I despise frays.

It’s part of why I’m not your quintessential Unitarian Universalist.  When I recently took the Intercultural Conflict Style inventory, I was not surprised to find out that my conflict style is located in the quadrant described as both “indirect” and “restrained,” and that most of my ministerial and seminarian colleagues were elsewhere in the four-square measure.   This will likely contribute to the weaker sides of my ministerial formation and presence, but as the Twelve-Steppers say, “the first step is acknowledging you have a problem…”.

So here I am, entering the fray, because I can’t stop thinking about quantum theology and because someone I respect, and whose respect I wouldn’t mind having, invited me (and you).  Thanks a lot, Tom.  (Now that I have written this post, I realize that it does not – yet – reply to Tom’s specific invitation, which has to do with his sectarian/belief grid.  I vow to write that post at some other time.)

A few days ago, Rev. Peter Morales, head of the UU Association, published online an article entitled, “Belief is the Enemy of Faith.”  One of the things that we UU minister-types strive for is pithy, eye/hear-catching titles (we are not alone; other clergy do this, too; not to mention writers and advert-creators).  One must take titles with a grain of salt, because sometimes they reflect the content, and sometimes they play off it.

In this case, it’s both, and it’s causing quite a stir in my little corner of the little world that is UUdom.

The Rev. Erik Martinez-Resly has responded with his own catchy title (“Don’t stop… believing!”) and his response holds characteristic substance (even if I am left with the earworm of Journey…).  Martinez-Resly describes Morales as “betting on beliefless religion to usher in a new ‘interfaith, multifaith spirituality’.”  Martinez-Resly also calls Morales’ suppositions to task, grounding his perspective in larger historical dynamics within the UU story:

If the last half-century witnessed bitter fights between self-identified theists and atheists about religious belief, it may be time for Unitarian Universalists to spend the next half-century fleeing from religious belief altogether.

In identifying two categories of UU futurists, sectarian and non-sectarian, Martinez-Resly concludes

Irrespective of which identity Unitarian Universalists choose going forward, belief will matter. To offer a generous reading, I think what Rev. Morales imagines is a community where people can hold different beliefs that are neither definitive nor divisive. If so, the solution must be additive, not subtractive. Instead of banning beliefs, broaden them.

My read of Morales’ article shares similarities with Martinez-Resly’s read.  Yet, I don’t think Morales fully rejects beliefs.  Martinez-Resly appears to think that Morales is unaware of his own belief system undergirding his attack on belief.  However, I see Morales’ owning beliefs, but a different understanding of what belief means and the purpose it holds for our faith.  Yes, Morales titles, then restates, that “belief is the enemy of faith,” but he does so with the qualifier

I am now convinced that “belief,” in the way we usually use the word, is actually the enemy of faith, religion, and spirituality. (emphasis mine)

At the risk of being a labeled an apologist for the UUA, the UUA president, or for Peter Morales in particular (it would not be the first time, which was by an systems-embittered Universalist minister), I will continue, but adding what may seem tangential, but feels highly relevant to me.  Please bear with me.

I just finished reading Diarmuid O’Murchu’s grounded, thought-provoking, scholarly book, In the Beginning was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality.   I am so smitten with this book and with my projections of who I think the author is that I can’t stop talking about it or recommending it to others to read.

I tend to wince when I see book titles with “indigenous spirituality” in them because so much New Age blather is irresponsible, disrespectful, and dependent upon cultural appropriation.  If I hear the phrase, “Native American spirituality” one more time, I think I am going to upchuck.  One of the many redeeming qualities of this O’Murchu book is that in the chapter on “The Great Spirit: Aboriginal Wisdom,” (which is different than the chapter on “The Spirit in Africa” or “The Asian Pantheon,”) he describes nine different peoples who inhabit or inhabited North America and details what is known about their belief systems, distinguishing among them, rather than conflating them.  (I will say that his introduction to Australian Aborigines is strangely problematic, given the respect and anti-racist sensibilities he demonstrates throughout the rest of the book; his assent to biological categories of race in this section is deeply disturbing.)

How is this related to this latest UU controversy?  Father O’Murchu (yes, he’s a Catholic priest) is a quantum theologian who roots himself in his Catholic faith while engaging, exploring, and exhilarifying (my word) essential core beliefs that he identifies in the Great Spirit – and he does this engaging, exploring, and exihilarifying using both the tools of science and religion, not to justify his faith tradition, but to seek the deeper truth that his tradition attempts ineptly (as human efforts do and especially human institutional efforts!) to approach.   He notes that at the atomic level, solidity plays a minor role and that this cosmological truth has spiritual implications  — ones that if we do not heed them, it will be to our own detriment.

At the level of the unimaginably tiny, at sizes below what physicists call the Planck limit, the material universe ceases being classically material.  There, quantum flow replaces discrete, isolated objects, and what we call “matter” become a relational process rather than an objective material construct.  The quanta that constitute matter and energy can no longer be accurately described as little balls bouncing off each other, nor as wave forms, nor (even) as always either “here” or “there,” nor “now” or “then.”  Reality becomes virtual rather than rational. (O’Murchu, p. 76-7)

The work of this book, and other quantum and process theologians, as well as just the day-to-day serious Spiritual-But-Not-Religious (SBNR) folks, is breaking out of just that thing that Morales names – not belief so much as “belief in the way we usually use the word.”  Belief that Martinez-Resly names a “divisive” or “definitive.”

It is the striving-not-striving that we do to engage, comprehend, and embody the generative Spirit that flows as a pulse through universe, this world, our blood, our mind.   It is this lack of old-school belief that the UU Rev. Abhi Janamanchi, in his 2009 General Assembly sermon, “Faith in the Borderland,” describes

The center of Unitarian Universalism lies outside of itself, in the stranger, in difference rather than in similarity. In our faith, the margins hold the center.

When I think about quantum theology, about the subatomic levels where solidity fails, this think about the vast truth of that little sentence: “In our faith, the margins hold the center.”

Morales calls UUs to pivot and respond, using our “faith beyond belief” to play a historic role in “a new interfaith, multifaith spirituality [that] is struggling to be born.”  He is right to some degree – I do believe we, in the creative tension we have intentionally encountered in making home for theists and non-theists alike, we have something important to contribute.

Yet, let us again be wary of UU exceptionalism as we do so.  Quantum theologians and ancient spiritual practices tell us that impulse is, in fact, not new at all.   And in heeding the advice of Martinez-Resly to be additive, rather than subtractive, I encourage us to think beyond words/conceptions like inter- or multi-faith, since this impulse is trans-(scending)faith.

In our faith, the margins hold the center.