Universalism: The Hope for Humanity

by

Philip Gulley

Elizabeth Watson Lecture

2010 Friends General Conference Gathering

July 6, 2010

FOREWORD

Philip Gulley is a convinced Friend and a birthright Hoosier. As a birthright Friend and a convinced Hoosier, I’m downright glad to have his company! Phil was born in Danville, Indiana, on the western edges of the Indianapolis metropolitan area, where he still lives with his wife Joan and his teenage sons Spencer and Sam.

When it came time for Phil to get a higher education, he did not feel moved by the Spirit to travel very far, so he garnered a Bachelor’s degree from Marian University and a Master of Divinity degree from Christian Theological Seminary, both in Indianapolis. He became a Friends’ pastor; he now pastors Fairfield Friends Meeting.

After receiving his M. Div. degree, Phil must have been in a very adventurous mood, because he traveled all the way to Richmond, Indiana, the eastern edge of Indiana (less than 100 miles from his home), to take a course in the Ministry of Writing at the Earlham School of Religion with my late colleague Tom Mullen. Phil’s purpose was to learn how to write a better church newsletter.

About seventeen years and sixteen books later (I think Tom’s teaching served him well!), Phil was invited to deliver the Elizabeth G. Watson Lecture at the Friends General Conference Gathering in Bowling Green, Ohio, in July, 2010. It is that lecture that you now have in front of you.

A few words about Phil’s books: He writes in several different genres, including short stories, memoir, and theology. His first two books in theology were co-authored with James Mulholland: If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person (2003) and If God Is Love: Rediscovering Grace in an Ungracious World (2004). He has deepened his exploration of universalist theology in his latest book, If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus (2010).

His advocacy of universal salvation and universalism more generally has been controversial among some Midwestern Friends. In his own Western Yearly Meeting, part of Friends United Meeting, there has been a movement to rescind his recording (i.e., his ministerial credentials) on the grounds that he denies the divinity of Jesus, and for other articulated beliefs deemed insufficiently orthodox. (Phil finds himself to be a follower of Jesus, and believes that Jesus himself would have rejected any claims to divinity.) In 2007 and 2009, this matter came to the floor of Western Yearly Meeting, and in those two sessions, there was not unity among Friends either to accept or to repudiate the attempts to remove his recording. Of course, other Friends, and many persons from other denominations, deeply value Phil’s thoughts on theology. Phil, for example, did receive a warm and appreciative welcome from Friends at the Gathering in Bowling Green.

While presently all too many Friends meetings and churches are declining in vitality and membership, you have a possible remedy before you now, in this pamphlet. In his writings and practice, Phil models a kind of gracious, welcoming, and hospitable Quakerism that can help our Friends meetings to thrive in this postmodern age.

Stephen W. Angell

Leatherock Professor of Quaker Studies

Earlham School of Religion

It is a pleasure to be at Friends General Conference and an honor to give the 2010 Elizabeth Watson Lecture. Typically, this lecture is delivered by someone whose saintliness and wisdom were apparent from an early age. In the interests of diversity, we have deviated from that pattern this year. I am the man who arrived late to the elevator, who jammed his foot in the door and squeezed through, intending to go down, before realizing too late the elevator was heading up, a direction he hadn’t intended to take. So while I am pleased to be here, I am also surprised. Not long ago, a fellow Quaker, commenting about me on a blog, wrote, “It is sad to see such a shallow thinker get so much attention.” That confirmed every self-doubt I’ve ever had that, deep down, I am really shallow.

I grew up Roman Catholic, but when I was a teenager, a Quaker couple, Mary Lee and Lee Comer, moved in next door. They led the youth group at the local meeting, and every Sunday evening the Quaker youth would gather at their home. One Sunday in the spring of 1977, I was sitting on our front porch, watching, as carload after carload of attractive Quaker teenage women descended upon the Comer’s home. I felt the leading of the Spirit, who said to me, “Philip, go be a Quaker.” So I crossed the lawn and became a Friend.

It was roughly a hundred feet from our porch to the Comer’s front door, which in retrospect were probably the most important hundred feet of my life. Most every blessing I’ve enjoyed since then has come from my association with Friends.

I have been asked to speak about universalism, a concept I learned not from the church but from my parents on the occasion of my eighth birthday. We lived in a neighborhood with lots of children, so I asked my parents if I could invite the neighborhood kids to my party. They agreed to that, with the understanding I invite all the neighborhood children and not leave anyone out.

I said, “I don’t want Juanita to come.” Juanita lived up the street, belonged to a weird church, was unattractive, and was tormented by everyone. I feared that if I invited her, my status in the fourth grade would plummet.

My mother said, “If Juanita isn’t invited, no one is invited.”

My mother was a fundamentalist in matters of inclusion. I was not, so I was very upset. But my parents held fast. No Juanita, no party. My mother and father were dogmatic about few things and gave me much freedom from an early age, but never the freedom to exclude. Fifteen years later, when I began studying theology, I had one doctrine from which I would never deviate: when God has a party, everyone is invited.

The concept of universalism was simply not present in my early church experiences. Indeed, in both the Catholic churches and Quaker meetings I attended, it would have been seen as heretical, as an assault upon the gospel and tradition. So even as my parents were doing all they could to encourage spiritual largesse, the churches I attended were doing all they could to discourage it.

But I have noticed that God is no respecter of doctrine, feeling quite free to work outside the carefully prescribed parameters we’ve created. Unable to reach me through the conventional means of the church, God spoke to me through what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience.” A peak experience is a transcendent, often ecstatic moment in which you feel deeply and joyfully connected with others and God. It is usually accompanied by a mystical insight or revelation. When George Fox had his vision of a great people to be gathered, that was a peak experience. It happened quite literally on a peak, on Pendle Hill. Note the universal nature of Fox’s vision. He saw a great people to be gathered. “From the top of this hill,” he said of his vision, “the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.” He continued: "I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that I saw the infinite love of God."

A great people to be gathered, an infinite ocean of light, infinite love of God: what is that if not the language of a budding universalist?

Even Fox’s deathbed statement reflected the universal scope of his peak experience. “All is well; the Seed of God reigns over all, and over death itself” [emphasis added].

I had my peak experience while seated in a broken-down 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. Moses had his burning bush; I had my VW. I was 24 years old, newly married, attending a private college, and broke. Our VW was limping along, we had no money to repair it, our rent was due, and Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected. The situation was dire. I was sitting in that cursed, demonic car, utterly discouraged, and suddenly felt enveloped by an extravagant and reassuring presence, filled with a deep sense of joy and peace. I knew immediately that everything would be well. But more than that, I felt profoundly loved by this presence. And I knew, I knew, in that very moment, that this love was not confined to me, but was extended to every person, to every creature, to all the world. This love was so penetrating and tangible that I was simultaneously filled with a love for all the world and everyone in it. I felt deeply connected to every person, as if I were seeing and relating to everyone as God saw and related to everyone. Later, while reflecting on that experience, I believed I had been permitted to see the world through God’s eyes and love the world through God’s heart.

I have only had that one peak experience, but it was enough. It was such a spiritual feast, such a banquet, that to pray for another experience like it seemed like spiritual gluttony to me. Indeed, it was so transformative that afterwards I even stopped telling jokes about Ronald Reagan. As a consequence of that peak experience, I became a universalist. I reasoned that if I had been given the opportunity to see the world as God did, to sense the love God had for the world, I could no longer subscribe to any theology that was any less inclusive, any less generous, any less bountiful.

So I became a universalist. I didn’t know what it meant. I wasn’t aware of what that word and condition meant. I only knew that I felt universally connected, universally cherished, and wanted nothing more than to love universally.

One more brief word about peak experiences. They are the precise reason we Friends believe in ongoing revelation. Early Friends who had these transcendent moments were utterly and thoroughly convinced they’d experienced a revelation from God every bit as authoritative as the Bible itself.

Shortly after that peak experience, I was invited to pastor a rural Friends meeting. On my first Sunday, I mentioned my universalist tendencies. I didn’t use that word, for I didn’t know it. But I spoke about God’s love for all people and God’s commitment to the eternal well-being of all people. After meeting for worship, the organist, a Southern Baptist, asked me if I believed in hell. I remembered my peak experience and said the idea of hell was utterly foreign to me.

She was a nice lady, but she could not transcend her Southern Baptist roots, just as we all have difficulty transcending our heritage. So that week she phoned the elders to tell them she was leaving if I didn’t start believing in hell. Since it had taken them six months to find her and only a week to find me, they rightly divined their priorities and urged me to believe in hell, so the meeting could avert a crisis. I didn’t see the merits of their argument, declined to believe in hell, and was fired. That would be the first blemish on my Quaker résumé, a portent of things to come.

The next week, I was invited to interview at a fundamentalist Quaker meeting. I wasn’t eager to become their pastor, but felt I needed at least to speak to them. The interview process included a sermon, so on the Sunday of my interview, I preached a sermon on God’s love for homosexuals. After meeting for worship, they went to the basement to discuss whether or not to call me as their pastor.

I sat upstairs, directly over the heating vent, listening to their deliberations. The waters were flowing against me, until an elderly man pointed out that, because of my youth and inexperience, they wouldn’t have to pay me much. Thus, the Lord spoke, the tide turned, and I was hired. I was at that meeting four years. By the time I left, I believed in hell.

I’ve often wondered why my first congregations resisted universalism to the degree they did. Initially, I attributed it to biblical fundamentalism, but I have come to believe that it is more complex than that. It was easy for me to believe in a gracious God, because I’d had gracious parents. It was easy for me to believe in a generous God, because I had always been generously treated. It was easy for me to believe in an afterlife of overflowing goodness and deep joy, for my present life had been filled with goodness and joy. Conversely, I find it difficult to believe in unrelenting evil, because the evil I’ve known has been transitory. I find it difficult to believe in an impatient God who gives up on some people, because I have been treated with patience and forbearance.

But the people in my first meetings had not been so blessed. Their daily lives were marked by paucity, not plenty. Many of their family lives were marked by discord, not harmony.

I wasn’t a universalist because I was smarter than they were. I wasn’t a universalist because I was more spiritual than they were. I was a universalist because I had been given a glimpse of God’s love, and because of my fortunate life found it easy to believe in a generous and benevolent God. Had my life been filled with brokenness, need, and pain, I would have found the idea of grace unbelievable.

Of course, one thing that makes the idea of divine grace so incredible for so many is that those who claim to speak for God have been anything but gracious. I remember speaking at a Quaker meeting some twenty years ago, where a man sat on the front row taking careful notes. I was very flattered, and when I learned he taught Sunday school, I made it a point to go to his class the next Sunday, reasoning that anyone who took such extensive notes of my sermon must be an excellent teacher. So the next Sunday I arrived at meeting in time for Sunday school, went to his class, and listened as he began the class, saying, “So-called ministers of the gospel will tell you this…,” and then read my sermon line for line. As the years passed, I heard stories about his life and learned two things about him: his early life had been horrendous, just filled with meanness, and the only way he felt able to save himself was to commit himself to a God as stern and intolerant as his parents. When anyone would speak to him about God’s love, he would immediately speak of God’s justice.

It was an odd justice, condemning people who weren’t sufficiently Christian, sending people to hell who’d never heard of Jesus. How just is that? But it fit the man’s experience, you see. He’d spent 55 years having those experiences confirmed, so there was no way his perceptions of God were going to be easily or quickly undone. Short of a peak experience, of course. Short of some transcendent moment that swung the needle of his spiritual compass toward grace.

The great mistake that those of us who sit at God’s left hand make is our insistence that all religions have equal value, that one is as good as the other, that it doesn’t matter what we believe. That simply isn’t true. Religion has not always been a friend to divine benevolence. When an entire segment of Christianity is looking forward to a cataclysmic battle in the Middle East that will usher in the second coming of Jesus, actually praying to God for a worldwide battle that will annihilate billions of people so a relative few can be transported to heaven, something is seriously wrong. We see that same twisted logic in almost every major religion: in almost every religion lurks a segment of people who utterly believe that, in order to love God, we must hate others and work for their demise. There is no hope for humanity in that. That is a cracked and barren land, void of life. If a religion lasts long enough, it will inevitably produce a number of people who believe that God is only for them and that everyone else is expendable.

At the risk of simplifying a very complex matter, it seems to me that our world has two options for a viable future: a gracious humanism committed to reason, education, justice, and peace, or a spirituality which transcends all religious boundaries. For it is clear that as long as there are distinct religions, each one insisting that it alone has the truth, there will never be peace. There is a self-centeredness to much religion, and it bleeds over into our culture.

I’ve been watching the Tea Party movement with great interest. All of that great, but misguided, passion, all those people worked up, giving one another permission to ignore their duty to their neighbor. I don’t like the looks of it, their inference that we have no responsibility for one another, their brushing aside of the social compact, reverting back to the law of the jungle, where, as Thucydides said, “[T]he strong do as they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” I wouldn’t want to live in a world of their creation. We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t work.

We need another road, a road with which we are familiar. The Bible tells about it. Remember on the day of Pentecost, in the book of Acts? Remember what happened? The devout people from every nation under heaven—that’s biblical code speak for every religion under heaven—were all gathered in one place, the separating effects of Babel still upon them, each one speaking but no one understanding.

What did the Spirit do? She filled those people to such a degree that whenever anyone spoke, no matter their language, everyone else understood. And all were amazed and asked, “What does this mean?”

We know what it means, don’t we? We know what it means. It means we were meant to understand one another. Not just those in our family, not just those in our tribe, or in our nation, or in our faith. But meant to understand everyone. God meant for there to be no barriers in caring for everyone, meant for us to speak to everyone, meant for us to listen to everyone, and meant for us to be with everyone. Think of that! The first activity of the Spirit in the church was to make everyone a universalist.

Of course, religion isn’t the only actor in this drama. I was having lunch last month with a professor of philosophy who attends our meeting, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of John Rawls. I wasn’t, so he gave me a quick lesson. John Rawls was a Harvard philosopher whose work was in moral and political philosophy. Rawls believed that you could determine the morality or immorality of a given situation by viewing the entirety of a given society or culture and asking yourself, “Would I want to be born into their situation?”

So if you were alive in the 1950’s in America, you would ask yourself, “Would I want to be born a black person in America?”

Or if you were alive today and were thinking about the morality of same-gender marriage, you would ask yourself, “Would I want to be born a homosexual in modern-day America, wanting to marry the person I love?”

I have a nephew with Asperger’s Syndrome. Though he’s a bright child, he has trouble with social intercourse. So you might ask yourself, “Would I want to be born with Asperger’s and try to get an education and earn a living in present-day America?”

You ask yourself those kinds of questions, and if you say, “Our culture is not kind, or fair, or helpful to people in that situation; I would not want to be born into their circumstances,” then it is immoral to allow anyone to exist in that situation. Rawls wrote quite extensively about it, but it’s actually a very simple test. “Would I want to be born into that particular position?”

I want to tell you a story about a man I knew who asked himself that very question whenever he met someone. His name is Lyman. Lyman is a retired tennis coach and teacher. He loves young people. He was a mentor long before it became fashionable. Now you can get college degrees in mentoring, but Lyman knew it instinctively.

Lyman is well into his 80’s now, but I knew him when he first retired and I was his pastor. Lyman was having a hard time with retirement, because he’d always been so engaged in life. He was always helping kids; then he retired and society said, “You’re too old. We don’t need you anymore.” Isn’t that foolish? Just when we finally know something, the world wants to put us out to pasture. But Lyman wouldn’t go down without a fight, didn’t want to spend the rest of his life standing on the sidelines. So he began volunteering every day, helping serve the noon meal at a homeless shelter in the inner city.

He’d been volunteering there a couple of weeks when a young guy named Mike staggered in one day for lunch. The other workers at the shelter told Mike to leave and then explained to Lyman that Mike was a drunk and they didn’t want him there. Mike showed up almost every day to get food, and every day they’d boot him out. But Lyman didn’t feel right about it. So one day when they threw Mike out, Lyman went out with him. Mike didn’t smell like alcohol, and he didn’t exhibit any of the other signs of alcoholism. He just staggered and fell into things, and sometimes when he spoke he didn’t make sense. By then, Mike had been homeless for some time and didn’t smell very good. His hair was long and matted and filthy. Lyman took him home and gave him a shower, took him to his barber and got him a haircut. It turned out that underneath all the hair and dirt, Mike was a handsome young man.

Lyman and his wife, Harriet, fed Mike several good meals, let him sleep in a soft, warm bed, bought him new clothes, and then took him to their doctor, who diagnosed Mike with Huntington’s disease, an incurable neurodegenerative genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and some cognitive functions. People with Huntington’s disease stagger when they walk, and the disease destroys brain cells, which leads to dementia. If you didn’t know someone had Huntington’s, you might think they were drunk.

Lyman lined up an apartment for Mike and arranged for a visiting nurse to check on him regularly. He got him signed up for Social Security disability payments. And every day he’d go visit Mike, take him groceries, help him clean his apartment, take him on short walks. This elderly man and this young man, the young man leaning into the older man, would walk around the block. Eventually, when the disease got too bad, Lyman arranged for Mike to be moved to a nursing home. And when Mike passed away, several years later, Lyman was at his side.

We had Mike’s memorial service at our meetinghouse. Mike didn’t have any family, so it was just we Quakers on a Sunday morning at the meetinghouse. A Friend stood and thanked Lyman for investing himself so deeply in Mike’s life. More silence. Then Lyman said, “If that had been me, I’d have wanted someone to help me.”

Lyman’s not much of a reader. He’s probably never heard of John Rawls, but he does know “Love your neighbor.” That’s all universalism is when you get right down to it: the infinite extension of loving your neighbor.

You know, Christianity has not always taught that concept well. For too long, religion has keep us apart, has divided our world, not united it. Too often, Christianity has sown war instead of peace, cast darkness instead of light, taught fear instead of consolation.

It is time religion brought us together. Can we live in the power of that Pentecost Spirit which empowers us to hear one another, love one another, listen to one another, speak to one another, and accept one another?

I was at home not long ago, working, when the phone rang. It was a guy from our meeting named Larry, wanting to read something to me from a book. Larry’s a retired attorney and judge, but his main passion in life is reading, so he spends a lot of time in bookstores. He’d just been to Barnes and Noble and was very excited, because he had this story he wanted to share with me.

It was about a church that decided someone needed to go preach to the Eskimos, go save the Eskimos. The Eskimos were lost. So the church sent a missionary to preach to them. When the missionary was done preaching, an Eskimo elder said, “Before you leave, let me ask you something. If we had never heard of Jesus and sin, would we have gone to hell when we died?”

The missionary said, “Well, no, of course not. Not if you hadn’t heard.”

And the Eskimo said, “Then why did you tell us?”

If all our religion can do is tell people how bad they are, then the world would be better off without us. But if we can live in that Spirit which enlightens and loves all people, then there is hope for a new humanity, hope for what John the Prophet called the New Jerusalem, where God will dwell with us, where we shall all be God’s people, where God will wipe away every tear, bind every wound, cherish every soul, and empower you and me to do the same.