BY STEFAN JONASSON, MINISTER, UNITARIAN CHURCH IN ARBORG, MANITOBA, CANADA, COORDINATOR OF SERVICES TO LARGE CONGREGATIONS FOR THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST
ASSOCIATION, AND CLF BOARD MEMBER
We asked longtime CLF member, the Rev. Stefan Jonasson, for permission to print the letter he wrote to his parishioner, Avery. Avery had asked him to respond to a question that would help her write a paper for her World Religions class. (You will note that Rev. Jonasson serves a Unitarian congregation, distinct from Unitarian Universalist, as it is located in Canada.)
Dear Avery,
I’m happy to do my best to help out with the information that you need for the paper for your World Religions class. I have to say I am most intrigued. You ask:
What exactly are the outlines of being a Unitarian and living a Unitarian life?
Some Unitarians would say that the outlines of our faith and of living faithfully as a Unitarian are contained in our much-loved seven principles, and I would be hard-pressed to quarrel with that view, for the thought of them moves me in my faith.
But when I think about the essentials of our faith and what it means to live as a Unitarian, I always come back to the affirmation written by James Vila Blake, which we recite almost every Sunday:
Love is the spirit of this church
And service its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another.
The wisdom contained in these few words is as old as the mountains and as fresh as the last snowfall. When Blake wrote these words as the “covenant of fellowship” for the Third Unitarian Church of Chicago in 1893, he meant to distill the essence of our liberal religious faith into the most precise, concise and inclusive statement he could come up with. More than a century later, after tens of thousands of sermons by thousands of ministers and lay preachers, after several denominational commissions and countless books on the subject, I’ve yet to read or hear anything that states it better.
“Love is the spirit of this church.” This marks our continuity with the Jewish and Christian traditions, which, from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus, taught that the sum total of religious teaching could be encapsulated in what was called the Great Commandment: To love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and to love your neighbour as yourself.
Now Avery, many Unitarians no longer believe in God, at least not in the way that most people in the world do, but I don’t think that that is the essential point. I believe the Great Commandment, which we perpetuate in the first line of our affirmation, is really calling us to love something beyond ourselves and someone beside ourselves. So it seems to me that it’s enough to love the Earth, which is our home, or Life itself, which is so mysterious and grand. The Mahatma Gandhi once said that his only god was Truth, and that too would be worthy of our transcendent affection. The only thing we can really say about God with any confidence is that we’re not it!
Loving our neighbours as ourselves can be more challenging, since some of our neighbours can be so damned annoying—or worse. Yet, when we affirm “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” we are making the bold claim that there is something in every human being, however hidden it may sometimes be, which is worthy of our reverence and affection. And even if the light within another is barely a spark, yet can we encourage it to burn more brightly and clearly and warmly.
But the most difficult love of all, I think, is loving ourselves. Yet loving ourselves is essential, for our capacity to love God—or Earth, or Life, or Truth—as well as our capacity to love our neighbours, is grounded in the ability to love ourselves. We cannot see the worth in others until we see what is worthy within ourselves. We cannot honour the dignity of others until we can see the dignity in our own lives. When we strive to love ourselves, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and to love the commanding reality in our lives which calls us forth from who we are to what we may yet become, whatever we may choose to call it, then we can be said to be living in the spirit of our tradition.
“And service (is) its law.” We live at a time when far too many people serve only themselves. Indeed, if I weren’t as familiar with the past as I am, I might mistakenly worry that we live in the most selfish age in world history. So many people define themselves by the possessions they own or by the mindless pleasures they pursue. While encouraging us to be happy and to seek our own individual satisfaction and fulfillment, our Unitarian faith also encourages us to make service to others central to our religious practice, including serving the well-being of the planet, with its varied creatures and natural wonders.
“This is our great covenant.” It is not a creed or required set of beliefs that bind Unitarians together into a faith community, but rather a “covenant” we make to be mutually supportive of one another. A covenant, in my mind, is simply a deeper and more spiritual word for “contract” or “agreement,” such as when we speak of the covenant of marriage. It is an agreement to be a community, which each one of us
enters into of our own free will.
“To dwell together in peace” means that we seek to be respectful of one another, even when we may disagree, and that we eschew violence or coercion, whether physical, mental or emotional. What could be more ridiculous, for instance, than trying to force someone to believe something through threats or intimidation? It is far better to persuade someone that something is true (or not) through carefully reasoned arguments and vigorous conversation! “We need not think alike to love alike,” said one of our early leaders in Transylvania, Francis David. So it is that tolerance has long been a central tenet of Unitarians. But I think that we can never be fully at peace without justice as well, so I believe that dwelling together in peace calls us to work towards a just and generous society in which all people share in the world’s riches.
“To seek the truth in love” implies that we are forever called to expand our knowledge and understanding, endeavouring to be intellectually, emotionally and spiritually honest with ourselves and with one another. Unitarians strive to believe things because they are true, rather than claim that things are true merely because we believe them! Evidence is more important to us than the claims of authority, which lead us to ask, “how do we know something is true?” Even the wisest person can be wrong, so it is always important to consider the evidence and then use our own judgment to arrive at conclusions about what the evidence means. If seeking the truth implies that we are a curious people, then seeking the truth in love reminds us that we should be humble in our assertions and respectful of others in our search for the truth.
“And to help one another.” Almost everything that happens in a church involves something we could each probably do by ourselves, if we really wanted to, although I think that such radical individualism and solitariness tends to impoverish us. There is something about joining together in a religious community which enriches the spiritual quest. Moreover, it is only when we are in conversation with others that our mistaken views are challenged, corrected and refined. Because human beings are social creatures, we seek out the company of others and find meaning in helping one another and in being helped by one another. We are stronger together than each of us is alone.
This is what I think it means to live a Unitarian life: to strive to live up to and into the affirmation we share with one another each Sunday when we gather, so that love will indeed be the spirit of our church and that, together and alone, we will spend our lives in service to the world.
