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As I led Shabbat services yesterday morning, I had with me Marge Piercy’s book of Jewish-related poetry, The Art of Blessing the Day. One of the poems within, “The Fundamental Truth,” caught my eye. It presents a harsh critique of fundamentalists of all religions. I read it and had a multi-layered reaction. Part of me angrily thought, “Right on!” Another part of me experienced a pang of doubt as I noticed myself feeling this intense bitterness and resentment towards fundamentalists. I was asking myself the question, “Does my emotional reaction lead me towards expressing my highest values? How do I deal with people or movements that I strongly disagree with in a way that reflects my highest ethics?” I happened to find a sermon that responded to Piercy’s poem on line. Rev. Kathleen McTigue, a Unitarian minister, tackles this question for herself in an April 2000 talk she gave at her church. I’ll be thinking about her ideas for a while. I’ve copied Rev. McTigue’s sermon here:

The True Believer

Rev. Kathleen McTigue
Sunday, April 16, 2000

The polarization that characterizes so much of American life is risky business in [any setting], but especially so in a monastic community. The person you’re quick to label and dismiss as a racist, a homophobe, a queer, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a bigoted conservative or bleeding-heart liberal is also a person you’re committed to live, work, pray, and dine with for the rest of your life. Anyone who knows a monastery well knows that it is no exaggeration to say that you find Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh living next door to each other. Mother Angelica and Mary Gordon. Barney Frank and Jesse Helms. Not only living together in close quarters, but working, eating, praying and enjoying…recreation together, every day, often for fifty years or more…. How do they do it?…They …have the wisdom of St. Benedict, who [taught]…that there are two types of zeal; one which is bitter and divisive, separating monks from God and from each other, and another which can lead them together into [more abundant] life. [Benedict defined] this ‘good zeal’ as acts of love…[and taught] that this means ’supporting with the greatest patience one another [through all] weaknesses of body or behavior.’

From Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace

When I was on sabbatical last year, part of my discipline of spiritual exploration was a series of retreats in different settings. One of these, a four-day retreat, was at a Benedictine Abbey in Bethlehem, CT. I discovered on my arrival that a part of the rhythm of monastic life offered to retreatants, no matter what their faith or their reasons for retreat, was the assignment of a member of the community as a kind of guide or liaison. The person I was assigned was a nun in her seventies, about four and a half feet tall, with the unlikely and deeply incongruous name of Mother Placid. She spoke rapid-fire and nearly nonstop with a strong New York accent, although she had been a member of that cloistered community for half a century. I found her to be a splendid companion for my stay there, full of humor, encouragement and acceptance, easily able to converse although the vocabularies of our faiths were so different.

During my stay at the abbey I also met an almost opposite incarnation of faith, in the form of a young fellow retreatant who turned out to be a Catholic fundamentalist. Our one brief conversation began with her question, in an interrogating tone, as to whether I was Catholic. On learning that I was not, she immediately began preaching conversion. When I politely interrupted to let her know that I had been raised Catholic and had chosen differently as an adult, my status plummeted from merely pagan to apostate, and she got all the way into preaching exorcism before I finally told her quietly that the conversation was necessarily over.

What do we do with fundamentalism? In her poem, “The Fundamental Truth”, Marge Piercy writes:

The Christian right, Islamic Jihad,
the Jewish right bank settlers bringing
the Messiah down, the Japanese sects
who worship by bombing subways,
they all hate each other
but more they hate the mundane,
ordinary people who love living
more than dying in radiant glory,
who shuffle and sigh and bake bread…They need a planet of their own,
perhaps even a barren moon
with artificial atmosphere,
where they will surely be nearer
to their gods and their fiercest
enemies, where they can kill
to their heart’s peace
kill to the last standing man
and leave the rest of us be.

Not mystics to whom the holy
comes in the core of struggle
in a shimmer of blinding quiet,
not scholars haggling out the inner
meaning of gnarly ancient sentences.
No, the holy comes to these zealots
as a license to kill, for self doubt
and humility have dried like mud
under their marching feet.

They have far more in common
with each other, these braggarts
of hatred, the iron hearted
in whose ear a voice spoke
once and left them deaf.
Their faith is founded on death
of others, and everyone is other
to them, whose Torah is splattered
in letters of blood.

We might go a long time in between conversations like the one I had with my fellow retreatant. But on a daily level we will see the true believers out there in the news, bent on crusades that mingle religion and politics. Sometimes it’s truly in the form of a holy war, where the flame of religious passion burns so brightly that each side is entirely blinded to the humanity of the other, and both killing and dying seem to become frightful sacraments. In our own country, where we reap the great benefit of a long and stable history separating church and state, we get the language of the holy war without as much of its blood.

So we hear about the Southern Baptists choosing the holiest days of the Jewish or Hindu calendar to launch a focused effort at conversion. We listen to the founder of the Promise Keepers, Bill McCartney, say on CNN, “We have no political agenda; we just gotta make sure the Constitution doesn’t find itself in violation of God’s law”. We watch as Kansas allows a religious belief about the origins of life to be taught alongside science in the schools. But even here, the language of holy war can be twined into physical violence. When doctors who perform abortion are called ‘murderers’, for instance, or homosexuality is named a sin or perversion, who’s to measure the weight of these words to someone whose hands pick up a club or a gun?

What do we do with fundamentalism? How do we understand our own religious mandates of tolerance and respect when we come face to face with a ‘true believer’, one who greets us with the zealous certainty that we are damned or dangerous — or both — because of our beliefs? Despite the plaintive suggestion in Marge Piercy’s poem, we can’t find a separate planet for the zealots among us. We don’t have to live in quite the level of forced intimacy of the cloistered Benedictines. But we do need to learn, as surely as they do, how to live together and find common ground across our differences.

To keep eyes open for common ground is not the same as passivity. When the creeds of fundamentalism are brought into the public realm as they so often are, we have no choice except to respond from the teachings of our own faith. When we hear the language of rejection and condemnation, our own religious mandates call us to speak just as clearly and firmly our language of inclusion and respect.

But it may be that our faith calls us to something else as well, not just an external but also an internal response. I think we’re also called to understand, as compassionately as we can, even those who show no compassion or understanding. When I found myself face to face with the Catholic fundamentalist last year, my first internal reaction to her was anger. How dare she presume so much? Words like ’self-righteous’ and ‘fanatic’ immediately sprang to mind, and when I ended our conversation it was with neutral language but a seething heart.

It was only later, replaying her words in my mind, that I was able to wonder what might lie behind her certainty, what might drive her to her rigid beliefs, so far removed not only from mine but from the open-hearted serenity of her fellow Catholic, Mother Placid. I didn’t want to re-engage with this fundamentalist; but I did want to step behind her eyes enough to feel something toward her other than anger. I wanted to carry away something in my own heart besides judgment and indignation.

In an interview a few years ago the quintessential liberal Christian, William Sloane Coffin, was asked about fundamentalism. He said, “Fundamentalism of any kind, political or religious, is deeply rooted in anxiety, and that which is emotionally rooted is not intellectually soluble…It is very hard to argue intellectually with people who believe doubt is the great enemy…” One of our difficulties, in responding to fundamentalism when we meet it, is that we are so much more comfortable on the intellectual than the emotional plain. We want to have a rational conversation, a movement of give and take, listening and response. We are so sure of where we stand intellectually that we keep trying to make rational inroads, and when we fail we throw up our hands in despair at how irrational the other person seems to be.

But if we can remember the degree to which absolutism is rooted in anxiety, maybe we can begin to look for some other ground for communion. We will not change the mind of a fundamentalist, because his or her conviction is rooted in the heart. But can we respond in a way that diminishes anxiety? Can we resist the rise of our own self-righteousness, and look for ways to cultivate compassion instead?

UU minister Scott Alexander often cites the early Universalists and the teachings they proclaimed over two centuries ago, as models for us in our own struggles with intolerance. Universalism was born within a theological world that was dominated, much more than our own, by rigid visions of God’s will and coercive movements of what we’d now call fundamentalism.

The early preachers of Universalism had a different vision to offer against the doctrine of human depravity and the certainty of hellfire. The early Universalists ‘could see human weakness and wrong-doing just as clearly as the Calvinists’, writes Alexander, ‘but theirs was a bold faith about human …possibility, a dream of what we might yet be and build together as a struggling human family…They saw the oneness and worth of humanity more than its separateness and sin.’ John Murray, one of the people who brought Universalism to this country, put it this way: “Go out into the highways and byways. Give the people something of your new vision. You possess only a small light, but 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; preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”

It’s important to remember these deep historical roots of ours — not because we will change a modern-day fundamentalist by quoting John Murray, but because we need to stay grounded in the power and promise of our own faith. If we are not so grounded, then we have nowhere to go when an intellectual conversation fails. We will wrap ourselves in the robes of our reasonableness, and without even noticing will slide toward the smug certainty of our own correctness, adding new walls and barriers to those erected by the fundamentalists. But if we remember that our vision has heart as well as head, we might surprise ourselves by discovering common ground — at least enough to build a few stepping stones.

A year or two ago, it became something of a fad among some Christian youth to wear bracelets or clothing with the letters “WWJD” printed on them. This stood for a query — What would Jesus do? — that was supposed to remind the one who wore it, or saw it worn, of some fundamental values to guide the decisions of the day. Our denominational magazine, the UU World, reported that some industrious young folks from within our own faith began sporting their own version: WWUUD, for ‘what would Unitarian Universalism do?’ One of our ministers, Tom Schade, had an interesting response to this. He said that within an increasingly sectarian dialogue, the original question, ‘what would Jesus do?’, could be a patch of common ground where our children and their more orthodox friends could meet.

Schade suggested that we had not served our youth well if they did not realize that our own UU teachings were rooted in centuries of pondering what Jesus taught, what he showed us, what in fact he might do with the moral dilemmas we meet in our lives. “By responding with ‘WWUUD’”, he wrote, “we offer a model of polarizing behavior rather than bridge-building. We show them we consider our identity more important that the shared system of ethical values we might find in considering the same questions with the Christians. And we place our name in the position of the name of someone they worship, which they can only interpret to mean we worship ourselves. Should we answer the Islamic cry of, ‘God is Great’ with ‘UUs are great?’”

Tom Schade’s words might also remind us of a specific part of our interdependent web. We’re fond of contemplating it on one level — the wondrous ways in which we’re connected to all of life. And that’s true and worth contemplating. But we don’t often focus on what might be the shadow side of this belief, less appealing but no less true, and it is this: we are also connected to all that goes wrong in our world, linked to all the capacities for harm that are out there.

In other words, we all have the seed of a righteous little fundamentalist lurking within us, and that’s critical for us to remember whenever we try to reach out, however tentatively, to those with whom we disagree. In addition to the lack of available empty planets out there, the other reason we can’t separate out the fundamentalists is because the same anxiety, rigidity and lack of humility lie potential within us all.

Even within our famously open circles, I have heard the voice of righteous intolerance speak. We all have. In the congregation I once served a woman rose one Sunday during the sharing of joys and sorrows and indignantly denounced the hymn we had just sung as ‘one that wasn’t really a UU hymn’ — despite having been drawn from our hymnal. In a different UU circle I once heard a man declare that it was absurd to think a true UU could also claim to be a Christian — despite our roots solidly anchored within Christian history. I’ve heard UUs sneer that those who have spiritual yearnings need to seek a therapist, not our religious community. And even in this congregation, as joyously affirming as it nearly always is, there are times when people imply that a good religious liberal can’t possibly be a political conservative.

There will always be some people in our world toward whom we cannot extend bridges because they’ll dismantle them more quickly than we can build. There will always be some who are too anxious or driven to ever hear the sweet music that comes sailing through humanity only because of harmonious diversity. Some of these closed souls will cause us grief, and some may even be dangerous to us, or to others we need to protect.

But in our struggle to respond wisely and kindly even to fundamentalism, we must try to remember the legacy left by our Universalist forebearers. Their theology was born from their stubborn refusal to give up on any member of the human family. They used light and love and generosity and joy as antidotes to the grim teachings of others, and those same tools belong to us. We must also remember to speak even our most passionate truths with a small ‘t’, guarding against the poisons of self-righteousness in ourselves. Anais Nin wrote, “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.” We need to leave ourselves room to glimpse truths available even in very foreign theologies.

And we might also do well to learn a little bit about the Rule of St. Benedict, which still guides some of the monastics who struggle, as we all must, to live together. Benedict taught a virtue that is so old-fashioned in name that we hardly every hear it spoken anymore: ‘forbearance.’ It means to be tolerant and patient. If we can practice forbearance we might not feel that our encounters with fundamentalists are measurably more successful. But we might walk away feeling something gentler than anger, something that leaves us less vulnerable to our own failures of humility and our own righteous judgments. Perhaps we could develop some version of daily prayer for ourselves that might echo this one drawn not from Benedict, but from the Sioux tribes of this country: Great Spirit, fill us with light. Give us the strength to understand and eyes to see. Teach us to walk the soft earth as relatives to all that live.

Amen.