Our spiritual development encourages us to become more fully who we are, and to work to remove barriers so that others may fully express their true selves as well. But without limits, a radically free individual can damage a shared community. The responsible individual voluntarily curtails their freedom, creating the defined self who may actually be the true self the healthy spirit seeks.
Last week, we looked briefly at the work of the American philosopher Josiah Royce, who originated the phrase Beloved Community.
For Royce, the Beloved Community is a mystical community comprised of all the communities who are themselves gathered around allegiance to the divine ideals. These communities, like a church, are those communities whose mission is to further the divine program of reaching toward the transcendental values of the good, the true and the beautiful. Royce called those kinds of communities, “Communities of Grace.”
Our church is a Community of Grace.
But our community, including members, friends, visitors, and others who we might claim directly, only numbers a few hundred individuals. That’s fine. Although we do need to work this year on growing a larger membership, we don’t need to have every person of good will on the planet join our church. Other folks will find other communities of grace: other UU churches, spiritual communities of other traditions, and secular organizations, too, because the spiritual is not confined to the overtly religious.
And then, imagines Josiah Royce, all of those communities, meeting separately, will join in the spiritual realm as members of the Beloved Community.
For Josiah Royce, as for myself, community is primary. Community is where it really all begins. And community is also the endpoint I think of a religion like Unitarian Universalism whose goal is not to bring individuals to salvation in another world, but to create for all of us, here and now, lives of joy and a world community of peace, liberty and justice for all.
Community is where we begin because Royce saw that though we are born as individuals, community existed prior to our birth. Our story begins with our birth. But our history precedes us. We are born into communities.
You are born into a culture. You learn a language that preceded you. You parents expose you to a religious tradition, or keep you from one. Before you choose how to do things for yourself, you are taught by the community, “This is how we do things.”
We discover who I am as an individual, first by learning who we are as a community. And then we name ourselves by saying, “that’s not me.” We separate from the community by asserting our individuality. I speak this way. I wear these clothes. I choose to live this way. But those choices that define our individuality are made against the context of a community. You can’t be a radical, unless you’re radically different from something common. You can’t be a free-thinker, unless there’s a normal way of thinking that other people are doing.
This dynamic relationship between the individual and the community is a fundamental issue of the spiritual life. It’s the difference in our spiritual natures between being, on the one hand, free to be ourselves; and on the other hand, responsible to others. It is both the ground of our identity and the spiritual goal: radically free to express my unique self, radically responsible to the interdependent web of all existence of which I am a part.
Spiritual growth, simply put, is a journey toward an increasing sense of connection with the universe, along with an increasing freedom for every particle of the universe to be truly itself.
You might say that growing spiritually means learning to be more loving, more peaceful with others, more compassionate with the feelings of others, more merciful with the failings of others. All of that is true. And all of those are fruits of the larger tree of growing in our sense of connection between ourselves and others. We grow spiritually as we begin to see ourselves in others, and them in us. We grow spiritually when we learn to identify not with the isolated ego walking around with our name and body, but with the collective community of all sentient beings, all life, all existence.
You might say that growing spiritually means working for justice for all people, equality for people regardless of difference, respect for the democratic process and other liberal values that encourage all people to be themselves and share their gifts. All of that is true. And all of those values are fruits of the larger tree of growing in our ability to know ourselves as individuals and express our individual gifts, and also to help others break the chains that prevent them from being themselves and sharing their gifts.
We often think, and I think this has to do with the American culture we grow up in (so there’s that community/individual pair that Josiah Royce pointed out), that the primary goal of life is to learn to be ourselves. To love ourselves. To express ourselves. To silence our inner critic. To unchain ourselves from bonds of guilt and shame.
One of the three spheres of exploration that belong uniquely to spirituality is the issue of identity, the question of who am I?
Who am I? Who is the real me?
What are the parts of me that I’ve hidden, because I’m ashamed? Or the parts I’ve tried to express but the culture around me has told me they won’t abide?
Our cultural progress as human societies over the centuries has been the gradual loosening of restrictions that kept some people down, silenced, and made to conform.
And our progress as a culture, as well as our individual spiritual growth, has come when we let everyone step out of the boxes we’ve put them in, or in which they’ve confined themselves from fear and shame, and unfurl their fabulous wings and let their freak flag fly.
That’s liberation. That’s freedom.
And that is indeed the spiritual goal. You’ve felt it yourself.
That moment of spiritual ecstasy when I could finally say the truth about myself. I could say openly who I am, and what I want. Though they told me that prize wasn’t for me, I won it anyway. I followed my dream. I proved I could. I found myself.
And then, having tasted the flavor of freedom for myself, I determined that I would help others do the same. I marched for their rights. I wrote letters. I voted. I counseled young people so they could see their potential. I gave them a start. I worked to remove economic barriers, or disability barriers. Everywhere I saw a wall, I worked to tear it down.
That’s what the choir was singing about. That’s what Emma Goldman was talking about in our opening words when she said:
“Some day, men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women.”
Freedom is the spiritual goal. To be yourself. To be truly yourself. To not let any internal neurosis hold you back. To not let any cultural restriction hold you back. And to work so that no one else is held back either, either by the unhelpful, untruths, they tell themselves, or the bigotry and biases of traditions that say, “no you can’t.”
Yes you can, says the healthy spirit. Yes YOU can, once you know who you really are.
That’s the goal. Because creation needs you.
Why are we all so different? Why not have a creation where every created thing is just a carbon copy of everything else? Why make ten thousand different things, when we could just have one perfect thing ten thousand times?
Because diversity is the goal. Glorious multiplicity. Variety. Thousands of different solutions available to meet any potential problem. Thousands of different mirrors reflecting the infinite image of God.
If you lose yourself… if we lose YOU, maybe we’ll never find the answer to that question that plagues us. If we lose your particular light, maybe we’ll never find our way out of the darkness.
The path to the divine goal requires that you be you. That’s why you were born. The gifts that have only ever showed up on the planet with you are exactly the help we need.
So, freedom, for ourselves and freedom for others, is essential spiritual work.
But putting it that way, slightly misses the mark, and could lead us into error if we’re not careful.
The real goal is not freedom, but the freedom to fully be the person you truly are.
The freedom to fully be the person you truly are
Here is where we come back to Josiah Royce. Because the person you truly are, as an individual, is formed by and inextricably bound into the community you emerged from. And the goal at the end of the spiritual journey is not to be radically free individuals, untethered from the rest of creation, because “all your rules are bumming me out, man.” But to approach the divine in community, as communities of communities, as Beloved Community.
If freedom alone were the spiritual goal, then you would be failing spectacularly right now. All of you sitting there in neat little rows, listening attentively to me preaching, following along in an order of service. None of that is freedom.
If freedom alone were the spiritual goal, then we should worship by running around the sanctuary, overturning chairs, laughing, screaming, lighting the altar cloths on fire. Or you would be free to sing whatever hymn you want, or thrown the hymn book through the window, or raid the kitchen for all the cookies saved for coffee hour. Freedom isn’t just destructive of course, you’d be free to sit quietly, too, or write your own sermon, or paint a mandala on the wall. But if freedom is the goal, then coming to church at all seems, unlikely. Why be with others if we’re all doing our own thing? Who says I have to show up at a particular place at 10am, with all my clothes on? I’m free. I do what I want!
But it’s not freedom alone that’s the spiritual goal, but the freedom to fully be the person you truly are.
And Royce’s insight about community shows us that who any of us truly is, is a person inextricably tied to community, and thus to responsibility.
As a radically free individual, I have no responsibilities. No one’s going to tell me what to do. As a free individual I am not beholden to any other person, or rule, or tradition.
But the person I truly am, is not just the individual with this name and this body. Truly, I am a person who emerged from community, and is ever since, in every way, bound back into that community.
The full person each of us truly is, is an individual in community. Being a member of a community is as much a definition of who we truly are, as is the individual with the name and body and unique gifts you hold.
How much of who you are can you say really came just from yourself? Take any cherished part of yourself and pull on the thread and soon you’ll see that it tugs on networks of relationships that tie you back into tradition and culture and history. That language you didn’t invent. That food you like, but didn’t grow. The education you’re so proud of, but ask who founded the school, and who wrote the books you read? You poke your head above the community, you free individual, you, only because you’re the most recent to arrive and you’re standing on a lot of shoulders.
That community aspect of our identity comes with a lot of restrictions. Our community dimension molds our individual dimension. And as we are free as individuals, we are responsible as members of a community.
We don’t tear up the sanctuary on Sunday mornings because we are members of a community and we are responsible to them. The members of the choir all agree to sing the same anthem and follow the conductor because we are responsible to each other.
As members of a community we are responsible to each other. So we voluntarily curtail our freedom. And we agree to follow rules created by the community. But being a member of a community, our community, we are responsible to ourselves as well. Because we are the community. The community is us. Part of me being me, is my place in my community. When we voluntarily don’t do many of the things that a radically free individual might do, we are not being less true to our true self, we are being more true, because we are including the communal part of our personal identity . When we act as responsible members of a community we are more fully being the person we truly are.
The person we truly are exists in community. We accept the restrictions of community gladly, because communal beings is who we are.
It is the radically free individual who is lost, isolated and alone. The responsible member of a community is happier because they don’t set their hair on fire, although they could, and don’t disrupt every occasion, and do show up on time, and do come prepared to meetings, and do pitch in with others on work that would only get done if every person agreed to contribute their individual gifts together.
That network of responsibilities is true freedom. Just as the true person is both defined individually and communally; true freedom is both defined by what you’re free for and what you’re free from. Free for individual expression. Free from community cacophony. Free for individual creativity. Free from community chaos.
As we sang in our opening hymn:
“We gather together to join in the journey,
confirming, committing our passage to be
a true affirmation, in joy and tribulation,
when bound to human care and hope — then we are free.”
Our Unitarian tradition teaches us the power of the individual, and the thrill of walking one’s own path.
Our Universalist tradition reminds us that we exist in a communal embrace that stretches across space and time, stronger than the power of any individual to resist.
So our path to the glorious expression of our true self, recognizes the communal as well as the individual dimension of our existence and glories as much in our responsibilities as in our freedom.