Maketh All Things New
As we look to the year stretching ahead of us, we can be certain of uncertainty. The way we relate to each other is our best bet in terms of preparing for a future we can’t yet know. In this regard, Unitarian Universalism has some things in common with the World Wide Web. This sermon was delivered to the UUs of Fallston on January 8, 2012.
Introduction
When I was a tween, I was involved for a year or two with a club called Odyssey of the Mind. We made up skits about myths and great moments in history, built towers out of balsa wood, and found creative uses for household objects. The adults explained that they were trying to get us to think critically and creatively, because those skills would come in handy even if all of the facts we ever learned changed in the future. It seems to me that our spiritual search should also prepare us to adapt. Unitarian Universalism has a long history, and has practiced innovation in every age. I think there must be something we’ve been doing right since the Renaissance, something that helps us to look toward the future.
I think it has something to do with understanding how to treat each other. Using a technology metaphor for the future, we might say that we have a network protocol for our spiritual community. That is, we have a way of guiding our shared search as linked yet unique individuals. The values that make our network protocol great, inviting warm community and continued evolution, have been woven into our code for a long time. We value an atmosphere of acceptance where diversity thrives. We value lively, meaningful interaction in our shared quest for truth. We value generous hope, opportunities for all of us to do our part in the spirit of love.
The Robustness Principle (Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance)
The UU of the day in the elementary Religious Education class is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990, and it was made available to the Internet at large in the summer of 1991. He became a Unitarian Universalist after that happened. He writes that, in retrospect, there are parallels between the open philosophy of the web and Unitarian Universalism.
“The Internet community always used to be decentralized as the Internet itself … There is very little structure. There is the idea that society can run without a hierarchical bureaucratic government being involved at every step, if only we can hit on the right set of rules for peer-peer interaction. So where design of the Internet and the Web is a search for a set of rules which allow computers to work together in harmony, so our spiritual and social quest is for a set of rules which allow people to work together in harmony.”
Berners-Lee goes on to say that “tolerance” in a technical sense was and continues to be important in the design of the World Wide Web. When he created the Web, there was already a community of developers who were excitedly working on interesting ways to make use of the Internet. There was an understanding among them known as the Robustness Principle [Postel’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle]: try to arrange the information you send so that it can be used by as many systems as possible, and try to arrange it so that you can receive information in as many forms as possible. Don’t use so much fancy code and specific standards that your information breaks someone else’s system. At the same time, if someone capitalizes words that you don’t, or arranges commands in a different order, be ready to accept that input as long as it makes sense. The Robustness Principle is sometimes worded, “be conservative in what you do and liberal in what you accept from others.”
For our community, we practice this when we discuss the bright tapestry of our different spiritual paths. We have different ways of understanding and relating to the mysteries of life, yet we come together from our different perspectives in a shared search. That’s what I mean when I say we have a network protocol, we have a way of talking to each other even from our different places. We may draw our spiritual practices from Paganism, or Christianity, or Buddhism, or Atheism, or simply from a direct sense of mystery and wonder. Each one of us strives to tell our own story in a way that is authentic, yet welcoming to others: widely meaningful output. We also try to hear what others have to say with a lot of latitude, not getting too hung up if their understanding of the Holy is different from our own: practice acceptance for meaningful input. This respect for the diversity we share is our Robustness Principle. We have the framework we need to thrive in today’s pluralistic world because of it.
Tolerance has been part of our network protocol for a long time. Back in 1568, Unitarian King John Sigismund of Transylvania proclaimed the Patent of Toleration, an edict that established a degree of religious freedom that was unusual for Europe at the time. In the early 20th century, Earl Morse Wilbur studied the grand sweep of almost 400 years of Unitarian history and concluded that “freedom, reason, and tolerance” were both the “distinctive vocation” of Unitarians and the only conditions under which the true ends of a religious movement can succeed. Rationality and open-mindedness are ground-level assumptions. This isn’t a new idea for us, but it does need some updating.
[I don’t happen to have Wilbur’s two-volume work around the house, so many thanks to my colleague Bruce Clear for the sermon that helped me check my memory of this quote.]
“Tolerance” in the social and religious sense has come to mean the baseline standard of decency. We’d like something better than being tolerated. What we’re striving for is curiosity, respect, and diversity. It’s not only OK that we have different perspectives, we are enriched by our differences and grow from the challenge of creating a shared community.
Rough Consensus and Running Code (Making Things Work for Everyone)
Berners-Lee’s description of the early 90’s Internet development community is egalitarian in a way. “People were and are judged on what they say rather than who they are.” He quotes another developer, Dave Clark, who said, “We have no kings or presidents. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”
The vision is of a pragmatic system of shared leadership, one where ideas are evaluated based on evidence that they work. I agree with Berners-Lee that there are some analogies to Unitarian Universalism here, too. We trust the guidance of reason and the results of science. Our congregational leadership is part of and accountable to the rest of the congregation. We have our own lively debates and friendly differences.
My hope would be that, as a spiritual community, we are even better about drawing the best from each other. Some of us are reluctant to share our ideas because we have been silenced so often in the past by racism or sexism or other forms of oppression. In drawing each other out, we can’t ignore those historic forces. Another thing not to ignore is the openness to newcomers. We want it to be possible for a new member to contribute their talents to the mission as early as that person is inclined. I hope that the technical language of Unitarian Universalism is a low barrier, that UU “developers” (by which I mean all of us) can get started right away. Encouraging the best “running code” from the group requires that we make a special effort to check that we’re really hearing each other. We dismantle prejudice where we find it, but that doesn’t mean ignoring our genders and ethnicities and identities. It does mean learning about each other as whole people.
I learned something about valuing people over pragmatism when I worked for an Internet startup in the mid-1990s. I was the media relations coordinator for a company that was one of the first to offer private e-mail service to individuals. We also offered internet service to businesses. Our offices and main servers were all crammed into a little suite over a Chinese restaurant. Most of our desks were folding tables from the office supply store that we carried up the stairs by ourselves. We all had to know something about using a computer without a graphical interface. There was a kind of warrior ethic, an idea that anyone who could struggle with a technical problem and prevail was welcome. We joked about labeling our office doors in the Klingon language from Star Trek, whenever we got around to moving to a building with offices.
The Internet was much smaller then. There were a bunch of mom-and-pop providers, but we were the only listing in the “Internet” category in the 1-800 directory. That meant that people who thought “The Internet” was a single company and called 1-800-555-1212 for information got our number. Then came the day in June of 1994 when the New York Times published an article about small businesses that advertised on the Internet. (“Getting Down to Business on the Net” by Peter H. Lewis, June 19, 1994.) It was a novel idea for some. We thought it would happen someday. One of our company’s founders was fond of saying that the Internet would be the next big infrastructure, “as essential to civilization as water, power, roads, and beer.”
Suddenly we were getting a lot more calls from people who weren’t experienced computer users. I was talking to reporters who weren’t from tech publications in cities where we didn’t yet offer services. We had to adapt very quickly, not just our customer service and our press releases, but our way of thinking about people.
For the Internet to grow into what we dreamed it could be, and for those of us who wanted to practice leadership, we needed to welcome people who were curious and maybe a little afraid. We had to recognize that personal value did not depend on expertise or victory in technological battle. We practiced more patience. We learned to honor voices we hadn’t heard before. I think the primary questions were still rational and pragmatic. Does it work? We refined the questions to ask who the solutions worked for.
There is a parallel between the Web and Unitarian Universalism in that both are built on reason, lively debate, and open participation. Those are some of the values in our UU network protocol, our community’s ways of being together, that will help us to adapt to a future we can’t yet know. When we remember to value all of the voices in that lively conversation, we can adapt with even more vibrance.
Of Which We Are A Part (Hope)
Diversity and lively participation are two of the parallels I’ve mentioned so far between the World Wide Web and Unitarian Universalism. Tim Berners-Lee also mentions hope. He writes:
The[re] is one other thing that comes to mind as common between the Internet folks and the UUs. The whole spread of the Web happened not because of a decision and a mandate from any authority, but because a whole bunch of people across the ‘Net picked it up and brought up Web clients and servers, it actually happened. The actual explosion of creativity, and the coming into being of the Web was the result of thousands of individuals playing a small part. In the first couple of years, often this was not for a direct gain, but because they had an inkling that it was the right way to go, and a gleam of an exciting future. It is necessary to UU philosophy that such things can happen, that we will get to a better state in the end by each playing our small part. UUism is full of hope, and the fact that the Web happens is an example of a dream coming true and an encouragement to all who hope.
The part Berners-Lee leaves out is that the explosion of creativity could have been prevented if the World Wide Web had not been open-source. [Open source is the term we use now; it was not a common term in 1990.] He decided to make the code available to others, not to close it off as a proprietary, money-making invention. Maybe it never occurred to him to hold back. He was already part of a community of developers, and he could see the hope and promise of what that community could accomplish.
“Open Source” means that people who use something such as a computer program or operating system can see how it works and have permission to make changes. The materials are distributed for free, although donations to support the project are often accepted. People who make changes often share what they have learned with others, which can lead to the next version being even better and more responsive to the collective wisdom. Being part of that process takes time, attention, and practice.
Rev. Christine Robinson of the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque says that Unitarian Universalism is an “open source faith,” because each one of us has the freedom and responsibility to modify our spiritual program in a way that works for us. She emphasizes our trust in the individual seeker.
In other words, we have hope for one person at a time, and we have hope for the world we can create with each of us playing our small part. Our UU seventh principle talks about the other kind of web, the spiritual kind, “the interdependent web of existence, of which we are a part.” All of our destinies are intertwined.
To me, this is part of Universalism. We are connected, all of us made from the hearts of stars, all of us infused with inherent worth and dignity. What affects one affects us all. I would like to believe that, when all things end and our galaxy collapses in on itself, by that time the essence of what we have been will be reunited with the source of life.
Universalism teaches hope and connection. Those values affect our way of being together, our network protocol. We prepare for a future we can’t yet know with confidence that we will face it together, and that we can transform that future with our love.
Conclusion
As Unitarian Universalists, we have a legacy from the past that helps us to prepare for an unknown future. Our stories, songs, and traditions don’t necessarily tell us what is going to happen or how we’ll have to change, lovely and instructive though they may be. The gift our living tradition has for our future is the way we are invited to be in community together. We value freedom, reason, and diversity as we explore the great mysteries of life. We invite everyone to the table, and are always making room for more. We have hope for what we can accomplish together, knowing that we are all connected.
In the year ahead, may we practice acceptance of those who travel with us on a search for meaning. May we practice hospitality for new companions on the journey. May we face the horizon in the spirit of love.
So be it. Blessed be. Amen.
