“…humble never really registered for me,” wrote Brian Doyle in our reading. It never really registered “because I was not humble, and had no real concept of humble…” Humility was something that he had to learn…that he had to be taught by the living of life with his spouse and children in this world with its great cruelty and great beauty.
“Religion today faces a world not merely of transition, but of one revolutionary crisis following another with almost unbelievable rapidity. Political breakdown, economic, (injustice) continental shifting of …power almost stun the mind.”
The world can get your attention these days.
But I am not quoting one of the progressive pundits of our era.
This was written by Universalist Clarence Skinner in the early 20th century. Skinner called our religious ancestors from concern only with God’s love, and their personal salvation, to the work of building Beloved Community.
The Social Gospel it was called.
Skinner’s was a primary voice calling Universalism to the concerns of this world, not just the world to come.
“A world of revolutionary crisis…” I’m quoting from Skinner’s last book, published in 1945. “One revolutionary crisis following another.” He could be writing about our time.
1945: The Second World War was ending, but the devastation it left was massive.
Among its casualties was the confidence of religious liberals that progress was inevitable…
Just below the victory celebration was the knowledge that western culture had managed to fail once again…and the devastation had been multiplied exponentially.
There was commitment to create a new world order, but also a knowing that humans were capable of the holocaust and that atomic weapons had changed the calculus of war.
Beloved Community was not …at least not inevitably…right around the corner.
Skinner again: “The crisis of our age, which is one of the most acute in the whole history of [human life], might well be described as a sudden demand for greatness for which the world is unprepared.”
A demand for greatness.
He railed against what he called the sinful partialisms of his age. Nationalism vs world consciousness. Capitalism vs Communism. Authoritarianism vs Democracy.
These win-lose battles of good vs evil…could not hold the universal truths that Skinner perceived.
Skinner called for universalism as the only approach that could hold what he called the “unities and universals.”
Of course, it was Skinner and the Universalists of his day who believed they got to name what those “unities” and “universals” were.
I often mention the privilege of the Unitarians, but the Universalists, as well, thought they had a monopoly on religious truth, that they were masters of the theological universe.
Humility is our spiritual theme this month. Another new theme for us and another good one, because humility…well, it brings us down to earth.
The words humility and human both derive from the root word for earth.
To be humble, writes Rev. Margaret Allen, “is to be grounded…”
C.S. Lewis said that “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.
Humility asks us to know that we are a part of creation, not the masters of creation…
Not masters of the universe.
When my son was 7 or 8, some 30 years ago now, he became obsessed with a line of action figures called the Masters of the Universe. Some of you may remember these 7” plastic “action figures…dolls.
The hero was He-Man…that’s right. He-Man. His “real” name was Adam and he was a prince in this magical world. With his sword and the saying of magical words, Prince Adam transformed into He-Man, the strongest human in the universe, the force for good…so that he could battle Skeletor, the personification of evil.
The battles were epic, violent…never ending, allowing the writers to introduce one after another evil scheme from Skeletor and an equal number of victories for He-Man.
It was awful. And it was big business with a weekly TV show, comic books of course, fan clubs, and merchandise of all kinds.
The imagery…well, let’s see.
First Adam…I remember that name from somewhere. Adam. Adamah…that first human in the western religious story. Adam is blond…white, needless to say. And impressively muscled…even before his transformation into He-Man. In fact his body didn’t seem to change at all in the transformation…but he added an iron cross on his chest and his skin tone deepened just a bit. Began to look almost semitic.
And Skeletor…with the face of a skeleton…seemed a personification of death as well as evil.
This was Christian allegory. Jesus and life vs Satan and death.
Other superheroes have become popular since those days but a new Masters of the Universe animated film is in production today.
I resisted bringing those figures into our home. The violence and the gender and racial stereotyping were so unforgiving.
And the theology…though I didn’t talk about it in those terms back then…so problematic.
I tried to talk with my son about how he did not have to see the world through that simplistic frame of good vs evil …everything did not have to be a battle…violence should be the last response not the first response.
I did not tell him to move through the world without his guard up…but I tried to let him know that living was not just about being on guard.
I resisted…but I eventually gave in and our house became He-Man central.
Life as a battle between good and evil resonates not just through the Abrahamic faiths. Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer, are major deities in Hinduism. Think of the Yin and Yang of the Tao.
Religions from time out of mind have used images of that battle between good and evil to describe our world and our lives.
What is our view of the world and how it works… that big picture, 30,000 foot view?
Rev. Daniel Kantor, in his book, Faith for the Unbeliever, writes that:
“traditionally … a worldview can take one of three stances: the world or universe is essentially evil, indifferent, or lifegiving.”
Those who see the world as essentially evil rely on force in responding to it. This is the view of the world that the Masters of the Universe and far too much current political rhetoric embraces. Good vs evil. Force is required. Its win-lose all the way.
The second possibility is to see the universe as essentially indifferent. This is the secular, the scientific, the non-religious view. The danger here is the difficulty in finding purpose in our lives…if there is no value one way or the other, how do we choose?
The third possibility is to see the world as essentially lifegiving and nourishing, filled with responsibility and grace. This option encourages belief that a purpose exists, and implies a responsibility to carry it out. The Universalists were reclaiming this possibility with their God of love and the Social Gospel that called faith into action.
The world as evil, indifferent or lifegiving.
I don’t think we hold to one of these views throughout a life. Different life experiences can call out different responses in us. We can move from one to another and back…but not often.
Most of us have a dominant understanding or assumption…a default view of this world and how we are called to move in it. We develop this view over time and through practice. We learn responses to the world that seem to work for us…whether they work well in truth or not….
And our responses become habit.
It was martial artist and sometime philosopher, Bruce Lee, who said: “Under duress, [when the chips are down] we do not rise to our aspirations, but fall to the level of our training.”
We default to what we know.
Our strategies and our views of the world and how it works have been forged by hundreds of years of winner take all, with domination of the planet and its people as the goal.
“Our default mindset has been forged from the experience of colonization, of slavery, of capitalism-as-religion and corporation-as-demi-god.” I’m quoting Rev. angel Kyoto Williams.
It should be no surprise that humility is a spiritual challenge for us. We default to our habits…even when those habits have proven destructive over and over in the past. We fall to the level of our training.
That Masters of the Universe model…in the affluent communities of the west… worked for quite a while. It was possible to sustain the illusion of control and the illusion that we were creating ways of living together on the earth that could justify hope…hope that our communities might, in the not too distant future…actually become life affirming and nourishing to the bodies and spirits of us all.
I call that an illusion because we see how fragile that hope has proven. How many were excluded. How easily it has been reversed. And how little we are truly in control. The coronavirus is just the most recent example.
But things may be getting bad enough…the threats to our very existence real enough…the failures of our past fixes impossible to ignore enough…
That some of us…perhaps many of us… possibly even most of us…
Are open to a new way…a new view of how the world works and how it might work…a new commitment to practices that shift the paradigm.
But here is where it gets hard.
Because it is not enough to add a humility prayer or a gratitude practice to lives that have been informed for generations by the good vs evil, winners and losers paradigm.
That can help but it is not enough.
We need to engage in different practices long enough…that they become the default. ..or at least long enough so that they become an option we know we can choose.
And that will call us to deal with things that those illusions of control papered-over.
James Baldwin wrote: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with [their] pain.”
We are not haters…most of us. But giving up the illusion of control is a source of fear for many of us.
It does not feel that this is just fear of the unknown.
I am not sure I can name it perfectly…
But is it possible that many of us have invested so much energy in presenting ourselves as in control of our lives…when inside we have known how out of control life can feel…
Perhaps we have pretended to be masters of our universe for so long…that we are holding shame at bay about our inadequacy.
What I know is that there is something that keeps us from stepping to the edge, letting our assumptions fall away and looking at the universe with newly opened eyes.
Words of Rev. Angela Herrera, (which I have adapted slightly):
“You bring yourself before the sacred,
Before the holy,
Before what is ultimate and bigger than your lone life
Bigger than your worries
Bigger than your money problems
Bigger than the fight you had with your sister
And your aches and pains…
You stand at the edge of mystery,
At the edge of the deep,
With the light streaming at you,
And you can’t hide anything—not even from
Yourself…
[And you] say,What is this?
What am I looking at?
What do I do?
[You] think of all the generations who’ve come hereBefore you
And cast words out toward the source of that light,
Wanting to name it.
Somehow…the names stayed
Tethered to the aging world and got old
While the light remains timeless and burns without
Dimming.
Meanwhile,
The armful of worries you brought to the edge of mystery
Have fluttered to your feet.
Unobscured by these, you shine back,
Light emanating unto light,
You, with your broken heart and your seeking,
You are the utterance of the timeless word.
The name of the Holy is pronounced
Through your being.”
I believe that we need to step to the edge, look into the deep, and discover what it is that we fear.
I believe that we need to find the skill or the courage or the desperate necessity to stop seeing the world through those long practiced lenses of good vs evil, of win vs lose.
The goal of control and illusion of our power have not served us well.
I believe we need to companion one another as we move to the edge and look together into the deep and discover, together, the light streaming toward us and the hope within us.
That is the Universalist promise. That we are all children of that light…that light that shines toward us even when we close our eyes or turn away.
We will need to deal with the pain…with all the harm we have done to one another and to the earth. We cannot avoid the pain.
But we can and we must change our habits and our view of the world…
We are not masters of the universe.
Humility is thinking of yourself less…and leaving room for love to hold you and help you…leaving room for love to light your path and point the way…through the pain… toward the life-giving hope that is ours to claim.
Topics: Humility