This past Easter, on a family trip to North Carolina, I paid a visit to my stepfather, Jim, to see how he was doing in his new home and to pick up some items that had belonged to my mother. My mother had died just the year before and Jim had found some items that he thought I should have. Among the items were some books and photographs of my mother's, but one item in particular caught my eye. At the bottom of the box was a cassette tape and recorded on it were two sermons that had had been delivered by my grandfather, who had been a Presbyterian minister. One of the sermons was dated September of 1963. I was astounded. The recording of this sermon was older than I was!! I immediately knew that my Uncle Ed had painstakingly recorded this sermon from reel-to-reel tape to cassette tape and had given it to my mother.
A couple of days later, as we were on the road toward home, I couldn't resist the urge to put the cassette in the van’s tape player to listen to my grandfather’s preaching. The recording as you might imagine, wasn’t perfect, but it was amazingly clear for how old it was. It was exciting and eerie all at the same time as I heard my grandfather’s unmistakable voice—that powerful voice with the slight twinge of his rural Tennessee accent, but dignified and mesmerizing, nonetheless. My grandfather preached that particular Sunday from the book of Acts from the Bible, where he read the story of Peter and Silas who were imprisoned in Rome and were miraculously freed by an earthquake. My grandfather might be described as an old-time preacher; he did not preach so much fire and brimstone, but he definitely spoke with a passion and fervor that is rarely heard in churches anymore and is only poorly imitated by today’s TV preachers.
I listened to that tape and recalled memories of my grandfather. I have to admit that as much as I loved my grandfather, I had not known him very well. I remember as a child thinking how tall he was, especially when dressed in his black preacher’s robe, and he was very imposing with the stern glare he often had while preaching. When not in the pulpit, however, he was a quiet, gentle man, and I lived for the warm smile he would give me and the wonderful gleam he had in his eye. I had great respect for my grandfather, not just for who he was, but in the way that he lived his life—with dignity, with a love for his family and a devotion to the people he served.
Nevertheless, my grandfather was not a man who was easy to know. He rarely shared very much of what he was thinking, and he was not a great storyteller. I remember my cousin, Karen, coming over to my grandfather’s house one evening to record memories of his life for a school paper she was writing. In his two hours of speaking I learned more about him than I ever had in all the time we had spent together. I realized, as I was driving home that day, listening to that tape, that I was afraid—afraid that my grandfather and I might be far apart on our views on religion and theology. I had always imagined myself as being close to my grandfather and this tape might reveal the chasm between us, at least theologically, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know just how different we were.
As the miles passed heading northward toward Virginia, where I had grown up, I recalled my own theological journey and how I had ended up where I was at, at least theologically. What had led me to where I was now, a new member of a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, and what twists and turns on the road awaited me? There had been a time when I had aspired to the ministry, an unusual career choice for someone who had rarely attended church during his childhood. My father was an immigrant from Lebanon and Palestine, a Muslim by birth, but not by practice, and his indifference toward religion had the effect of stifling the feeble attempts my mother had made to get my brother, sister and I into church. It was not until I was in high school, when my parents’ marriage was crumbling, that I looked toward the church for some stability, some purpose and some compassion as I weathered the storm of my parents’ break-up.
I voluntarily attended confirmation classes at the Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia and I remember learning about church history, the Apostles Creed, the Reformation and the trinity. I remember taking the confirmation classes far more seriously than my peers, most of who had been forced into the class by their parents. The few people I chose to tell that I was there because I wanted to be there looked at me as if I had rocks in my head. I ended up enjoying the classes a great deal and in the spring of 1981 I was baptized and confirmed on the same day. I later joined the youth group at the church and found a great place for fellowship and support during my last years of high school. When I graduated from high school I was seriously contemplating a career in the ministry. My desire to join the clergy didn’t stem from the traditional "call" that so many seminarians experience, but more from the positive experiences I had had in the church during my adolescence and my own personal need to know more about, and to be more involved in, the church.
It didn’t take me long in my first year at Virginia Commonwealth University to make my career choice official. After my first semester as journalism major, long lines at the Journalism Department’s faculty advising gave me the motivation to walk across campus to the extremely short lines at the Religion Department where I changed my major and was off on my adventure.
My first year of college was an extremely formulative one, not so much because I changed my major but because of what I experienced while on campus in Richmond. The first close friend that I made was Richard, whom I met in my comparative religions class. Richard and I enjoyed one another’s company a great deal and we spent a good deal of time studying together and eating at the Student Union. One day, as we sat down to eat, Richard looked at me intently and told me that he was gay. At first I thought he was kidding, but it soon became clear that he was quite serious. I was shocked. I had never known anyone who was openly gay, and this was not a subject my parents had ever broached with me. I knew the church’s views on the matter, and they were not at all favorable. It is fair to say that I was having my first crisis of faith. I hope I didn’t leave the table looking as dumbfounded as I remember, but I did a lot of soul searching over the next few days.
I eventually came to the conclusion that Richard was my very good friend, and that his being gay didn’t change that. Furthermore, however, I also came to the conclusion that any god who condemned my friend, whom I knew to be a kind, generous, caring and worthy individual was no god I wanted to follow. I think it was this crisis of faith that started me on the journey to formulating my own theology, rather than just blindly following a particular theology the church was feeding me. It was this incident that taught me that my own intuition and experiences were important elements in my relationship with God and in the formation of my own personal theology. My friendship with Richard was a revelatory experience for me, no less revelatory than Saul’s, whose eyes were opened on the road to Damascus. My eyes had been opened and it was God who had opened them, I was, and am, convinced.
Despite my friendship with Richard, I transferred to Texas Christian University for my sophomore year, not so much because it was a better school but because it was as far away as I could imagine from the trauma of my parents divorce. TCU had been recommended to me by my high school history teacher, but I had also heard it had an excellent religious studies department. I was not disappointed by the education I received at TCU, but again it was my experiences outside the classroom which had the most impact on my faith.
At TCU I became good friends with Larry, a fellow student in my Greek class. He convinced me to attend mass one evening with the TCU Catholic Community, headed by Father Charlie Calabrese. Father Charlie became my spiritual mentor while at TCU and his gentleness, his patience and his concern for me helped carry me through to graduation. Father Charlie was definitely a unique priest. Father Charlie refused communion to no one who came to his masses. Indeed Father Charlie encouraged anyone, who felt the need, to come and partake. Father Charlie did not believe the Roman Catholic Church had the right to deny anyone the sacraments, and his rebellion in this matter shocked more than a few people. I was such a faithful participant at his masses that I often helped serve communion and couldn’t help but wonder what the bishop would have thought of all of this. Father Charlie taught me that God’s gifts and grace aren’t reserved for just those whom we, as human beings, deem righteous or worthy. God’s gifts and grace are for all and we who serve should serve all.
Father Charlie often mentioned in his masses the responsibility that Christians had for the plight of the poor. He saw Jesus as one who came to serve the poor and believed Jesus was especially concerned with their welfare. In private moments Father Charlie often shared with me that he often felt guilty for the comfortable lifestyle he had while so many suffered under the weight of poverty. Issues of social justice were of great concern to him.
I began to explore in my own studies how issues of social justice related to issues of theology and faith. In my studies I discovered the writings of the liberation theologians, one of whom was Gustavo Gutierrez, from whom I read earlier this morning. Liberation Theology teaches that God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed and that it is the responsibility of faithful Christians to fight against injustice and to liberate those who are in poverty. The teachings of the liberation theologians were especially attractive to me, the son of a Palestinian refugee. For many years I had read about the Palestinian people and their plight and knew by heart the story of my father and his family’s flight to Lebanon following the 1948 war. I saw in liberation theology the foundation for my own struggle to understand the conflict in the Middle East and, perhaps, the means to fight it.
Amidst all of this, I was still on track with my home church in Fairfax, Virginia to begin my studies for the ministry. Following my graduation from TCU, I began seminary at the Boston University School of Theology. In my first couple of weeks there I met a fellow seminarian, Rich, who convinced me to sign on for a trip to Nicaragua that he and some other seminarians were making in order to understand the conflict between the Sandanistas and the Contra Rebels and how Liberation Theology was influencing the people and the government. I was excited by this opportunity, as this would give me a chance to study the movement that was so dear to my heart in the region of the world, Central America, where it had been born.
My trip to Nicaragua was one of adventure and fascination, wonder and horror. Nicaragua was in the midst, at that time, of a destructive civil war. One could see readily that there were few young men walking the streets of Managua. Most were off fighting the war. Poverty was rampant in the country and many of the buildings in the capital city of Managua still showed the effects of an earthquake that had taken place sixteen years earlier. Nevertheless, the people were friendly and gracious to us, which I thought remarkable considering that our government was funding the Contra rebels who were devastating the country. We took a trip to the northern party of the country and saw firsthand the destruction of the war: burned out homes, walls with bullet holes and fear on the faces of the people. We attended mass at a number of different churches and listened to the message of hope and perseverance that the priests were preaching. I returned from the trip humbled by what I had seen and with a renewed determination to commit my life to the struggle for justice and the liberation of the oppressed.
It was back at home that I would experience what my commitment really meant and how it might affect me adversely. My trip to Nicaragua had been partially funded by my home church, with the agreement that I would give a slide show presentation to members of the congregation who might be interested following a Sunday service. I carefully prepared my slide show and looked forward with anticipation to my presentation. I was not at all prepared for what would occur.
Many congregants came to my talk with hostility"angered that the church would fund a trip for a seminarian to what they saw as an openly communist country, hostile to the United States. I found myself not only defending what I saw as the people’s right and duty to throw off a previous government that had oppressed them and even sent death squads to execute dissidents, but having to explain my own reasons for going and how it pertained to my seminary education. In the congregation was a member of the CIA’s Central American unit, who took particular offense at much of what I had to say.
I left the church that day a bit stunned and shell-shocked. This was a congregation in which I had found shelter and comfort amidst a troubling time in my life, a place that I considered to be my home. I left the church that day feeling unwelcome and angry.
Later that fall I took a series of psychological tests, required by the Presbyterian Church for candidates for the ministry. I was only 23 years old at the time and the tests, perhaps correctly, showed that I was a bit immature and needed some counseling in order to get past some issues of anger. I took the tests entirely too personally, however, and used them as my excuse to opt out of the ministry track I had been pursuing. I felt betrayed by the church and angered by what had happened to me, and I no longer felt the desire to serve the church that I had felt when I had started college. I still enjoyed studying religion and theology, but my passion for the ministry was gone.
I returned to Texas and to TCU where I finished a master’s degree in theological studies. During my time there I met, and later married, Mary Kay, who was finishing her studies for the ministry and who was shortly thereafter ordained in the United Methodist Church. During my many years as a minister’s spouse I marveled at the kinds of problems that Mary Kay had to deal with, most of which were not discussed in the weighty theological discourses we had had in seminary. Most people in the congregations that she served spent the first year of her ministry getting over the fact that she was a woman and that she was the first woman their church had ever had as minister. I became frustrated with the types of issues that people struggled with and I felt a great divide between where I was spiritually and theologically and where the rest of the congregation was. It is probably fair to say that I lacked grace, at times, when trying to reconcile my place in the church.
Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to learn a lot during those years. Mary Kay introduced me to Process Theology, a view of God which is rooted in the writings and philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead’s philosophy saw nature as "a structure of evolving processes." Whitehead’s views on religion and God were rooted in the ever evolving "processes" of nature. Whitehead’s God was a primordial God, not an omnipotent, unchanging God, but one who evolved and changed along with creation. This, of course, is not the orthodox or popular view of God, and goes against much of what the church has traditionally taught. Process Theology emphasizes that all creatures are intricately interconnected and that our actions have an effect on the whole. In addition, Process Theology teaches that God does not act coercively but persuasively within creation, a God who knows all of the choices but not necessarily the end results. The choices we make, given our free will and our relationship, or lack thereof, with God will ultimately determine the future.
Process theology taught me that all of creation was in relationship with God. This made perfect sense to me, yet as a minister’s spouse I was constantly amazed at how concerned most people in church were with salvation, and not just their own, but that of others. For me, salvation was never a particularly significant part of my faith. My faith has always been concerned with how I can live my life here and now and how I can best serve others. Nevertheless, the church has a lot to say about salvation, and it increasingly has become more exclusive and, for me, more troubling. The church has traditionally taught that what is required for salvation is not just a belief in Jesus Christ, but acceptance of him as a "personal Lord and Savior." Interwoven with this belief in Jesus’ role as savior, includes the belief that his life was given up in his death on the cross as a sacrifice to God for the sins of humanity. This particular belief has always been troubling to me. Jesus spoke in his ministry of a God of grace and forgiveness who saw all people, including Gentiles, tax collectors, lepers, prostitutes and drunkards as children of God and worthy of love. And yet we are taught by the church that all that love and grace is swept aside at the end by a God who continues to demand sacrifice for the sins of humanity—and not just any sacrifice, but that of God’s own son. As I grew older and matured in my spirituality this idea became abhorrent to me. Why would God condemn his/her own, even those who, perhaps, had made poor choices in life? Do we turn our backs on our own children, even when they make choices and decisions that we may find troubling? Do we not continue to love and cherish our own? Why should God be any different?
Even more disturbing, however, is the fact that this traditional "sacrificial" view of Jesus’ death removes our own responsibility for what took place by seeing Jesus’ death as "necessary" to God’s plan and our salvation. It was, in fact, the very people that Jesus had served that gathered in the courtyard in front of Pilate and demanded his death. It was not just the Jews or the Romans that crucified Jesus, it was all of us, in the same way that we murder the prophets of our own day when their message becomes too disturbing, upsets the status quo, or forces us to examine ourselves for what ails our world. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are just a few of those who have been murdered by a society too afraid to heed their messages.
I am a Universalist in that I believe that we shall all be "saved," whatever that may mean to you (and it may mean nothing). We are all God’s children, all worthy of God’s love and we shall all be with God in the end, despite whatever sins we have committed, and we have all committed our share. Our own notions of justice—whether they are the lethal injections we believe are humanely injected in the condemned, the grotesque treatment of prisoners at Abu Gharib or the inhuman beheadings of hostages—these are not the ways or justice of God, and for that I am very thankful.
My journey of faith continues to evolve. I have come through the pain of a broken marriage. I have started a new life, with a wonderful woman and am a stepfather to two incredible boys. They have all taught me much and have shown me a love and grace that is beyond my understanding. I have found a home here at UUFHC amidst a congregation that welcomes and challenges me in ways I had not thought possible. I am looking forward to the birth of my first child in September and face her birth with a mixture of wonder, awe and fear. I continue to see the work of God around me and continue to look for new ways to live in harmony with creation.
If I have brought you this far on my journey, and you are still listening, then I am grateful. I don’t pretend that all, or any of you, have had a journey similar to my own. You may, in fact disagree or have problems with some or all of my conclusions. I know, in fact, that I am different from most of you. The theological salad we created last year includes only one onion, and you have one guess as to who added it. Nevertheless, if I have learned anything in my ten months as a Unitarian Universalist it is that we not only welcome and accept the spiritual journeys of others, we can use them as stepping stones to further our own journeys. If anything I have said has given you pause or caused your brain or soul to stir, then I feel satisfied that my story has been of value.
I no longer worry about whether or not my grandfather and I have similar theologies or not—I feel sure that we would have had many points to debate if he were still alive today. I do believe, however, that he is with God and that he has been with me and influenced me at many points along my journey. I have no doubt that I have had an effect on his as well. We do, in fact, travel together—not always taking the same road—but seeking as best we can that which is sacred and meaningful. I look forward with joy and hope to find the paths that you are traveling on.
Copyright © 2004 Bob Kublawi. All Rights Reserved.