To Live Deliberately – A Talk In Answer To
“What I Believe And Why”
Traci H. Eaton
May 9, 2004
What I believe and why?
Wow! Biiiig job! When I was asked to give one of these talks last October I was flattered and I hoped I would not be overwhelmed by the task. What I would say and how I would express my ideas and feelings has occupied many thoughts and quite a few conversations since then and now here is the current version – subject to revision of course.
I Believe that I am a Unitarian Universalist. Being a UU has become a core part of my identity, an essential element of the “who and what I am”.
I believe, like Michael Servetus, that:
“God himself is our spirit dwelling in us and this is the Holy Spirit within us. In this we testify that there is in our spirit a certain working latent energy, a certain heavenly sense, a latent divinity and it bloweth where it listeth and I hear its voice and I know not whence it comes nor whither it goes.
I use Servetus’ words in the common vernacular in which they were written. That is difficult for me because words like “God” and “Holy Spirit” feel twisted and distorted to me by the current vernacular and they are uncomfortable to use when I am attempting to describe how I feel and what I mean when I try to talk about my spiritual life.
I believe I am a deist, sometimes called the most purely rational form of religion. I believe in the existence of a force beyond my understanding – it may be quantum physics. I know I don’t understand much about quantum physics but something about the little I do understand makes sense with what I believe – I will even call it a “divine spirit” in the sense of an intuitive knowing. I may call that force “God” or I may call it “Nature” or I may stumble around seeking words to express what I do not understand in a way that others can hear without “religious baggage” distorting my meaning.
I think I must have been born into that difficulty. My mother’s parents were French Roman Catholic and German Lutheran. She was raised unchurched in a time when that was not common even in the wild north woods of Wisconsin. My father was a child of divorced parents and spent a good part of his early childhood living in his grandparent’s home. He remembers, as a little boy, going to church with his great grandmother who was the descendant of lowland Scots Presbyterians going straight back to the reformation. When his mother remarried and his Granny Hart passed away, he too had an unchurched upbringing.
Both of my parents grew up feeling the social stigma of not “belonging” anywhere in a religious sense. My mother felt embarrassed that she was not “baptized” like her little friends. In the hope of making their children’s lives more comfortable but without a formal spiritual home of their own, they sent my sister and me to Sunday School regularly – in whatever church was convenient to wherever we were living. Thus I learned that “The Wise Man Built His House Up on the Rock” from the Baptists in Texas and “I’ll be a Methodist until I Die” in Michigan. By the time I was 9 my family was living within walking distance of a little Lutheran Church in Madison, Wisconsin. Courtesy of the Lutherans Rock of Ages and the Apostles Creed became familiar parts of my religious education.
I never was a good Lutheran though. I was always looking for a larger understanding of this religion thing. I interrogated all my playmates about their religious practices. I wanted to know why my catholic friends were called “minnow munchers” and “pot likkers” by some of the other children and why they didn’t eat meat on Fridays and what was a First Holy Communion. They didn’t have any answers that I found satisfactory. I also questioned the motives of my Lutheran Confirmation class-mates when we all started catechism classes in the 7th grade. Every Saturday morning there was this little red book which was full of questions – and my friends didn’t seem very interested in the answers. I went for a few times but I did not feel within my spirit the working energy of that “certain heavenly sense” nor did I “hear its voice”. I just kept on asking questions and not getting any good answers.
I got my first formal clue when I was a senior in High School. I questioned my pastor about the basis of his faith and applied what I now know to be Universalist principles to his answer. His advice to me was to go be a Universalist if that was what I really believed. I didn’t do that just then, what I did do was practice yoga and read Kahlil Gibran and learn how to drink whiskey and participate in the sexual revolution without waking up with either a hangover or an unwanted pregnancy. I also learned to listen for the voice of Servetus’ “Holy Spirit within” and I continued to wonder and question about whence it came and “whither it goes”.
Gradually, I began to recognize that some ideas made it through to that “latent working energy” core of my being. There were values and beliefs that had a “truth” to them, which “fit” for me. When I think back on those values as I was first aware of them I can’t pinpoint where they came from. I believe my parents are basically good people but my mother is outspokenly prejudiced against other races, nationalities and creeds, my father will never accept the idea that being gay or lesbian is just another way we are born to be, he knows “they really could be straight if they wanted to”. How was it that I came to love my pair of baby dolls that I called “Black Dumpling and White Dumpling”?
The following words by Henry David Thoreau and Jimmy Buffett’s lyrics to “Fruitcakes” are worlds apart in time and each expresses himself in the vernacular of his day. Both speak to me about what I believe and both empower me to continually ask “why?’ Jimmy says “It’s a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday mornin’”. I believe that in order to live my Unitarian beliefs I want to erase that line and live each day deliberately.
TO LIVE DELIBERATELY
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived. I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear, Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary. I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.”
If I wish to “front only the essential facts of life” then I must examine my beliefs. Not for the purpose of discovering any big “T” truths but so that I can, on a day to day basis, live what “is” life and experience it as “dear”. I do not want to let “ego” get in my way, I want to stay aware of myself and the rest of humanity; as Jimmy says: “Struttin’ naked towards eternity – we’ve been that way since birth.” That for me is a suitably, humorously humbling vision which gives me perspective to face what Thoreau calls the “whole and genuine meanness” of life.
Especially during this past year I have been face to face with that “meanness”. It is not just that the Bush government declared a war, justified by lies and driven by spite and greed, upon Iraq; it is everything which that implies. It is the loss of essential civil liberties which will have consequences into the future which I cannot bear to think about for very long. I feel angry and I feel despair. It is having someone leading our country who publicly professes a fundamentalist belief which denies logic, disregards intellectual advancement, devalues the natural world as a target for unrestrained exploitation and justifies it all by unquestioning belief in the literal inerrancy of a volume of politically driven, superstitious folk tales which is wildly inconsistent in every subject about which it claims divine inspiration. It is the knowledge that so many of my countrymen and women are so gullible and emotionally impoverished by the lives they lead tha they are willing to believe these lies which brings me to despair. In acknowledging all this I have been feeling compelled to “practice resignation”. I don’t want that, I want to be able to get to “the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world”. Then I want to keep on struttin’.
I believe in “the good”. Not that the universe is an intrinsically good place which is beset by evil forces to be conquered nor that it is an evil place in which good has somehow gained a toehold which it must forever strive to maintain. The complex concept of good is so uniquely human and what constitutes good is so individually driven that it seems impossible to know what that could mean. It is a universal question which every religion tries to answer. I believe the Unitarian Universalist 7 Principles do the job as well as anybody has. The UU 7 principles felt like a no-brainer to me when I became aware of them. The God/ Spirit had spoken of them to me for many years and I had heard them over the din of conflicting self interest. They were familiar and they “fit”. The Principles address those things which western philosophy identifies as worth pursuing. Dignity, courage, compassion, freedom, peace, personal growth, truth seeking, the interconnected nature of life on this planet and presumably in the universe; all are things which would be “good” for anyone. Until I reach a higher level of understanding they are good enough for me.
I believe, as did my grandfather George, that my God/Spirit will be as much at home in the green woods or on the clear waters of a lake as it will within the walls of a church. George’s generous nature and acceptance of all men as equally deserving of his respect by their deeds and not their heritage, lets me know that he drew no line between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Nature inspires me to the best in myself. It soothes my woes by its beauty and by it’s objectivity, its refusal to play favorites no matter what, it eases my despair. It is a very big part of my “divinity”, it awakens that “heavenly sense” of God as defined by Servetus.
I believe that, to live deliberately, I must, from time to time, examine what I think I believe along side the elements of my life as I live it to see if they are compatible. I learned somewhere that one sure road to insanity is to try to live a lie, to try to live as if my values don’t matter. When I stop to evaluate it I may find that I have such sloppy definitions of my values that my life makes no sense, or, I may find that the life I have chosen or let be become mine because I think I have no choice is toxic because it is so at odds with my beliefs and values. Because my Unitarian faith is non-creedal I can make any adjustments I need to on either side of the list. That doesn’t make it easier. Being a UU calls me to examine my life more closely, define my values more clearly and live my life more intentionally if I wish to emulate Thoreau and live deliberately.
And so, if I believe one thing; I believe I will keep on being a UU and I will continue to question what it is that I do believe and I will continue to ask myself why.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth
Promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person