The first source of our UU faith is our personal direct experience. That will probably always be the most important source. But it’s important that we not depend only on our own wisdom and experience. What are the “texts”, understood broadly, that correct us and challenge us and ask us to reach beyond ourselves?
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We’ve been exploring together, over the last three months, our religious beliefs.
Beliefs are those ideas about ourselves and the world that we hold to be true. Beliefs are our worldview.
When we look out at the world, what do we see?
Beliefs are just the first part of a complete faith. Adding to our religious beliefs we have our religious values. I’ll switch to talking about values after the new year. And a complete faith also includes what we do with our beliefs and values, the actions that we take in the world as we live our faith. I’ll talk about the actions part of faith in the spring.
I want to emphasize that when I talk about beliefs as the foundation for a complete faith, I don’t mean just beliefs about immaterial, so-called “spiritual,” subjects, like belief in God or belief in reincarnation, or belief in Santa Claus, or what have you.
I mean beliefs as our entire worldview. Beliefs, in the way I’m using that word, refers to everything we know or think we know about the world around us. Beliefs are our description of reality, including everything that we think is part of reality.
I use the term this way, because when a person considers their beliefs, they don’t draw clear distinctions between the beliefs they have good evidence for and the beliefs they hold based only on a hunch or feeling. All our beliefs have the same weight and serve the same function to our faith. A person might have objective evidence for a belief like, the age of the universe, and only subjective evidence for a god belief, but those two beliefs amount to the same thing in guiding the person through their life, their faith life.
We can draw distinctions between beliefs based on hard evidence, beliefs based on reason and logic, and beliefs based on myths and traditions and subjective feelings, but all of those together serve the same function in providing the base for our faith. So I call them all beliefs. This is what I believe. What I know for sure because I can prove it. What I can reason out using logic. And what I believe because it feels true for me.
“Where do beliefs come from?”
How do we go about gathering up the things we know, the ideas we’ve come to hold, and the hunches we work with? How do we gather the collection of beliefs, our personal beliefs, that comprise the base of our complete faith?
I’ve been organizing my preaching about beliefs over the last three months by following a little scheme that appears on our Fellowship website.
Under the page titled, “Our Faith” there’s a section titled, “Our Beliefs” and in that section there’s this:
“Unitarian Universalists believe more than one thing. We think for ourselves, and reflect together, about important questions:
The existence of a Higher Power
Life and Death
Sacred Texts
Prayer and Spiritual Practices
I’ve preached about three of those. Today I want to look at the last: sacred texts.
For many people, the answer of where they turn to gather their beliefs, is to point to a book. A sacred text.
The Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita. The Lotus Sutra. The Torah. The Tao Te Ching. The Gospels. The letters of Paul. The Koran. The Book of Mormon.
Every culture that has writing has sacred writings. Nearly every religion has a sacred text. Unitarian Universalism does not.
Although we grew from Jewish and Christian roots, and we continue to have a special connection to the Bible because of our religious tradition and our national culture, Unitarian Universalists don’t consider the Bible sacred, in the way that Jews and Christians do. Although we love many of the texts I just mentioned, and many others, we don’t consider them sacred, the way people of other religions do.
Why don’t we have a Unitarian Universalist sacred text?
We don’t have a sacred text because we don’t believe that any person’s experience of the holy, including our own experience, can ever be authoritative beyond that person and that time.
We don’t have a sacred text, because our Unitarian Universalist experience of encountering spiritual teachings from others, is always to judge that teaching against our own experience, rather than to judge ourselves against that teaching.
I don’t consider the Bible a sacred text, because when I read the Bible I sometimes find verses in the Bible that seem good, and true, and beautiful to me, and then I find that text useful in someway to my spiritual life. But other times I find Bible verses that seem immoral to me, or ugly, of untrue, or clearly bound to the particular time and circumstance they were written and irrelevant to me. And then I dismiss the words of the Bible. I pay them no mind.
If the Bible were a sacred text for me, it would have authority. If I encountered a Bible verse that contradicted my own experience I would believe the Bible, and question myself. If I encountered a Bible verse that said something I was doing was actually wrong or sinful, I would believe the Bible and try to change my ways.
I don’t do that when I read the Bible. And I don’t do it with any of the other texts that are sacred to some people but not to me. I like what I like and ignore the rest. I pick and choose. I judge what is true in the text by what I already hold to be true in myself. I don’t expect the text to teach me, at least not much any more, but to confirm me. I don’t change my sense of what is true or moral. Sometimes a text will inspire me to be better at being the person I already know I want to be. Sometimes a text can still challenge me, but they don’t often change me.
Now I would say, parenthetically, that the way I read the Bible, picking and choosing, and finding the places that confirm my thinking rather than changing my thinking, is actually the way that most people read the Bible, including the ones who claim it as a sacred text. I just try to be honest about that fact.
A truly Sacred Text should have power over you, change you, judge you, challenge you, be more true than your own experience. But Unitarian Universalism doesn’t work that way.
Instead, we say that our personal experience is the most important source for our spiritual wisdom. We begin with what we know for ourselves, from our own experience. And then we pull from other, broader experiences, but test them against our own experience first, before we allow them into our faith.
You’re probably aware that we name a list of six sources of our faith. If you don’t know these six sources you can find them on the UUA website, and they are also printed in the front of our hymnal.
The first source is “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” So we begin with direct experience, our primary source, our own unmediated interaction with the world around us: what we see, what we feel, what we notice.
The second source is “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men…” So that is a secondhand source. Someone else has a direct experience and then through their words and deeds they teach us what they know and we learn from them.
But we can ask right there: why should we trust someone else’s experience as being any more authoritative than our own? They are just people, too. In Unitarian Universalism we don’t recognize any special beings, no saviors or messiahs. We recognize prophetic people, but not prophets. We know some people are especially good, or heroic, or inspired, and we can learn from them. But they aren’t an authority over us, just a teacher, and maybe a model.
The third source is: “Wisdom from the world’s religions…” And the fourth source is “Jewish and Christian teachings…” These are secondhand sources. Somebody else had an experience of the holy and then talked about it or wrote it down. But there’s no reason to trust their experience as more true than a direct experience I can have myself. Whatever experience they had was mediated through their own person, through their own time, through the biases and assumptions of their particular culture, and the particular question or problem they were concerned with. Sometimes what they discovered and said or wrote down would have wisdom for me, but other times the particularities that shaped their experience would make their insight irrelevant to me, or even wrong for me to follow.
The fifth and sixth sources are a little different from the others in that they provide what might actually be authoritative over me: an objective source of wisdom, not secondhand experience from someone else.
The fifth source is: “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”
“The guidance of reason and the results of science” is, actually, an authority beyond ourselves I believe we should recognize and respect. Reason doesn’t ask you to substitute someone else’s experience for your own. Reason is a tool anyone can use and use the same way. The results of science are the same for me and for you: a true wisdom source outside of either one of us.
If my experience tells me that the earth doesn’t turn and the sun moves across the sky once each day, but science tells me I’m wrong, I believe the science. I try to follow the science, and listen to reason, when I’m making choices in my life about vaccines, and climate change, and human sexuality, and racial identity, and so on. I am my own authority on many things. But I also recognize that my personal experience doesn’t count as evidence for many issues where reason and science give us answers on good authority.
The sixth, and final source of our UU faith is “Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”
That source, too, in a smaller way, points toward an objective source for our faith. “the sacred circle of life.” “The rhythms of nature.” The pagan holidays based on the changing seasons. The agricultural cycle. The relationship between the sun and the earth, the weather, the features of the natural landscape. All those are objective facts and provide an objective source for our faith. I don’t practice a pagan spirituality, but I’ve always appreciated how that six source of our faith grounds us in the real. Religion can so often float off into the transcendent realm. It’s nice to have a reminder to connect our spirituality to the world around us.
So Unitarian Universalism recognizes no sacred text because we regard all texts as records of particular people, essentially no different than ourselves, and their experience in their time and culture, and therefore can find no reason to elevate their experience above our own.
And yet, because we are also merely people, not saviors, or messiahs, or prophets either, but flawed people like everyone else; our own experience might be mistaken, or incomplete. We might misunderstand our experience. Or we might not see that our experience is also a product of our own time and culture, and our biases and blindspots, and shouldn’t be regarded as truth. We might be wrong.
So we need something more than just our experience to get to the truth. A sacred text isn’t the thing for us. But what could help us see the deeper truth beyond ourselves?
One is those objective sources I just mentioned. We subject our personal experience to the tests of reason, logic, and the scientific method. And we stay wary of floating off into our own heads by staying grounded in the real world around us. In the words of our fifth source, we follow the “humanist teachings which … warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”
And there is yet another tool we can use to test and challenge what we think we learn from personal experience. A tool that brings us back to the essential quality of this Fellowship. The tool is each other. The tool is this community.
It’s in that quote that I read earlier taken from our Fellowship website. It says, “Unitarian Universalists believe more than one thing. We think for ourselves, and reflect together, about important questions:”
We think for ourselves. And we reflect together. I bring my experience. You bring yours. I tell you my story. You tell your story. I defend what I think it true. But maybe you convince me that the truth is more subtle or complicated than I thought it was. Or maybe that what I thought is true isn’t true at all, now that I’ve listened to the stories from my community. I change. I change you. We grow together. I become aware of my weak spots, my biases and prejudices. I learn to say, “I never thought of it that way, now I see a new way.
Our Fellowship, then, becomes a kind of living, evolving, sacred text. Each of us writing a verse, then discussing and changing what we’ve written, then coming back next week with new experiences to share, new verses to write. A scripture written in water, written in air, written with our lives, that changes with us, and changes between us, and has authority over us, only because we find ourselves written in it.