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Like many Unitarian Universalists of color (and many white allies), I get tired of white male dominance within our society and yearn for more diverse representation. Yet I was taken aback one day, while admiring stained glass renderings of some of our spiritual forefathers, when a friend came up next to me and dismissed the images as “old, dead white men.” This was a phrase that I had used numerous times myself in response to images of men who meant nothing to me. But in the narthex of that historic Unitarian church, I recognized some of the men and their importance to our faith.
“Old, dead white men” suggests that these people have no relevance to us now, especially to those of us who are neither white nor male. But these people have relevance to me. They were integral to shaping Unitarian Universalism into what it is. And since UUism is part of who I am, these people were integral to shaping me. They are my spiritual ancestors.
Whenever I lead a communal construction of an ancestral altar, I assure participants that ancestors need not be only those people to whom we’re biologically related. Ancestors can be anyone whose past life now shapes our current one.
We are more than just our bodies. Buddhism describes every being as comprised of five “aggregates,” only one of which is physical form; the rest have to do with how we perceive and think. In other words, those beings who shape how we perceive and think are every bit as much responsible for who we are as those who contributed our genetic makeup.
Still, it’s easier to recognize biological ancestors. It’s easier to see how their genes, passed on through generations, created us. If any one of them did not exist then we would not exist. If any one of them way back in time were different, somebody might still exist in our place who could be similar, but they wouldn’t be us. We know that all our biological ancestors created us, even if they are now so far removed that we might not recognize them.
The ideas that shape who we are come from our spiritual ancestors in the same way that our genes come from our biological ones. One “old, dead white man” whose ideas clearly shaped my life is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson described Hindu theology using Christian terminology. His essay “The Over-Soul” is a direct translation of Hinduism’s Paramatman, param(a) meaning highest and atman meaning self or soul.
Emerson transformed Unitarianism from anti-trinitarian Christianity into a faith tradition that welcomes Hindus and Buddhists, Pagans and atheists and every other theological bent. Because if God or the Over-Soul is not separate from us individual souls, then it is no longer necessary to “believe in” God. Rather, what we agree on is the inherently worthwhile nature of humanity. Without Emerson, I would not be a UU. Many of us would not. His short-comings notwithstanding (and let’s face it, many of our ancestors had short-comings), Emerson is one of my spiritual ancestors.
Emerson was not among the men immortalized in stained glass that day, but William Ellery Channing was. Channing helped create Unitarianism in the United States by breaking off from the more traditional Congregationalists. He both rejected the trinity and asserted that we humans are capable of cultivating goodness, ever increasing our “likeness to God.”
While the Transcendentalists eventu-ally decided that liberal Unitarian Christianity did not go far enough, it was people like Channing who created the spiritual space in which they could arise. Without Channing and his contemporaries, there would be no Emerson and his compatriots. If Emerson is like a spiritual grandparent, Channing is like a spiritual great-grandparent.
To respect our spiritual ancestors is to know that we don’t just come from a lineage of blood, but also of ideas. It is to realize that we are continually re-created and helping to re-create anew as we influence each other. It is to honor those we admire and to feel our connection even to those we don’t. To recognize our spiritual ancestors is to recognize the interdependent web.
Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211109041936/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/18_11/02.mp3
