November 5, 2023
©Rev. Janet Onnie
A few weeks ago the weather was unseasonably warm for the Saturday morning Staunton Farmer’s Market. As I shouldered my way through a bumper crop of chatting adults, unleashed children, and many, many dogs, I remembered a column by Perry Bacon Jr. who was bemoaning his inability to find a religious community for himself and his daughter. He wrote, “The Saturday farmers market in my neighborhood and a weekly happy hour of Louisville-area journalists provide some of what church once did for me: consistent gathering of people with some shared values and interests. I’ve made new friends through both. And there are plenty of other groups and clubs I could join. But none of those gatherings provide singing, sermons and solidarity all at once.”
Singing, sermons, and solidarity all at once. This is what religious institutions provide: a framework for meaning-making, rituals marking the passage of time, creating and supporting communities, and inspiration to take prophetic action. Through the pursuit of these four tasks, religious folks might also experience a sense of wonder, discover some new truth about themselves or the world, or even have an encounter with the divine.
We are living in a country where a significant portion of the population is lonely, anxious, depressed, angry, and/or frightened. At the same time attendance our religious institutions – where comfort and belonging were traditionally found — are in freefall. This morning I want to take a look into the impact of these times on our religious institutions and how responding with generosity will help propel us through these hinge times.
Hinge times are periods in human history that happen every 500 years or so where everything social, economic, political, cultural, religious – you name it – is shaken to the foundations and comes out reconfigured. Religious institutions are not exempt. For example: 500 years ago the Great Reformation gave birth to the Protestant church and served to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church as well. Now, 500 years later, social unrest in the 1960s ushered in the end of the Christian era in the Western world. In the same way that the Great Reformation began with Dr. Martin Luther in 1517, we find ourselves living in a time of upheaval. Hinge times are not good news for hind bound institutions, but they didn’t then – nor do they now – negate the need for communities of inspired meaning-makers where one could bring one’s whole self without fear of censure. This deeply human need to belong to something larger than oneself is not going away any time soon.
This particular hinge time is thought to be ushering in a second Axial Age. The first Axial Age was described by philosopher Karl Jaspers as the time in history — roughly between 800 and 200 BCE — during which the headwaters of all our great religious traditions began to independently form around the globe. Until this shift, human spirituality had been largely earth-based, and our original gods and goddesses were found in the cycles, seasons, and forces of nature. Axial spirituality began breaking ties with both collective identity and with the Earth. At the same time, with the new emphasis on the individual and the transcendent, the models of salvation or enlightenment that emerged began to look a lot like escape —whether it was understood as fallenness and sin in the West or suffering and samsara in the East. A profound sense that something was wrong with this world began to dominate the spiritual landscape. Something was wrong, and the ultimate goal was to get out of here—to attain to the heavenly prize or to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. This sense of exile has been a deep undercurrent in human spirituality ever since. Let me say that again because I think this is the reason many of you are here in this place today. The sense of exile from the earth-based religions has been a deep undercurrent in human spirituality for millennia.
Humanism’s great gift is to call us out of exile: to articulate the sense that we belong deeply to this world and to each other. The truth of interconnection is pouring in from every field of knowledge: from environmentalists, recognizing that we are part of a global ecosystem; to quantum physicists, uncovering the deep interconnection at the most subtle levels of matter; to evolutionary biologists, revealing life’s unfolding as a single, vast process. Not to mention the internet and smart phones, which are interweaving the world at the level of communication. Slowly we are beginning to discover that there is ultimately no separation within the field of existence. And religion and spirituality are being transformed all over again.
This is good news. With this second shift, we are picking up everything we lost in that first great axial transformation—the profound earthiness and connection to our bodies and a deep sense of collective identity. But we are not picking them back up at the tribal level. We are picking them up at the global level. We are one tribe, one human family, one planet Earth. At the same time, we are not losing our appreciation of the individual, the transcendent, and the rational that we have cultivated over the last two thousand years; rather, we are integrating it with an appreciation of the collective, the immanent, and the intuitive, now bound together in a global vision big enough for the entire human family. The “Second Axial Age” is about the marriage of heaven and earth, the immanent and the transcendent, spirit and body, time and eternity. One of the foundations of this marriage is a generosity of spirit.
The tension arises from the desires of the offspring from this new marriage and those who are still looking to escape this troubled world. Who are clinging to their tribal identities.
Jim Davis and Michael Graham have written a book entitled “The Great Dechurching”, which is a sociological study of why people are leaving institutional religion and what could be done to bring them back. I’ve only skimmed it, but I have a couple of thoughts about bringing people back. First and foremost, I’m not so sure people WANT to come back to 1950s-style religion. Instead, let’s imagine that this time could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success. Let’s imagine that church or any religious institution could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many churches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers to create.
There is a 220-year-old church in Staunton that has an average Sunday attendance of about 40 people. The entire upper floor has an indoor gym and classrooms for the children. Of the many rooms in the buildings there’s one designated as the “Women’s Sewing Room”. Both kitchens are equipped to industrial standards. In fact, the whole facility is constructed to house a 500-member inter-generational congregation. It’s a lot of space for 40 people. You might conclude that this is a dying church, and, by some measures, it is. But it has a food ministry that hosts a food pantry open to all comers twice each week and delivers food to home-bound folx twice a month. Classrooms have been utilized as food storage areas. It’s staffed entirely by volunteers – most of whom are not church members. These volunteers also participate in the noontime lunches held in the church across the street. This church is known county-wide for their thriving programs to feed the hungry. But the sanctuary and classrooms are mostly empty. How are we to think about this place? The number of ‘members’ have dwindled but the number of non-member volunteers has expanded. Is it still a church if the main identity is not the worship services but the feeding programs? This leads me into my second thought.
Let’s jettison the handwringing over the decline of attendance and affiliation – the old metrics of a successful religious organization. Instead let’s look at the signs of life that are popping up elsewhere, like the one I just described. Remember that the third reason for religion is to create and support communities, allowing each of us to find a place of belonging. Belonging. This is not the same as ‘fitting in’. Brené Brown defines belonging as “being part of something bigger but also having the courage to stand alone, and to belong to yourself above all else.” In that case, belonging is actually the opposite of fitting in! Fitting in means that we are changing ourselves to make other people like us.
We Unitarian Universalists like to refer to our communities as those of ‘like-minded’ people. This is not the most generous stance one could take. I once had a person who came to the congregation with a love for debate. Their views on topics like gun control and immigration were such that there was always plenty of room for discussion, often heated. Over time most in the congregation steered clear of them and they eventually left. They were unwilling to ‘fit in’ at the same time they were desperate to belong. The sad part of this experience is that no one – including me – was willing to really pay attention to them. And “attention”, wrote Simone Weil, “is the purest form of generosity.” We failed to be generous.
If we are to swing through these hinge times, we will need to elevate our practice of generosity. We can do that through attending to the process of revising Article 2 of our UUA Bylaws, expressing ourselves in terms of our values, one of which is “Generosity”. It reads, “Generosity. We cultivate a spirit of gratitude and hope. We covenant to freely and compassionately share our faith, presence, and resources. Our generosity connects us to one another in relationships of interdependence and mutuality.”
The first sentence articulates WHO we are: We are people who cultivate a spirit of gratitude and hope. I hope so, because we are going to need all the hope we can muster as we live into this second Axial Age. Change is always unnerving, but a change on this scale can be heart-stopping. We can be grateful that the hinge has been oiled by our Unitarian Universalist ancestors and the people who have led us into significant institutional changes since the 1960s. At times it’s been pretty messy. People have been deeply hurt. But we are learning to lean on each other – to be generous with each other — as we stumble into the 21st century.
The second sentence tells us WHAT and HOW we are going to live out our covenant. In the value of generosity, it tells us that we will freely and compassionately share our faith, presence, and resources. The word “faith” resonated with me. How many of us shy away from sharing our commitment to Unitarian Universalism? I note that, in our reactive stance against proselytizing, we are rather stingy about sharing our faith. However, in the many articles, books, and surveys available it’s shown that unchurched people are just waiting to be invited. Or as my mentor, Rev. Katy Korb, once quipped: “if you want more people of color in our congregations, invite your POC friends.”
The third sentence tells us WHY we value generosity; it “connects us to one another in relationships of interdependence and mutuality.” I never thought I’d be quoting Jimmy Buffet, but his song “Fruitcakes” sums up our relationships of interdependence and mutuality. “But the right word at the right time, Hey, give me a little hug, That’s the difference between lightning And a harmless lightnin’ bug.” No matter our differences – and they are significant – a generous share of metaphorical “little hugs” will do more to connect us than the loftiest statements of intent. He reminds us that we all want a little love and hope. We all want someone to say, I am better because I met you today.
I have given you a glimpse of the hinge times in history and their trajectory into a Second Axial Age. There are tremendous forces resisting this trajectory. However, there are signs everywhere that the future of religion and spirituality will include people coalescing around shared values – including the value of generosity. As a non-creedal religion, Unitarian Universalism is uniquely positioned to officiate at this impending marriage of heaven and earth, the immanent and the transcendent, spirit and body, time, and eternity. May it be so. Blessed be. Inshallah. Amen.