First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

On Becoming a Grown Up, Part One

First, let’s calibrate the translation process. I am of course not eager for anyone to approach me with a million dollars to help build the kingdom, or to bring people closer to god. These are not the terms we would use. However, it is perfectly possible that someone could one day sit in my office and offer the same breath-taking amount of money to "promote Humanism," or to support the mission of FUS. And I would be at the same loss for a guarantee. Oh, I could think of ways to spend the money, never fear. Even apart from the fabric of our current facility, I could imagine how to spend a million dollars on programming and staff to raise the profile of humanism in this city, improve our operational competence, and expand our opportunities for participation very easily. But if you asked me to promise that these initiatives would change people’s lives, I would hesitate. I would be willing to say that if we do enough of a variety of different things, the statistical likelihood is that some people will find some of them life-changing in some way. But as far as which activities will impact which people in which ways, we just don’t have that kind of predictive power.

In fact, we are in the same dilemma that Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson describe. We can count heads in attendance – on Sunday morning, at Eat & Meets, at children’s RE or adult RE, at discovery groups or choir practice or peace rallies – on the assumption that if people are showing up, they must be getting some benefit. But we don’t have any good way of determining whether they are in fact becoming any wiser or kinder or more ethical or happier; we don’t know if they are finding greater meaning, wholeness or integrity in their lives, for the simple reason that we have no good ways of measuring these things. As Hawkins and Parkinson suggest, it is much easier to count heads than to measure hearts. We may differ with Willow Creek and the other mega-churches as to how we want to help people improve their lives, but better lives is what we are after in the end. 25 years into the mega-church movement, most congregations have gotten the message that people don’t come to church looking for the opportunity to join a committee. Committee work may sometimes be a path to other things that people want, like making connections, or having power, or keeping the institution functioning, but it is not a value in itself, and fully staffed committees do not measure the success of a congregation’s mission. Indeed, given the mobility and consumer mentality of today’s church-goers, if committee work is all that a congregation offers beyond Sunday morning, most people will soon look elsewhere.

This recognition, a quarter century ago, brought about the present focus on content programming and small group ministry – efforts to offer people the retail product they appear to be shopping for. Experiences of emotional stimulation, spiritual inspiration, and personal connection became the supply to meet customer demand, and many congregations have grown increasingly sophisticated about designing and marketing these wares, both to their existing customer base, and to the public at large. Now, I’m not saying that this is altogether a bad thing, and neither I take it are Hawkins and Parkinson. But it is worth contemplating whether raw consumer satisfaction is an adequate measure of a religious community’s success.

In fact, ironically enough, this whole process of reassessment was initiated at Willow Creek by an expression of dissatisfaction from a seemingly unlikely group of consumers. Like any smart market-driven corporation, Willow Creek church is constantly in the process of evaluating its programs and products, and gauging the satisfaction of its customers. And lately they had begun to notice a curious pattern. Some of the people who were most involved and committed to the church – long term members, leaders and pillars, active in all facets of the institution – were indicating a vague dissatisfaction. They had no complaints about the programs or activities or services they were receiving; that stuff was all fine. But they weren’t sure that any of it was making that much difference in their lives, other than keeping them busy. They questioned, in a puzzled sort of way, whether they were actually growing in their faith, which they had thought was the object of coming to church. They were doing all the things that the congregation offered and recommended to them. They enjoyed the classes, and felt good about serving in the soup kitchen, and had close connections to the other folks in their prayer groups, but they didn’t feel as though they were actually becoming any closer to god, any more spiritually mature. I think that it is to the credit of the folks at Willow Creek that they picked up on this rather subtle puzzlement among people who would in all other respects be classified as satisfied customers.

This is precisely the problem with the consumer satisfaction model of church success. If religious communities exist solely to provide services to current and potential customers, under one or another theological brand niche, then counting heads and asking about the perceived value of the product certainly seems like the way to assess how we are doing. And there can be no question that such information is valuable, and has substantially changed the way that many congregational systems think and operate. If there is no market for our brand, or if what we offer under that brand doesn’t work well, then we aren’t going to thrive, that’s all there is to it. On the other hand, there is a bottom line beyond just selling our wares. In the business world, not only do you have to market a desirable product, you also need to turn some kind of profit, or you won’t be in business for long. From time to time, churches have been known to make the error of thinking that it was also their purpose to accumulate money. I think we can agree that when that happens to a congregation, their religious identity and integrity are in big trouble, if not altogether lost. The church cannot usefully borrow the corporate bottom line, but I would argue that we have one of our own. It seems to me that the church’s task, ultimately, is to help us all grow up, to cultivate our spiritual maturity. I think that this is what those Willow Creek veterans who were casting about for something more were feeling. Despite the huge variety of educational, relational, and service program opportunities, they were not being nurtured in their spiritual life and growth. And their acknowledgement of this issue leads me to wonder just how well we are doing here at FUS with this generic task in our own humanist brand product line.

I think that we need to think about what that bottom line looks like for us, and this is where I part company with Willow Creek and its Christian evangelical cousins. For except in the broadest possible metaphorical sense, we are not here to cultivate your walk with the lord, or your growth in Christ-likeness. On the other hand, we surely all understand the image of the Grinch’s undersized heart, and how the world became a better place, and he became a better Grinch, when a transformative experience caused it to expand. The stories about spiritual growth come from many places, and it should be no surprise that beloved children’s literature is one of them. They also come from all over the world, as the Jesuit priest and spiritual advisor Anthony de Mello so beautifully demonstrates in his anthology, The Song of the Bird. The three tales that Steven and I have shared this morning are among my favorites, and it seems to me that they are all about what it means to be a spiritual grown-up.

The seeker who is able not to attached to the world’s wealth triggers a hunger in the man who at first thought only of getting his hands on the costly diamond. The believer who chooses victimhood almost to the point of starvation realizes that there is a more responsible way of interpreting the scenario he witnessed between the tiger and the disabled fox. And the monk who is invested in rules and judgments finds that his mind is less pure than the one who can do what needs to be done, and then let go. Stories like these, in which I recognize myself as well as so many other people I know, serve to convince me that there is a continuum of spiritual maturity, just as there is of physical, or intellectual, or emotional maturity, in each of our lives. Like these other three qualities, spiritual maturity unfolds in three interconnected but distinct ways. First, we all undergo a process of organic growth with a developmental trajectory that takes us through successive stages of competence. We learn to walk and talk, to use abstract symbols and to take turns; we go through puberty, make affiliations with other people and groups, learn the patterns of reasoning that are relevant to our environment. This evolution happens almost unnoticed, automatically, unless something goes very wrong. At the same time, we may also have identifiable critical experiences, that suddenly transform our physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual worlds. When someone close to you dies, or you discover that a dearly held belief isn’t true; when a certain teacher or book opens up a whole new horizon of the mind, or when you become pregnant – in such moments, things change quickly, and are never the same again. Thirdly, it is also possible to nurture our development in any of these dimensions by deliberate practice. You can train to run a marathon, you can work with a therapist to resolve emotional issues, you can read books or take courses on various topics to cultivate your mind. There is also an extensive tradition of practices for nurturing your spiritual maturity. And I would suggest that much as school is a place for the intentional pursuit of intellectual maturity, so religious community is a place where the bottom line is the goal of increasing spiritual maturity. This is the purpose that is not measured by attendance figures and participation records – are people actually growing, deepening, becoming more spiritually mature as a result of anything this congregation is doing?

School is actually a helpful analogy, I think, for there are many secondary purposes served by educational institutions. At its best, the experience there involves all our developmental dimensions, and we find the process engaging as well as challenging. It is good to make friends and admire teachers, to go to the dances and join the clubs and cheer for the teams and be in the class picture. It is sad, and a source of concern when any of those things doesn’t happen, but none of it really means anything if you are not actually learning something. And learning, as we know to our cost these days, is not measured by attendance records. It is not even a function of the students’ reported enjoyment of a particular class. In the long run I suspect that we tend to remember most fondly the classes in which we really learned the most, but often enough they are not the ones where we had the most fun at the time. So it’s a delicate balance. Obviously, if no one shows up at all, then no one is learning anything from a given class. And if the students dislike it because the material is boring, or badly presented, or because they are frightened by the teacher, they probably won’t learn much either. But if they complain that the material is difficult to master, and yet they do master it, don’t we tend to say, well, that’s the nature of school? Sometimes, intentional intellectual development is hard work, and we are not here just to have a good time. In fact, if the educational process works as it should, eventually we take responsibility for our own learning, and actually seek out challenging things to learn, and feel shortchanged if something that was supposed to be a learning opportunity doesn’t make us stretch, at least a little.

I want to suggest that the same is true of religious community, if we approach it right. Where school is about smart, church is about wise. It’s great to find a sense of belonging, and opportunities to make the world better, and beautiful words and music and space, but when we gather as a congregation if we are not about the business of becoming more spiritually grown up together, then the institution is not fulfilling its most basic function, and all these other things are just distractions. Of course, the first challenge that confronts us as religious liberals is to define what spiritual maturity looks like in our world view. It is not about believing a set of ideas that we are told, certainly; or accepting the authority of anything but evidence, reality, and the requirements of our own conscience. Indeed, I would suggest that two of the qualities incorporated in spiritual maturity are these: the commitment to abide by logic and facts rather than wishful thinking, and the capacity to hold a position of conscience even in the face of disagreement or challenge by others.

In my experience, these qualities do not necessarily correlate with the length of one’s membership in a religious community. I have met people who were deeply involved in church institutional leadership, or denominational programs, or in social activism, who seemed to me not at all wise or kind or balanced, who had no resilience in the face of challenges, and little patience or generosity toward others. Some of them were very smart people in many ways, but they had not found that peace at the core of themselves that is the soil in which wisdom grows. By the same token, I have encountered people who were not extensively educated or socially privileged, in whom I experienced a calm energy and joyful commitment to the world that just made me want to be around them – I expect we have all met folks like that. Just as our bodies grow toward equilibrium and health, and our minds demand to know the truth about the world, and our hearts yearn for authentic, reciprocal love, so I think we also have an attraction toward spiritual adulthood. Some part of us wants to be more courageous and generous, more compassionate and self-aware, more at peace and at home in the world than we yet are. At times, we mistake that longing for a signal that something is wrong within us, but it’s not. That impulse is the call toward spiritual maturity, and it is in fact an indication that our humanity is unfolding as it should, that we are preparing to blossom fully into the unique person that each of us has the capacity to become.

Becoming a spiritual grown up means putting away childish things, like grudges and victimhood; like selfishness and the desire to be protected from the consequences of our actions; like greed and self-righteousness; like the search for immortality and the hunger to make everyone else do as we command. Spiritual maturity means taking responsibility for our own behavior and our own boundaries, for the results of what we say and do, whether intended or unintended, and for the future that we help to create. It means enlarging our capacity to tolerate ambiguity, to repent and to forgive, to appreciate the uses of metaphor and the power of ritual, to celebrate and to mourn. It means remembering our finitude and our mortality, not in terror, but with gratitude for the gift of life. It means discovering and embracing our own particular place in the interconnected web of being, and honoring the diversity of all else that makes up that web. It means having ethical principles that we are clear about, as well as a vast compassion for all the pain that is in the world. It means an openness to beauty, whether in art or in nature, whether physical delight or intellectual elegance, emotional catharsis or moral honor. Spiritual maturity means being able to offer uncorrupted leadership when it is your turn, and to be a loyal but not uncritical follower when that is your role. It means having the ability not to tell everything you know just to show how much you know, while at the same time being willing to speak truth to power as needed, even when that is an uncomfortable conversation. Spiritual maturity begins with an inner centeredness, calm and peaceful, which does not mean that we have solved all our own problems and can now look down upon the rest of the world. Rather it means that we have stopped pretending that the world is other than it is, that we are other than we are, and accepted that the universe is not mine or yours to run, but a gift that is part practical joke, in which we all share.

Dearly beloved, be clear that what I describe is the state of being to which I aspire, not one that I have by any means attained. I know what it looks like because you have shown me, each of you in glimpses and flashes at moments when you perhaps least knew you were instructing those around you about the nature of spiritual maturity. I know what it looks like because I have seen the transformations in your lives; the critical decisions of high courage that changed everything, and the years of patient, sacrificial practice that have left some of you translucent to the light of the human spirit. I want my life to be like that, and there is nowhere else to learn it but here. I know of no scale by which to measure it, no cookbook, no standardized test. And I am going to keep offering programs and activities and opportunities for participation here at the First Unitarian Society, and I hope they’ll meet some of your needs, some of the time. We will still count the attendance, but I will never believe that that is what we are really here for. I will continue to think that what we most deeply want is not the diamond, but the inner wealth that makes it possible to give the diamond away; that we are forever called to turn from the example of the fox to the guidance of the tiger; and that it is better to leave the woman at the riverbank than to carry her along all day in our condemnations. I will persist in believing it to be true that

"The soul hath lifted moments, above the drift of days

When life’s great meaning breaketh in sunrise on our ways,"

and that those moments are precious in themselves, as well as clues to help us along the path toward the fully human and mature person that our best selves yearn to be. This is what makes us truly brothers and sisters, that we are engaged in the task of growing up together, helping each other as best we can, often without even knowing that’s what we are doing. Even if we can’t measure it; even if Willow Creek can’t bottle it and sell it, this is what we are about, and it is the most important, most unendingly fascinating, most real enterprise I know.