Under normal
circumstances, the local Friends Meeting would have not have asked someone
living twenty miles away from the new Unitarian church to join the Quaker
delegation at the dedication ceremony, but a number of Friends had scheduling
difficulties on the night in question. I felt honored to attend, and not only
because of the similarities in outlook between Unitarians and many unprogrammed
Meetings. My maternal grandfather was a Universalist minister —the
Universalists are the other part of the “UU’s,” the joint Unitarian Universalist Association in the US.
Admittedly, he left religion altogether around the end of World War I, but he
was an exception. The First Universalist
Society of Hartland, Vermont, was founded in 1802. My ancestors were in the
town at the time of the American Revolution and were long-time members before
my grandfather came along.
Members
of the church were helpful to a relative who was a conscientious objector
during World War II. My maternal grandmother, the last “card-carrying” member
of that congregation, was a devoted Universalist until her death in the late
1970’s.
I could only regret that she was not alive
to hear about the occasion.
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| First Universalist Society, Hartland, Vermont ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
Although some time has
passed since that gathering, and the church in question moved to larger
quarters a few years ago, the spiritual and cultural familiarity of that
evening has stayed with me. In my case the cultural associations were indirect,
though my grandmother and her oldest sister rather than my parents. Because
there was never a UU church available at a time when my parents were moving to
a new community (in one town, the church had closed, while in another, one
opened about a year after my parents had settled in somewhere else), I have
never personally been a member of that Association. The connections were
nevertheless there, waiting to be aroused from hibernation. The approach to worship, the choice of lyrics
in the music, even the decor —the minister was sitting in a virtual clone of my
grandmother’s favorite wing chair— all were familiar. The initial lines from
one of my favorite poems of William Blake, “The Divine Image,” formed one of
the hymns: “To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love/All pray in their distress;/and to
these virtues of delight/Return their thankfulness.” (Blake traveled in
the same circles as Joseph Johnson, who was in turn associated with Joseph
Priestley and other Unitarian reformers.) Downstairs in the Sunday school rooms
were posters showing Emily Dickinson, Clara Barton, and members of the
philosophical school of the New England Transcendentalists. Hundreds of miles
away from New England and an ocean away from Britain, I saw the New England
culture of my childhood and the British connections of my late adolescence in
front of me.
The ideas behind what
became the Universalists
and Unitarians arose
independently with different people in a variety of locations, with the
Protestant Reformation as it developed in Britain and New England providing the
catalysts to the modern form of both. The fundamental belief of Universalism is
in the universal nature of salvation. Since God is a God of love, the Deity
would never create a person knowing that that individual was destined for eternal
damnation. The Unitarians believed that that God was one entity and that Jesus
was fully human; in contrast, the view of Christianity as adopted by the
Councils of Nicaea in the fourth century CE was that God was three persons,
father, son, and holy spirit, who together form the Trinity. My mother used to
put the differences between the two groups and between them and Christianity
quite succinctly: “The Universalists do not believe in Hell and damnation,
while the Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity.” (It was the belief in
freedom from damnation which brought in my grandmother, who had witnessed the
tail end of the Wesleyan Revival movement in nineteenth century North America
and who was from that more traditional background.) These core beliefs became
the nucleus of many others. The current Unitarian Universalist Association, formed
from the two groups in 1961, has embraced religious pluralism.
Only a minority of members of the current Association would consider themselves
Christian.
Many unprogrammed and
some programmed Friends have a favorable view of Universalism, and the
practical ramifications of Quaker and Universalist Universalism (so to speak)
are similar; but the two movements are very different in the way the concepts
developed. The Universalists’ belief is ultimately one about the afterlife, or
eschatology. Friends, on the other hand, have from our earliest days in the
seventeenth century CE believed that it is the understanding of the Inward
Light (the manifestation of the Holy Spirit) that is universal. This was the
experience of Mary Fisher, the seventeenth century Friend who visited the
Ottoman Empire (“the seed of them is near unto God,” as cited in Quaker Faith and Practice), and to some
extent William
Penn. To put this belief in philosophical terms, the Quaker belief is
ultimately one of knowledge, or epistemology (for a discussion of the latter,
see Jeffrey Dudiak and Laura Rediehs in Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion, The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies,
2013, pp. 511-12). Whether this universal experience of the Inner Light leads
to the kind of religious pluralism understood by modern Universalists in that
denomination is another matter. John Punshon, in his Letter to a Universalist (Pendle Hill, 1989), advocates for Friends
reclaiming their Christian roots; establishing mutual respect and tolerance
between faiths is what creates world peace. Daniel Seeger takes a different
viewpoint. Writing in The Quaker
Universalist Reader Number 1 (1986) and elsewhere, he speaks of the kind of
religious pluralism that entails participants to be grounded in one religion.
For Seeger, that religion is Christianity. In fact, even among contemporary
liberal branches of Quakerism, Christianity is a theological and cultural
foundation. (For a broader understanding of the complexities of modern Quaker
Universalism, see the resources of the Quaker
Universalist Voice, Ralph Hetherington's 1993 Pendle Hill pamphlet Universalism and Spirituality, and the summary in J. William Frost’s discussion of
modernist and liberal Quakerism in The
Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, pp. 88-89.)
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| Sultan Ahmed Mosque (colloquially known as "the Blue Mosque," Istanbul Upload via Wikimedia Commons This mosque had already been built by the time Mary Fisher visited the area. |
Speaking about Quakers
and Unitarianism is equally complex. Neither George Fox nor Robert Barclay, the
author of the first methodological theology of Quakerism, refers to the
Trinity. William Penn, on the other hand, does. In Keys,
Penn is quite specific about Friends’ acceptance of the doctrine, citing
scriptural documentation in I John 5:7, the passage as it stands in the Greek
manuscripts, not with the gloss “in heaven: the Father, the Word [Jesus], and the Holy Spirit; and these
three are one added” which appears in some Latin manuscripts. Despite some ambiguities
as to what exactly the early Friends meant by the Trinity, a basic accord with it is understood in the
affirmation used by Friends in the Toleration Act
of 1689, which ended much of the persecution against early Quakers. (Stephen
W. Angell’s article in The Oxford
Handbook of Quaker Studies, pp. 160-61, contains an up-to-date summary of
the scholarship concerning Quaker beliefs about the Trinity.)
The limitations of the
Toleration Act of 1689 made me blush scarlet when I first visited yet another
Unitarian church, this time the First Unitarian Universalist Church in
Winnipeg, Manitoba. The topic of the day’s sermon was the history of
Unitarianism. After brief references to Michael Servetus and other Continental
reformers, the minister provided a biographical sketch of Joseph B. Priestly,
the English Unitarian theologian, political theorist, and chemist. More than a
century after Friends were living reasonably freely in England (albeit without
access to university education), J.B.
Priestly was forced out of London; one of the places he stayed in his exile was
Pennsylvania, which in turn was inhabited by many beneficiaries of the
Toleration Act of 1689. Changes to the
Toleration Act that removed the requirement for Christians to accept the
Trinity came only in 1813. When the Winnipeg Unitarians greeted me with great
warmth during coffee hour upon learning that I was a Quaker, I responded with sorrow
that Friends’ determination to ensure their own acceptance in the Toleration
Act had inadvertently left no room for the early British Unitarians when they
came along later. (Talk about the law of unintended consequences!)
Both Friends and
Unitarian Universalists have been instrumental our own ways in developing the
separation between church and state that was enshrined (so to speak) in the US
Constitution, and which has in turn become a part of the legal foundations of a
number of Commonwealth countries. This is one of many areas which we have in
common. We share a commitment to gender equality and a strong social witness,
as well as support for science and the life of the mind. Seekers using the
on-line tools of Beliefnet sometimes get similar answers for both liberal
Quakerism and the Unitarian Universalist Association. When I wrote in an
earlier post of the importance of other Friends Meetings and other religious
groups as a “home away from home,” our
“UU” counterparts are a superb example. Indeed, one Meeting known to me
has pooled resources for religious education with the local Unitarian
Universalist church.
When “UU” friends and
acquaintances speak about differences between Quakerism and their own
traditions, the contemplative tradition of the Meeting for Worship and the
sense of the Meeting which forms the basis of our corporate business practices are
subjects of great interest to them. In terms of contemplation, some members of
both groups have worked with labyrinths. I do not think it coincidental that in
a single week I was photographing a labyrinth at a Universalist church and
invited to walk one that was being set up at a Quaker Half-Yearly Meeting.
(Unfortunately, scheduling problems prevented me from walking either.) Conversely,
one of the great treasures of the Unitarian Universalist tradition —not only
for themselves, but for all humanity— is providing a spiritual home to
interfaith couples and families. Friends also have much to learn from their
excellent religious education for both children and adults. Finally, Friends
can benefit from the Unitarian Universalist breadth as a part of world
religion, while at the same time offering the variety of world-wide Quaker
experience as it relates to the Christian Oikoumene.
In
writing this post, the author would like to acknowledge the generosity of the
First Universalist Society of Hartland, especially the minister, Paul S. Sawyer,
to her family in ways that can never be repaid. She would also like to thank the hospitality
of the Grand River Unitarian
Congregation (Ontario) and the First
Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg (Manitoba) at different times
over the years.
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| the labyrinth at the First Universalist Society, Hartland, VT ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
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