Opening Words:  “The Free Spirit” by the Boston Architect Louis H. Sullivan, from Autobiography of an Idea

The Free Spirit is the Spirit of Joy. It delights to create in beauty. It is unafraid, it knows no fear.

[The Free Spirit] declares the earth to be its home, and the fragrance of the earth go be its inspiration.

It is strong. It is mighty in beneficence. It views its power … with emotions of adventure.

…It dreams a civilization like unto itself. It would create such a world for [humankind]. It has the strength.

[The free spirit] sees the strength of the fertile earth, the strength of the mountains, the valleys, the far spreading plains.

The vast seas, the rivers…, the great sky as a wondrous dome, the sun in its rising, its zenith, and its setting, and the night.

It glories in these powers of earth and sky as its own.

It affirms itself [one] with them all.

[The free spirit] sees life at work everywhere – life, the mysterious, the companionable, the ineffable, the immensest and gentlest of powers.

Clothing the earth in a pattern of … radiance, of tenderness, of fairy delicacy – ceaselessly at work.

Thus the free spirit feels itself to be likewise clothed,

…bound up in friendship with the wonder worker: life.

PRAYER: -- Sophia Lyon Fahs

"We gather in reverence before the wonder of life,
The wonder of this moment.
The wonder of being together, so close yet so apart
Each hidden in our own secret chamber,
Each listening, each trying to speak
Yet none fully understanding,
None fully understood.

"We gather in reverence before all intangible things
That eyes see not, nor ears can detect,
That hands can never touch,
That space cannot hold and time cannot measure."

READING: by A. Powell Davies, from “Is This Your Religion?” November 5, 1944

We are the consummation of thousands of years of religious history. We are thousands of years that have stripped off superstition and battled with tyranny; thousands of years that struggled to take fear out of religion—to take it right out of human life; thousands of years that have marched, sometimes joyfully, sometimes in agony, toward spiritual emancipation. We are indeed the consummation of something.

Yet in this world of blood and sorrow it is scarcely important, hardly worth mentioning, unless in addition we are the beginning of something, unless our religion is new—the religion that has always been new in every prophet who died rather than forsake it; the religion that has been buried over and over again in creeds and rituals and sacred sepulchers and yet has always come to life; the religion that today is new all over the earth, stammering itself into utterance in every language known to humankind.

The religion that says freedom!—freedom from ignorance and false belief; freedom from spurious claims and bitter prejudices; freedom to seek the truth, both old and new, and freedom to follow it, freedom from the hates and greeds that divide humankind and spill the blood of every generation; freedom for honest thought, freedom for equal justice, freedom to seek the true, the good and the beautiful with minds unimpaired by cramping dogmas and spirits uncrippled by abject dependence. The religion that says humankind is not divided—except by ignorance and prejudice and hate; the religion that sees humankind as naturally one and waiting to be spiritually united; the religion that proclaims an end to all exclusions—and declares a brotherhood and sisterhood unbounded! The religion that knows that we shall never find the fullness of the wonder and the glory of life until we are ready to share it, that we shall never have hearts big enough for the love of God unless we have made them big enough for the worldwide love of one another.

As you have listened to me, have you thought perchance that this is your religion? If you have, do not congratulate yourself. Stop long enough to recollect the miseries of the world you live in: the fearful cruelties, the enmities, the hate, the bitter prejudices, the need of such a world for such a faith. And if you still can say that this of which I have spoken is your religion, then ask yourself this question: What are you doing with it?

 SERMON:    “The Air That You Breathe”  -  Rev. Alison Hyder

I have always liked the wind. Maybe that is one of the reasons I like living near the ocean – the ocean currents stir up the air and everything around them. The breeze animates the trees and grasses, and brings a new freshness to the landscape. Whether it is a soft summer breeze, or a wild and powerful gale, the wind moves my soul. I never use the air conditioning in my car. Even on the hottest day, I want the windows open to the air. I just can’t bear feeling stifled. It makes me nauseous.

Of course, everyone wants to breathe. We are acutely aware of the alternative. But most of the time we can take it for granted. We’re not aware of our lungs filling and spilling, the way our diaphragms pump the air. It’s a reflexive action, as natural as – well, as life. Without oxygen, nothing on this planet would live.

But what most of us don’t know is that oxygen was discovered by an amateur scientist, a Unitarian minister named Joseph Priestley. The air that we breathe is a Unitarian construct.

Joseph Priestley was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1733. His father dressed cloth in the woolen trade, but his mother died young and Priestley was raised by his aunt, an open-minded English Presbyterian. In England, the Unitarian movement arose mostly out of Presbyterianism, and young Joseph’s aunt welcomed all neighboring preachers, however heretical, if she thought them “honest and good men.”

Like most children, Priestley had a lively curiosity, and he played with experiments. His brother Timothy remembered him shutting spiders up in bottles to see how long they would live. He was tutored by a local minister, who introduced him to philosophers like Newton and John Locke. Priestley studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later added French, German and Italian. For a while he worked for one of his uncles, a merchant, as a translator.

From a child, Priestley had been terrified by Calvinist assumptions about predestination and God’s wrathful damnation. He could find no sign that he was not destined for hell. “I felt occasionally such distress of mind,” Priestley recalled, “as it is not in my power to describe, and which I still look back upon with horror.” He developed a stutter. Then, as a teenager, Priestley contracted tuberculosis. His the family got him a position in a firm in the warmer air of Lisbon. But at the last minute, he realized that his heart was not in business. He returned to the idea of medicine or ministry and he enrolled at Daventry Academy. It was a liberal school, and Priestley flourished in its community. His sense of doom vanished.

When he became the minister at Nantwich, in Cheshire, Priestley opened his own school, creating a lively new curriculum for girls as well as boys. He snuck in a science course, which allowed him to indulge his hobbies and “purchase a few books, and some philosophical instruments, [such] as a small airpump, an electrical machine, &c.”  He taught his older students to take care of them and allowed them to entertain their parents and friends with experiments. As a result, he confessed, “I considerably extended the reputation of my school; though I had no other object originally than gratifying my own taste.”  [all quotes and biography adapted from Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men.]

Joseph Priestley was a natural teacher. His schools were patronized by local tradesmen and merchants. They believed in progress through education and had found little encouragement from Anglican doctrines. Most of them were Dissenters from the Anglican Church – Quakers, Unitarians, and Presbyterians – who were outside of the established orthodoxy. They looked for a more rational religion free of tyrannical authority.

Priestley was a rather comical figure, with a long nose, bulging eyes, and a slight frame. He walked with a kind of disjointed, bird-like hop and talked at a non-stop rattling speed, until overtaken by his stammer. His students loved him. His classes included girls as well as boys and took the form of open discussions and clear, direct lectures. For Priestley, curiosity was a sacred virtue, a form of religious worship. He encouraged debate and was delighted when his students challenged him. “His object,“ recalled one student, ”was to engage the students to examine and decide for themselves, uninfluenced by the sentiments of any other person.” [ibid]  He wrote several lucid science texts that were popular for decades. In them, he described his failures as well as his successes. Although he realized that the admission of failure was “less calculated to do an author honor,” he hoped, he said, that by showing that no special genius was required for experiments, others might be encouraged to have a go. Even if he looked a fool he could ‘make other persons philosophers, which is a thing of much more consequence to the public.’

This is the fool who analyzed the properties of air, and discovered oxygen, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. He also discovered hydrochloric acid. Priestley also gave the world rubber erasers and that most American of products, soda pop. Priestley was the first person to make carbonated water. For some people, that’s as essential as air.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, science was a fairly common hobby. A new discovery could create jobs and industries, speed production, and improve safety, although it destroyed many older trades.  It could also make fortunes for merchants and manufacturers. For Priestley, it was a pathway to God. He was just one of a class of people who experimented with chemicals and the uses of heat, steam and air. Eventually, they produced journals where they would document their findings and exchange ideas. They corresponded and formed friendships that spurred them even more. Science encouraged democracy and the free flow of information and ideas between countries. Benjamin Franklin visited his English counterparts, and became close friends with Priestley. Inspired, Joseph Priestley formed a society of practical philosophers. Every full moon, when there was enough light to travel back home, they met to tell their news, trade insights, and spur each other on. They shared Priestley’s democratic ideals, and held knowledge to be the antidote to hatred and oppression. In his 1772 preface to Experiments and Observations. Priestley wrote,

The rapid progress of knowledge, which like the progress of a wave of the sea, or of light from the sun, extends itself not in this way or that way only, but in all directions, will, I doubt not, be the means, under God, of extirpating all terror and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as of science; and all the efforts of the interested friends of corrupt establishments of all kinds, will be ineffectual for their support in this enlightened age.

Priestley’s advocacy for a separation between the Church and the State influenced his fellow experimenter Thomas Jefferson. Priestley and his friends helped end England’s part in the slave trade. Manufacturers like Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton offered health care and schooling to their employees and were advocates of women’s rights. Priestley’s Unitarian pulpit in Leeds was often a political platform. But Joseph Priestley got into trouble for his religious ideals. He was often lampooned in broadsheets and political cartoons as a radical. But when he supported the French Revolution, he raised the ire of the people. His Birmingham home and chapel were mobbed and burned down. At age 58, Joseph Priestley left England and settled in Pennsylvania. He brought his beliefs and ideals to this country, and helped establish the Unitarian movement in America.  Not a bad legacy for such an “ordinary man.”

But our faith is founded on people like him – men and women – and children – who value the free and ranging use of reason and imagination. For us, there is no fact that is too dangerous, no discovery that could threaten God. All that we can ever know or be is an aspect of the Universal whole, the sacred pulse of life. It is no wonder that so many of this country’s founders were Unitarian. Like Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams believed that each mind must be free of coercion and oppressive dogma and they based our Constitution on principles of liberty, equality, and religious integrity. We are still trying to achieve those ideals.

In 1944, the influential judge Learned Hand spoke at a rally in Central Park. He asked,

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, nearly two thousand years ago, taught humanity that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten: that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

Are we any closer to that goal? Most of us, here, feel the need to think independently and question our country’s conventions and values. We value our integrity and our individuality and the freedoms that we have found in this community. But I think that we still take refuge in our own assumptions. We have simply replaced the national norms with local rules and opinions. In truth, we are just as prone to peer pressure and bias as any other group, to judgment and intolerance. We value our feelings, but we don’t always temper them with reason or compassion.  Our beliefs are reactive, based more on fears than freedom. We prefer comfort to the demands of mercy and understanding and joy. They need way too much room in our thoughts.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have chosen a difficult faith, a liberal faith that values individual justice and growth, that makes its politics personal. For the walls we plan for others we first build in ourselves.  That is why Joseph Priestley encouraged his students to question and debate. He gave them the tools to open up their minds and learn to think for themselves.

A free mind wakens the conscience; while others rely on rules. But everyone is responsible. Every judgment affects the spirit of liberty and truth and – dare I say it?  - love that we desire. 

In an address at Harvard in 1954, A. Powell Davies remarked,

It is significant, I think, that although thousands have been done to death for heresy – that is to say, for not believing the official doctrine – no one, through all the Christian centuries, has ever been tried by an ecclesiastical court for not loving his neighbor as himself or for transgressing the Golden Rule. This means that it has been more important to the churchmen that people should accept their speculations … than that they should follow the teachings of Jesus.

There is no virtue without the healing breath of love. We can be smart, we can be good, we can be reverent and brave. But we won’t be neighborly.

We all need a little more humility and a little less certainty; more charity and fewer norms until we can demonstrate that understanding that is the basis of compassion. We must be sympathetic to other people’s needs and beliefs.  For, as Priestley wrote,  “In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we cannot solve one doubt without creating several new ones.” This is the spirit of inquiry, the very path to God, whose revelation is love.

Let us each be open to new truths and fresh inspirations.  Let us breathe freely and deep. And may the winds of freedom expand our concept of love.

CLOSING WORDS: by Meister Eckhart:  

“The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which he sees me. My eye and the eye of God are one eye, one vision, one knowledge and one love.” “Up, noble soul! Put on your jumping shoes which are intellect and love.”