Are you as scared as I am?  What are we going to do?  How are we going to survive this transition?

I speak not of the Y2K bug, the threat of terrorism, and all that goes along with the turning of the year, the century, and the millenium.  These are perhaps more serious concerns than the one I wish to address, but they have received more attention elsewhere, and I will return to them shortly.  The concern I have is one that strikes more directly to my heart, and perhaps yours.  I speak of the end of Peanuts!

After fifty years Charles Schulz is ending his comic strip that has dwarfed all others for most of its reign.  Peanuts is huge; rarely if ever has one entertainer so dominated his or her field as has Charles Schulz.  I have enjoyed other comic strips, such as Calvin and Hobbes, but they are at best transient expressions of the permanent truths better illustrated in Peanuts.

For fifty years Charles Schulz has placed on center stage new manifestations of ancient archetypes.  The Trickster, the Coyote, appears in domesticated form as a Beagle by the name of Snoopy.  From Snoopy we learn the value of play and of not taking things at face value.  The Priest, the Sage, appears as a lumpy-headed, intellectual, five year-old boy named Linus, who wields a security blanket in place of a staff and sucks his thumb rather than strokes his beard.  From Linus we hear ancient words of wisdom deftly applied to ordinary human relationships.  The Queen appears as a domineering big sister and fraudulent psychiatrist named Lucy.  In Lucy we see Ego magnified; we see our own desire to assert ourselves over others, and we occasionally catch glimpses of tenderness and vulnerability.

These three characters have an appeal obvious to discern.  But what of the fourth, the main character, Charlie Brown?  In the pantheon of comic strip characters, Charlie Brown is at the center; he is Zeus!  Good grief!  Charlie Brown?!  A depressed, wishy-washy loser whose every pitch is hit for either a towering home run or a scalding line drive that knocks off all of his clothes, even his shoes and his socks, leaving him dazed and naked on the mound, waiting for a sarcastic retort from one of his own teammates?!  Charlie Brown can’t fly a kite without it getting tangled in a kite-eating tree; he pines for a little red-headed girl who wants nothing to do with him; he falls for the football kicking trick every time; and he is so clearly on the very bottom rung of his peer group that even his own dog mocks him.  On the lips of Charlie Brown are some of the darkest insights into human nature, such as the following paraphrase of my favorite quote from Dosteovsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “I love mankind,” Charlie Brown says, “It’s people I can’t stand.”

For some reason, this character has taken center stage in our comic strips – and in books, cartoon television shows, greeting cards, lunch pails, and on and on.  He represents something very important to us.  We feel sorry for him; we laugh at him and love him at the same time.  Charlie Brown is a place to hold all of our own anxieties, and we have a lot of anxiety to be held.  He is in this sense the archetype of the Suffering Servant, not unlike the fellow whose birthday was celebrated yesterday, carrying the cross of all that which our modern society shuns: depression, incompetence, and loneliness.

Most of all, Charlie Brown is a reflection of our own fear and alienation.

We have good reasons to be afraid.  The Y2K bug is a real threat.  It could cut off our power or our water for a time.  It will likely create very difficult problems for people in newly developing countries and those in this country who have neither the money nor space to stockpile supplies and easily survive even a short delay in a paycheck or welfare check.  Some misguided Christian fundamentalists eagerly await the global destruction they believe to be the harbinger of their Lord of Peace.  Fanatics from many religions and cultures, including ours, are only too eager to catalyze that destruction and chaos.

But even if no disasters come to pass – and I pray they do not – this transition into the new millenium is a time for us to take a step back and look at our society and in what direction we are moving.  The Y2K bug sends us a message in flashing neon lights that we are, at the same time, a technologically brilliant and incredibly short-sighted society.  The threat of terrorism tells us how vulnerable we are to people within and without of this country who hate what we stand for.  The threat of Y2K disasters in other lands sending economic effects rippling all over the world reminds us how strongly interconnected we are.  On the one hand, we are part of a global village; on the other, we are increasingly oblivious to local events and the lives of our neighbors.

We often despair when we think of these things, throwing up our arms like so many Peanuts characters and crying out,  “What can I do about all of these big problems?!”  The answer is that “I” can do nothing.  It’s we who can do something.  Alexis DeTocqueville, the Frenchman whose observations of American society in the 1830’s are prophetic to this day, observed that America’s greatest strength is our voluntary associations.  In Democracy in America, he writes,

In no country has the principle of association been more successfully used, or applied to a greater multitude of objects, than in America… Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

A [Unitarian Universalist] society is always a society in motion: one in which at any given moment something is being changed, replaced, supplanted, superseded.  By necessity, therefore, there must be inconsistencies: that which is passing will be in conflict with that which is emerging; developing purposes must make their way through changing present facts… [Unitarian Universalism]  is never uniformity, even in conviction.  Always there will be debate.  [Unitarian Universalism] is discussion, and thus an enterprise of mutual education…What else, then, shall we call it, if not a way of life?

In the beginning, American religion was out of sinc with Democracy.  The dominant religion was Calvinism, a hard Puritan religion that asserted the doctrine of pre-destination: most go to Hell, a few go to Heaven, and there’s nothing you can do about it.  It’s like the front six rows here going to Heaven, and everybody else going to Hell.  And no changing seats!  Not very democratic, is it?  Not much incentive to change, either.  In Calvinism, there’s none of the democratic vitality so adored by DeTocqueville, Walt Whitman, and A. Powell Davies.

Not too surprisingly, as the country embraced Democracy, it for the most part let go of Calvinism.  And so the country needed new religions.  Ones that upheld democratic principles like equality, reason, respect for individual rights, belief in the goodness of human beings and in progressing toward a better society… enter Unitarianism and Universalism!

The values of Democracy are essentially the values of the Enlightenment.  When you add the Enlightenment to Christianity, the result is Unitarianism, where reason may be used in religious inquiry, where the human individual is held up, where Jesus is demystified and understood to be a man – and this is no longer an insult, since humans are nearly deified.  Hell is out of the picture entirely.

Universalists came to similar views from a different approach.  They were more feeling-oriented and focussed on God.  They got their name because they believed in universal salvation, that every soul eventually goes to Heaven.  Everyone gets to go to Heaven – how Democratic can you get?

You can imagine how Unitarians and Universalists thrived in the first one hundred years of our country, our democratic and humanity-affirming beliefs going hand-in-glove with the new, fresh Democracy.  And indeed each religion did flourish.  The Red Cross and many other philanthropic organizations were founded by Unitarians and/or Universalists.  A large portion of America’s feminist leaders were Unitarians or Universalists, including Susan B. Anthony and Olympia Brown.  The Universalists collectively opposed slavery over twenty years before the Civil War.  Theodore Parker openly officiated weddings for runaway slaves in Boston in the 1840’s.

Our heritage is strong.  And today, being a spiritual counterpart to American Democracy means many things.  To Frances Moore Lappe, it meant learning the value of being actively engaged with others, with mind, heart, and soul.  In her words, “I grew up in a family that took for granted that one of life’s greatest joys is engagement.  We assumed that developing one’s thinking in lively interchange in order to act responsibly is part of what it means to be fully alive.”

What a wonderful antidote this is to the fear and alienation in our culture!  American thinking leads us to believe that we are free and happy when we are free from outside influences.  We are free when no government is telling us what to do, when no religion is telling us what to think, and when we have enough money to be self-sufficient!  But if this freedom is not used constructively, it is not liberating; rather, it leads to alienation and depression.

Lappe’s book emphasizes the other half of freedom, freedom to.  She argues convincingly that there is no trade-off between individual freedom and community responsibility.  She writes, “A person’s individuality is constituted, not in defensive protection against society, but in that unique mix of relationships she or he bears to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and co-workers.”  Lappe argues that Democratic government, rather than a necessary evil, is one of the means through which we express our communal responsibility and, in so doing, develop ourselves as individuals.

Our society is full of contradictions.  Our strength as a Democracy rests entirely on the active participation of its members, yet our excessive individualism prevents this from happening.  Democratic values such as freedom, liberty, and equality become stale or even warped to selfishness if there is not some force at work to make them fresh and vital.

Unitarian Universalism, at its best, is such a force.  We elevate, challenge, reshape, and deepen the secular values that undergird our civilization.  Our congregations, which are entirely self-governing, are places to practice Democracy as a way of life.  We select our own ministers and make our own decisions about capital campaigns and every other important issue we face.  Here in Sudbury, when the congregation restored its building, the Building Preservation Committee went to great lengths to include as many people as possible in the process.  As Rev. Crane told me, “There were meetings and polls and forums about everything – even the color of the walls.  And everyone voted – even children.”

With no dogma and no strong religious hierarchy to tell us what to do, we have made dialogue in the service of community and justice a religion in itself.  And we reinforce our values with rituals.  For instance, many Unitarian Universalist congregations begin their church year with a water communion, in which members add water from their year’s travels or places special to them.  The collected water is then typically used for life-cycle rituals, such as baby namings.  Other religions call holy water that which is blessed by a leader who is seen as a conduit between God and the people.  Through rituals like the water communion we are saying, “That which is most holy is that which comes from each of us, unique individuals yet one in the whole.”

Oftentimes, though, we follow the dominant culture rather than lead, defining ourselves in defensive, individualistic, “freedom from”  terms.  Our promotional material usually emphasizes spiritual freedom -- “Come join us, there’s nobody here telling you what to think” – and the individualized spiritual growth you may create for yourself.  This is a valuable gift we offer to people, but it is not enough.  The fact that we frequently go no further than these individualistic freedoms is part of the reason, I believe, why so many people who enthusiastically join Unitarian Universalist churches strangely disappear some months or years later.

I believe what people value more deeply than individual spiritual freedom is being part of a larger body of which they are proud.  Being able to make a “we” statement.  Freedom from creeds or dogmatic people means next to nothing if we are not clear about what we want to do with our freedom.  Who are we, and who do we want to be?  What do we want to do together as a liberal religious community acting in the world?

Each Unitarian Universalist congregation has some special identity.  Luckily for me, at First Parish in Wayland, one of the stronger “we” statements members can make is this: We are a teaching congregation.  We help nurture and develop aspiring ministers.  This sense of identity was clear to me in my first week in Wayland, without anybody ever saying it.  People greeted me with warmth and anticipation; I felt their confidence in our relationship even though they’d never met me.  At last month’s Parish Committee meeting, when the possibility of cutting the intern program was raised for budgetary reasons, I shared my sense of the importance of the teaching church identity to the congregation, and I was amazed at the number of heads I saw nodding.  First Parish Wayland without an intern would be missing a core piece of its identity and pride.

What “we” statements can make heads nod at your church?  The Framingham congregation might say, We are a stable, happy congregation with a strong place in the community.  The First Parish in Framingham is known as a full-service church with strong religious education, music, and worship.  At Sudbury, one statement must certainly be, We are a welcoming congregation.  We embrace diversity.  You make this statement that can be seen, in color, from the road!

People want to contribute.  We want to be part of something larger than ourselves, something that gives us identity, that shapes and challenges us into being more responsible human beings.

This is what is most sad about Charlie Brown – he is constantly excluded by others.  He is a symbol of the alienation we all feel in our individualist, materialistic, and competitive culture.  As a liberal religion, we do indeed offer a place to explore one’s spirituality free from dogma.  But more importantly, we also offer a place for the Charlie Brown in all of us to say, “I belong.”  And even further than that: “I belong to a group I am proud of.”

What Democracy strives for, what Unitarian Universalism strives for, and what our world most needs, is to deepen, strengthen, and constantly expand the meaning of the word, “We.”  May we keep this mission forever in our hearts.

Amen.
 

Bibliography
George K. Beach, ed. The Essential James Luther Adams.
A. Powell Davies, Man’s Vast Future.
Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America.
Frances Moore Lappe, Rediscovering America’s Values.
 
 
 

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