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Radical Thea/ologies

A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
June 1, 2003

A number of years before I came to this congregation, I worked with the West Valley UU Church in Glendale. Like typical UU congregations, we encouraged people to explore their own religious and spiritual paths, and on those Sundays when the minister, me, was out of the pulpit, we would invite folks to consider speaking about what they believed or were exploring. One woman in my congregation was a follower of Wicca, the modern feminist revival of the ancient pagan religion. She offered to do a service, which we were excited about. I thought everyone would want to come hear about this new earth-centered, woman-honoring path that had been so persecuted by Christians over the centuries. I was wrong.

A week or so before the service, I was speaking with another woman, a long-time UU, who I thought was open-minded and forward-thinking. She told me that she was not going to go to that service because witches were evil. I tried to explain that her fears came out of the false, power-motivated teachings of Catholicism and that her understanding of witches had virtually no relation to what Wicca was really about. But nothing I said changed her perspective nor alleviated her fear. She stayed away from that service.

Today, when people don’t agree with someone’s religious beliefs or are uncomfortable with their theology, if they don’t want to listen or learn, they just stay home. Our Principles and Purposes, composed and adopted in the early eighties, guide us to accept and encourage one another’s spiritual growth, as well as to enter into the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Our sources list direct experience, the wisdom of the world’s religions and of prophetic men and women, as well as Humanist teachings. Such a broad, open-minded, respectful orientation toward religious matters challenges all of us to take another look at what people are saying about a particular faith path or teaching. It encourages us not to hide at home, but to come into the community with trust and conscience, to hear and to see, and to decide for ourselves.

Two hundred years ago, instead of individuals staying home, entire Unitarian congregations would close their doors to teachings they found fearsome or too challenging. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose bicentennial we are celebrating this year and whose life and teachings and inspiration I’ll share with you next Sunday, left his Unitarian pulpit because it felt too restrictive. He was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the rite of communion, and his theology was evolving from Bible-centered to nature-centered. Even though his congregation wanted him to stay and allow someone else to deliver the sacrament, Emerson’s conscience and desire to write propelled him to leave the pulpit, though he did not leave the church.

One of Emerson’s contemporaries, the Rev. Theodore Parker, had views so controversial that almost all of the Unitarian ministers in Massachusetts, except Channing, refused to allow him to speak from their pulpits. Parker ended up speaking from the Boston Music Hall, drawing thousands to hear his new views about God’s words as being not just derived from the Bible, but spoken in every person’s heart through conscience, reason and faith. Such a Unitarian blasphemy! Parker’s Unitarian congregation became the largest congregation in New England, drawing three thousand people every Sunday!

We can laugh at the treatment our Unitarian forebears gave these American Unitarian prophets, as we resonate to their theology which, over time, has shaped our own. Two hundred years ago, fear closed many doors. I wonder, though, if today we don’t still do that, albeit we close our own individual doors to those radical thea/ologies that challenge and frighten us.

I have noticed about four radical thea/ologies people in our congregations have been exploring in recent years: New Age, Pagan, Wiccan and Indigenous or Native American religions. I have also witnessed some of our UU members expressing fear or disdain towards those same religious paths. We seem to be, as a people, both attracted and repelled by these paths. I am curious whether such paths are our future, as both Emerson’s and Parker’s theological views eventually became, or if aspects of each religion will become absorbed into the larger picture of Unitarian Universalism as they seem to be doing now. And there is the question of how we can get beyond our fear and prejudice to learn about such different thea/ological perspectives.

Out of those four, I’m going to explore Wicca with you this morning, because of the four, it seems to be the least understood and the one that generates the most fear. Reactions to New Age orientations, such as those embracing spiritualism, reincarnation and holistic healing, range from joy to disdain. We don’t seem frightened by Native American rituals or references either. Paganism just refers to those religions outside Christianity, as the word “pagan” is derived from the Latin “pagani” meaning “country-dwellers.” Pagans were only evil in the eyes of Christians, and much of paganism became absorbed into Christianity in the form of saints, customs, holy places and holidays. Even though wiccans are pagans, their religion has been more distorted than practically any other through the efforts of Catholicism, and our society perpetuates those distortions in an enduring fashion.

The source of the word “witch” is enlightening in itself. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “wicca” with an “a” or “wicce” with an “e” depending on whether male or female, both of which are a corruption of “witga,” meaning a seer or diviner. That in turn is derived from “witan,” meaning “to see” or “to know.” The Icelandic “vitki,” their word for witch, also came from a word meaning “to know,” but also from “vizkr,” meaning “clever or knowing one.” These definitions are from The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, by Barbara Walker. She writes that the words “wit” and “wisdom” come from the same roots as “witch.”

How does the witch, a knowing, clever and wise person according to these word derivations, become the embodiment of evil in so many stories and histories? The answer really lies in the story of how an intensely patriarchal religion overcame a more matriarchal one. In patriarchal Judaism and Christianity, women were blamed for all the evils of the world, the source of original sin. Only males could hold divine office, and God, of course, was male. So as Catholicism spread throughout Europe, the way to gain power over the common people, who had matriarchal leanings, was to cast aspersions of evil on all women who held power, power such as that of healing or of influencing. The wise woman, the witch, was labeled “evil,” and her deities were labeled “devils.” Her symbols and utensils, including the cauldron, seen in many traditions as the Great Mother‘s cosmic womb, were twisted into perversions.

In its worst form, we have the Inquisition, which Walker describes as the 500-year reign of organized terrorism “invented primarily to force public acceptance of a church the public didn’t want.” (p. 437) The Spanish conquistadors brought the Inquisition with them to the Americas where they applied torture and burnings as a means to convert the heathen Indians everywhere they went.

Persecution is something to be feared still today, as we witness young homosexuals being murdered for their sexuality. As we witness abortion doctors being killed by Aryan Christian followers. As we read about or watch on TV conservative Christian ministers declare gays and lesbians and abortionists to be evil. As we hear conservative Muslim clerics declare the rest of the world as heretics and infidels and worthy of dying in Jihad. As we witness or even survive 9/11. The same mentality that perpetuated the Inquisition over 500 years is alive and seething even today. It is no wonder that we might be afraid of radical thea/ologies. The consequences of following a radical path could very well be more than a church door closing in our faces.

Why risk it? It isn’t a matter of choice, as dogmatic religionists believe, but a matter of heart and integrity. People are looking for affirmation, for themselves as they are, for how they see the world, for a more respectful and inclusive faith. Those who encounter the teachings of Wicca have resonated to a faith that upholds the divinity of the female as equal to or greater than the male, a healing of the rift between the body and the spirit, a respect for nature as well as the individual, an honoring of human sexuality, and a recognition that pleasure is “a positive force in life.” (Walker, p. 1090) The opportunity to meet in small groups that empower the layperson as participant or co-ritualist also is attractive to some. All of which fits in with Unitarian Universalist teachings.

Our freedom to practice our own religion, to travel our own spiritual paths, is one to be recognized, honored and protected. We do this not by closing doors but by engaging with others, learning and teaching. To combat society’s misunderstandings of religious traditions, we need to educate ourselves about them and to speak up in the face of distortions that perpetuate hate and fear in the world. Walker says in her book that “the edicts that established the Inquisition have never been repealed. They are ‘officially still part of the Catholic faith, and were used as justification for certain practices as recently as 1969.’” (p. 448) Such edicts are a time bomb. Remember the Boy Scouts and their regression to literal interpretations of their by-laws that promote discrimination in order to destroy the liberal evolution that the organization had achieved in many communities. There are people waiting to limit freedoms, to oppress others by race or gender or religion or sexuality or whatever defines them as different. There are people who use hate as a weapon to motivate others to kill or to justify their own killings.

We have to stand against such a tide with strength and the knowledge that love really can wash away fear, that truth will eventually rise to the surface. Don’t go home and close the door. Keep it open to the beauty of the good of humanity. Be willing to learn the difference between what society says about someone and what a person says about him or her self and the path that calls to the heart. Let us all keep our doors open.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson