OUR BOND OF UNION
by Forrest Church
Feb. 6, 2005
"This Church is dedicated to religion but not to a creed. Neither upon itself nor upon its members does it impose a doctrinal test. Love to God and the perfecting of our spiritual nature we regard as the unchanging substance of religion." So begins our Service of the Right Hand of Fellowship, the rite we celebrate twice a year in welcoming new members into All Souls. "By presenting yourselves here today, you commit yourselves to a moral and spiritual purpose: to be faithful to the inherent responsibilities of religious freedom. You commit yourselves henceforth to discard whatever beliefs you discover to be false and to accept whatever you are convinced are true."
The new members, standing on the chancel steps, together with the gathered congregation then recite the Bond of Union, "wherein we walk together," as the Service of the Right Hand of Fellowship explains, "reserving the right of private judgment of our beliefs and respecting likewise, the same privilege for others."
My predecessor, Walter Donald Kring wrote the words for our Right Hand of Fellowship ceremony in 1955. The text is printed in what some of you will remember as the Red Hymnal which was supplemented by the Blue Hymnal in 1975 and finally supplanted by the gray one in 1993. The Service of the Right Hand of Fellowship itself, however, we still use, fifty years after Walter wrote it. I won't be in the least surprised if we are using it still fifty years from today. In the best sense of the word, All Souls is a conservative institution, an institution established to conserve liberal religious values.
Today, at our 186th annual meeting, we shall be considering two important amendments to our by-laws, each requiring a two-thirds vote for passage. Begging the forgiveness of visitors, whose interest in our parochial concerns may understandably be limited, I owe the voting members of All Souls a clear statement of why Galen and I initiated this by-laws revision process some eleven months ago. I shall include a little history, some clarification on questions you may have about how these changes, if enacted, would affect congregational worship and identity, and my own sincere appeal that both amendments receive a two-thirds positive vote.
Let me begin with the second amendment—removing language from the by-laws that makes subscription to the Bond of Union a condition of membership. This change, incorporating language from our Right Hand of Fellowship service, should not and I expect will not prove controversial. The truth is, very few of us were aware that the letter of our by-laws was so dramatically out of sync with the spirit of this congregation. As my predecessor stated so clearly: "this church is dedicated to religion, but not to a creed. Neither upon itself nor upon its members does it impose a doctrinal test." For decades, at least since Walter composed those words in the early 1950's, the by-law language restricting membership has been intentionally ignored. I don't know what Walter was thinking when he wrote a Right Hand of Fellowship service that countermanded the letter of the by-laws. I expect he simply decided to let well enough alone. The few times I've been questioned on this subject over the past, I've simply said, "We're a liberal church. We follow the spirit, not the letter." This may be true, but it is fudging nonetheless. Walter fudged for 23 years. I've fudged for 27. That's half a century of looking the other way. It seemed high time to bring the letter of our by-laws into alignment with the spirit of All Souls.
Aren't we thereby breaking with tradition? Not really. Our tradition is one of deeds not creeds. From the outset of our experiment in planting liberal religion in New York City and throughout the vital periods of our history, All Souls has been a church where people need not think alike to love alike. By passing the amendment unlinking subscription to the Bond of Union from the requirements of membership, all we will be doing is reversing a Board decision countermanding that spirit made some eighty years ago, in 1922. All Souls was tiny then, struggling with its identity, the boom years having passed shortly following Henry Whitney Bellows death in 1882. Circling the wagons perhaps, our then Board of Trustees selected a Bond of Union and inserted it into the By Laws as a condition of membership. However unwittingly, this action defied the most sacred of all Unitarian principles, freedom of conscience. It also defied the tradition of the All Souls itself, which for more than a century, since our founding in 1819, had maintained the liberal religious custom of complete freedom of belief. The congregation explicitly ratified this custom decades earlier, in 1846, when the lay leadership affimed, "The method of uniting with this church shall continue to be optional with the candidate, and that the signature of no creed or profession whatever shall be required." At the request of the minister, the church leaders made the following compromise. Those who wished a "more precise bond of union with this church" could express their fidelity to Christ by inscribing their names on a new page of the membership book designed for this very purpose. This special page contains only one signature. The only member of the congregation who elected to exercise this option was Bellows himself. Why? I can only guess. I do know that Bellows, already a leading national spokesperson for liberal religion, was taking fire from Orthodox theologians who were questioning his Christian credentials. Representing a church that celebrated complete freedom of religious belief may have prompted Dr. Bellows to seek a little theological cover. Or maybe he was simply to the theological right of his congregation? All the record shows is this. A century and a half ago, when all members of All Souls who felt the need to sign their names on a doctrinal dotted line were called to step forward, Bellows stood alone.
With this as a historical back drop, a positive vote today officially to remove subscription to the Bond of Union as a condition of membership accomplishes three things. It restores the letter of the pre-1922 All Souls tradition. It conforms to the spirit of this same tradition as practiced since at least 1955, and probably long before. And it brings the letter of our by-laws into sync with the spirit of Unitarianism, as expressed in the first line of our present Bond of Union, which proclaims that we gather "in the freedom of the truth."
The other proposed change, though far more slight, is somewhat more controversial. It amends the present Bond of Union by changing the second line, "And in the spirit of Jesus," to read "And in the spirit of love." A number of you have expressed concern about this proposed change, and for a variety of sound and thoughtful reasons. Before considering these, I should quickly dispel one less reasonable fear that's been circulating about. Whether this change passes or not, the liturgy will remain the same, the music will remain the same, Christmas Eve will remain the same. The trumpets will blow on Easter. And though ten of you will complain to me afterwards, on Easter Sunday we'll still sing "Christ the Lord is Risen today," even if he doesn't soar quite so high in my sermon.
Such concerns aside, there are other and better reasons to question this change. A few of you ground your faith naturally and deeply in the teachings of Jesus as the primary source of your theology. You may remember my metaphor of the Cathedral of the word, one Light shining through many different windows. You see the one Light as refracted through the life and teachings of Jesus and therefore naturally embrace our present Bond of Union in its fullness. Often from long acquaintance with this congregation and its religious culture, you recognize that when we speak here of gathering in the spirit of Jesus, we are not speaking of the Christ or Messiah of Christian tradition, born of a virgin, resurrected on the third day, unique Lord and Savior. You further recognize, drawing as we do from the Universalist well-spring of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, that even in singling Jesus out, we make no boast that his teachings are the final statement of religious truth or his path the only path to sacred knowledge. Yet Jesus is your spiritual touchstone, and his spirit, the liberal spirit of love to God and love to neighbor, is one you invoke with reverence and joy. I, by the way, number myself among you.
If I am right, however, the questions posed most often by those among us who oppose any change in the wording of our Bond of Union are not, first and foremost, theological ones. They have less to do with a reverence for Jesus than with a reverence for the All Souls tradition. We have been, are, and will continue to be a "high" Unitarian church. We are devout in our religious liberalism, comfortable with a relatively formal liturgy and wedded to a deep spiritual grounding. Your desire—one I fully share—is for All Souls to remain in the vanguard of the unapologetically religious wing of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Your concern—as I understand it—is that tampering with the Bond of Union represents submission to the relentless forces of secularism that relativize faith to the point that it will soon become meaningless. If I am reading you correctly, you oppose change less because of your fidelity to Jesus than because of your fidelity to the spirit of All Souls.
Since I embrace that spirit to the core of my very being, let me describe what I understand the Spirit of All Souls to be. We are remarkably diverse theologically. At the same time, we are a surprisingly coherent bunch, both spiritually and in our shared values. As a group, we are intellectually curious, ethically engaged, theologically humble, and devotionally reverent. We respect differences of belief within these doors and beyond them—that's why we call ourselves "All Souls." Individually, we refer to our theologies by many names: theist, religious humanist, naturalist, transcendentalist, mystic, agnostic, Christian, Jew, and Buddhist. Surely there are more. I, by the way, most often describe myself as a Christian Universalist, with Christian teachings modifying the Universalist foundation of my faith. So we are many here, but also one. Think of All Souls as the perfect laboratory for a spiritual version of e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Though professing many different theological viewpoints, suspending all distinctions we freely join together "for the service of all" and to worship the Holy, the God of many names, beyond our knowing or finally even naming, the Light that shines upon us and out from within us and brings us peace.
Do we fit the same profile as the congregation that gathered in 1922, when the present Bond of Union was inserted into the By-laws? Probably less than we do the profile of the congregation that gathered in the mid-19th century when All Souls was flourishing, described by one leading member as being a broad mix of "English radicals and daughters of Erin, Germans and Hollanders, philosophic gentiles and unbelieving Jews." "In this our association, there is at least one of every sort," wrote the novelist Elizabeth Sedgwick to her more theologically buttoned down Bostonian friend, Eliza Lee Cabot, admitting that, "It requires no little zeal and skill to make the discordant elements of which our church is composed, mingle." But so we did, and so we do today.
Over the past ten months, a valuable and open process of careful listening, followed by a congregational poll suggests that a majority among us are open to finding not less spiritual, but more inclusive language for our Bond of Union, language that sustains our religious tradition while extending its embrace. If unlinking the Bond of Union to membership honors the Unitarian first principle of freedom of conscience, in like manner, the simple, and spiritually consonant, change from "The Spirit of Jesus" to "The Spirit of Love" makes explicit the Universalist first principle—divine, unconditional love. We remain faithful to the tradition of All Souls. At the same time, we align ourselves more closely with the two great spiritual principles of Unitarianism and Universalism. To me, this simple change is graced with both neighborly solicitude and theological elegance.
Nor does this water down our faith, especially given the many sources that sustain it. On the contrary, by making this change, we strengthen our Bond of Union, we do not weaken it. Though the spirit of Jesus is the spirit of love, the spirit of love is more encompassing than the spirit of Jesus. Written in the souls deep pages over centuries before his birth, the spirit of love emanates as well from the saving words and deeds of non-Christian sages since his birth throughout the world unto this very day. I speak here as an evangelical Universalist, one who believes that a saving faith in this divided world must reach beyond all superficial differences of nation, race, and creed to affirm the essence of our shared humanity.
All Souls is once again the flagship of Unitarianism today as it was a century and a half ago. We have a mission to expand the compass of the liberal gospel, to extend the saving work. I'm thinking now in particular of those who visit us each Sunday on their own quest for faith and community. Seeing one name above all others singled out in our Bond of Union, those who have experienced the Spirit of Jesus as a spirit of divisiveness or oppression (and there are many) will not linger to be taught what we mean by the spirit of Jesus when we repeat those words—the spirit of the young Rabbi of old who preached that all the law and all the prophets can be summed up in two great commandments: love to God and to our neighbor as ourself. They will never chance to learn that, for us, the Spirit of Jesus invokes the Spirit of Love among us. And also of neighborliness. If by the change of a single word, we can expand our circle of welcome without in any way diminishing the profound devotional spirit in which we gather, to do so will be, I deeply believe, a very fine thing.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.