No Wrong Notes

Live Oak, September 23, 2007

Aaron White

Good morning. Before I came here to Live Oak to begin my internship, I had what you might call a “busy” summer. I graduated from Divinity School, Kate and I packed our home in Boston, moved cross-country back to Texas, settled into a new home in Austin, and last but not least, were married - all in the course of six weeks!

Needless to say, by the time our honeymoon rolled around, we were ready for a little relaxation. When we arrived on the beach a few days after the wedding, the last thing I thought I would find there was inspiration for work. But life is funny that way.

One evening, we walked into a little piano par where we were staying. With a few other couples and the, aptly named, Gilbert behind the piano, we sat up singing songs until late in the night. At one point in the evening, Gilbert was trying to teach me how to play jazz piano. With his hands flowing unexpectedly over the keys, he turned to me and said, “You see, there are no wrong notes. It’s not the note you play that makes it wrong or right, it’s the one you play after it; its how you follow it.”

At the end of the night as we were leaving, I turned to the man behind the piano and said, “Gilbert, my friend, you just wrote me a sermon.”

No Wrong Notes. In our short time together that night, Gilbert had unknowingly articulated in only a few words a major aspect of my own theology. He illustrated a notion that our Universalist ancestors affirmed hundreds of years ago. In the religious life, there are no wrong notes. Theologians like Hosea Ballou and John Murray handed down the affirmation that we have kept alive today: no one action, no aspect of a life can ever deny a human being access to what is sacred in this world.

While there was always some variance, of course, the first major schools of Universalism preached that all human beings, regardless of creed or religion, would eventually attain salvation because of the undeniable love of God. This eventually developed into the belief that there is no hell at all. Today, most of us in UU churches, when asked, would probably take a little moor agnostic stance to this: “we don’t know what happens when we die, but we bet is happens to everyone.” A short quip often used many UU’s is that we believe in life before death.

Around the same time Universalism was taking hold in America, Unitarians were presenting the bold notion of an inherently good humanity not tainted by original sin, and that people must use their reason and have individual freedom of belief in religion. William Ellery Channing taught that any really divine force would not punish human beings for using our minds to question what we read and hear in churches. During the time of the Civil War, the minister Thomas Starr King noted that “The Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them, whereas the Unitarians believe they are too good to be damned!” ¹

While these concepts were radical then, and still are in many circles today, they were not on the fringe of society. At one time in the 19th century, Universalism was the 5th largest denomination in the United States, and our own Thomas Jefferson said once in a letter that “in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief …I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” ²

While Jefferson was, obviously, not correct in his prediction, we can be assured that we have a longstanding tradition behind our movement urging us to voice that no person should be denied their worth in religion. We affirm that no human being or part of creation is cut off from receiving what they consider holy. Many of us call this different things within our church – the love of humanity, connection with the web of life, God, Goddess, the Spirit, the good life and so many other names.

What remains constant, however, is our conviction that we cannot and should not say that anyone cannot find it because of their nationality, religious belief, political stance, gender, or sexuality. Life is in our hands. No one note may ruin the song of our lives. It is how we respond – how we improvise. No Wrong Notes.

When I heard this phrase, I couldn’t help but think back to what the Universalists used to say of their church bells in the mid 1800’s. It was commonly said at the time that when you heard the bells ringing from a Universalist church, they were singing out, “No Hell, No Hell, No Hell.”

Our religious lives together would be easy enough if this were the end of the story - if our spiritual tradition asked that we just not fear a hell, sit back and enjoy the ride. But we know that life is not that simple, and our living tradition challenges us to join together in our diversity for the betterment of this world – as the hymn we just sung reads, both to “build the common good, and make our own days glad.” ³

The day we came back from our honeymoon, I received an email from one of my seminary friends, Marc. Since we had last spoken, he, too, had just come up with any idea for a sermon comparing the life of Unitarian Universalism to the improvisational playing of jazz. I believe that Dr. Jung called this “synchronicity.” We were on to something. But here, my friend was talking history instead of theology. Sure we’re playing off each other extemporaneously he said, but we’re not really starting from scratch. We’ve inherited the instruments we use to play, and to do this improvisation well, we’ve had to learn the scales and chords of our shared history.

This image, this similarity between the improvisation of music and that of the spiritual life would not get out of my head. So I went right to the source, a good friend of mine from Boston who is a composer and jazz musician. Al recently composed a version of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” for a string quartet that was played during my wedding ceremony, so I knew I could trust him to be unorthodox. When I asked Al to tell me about improvisation in a life of music, he told me that three things stood out to him:

1. Like Marc, he said that you have to know your stuff. You have to take the time to train, to learn different styles, learn scales etc.

2. The best kind of improvisation is done with other people. You are most creative, most fulfilled in this act, he said, when you do it in community.

3. He was sure that it was a skill at which you can improve over time. It just takes practice.

It felt like every time I asked someone about music, they gave me an answer about theology.

In my experience, our life of liberal religion is one of spiritual improvisation. We have asserted that, while we do not know honestly know what the end of a human life looks like, we do not think it is to be feared. The world, this universe, and what is sacred, has too much good in it for us to be punished for playing off tune every now and then.

As I alluded earlier, however, this does not mean that we can expect our faith to be a simple one. In our journey of religious improvisation, we do not have a script in front of us that promises the sure path to enlightenment or the happy life.

If we as Unitarian Universalists have “no wrong notes” in our religious lives, it is also true that we have no sheet music. Unlike some of the world’s religions, our tradition does not have one definite book, personal authority, or practice that is going to give us the final answer.

When I have described the inclusive vision of our movement, many have responded that Unitarian Universalism sounded like an “easy” religion. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Unitarian Universalism is not easy. And for our visitors today, I know that I am not presenting an easy sell here either. Learning to look upon, not only the people that we disagree with, but those who have hurt us, those whose actions go against all we hold to be true and sacred, and attempting to envision that even they, too, are connected to the ground of all being, the holy in the world – this is one of the most difficult spiritual exercises in which we will ever be asked to engage. And the wonderful thing about our church is that it asks us to do this all the time. Not only on Sunday morning, but in every day of our lives. Because we know that the religious experience does not only happen within these walls. The majority of our religious lives occurs from Monday to Saturday.

We are challenged to find the worth and dignity of every person, including ourselves, even when it is so hard to be religious - when we are battling with addictions, when we are too burnt out to find any meaning our career, when our families don’t work they way they do on TV, when we are so frustrated with the state of the world that we feel we cannot make any difference on our own. This too, is where our religious lives take place.

In our denomination, I believe that we have bravely taken on a great task: the challenge to be as true to ourselves as is possible. This means sometimes saying, “We don’t know why there is suffering in the world, but we will continue working to make it better.”

“We cannot be sure what happens after we die, and so we will work together for justice in this life.”

“We have found that many paths bring peace and connection in the world, and so we will not close the doors of our faith: ‘Come, Come, Whoever you are.’”

At the end of the day, the story of Unitarian Universalism is a hopeful one. As the minister Francis David said in the 1500’s, “We need not think alike to love alike.” We have much good work to do.

Our tradition affirms that while great insights in the world of religion have come before our time - in Jesus, in the Buddha, in Rumi and Thoreau, they are also occurring in you, in me, and in the communities that we share. As Emerson put it, “The sun shines today also.” ⁴

In my training in theatre, the major thing I remember learning about improvisation is that you always say “yes.” If someone comes to you in a scene and tells you that the sky is green, you do not contradict them and say it is blue. You might be better served by saying, “How strange! Let’s go take a look.” The plot, it seems, moves along so much better when you say “yes.”

My spiritual friends, we are faced with the challenge of saying “yes” to life. The word “faith” does not only have to mean blind belief, but also trust.

We may trust that while there is unexplainable suffering in this world, yes, there is also beauty that every human being deserves.

We may trust that we have made mistakes, some for which we even have trouble forgiving ourselves, but, yes, we are still all worthy of love.

We may trust that while we cannot claim to have all the answers, yes, we do have each other.

No matter what religious tradition you came from to join us today, or none at all, we may share the same challenge.

We are called to look at a creation we often cannot understand, and to continue unapologetically to say “yes” to this world and to this life.

We know that there is not a script on how to love our neighbor as ourselves, and there is no manual that will produce a perfect world filed with the justice we so greatly desire.

Let us find, today, and in all days, the courage to trust this journey. May we look deep within ourselves to find the energy to experiment, working together to find new ways to love this world and one another.

May we allow ourselves to believe that in the religious life, if we play our parts with a spirit of commitment, trust, and radical love, there are no wrong notes. What better time than now?

Amen

¹ Our Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism, John A. Buehrens and F. Forrester Church ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. p34.

² Letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse June 26, 1822 - http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/lit/jeff17.htm

³ Bruce Findlow, “For All That is Our Life” in Singing the Living Tradition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

⁴ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” in David Robinson ed., The Spiritual Emerson. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. p 23.