Beloved Community II 
Rev. Edmund Robinson

Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
November 11, 2001

	1st Reading: from Josiah Royce (via Rev. Lindsey Bates, Geneva, Ill.):

   Through the long centuries of human history, there has been building a Beloved Community.  All souls that love, all souls that aspire, strengthen its bonds.  Precious unto us are the names of the true and the brave, who have toiled and suffered for the sake of the Beloved Community.  Precious unto us are the nameless and the lowly who have served it with single-hearted devotion.  Of them are the treasures of the common life.
   There are no strangers in the Beloved Community, none against whom doors are shut and harsh words spoken.  For they who belong to it are bound together in one living body, apart from which there is no life.

	2nd Reading, a poem in this week’s New Yorker by Katha Pollitt:

	The Expulsion

Adam was happy – now he had someone to blame
for everything – shipwrecks, Troy,
the grey face in the mirror.

Eve was happy: now he would always need her.
She walked on boldly, swaying her beautiful hips.

The serpent admired his emerald coat,
the Angel burst into flames
(he’d never approved of them, and he was right).

Even God was secretly pleased: Let
History Begin!

The dog had no regrets, trotting by Adam’s side
self-importantly, glad to be rid

of the lion, the toad, the basilisk, the white-footed mouse,
who were also happy and forgot their names immediately.
Only the Tree of knowledge stood forlorn,
its small hard bitter crab apples

glinting high up, in a twilight of black leaves:
how pleasant it had been, how unexpected

to have been, however briefly,
the center of attention.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

	“All shall be ruled by fellowship I say
	All shall be ruled by the love of one another
	All shall be ruled by fellowship I say
	In the light that is coming in the morning.” 
– “John Ball,” by Sydney Carter

	Last week I outlined the concept of the beloved community, and I suggested, following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that this occupies a place in our thought  similar to heaven or the hereafter in other religions.  Now most orthodox ministers don’t try to paint a picture of heaven in any detail, for indeed there are no reliable eyewitness accounts.  Yet if we are serious about trying to build the beloved community here in our own time and in our own place, it might serve us well to be a little more specific about what it is we aspire to, what a beloved community might look like.
	In the first place, you may have noted that I was deliberately vague last week about what level of social organization constitutes the beloved community.   I had some things to say about this church, and certainly this is the primary beloved community I had in mind, but not the only one.  We might consider Unitarian Universalism as a beloved community, but we are also all members of other sets of people: our families, our occupational groupings, our town, our state, our region, our country, our planet.  At weddings and funerals I am apt to observe that the particular set of people gathered together for that occasion may never be gathered again, but for the time of the ceremony, they form the community of the couple or of the deceased, here to bear witness to the transition.
	Now we have had Utopias in Unitarianism and in Universalism, and this is understandable because both come historically out of New England Congregationalism, which came to these shores to escape the corruptions of the Anglican church and to establish a city on a hill, a new Jerusalem, also known as Boston.  And to the rest of the country, we have carried an insufferable arrogance ever since.
	On a smaller scale, in the Nineteenth Century we have had examples of utopia’s stepchild, the intentional community.  Unitarian Bronson Alcott founded an intentional community at Fruitlands, in Harvard, Mass, that lasted a few years, and Unitarian and Universalist Minister Aidin Ballou founded a community at Hopedale, which lasted a little longer.  Many people today are reviving the concept of intentional community, and I have several groups of friends of advancing middle age,  who are actively making plans to get a parcel of land and design a set of buildings with private and common aspects to live with like-minded people. 
	I don’t think I’m talking here about anything that organized, anything that planned.   But I am talking about voluntary associations.  And maybe as well about involuntary groupings, like families.   I think of something more organically arising, where there may not be a common intention at the founding, though Royce would say that a common purpose emerges when people get together.  No, intention is a characteristic of the mind, and I think I’m talking about a collection of people bound together primarily by ties of the heart, people of all states of mind.
	I don’t have a blueprint or schematic for how such community would work, because I’d hope that it would grow by its own cardiac momentum, what the evolutionists call a stochastic process, one that is not driven by its end-point, where each stage builds on the stage before.  So disclaiming any overall vision of what such a community would look like, I would offer up instead a few spot-checks, a few of the fulcrum points on which such an idea might be cantilevered, as it were.
	In the first place, I think the beloved community is a come-as-you-are party.  That means that you don’t have to put on your best face, that you are accepted for who and what you are.  
	There was a cartoon in the New Yorker this week that pictured a middle-aged couple walking in the rain with an umbrella and she was saying to him, “The trouble with you is you try to be nicer than you really are.”  Nicer than you are.  I suffer from this, for sure.  I’m always thinking that I’m too good to feel anger or jealousy or spite, then because I refuse to recognize the feelings, they sort of burrow underground and then I find myself doing bizarre things I can’t explain.  
	Churches are places where we in America traditionally put on a good face. We dress up, we greet each other cordially, and the heartaches, the shames, the fears, the inadequacies get covered up for the time.  The beloved community does not require you to be nice.  It requires you to be real.
	But this leads to the second observation, that the beloved community must offer you a safe place to be real.  We have developed the “nice face” after all because it is, in a Darwinian sense, adaptive, it is useful and helps us to survive.  It saves us from that which can hurt us.  We can only open the darker and more vulnerable parts of ourselves when we have an environment that is safe.
	One of the deepest and most meaningful ways in which I have been honored to serve this wonderful group of people is that some of you have taken me into your confidence about very painful subjects, and that has told me that you have made an assessment that I am safe to talk to.  I am gratified and humbled by this, and I on my part undertake to be worthy of the confidence.  
	The other place in our church where we have made an especial effort to set up a safe place is the small group program.  For that is a place specifically set up for sharing, a place where you can know and be known. We talk of it as spiritual exploration, and it is that, but the most important aspect of it is simply a place where you can, in your own time and as you get comfortable, take off your masks.  Those pesky masks we wear every day to try to keep up with all the roles we have to play, to keep folks from seeing who we really are out of the fear that if they know who we really are, they won’t like us.  What a relief to be able to put those heavy masks aside, and what a joy to discover that, when we are out from under them, people still like us.   As we are.
	Third, the beloved community is a place that is accepting and suspends judgment.  Acceptance of one another is one of the UU principles, and it flows straight out of another, the belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, an old Universalist concept.   More about that in a minute.
	Suspension of Judgment is not an abdication of your critical faculties, it is a just an agreement that you will not use those faculties to divide the group, in your mind, into good and bad people.  You will not sit in judgment on your fellows.  Ma krinete hina ma krithete – judge not that you be not judged.
	It is this feature of judgment which can make community so stifling.  I went through Divinity School with a fellow from Utah named Chris Walton, who is now an editor at the UU World.  Chris was raised Mormon before he saw the light, and he used to say, “I don’t see what is so great about this thing we mystically call community.  I was raised in a very integrated community that controlled every facet of life and I had to get out in order to breathe.”  Community can become so all-pervasive that it cuts off individual freedom and growth.
	And these two features, acceptance of one another and suspension of judgment, when put together imply a rejection of either the perfection or the  perfectability of humans.  There is no such thing as perfection.  Rather than fallen from a state of grace, as the Eden story would have it, we need to think of humans as rising from a condition of brutality.  Thus the poem I read a moment ago basically rejoices in the Fall, which reverses about 4,000 years of thinking that this mythical story represented the great and original calamity visited upon humankind, the explanation for human suffering.  In this scenario, Adam is pleased that he has someone to blame, Eve is pleased that he would always need her, the snake is pleased with his emerald coat, and even God is pleased.  What they are all pleased about is the event that is the title of the poem, the expulsion. Only the tree of the knowledge of good and evil stood forlorn, shamed.	
	In the original expulsion story, the fruit from this tree was what brought about the whole expulsion.  This implies that in the original condition of humankind, we did not know good and evil.  
	Universalists have always preached that we measure up, not down.   We don’t torture ourselves with our fallenness, with our failures to come up to some impossible standard.   In the beloved community, good and evil have their place, but morality is not the basis for the coming together.
	A fourth and more controversial point is that the beloved community does have boundaries, and I think this is true regardless of what level of community we’re speaking of.  The principle of acceptance and of inherent worth and dignity, taken to the farthest extent, would seem to say that we can’t have any community which is smaller than the set of all humans alive.  But we are talking about humans, not some idealized creatures that we would might like to be – angels, perhaps.  A certain sociality is part of our natural genetic heritage, but that sociality expresses itself in groups of a definite size.  It is instinctual for us to think in terms of “us” versus “them.”  In our group boundaries is our group identity.  
	Yet as religious people we try to transcend that thinking, and sometimes the most powerful religious insights come when we realize that one of “them” is actually quite like one of “us.”  Last Sunday I read the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has exactly that point.
	But to recognize our common humanity with those in other communities is not to deny the boundaries of our community.  We are not the Baptists across the street, nor are we the Roman Catholics across town.  Some of us discovered in our Islam class what  a wide gulf there is in values between ourselves and our Muslim brothers and sisters, and it was disturbing.
	For our congregation, and the UU movement generally, is committed to a view of reality which says we don’t know it all, other points of view are possible and we don’t have a lock on truth.   Or as I sometimes like to put it, a religion based n the proposition that some questions are too important to have only one right answer.  We encounter a fundamentalist Christian or a Muslim who adheres just as sincerely to a belief that his religious tradition hands him the absolute truth as dictated thousands of years ago by an unchanging Almighty God.  
	What do we do?  Can we share community with people who start from fundamentally different premises?
	Maybe not a community of belief, of ideas, of values, since it is impossible to reconcile the notion that only one religion is true with the idea that all have a bit of the truth.  Maybe we don’t worship together.
	But we can form communities of the heart, communities of loyalty and love.  We can as a town or a number of towns recognize that all those living here are our neighbors, in the good samaritan sense.
	We can get to know the Muslims, Bahais, Hindus, Jains, Methodists, Sikhs, Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholics living among us, embrace them as part of the changing face of America, seen more acutely in high-tech regions such as this one. 
	Royce talked about Christianity as a community of memory and hope.  Not a geographical community but one existing in idealized space, a community of memory that looks backward to a common touchstone event, the crucifixion of Jesus, and looks forward in hope to salvation.  
	We too are a community of memory and of hope, but we don’t have the same points of reference as an orthodox Christian congregation.  Our memory is of a variety of religious traditions, and insofar as we think about Jesus, we are inclined to draw strength frm his life, his praxis and his teachings rather than his crucifixion.  As in the larger community we honor those who fought and died for the country on this Veterans Day, we are inclined in our UU communities to honor and remember those who were persecuted for their beliefs, who died in the cause of freedom, people like Jan Hus in Prague, Michael Servetus in Geneva, John Ball in London.
	Last week, we engaged our memories on a different level, as we brought to a table in the front. of the church pictures and mementos of our loved ones who are no longer with us.  The act of coming forward and saying the names somehow transformed this community, it showed that this is a place where we can bring our losses, our grief, and it showed us that the others in the pews ha suffered losses as we had.
	And we are a community of hope, hope not for a paradise in the sky.  We don’t expect the restoration of a Garden of Eden which never was.  Rather we look forward to a continuing evolution which has no end point, but which we are confident can produce a humanity more in touch with itself, a humanity that reached out to one another, a humanity in which we came to know the other’s point of view or, in the words of the song, when we all are ruled by the love of one another.  That is the light that is coming in the morning, that morning towards which the world is always turning.  That is the salvation for which we can hope, and towards which we can roll up our sleeves and work.  Building the beloved community.
	As the great Universalist preacher Quillen Shinn put it a century ago:
“we sing the glad song of victory. All the resources of the universe are pledged to the great consummation, God's character, and his infinite love. Is love to think of the agencies we see now at work. Every exertion you put forth to make this world better is so much done to make our doctrine true. God works through instrumentalities. We are all to be agents.”
	Hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Go forth, my friends, and be agents of hope and love.  Let us build the Beloved Community.  
Amen.