LOVE'S FIRE
by Galen Guengerich
April 6, 2003
Before Eric Lamm spoke the words that opened this service of worship, he lit the flame that now rises from the chalice here in the front of the sanctuary. The same thing happens every Sunday at the beginning of Children’s Chapel at All Souls, as well as at the start of our Junior High and High School Seminar meetings. It also happens in most of the 1,000 Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country.
The flaming chalice may be a new addition to the symbolism of our sanctuary, but it is not new to our faith tradition. During the Second World War, an American Unitarian minister named Charles Joy was stationed in Lisbon to help refugees escape from the Nazis. As Executive Director of the Unitarian Service Committee, Joy felt that his organization–then new and unknown–needed a visual image to represent Unitarianism to the world, especially when dealing with government agencies in Europe. He commissioned a Czech cartoonist named Hans Deutsch, who was himself a refugee at the time, to design a symbol for the Service Committee that could be used on official documents. Deutsch drew the first version of our flaming chalice.
Joy described what Deutsch had drawn in the following way: "A chalice with a flame, the kind of chalice which the Greeks and Romans put on their altars. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice." Joy added, "The fact that it remotely suggests a cross was not in the artist’s mind, but to me this also has merit. At the present moment, our work is nine-tenths for the Jews, yet we do stem from the Christian tradition and its central theme of sacrificial love."
In more recent years, especially since the American Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, the flaming chalice has been adopted as the symbol of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and of our denomination as a whole. The Service Committee continues to promote human rights around the globe. And the flame of a free faith still burns in Unitarian and Universalist congregations everywhere.
Even so, our congregation has been around more than a century longer than Hans Deutsch’s symbol, which is one reason we have come more slowly to adopt it. As many of you know, the question of whether we should have a flaming chalice in the sanctuary has been a topic of considerable discussion among some members of our congregation. The strongest case for adopting the chalice concerns what happens outside this sanctuary. The chalice is an integral part of the worship life of our children and youth here at All Souls–except when they come into the big church. And the chalice is an integral part of worship for most Unitarian Universalists across the country–except when they come to visit what is arguably the flagship church of the denomination.
On the other hand, the strongest case for not adopting the chalice concerns what happens inside this sanctuary. One of the signal strengths of All Souls for nearly two centuries has been the constancy of our liturgy, or our form of worship. In a tradition which has no founding prophet, no holy scripture and no normative creed, we need something that serves as a keel to steady our ship and keep our course true. We find it here, in the sacred calm of this sanctuary, in the beauty of the music, and in the dependable rhythm of our worship. In times like these, when so much in the world around us is changing and uncertain, we need a steady foundation we can count on. For many of us, that’s why we come to All Souls from week to week: to be comforted by what does not change.
Needless to say, these are both compelling arguments. Nonetheless, over time it became clear that we need to take seriously both the worship life of our children and our leadership role in our denomination. Last fall, the Board of Trustees formally requested that the ministers find a way to include the symbol of the flaming chalice in our service of worship. We have done so in a way that honors our liturgy, while embracing our larger faith community. As of this morning, a member of the congregation will light the chalice on his or her way to opening the service in the accustomed way.
As I watched our chalice take shape over the past weeks and months, first in our minds and hearts, then in stone and wood, I recalled a few lines penned by the 19th-century poet A.C. Swinburne:
O heart of hearts, the chalice of love’s fire…
Help us for thy free love’s sake to be free,
True for thy truth’s sake,
For thy strength’s sake strong.To me, this chalice is the chalice of love’s fire. It serves as a reminder of our shared commitment to strive to be free and true and strong. But why have we made this commitment? For what purpose do we strive to be free? To what standard do we strive to be true? For whose sake do we strive to be strong?
These are religious questions, and thus the chalice is a profoundly religious symbol. What is a symbol? A symbol stands for or suggests something by means of a relationship, an association, or a resemblance. It is more than just a sign. A sign points toward something or indicates something: turn right for the restrooms; this bag of carrots costs $1.79; LaGuardia Airport is 1 mile ahead. The theologian Paul Tillich distinguished a sign from a symbol in this way: "While the sign bears no necessary relation to that to which it points, the symbol participates in the reality of that for which it stands." A wedding ring, the American flag, a red lapel ribbon: these symbols evoke experiences of commitment and struggle, of hope and hardship, because the symbols themselves have been born out of–they have emerged from–those experiences.
In the same way, religious symbols connect us with experiences of the holy, the sacred, the transcendent, the divine. For Christians, the presence of a chalice on the altar is a reminder of the sacrifice made by Jesus of Nazareth, whose perfect life and exemplary death satisfied the divine demand for justice in the wake of human sinfulness. During the traditional Catholic sacrament of Holy Communion, the priest blesses the wine in the chalice, thereby (Catholics believe) transforming it into the blood of Christ, which Christians believe is the agent which cleanses them of sin.
Even more ancient, and in my view more compelling, is the practice cited by Charles Joy, in which the Greeks and Romans placed on their altars chalices filled with flaming oil. The symbolism of the flame was especially significant in ancient times. According to the Greeks, the goddess Hera gave birth to a son named Hephaestus, whose name means burning, shining, flaming. Known as the god of fire–of volcanic eruption, celestial lightning, incendiary flame, the glow of hearth and forge–Hephaestus became the chief smith and armorer of the gods, the finest worker in metal among them. He built the dwellings of the gods, and he forged the scepter of Zeus, the arrows of Apollo and Artemis, the breastplate of Hercules, the shield of Achilles, and the spears of all the gods. He also took part in making the human race. Hephaestus was a peace-loving deity, as popular on earth as he was in heaven. It seems fitting, somehow, that this god of fire and forge was married to the irresistibly beautiful Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
On the one hand, the flame in an ancient Greek chalice represented the warmth of the hearth, the safety of home, and the consolations of love. On the other hand, the flame also enabled the god of fire to forge weapons of war: spears, shields, and arrows. These two alternative human realities underlie Riane Eisler’s 1987 book titled The Chalice and the Blade. In it, she notes that human beings have many legends about the time before history began. It was, the legends say, a time of harmony and peace. The Biblical legend describes a garden where a woman and a man lived in harmony with each other and with nature. Then, according to the story, a male god decreed that woman should henceforth be subservient to man. The Chinese Tao Te Ching describes a time before history when the yin, or feminine principle, was not yet ruled by the yang, or male principle. It was a time when the wisdom of the mother was honored and followed above all. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod wrote of a golden race that tilled the soil in peaceful ease before a lesser race brought in their god of war.
Eisler argues that these similarities are not coincidental, but that they point to a time before history when societies on earth were based not on what she calls the dominator model, but on what she calls the partnership model. Then something happened to doom the partnership model to virtual extinction. Eisler explains:
The title The Chalice and the Blade derives from this cataclysmic turning point during the prehistory of Western civilization, when the direction of our cultural evolution was quite literally turned around. At this pivotal branching, the cultural evolution of societies that worshipped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe–in our time still symbolized by the ancient chalice or grail–was interrupted. There appeared on the prehistoric horizon invaders who ushered in a very different form of social organization. These were people who worshipped the lethal power of the blade–the power to take rather than to give life, the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination.
Not surprisingly, Eisler’s thesis has encountered a storm of criticism. Some scholars question the soundness of her analysis of prehistory, while others suggest that her so-called partnership model is mostly a call for men to wake up and follow women–a female-dominator model, in other words. Even if Eisler’s analysis is somewhat flawed, I think her observation that history has felt too much of the blade and seen too little of the chalice is unerring. To be sure–here is where Eisler and I disagree–a society needs both the blade and the chalice to endure over time. But the blade and the chalice must work in partnership. Furthermore, the ultimate morality of a nation is not determined by how effectively it can wield the blade in order to dominate and destroy. Rather, it is judged by how resolutely it attends to the commitments symbolized by the chalice.
The blade represents the human desire to destroy things we abhor and to defend ourselves from things we fear. The chalice represents the human commitment to nurture the things we value and to embrace the things we love. These include the five elements that make up what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead terms civilization: truth, beauty, art, adventure, and peace. Civilization is the process of enhancing the world by persuading others to embody these qualities and pursue these goals. While the use of force is sometimes unavoidable in human societies, Whitehead concludes, it is a sure sign that civilization has failed.
On these terms, the fact that we have resorted to using force against Saddam Hussein represents the failure of civilization. This is not to pass judgment on whether this action could or even should have been avoided. It is simply to say that the elements of civilization have been subsumed, at least for a season. The question is whether we as a nation will have the patience and the commitment to help them to flower once again. I take it that Thomas Friedman was asking something like this same question when he wondered whether we would be able to make the Iraqis smile again. If we do not, if we consider our work finished when the dragon has been slain, then we will have failed to honor not only our commitments as a nation, we will have failed civilization as well. Our role as people of faith is to keep the chalice burning bright–to remind each other and our nation’s leaders not only to defend against what we fear, but also to nurture the things we value and embrace the things we love.
Some people may enter this sanctuary and see burning here nothing but a candle in a dish. I see much more. I see a potent symbol: the chalice of love’s fire, a constant reminder of our shared commitment to strive to be free and true and strong. We make this commitment for love’s sake and for our children’s sake. We make it for the sake of people who long for what we take for granted, like liberty and dignity and democracy. Especially on this day, we make this commitment for the coalition troops and for the people of Iraq. For them, we will be free and true and strong. This is the chalice of love’s fire.