Fire of Thought

The Heritage of Mind and Heart

Everyone in a UU congregation, no matter what age, is engaged in a process of calling forth the best that is within, forming common bonds with others in the community, and figuring out how to search for meaning in the company of other seekers. To me, these activities are summed up in the phrase “Religious Education.”

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Our stones of joy and sorrow are a fixture of the service nearly every week. A stone that represents a deep sorrow one week can represent a joy the next week. These stones absorb the weight of our struggles and triumphs time after time. Every week, they are cleansed in the waters of love that this community brings together. This bowl holds both constancy and change.

Joys and Sorrows is an example and a symbol of what we’re trying to create for ourselves and pass along to those who come after us. We want a spiritual home that is steady enough to offer comfort, and fluid enough to move with us as we grow. We want a circle of memory and hope, a place with enough ritual to satisfy our souls and enough honesty to satisfy our intellect. What we have here is a heritage of mind and heart. Coming to understand it for ourselves and teaching it to others is the goal of Religious Education for all ages.

Antoine de St.-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, also wrote something about similar goals. He wrote:

In a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another takes up the heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds. Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations. Therefore we do not neglect the ceremonies of our passage: when we wed, when we die, and when we are blessed with a child; When we depart and when we return; when we plant and when we harvest … We live not by things, but by the meanings of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

Religious Education holds the heritage of mind and heart that “one hands down and another takes up.” It is our way of knowing and teaching the passwords. In this afternoon’s congregational meeting, members will consider some items for next year that lift up the importance of Religious Education. The budget and my contract show a continuing commitment to this aspect of our ministry together. So I thought we should take some time to talk about what Religious Education means for us.

When I say Religious Education, I mean the way we treasure and transmit our heritage. We are the stewards of a tradition of exploration and growth within a framework of shared values. We practice principles such as justice and compassion, celebrate the joys and challenges of the spiritual search, and cultivate a sense of belonging in the spirit of love. This is the heritage of mind and heart that we hold for ourselves and entrust to the next generation. This is what we teach in classes for children, youth, and adults. This is the spirit we share in worship. This is the light that shines when we reach out beyond the walls of this church. To me, religious education is what we are celebrating and teaching in everything we do as a congregation, not limited to the classroom. We practice values. We search together. We belong.

Practice Values

The word “education” comes from a Latin root meaning “lead out” or “call forth.” While our modern picture of education might focus on standardized tests and orderly classrooms, the word itself is about a process in motion. Education is calling forth the best of what we have to offer individually and together. Practicing our values is one thing that calls us forth at our best.

In another congregation I was part of, we did an experiment with in-class service projects for children and youth once a month for two years. One of the projects that the children liked was building homes for animals. An educator from the bird sanctuary brought rescued birds and taught us how to make nests for foster baby birds out of newspaper. The bird sanctuary used the newspaper nests in the spring. The children developed empathy with young beings who needed a place to sleep.

This same congregation participated in rotating shelter that served families who were homeless. About a dozen congregations in the interfaith community would each take week-long turns hosting the families. Volunteers of all ages welcomed the guests and made dinner and bag lunches for the next day. Children from the congregation and the guest families played together. The project helped us understand how to be better neighbors.

I believe our actions, more than our words, speak to what it means to be Unitarian Universalists. That’s part of the point with asking the youth class to plan a service project as part of their curriculum this year. They decided together to focus on the issue of poverty, and they decided to host games for the rest of the congregation as a fundraiser to address the issue. Look for the youth at the annual barbecue to help them reach their goal. Youth are apprentices of this tradition. They are learning that being part of a UU community means collective action arising from shared values.

Here in Fallston, we are very familiar with practicing and teaching our shared value of hospitality. We are always glad to welcome newcomers to the service. We have a thoughtfully-crafted Path to Membership class to prospective members feel welcome. Our outreach to the community such as volunteering at the Sharing Table and donating to the food pantry are strongly linked with hospitality, and are also ways that children and youth get involved. I think the spirit of welcome is a hallmark of the culture of this congregation. It’s one of the things we’re most motivated to understand, to practice as an intergenerational community, and to teach to anyone who would like to get to know our congregation.

Embodying values such as hospitality is part of the heritage we’re receiving and giving. We are learning how to be part of a culture. Learning takes practice. Let’s continue to share the practice with people of all ages and all shapes of families. Let us be called forth.

Search Together

Learning how to engage in a free and responsible search for meaning together is another aspect of Religious Education for all ages. The journey is a big deal for us. If we had saints in Unitarian Universalism, many of them would be exemplars of the courageous search: people like Margaret Fuller, whose 200th birthday is today. Margaret Fuller wrote that “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”

I think the spiritual search is something we have an innate drive for, but knowing how to go about it, having an ethical framework for it, and knowing how to share that search with others are all learned skills. We aren’t born knowing how to analyze the implications of our attitudes or our actions. Figuring out how to have explore and talk about religious and spiritual issues among friends who disagree … that’s hard. Congregations like this one are where we learn how to search together. That’s part of Religious Education: learning the methods and the ethics of a spiritual search.

The together part is important. We need each other for checks and balances. We benefit by being around people who will gently remind us of our values and commitments, who will ask loving and insightful questions that challenge us to question ourselves when we forget humility. It’s possible to be a solitary Unitarian Universalist, but it’s better when we give something of ourselves to a UU community.

I’ve spoken before about my own experience of becoming a Unitarian Universalist. When I visited a UU Sunday service for the first time, I had been a solitary Pagan for almost ten years. I might get together with a few friends for a holiday ritual, but most of my study and celebration was private. Having been raised in a liberal Christian church, I had a vague memory that congregational life offered something that my solitary practice did not. The local UU congregation seemed to be better organized than the local Pagan coven, so I thought I would try that first.

I don’t know if, at the time, I could have put words to everything that I was seeking for when I went looking for a congregation. Recalling that experience now, I think I can describe some of it.

• I missed the experience of sacred music with a group: hymn singing, if you will.
• I missed being part of an intergenerational community. It just seemed to me that a person ought to have one part of her life where she rubs elbows with children and elders and adults and teens all in one place. We have to go out of our way to find that in modern society; being part of an intergenerational community is a skill in danger of being lost.
• I wanted to be part of a group that  did community service and social justice together. I might volunteer on my own, but it was hit and miss compared with the predictable calendar of volunteerism I remembered from church.

All of those challenges - learning new music, getting along with people who were not in my peer group, stepping outside my usual routine for community service - all of those challenges were things I learned as a child to expect from a shared spiritual search. That’s part of what I want children and youth and adults to learn in Religious Education.

When I went seeking a church as an adult, I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, the person I thought I could be in a congregation. Joining a congregation didn’t help me to become perfect. But it did make demands on me that I’m better for having attempted.
 
Even maintaining a UU identity, I go through cycles where I am more and less open to letting the shared search do its work on me. Some years I’m too tired to question my assumptions. Sometimes I don’t open myself up emotionally to change. But the promise of a shared journey calls me back. I was a good person (I hope) during my solitary years. Being on a search for meaning with others helps me to be a better person.

Unitarian Universalism doesn’t give us foregone conclusions. No spoilers! We have a couple of ways of learning and teaching the skills and guidelines of a shared spiritual search. Often, UU classes for youth and adults are discussion-based. We learn what kinds of behavior help people feel comfortable speaking the truth in love. Sometimes, cooperative games or artistic activities help us engage different parts of our minds, giving us a more complete understanding of ourselves and each other. For adults who aren’t used to games and art supplies being serious educational tools, this can be a challenge. Challenge is good for us, too. In classes with children, songs, games, and craft activities help reinforce the highlights of stories and factual information, plus they communicate that the spiritual search is full of joy and creativity.

I like to compare Unitarian Universalism to the scientific method. (This is an analogy. I’m not saying that religion is the same as science.) Two scientists in the same discipline, both of them rational and well-educated, may reach different conclusions about their area of study. They agree on the scientific method, on forming hypotheses and testing them against evidence. One hopes that they agree on scientific ethics, on academic honesty and being respectful toward living things involved in their research.

Similarly, any two Unitarian Universalists will have different conclusions about spiritual matters, but we have some common ground about the methods and the ethics of a free and responsible search for meaning. We agree that encouraging and challenging each other helps us reach a better understanding. Some of our ideas may not be disprovable, so it’s not exactly like science, but we can reach a more authentic understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Our methods tend to be collaborative and creative. The ethics of our search involve respect, freedom from coercion, and awareness of the interdependent web of life.

Following a spiritual search in a multigenerational group involves a set of skills that people can learn. We learn why a shared search has some advantages over a solitary one, we learn how to get along with traveling companions, and we learn some methods for calling forth our best. This is part of what we learn in Religious Education.

Belong

Earlier, I gave the origins for the word “education.” We’re talking today about Religious Education, so I want to give you the other half of that definition. The Latin “religare” means “to bind,” leading to the word “religio” for “bond” or “reverence.” So a religion is something that gives people a common bond, way of belonging. A sense of belonging is the third aspect of Religious Education that I’d like to talk with you about today.

For a lot of us who were raised in a Western Christian culture, we were trained to think that the only thing that can bind a religion together is a creed. We might be reluctant to call Unitarian Universalism a religion because of the connotations in our culture of forced dogma. There’s plenty of room to use other language if you prefer, but I say that Unitarian Universalism is a religion because it is a community and a system of sacred things that bind us together.

The glue that holds a religion together can be heritage or religious practice or a way of being in relationship. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism may be influenced by belief, but (if I understand correctly), belief is not the central concern for people raised in those traditions. For my Jewish partner and extended family, Jewishness is more about identity and practice than about belief in God. Similarly, I’ve met many Buddhists who are also pragmatic Atheists. To equate the definition of religion with belief and only with belief is to let one culture dominate who gets to be included in the interfaith community. I’m going to be stubborn and reclaim the language of religion. That word should be available to all of us who have sacred traditions and spiritual communities.

The key question, I think, is not what we believe about God or the afterlife. Creeds are beside the point. If a religion is what binds us together, the key question is one of belonging. What is the glue? What do we need to teach and to learn in order to create the fact and the feeling of belonging? This is an essential part of Religious Education for all ages.

Belonging is partly about learning our shared stories, partly about absorbing facts, and partly about emotional risk. The shared stories might include Unitarian Universalist history that helps us claim our heritage, the great story of evolution that helps understand our earthly home, and the history of this congregation. The elementary school curriculum we’ve been using, Around the Church, Around the Year, introduces some of these themes to children, because we want them to learn that they belong here, that they have a place in this community. For adults and children in Sunday services, we’ve talked about shared stories and histories a bit this year, and we’ll come back to them another time.

Then there’s the factual learning. Immersing ourselves in this congregation means figuring out how to be active in this community. We might learn this in the “Path to Membership” class or through mentoring with a longtime member. For instance, what’s involved in volunteering to provide hospitality at social hour? We have to figure out where the coffee is, what to do about trash, what to do with leftovers, and other practical things. Other how-to questions for being active in the congregation might include how to participate in consensus decision-making, or the general outline of a Sunday service, or how to propose an event for the calendar. Some of these how-to’s will change over time, so we’re all in a constant process of learning to belong. That’s Religious Education, too; learning how to take an active role.

Belonging is also a process of emotional risk-taking as we learn to give and receive acceptance. In this morning’s Time for All Ages story (Chester’s Way by Kevin Henkes), Chester and Wilson were a community of two. Their bond was based on similarity as well as acceptance. When Lilly came along, they eventually learned to take a risk by accepting her into their group, even though she brought differences as well as similarities. It’s the same in any group. We take a risk when we reveal our differences and practice acceptance. We take a risk when we give and receive emotional support. Opening ourselves up to these challenges is part of what creates the sense of belonging.

On a heart level, we learn to belong by making a commitment, by giving things a try, by showing up in body and spirit. This is why I believe fellowship events count as Religious Education; we are learning to belong. When children and youth check-in during their classes, sharing the big events of their lives, that is Religious Education. When we have come to trust that this is a safe place to accept others and to be accepted, we have been educated religiously.

Conclusion

We are the stewards of a tradition of transformation built upon a bedrock of ethics and inspiration. Religious Education describes everything we do as people of all ages to form a common bond and to call forth our best.

Practicing our values is one aspect of Religious Education. When we put our principles into action together, especially when we can do that in a multigenerational group, our Religious Education has life to it. Experiential learning is important in Religious Education.

Sharing a free and responsible search for meaning involves a set of skills that can be learned. Religious Education helps us understand how to share that journey, why we would want to, and what it means to be responsible along the way.

Cultivating a sense of belonging is caught by heart as much as it is taught formally. We are held together in this circle of memory and hope by a combination of understanding and emotion. In the classroom, we can learn the history and the how-to’s that help us to cohere as a group. In Sunday services and fellowship events, we learn how to belong as we take the risk of giving and receiving acceptance.

This is the heritage of mind and heart. These are the traditions that we treasure for ourselves and prepare to entrust to others. Let us live “by the meanings of things.”

So be it. Blessed be. Amen.