Why Belong?

Quest Monthly Magazine

I wanted to start this sermon by saying I am no good at joining, by proclaiming, I don’t follow the crowd! I am an individual! But then I started thinking about all the groups and clubs and societies and associations I’ve been a member of.

I am now or have been a member of—well, I can’t even keep track of how many organizations I’ve joined. Many environmental groups: The Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club; but also groups like PFLAG (Parents Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and a 1980s version of Students for a Democratic Society that didn’t quite get off the ground. I have joined labor unions and book clubs and folk music societies and….

I’m hoping the FBI has the records on me because I just can’t keep track.

But what if our gathering into so many groups and belonging to so many organizations is a good thing? The 20th century UU ethicist and theologian James Luther Adams believed that “Any healthy democratic society is a multi-group society.” This conviction of Adams’s grew especially out of his experience of living and studying in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The Nazi party was growing in its control of the country and was coercing people to join. For Adams, a free society is marked by what he called its voluntary associations. There need to be associations we can enter into by choice, and there need to be many of them.

But there is also a strong individualist, anti-joining thread in our UU identity. I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to be seen as a joiner. When the American Unitarian Association (AUA) was founded in 1825, William Ellery Channing, who seemed to be the logical leader for the new movement, refused its presidency. He had preached a sermon just six years before called “Unitarian Christianity” that became the touchstone for the emerging movement, a sermon that, when published, was “the second most widely circulated pamphlet ever, trailing only Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in sales.”

But Channing also set a benchmark for the aversion to centralized power that has characterized Unitarianism. He feared associations because they “injure free action,” and especially because “they accumulate power in a few hands.”

This aversion to centralized power is still with us. Rebecca Parker, former president of Starr King School for the Ministry, our UU seminary in Berkeley, California, observes in A House for Hope (2011) that “Many liberals, consciously or not, seem to prefer that their religious institutions remain weak, underfunded, or distracted by endless attention to ‘process’ and checks on the exercise of power.”

In his “Remarks on Associations” (1829) Channing said, “In truth all great actions are solitary ones. All the great works of genius come from deep, lonely thought… .That is most valuable which is individual.”

I think Channing is great, and rightfully a source of inspiration for us. But on this point I think he’s just wrong. I’ve been an individual. I’ve been “deep, lonely.” I wouldn’t recommend the experience. When I think of the truly profound experiences of my life, they have all been in relationship.

I’ve thought some pretty good thoughts in my day, and I’ve got more pretty good thoughts to come, and all of them—all of them—are realizations about relationship. My thought is always related to something I’ve read or something I’ve seen or overheard or it’s something my wife said. Moments of insight? They’re always discoveries about new relationships that I can have with other people and other ideas.

We need community. I need community. When I couldn’t find it in the Catholic Church, I tried to find it in academia. And when I couldn’t find it there and I felt stuck in a deep lonely, I started following my love for music and that led to coming into community with people who liked folk music.

I love music. And music is all about relationships. It’s about the relation of one note to the next, the relation of my body to the breath it holds and releases. And the banjo—can I talk about the banjo? The banjo got me into a style called Old-Time music, a big part of which is what gets called fiddle tunes. And I’ve gone to Old-Time music camps in Massachusetts and in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina.

The best part of those camps is always the jams that take place at night. We’ve been together all day, getting to know each other, trying out one thing or another, and then in the evening we all

sit down together. It’s not a circle, usually. More like a crowd. And we’ve gotten to know each other a bit and are starting to trust one another and so we’re huddled up real close to one another—on top of each other, really. It’s very intimate.

And from that community of people, this amazing music pours out. Our feet are pounding away at the floor and maybe I can’t play every note of this tune but I’m playing every other note, and our guitars are banging and there’s a bass thumping and banjoes ringing and fiddles singing. It’s amazing. It’s an experience that takes me out of myself and into community—an experience of community like no other except one: being in church.

It is community like that that grounds the church.

A book by Gary L. McIntosh on connecting visitors to congregational life describes ten characteristics of the Emergent Church, a movement which is sort of a Gen X reaction to the mega-church movement. One of the characteristics of these trendy churches on the cutting edge of redefining what “church” means—these churches that are looking toward the future of faith—is this: “They see community as more important than church. Thus, community happens first, leading to church; rather than church happening first, leading to community.”

I think contemporary Unitarian Universalism has a great aptitude for this point of view, and is getting better at thinking and behaving in this way.

Our aspiration is to beloved community. It may even be our vision of heaven. It was Dante’s. In the last part of The Divine Comedy, in the Paradiso, Dante’s vision of heaven is of a community of love that can’t wait to welcome more into the community. A new soul comes to heaven and the present occupants say, basically: O Goody! Someone else we get to love!

James Luther Adams writes about this sort of community in an essay titled “Our Responsibility in Society.” He describes how our ability to act for justice in the world is grounded in our ability to create community and how part of what we have to offer society is a church community built on love.

It is just here, then, that we encounter our peculiar responsibility in society, the responsibility to offer a church in which there is an explicit faith in the community-forming power of God, a practice of the disciplines of liberty, an eliciting of the participation of our own membership in creative fellowship.

Based in such a fellowship, we extend fellowship—a just response to the love that will not let us go.

Community, being together, is difficult. And no, we don’t always get along and we disagree over how to make decisions and over who is in charge of what. But it is vital that community is what we strive for.

There is a passage from a novel called Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry that illustrates the evolution of community leading to church—to a religious way of being. The main character, who loves his hometown, says,

My vision of the gathered church…had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection… It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill… My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

May we—through time and effort and attention to community—be perfected by the grace of belonging.