BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
Jane’s sermon on the front page got me thinking—for a lot of my life I’ve been someone who thinks that history is, well, kinda boring. I know I’m not the only one to hold that opinion. What’s the point of remembering dates on a timeline, or knowing that So-and-So fought the battle of Such-and-Such? After all, as the saying goes, “That was then, this is now.” Or, to put it a different way, “That was them, this is us.”
But the thing is, “them” really is “us.” Bad grammar aside, what I mean to say is that it’s easy to think of people 2000 or 200 or even 20 years ago as being a different kind of people, old-fashioned people who weren’t anything like we are now. And, true, they didn’t have MP3s or X-Boxes or even in-line skates. But they were still people, not so very different from who we are today. Maybe the problem with looking at history is that we put the accent on the wrong place in the word. Maybe instead of staying “HI-story,” we should pronounce it “hi-STORY.” That way we would be more likely to remember that what we’re talking about is stories, stories of people who had a lot of the same questions and problems and issues that we have today.
For instance, there are plenty of Disney movies about kids (or cute animated animals or cars or whatever) who struggle with whether to stay true to themselves or whether to hide who they truly are and what they truly think in order to fit in and be popular. But Disney certainly didn’t invent that story line, and they don’t necessarily even have the best versions of the plot. Consider Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister in the 1800s, who came to believe, unlike most ministers of his day, that the real authority for understanding religious truth was each person’s brain and conscience, not what was written in the Bible. He even went so far as to preach about his beliefs in public. This was certainly not the done thing, even amongst Unitarians—way worse than wearing unfashionable shoes. One day his fellow Unitarian ministers went to Parker’s house and told him that if he kept on saying such outrageous stuff, he was going to be kicked out of the club, officially removed from the ministers group.
Has that ever happened to you, or to someone you know? Has anyone ever threatened to not be your friend, or to kick you out of a group of friends, if you refused to go along? What did you do?
I’ll tell you what Theodore did. He not only refused to change his beliefs—and his preaching—he refused to be kicked out of the group. He told the ministerswho were sipping tea in his front parlor that they had no right to remove him from their fellowship, and that he had no intention of going anywhere. And that he certainly wasn’t going to limit what he said because they disagreed with him. The Unitarian ministers refused to let him preach in their churches, but eventually, whether they agreed with Theodore or not, they had to come to grips with the question of whether Unitarians were going to be the kind of group that kicked people out who had different beliefs, or whether we were truly a religion where differences were tolerated—or even welcomed. Bet you can guess which side eventually won. And, oh, Theodore Parker, the guy who wasn’t allowed to preach in all those Boston Unitarian churches? He went on to rent a big theatre to make room for all the people who wanted to hear him preach—a group that eventually numbered some 2000 people on a Sunday!
OK, I admit I’m as much of a sucker for a musical as the next person, and probably a lot more. And to the best of my knowledge there are no big song and dance scenes to go with the story of Theodore Parker, or any other of our Unitarian or Universalist heroes. But if you’ve ever been told that you can’t do something because you’re a girl, you might really relate to the story of Olympia Brown, the first woman to be fully ordained as a minister. And if your mother has ever stopped you from pursuing your dreams because she was afraid of what might happen to you, you might relate to the story of Origen that Jane tells on the front page. (OK, I’ll give away the punch line and tell you that when he decided to run away and become a Christian martyr like his father, his mother stopped him by hiding his clothes!)
The point is, history isn’t just facts about “them,” some random people from a long time ago. It is stories about “us,” people figuring out how to get along in the world, sometimes in fairly remarkable ways. And I have to say, our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors were a pretty interesting (and outrageous) bunch. If you want to find out more, one place to look is our KidTalk web page for kids, at www.clfuu.org/kidtalk (look for the archives link at the top if you want to read more from past months). And, hey, if you decide to make up a musical about Clara Barton or Joseph Priestly, let me know when it opens—I want to be there for sure!
