Of Terrorism, Horrorism, Covenant, and Rebellion Paper presented by Dennis D McCarty by invitation at the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists’ symposium in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. July 4, 2006

We live in a complex time, which intellectuals sometimes call the “postmodern” age. Much of the world is enflamed by what has been called history’s first “postmodern war:” an ill-defined conflict between national governments, insurgents, and various terrorist organizations. Assumptions once taken for granted, are being re-examined, “deconstructed,” and often found wanting. Can any faith survive in this world of ours?
Might I come at the question a different way?

Advancing technology accents both the best and the worst humanity has to offer. It brings us new wonders, but it also provides us with a capacity for our own destruction, either intentional or unintentional.
Because of this, saving faith is not just possible. It is essential for humanity to flourish. But we are born with saving faith. Here’s just one example, from one of my favorite religious teachers: my younger daughter, Colleen.  Long before I became a minister, I was a construction worker in Salt Lake City in the United States.
Construction work closely follows the ups and downs of the local economy. When Salt Lake City’s economy went into a serious local recession, I was forced to leave town and find a place where the economy was better, to find work. Nobody in my family liked that idea--and I didn’t, either.

Colleen was less than two years old, too small to talk much. But she did understand that I was going away. She asked why I was leaving. I told her I had to go away to earn money, so we could all eat. Winter was coming and I wanted to give her hope that my time away wouldn’t last forever. So I told her that I would return when the flowers began to bloom. If she saw any flowers blooming, she’d better call me on the telephone and tell me, so that I could come home. I traveled to the state of California and found work on a large construction project. I telephoned my family every few days. My wife would let my two daughters talk to me on the phone and each time, Colleen would say, “Daddy, the flowers are blooming.”  It was the dead of winter by that time. They had thirty centimeters of snow on the ground in Salt Lake City. But she wanted me to come home and I’d unwittingly given her magic words she thought would bring me back. “Daddy, the flowers are blooming.” It was so innocent--she had no idea how to actually lie, she was just saying something she wished were true. I couldn’t be angry with her.

I bitterly missed her, and my wife and my other daughter as well, so I understood her two-year-old attempt to end the heartache of separation. I was working sixty hours a week, but I still had time to be lonely. By the middle of January, I decided that even unemployment was better than being away from my family. I loaded my tools back into my car, quit that job, and drove the thousand kilometers back to Salt Lake City.
I was worn out by the time I reached home. I walked in, hugged my family and sat down on the sofa. Colleen climbed up beside me and just stood there, stroking my arm and staring at me with an expression which I can only describe as ecstatic joy. She was so happy, she was actually funny to look at, glowing with the pleasure of seeing her father again. Looking into her eyes, I realized that I was looking at something eternal, something truly holy. There was a cosmic connection to that moment. My two-year-old child was showing me what really mattered in life: the way human beings are meant to look at one another. In stroking my arm, she was touching me the way we were meant to touch one another.  I was thirty five years old and I thought I knew something about life and love. But in that moment, I realized that I didn’t know anything. My two-year-old daughter was teaching me. To this day, I am still in awe of that moment. I was looking at ultimate reality.  Without words, my daughter was saying to me, “This is what holiness is. You matter to me, and now I know that I matter to you, as well.”

Our lives matter. In a postmodern world, that is the core statement of faith. Faith in some absolute religious truth--that is, faith in unchecked authority of any religious belief--leads to anger, war, and destruction. It always has. Redeeming faith is the faith that life is worthwhile, that people are worthwhile, and that working together, people can make the future better than the past.

Eighteenth century English poet William Blake showed one tiny corner of this faith--the kind of innocent appreciation my daughter showed me--in a poem titled, “The Lamb.”

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself the Lamb.
He is meek and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou, a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

William Blake was a complex and passionately religious man. There are so many aspects to his poetry, one might call him history’s first postmodern poet--even though he wrote two hundred years before the term, “postmodern,” was coined. It’s tempting to see “The Lamb” as a saccharine statement of Christian theism. Which, in a sense, it is. But it’s also more than that. Blake was a restless intellect, ever re-examining things. “The Lamb” appeared in a very early collection of his poems, titled, Songs of Innocence. He later produced an enlarged collection, called, Songs of Innocence and Experience. This second collection contained another famous poem, titled, “The Tyger.”

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare weave thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake’s poetry anticipated a later philosophical school called Idealism, and such thinkers as German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Blake has come to be recognized as one of the most brilliant--and complex--literary minds England has produced.

It’s too easy to simply take his poem, “The Lamb,” as about good while “The Tyger” is about evil. As Blake notes with alarm, both the Lamb and the Tyger are creations of the same God. As a mystic, he saw the same divine connection both in the Lamb with its innocent delight and its rejoicing tenderness, and in the Tyger, with its eyes of fire. To Blake, both images reflect divine reality. What’s more, both the Lamb and the Tyger are faces of human nature.

So it was that when I looked into my little daughter’s face so many years ago, I could see the sweet face of the Lamb, with its “tender voice, making all the vales rejoice” What I experienced was not just a sound, but a vision. In the joy and trust and vulnerability she showed me, my daughter Colleen was expressing a purity of faith--a joyful worship of human connection, which, probably, only a small child can.

As we gain life experience, we gradually give up that simple way of looking at things--we need to because life is not simple. Life’s disappointments prod us away from both poles: Lamb and Tyger; and toward the center. But we need to connect what’s best in the Tyger and the Lamb, rather than looking at them separately..

When I was very small, I wore the face of the Lamb.
I’ve seen the pictures. But like others, I got older, I experienced life, I ran into a world more often harsh than loving. As I grew, I left that childlike joy far behind. I thought I’d gained something in the bargain. But looking back, I realize that in my youth I was often afraid and often in pain. To protect myself, I learned to show the world quite a lot of the Tyger. Remembering this, I can look into a human face now and see the Tyger--and I realize that as powerful and frightening as that Tyger may look, a Tyger without a Lamb is more about fear than about strength.

This crucial point explains much about our postmodern world. The one who is actually frightened is not the Lamb. It’s the Tyger. The Lamb does not know what pain is--but the Tyger does. The Tyger knows all about pain and danger and fear. The Lamb knows delight--and tears--as a regular part of a day’s intercourse. By itself, the Tyger doesn’t have time for delight. And it sees tears as a sign of weakness. By itself, the Tyger is afraid of weakness.

Love, joy, fierceness, and fear are all part of what we are. The interplay between them is wonderful and horrible, sacred and profane--and holy in complex ways. Destruction and despair lie in our all-too-human practice of sending our Tygers out to vex the world, even while we proclaim images of the Lamb to soothe our consciences.

Which brings us to a third poem which anticipates the religious realities of our present-day world: William Butler Yates’ “The Second Coming,” written in 1916.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats’ imagery in “The Second Coming,” is brutal, enigmatic and frightening--no less frightening today than when it was first written, ninety years ago.  William Butler Yeats’ poetry was influenced by William Blake. Like Blake, Yeats was a passionate and deeply thoughtful man, a mystic who was familiar with both Eastern and Western religious traditions. He wrote “The Second Coming” in 1916, while his country, Ireland, was being torn apart by political violence. 

1916 was also the most horrible year of the First World War. The First World War descended directly from the writings of a Prussian military genius named Carl von Clausewiz. Clausewiz thought of war as “a continuation of policy by other means.” While Blake, Coleridge, and Schleiermacher were refining ever more subtle notions of who God might be, Clausewitz was developing the awesome Prussian military-industrial machine. Over the next hundred years, European leaders, followed Clausewiz, not Schleiermacher, until their military culture matched that of Prussia.

When the First World War came, those mighty machines began to grind Europe to cinders. In 1916, titanic battles, such as Verdun and the Somme, went on for months, killed hundreds of thousands, and turned forest and field into moonlike wasteland, devoid of life. Such horrors helped inspire Yeats’ poetic imagery. Then again, in its foreboding, despair, and religious disillusionment, “The Second Coming” could have been written yesterday. It describes current world events even better than events in 1916.

Yeats describes a world which has gone terribly out of balance: “The center cannot hold.” The Lamb has fallen into evil purpose: instead of mere Christianity, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
and “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Yeats sums up our own world’s chaos in one statement: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Today, as well, the “blood-dimmed tide” has been loosed in the name of religion. In the deserts of our own time, “indignant desert birds” reel and swoop, sent forth not least by American religious fundamentalists, who see world-destroying war as a necessary step toward paradise. American warplanes shoot rockets and drop bombs on innocent civilians.

Other religious fanatics destroy themselves along with their targets, which, usually, are also innocent civilians. In too many places, the Tyger--become a sphinx of reckless religious authority--slouches towards Bethlehem and towards Baghdad, towards the Gaza Strip and towards Europe. It “vexes to nightmare”
a suffering world, with a gaze all too often “blank and pitiless as the sun.” And yet this sphinx is far removed from the ideals of the founders of those religious traditions.

My own nation has sent economic Tygers into the world as well, carelessly combining good and evil. We gain temporary economic advantage by “outsourcing” jobs and production to third-world neighbors, yet at the same time, we live in fear of economic competition from those same nations. We export toxic waste and, on occasion, political violence, even though we fear that anger and violence might be re-visited on us. We most live in fear of terrorist attacks on our soil, as do other economically developed nations. As events have shown, that fear is justified. Yet when the Tyger is fearful, the Tyger is itself most dangerous, most capable of evil. Its own gaze becomes “blank and pitiless as the sun.”

My nation’s fear has caused us to export the same kind of violence that racked Europe during William Butler Yeats’ time. We have invaded and bombed foreign lands, and killed untold thousands of the innocent. We have preached freedom, democracy and justice while practicing violence, horror, and torture. We have defied international law, tortured and abused prisoners of war, and even begun to spy on our own people. And in so doing, we have made ourselves even more vulnerable to terrorism than we were before. But who is this we? The kind of Clausewizian machine which crushes weaker nations like insects; and the pursuit of aggressive war as a matter of Clausewizian “policy” rather than self defense; are not products of just one person or even just one political party.

Particularly in a democracy like the United States, every person who participates in--or even tolerates--our increasingly military-industrial culture, bears some responsibility for its deeds.  Precious few Americans can really claim to be totally unsoiled by this machine.

For my own part, I cannot honestly make such a claim.  Terrorism is only one nightmare in our postmodern world. My dictionary defines terrorism as “organized violence and intimidation, usually for political ends.” Terrorism, rooted in political and religious fundamentalism, is indeed a terrible thing.

But what are we to say of nations who irresponsibly use war for political purposes, who unleash the horrors of war without regard for its impact upon the innocent or the vulnerable? If a bombed, gutted building is terrorism, then is not a ruthlessly bombed, gutted city and a displaced, shattered population--done for political purposes at home and policy purposes abroad--horrorism? To me, “horrorism” is a fitting term for what my country has done.

Any war is a horror. A war recklessly entered into and heedlessly pursued for the sake of political and policy goals only, without serious defensive need--is horrorism. Because we fear religious terrorism from abroad, and encouraged by religious fundamentalism at home, our government has loosed the horrors of war and new atrocity against innocent civilians far more than against terrorists. In response to terror, America’s voters have licensed a government of horrorists, vexing to nightmare the lives of men, women, and children who had nothing to do with attacks against us. We have discarded our best traditions, our potential to be a light among nations, and become a stone-blind Tyger, slouching toward Bethlehem.

I was brought up to appreciate the best of my country’s traditions. I am proud of my country’s ideals. But I am deeply ashamed of the horrorist government we have put into office--and the fact that I, myself, could have done more to oppose it. I am ashamed of what we have done. As an American, my heart is broken.
Theologian Hans Kung wrote, “There will be peace in the world when the religions of the world are at peace.” The terrors and horrors of our own time confirm the truth of this statement. The religions of the world are not at peace, and there is little peace to be found in the world. Violence is quietly accepted and sometimes openly encouraged by the three great Western religious traditions, even while we proclaim the virtues of faith, justice, compassion, and mercy.

We praise the best of the Lamb while turning our world into a wilderness of Tygers. Tygers cannot breed Lambs. If our world’s condition teaches us anything, it’s that Tygers only breed more Tygers. It is a sad comment on human nature that we are so able to pray for peace while condoning war, to preach tolerance and enlightenment while condemning as evil those who believe differently from us. For all the passion of our religion, few would claim that we have the world we want--or that we are likely to get the world we want. The religions of the world are not at peace. Faith in religious authority is not working.

Moreover, I submit that faith in religious authority has never worked, for more than a privileged few. If we may know a faith by its fruits, faith in the absolute authority of religious belief has ever been a poisonous tree.
William Blake suggested that the Lamb and the Tyger are equally holy. But if that is the case, does it not also follow that the Lamb and the Tyger are also equally un-holy, equally evil? Yeats’ poem explains how this is so: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

To speak very plainly, the Tyger’s potential for evil is obvious. Fierceness without foresight; passion without compassion, are evil by their very nature. But beyond early childhood, joyful and pious spirituality without concern for those who suffer or for the fate of future generations--is no better. The Lamb which lacks conviction feeds evil just as easily as the Tyger with its passionate intensity.

The religions of the world are not at peace. Many faiths seat themselves solely on strict religious authority. To many call their adherents to abandon their inter-human obligations to people of other beliefs, in support of that authority. When we turn against one another in service of some “higher power,” we split and bypass our own humanity. It becomes too easy to celebrate the Lamb while feeding the Tyger, separate and evil. We need a faith of ethical relationship: Lamb and Tyger harnessed together in a faith which serves, rather than separated into mutually opposed faiths which destroy.

That religious harness already exists. It is a faith of covenant: a committed faith that people’s lives matter; that what happens between human beings here and now, matters more than the authority of any particular belief; and that we have it in our power to make the future better than the past.

My dictionary defines the term, “covenant,” as “a solemn promise.” Several world religions express faith which could be called, “covenantal,” and it has a long history in Unitarian and Universalist traditions. Such faith, diligently practiced, can hold the “center” which, in Yeats poem, “cannot hold.”

In Western religious traditions, we can trace covenantal faith back to the dawn of Hebrew Scripture.
Three thousand years ago, the Egyptian Pharaoh we now call Ramses II led his armies against Marsalis, king of the Hittites. Their war did not go according to plan--wars never do. It dragged on for years, weakening both nations until they couldn’t defend themselves against other enemies. Finally, after sixteen years of fighting, Ramses and Marsalis signed a solemn promise to stop making war with one another.

Their covenant was a typical diplomatic statement for that time. Historians now call it a parity treaty. It was a solemn promise between two kings who are equals.  There was also another kind of treaty used in that day, called a vassal treaty. Great kings like Ramses or Marsalis would impose vassal treaties on nations who were weaker than they were.  This is important because when Hebrew scholars wrote about their allegiance to their God, YHWH, they used language they understood. They made a covenant--a solemn promise--with YHWH in the form of the standard diplomatic treaties of their day. They were worshippers and YHWH was their Lord, so a parity treaty would not have been appropriate. Instead, they framed their relationship as a vassal treaty, with YHWH as the superior party.

The Sinai Covenant in the Hebrew Bibles book of Exodus, is a well-known example of a religious covenant written in the form of a vassal treaty. It begins with a preamble: YHWH reminds Moses of how He freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Then it has stipulations: YHWH tells the Hebrews they have to obey His Commandments and the Law which He hands down.

Finally, it finishes with curses and blessings: what YHWH will do for Israel if they obey His laws, and how He will punish them if they don’t. This was exactly like vassal treaties between Middle Eastern nations of that day.
In that place and time, solemn promises between nations were just as important as they are in our own time. So political covenants became the model for religious covenants in the Old Testament. Biblical covenants like the one between YHWH and Moses, and like other covenants between YHWH and other prophets and kings of Israel, were a natural way to express faith and religious relationship. It meant that both justice and reverence were important to the Hebrews’ sense of religious life. Later, when Babylonians burned Jerusalem and hauled Israel’s leaders away as captives, prophets said it was God’s punishment because the Children of Israel had not honored their covenant with YHWH.

The Encyclopedia of Religion tells us that “The religious covenant. . . called for [two different things:] allegiance to a single God and observance of important mutual obligations in the society (respect for life, property, justice, and so on). . . . This was a powerful force for national union, an operative principle, rather than a theological abstraction.” Covenantal faith is not a “theological abstraction.”  It’s a way of living in the world. Our vassal covenant with God calls us into a parity covenant with one another: a way of living, vested in the importance of each human being, created in the image of the Divine. It makes little difference what our particular belief happens to be. Hebrew religion worshipped a father-God, but more importantly, it called for faithful conduct toward one another. This faith made a solemn promise: not just to worship faithfully, but also to act justly and ethically, especially toward those who were weakest.

Hundreds of years later, Jesus of Nazareth also taught an approach to faith which could be called covenantal. The Gospels don’t use that precise term because the Hebrew word for covenant, barit, does not translate well into Greek, the language of the Gospels. But Jesus’ interpretation of Mosaic Law and most importantly, his use of the Beatitudes, outlines a religion even more ethically centered than Judaism.  Comparing the Beatitudes to Hebrew and other Mesopotamian scriptures, we find them to be poetic and theological tours de force. As German theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer pointed out, the Beatitudes are masterpieces of ethical theology, representing a powerful new development in covenantal thinking.  Unfortunately, Christianity changed when it became the religious arm of the Roman Empire. The Romans ignored much of Jesus’ ethical teaching. Faith in ethical conduct and right relationship was replaced by authority--of belief in the godhood of Jesus himself.

As William Butler Yeats would say, this was the “rocking cradle” which “vexed to nightmare” future centuries.
Medieval European religious practice threw out faith in the importance of even the weakest human being, and replaced it with the authority of the institutional Church as their sole connection with God. Religious life could be lived only through Church authority.  Unless a person took part in the Church’s sacraments with Church approval, they were cut off from God no matter how ethical they were in other ways. Authority became crucial while the ethical and relational aspects of Christianity were sacrificed.

This difference, between ethical relationship on the one hand, and authority on the other, marks the dividing line between liberal and fundamentalist religion to this day. To a religious fundamentalist, my good works toward my fellow human beings will not save me from eternal punishment. I am lost unless I accept the proper religious authority. On the other hand, a religious liberal’s faith centers on the human condition, ethics, relationship, and faith in the importance of each person.

The Protestant Reformation challenged the medieval Church’s authority. Martin Luther and Jean Calvin both believed religion was between the individual and God, no matter what the church did. Thus, the Reformation moved toward a more democratic spirituality. The churches of the Radical Reformation, including Polish and Transylvanian Unitarians, moved even more sharply toward a religion which served humanity, rather than the other way around. Christian progressives worked hard to reclaim the covenantal faith Jesus actually preached.
But it was complicated. English and Scottish Calvinist churches turned back to the Bible to find guidance on how faithful people ought to live together. This led to a return to the covenant as a mainstream Christian idea. Covenantal English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians certainly retained their faith of authority. But they also believed a church’s members were not in correct relationship with God, unless they were living together the right way. To them, civil authority did not just spring from the will of God. Good government, be it church or civil, required a covenantal approach. Thus, they laid groundwork for a faith of justice and equity.
When the Puritans came to New England, they continued to refine covenantal faith as a voluntary agreement between free and equal human beings.

One of the first legal documents in America was an agreement called the Mayflower Compact, in 1620. In part it states,

“We, . . . do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God
and one another, covenant and combine ourselves. . .
into a civil Body Politick,
for our better Ordering and Preservation. . . . And by virtue hereof do enact,
constitute and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts,
Constitutions, and Offices. . . as shall be thought most meet and convenient for
the general Good of the Colony. . . .”

Unitarian Universalist minister Peter Raible writes that, despite its religious language, the Mayflower Compact is a civil--not religious--agreement. In this way, the practice of covenant turned full circle. It began as a secular practice, then was adapted for religious use, but ultimately helped shape secular democracy.  A later Puritan covenant, the Cambridge Platform of 1648, formally established Puritan Congregationalism in America. Each congregation would manage its own affairs, without direction from external religious authority. In the process, the Cambridge Platform also (accidentally) sowed the seeds of American religious freedom, separation of church and state--and American Unitarianism.

America’s Declaration of Independence is also written in covenantal language. The basic reason the Colonists gave for breaking away from England, was their belief that English rule in the colonies had become tyrannical, rather than covenantal. One could say that the best in American democracy is founded on the idea of the covenant. And would be improved if all Americans could keep that in mind, all the time.
Ironically, in becoming more religiously fundamentalist, Americans are straying ever farther from our real religious roots.

A covenant is a willing agreement between free partners. In his essay, “From Cage to Covenant,”
Unitarian Universalist theologian, James Luther Adams, contrasted between what he called the “cage,” the coercive medieval church and the equally coercive medieval state; and the “covenant:” namely, government by the consent and will of those governed.

Adams emphasized five important points about covenants. First, human beings are at our best when we make solemn promises to one another and try hard to keep them. We are the only animal that makes promises, we are “promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing” creatures. Our very humanity lies in the way we carry out our promises to our families, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our fellow members of the human family.

His second point is that to be genuine, a covenant must be a covenant of being. It’s not just about good words, but about actions. Or as the Encyclopedia of Religion reminds us, covenantal faith is not just a “religious abstraction.”

Third, the covenant exists for the sake of each individual as well as for the whole group. It is both a gift and a responsibility. The individual is brought into just relationship with the rest of the group, but each individual is also responsible for what the whole group does. Nobody escapes responsibility. If what my church--or my nation--does is wrong, I share in that responsibility. Again, it’s not just about blaming one person, one faction, or one political party. I must do my utmost to keep evil from being committed in my name. It’s not enough just to say, “I didn’t know what was going on,” or “there’s nothing I can do about it.”  My covenantal duty is to be informed on what is happening, and to act on that information.

Fourth, Adams says, “the covenantal responsibility is especially directed toward the deprived,” the unfortunate. Covenantal living demands that we pay attention to those who labor at a disadvantage; to those who suffer from society’s neglect or injustice, from war and horrorism, from the predation of Tygers and the disengagement of Lambs, and that we do something about it.

He also reminds us of the difference which can exist between our covenant--our expressed ideals of how we want to live together--and our actions. One task of the covenantal church, is to call attention to the gap between our high-sounding words and our low actions.

People of many faiths have long done this, as Gandhi did in India, as Jane Addams did in the United States, and as Dietrich Bonheoffer did in opposing Nazi totalitarianism before and during the Second World War.
Finally, Adams makes the point that “the covenant. .. is not fundamentally a legal covenant. It depends on faithfulness, and faithfulness depends on loyalty and love.” In other words, covenantal living is not about obeying the letter of the law while we take advantage of someone. Violation of a covenant is serious not because it breaks a law, but because it’s a violation of trust. It is a breach of faith.

We make promises to one another, we do the best we can. To even make a serious promises is a real expression of faith, not only in the person we promise to, but also that the future is worth saving. That at its best, the future can and will be better than the past. To make promises, calls forth the best that is in us.
But we are human and we make mistakes. Promises get broken. So we try again. Covenantal faith does not ask us to be perfect. It does ask us to look at our own mistakes and shortcomings, and try earnestly to correct them.

James Luther Adams believed there was a force to the universe that drove us toward better lives. But he was interested in Jesus as a moral and ethical leader, rather than as a subject of worship. In this way, he was in the mainstream of Unitarian thought dating back to the foundational Unitarian and Universalist churches of Eastern Europe, England, and America.

Covenantal faith joins the best aspects of Lamb and Tyger while honoring both. It a simple and human faith. It was the faith my daughter, Colleen, showed when she gazed into my eyes as a tiny tot. Whatever one believes in: God, Divine principle, or cosmological constant; a grand view of human existence mandates a faith statement. Simply getting out of bed each morning makes a statement about life and ultimate reality, based solely on faith: namely, that life is worth living. In being lived and spoken, rather than merely assumed, this becomes a statement of saving faith which can “hold the center” in this postmodern world. Your life matters; my life matters, as well; and the future can be better than the past.

We live in a universe which could be the embodiment of some being or force that loves and guides us. But it’s also possible that we live in an inanimate universe which is unaware of anything, including us.
In either case, these statements comprise a saving faith which may well determine whether the human species survives through this century. We are developing--if we don’t already have--the technology to destroy ourselves. Our survival depends on a covenantal commitment to life, to one another, and to the future.
The purpose of shared worship should be to renew our promise to treat one another in a just, caring, reverent way. To re-commit ourselves to living out that promise through our actions, not just talking about it. We do this for the good of each person, as well as for the good of all. We agree to take seriously the difference between our words and our actions. We do it not because it’s a rule or because of some supreme authority, but because we care about one another--and about the world beyond our walls.

Covenantal faith does not allow us to retreat into the Lamb, nor does it allow us to resort to the blind rage of the Tyger. But in a greed-swept, war-swept, rage-swept, horror-swept world, it does require Lamblike love, combined with an attitude of Tygerish rebellion against the principalities of evil.
In an essay titled “Prayer as Rebellion,” psychologist Leonard Felder recommends prayer as a key to focusing our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources on the needs of the day. He asserts that both the theist and the atheist can draw strength from prayer. For example, he says, we can pray, “I give thanks for the strength and determination to act, to make the world a better place.” Or another example, “Blessed is the Eternal Source of Life that inspires us to lift up our hands and raise up our voices.”  Felder recommends both prayers of words and prayers of action, as tools to focus us toward a faithful and meaningful way of living. And in a world which too often shows a face of violence, oppression, injustice and faithlessness, he recommends prayer as an act of rebellion.

In a world of terrorism and horrorism, of Lambs and Tygers divided against themselves and one another, covenantal faith requires an attitude of rebellion. I resolve to be a vigilant, forceful Lamb, rather than a blind Tyger. I resolve not to retreat into the Lamb, nor to feed the Tyger while I praise the Lamb. I proclaim myself in rebellion against the heedless savagery of our times, and I invite the faithful to join in this rebellion. Together, let us practice a faith of Tygerish Lambs, resolved to stand, loving and vulnerable; courageous, resolute, and powerful: resolved to confront and nurture a world which is too self-centered and too afraid to be loving or just on its own.

Abiding faith in life and human experience will not allow us to abandon our ideals or relinquish our dreams that the future can be better than the past.  Our faith calls us to maintain ideals, hopes, dreams, and expectations in the face of all the world can do to destroy them. The very fact that we gather at this time and in this place, is a statement of that faith.

Let us look at one another and the world, through the eyes of a covenant together. Let us nurture one another and the world. Bathed in the light of the Lamb and the fire of the Tyger, filled by a spirit of loving rebellion and committed to sharing that light and that fire with the world, let us gently but forcefully oppose greed, neglect, terrorism, and horrorism wherever we find them. As a preacher, I can only finish by saying, “amen.” May it be so.

The Reverend Dennis McCarty is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Columbus. His opinions are his own, and not necessarily shared by members of his church. He can be reached by e-mail at revden50@yahoo.com

last updated: 01/08/2008