Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
What I Believe and Why
Karen Johnson Gustafson
December 7, 2003
Abou Ben Adhem
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee. Then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."
The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names of those who the love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest! James Henry Leigh Hunt.
The poem Abou Ben Adham was introduced to me by my father at some point during my growing up years. It was a poem which, among others including the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, he could recite from memory, and did. When I was born in 1946, my father was forty years old. He and my mother had three other children ages 20, 16 and 14. When he died in 1991, I and my three siblings sat together in my father's house and spanned the generation between us as we unpacked the legacy of poetry and the songs that he had shared with all of us.
As a family we did not share a common religious tradition. My parents were unchurched. At the time of my father's death my oldest brother was still unchurched. The younger of my brothers had spent twenty years as part of the Ecumenical Institute, a religious order growing out of the World Council of Churches in the mid-fifties, whose purpose it was to address poverty in the inner cities by empowering the poor according to the best intentions of the Christian gospel. My sister was and still is, a liberal Catholic; and I a Unitarian Universalist minister.
On the surface four different religious paths, paths with common beginnings which, stripped of their trappings, continued to hold fast to their source. The text of our common faith was not the Bible or the Torah or the Koran or the Gitas or the Book of Common Prayer. It was the writing of William Wordsworth and Robert Louis Stevenson and Oliver Wendall Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Henry Leigh Hunt, and Charles Darwin and E.B. White, to name a few. Literature was never forced upon me but was frequently referred to in order to illustrate a point or a principle or shared as an example of the eloquent use of language. I still plague my children and spouse with bits of "listen to this!" Remarkably, many of those writers were Unitarians or Universalists, though none of us knew at the time.
The other common piece is that we all grew up with an intimate relationship to nature. My parents live on three different islands on Rainy Lake, two of them year round and one a resort that we operated during the summers only.
Our live were shaped and directed and enhanced by seasons and sunsets, by wind and rain and sunshine and snow and silence as deep and as thick as a grave. Metaphors for everything I've ever needed to know were there in the world around me. When I discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver in the early '90's she became for me a primary scriptural resources as her nature metaphors articulated what I knew in my bones.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies into pillers
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the ling tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
It did not occur to me during my growing-up years when I lived at home that what I was getting was a religious education. I was a very independent child and for the most part, my parents delighted in my questioning and precocious nature. It was that nature that led me first to a mission church in Ranier, Minnesota. It was run by Christian missionaries, probably Baptist. My friend Connie's mother took us there. I was a very serious Christian between ages eight and eleven. My parents attended when I recited in the Christmas pageant each year. They were sympathetic with my concern about their eternal souls but made no effort to either convert or apologize for the possibility that we would wind up in different places in the end. I guess they figured that by that time we would be able to manage without each other. Besides my father was clear throughout my life that it was irresponsible to tell someone what not to do or believe unless you had an alternative to suggest. I don't think he ever assumed that he knew what came after death and so was reluctant to tell me what not to believe about it. For as long as I can remember my father put absolute trust in my ability to figure things out for myself. Ever willing to hear me out, to offer his own perspective without judgment and then to say, "You know more about this than anyone else in the world. I only know what you have chosen to tell me. You will need to live, for better and for worse with the consequences of your choices. Your mother and I will do what we can to support you however it comes out." And they did.
I see now that I could only ever be disappointed in the Father God of the Judeo Christian tradition. I kept wanting him to be as compassionate and understanding and reasonable and as playful and respectful as my own father.
What I also know is that there is something called human nature that moves intelligent being to seek beyond even what is right and good and find for oneself some larger truth. And so I went to church.
When my questioning became too intense for the missionaries, I joined the Congregationalists. This turned out to be a very good thing. My questions were heard and honored, if not always answered. What was the trinity? Why was it important? If God loved us, why would he let us go to hell? How could someone know he or she was good enough? Were mistakes sins? What was the significance of the virgin birth?
What I know now is that my real religious education had already taught me what I needed to know and that my struggle was trying to square what I already knew to be true with the doctrine of the church. Here were all these good church people who cared deeply about me and who claimed to have aligned them selves with big T truth. Here was beautiful music being played and sung, and words and rituals addressed to the glory of a God who seemed good enough but not very relevant to my life. Clearly they were smarter and wiser and better people than I, could see what I could not see and accept what I could not accept. Despite my very best efforts over the next twenty years or so to clothe the emperor, I was unable to do so.
Of course, around the edges of the church doctrine there were things that made sense. The Ten Commandments seemed to me like a good thing. But the drama of the burning bush and the whole stone tablets thing seemed overly dramatic to me for a set of rules that anybody could see would make things work better. I was just getting this story when I was about twelve and I already knew that it was not okay to kill or steal or take up with someone else’s wife. My mother steadfastly held to the Golden Rule, the "gold standard", you might say. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
The examples of her qualities of warmth and welcome, resourcefulness and competence, and my father’s passion and love for literature, connection with the natural world, common sense and humility in the face of the complexity of the human condition, became the central tenants of my religious education.
In May of 1965 I created my first statement of faith in Henry Ehlers Introduction to Philosophy class. It was a survey course and I wrote in response to a lecture on pragmatism by Abraham Kaplan in his book , The New World of Philosophy . The paper was entitled "The Religion of One Pragmatist ". The question raised by Kaplan was "Does pragmatism make any provision for religion? To which he says "Specifically, pragmatism can interpret religious ideas, like any others, only in terms of what lies within experience." Aha! Permission to trust my own experience. Here is what I wrote:
"I do not claim that my concept of religion is original but neither does it depend upon any specific set of rules or principles. It is only original in that it is a reflection of my experience and is practicable by me, for it is my reality and embodiment of "the good life".
My concept of religion consists of three parts which also serve as a basis of god or creator: 1) sensual perception of the orderliness of nature, 2) recognition of intelligence in myself and other humans, 3) recognition of human emotion.
I feel that a sort of "religion of life" based upon these tangible aspects of existence is sufficient for a wholly acceptable and productive life without any attempt to transcend earthly experience. It seems to me that for the finite mind of man to attempt to comprehend such as the "Christian Divinity" is too often "to create God in man’s own image".
Let me now examine more closely each of the tangibles mentioned earlier.
First: Sensual perception of the orderliness of nature. This includes such phenomena as birth, growth, death and decay which exist in the experiential world. I can see, smell, taste etc. The symmetry of leaves, fragrant flowers, the taste of wild strawberries, the feel of a kitten’s fur and the song of a bird make themselves known to me through pure sense. Such experiences may be heightened by intellect, yet a child’s delight at his first flower is a spontaneous sensual experience. Here, perhaps, is where a feeling of some sort of supreme being "rears its head". For it might be said that this reaction this is merely a matter of chance. I don’t think so, somehow. The universal complexity of that flower and the universality of the childish response are too real to me. I don’t feel that these just "evolved", as it were, by chance. I am "deistic" in the sense in the sense that I do attribute to chance my having been born to Caucasian parents in the United States rather than as a negro in the Congo. But I think it no chance at all that I was born to human parents as a girl child rather than as a male kitten or a white rat. This is the natural law, ever basically consistent.
My recognition of sense came about through intellect. This, then, brings up my second point: recognition of intellect in myself and in other humans. Not only do I experience but I am able to relate these experiences and to communicate with others by means of speech and action. I recognize reasons for certain physical discomfort and often can take steps to remedy them. I organize (to a degree!) and am able to comprehend scientific, mathematical and historical fact that I may or may not ever apply. I recognize that the degree of intellectual development is not equal in all humans but its existence is.
My mind and reactions are affected at times by another tangible presence, that of emotion. I experience feelings which are non-sensual and non-intellectual which I term to be emotion. These feelings are spontaneous and prompt reaction or response to situations in a non-intellectual sense. Granted, emotion can be controlled to an extent through intellect, yet children, more often than not, respond without thought.
I do not think that these universal phenomena "just happened". I feel that all of this complexity and order must have come about as a result of creation by some "Supreme Being" for whom I have the profoundest respect and to whom I am endlessly grateful. BUT for me, in my finite wisdom to attempt to understand or comprehend him through the intangibles of organized religion would be, I think, an endless and futile task. That which I have stated as being the tangibles are for me sufficient. I do not reject the Christian God. Yet, in admitting my own limitations, I cannot concern myself with "divine revelation", "the validity of the scripture", or "after life". Rather I must concentrate upon the "God", heaven and hell I have right here, right now, which are part of my life here on earth.
I do not deny organized religion one iota of the credit due them in their efforts to make the world a better place to be from. I do not deny the teachings of Christ or the validity of the Bible. I only question their importance as part of real, day-to-day existence. I do, however, seriously question anything which sets up a series of intangible absolutes which may breed doubt, guilt and undue concern which can easily cloak human love, human kindness and forgiveness.
I say, rather, let us learn from man’s mistakes, his folly, his triumph, and his love, for was not even Jesus Christ a man?
And if there is an afterlife then it is no more or less mine than any other man’s. Other men have at their disposal the same tangibles – nature, intelligence, feelings, and the example of other men just as I have. In this sense men are somewhat equal. I deny no one the Christian God. But for me, life is too short. If I find "God" it must be through man and nature.
When I die (as I have faith I will, may I face death calmly because I have lived. And be there an afterlife, I can only hope to be like Ben Adhen who asked the "Angel" that he be written in the "book of gold" as "one who loves his fellow men".
The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names who love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!"I was eighteen. I got an A-.
I cannot fully describe the feeling I had when, sorting through a box under my bed at the island, I came across this paper. It was probably ten years ago or more. Out of the mouths of babes?
Since that time, I have lived a great deal. I have studied the Bible and world religions. I have successfully completed a theological education. I have supported and guided many people in their search for truth and meaning.
But in some important sense I have spent the last forty years honing and expanding upon a paper that wrote when I was eighteen years old whose basis is the religious education of my childhood. The language has become more inclusive. I no longer speak of man and mankind.
I have adopted the language of the Unitarian Universalists tradition now. I site as the primary source of my faith, "Direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life." Then I said, "It's consistent with my experience." I have added the universal dimension.
I am still grounded in this world. I still rely heavily upon nature as my informing metaphor, though I am less romantic about it. The themes of loss and regeneration as they are manifest both in the natural world and in the life I live and observe have much more power now. I am more aware of the tremendous capacity of humans to both create and destroy. There is so much conflicting power in the world and I am more reluctant than ever to name its source.
Three pieces I have added as fundamental to my well being and my pursuit of the good life. One is the acknowledgment of myself as a spiritual being. For me that means that it is not enough to simply sense and recognize that one is part of nature and is committed to loving one's fellow humans. It is equally important to remember that in an intentional way and seek the strength to act on that knowing. I call that spiritual practice. For me that practice is paying attention and giving thanks.
The second is finding ways to help others to recognize and live out their own goodness. This is, I believe, the basis for social and political justice. I believe from my own experience that people who feel oppressed and unloved and inadequate and unappreciated and uncared for and afraid, act out in ways that are hurtful and destructive to themselves and their society.
As I said forty years ago, I seriously question anything which sets up a series of intangible absolutes which breed doubt, guilt and undue concern which can easily cloak human kindness and forgiveness.
The third is participation in human community. This is why I became a minister. To participate in intentional community which would enable both spiritual and human connection.
The love of poetry and literature continues to be part of my religious grounding. Mary Oliver rounds out the themes added in the forty years since James Leigh Hunt as the closing for this version of the paper. And it ends with the great religious question that I now know my father was asking of me:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaw back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do now how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?