This is the season when preachers and teachers in religious communities search within themselves and in the world to justify hope. The renewal in the earth around us stands in stark contrast to the failures in human community, also around us. Human failures are now compromising even the resiliency of earth. It is a challenge always to find an honest message in the spring, as we approach Easter.

I had the privilege of leading a First Connections session last Sunday, the first one I have led. The topic was Theology 101.

I recounted the Unitarian and the Universalist contributions to our now “blended” religious family. I praised the empowerment of the Unitarian religious tradition, the belief in our ability to shape and improve the world. I also celebrated the power and presence of an abiding Love that is the heart of the Universalist message. I spoke of the Universalist “ultimate confidence” that love is real. Our Unitarian Universalist faith attempts to blend mind and heart, reason and faith.

The folks around the circle last Sunday afternoon were engaged in the story of our religious history, the narrative of how we got here. History can help us understand and that is important.

But beyond understanding how we got here, I also invited the group to think about how that history lives in our lives. How does the empowerment of the Unitarians get lived out in your life? Does the “ultimate confidence” of the Universalists resonate in your heart?

You often hear me speak of our faith requiring us to remain naïve enough to believe that love might actually be real. The problem is that there is so much evidence to the contrary. Our commitment to reason means that we must acknowledge that evidence and never pretend that it does not exist. We need to acknowledge all of the ways we humans do violence to one another and to the planet.

And yet, we also are people who somehow preserve the fragile faith that love can win, that love can even transform hate and that the Beloved Community can be built.

Our faith is therefore both deep and fragile. The “hallelujah’s of the Easter hymns suggest a confidence that can be hard to sustain.

Rebecca Parker tells the story of hiking in Washington as a young person with her brothers and getting lost as a dense fog descended on the mountains. One brother “unfolded the geological survey map, studied it, and pronounced ‘Mount Ranier must be around here somewhere!’ … He traced our route. ‘Here is where we came, and here is where we must be right now, which means that Mount Ranier must be right…there.’ …We all turned our heads and looked into the pea-soup fog. Just as we turned, the fog opened, like two opaque sliding glass doors pulling away from each other, and Mount Ranier was…there.”

The fog soon rolled back in on itself and once more “they couldn’t see beyond their toes.”

“Our religious lives are like this,” Rebecca writes. Sustained by glimpses of insight that are enough to justify hope.

The history of our blended family of faith can be understood as a map, with directions that point to hope.

Again, from Rebecca Parker: “…I suggest that the purpose of our religious life is to see the mountain; and when we can’t see the mountain, to feel the mountain; and when we can’t feel the mountain, to be the mountain. And if there are moments when we can neither see, nor feel, nor be the mountain, then read the map.”

Hallelujah.

Bill