Growing up Absorbed: Religious Education Among the Unitarian Universalists

Copyright © 2014 Richard S. Gilbert.

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Contents

FOREWORD: Peter Morales

PREFACE Growing Up Absorbed A Personal Reflection

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: HISTORY

Chapter 1 Unitarian History

Chapter 2 The Sophia Lyon Fahs Era

Chapter 3 Universalist History

Chapter 4 The Galloping Gospel Of Angus H. Maclean

Chapter 5 Into The 21st Century: Toward Life-Span Faith Development

PART 2: GROWING A SOUL

Chapter 6 The Theology Of Child Growing

Chapter 7 The Fantastiks Coming Of Age In America

Chapter 8 Middlescence And The Wisdom Of Immaturity

Chapter 9 Elderhood: Age-Ing And Sage-Ing

Chapter 10 This Time-Bound Ladder Religion, Death, And The Life Process

PART 3 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION: THE BIG QUESTIONS

Chapter 11 Why? What Are Our Goals?

Chapter 12 Who? We Are All Gardeners Of The Spirit

Chapter 13 What? Curriculum As Experience

Chapter 14 Where? The Church Without Walls

Chapter 15 How? The Nature Of Spiritual Osmosis

Chapter 16 When? Toward Life Span Faith Development

PART FOUR USEABLE TRUTHS TO REPAIR BROKEN WORLDS

Chapter 17 Except The Spark: Religious Education For Social Change

Chapter 18 What Is Useable Truth Repairing Broken Worlds

Chapter 19 Growing People Of Prophetic Fire

Chapter 20 The Questions That Empty The Room

AFTERWORD

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Also by Richard S. Gilbert

In the Middle of a Journey: Readings in Unitarian Universalist Faith Development (Editor)

Thanks Be for These: Meditations on Life and Death

In the Holy Quiet

How Much Do We Deserve? An Inquiry in Distributive Justice

The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice

In the Holy Quiet of This Hour

Building Your Own Theology (Volumes 1, 2 and 3)

The purpose of life is to grow a soul, to love and to be loved and to help repair the world. In a faith where one is expected to build one’s own theology in a community of seekers, religious education at all ages and stages is imperative. Unitarian Universalist faith development is an absorbing adventure of the spirit.

FRONTISPIECE

There Was a Child Went Forth

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900

There was a child went forth everyday

and the first object he looked upon

And received with wonder, pity, love or dread,

that object he became.

And that object became a part of him for the day,

or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became a part of this child,

and grass and white and red morning glories,

and white and red clover,

and the song of the phoebe-bird.

And the March-born lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter,

and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf,

And the noisy brood of the barnyard,

Or by the mire of the pond-side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—

and the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—

all became a part of him.

The field-sprouts of April and May became part of him;

Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn,

and the esculent roots of the garden,

And the apple-trees covered with blossoms,

And the fruit afterward, and wood-berries,

And the commonest weeds by the road… .

And the schoolmistress that passed on her way to the school,

and the friendly boys that passed—

And the quarrelsome boys,

And the tidy fresh-cheeked girls—

And the barefoot Negro boy and girl,

and all the changes of city and country,

wherever he went.

His own parents… . they became a part of him… .

The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture—

the yearning and swelling heart,

Affection that will not be gainsaid—

The sense of what is real—

The thought if, after all, it should prove unreal,

The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time—

the curious whether and how,

Whether that which appears so is so,

Or is it all flashes and specks?

Men and women crowding fast in the streets—

If they are not flashes and specks, what are they?

The streets themselves, and the facades of houses,

and goods in the windows,

Vehicles, teams, the heavy-planked wharves—

the huge crossing at the ferries,

The village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset—

the river between,

Shadows, aureola and mist,

The light falling on roofs and gables

of white or brown, three miles off,

The schooner near by, sleepily dropping down the tide—

the little boat slack-towed astern,

The hurrying tumbling waves,

Quick broken crests, slapping,

The strata of colored clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint,

away solitary by itself—

The spread of purity it lies motionless in,

the horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow,

The fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud;

These became part of that child

who went forth every day, and who now goes,

And will always go forth every day.

The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman.

New York: Penguin Books, pp. 386-388

For Joyce, my wife of 52 years,

who has been a companion in the absorbing business of life and love

as well as a gentle editor of all my writings

This book is published thanks to generous grants from

The Fund for Unitarian Universalism

and

The Unitarian Sunday School Society

Special thanks to

The St. Lawrence District of the Unitarian Universalist Association

and

The First Universalist Church of Rochester, New York

for their assistance

FOREWORD

When I entered the ministry just before the turn of the century, Dick Gilbert was already something of a legend among seminarians. He was known both for his passion for social justice and for his authorship of the widely used Building Your Own Theology curriculum for adults. I met Dick a few years later when he agreed to serve as the interim minister at Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden, Colorado, as I left that congregation to take a position at UUA headquarters. Dick had just retired (the first of what were to be several retirements) from a long ministry in Rochester, New York. This legend turned out to be humble, charming, funny, kind and very smart.

In this volume he offers the perspective of a lifetime of engagement and reflection on how we nurture spiritual and moral development. I share his conviction that what we call religious education is ultimately the development of the whole person and that faith development must be experiential, not merely cognitive.

This volume is timely. We live during a period of religious change unlike anything seen in centuries. The largest religious group among young adults today are those with no religious identity—what the scholars and media call the nones. We are witnessing nothing short of a mass migration away from traditional religious institutions.

While this presents a huge challenge, it also presents us with a historic opportunity. We know that tens of millions are seeking community, depth and involvement. Our values align with the emerging culture. Alas, our practices often do not. The great issue before us is how to take our timeless values of engaged spirituality, compassion, freedom and respect for human dignity and spread these values in a new era.

This is a good time to rethink the very foundations of what we are doing. This is an opportune time to get some perspective, some historical context, some philosophical clarity. This book provides just such perspective. It provides historical context and a philosophical perspective. I can imagine this book being used as the basis for important discussions among leaders in our faith.

This book is a gift to our movement. May we put it to good use.

-Peter Morales, President,

Unitarian Universalist Association

PREFACE

GROWING UP ABSORBED

A PERSONAL REFLECTION

The vitality of religion is proven by the fact that it has survived the ordeal of religious education.

—Alfred North Whitehead¹

One of my seminary professors, the late Robert Cope, parodied Paul Goodman’s classic counter-culture work of the 1950’s Growing Up Absurd² with a life-affirming phrase growing up absorbed. His thesis, the antithesis of Goodman’s rather cynical take on American adolescence, was that life was a fascinating and, yes, an absorbing experience. I liked Cope’s hopeful expression and have borrowed it as an underlying theme for this work on life-span religious education among the Unitarian Universalists. If we believe that faith development is a cradle to grave process, and if it is an adventure in learning to be human, then we can say the whole process is absorbing.

By absorbed I mean to include or incorporate as part of the self, to take in, to be intently engrossed in, to be engaged with life in all its dimensions, as Walt Whitman’s A Child Went Forth so poignantly illustrates:

These became part of that child

Who went forth every day, and who now goes,

And will always go forth every day.

By absorbed I mean that passion for life exhibited by poet Donald Hall in his book Life Work. He cites a conversation in which he and a friend were attempting to define contentment. They concluded that contentment was absorbedness, as when he feels absorbed in the writing of Life Work; as when his wife Jane gardens with a devotion undertaken with passion and conviction, because it absorbs her, because it is a task or unrelenting quest which cannot be satisfied.³ Hall writes these words even as he knows he is dying: It is easier, and it remains pleasant, to undertake short endeavors which absorb me as much as any work can. There is only one long-term project.⁴ And that project, of course, is life itself.

Hall quotes sculptor Henry Moore: The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.⁵ Faith development, then, is paradoxical—the impossible possibility, that which can never be completed, but in which we are utterly absorbed.

The absorption in life I have in mind, then, is the very opposite of the self-absorption that marks our age. It moves beyond an absorption with self to an understanding of self that is informed and nurtured within a religious community, is enlarged by participation in a wider community and is engaged in meaningful connections of self and society. This kind of absorption is summed up in a personal mission statement: the purpose of life is to grow a soul, to love and to be loved, and to help repair the world. The meaning of the religious life is to be intensely engaged in those endeavors. To be thus absorbed in existence is to serve what theologian Paul Tillich called our ultimate concern. That is absorbing business.

Certainly I have found it so. I am a born Universalist who grew up in a Universalist Sunday School in Upstate New York, Bristol, to be exact. At the tender age of fourteen I decided to become a Universalist minister and delivered my first sermon. At sixteen I launched my teaching career in that tiny church school in the Upper Room—where, conveniently, the church bell rope dangled down temptingly. I have been preaching and teaching ever since. The practice of religious education led me to the Unitarian Universalist ministry, in which I have been engaged for more than 50 years. It has been absorbing, and I share some of my enthusiasm in this book.

Over the years I have had the good fortune to know two of the giants of Unitarian Universalist religious education—Sophia Lyon Fahs and Angus Hector MacLean. I grew up on The Gospel According to Martin and Judy, and studied Fahs’ early books How Miracles Abound and Beginnings of Earth, Sky, Life and Death. At fourteen I sat at her knees as a student in a lab school she conducted at Camp Unirondack in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. In seminary her writings were a central feature of my religious education major. I particularly enjoyed her role as a visiting professor. We met several times over the years; however, I especially cherish an appreciative letter she wrote me after I preached about her ministry in May of 1974. She had included a myth created by a Rochester (New York) Unitarian Church school class in her last book, Old Tales for a New Day,⁶ completed near her 100th birthday. Her 1952 book on liberal religious education philosophy, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage,⁷ made its mark, and inspires me to attempt a 21st century sequel on Unitarian Universalist religious education philosophy. This book explores faith development over the whole life process.

Angus H. MacLean, Professor of Religious Education and Dean of the St. Lawrence University Theological School, was a teacher without peer. He involved his students in the rich variety of activities which he believed characterize any good classroom. I still treasure a small red jar which began life as a piece of clay which I threw on the potter’s wheel and later fired in the kiln which he had acquired for a class in religious education and the arts. In 1960, the year before my graduation, MacLean retired to accept a position as Minister of Education at the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland, where Robert Killam, then chairman of the school’s board of trustees, was senior minister. I followed a year later as Assistant Minister, my main responsibility being religious education, administering a church school of over 700. Because I knew MacLean through six years of academic study and three years of shared ministry, his spirit permeates this book.

Religious education, then, has been a central theme of my ministry—in formal classes and as an underpinning for worship, pastoral care and social action. Though serving primarily as a parish minister in the congregations I have served, religious education at all levels has been a priority. One special interest was developing a Religion in Life program for young teens, remembering that my decision to enter ministry was in no small part due to earning the Boy Scout God and Country Award—the precursor program to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Religion in Life program. I have taught more than a half-dozen such classes, including several field trips to Boston. Several of the adult religious education courses I created evolved into books: the three-part Building Your Own Theology,⁸ The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice⁹ and How Much Do We Deserve? An Inquiry in Distributive Justice,¹⁰ illustrating my belief that religious education and social action are closely related.

Service on three faith development committees prompted me to take a deeper look at Unitarian Universalist religious education. The UUA Curriculum Advisory Committee helped lay the theological and philosophical foundations for the Tapestry of Faith materials. Involvement in a group studying Unitarian Universalist religious education history was still another source of interest. Participating in the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) RE Education Futures Committee was the precipitating factor in beginning work on this project. I had long felt that Unitarian Universalists needed a fundamental 21st century book on religious education for preachers and teachers, seminarians and parents, and everyone interested in transmitting values, meanings and convictions from one generation to another. It should be a book that is intellectually respectable, yet is user-friendly for congregations, districts, camps and other settings where Unitarian Universalists come together. It should focus chiefly on Unitarian Universalism. With all due respect to the rich contributions of liberal religious educators in virtually every tradition, I sense a need to know about Unitarian Universalist theory and practice. This book on the philosophy of Unitarian Universalist religious education I trust will make a contribution.

My understanding of Unitarian Universalism involves faith development as a life-long endeavor—a stirring challenge in my elderhood and to the end of my days. Such an understanding is central; it is fundamental; it is indispensable. And so this book on the philosophy of Unitarian Universalist religious education. I hope the reader finds it half as absorbing in the reading as I have found it in the writing.

I am reminded of the words of classicist Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, United Kingdom: We have sought truth, and sometimes found it. But have we had any fun?¹¹ I have, and hope you will, too.

NOTE: As a supplement to Growing Up Absorbed, I have created an anthology, In the Middle of a Journey: Readings in Unitarian Universalist Faith Development,¹² a collection of seminal essays on liberal religious education, mostly, though not exclusively, by Unitarian Universalists. Beginning with excerpts from Channing’s 1837 address to the Sunday School Society in which he wrote about the great end in religious instruction, to Sophia Fah’s fundamental A New Ministry to Children and Angus H. MacLean’s oft-quoted thesis The Method Is the Message, this collection provides some classic statements now out of print or virtually inaccessible. It was published in 2013 by iUniverse.

I wish to thank a number of my colleagues who have contributed so much to this project: Barry Andrews, Susan Archer, Anne Bancroft, Mary Benard, the late Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, the late Helena Chapin, Marge Corletti, Betsy Darr, Pat Ellenwood, Steve Ellenwood, Natalie Fenimore, Judith Frediani, Christine Frye, Jan Gartner, Mark Hicks, Pat Hoertdoerfer, Hugo Hollerorth, Keith Kron, Harriett McAdoo, Betty Jo Middleton, Makanah Morriss, Gene Navias, Bobbie and Chris Nelson, Jeanne Nieuwejaar, Tom Owen-Towle, Linda Olsen Peebles, Robin Pugh, Paul Rasor, Lori Staubitz, Elizabeth Strong and countless unnamed souls over the years of all ages who also found this life journey absorbing.

Please note that many of the quotations included were written in the context of their time and are thus generally non-inclusive in terms of gender. In each case I have used the original. In a number of cases citations of materials now out of print have been noted as from In the Middle of a Journey where the original references are included.

Endnotes

¹   Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. MacMillan, 1929, p. 50.

²   Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society. New York: Random House, 1960.

³   Donald Hall. Life Work. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 34.

⁴   Ibid., p. 124.

⁵   Ibid., p. 54.

⁶   Fahs, Sophia Lyon, Gobin Stair and Alice Cobb. Old Tales for a New Day. Boston, Buffalo, New York: Humanity Books, Beacon Press, 1992.

⁷   Fahs, Sophia Lyon. Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.

⁸   Gilbert, Richard S. Building Your Own Theology (Second Edition). Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 2000; Exploring, 2005; Ethics: An Exploration in Personal Morality, 1994.

⁹   Gilbert, Richard S. The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice (Second Edition). Boston: Skinner House Books, 2000.

¹⁰   Gilbert, Richard S. How Much Do We Deserve? An Inquiry into Distributive Justice. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2001.

¹¹   Quoted in Soul: An Archaeology. Phil Cousineau. HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, p. xxxii.

¹²   Gilbert, Richard S. In the Middle of a Journey: Readings in Unitarian Universalist Faith Development. Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, Inc. 2013.

INTRODUCTION

Life matters;

People are precious;

Deed is more important than creed;

Love is the spirit of our church;

Existence is our gift;

Meaning is our quest;

Service is our prayer;

Freedom in community is our way;

Responsibility for others is our obligation;

Reverence for life is our practice.

Justice is always unfinished business.

In the love of beauty and the spirit of truth,

we unite for the celebration of life

and the service of humanity.

-Richard S. Gilbert

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, here and now without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

—Jose Ortega Y Gasset¹

Faith Development: Some Definitions

Religion is that core of values (what matters to us ultimately), meanings (why we do what we do) and convictions (beliefs leading to action) out of which we live our lives—our fundamental faith. One person with a conviction is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only beliefs or feelings. Conviction is more than a belief, an intellectual construct; it is more than emotion, a psychological construct. It combines reason and feeling with will to act in a consistent pattern.

Spirituality is not so much having a belief in God or the supernatural, as having the capacity for an experience of the transcendent—that which gives meaning to ordinary existence. Spirituality is one of those squishy words that sound good, though few can articulate its exact meaning. I can’t describe it, but I’ll know it when I see it. But can we? It is not strictly intellectual, emotional or moral, yet it partakes of each of these. The spiritual is a holistic experience. The more you try to define what you’re talking about, the more elusive it becomes. We enter the dangerous and mysterious world of the intangible, the ephemeral, the subjective. Being spiritual has been likened to nailing down the air in a balloon. Spirit in Latin means to breathe or to blow; in the Hebrew scriptures it is life, breath, ruah; in the Christian scriptures it is pneuma, life force, vitality and aliveness. The spiritual realm has to do with those invisible forces that create and sustain life, the very ground of our being. It is the inner dimension of things. As former Christian Century editor James M. Wall put it, . . . we define soul as that dimension of our existence which is connected to the ultimate in the universe. But the soul shrivels when it is not open to experiential connections with the ultimate.²

Theology is the articulation of our faith—how we express it in words. Theology is the intellectual reflection on religious experience through which we can understand it, discuss and celebrate it. It is the language, a language of reverence, we use to attach meaning to experience. This reflection enables us to critique our values, meanings and convictions.

Faith Development is that inherently subtle life-span process of growing those values, meanings and convictions—what we believe, what that belief means and to what we commit ourselves. Faith is that total expression of religion which guides our living. In simple terms, our faith is what gets us out of bed in the morning. It is not a blind belief in the unknown, but an adventure in scorn of consequences. Faith is that human construct that encompasses religion, theology and religious education. It is more verb than noun, as it captures the dynamic of what we are and do. Faith as a verb indicates far more than a set of doctrines or beliefs; it is something that is happening. (See Kenneth Stokes, Faith Is a Verb³) It is well-nigh impossible to measure; it is also very difficult to program.

Religious education is our attempt to help people and communities grow their own faith. It usually refers to programs which enable people to develop a faith that will sustain them through the life process. Once thought of in terms of children, religious education programming is now lifespan. Something does happen in church and church school and other places religious communities gather. Sometimes it is meticulously planned; sometimes it is simply serendipitous. Often faith development and religious education are used interchangeably. Here, religious education, RE, will be considered as a congregational program; faith development as the process of growth emerging from that program, and from the wider world in which we live.

Spiritual Osmosis

Liberal religious educators have for centuries sought to help people grow spiritually and morally. How do they do that? That is one of the questions that empty the room. No one really knows. However, I believe what happens is spiritual osmosis. Osmosis, according to the dictionary, is that chemical/biological process by which molecules of a solvent tend to pass through a semi permeable membrane from a more concentrated solution into a less concentrated one, thus equalizing the concentrations on each side of the membrane. Taking some liberties with this scientific description, spiritual osmosis might be defined as that human process by which values, meanings and convictions are learned and lived—transferred back and forth between and among persons. The process can be conscious and it can be unconscious. It can be sudden and dramatic; it can be slow and gradual. It can be how a baby learns basic trust in the universe and it can be how an elder takes stock of a life lived. The teaching-learning process is a mysterious business. We can, however, create opportunities for this process to happen and help shape how it unfolds, thereby helping to transform people and change the world.

Religious educator Barry Andrews tells of a man who was rummaging about in his attic and came upon a cardboard box containing mementos which had belonged to his grandfather. Two birthday cards stood out, given to the grandfather 70 years ago by his church school teacher. One had butterflies cut out of tissue paper glued to it. On the wings of each the teacher had written an encouraging message. The next year similar messages appeared on carefully folded sailboats. They apparently had assumed real import in the young student’s life. Andrews concludes, It is unlikely that the man’s grandfather remembered what the teacher said in class. The boy would have been nine or ten years old at the time. But it is obvious that he had cherished this reminder of a man who had sent him loving messages in his youth.⁴ That is spiritual osmosis.

Progressive Roman Catholic educator Thomas Groome writes, First and foremost parents educate by osmosis—through the process of socialization in the shared life of the home.⁵ That process operates in settings far beyond the home: in the congregation, in the community and in Nature itself. While conscious instruction is vital, it is increasingly clear that it is through the very spiritual atmosphere of living that we learn. The church teaches by what it does and how it does it.

Confidence in spiritual osmosis is clearly not enough. Religious educators must clarify, symbolize, give words to the values, meanings and convictions that are being absorbed. As Aldous Huxley said, "Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you."⁶ It is of little value until the person having the experience finds meaning in it. In the beginning those meanings are subtle, unconscious, but become more conscious as we grow. What is at first implicit becomes explicit. And we ought not think the experience refers only to one’s own very personal experience. We are informed by experiences from the past, from our contemporaries, from those near and dear to us. We would be poor indeed if our only experiences were what we had discovered for ourselves. History and the world also provide the material which we absorb.

Process Theology and Faith Development

Cartoonist Charles Schultz renders a soliloquy on theology through the words of Lucy in Peanuts. My topic today is the purpose of theology. We must always keep our purpose in mind. Our purpose as students is understandably selfish. There is nothing better than being in a class where no one knows the answer. That truth is unmistakable, yet theology is a necessary perspective in life-span religious education.

Theology is ultimately a practical endeavor—one from which we cannot escape, even if we would. We bring theology into the classroom or seminar or youth group or family or the wider community. We bring with us some assumptions about human nature, for instance: that these students, as well as ourselves, are worthwhile people; they matter in the cosmic scheme of things. We assume they are open to growth and learning. We assume they are decent human beings who will respond positively to responsible behavior. We assume our human nature is nurtured in a social setting.

We also bring with us some assumptions about the meaning of life. Life matters ultimately. There are existential issues in living that ought to be addressed. Who am I and how do I relate to the ultimate scheme of things? How should I relate to my neighbors? Where do I fit in nature, and what is my role and responsibility in the great democracy of creation? We bring with us certain theological/ethical assumptions based on our understanding of human nature and the nature of ultimate reality.

Despite all this, there is often a significant perceived gap between our religious education programs for children and youth and our theologizing in adult worship, for instance. Adult worship is clearly theological, but many would assume that little definably theological happens in church school. In fact religious education at all levels is theological.

We are all theologians. As theologians we are the measurers of all things religious. By our very nature we are the ultimate seat of authority in religion. Take the Abraham and Isaac story in the Hebrew Scriptures. Abraham presumably has been commanded by Yahweh to take Isaac into the wilderness and slay him as a sacrifice. At the last moment a voice intervenes and commands Abraham to stay his hand. How does Abraham know if the voice is that of Yahweh or Moloch, god of death? To make that decision Abraham has to decide the source of the command. Only he can make that decision. No, only we can make that decision. We are the meaning makers. We are co-creators of values, meanings and convictions. We live in a community of co-creators. (See William Jones, Moral Decision-Making in the Modern World. In the Middle of a Journey: Readings in Unitarian Universalist Faith Development, pp. 273-290)

This approach assumes theology to be confessional, not apologetic; that is, its function is to clarify theological positions, not to argue for one being supreme over all others. It stands over against the dogmatism that marks certain caricatured interpretations of the Supreme Court—we may be in error, but we are never in doubt. Dialogue, not dogma, is its watchword.

This understanding of faith development is grounded in the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead and the process theology of Henry Nelson Wieman. For Whitehead, God is the binding element of the world; the mind of the universe; the poet of the world; the alluring ideal. Nature is self-sufficient and self-explanatory, a dynamic web of events rather than mechanistic substances. Cosmic evolution is ongoing, manifest in humanity as well as in other parts of nature. Whitehead says, We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.⁷ In this sense God is a verb—the holy is relational power. To articulate this in Unitarian Universalist terms, we affirm the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

We can interpret this process in three ways: (1) We are participants in a historical stream in which we swim for a time. We boldly proclaim that if we don’t like the news of the world, then we should create some of our own; (2) We are creatures of nature in which we live and move and have our very brief being. This spirit is illustrated in a conversation between an astronomer and a theologian. The former says, Astronomically speaking, we are negligible, to