I Believe

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 20^th of October, 2002

Worship Committee
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words - Steve Abbott [Next] [back to top]

We come together like pieces of a quilt,
each piece a different texture and color,
each of us unique in our beliefs and paths.
Bound together by the common thread
of our covenant of love and support,
our separate pieces become one,
a quilt of endless variety and common purpose,
and a reflection of our endearing differences.
We come together to worship and to acknowledge
what distinguishes us from each other
and what holds us together,
a beautiful and valued heirloom of tradition,
an amalgamation of individual strengths
that form a tapestry of commitment and devotion
that will allow us to continue
this, our shared journey.

Introduction  - Steve Abbott [Next] [back to top]

Trying to talk about what Unitarian Universalists "believe" offers problems similar to those of creating synesthesia-that is, describing one sense in terms of another. How to describe red to a blind person? How to represent the tones of saxophone and flute to a person who has never heard any sound? How to explain what music looks like, or colors sound like, when the senses-such as those of persons who have stretched, in the words of poet William Blake, "the doors of perception"-have been altered through inducing meditative trance states or ingesting mind-altering substances? How does one discuss an afterlife with a person who believes that our heavens and hells are made on this side of death? If we want to look at the lighter side, how can the characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oklahoma! and Waiting for Godot perform their lines on the same stage at the same time?

Some of us are lifelong Unitarian Universalists. Many others came from churches they grew up in or had no formal religious backgrounds. We carry with us the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, humanism, paganism, and numerous other strains of belief, a patchwork of theist and secular influences.

One friend of mine, when I told him I'd joined this church, described our religion as the one in which "you can believe anything you want." That gave me the opportunity to open with him a discussion of our Principles and Purposes that continues to this day. In this service, presented by members of the Worship Committee, we offer the first in what will be an occasional series of lay-led services over the next year exploring the topic "This I Believe." We hope that in exploring our Principles and Purposes, we can better understand-and thus explain to others-the multifaceted and diverse set of beliefs possible in a covenental faith.

The term covenental is what distinguishes our religion from many others. Unitarian Universalism is not based in a creed, in which a set of shared beliefs and agreed-upon doctrines dictate the belief systems of its members. Rather, we are a covenental faith. Our faith's statement of principles begins, "We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote…." This is followed by a listing of the principles, which appear in the front of our hymnal.

A covenant is a contract, a promise, and rather than surrendering ourselves to a creed interpreted by specialists or inherited doctrines, we enter into a freely chosen agreement to work together and seek truth independently within the shared light of our statement of principles. In sharing a covenant, we agree to support these principles and not to condemn another's beliefs as "wrong." Rather, we agree to discover, share, and celebrate our religious commonalities.

As you entered today, you received a small piece of cloth similar to the pieces that might make up the most basic and simple of quilts. Here at the beginning of the service, we are separate pieces with the potential to become a single quilt. By the end of this service, when we symbolically join hands in our customary fashion for the blessing, we hope that this spirit of distinct paths and common purpose will bring us together into the beautiful quilt that our faith allows us to be.

Our principles are the thread that stitches together the diverse elements, the separate pieces of patchwork, that make up our separate and collective spiritual paths. By presenting today what is only a sampling of our diverse beliefs within our shared values, we hope to enrich our understanding our Unitarian Universalism and to validate and nurture the differences that make us strong.

(Meditation, and The Silence)

We will enter now into a few minutes of reflection and contemplation. I suggest you make yourself comfortable, relax, and allow yourself to clear your mind of planning or thought by closing your eyes and making yourself aware of the quiet movement of your own breathing.

The teacher Baba Ram Dass has suggested that modern life often feels incomplete because we see ourselves separate from the rest of the world, and that our uneasiness is the result of this lost connection, and that in recognizing our interconnectedness with the rest of the universe we find meaning.

Simply allow yourself to breathe. Let anxiety slip away. Let plans slips away. Let desires slip away. Lower yourself gently the calm and quiet within where, in the space between breaths, you connect with the place that needs no words, needs no language. Let breath be the measure of meaning. Lower yourself gently into silence, the locus of solitude and connection, the warm center of the moment. Breathe. Breathe, and be still.

In connecting fully with and within ourselves, we find our connection to the rest of creation. Into the space of silence, we now bring the names of those we love, of those we miss, of those we keep in the deep recesses of our hearts and lives. I invite you now to speak aloud, or in the silence of your heart, these special names….

We are parts of a greater whole, pieces of a greater design. Our individual silences shape a larger, shared silence. From this place of contemplation, we move into connection with each other, and action in the world. So be it. Amen.

This I Believe

• I believe there are mysteries I cannot understand that may or not be related to a deity or group of related powers
• I believe that prayer is a form of focused intention, and that whether TO something or FOR something, whether seen as a crude form of begging or a focused application of spiritual energy, it improves my life even without always producing specific results
• I believe that our daily struggles are shared, and that only in recognizing our interdependence can we find satisfaction
• I believe that great teachers throughout time-including the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Confucius, the writers of the Talmud, and innumerable poets, musicians, and other writers-have provided wisdom and guidance that inspire action and mediatation
• I believe my Catholic upbringing gave me an appreciation for faith, a respect for the power of ritual and religious community, and a profound sense of social justice
• I believe, knowing what it is to be and having no idea what it is to NOT be, that every day above ground is a good one with demands for struggle and opportunities for joy
• I believe kindness costs no more than cruelty and produces better results, and that it produces benefits that don't need to be banked into a place beyond death and that change the world in ways I will never know
• I believe that the bonds of individual and group caring, connection with the natural world, and the application of gentle humor are more effective palliatives than any medications

I Believe - Su Ann Farnlacher [Next] [back to top]

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-T. S. Eliot

I am Su Ann Farnlacher and I have been a member here for 30 years and this is where I discovered UU. Since high school I considered myself to be an Agnostic in that I’m not certain if there is or isn’t a God. The older I become I find that belief in a god or prophet or the son of god is just not important. And probably the reason I feel so at home here is because I believe it is one’s actions that speak the loudest.

The rest of my beliefs are simple and uncomplicated.

I believe that love and all of its expressions are powerful, healing and totally good. That this love is best demonstrated by listening , respecting, honoring each and every person and animal.

We are linked and connected by this love and it is always striving to present itself. I believe this love is incredibly freeing. It is best attained by acceptance and forgiveness or yourself and others. I believe that loving yourself first is paramount and people who cannot do this have been injured. If we cannot love ourselves we cannot truly love others.

As I said before I don’t think that it really matters what you “believe” as long as your actions reflect this love and acceptance of each other.

My sense of awe about love and nature is at times is so overwhelming it is hard to bear. I have wanted to share this feeling with others but to do this one has to give it a name and to give it a name seems to limit it.

I believe each of us has to find their own way to whatever it is they believe.

I was a delegate to our denomination’s international General Assembly during the 2 or 3 years in the 80’s when the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Purposes and Principles were crafted, refined and voted upon. They are very real and important to me. It was awesome to be a part of their creation.

As Steve said we are a covenantal church and not a creedal church. We are a muscular church in that we ask our members to live by these principles. Since we don’t tell our members what they must believe we make our members think. For this reason we are not an easy denomination to belong to.

So to this day I still can’t tell you if there is a god and I don’t feel it necessary. Yet over and over I am humbled by the incredible beauty and sacredness of this world and it inhabitants. I believe that life itself or the now is the Gift.

Confessions of a Commandment Breaker - Ray Nandyal [Next] [back to top]

On an October evening in 1987, I told my friend Worley that I'd just come back from a worship service at a Nazarene Church.

Worley was not pleased. He was an Episcopalian. "Ray, you have a problem," he said. "I've known you to attend services at Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, but you don't seem to stop there. You're like having affairs with religions. You don't care what a church believes in as long as the music has some melody and rhythm and the people there don't think you're an alien from another planet."

"What's wrong with enjoying all denominations?" I asked.

"Plenty. When you worship in a church, it's like signing a contract saying that you believe in the same things as they do."

"True," I said. "But these are not exclusive contracts."

Fifteen years later, I'm even more guilty of the crime Worley accused me of. I've been a member of one UU church or another, but I have paid an occasional visit to a Lutheran church that I like in inner-city Cincinnati, a couple of Hindu temples, and a Buddhist meditation group. My children have attended a Jewish pre-school, a Baptist Summer School, and a UU Sunday School.

Some of my Christian friends, including Worley, may accuse me of breaking the first commandment, "thou shalt have no other gods before me." In that case, they might as well know that this sinner has had a long history. I was born and raised a Hindu and a polytheist. As a child, I used to go with my family to temples of various gods and goddesses and even a few Christian and Muslim prayer services. My mother prayed to any god who would answer her prayers. And she had a lot to pray about, with the early death of my father and the single-handed raising of ten children, one with polio and one or two with behavioral problems.

Longing for a moral compass, I found Hinduism too complicated and at the age of sixteen, encouraged by a Jesuit priest, I fell in love with Jesus. But it took me a decade or so to admit to myself that the gap between Jesus and Christianity was at least as wide as the one between Gandhi and Hinduism. I became a Unitarian Universalist.

Being a UU allows me to be open to all spiritual experiences. Now I could attend a Christian church on Good Friday and listen to the most moving passage I've ever found in any text, religious or secular, where Jesus, after being whipped, spit upon and crucified, still says, "father, forgive them for they know not what they do." That instant in my mind, Jesus seems to share the cross with Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Matthew Sheppard, and thousands of women and men in whom I see the triumph of love and forgiveness over hate and cynicism. I also consider it my civic responsibility to enlighten the occasional bigot that I meet in Christian churches that a) I'm not associated with the Al Qaeda, b) if looks indicated one's proclivity toward violence, then Jesus probably resembled Osama Bin Laden more than he did George W. Bush, and c) Jesus never said anything anti-gay or pro-Capitalist.

My need to visit temples of Hindu goddesses is a bit more complex. I believe, because I grew up not knowing a father, I can only think of God as a mother. Besides, it's cool being part of the one-sixth of humanity who have no trouble thinking of God as a woman.

Belief in God or Goddess to me is the acknowledgment of the Great Mystery that is the universe, the metaphor that represents among other things boundless Space and endless Time. A religion is like a poem full of imagination that revolves around this Great Mystery. Anyone who believes in only one religion to me is like someone who only appreciates one poem.

A humanist friend of mine thinks there's another reason why I'm a polytheist. He said, "what better way is there to oppose religious fanaticism than to believe in all religions?" I hope to Goddess he's right.

What I Believe - Caroline Rayner [Next] [back to top]

I believe any entity so intelligent that it could have started the universe in motion is so vast, so incomprehensibly immense that my poor little brain cells couldn't begin to understand it. Verifying the existence of a God or Not is something I wouldn't be able to accomplish in a thousand lifetimes. So why should I waste my precious time worrying about the presence of an omniscient, all knowing being today or tomorrow or next year? What I know for sure is that the only force powerful enough and beautiful enough for me to believe in is the love that human beings extend toward each other. And that love takes many forms--from the romantic joining of two hearts in a lifelong partnership, to the love of a parent for their newborn child, to the respect and joy that two friends experience, to the love of others in community or country, to the bond we all share to every other living, breathing individual on this planet. A case could be made for the importance of love between a person and animals or nature in our interconnected web, but that's another topic, and I only have a few minutes to speak!

Instead of saying that love is an expression of faith in God, I suppose that I'd twist it a bit and say that the concept of God is an expression of faith in love. Whether or not a physical God actually exists is actually unimportant to me.

I'd like to read modified excerpts from an article I read recently by Brian Doyle, entitled "Leap" ⁽ⁱ⁾

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, as if they were parachuting. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people lining up and jumping, flailing on the way down. Elizabeth Garcia saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Stuart DeHann saw one woman's dress billowing as she fell and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

There is no fear in love, wrote John the Apostle, but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It it is what makes me believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against the evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window. But they did reach for each other and they held on tight and leaped, falling endlessly into the smoking canyon at 200 miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands and I hold on to that.

When I read this article, I was very moved. Although we all can feel great love intermingled with great joy, it is often during moments of pain, of horror, that all the inconsequential concerns and needs filling our days just disappear. What is left, deep down inside, is an understanding of that which is most important to us, that which guides and sustains us through life. At traumatic times like these, the love for one another shines above all.

What I want to do, during the few years I have on this planet, is to figure out how I, a very imperfect, self-centered, and ultimately very human woman, can best express love to others. This is what I believe, all I believe, and what I want most in my life.

⁽ⁱ⁾ Doyle, Brian. "Leap", Utne Reader: The Best of the Alternative Press. Sept-Oct 2002, pp 37, 38. (Reprinted from The American Scholar. Winter 2002)

I DO NOT Love the Internet - Scott Lewis [back to top]

As a librarian I feel I must confess, I DO NOT love the Internet! I guess that is tanamount to blasphemy in my profession, but to tell you the truth, it is not where I want to spend my time. It is a fine tool however, that can be very useful at times. Here's a good example: Go to the website http://www.selectsmart.com/RELIGION/, answer 20 relatively sophisticated theological questions in a multiple choice format, and you too can discover what religion is right for you. I have taken this test several times and each time I come out a Unitarian Universalist. So after 44 year so soul searching a ten-minute survey has confirmed what I already knew, I am a Unitarian Universalist.

I agree with many things in Unitarian theology but to be precise, I am a Unitarian UNIVERSALIST. It is Universalism that really resounds with me. As most of you probably already know the Universalists believed in Universal Salvation. To over-simplify, nobody is going to hell. As a kid in the Methodist Church I was afraid of going to hell.

My mom, whom I was privileged to introduce here last Mother's Day, was very proud of her copy of H. W. Janson's The History of Art on the coffee table and I was encouraged to look at it often. I had turned to page 244 and seen the full color illustrations of the Van Eyck brothers' portrayal of hell. Frankly, I did not like what I saw. I was not too keen about Michalengelo's "Last Judgement" either. Meanwhile my Sunday school teachers were telling me, "God is Love." It was the sixties after all. But he had a special roasting pit ready for us if we were not careful. This was hard for a pre-pubescent to figure out, but I persevered. Eventually, I stopped believing in hell, stopped calling him "God", stopped thinking god as "him" and began to perceive the "interdependent web of all existence of which we are all a part."

In his work The Larger Faith: A Short History of American Universalism, Charles A. Howe writes Universalist theology implies that all people are "members of one human family and worthy of salvation, not only in the next would, but, insofar as possible, in this world as well."

"In this world as well…" What that means to me is that it is essential to my beliefs that I not only love and respect all people as my equals, but as fortune has made us un-equal, it is my responsibility to help restore equity to all.

Universalist thinking meshes with my social values of making the world a better place. Political issues like child advocacy, economic-racism, reformative justice and stopping the rape of our planet to promote capitalist growth, are all things that matter deeply to me. These are the I want to give my energy, as well as my bucks.

But making the world a better place can be as simple as giving someone else a break in traffic or asking the teen at the drive through window if he prefers the cooler weather. Seeing him, respecting him, building him up. I believe simple actions, as well as great political movements change the world and are also essential!

For me Emily Dickinson said it best in those few simple lines a lot of us memorized in high school:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

[back to top]
 

First UU Church Home | Church Newsletters | First UU Staff | Sermons | Elected Officers
Email Mark | Email the Church Office | Email the Webmaster

Last update: 02/02/2003