"CREDO"
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday, May 2, 2004
All
The story is told of the British Prime Minister before World War I named
Herbert Asquith. His nemesis in Parliament was an argumentative young man by
the name of Winston Churchill. Churchill continuously challenged the Prime
Minister with confrontational questions and speeches. After one of Churchill's
harangues in Parliament, the Prime Minister commented to his assistant:
"I wish I knew as much about anything as that man knows about
everything."
A "Credo" is a list of personal belief statements. There is an element of self-indulgence to what I'm about to do, to catalogue many of my beliefs.
I am about to finish my tenth year as minister here at All Souls. It has
been an enriching experience for me. It has generally been my practice to raise
issues on Sunday morning that I think are worth wrestling with, and to offer a
variety of perspectives to consider. I do, at times, declare my own opinions,
and when I do, I usually encounter some vocal disagreement afterwards. I
appreciate when that happens because it shows me not only is someone listening,
but they're also thinking for themselves. In one sense, my comments this
morning are simply summarys of the more than three
hundred sermons I've given more than ten years. In another sense, it is my plan
today to string together as many statements as possible with which you can
disagree, and then let you go at it.
I'm going to talk about my beliefs under the title "Credo," which is a Latin word, first person singular for the verb "to believe." It means, therefore, "I believe," or as a noun it means "my beliefs."
Warning: do not confuse it with the derivative word "creed." In Unitarian circles at least, the word "creed" is a bad word, a nasty word, a form of theological profanity, perhaps even blasphemy. A creed is a belief statement that is offered as authoritatively true that is used, primarily, to separate people according to those who are approved by God and those who are not, based on their beliefs.
In our tradition, freedom is far more precious than any belief, and therefore any creed or dogma that restricts or chills the spirit of freedom, any attempt to prescribe true beliefs, is antithetical to our tradition.
"Credo" (as distinguished from "creed") captures the very spirit of free religion. A credo is a personal set of beliefs, for which the believer accepts responsibility: credos do not come from someone else, nor from "on high," and they may allow for others to hold differing credos without disparaging judgments on what others believe.
In a word, "credos" are subjective. My credos are mine, points of view, based on my experience, thought, and study. They may be profoundly and utterly mistaken. I offer no guarantees. I never have; I never will.
I am often confused and bewildered by those who declare their beliefs to be in errantly and indubitably "true," and then go on to describe those beliefs as "faith." To believe in something that you know to be true is not an act of faith. To "have faith" is to believe something that you admit might be false, but you hold to that belief in spite of its ultimate uncertainty. Faith is not a consequence of deduction; faith is an act of the will. It is, as Kant said, a decision to live "as if" - to live as if something is true, even though you can't be certain that it is true.
My beliefs, my credos, are all statements "as if," they are statements of faith about which I have no certainty, but I do have conviction and therefore do have "faith."
From my perspective this morning, I share the view on faith outlined by
Alfred Lord Tennyson in a poem entitled "The Ancient Sage." The poem
points to the fact that we can be certain of very little about things that
really matter; he then reflects on what that fact means for our faith. The Poet
writes:
Thou canst not prove
the Nameless,
O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world
thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou
art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou
art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou
art both in one.
Thou canst not prove thou
art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal --
nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I,
who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse
with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving
can be proven,
Nor yet disproven.
Wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side
of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond
The forms of Faith!
This last line strikes at the heart of my own credo. Like Tennyson, I doubt the ultimacy of our knowledge about those things most worthy to be known. The act of faith, therefore, he says, is to "cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt." And this I will seek, and do seek, to do. To do so, he says, is to "cling to Faith beyond the forms of faith." The "forms of Faith" are, for me, the faith distilled through ecclesiastical creeds. But the personal credo seems to me therefore to be a "Faith beyond the form of Faith."
In his poem, then, the poet goes on to describe such faith this way:
She reels not in the storm of
warring words,
She brightens at the clash of
"Yes" and "No,"
She sees the best that glimmers
thro' the worst
She feels the sun is hid
but for the night,
She spies the summer thro'
the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before
the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within
the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they
wail'd
"Mirage!"
So here are some topics about which I offer "credo": beliefs.
HUMAN NATURE
I begin where the Unitarians and Universalists both began their heresies long ago: beliefs about human nature.
I believe that human beings have inherent worth and dignity. So far, I suspect most of you are with me. I believe we have within ourselves what Channing called "a divine spark" which is available for us to make right choices, and to live with dignity and integrity. Not quite as many are with me in this language, I would guess.
I agree with the early Unitarians and Universalists, from centuries ago, that the most insidious of all religious dogmas is the doctrine of original sin. People are not, by nature, evil and depraved; we are not born with a stain on our souls which can only be cleansed by an act of God or by the surrender of our will. Over the ages this creed has caused untold suffering by those who have been convinced that anyone who is not of their faith, of their creed, must be evil, or at least must be "lost." There is no way, of course, that any of us can look into the human soul and discern within it whether people are by nature good or evil, born with inherent dignity and value or with depraved sinfulness. On this we can only exercise both faith and doubt, and my faith, like Tennyson's, is to "cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt."
For me, with regard to the doctrine of human nature, the "sunnier side
of doubt" means to affirm the intrinsic and basic goodness of life, of the
world, and of the human soul. In this, I share the faith of the radical
Catholic priest Matthew Fox, who speaks of a doctrine of "Original
Blessing." Though that goodness is forever tenuous, and it is no more provable
than the doctrine of original sin, "original blessing" is, for me,
the far better object of faith, and the sunnier side of doubt.
RELIGION
Let me turn now to what I believe about religion - it is in fact a word that signals differing feelings in different people.
I believe religion to be a wholly natural and a deeply significant, even vital, part of human nature.
Religion can be constructive or destructive or neutral, but it is an important aspect of being human, like creativity or intelligence or passion. People are creative and/or intelligent and/or passionate and/or religious: these are qualities of being human, and some have these qualities more strongly than others. Some use their creative talents for good, and others use it for harm; some use their intelligence to create a better world, and some use intellect to create suffering. Likewise the human religious quality has ambiguous potential.
It is religion that motivated Martin Luther King and Albert Schweitzer to
seek justice and compassion; it is religion that inspired the building of
hospitals and schools throughout the world that offer health and education to
so many. It is also religion that motivated most of history's wars, and built
Jonestown in
When I meet with newcomers to our church, I try to explain, with varying degrees of effectiveness, that Unitarianism is not a religion centered on beliefs. It is a religion centered on values. Beliefs are important, but of infinitely greater importance than beliefs are the values that are expressed by the way a person lives.
I care very little what people believe about metaphysical speculations. Whether they believe in a Trinitarian godhead, or no god at all, whether they believe in the mystical power of pyramids and crystals, or in the mysterious power of prayer; whether they believe in transubstantiation or reincarnation, I prefer to make my judgments according to the values people embody in their lives. In my mind, it is the values, not the beliefs, that define a person's religion.
In our reading this morning, Sophia Lyon Fahs (the great Unitarian educator) says, "It matters what we believe." She is right, to the extent that our beliefs are reflected in the values we live out in life. Very often our values do express our beliefs, but far more often, it is the beliefs that follow the values.
Tennyson advised us to "cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith." Our expressed belief systems are only the "form" of our faith. I think, for example, of those who claim to believe in Jesus' message of love and acceptance, but then affirm by their lives a doctrine of hate and exclusion in racism or sexism or homophobia. Their claim to believe in Jesus' teachings is only the mere "form" of their faith. The values of demeaning others is their true religion.
Religion is the name given for the way in which human beings have tried to make sense out of a world that is confusing and uncertain. This has been true universally across cultures, and eternally over time. It is no less true today in the modern world. Is religion, though, merely the way in which human beings seek to escape from the real world or explain away things that can't be explained? Some would say so, and there is some real evidence for that. To me, to cleave to the sunnier side of doubt is to affirm religion as a rich and natural and potentially supportive part of human nature.
The root meaning of the word "religion" has to do with "binding things together," with being connected. To me, it speaks of our connectedness to tradition -- in our case to the cherished heritage of those who over the centuries labored to keep religion free -- and to our connectedness to community, our connectedness to brothers and sisters throughout the world, our connectedness to the natural world, from the vast universe to the natural resources of this earth, and our connectedness to God.
Oh, yes, I haven't said much about God, have I?
GOD
I believe in God. To say "I believe in God" is not a statement about the nature of reality, it is a statement about human experience, specifically, my human experience. God to me is a very powerful metaphor for something that is experienced in life. It helps me not only to make sense out of life, but it also helps me to make sense out of my experience of the world. What I mean by the word "God" is not what is commonly meant by that word, and as a result, I don't talk about God much. I do a sermon on the subject every few years or so, but between such sermons, I don't mention the word very much, because everyone seems to mean something different by it.
God does not exist in somewhat the same sense that a minute does not exist. There is no thing in the world we can point to or hold or see or touch that is called a "minute"; it is instead a name we give to an experience, and the name and the experience are both sensible and useful to us. I do believe in "minutes." They don't exist, but I experience them, and they have meaning for me.
I give this rather peculiar analogy in order to underscore the fact that the God I believe in is not a "being" nor an "entity," but in my mind can only be conceived as a concept, a metaphor that helps me to make sense and meaning out of my experience -- like the concept of "minute," which does not literally exist, but is as real to me as any concept I have.
Nor do I insist, or expect, that the God I believe in make sense to anyone else; God is personal, as any experience is personal.
My conversion to this form of theism comes from the writings of Alfred North
Whitehead, and though his ideas about God are too convoluted to detail here,
I'll just throw out a few Whiteheadian statements
about God, in no particular order, and with no particular defense or
explanation. I offer them to make you either curious or annoyed.
1. God is a part of all that exists, and all that exists is part of God. That includes you and me.
2. God is neither all-knowing nor all powerful. Sometimes God fails, and sometimes God errs.
3. God operates in the world by persuasion, not by coercion. God does not use the threat of torture or hell to make you straighten up. But God does speak to reason, and conscience is a good example of how God's persuasion works.
4. God suffers when we suffer. When we grieve the loss of a loved one, for
example, God not only feels our grief, but joins in it. When our enjoyment in
life is diminished or enhanced, God's enjoyment is diminished or enhanced.
I'll leave the Whiteheadian comments there for a while -- it should be enough to raise objections by almost everyone for very different reasons.
But I'll add only this. All statements that have ever been made about God, including my own, are all in the realm of faith. That is to say, they are subjective beliefs that have no certainty. All comments about God are assertions that no one can know for sure -- they are in the realm of doubt.
And on this subject more than any other, my belief in God is
self-consciously an affirming kind of belief. Though we don't know, and we
can't know, whether the world has some divine source behind it or within it, I
choose to believe it does. It makes the world more sensible to me, and in many ways more available and congenial. This
belief truly represents the sunnier side of my doubts.
TRUTH
I may believe in some sense of God, but I'm a devout agnostic when it comes to Truth (with a capital "T": Truth in the sense of some ultimate answer to life's great questions). In fact, I would say, the more important the question, the less likely the answers are reliable.
Perhaps the most exciting things that have happened in the twentieth century come to us from the world of science. I do not refer to the technological advances of science: the computers, the space travel, and certainly not television. I do not refer to the expansion of scientific study into areas previously unimagined, such as genetic programming or particle physics.
No, the most exciting part of twentieth century science has been the slow but very dramatic discovery that our world is fundamentally put together very differently than we have previously supposed. As I mentioned last week at our Earth Day service, nature is not like the finely tuned clock that science described to us in previous centuries. Nature is a growing, changing, evolving, and transforming organism. There have developed in our times theories of chaos and theories of uncertainty and unpredictability in nature.
The closer we look into the tiniest structures of matter, through subatomic physics, and the farther we look out into the universe toward cosmic systems, the more we discover what we don't know, and the more we uncover what appears to be intrinsically mysterious.
This is exciting news for those of us who are agnostic about Truth, for what science seems to be saying is that it is inherent in the quality of nature that we will never finally, fully, and completely discover Truth, for Truth is by nature, in some essential sense, illusive, changing, always in process. This doesn't mean that we won't acquire more and more knowledge as we go along. We certainly will. But life will never be a fully solved mystery.
This agnosticism about Truth is a form of doubt, but is it, in fact, the "sunnier side of doubt," as I have been advocating all along? I believe that it is. The greatest intellectual and spiritual joys of life, for me any way, are the joys of discovery of new truth and new insights. If we were ever to finally capture Truth, as one might capture a wild beast, the hunt, and the joy of new discovery, would be over. My agnosticism about Truth ensures new discovery, continuous search and exploration, and is therefore, in my eyes, a very sunny side to doubt.
The promise of continual search for truth leads, then, to the final
statement of this morning's credo: the ultimate subject of religion, which is
the meaning of life.
THE MEANING OF LIFE
A few years ago, I gave a sermon in which I revealed to you -- I'm sure you remember -- the meaning of life. Not everyone was taking notes that day, so I suspect I'll need to remind a few of you, and refresh your memory.
The meaning of life is "conversation." By that I don't mean just talk, but I mean learning from others and from the world. I do not believe that we will ever know the total truth about anything in life -- as I've said, I don't believe that "the Truth" (with a capital "T") is available to us. But we can approach it, and can approximate it, if we keep the conversation going with others who journey with us.
To shut off conversation is to rob life of its meaning. This is again the reason why creeds are an anathema to our tradition. Any claim to have found the final and ultimate truth ends the conversation about life. Life, then, loses its passion, its meaning, its joy, and its future.
I believe it is our religious imperative to keep conversation alive. It is for this reason that one of my strongest beliefs and commitments is to religious diversity.
I attended a Unitarian seminary that was affiliated with a cluster of other
denominational seminaries in
He is right. And I go further. It would be boring if all Unitarians held the same religious beliefs. What provokes my religious interest is variety, curiosity, diversity -- all undergirded by a sincere mutual respect. Most enriching to me is a religious community that embraces Christians and atheists, humanists and mystics, Buddhists and scientific religionists, and all manner of seekers. As long as each respects the integrity of others, and makes no claim to exclusive ownership of Truth, the community at large is strengthened by its openness and shared quest.
But it is more than that. We need diversity to keep the conversation going. We need diversity to keep life's meaning alive.
This affirmation of diversity is a call for credos rather than creeds, to welcome personal belief statements that amplify and enhance our conversations with each other.
This metaphor of conversation is one way of saying that life's meaning, I believe, is found not in ideas, not in beliefs, not in what we think. Life's meaning is found in relationships. We find deepest meaning only in our relationships and values. If we want to nurture that meaning we nurture relationships with those in our community, and those outside our community, with those who agree with us, and with those who disagree.
Life has meaning when we experience ourselves as not just in the world, but in relationship with the world, in relationship, in fact with the source of the world, which many call God.
Our task is to nurture all these relationships, and to keep conversation
open.
**************************
I hope and believe my beliefs will change over time. I believe some of them are
probably wrong, and I look forward to discovering which will change, and which
ones will hold fast.
I believe that wisdom lies in cleaving to the "sunnier sides of doubt," and to "cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith."
I believe in Kant's categorical "as if." On one hand, we need to have the humility of knowing that our beliefs may be wrong, but on the other hand, we need to live "as if" they are right. To live with integrity requires both.