Given 10/22/06
by Robin Mitchell

But what about UU-ism? I am, after all, speaking to you as a UU, but why do I still call myself that if my heart is with the Buddhists and the Christians?

That's a good question. And when I first gave this sermon two years ago I didn't really have any good answers. I talked about the beloved community, about how reassuring it was to have a religious home where I was valued because of my search for the truth and not because of the particular path I happened to be following. And that's all true, but it hardly lives up to the high call I've found in other faiths; it's more consolation than transformation.

And I don't think I could have given you a good answer two months ago either. But two weeks ago I went to a workshop on theological diversity in our UU congregations (along with several people from your Fellowship), and I came away with a new vision of who we are, one that does seem worthy of my heart. We did a lovely exercise where we arranged ourselves into our full array of religious outlooks - atheists, theists, mystics, humanists, earth-centered, the three brave Christians in a room of sixty people - and we each told not only what we uniquely brought to our UU faith, but also how we were sometimes devalued even in our own congregations because of our spiritual orientation.

Then we talked about our covenant to respect and encourage each other's spiritual growth, and how that is the true heart of our faith community. And it dawned on me that that covenant, combined with our wide diversity, presented a truly inspiring challenge. We're certainly called to do more than tolerate each other, as being perhaps misguided but still sweet in a loopy kind of way. And we're called to do more than simply respect each other, as interesting, or exotic, or as someone we can perhaps get some insights from.

Our covenant calls us to encourage each other. And what does it mean for me to encourage someone on a very different path than mine; say a skeptical atheist? At the deepest level it means to see their path through their eyes, to see how it seems right to them and to find ways to help them progress along it without trying to steer them to mine. And to truly do that, to see reality through someone else's eyes with no prejudice or partisanship, is to remove yourself from the center of the universe. It's what Jesus called loving your neighbor as yourself, or what the Buddha called true compassion.

And so, another path out of the ego. But a human path, one that doesn't end in an ineffable God but in the hearts of your fellow human beings. A path of transformation that starts with the people sitting next to you, proceeds across the country and around the world, crossing boundaries of faith, politics, race, gender. A path that begins now, here in our beloved UU community. May we all find ourselves worthy of that path.