The Middle Way

Rev. Kate Rohde

Given April 29, 2007 - Candidating Week

I walked into the prison.   The doors shut behind me. 

It had begun a few weeks earlier:

“Did you get my invitation?” the prison chaplain asked me.

I honestly didn’t remember.  I had probably put it away to look at later. 

“We’re having an open house for clergy and I haven’t heard from anyone. The men have worked so hard on it.” He said.

So I agreed to come.   I knew how it was to plan something and have a poor showing.

I got to the gathering a little late.  It was my first time in prison and I hadn’t factored in the time to get through gates and guards and such.   In Augusta , Georgia ,  in 1982 it usually took about 15 minutes to get anywhere.  This took 45.   When I arrived it was clear that no one worried that I was late,  they were glad that I was there  ---  since I was the only clergyperson in the city who had shown up!   So I was their audience of one.   It leant a special poignancy to the men’s narrative of life in prison -- how even more difficult than the deprivation of freedom was being on the ladder’s lowest rung, despised and forgotten.   And it leant a certain weight to the chaplain’s next request.  

After the presentation,  when we were having a cup of tea in his office, Chaplain Streett said a little mournfully,  “ You know the only religious people these guys ever get to see are Fundamentalists.  It sure would be nice to present them with an alternative!”  

He got me.  I said yes. If he could get a group up,  I would come and lead it.

So the next Tuesday I walked into prison,  little knowing that I would be going there every week for the next two years.   It was a good size group of guys,  not drawn, by the promise of Unitarian Universalism --- which no one had ever heard of --- but by the promise of something to break the dull monotony of prison life and the novelty of a 30-year-old lady preacher.

We couldn’t have been more different.  I was a Yankee.  They were from Georgia . I was a young woman and a feminist.  It was an all male group with a rather macho outlook.  I had had eight years of higher education.  Few of them had completed high school.   I came from a loving, intact, middle class family.  They came mostly from abusive and or broken homes,  and from impoverished or struggling economic circumstances.  Several referred to themselves as “rednecks”.   I came from a family with liberal leanings,  that preached reaching out to others. 

They admired, even against their own interests, strong, macho, leaders like then President Reagan.  I was a UU.  Any of them who had experience with church, had experienced very fundamentalist churches, but now they were nothing at all.  And of course,  I was a minister,  trying to be good,   and they were all doing serious time.

I was more than a bit nervous going in.  My idea of prisons and prisoners came mostly from old Jimmy Cagney movies and their more violent modern counterparts.  None of the prisoners I’d seen in Jimmy Cagney movies seemed like good candidates for a theology discussion group!  But what worried me almost as much going in, was whether my Unitarian Universalist approach to religion really could stand up to this kind of a test.  Would  Unitarian Universalism be relevant in a Georgia prison?   Or was mine a faith that was only relevant to the educated, middle class, progressive, folks that made up the vast majority of my Georgia congregation?  So I went in feeling that this was, in a sense, a test of my UU, our liberal religious, approach to faith.  I confess that I wasn’t confident.   I wasn’t even sure if I myself believed this was the best approach for these guys. 

 Did I really believe that if these guys searched deep within they would find in themselves a moral core, the reflection of God?   If pressed, wouldn’t I feel more comfortable coming to them Moses-like with a tablet full of commandments, rather than a “Doing Your Own Theology Curriculum? 

But I had been invited and I went.   I went to them just as I had come to members of my congregation armed not with a list of rules, but with the hope and faith that by exploring deeply within our own souls we could discover what was good and true, important and meaningful. Still, I was as surprised as anybody at how well our religious approach worked for those young Georgians!  

We explored our beliefs about life, faith, and morality with a depth that I had never before approached in any group at church.  And it wasn’t theoretical, it was personal as we talked about lost love, abusive parents, cheating spouses,  the joy of seeing a child born,  the difference between the family they had and the one they wished for.    I  rarely have been so honest and vulnerable in my own exploration or struggles with life and faith,  and that small group of men returned the favor. 

Given the context, one in which posturing and a show of strength was their daily norm,  it was all the more amazing to be let in to those young men’s struggles and  wounds ---  to see them willing to  be so authentic in discussing  their doubts and hopes.   In a place in which they were almost never treated as worthwhile people, or  as men capable of moral thought or reflection, our weekly meeting was a little oasis which they quickly dubbed “the twilight zone”  ----  Because there they were treated with openness and generosity and a faith that there was something deeply worthwhile within them, not just by me -- there, at least, they were respectful towards and open with each other.  When the sessions I had planned ran out,  they begged to continue, so I just kept coming up with something new.   Our group only came to an end when I left Georgia . 

Even though I can never know exactly how those moments together affected each of those men,   I saw changes in them over time, changes not typical for prison life.   The Episcopalian chaplain wrote me later  that several of them ended up finishing a college degree and seemed headed for a better life upon their release. 

One called me four years later just to let me know the good direction that his life had gone in.   As I say,   I don’t know that their small brush with a liberal religious approach, an approach that they found generous and affirming, was enough to overcome everything else in their lives ---    But I do know that in that time and that place it did work, it made a difference, and we all were better for it.    I know also, that it was an experience that  affirmed for me our tradition’s hopeful attitude about the possibilities that lie within each human soul.   It was an experiential affirmation that there is a way to lead men towards a moral life  that is gentler and more convincing than commandments from the mountain.   There is a middle way between strict orthodoxy and no faith or values at all.

Over the centuries,  our Unitarian Universalist religious path, has been a part of the “middle way”.    

Throughout the history of religion there has been Orthodox Religion, by which I mean an approach to religion which is very strict, which emphasizes following rules, doctrines, and commandments and where religious authority is heavily vested in a priestly or political body little affected by the mass of the adherents to the faith.  In these orthodox religions the god or gods are often pictured as punitive or angry, perhaps needing to be placated through sacrifices.

These religions often emphasize the smallness of human beings and the great power of their God or gods.      

At the other end of the spectrum were the irreligious,   at that end were those who worried little about pleasing God nor about a moral or spiritual life, but rather lived for what seemed attractive in the day to day world: wealth, power, sensual pleasures, and so on.   In ancient times it might have been exemplified by the orgiastic excesses of the Roman empire . Today it is the secular values of the marketplace and all the institutions that bow to those values:   It is exemplified by Donald Trump ---- and by the young men who ended up in my class in the Georgia prison.

It may not be well recognized, but throughout history there has always been a Middle Way .  In that middle are people and institutions that are indeed religious, deeply concerned about a spiritual and moral life, but religious in freer, more generous, and  less orthodox ways.   This is what we have called the liberal religious tradition.   In the U.S. ,  American Unitarians and Universalists, especially the former, were among the most prominent and influential institutional heirs to this tradition.

We were born,  though,  out of a disagreement with Orthodoxy.   In the early 19^th century, New England was religiously dominated by the orthodoxies handed down from their Puritan ancestors.   The legacy was a very strict one:  human beings were hopeless sinners,  God was very angry and had to be propitiated by a sacrifice --- namely the crucifixion of Jesus,  and, despite that sacrifice, most of us would burn forever in hell anyway.  It was a stern religion with many rules, and though it gave lip service to God’s love and forgiveness, the picture it painted of God was of a harsh, vengeful, patriarch.   One of the popular preachers and theologians of the day,  Samuel Hopkins, frequently preached that we humans ought to be pleased to burn in ever-lasting torment to prove the power and grandeur of God.  

But powerful forces were arrayed against orthodoxy in this country.   Our nation was founded by men and women whose temperament and philosophical outlook was much more hopeful about human nature and therefore less authoritarian than any nation yet devised. Philosophically, the American democratic experiment was in itself a challenge to orthodox faith, because it was based on a philosophy of god and nature that was, in its essence, far more generous and liberal than that  any nation before it.   The freedom in which people lived, gave them opportunity to pull away from tradition, a freedom they did not have in many European countries which required adherence to certain faiths.   Also the atmosphere of a prosperous, burgeoning, democratic, Boston seemed at odds with its ancestral Puritanism.   A shift began to take place with more and more clergymen preaching a more and more progressive ideal of religion. 

The most important theme that separated orthodox and progressive religion was human nature.  The orthodox emphasis on human depravity and the importance of controlling people lest they give in to their many base impulses, was challenged by a different approach.  William Ellery Channing, who reluctantly became a leading light among the liberals, spoke of the reflection of God in the inmost human soul.   It was not that human beings were gods or incapable of evil, but evil was not the focus of religion for Channing.  Rather, God was reflected in the inner soul of human beings and it was the job of our religious life to nurture the God within our soul and to grow and develop the aspects of our nature in which God was reflected.  

Channing, for example,  was one of the first to preach the virtues of “self-culture” a new idea at the time but one we almost take for granted today.  Where previous generations had preached that human beings could do nothing to save themselves from their own corrupt nature,  Channing’s was a gospel of self-improvement --- that we could, through our own efforts, come closer to being the person God had meant us to be.

Liberal religion linked spirituality and the natural world.   The orthodox had tended to view nature as something to be conquered, as hostile to humanity.   Liberals found God’s presence within the natural world, nature created in them a mystical sense of the divine.   While the Orthodox sang hymns that “the earth is not our home”  and “there is a better land a’waitin’ in the Sky”,   liberal religion was praising creation and glorying in its beauty.

Our UU ancestors had chosen a middle way.   While the orthodox called them a “half-way house to infidelity”,  they did say we were only half way.

Today,  in the 21^st century,  we Unitarian Universalists need to boldly claim our place in the middle.   While we may have begun as a rebellion against orthodoxy,  the orthodoxy of the 19^th century is no more.   And while we, rightly,  lift up our liberal principles in the face of the rigidity of those on the Religious Right,  the fastest growing and perhaps far more important change  is that the growing number of people who have no commitment to any religious path.  The fastest growing segment of our society is not conservative mega-churches.

It is,  what Garrison Keillor calls, “the church of the Sunday Brunch” ----  those whose commitment is neither to the humane and hopeful theology of the liberal churches,  nor to the fearful or the strict theologies.   Most Americans fall in that category,  whatever their private thoughts, they are not publicly committed to higher values of any brand.   That might not be so bad a thing if we weren’t being bombarded by secular messages 24 hours a day preaching the gospel of greed and materialism,  the gospel of selfishness and convenience.   One thing I have learned in my interfaith work is that I actually have more in common with Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish Clergy,  than I have with those who have no religious commitments or convictions.   Despite profound differences on some things that were important to me,  on many issues such as poverty and homelessness,  health care, racial justice, and peace we tended to be of one mind even though much of America may not agree with us. 

Despite our UU tendency to focus our negative attention on some of the faiths with which we strongly disagree,  the biggest purveyor of values in American society is not any religious institution --- it is the secular media.  

This is why I think that to be relevant to our times,  we UU’s and others who hold Progressive faiths,  must take our attentions away from arguments of 250 years ago.  While 50 years ago and more,  people may have sought us out as they were leaving a more conservative faith,  today they are far more likely to come to us as an alternative to the Church of the Sunday Brunch.   Even those who were once Baptists,  or Catholics,  or Orthodox Jews,  don’t usually come straight out of  those congregations.   No they usually have been sleeping in on Sunday morning,  or playing golf,  or some other such pursuit.   Few people,  any more,  come to us as an alternative to Fundamentalist or Orthodox Churches ,   rather they come to us as an alternative to no church at all.  So our message can’t be,  for the most part,  that we aren’t Southern Baptists or the Foursquare Gospel Church .   It rather has to be about what we offer that is better than reading the funny papers.

In the past we have emphasized the bogeymen of rigid religion.  But the world has also seen dangers from those who pursue short-term profits over the natural environment, over their workers – those who value the materialistic over the humanistic.  There may be many whose lives are cramped by narrow religions,  but far more Americans today have lives ruined by a hole in their soul that they try to fill up with booze or drugs or overwork or even television.

The young men I saw in prison were there in part because they were addicted to the adrenaline rush and excitement of being outlaws,   they had not found something better and deeper to life.  I went to seminary because I had found in my life as a social worker that what the people I worked with needed most, was something that religion and spirituality,  not social agencies, had to offer.   The people I saw needed something even more than entertainment, food, and shelter,  they needed a reason for being.

I came to see how important it is to address our deep need for meaning, our need to devote ourselves to something good,  our need to find hope within our own souls and the souls of those who surround us :   needs that address those of us who are too much surrounded by the soulless concerns of the secular life.

In 2003,  a group from our Pennsylvania church went in to talk to an aide to our senator,  Senator Specter, about the reasons we should not go to war.  I found then that I had a hard time framing my arguments in ways that really spoke to my deepest beliefs.    I  began by talking in practical terms about the practical disadvantages to war, rather than talking from my heart and soul about the human tragedy of war,  to say what I deeply believe -- which is that war is never good because it always punishes and kills the innocent in immeasurable and irreparable ways,  and it should therefore only be undertaken only when the alternative to war is also so horrendous, bloody, and oppressive  that it is even less possible to bear.    It was only when the aide pressed us,  that I could find my voice --- that I could speak in moral terms as well as practical ones.

Although I am a minister,  all too often,  I get caught up in talking from the secular materialistic point of view that so dominates our society,  rather than from the Humanistic and spiritual morality it which our tradition is rooted.  In modern times we fear that if we talk about doing what is right, people will see us as fanatics,  and if we talk about doing what is good, people will see us as wimps. 

But if we want to really give voice to our deepest concerns,  we have to use that kind of language,  to talk about what we are called to do,  to talk about what is just and good,  to explore what it would mean to nourish the reflection of the holy that  is found deep inside each human soul.   We have to stop worrying about looking silly, unsophisticated, too earnest.  We have to open up our hearts and minds to the longing deep within our souls.  We have to vision what the world would be like if everyone believed, with Channing, that the holy lies in each human soul and is longing for us to nourish it, educate it and help it grow.  We have to vision what it would be like to create a world in which each human soul would be nourished. 

We have often said that the middle way is difficult because it is so free and unstructured.   There is truth in that.   But I think what is even harder in today’s world is that the middle way requires from us an industrious, vocal,  hope, as well as a faith in human possibility.   It requires us to be vulnerable to the constant disappointment of our hopes --- without giving them up.    It requires us to learn to open our minds to unexpected possibilities, yes,  but even more it requires us to open our hearts to unexpected people.

The thing is it works.    If the quiet young woman I was, could go into a group of young robbers, burglars, and muggers,  and we could find within one another the reflection of the holy,  if we could create with one another , bonds of kinship and respect just by spending an hour a week treading the middle way,   well --- think of what it would mean if all of us did it a whole day every week.   Think what it would mean if we were like that with each other every day.  

Remember the words of John Murray:

“Go out into the highways and by-ways.

Give the people something of your new vision.

 “You have a small light.   Uncover it.  Let it shine.

Use it in order to bring more light and understanding

to the hearts and minds of men and women. 

Give them not hell, but hope and courage.”  

Updated 09-05-2007 - wfr