Spending this summer at a Unitarian Universalist retreat/learning center is wonderful-- and deepening my own faith in unexpected ways, renewing my awe at deep, deep grace. Each day here fosters diverse and lively conversation about truth, faith, religion, worldview, the common good, issues, justice, etc. -- passion that leaves me full of hope and also aware of my limited perspective. Perhaps one of the most important ways we journey towards God is through encountering others.
In encountering the spirituality and beliefs of others, I am learning how to occupy the territory of my own faith-- the on-going process of doubts, questions, and revelation. And being witness to the present wounds the lack of consistency between Jesus and we, the church, has inflicted is eye-opening, humbling, and convicting. A UU Christian writer recounted what I've been noticing, "The well, for too many UUs, had been irrevocably poisoned, and they would thereafter drink of the living waters from another source. Any other source, it seemed, but the Christian well."
Being one of few here who worship God-in-Christ causes me to pay attention to how I marginalize others and how I minimize my own faith in my desire to find common ground. In some ways I feel less diminished or wearily labeled here, it is refreshing to not feel like God is in a box or to feel the tug of red, blue, hippy, evangelical, progressive, blah blah blah. (Especially because I so often feel pulled between identities.) In some ways, its like coming out of the closet, instead of feeling pressured to conform to a particular idea of Christianity, I feel only responsible for myself. And I am already curiously "different." Here there's just the terrifying (mercy-filled) weight of comparison to the Christ I am claiming to follow, the weight of integrity to myself.
The thing that matters most to me is consistency between the internal and external, a genuine expression not of rules, values, morality, or religion (though freedom is most often bounded), but of my own encounter with the Uncreated One and freely embodying my faith and worship. I think of social reformers, of priest, of theologians, who embody their faith in a way that is full of life, engaging, and not defensive. To live bravely and to speak with my own voice, my own conviction. That challenges me.
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The same writer I mentioned above, explained her path to "Jesus claiming her" this way...
"Who is Jesus Christ to me? He is both a teacher of the Way, and the Way itself. For one who has always had a hard time grasping the concept of God, let alone developing a working definition of God, Jesus both points me toward a definition of God and then lives that definition. Jesus Christ is the freedom that laughs uproariously at the things of this world, while loving me dearly for being human enough to lust after them. He is my soul’s safety from all harm. He is the avatar of aloneness, a compassionate and unsentimental narrator of the soul’s exile on earth, and proof of the soul’s triumphant homecoming at the end of the incarnational struggle. He is not afraid to put his hands anywhere to affect healing. He mourns, and weeps, and scolds, and invites. He is life more abundant and conqueror of the existential condition of fear.
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. There are indeed degenerate branches on the tree of Christian life, but this does not keep me from Christ. There are even disagreements among Unitarian Universalist Christians about the appropriateness of this or that perspective, practice, or teaching—debates that I regard mostly with affection, if occasionally with irritation. We have so much else to do. My daily Christian practice, although it changes frequently and is augmented by wisdom and practices from other traditions, consists mostly of clumsy efforts to love my God with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul, and all my strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. That’s work enough for this lifetime.
I call myself a Christian because I am a disciple of Jesus Christ—not just Jesus-that-great-guy-and-teacher-with-the-long-hair-and-sandals but Jesus the living avatar of the great God and Jesus the Christ of Easter morning. ... When we (UUs) say that our living tradition draws from “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 that create and uphold life,” I think of that original community of disciples, who had a direct experience of the risen Christ that I revere and respect. ... Do I believe, then, in the resurrection? I believe that the original community of disciples had a direct experience of one who was truly dead, and who soon thereafter sent them out to love the world, to serve, to heal, and to overcome the forces of hatred and oppression.
... And I am convicted."
