Rabbi Lerner's Sending this Around Re: Knoxville church shooting

Shootings at Unitarian Church in Knoxville

I became a Unitarian in early 1956 because it was the most Christian church I could find in the entire state of Florida--the most Christian church I could even imagine!

Some UUs seem embarrassed to claim that part of our grand worldwide heritage, but we try hard to practice what Jesus taught and that's what matters. Rev. John Brigham of the Unitarian Universalist Association once told me that UUs don't talk much about God because, being stuck on one tiny planet, the only knowledge we possess about the vast universe is very recent. We simply don't know much and might say something that isn't true. "It's fine to make guesses and spin metaphors about God, but we certainly shouldn't make claims that these are infallible truths! It's wise just to speculate tentatively or stay thoughtfully silent," he said, adding, "Most UUs don't dismiss God, but I believe that our Puritan heritage makes us take blasphemy very seriously, and we know instinctively that insisting on the literal truth of imaginative metaphors is blasphemy. It's little more than a sales pitch, and we UUs avoid hucksters."

I agree that we are suspicious of religious sales pitches, but my life experience would add that we also abhor exploitation, whether of individual persons, spotted owls or the entire ecosphere, and I think most of us would agree that denying evidence, like that of evolution, is a major sin against oneself and society. What we embrace positively is listed in our Principles and can be summed up succinctly in St Paul's words from 1st Corinthians, ". . .faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love."

Love is not something to be directed inward. Loving ourselves and spending time on "self-improvement" just isn't high priority in an age of critical needs. Paying attention outside ourselves is important, and it takes guts. I have friends who have been arrested literally dozens of times since the Iraq War began, for pushing back the envelope of free speech that has closed in around our society and penned us in. I admire them and wish I had money for bailouts and lawyers. My arrest record is minimal. In May of '56, a brand-new Unitarian, I was taken into custody (illegally), along with others in the U. of Florida Unitarian Fellowship, for petitioning to get a highly qualified African American, an undergraduate A-student and Korean War veteran, into the UF law school. We obtained an amazing 3,000 signatures during the first three hours of the petition drive. Someone phoned the politicians up in Tallahassee who profited from racism, they got scared and sicced the cops on us, who took our petitions and either destroyed them or delivered the names to the governor's mansion. I was 20 years old and was more than scared, I was terrified, but none of us cooped up in that sweltering little room wept or wailed, there were no regrets, the grad student leader, a woman whose last name was Guerry, cracked jokes about the lack of drinking water and a toilet. Otherwise we worried silently about what could happen to us in an Okefenokee Swamplockup and waited it out till the Dean of Women, the blessed Marna V. Brady, a former WWII WAC Colonel, marched in indignantly and sprang us. (You need not ask why I joined the military after graduating.) What our Fellowship did and our behavior in distress, and learning that our Korean vet entered the law school two years later and ranked near the top of his class, made me proud of being a UU and I've stayed proud. I admit, sometimes the New Age self-absorption gets me irritated. Sometimes we concentrate too much on minor areas of reform and ignore the world falling apart around us. Sometimes I feel as though I almost have to SCREAM to plead for parishioners to break routine and come out to an important mass demonstration where numbers matter. Sometimes it seems we're not as generally well-informed as we were in the 1950s, but in this age of Idiot Box sound bites, who is? I respect and admire--even love--other religions, but am hooked for life as a UU, and maybe for life after death too, although in honesty, I can't be sure about that.

Curiously, I think that this attack on one typical Unitarian Universalist church and the congregation's amazingly courageous response will end up bringing many persons into UU churches who may never before have heard of us. When they learn of the Knoxville church's activities and its Christ-like welcome of those who are often despised in Southern culture, they may think as I did years ago, "Here is a truly Christian church!" One deranged man has created martyrs who didn't want to be martyrs any more than Viola Liuzzo did. It's rather depressing when we consider how often martyrdom makes converts. I suppose it's understandable as the psychology of hero-worship or, at least, admiration. The number of Unitarians increased significantly all over Europe after John Calvin burnt Michael Servetus for heresy. It just works that way. Historically, as this article points out, we have a grand array of activist saints; now some new ones.

I decided forty years ago during the Nixon suppression of law that I didn't want to be a martyr either, but could be one if forced to do so. I'm definitely not a courageous person, and know all about poor Winston Smith in "1984" and the prisoners my own nation has tortured into false admissions since 2001, but my adult life has been dedicated to studying the history of dissent and it's an awesome legacy. How could I not follow the example of my own heroes like Marguerite de Porete, John Ball, John Bunyan, Wolfe Tone, Viola Liuzzo? So I still believe they could lock me up and torture me, threaten death and even carry it out, and I would need to grit my teeth and remain a proud heretic, dissenter, political liberal, social radical, panentheist, Unitarian and Universalist--to the end. There, I've written something for the public record that many UUs would find weird or stupid. But because it's public, you see, I can't make excuses and renege. It's on record. In an era in which we know exactly who "they" are, maybe we should all think about this and take a stand, because, as UUs, we know there are ideals and goals worth putting oneself on the line for. And, as Sara Robinson points out and as the Tibetan Buddhists of China have exemplified recently, wherever the forces of Big Brother tyranny exercise complete control, the outspoken liberals of all religious faiths are likely to be the first to be persecuted for our beliefs and actions. Remember Pastor Bonhoeffer's warning.

Sandy Fulton