Labeled!

Given our theological diversity, perhaps it is natural.  We want to understand our social environment, and if other people have different ideas, we try to put a name on the difference. So we label each other.  Having labeled the other,  we think we understand.  He is a Buddhist, she is a Humanist, and her sister is a Christian!  Thus we put each other into convenient categories, and we think we know all we need to know about what they stand for, and how they think.  The preacher says, let us pray, and the preacher is labeled theist,  he includes  "blessed be" in his benediction and he's a pagan.  We could go on.

Should we accept the labels given to us?

Phillip Hewlett writes:

"It's pretty hard sometimes to follow through consistently with a refusal to accept labels which assign you to one or another mutually exclusive camps, desiccating the richness of human response to the overall reality we experience into a few hard and fast categories.....I am not interested in trying to sort people out into categories.  The categories I have in mind...coexist and interact within our tradition - and whether we care to admit it our not, they co-exist and interact within each and every one of us, in widely varying proportions and ways."

In our pluralistic faith tradition we interact with Christians, Pagans, Humanists, Buddhists and many other ways of being Unitarian Universalists.  These my fellow Unitarian Universalists are not hyphenated UUs, they are Unitarian Universalists who have struggled to develop a spiritual practice and an interpretive framework that goes deeper than generic religious liberalism.  Hewlett is not suggesting that we give up our individual spiritual identities in order to become Unitarian Universalists, he treasures our pluralism.  Rather he is suggesting that in our interactions with the theologically and spiritually "other" we may discover how much we are coming to share with the "other."  I found a good description of my theology on a website devoted to religious humanism last week.  I am constantly finding myself in the writings of liberal Christians.  I have read enough Buddhists and engaged the practice, so that I can follow their writings, and sometimes I find myself emphatically engaged and the "otherness" vanishes. 

So beware!  Unitarian Universalism might have a deep practice after all, subtle but deep.  It may create conditions, and invite us into a discipline in which we engage the other and become ourselves transformed.