THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
by Alison Miller
August 8, 2004
Those of you who know me and those of you who have read my biography may be wondering, why I would choose to spend a year in Oklahoma? We New Yorkers have a tendency of traveling from coast to coast with little notice of what comes in between, except that it makes the plane ride from JFK to the San Francisco International Airport longer. The "Why Oklahoma" question was definitely on the mind of my road test instructor last August. He asked the reason that I wanted to get my driver's license. I explained my plans to move to Tulsa and the need for a driver's license to get around. He retorted, "Um, I think you'd be better off getting a horse license. Do they have cars out there?" I was amazed at some of the responses I received from some people around here to whom moving to Tulsa seemed to entail traveling backwards in time.
Sadly most of us don't know much more about that region than we learned in our high school's production of "Oklahoma." Just out of curiosity... how about a show of hands. Have any of you been to that part of the country?
The answer to why I wanted to go there is simple. There is a large, dynamic All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa thriving right there in the buckle of the Bible Belt. The Christian right has swept not only the heart of our president, but much of this country. I wanted to learn first hand about the power of these churches and to serve in a church that provided a liberal alternative.
I knew from experience that traveling helps me gain perspective on different ways to live. What often surprises me, though, is that I also see my own situation with fresh eyes. I learn new things, but I also become aware of the lessons present in my everyday life. They were always there. I just didn't see them.
Granted I have some stories that illustrate some interesting differences. One day I was in a tiny town in Oklahoma hiking with a friend. We came upon a little pond where a middle-aged man with no front teeth was fishing with a rod in one hand and a gun in the other. I wasn't sure if we should greet him or run away. We moved towards him and said "hello." He responded, "I've seen some water moccasins today, but don't worry. If I see any more, I'll just introduce them to Henry." His gun had a name! That was my first time becoming acquainted with a gun's name prior to its owner's. To this day, everyone seems to own a gun on the prairie. In Oklahoma, even the liberal politicians mention their NRA membership in their campaign ads.
But seriously, I have to tell you that Tulsa is actually a very metropolitan city with restaurants, the arts, parks, and a downtown much like here in New York, just smaller. However, it is a very different experience to be a Unitarian Universalist in that city.
Here, the first question people often ask is "Where do you work?" When I lived in Boston, the question was "What school do you go to?" In Tulsa, it was "What church do you attend?" It is almost assumed that you are Christian; the question is of what stripe? There are visual reminders of the strong religious presence such as the sixty-foot, thirty-ton, bronze statue of praying hands, on the Oral Roberts University campus. The hands are very visible from the road. According to publicity, they are the largest bronze structure in the world. I was fairly impressed until last month when I drove by the one hundred and ninety foot, seventy-five ton cross outside of Amarillo Texas.
Another reminder was when my mother came for a visit last December. It took all of two minutes after landing for the skycap to begin witnessing for his lord and savior. When he discovered that I was a Unitarian minister, he wanted to know more because, in his words, "he hadn't heard anything good about us."
Issues that many Unitarian Universalists care about, such as a woman's right to choose, appear to be almost too controversial to hit the papers in Tulsa. The march for women's lives last spring, the largest march ever in D.C., wasn't even a blip on the radar. There was no coverage in the local news media. I decided to preach on reproductive rights that Sunday at All Souls Tulsa's contemporary service, which attracts both UUs and non-UUs alike, and received my first piece of hate mail.
I attended a mega-church called GUTS, as in "it takes GUTS to love Jesus." Their largest outreach program is a haunted house called The Nightmare. About 30,000 children and adults visit this exhibit whose aim is to "scare the hell out of you." I had to see it for myself, and this is what I found. The promoters of the "Hell House" use all of our fears about guns, violence, drugs, rape, child molestation and a gruesome crucifixion scene to make a point about how hell is far worse than any terror we may come across in our lifetime. The finale is a sea of volunteers who grab the hand of everyone who exits. Each of us was told how Jesus could save us from all terror, right there and then, if we were ready.
Living in Tulsa taught me to proclaim the good news that we offer so many people who have been wounded by the fundamentalist points of view. Oklahoma is not the only place where fundamentalists have a strong foot hold, they are gathering force even here in the Northeast. After this year, I have a heightened awareness about how our liberal religious home of Unitarian Universalism is an important voice of healing in this world.
Let me share an example from the Tulsa trenches. I taught a Bible Based Gender and Sexuality series last year. This is a hot button issue for many of the congregants in Tulsa, and I suspect for some of you gathered here today. Many people who have been raised Christian and all of us who have been raised in this country are affected by oppressive biblical interpretations. Either we heard them in our congregations growing up, or we hear them falling from the lips of our elected officials. Family Values and Defense of Marriage are talked about along with supporting biblical chapter and verse, usually from Genesis or something that Paul wrote.
The conservative religious point of view leads to statements that we hear often outside these walls:
1) Love exists only between a man and a woman
2) Working women are responsible for the downfall of our children
3) Divorce is always wrong
Why? Because the bible says so. Well, the Bible also contains literature, like the Wisdom literature in Proverbs, that tells us we need to examine what we observe in the world around us. The author of Proverbs urges us to learn from the natural sciences and the social sciences as well.
Perhaps, biblical literalists are asking questions of the scriptures that the authors didn't intend to answer. The Genesis story is basically a myth about creation and how our planet and humanity came to exist. It is not a defense of heterosexuality. In addition, there are thousands of gay and lesbian couples who share a life-long commitment. With so many broken families, who am I to break up a loving relationship?
Three women who were new to the church came into the class and sat down as we were sharing positive and negative stories about our experiences of gender, sexuality and the Bible. All three were coming out of various fundamentalist Bible centered communities. The first one sat down and shared her current struggle of getting divorced. Her church was shunning her. The second woman shared about her struggle to accept that she was a lesbian and come to terms with her understanding of love and humanity in spite of her family's rejection. The third woman told her personal story of child abuse. She also shared how Catholic priests in the church of her childhood and her professors at Oral Roberts University encouraged the view that her suffering would bring her closer to Jesus.
As they shared their stories and as we revisited passages of the Bible, it was one of those incredible moments when you could feel the spiritual bruises these women bore begin to heal. It was the first time they had been in a congregation where different points of views were accepted. They had entered a safe and sacred community where their identities and their understandings of the truth held in the scriptures were not only accepted, but also welcomed.
It matters what we believe. Yes, it matters what Unitarian Universalists believe. Contrary to the abbreviated version sometimes used to describe our faith, Unitarian Universalism does not equal "anything goes" or "believe whatever you want." Too often we forget that the gift of openness those women discovered that day is a belief, not a lack of belief. It stems from a long history of promoting the individual's search for truth and meaning. Unitarian Universalists think this can be accomplished in a free yet responsible way. We believe in putting this understanding into action in our congregations and in society at large. Deeds not creeds are what count.
There is a struggle in our world to win this very cause in our world. Freedom of conscience and freedom of belief are not a given yet. Fundamentalists of various faiths each claim that there is one path to God while we assert that there are many. Unitarian Universalists possess a healing salve in a world where people are killing each other over theological difference.
We still have a lot to learn, but we already know something about how to co-exist peacefully in the midst of religious diversity. This does not mean that we don't debate. Unitarian Universalists cherish debate. An individual's journey to articulate his or her religious truths can be filled with moments of struggle and insight. Ultimately, this search can lead to strong religious convictions. We make space in our congregations for multiple versions of deeply felt understandings of God, human nature, and the cosmos. Atheists, Christians, and Pagans often share the same pew. We need the courage to share with the world how you can believe in something wholeheartedly and still leave room for others to disagree with you. This is soul saving work.
Let me tell you another story. This one is from the Northeast, lest we fool ourselves into believing Christian hegemony is a problem of the Southwest. Last summer I worked as a chaplain intern in a huge hospital in Boston, which is a predominantly Catholic city. The chaplains on staff were mostly Catholic or Protestant with the exception of one half time rabbi and one quarter time Imam. I noticed that my colleagues struggled with how to minister to the sick and the dying, if they did not believe in Jesus Christ. As chaplains much of our ministry was to listen to patients' stories and assist them in making meaning. In order to be a healing presence for our patients, we needed to work with the patients' spiritual resources and religious convictions rather than imposing our own. This was a challenge, but as a lifelong Unitarian Universalist I was comfortable conversing with people who had similar or dissimilar interpretations from my own. I did not view healing as linked to a particular understanding of where God was or wasn't located in their story. Chaplains and fellow interns often asked for my help with patients who ran the gamut from atheist to any non-Christian. It was gratifying to become more fully aware of the gift Unitarian Universalism gave me, but I was concerned. How would those patients be served after that summer, if the department did not add a chaplain trained to work in an interfaith setting?
One day a chaplain was recounting a story about a Buddhist family whose baby was dying in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Before her death she was secretly baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity. It soon came to light that this was not a one-time episode, but that nurses or doctors frequently baptized babies regardless of their family's religious background. The nurses and doctors performed baptisms just in case their religious conviction was the only path to God and all non-Christian babies were damned to hell.
I was furious and upset. I couldn't believe this was going on. I couldn't imagine this insult happening to families losing a child, but it was. As if it weren't enough grief for a Buddhist family to lose their baby girl, in her last moments on earth her parents' religion would be slighted. She would be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, just in case the family's beliefs were wrong and this innocent baby's soul was in jeopardy. I felt as if I had entered a time machine that landed in the Middle-Ages. It was reminiscent of Spanish Inquisitions when the Catholic authorities gave Muslims and Jews the choice of a forced baptism or death. This was also the time when the much-celebrated heretic Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva by Protestant authorities for opposing the trinity and infant baptism. The difference is that this hospital's version of Christian supremacy was practiced covertly rather than in plain sight.
Freedom of belief is interwoven with the fabric of our country's laws in part because of the influence of Unitarians, such as John Adams, involved in our founding documents. I thought that freedom of religion was a guaranteed right in this day and age in this country, but I had neglected to apply what I read everyday in the newspapers to my life. Anti-semitism is on the rise in Catholic France, and in this week's headlines we have read about Islamic fundamentalists bombing churches in Iraq. Humans are killing one another and oppressing one another for not espousing the same beliefs about God.
Are Unitarian Universalists willing to defend our convictions of freedom of belief in the face of threats to our jobs or even our lives? This freedom is not yet completely won, and there is much work for us to do to promote this issue of justice.
As the chaplain recounted her story, I noticed as I looked around that I was the only non-Trinitarian in the room. No one else seemed to think baptizing Jews, Buddhists and atheists was a big deal. I asked her how she handled the situation with the Buddhist child, and she shared her concerns about ministering to the needs of the Catholic medical staff. I refused this dichotomy between the needs of medical professionals and patients and their families. One need was for the staff to have an appropriate way to grieve. The other was for patients and families to have a death with dignity, including preserving the integrity of their religious beliefs.
Inspired by my Unitarian Universalist values, I realized that I had to speak out. I began a conversation with my supervisor and the entire chaplaincy department. It was important to me to stand up for my beliefs regardless of the consequences. I didn't get fired or disciplined, but the pediatric chaplain never did speak to me again. Fortunately my supervisor was sympathetic. The hospital is now doing trainings of nurses and doctors about the history of forced baptism and why it is so offensive. Babies who are not Christian are no longer getting baptized there.
450 years after the death of Michael Servetus and over two hundred years after the constitution of the United States was written, we are still struggling to create the safe space for all people to exercise their beliefs about how to live and die rightly. Sophia Lyon Fahs sums it up well, "Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies. Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern." Her words ring especially true in times of great sorrow or suffering. It is soul severing not soul saving that occurs when people crush the deeply held convictions that help individuals make it through painful times. Unitarian Universalists have much to teach this world about how we deal with diversity. Each one of us may be called upon to show the world how it is possible to have strong convictions and yet, leave room for other strong convictions. May we have GUTS to help create a world where there is truly room for All Souls. Amen.
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