Do two walk together, unless they be agreed?

Does a lion roar in the forest, when he has no prey?

Does a young lion cry out from his den, if he has taken nothing?

Does a bird fall in a snare on the earth, when there is no trap for it?

Does a snare spring up from the ground, when it has taken nothing?

Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid?

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. For God is love. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.

The litany of questions from the Book of Amos were meant to elicit from hearers a knowing response. Modern versions could include, “Do children ever go on vacations without asking ‘How many more miles’?” “Do men ever make a list of needed items and go to the store before they begin to tear apart the household plumbing trying to fix it?” We can’t understand common questions in Amos’ time anymore than he could understand those common to ours. But the first question on his list is timeless: “Can two walk together lest they be agreed?” Then, as now, an agreement of some sort is necessary for any “walk” to take place. Could a Palestinian and an Israeli, an American politician and Iraqi politician, Jerry Falwell and Rosie O’Donnell walk together without some kind of agreement?

I didn’t say, “agreeing,” and neither did the Scriptural passage. Agreeing means there is a simpatico of thought, a convergence of belief, a recognition in another what we hold in ourselves. Agreeing means there is little or no difference. An agreement isn’t the same thing. It is a bond. It is arrived at by consent. It means there is a connection beneath all the differences, a tether line more basic than the need human beings have to be right and dwell with those who agree that they are right.

And agreements are so basic to human existence that we often do not even recognize them when they exist and even when we participate in them.

When we go to the movies for example we enter into an agreement: The filmmaker will create a world and we will live inside it for a few hours. It’s not a matter of agreeing with the world the filmmaker makes. This summer I saw the brilliant movie, A Beautiful Mind, a biographical drama starring Russell Crowe in the role of mathematician John Nash, an MIT professor who won the Nobel Prize in economics, although he suffers from schizophrenia. It was brilliant because of the twist on the agreement between filmmaker and film viewer. We are invited into John Nash’s world as he sees it, including the characters that come to form his world. The poet wrote that we do not inhabit the world but a picture of the world, and the picture of the world we live inside of with John Nash includes characters that are real only to him. As the film viewer you don’t know this. It’s part of his schizophrenia. But as the viewer you don’t know who is a character only in John Nash’s picture of the world, and who are the characters that inhabit the pictures of the world that the other characters are in agreement with. You see, human beings even have a general agreement as to what constitutes normal reality, the picture of world. The deeper problem of Nash’s mental illness is that he believes certain characters exist, while his wife and his colleagues believe they do not. And the tension of the movie involves the worlds human minds are capable of producing. Is there one certain belief about the picture of the world? Whose? As the viewer you are caught, because in a picture of the world based on certainty and singularity of belief you don’t know whom to side with. You are forced to confront a deeper truth than one based upon choosing only one picture of the world as completely and singularly true.

Discovering that deeper truth awaits two people who are being united in bonds of true love. The second reading this morning is one that I often use in weddings, as was the case yesterday when we had the privilege of witnessing the first marriage of two people in this young church’s life. I’ve heard it said many times that when two people marry, two become as one. That’s simply not true! Two don’t ever become one. Two separate identities don’t merge to form a single picture of the world. In fact if anything, when two are joined together a third entity is created, the marriage or the union, and its views and demands and needs. It is only those who are adept at fooling themselves who think that reciting vows means two people agree on all or even many things!

So many things in our material world are illusory to our eyes. We see two people in love and think they must be like one, reduced by their love to a single entity that sweetly but effectively devours individuality. But, love multiplies, it does not subtract. Because love is not of the material world. Our pictures of the world change and pass away, because so much of our world is not permanent. Jobs change, children grow up, parents die, we are sick and healthy, sorrowful and joyful, we become disillusioned and then become dreamy and starry eyed. Why even our beliefs about how the world is constituted, our most intimate certainties about the picture of the world, change. What is true, and lasting though, is spiritual. It is love. To live by love is, sometimes, the only truth to live by!

This is what this religious community is aimed towards. It is not the truth of a certain belief about God, Jesus, humanity, sin, death, or taxes! It is not the truth that was set in stone centuries before by minds that we should defer to because they lived before we do, and therefore must be wiser. It is not the truth of a church that claims eternal and infallible knowledge, or the truth that a dazzling personality proclaims with such charisma that it must be true. Wrote Unitarian Theodore Parker a century and a half ago is still true today: “The church which did for the fifth century, or the fifteenth, will not do for this. It must have our ideas, the smell of our ground, and have grown out of the religion in our soul.” This community is aimed towards living out an agreement, a covenant, that forms a bond of affection that is meant to spill over into the life of West Michigan: To walk together in relationship to one another, to our larger community, and to the transcending mystery of the universe. That the spirit in and amongst us might be liberated, and we experience love and give love away to others. In other words, our mission is to liberate and cultivate the human spirit so that all of humanity might be free to love.

That may or may not be the purpose of religious community as you have experienced in your life. The purpose of much of what passes for religious community is certainty of belief and conformity to that certainty, as the basis for fellowship and love. It’s been that way for centuries in the Western Christian tradition. It is not what Jesus taught. He said all the commandments could be reduced down to two: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. He said nothing about the theological beliefs a person had to adhere to, to warrant our love. He said nothing about the social or economic standing a person had to attain to justify our love. He said nothing about nationality, race, color, sexual orientation, or the myriad of ways the human family has divided itself into those worthy of love and those worthy of disdain. It’s one of the reasons why the early religious communities that arose following his death, made up predominantly of Jews with some Gentiles, were so persecuted by the Roman Empire. Anybody could join them! Slave or free, man or woman, wealthy or poor, Jew or Gentile or whatever, it made no difference. There was not the church doctrine as there would be centuries later, what we know today as Christian beliefs. You just had to enter into an agreement to love, which put one into a spiritual lineage traced to Jesus. That’s what the second reading is about. Beliefs are construct from the material world; the world that is transient and passes away as beliefs themselves do; the material world that so many people picture in so many different ways. Love, though, is of the spiritual. It alone is eternal. It’s like the cheese in the old children’s rhyme. When beliefs and certainties crumble, and even faith and hope fall away, it is love that stands alone!

This was the form of early Christianity. It wasn’t about Jesus being God, and those who didn’t believe so were condemned to everlasting hellfire! It wasn’t about living a moral and ethical life so pure that you end up a slave to all kinds of silly rules and laws. It was about the agreement to love. It was called then, “The Way.” Three hundred years after Jesus’ death, the Christian Church, by this time exclusively Gentile and no longer aware of or in touch with its Jewish roots and its own history, proclaimed Jesus was God, the exclusive Son of God, something Jesus himself, as a Jew, would never ever have claimed about himself. This became the doctrine of the Trinity, and is the form that most all of Christianity takes today. From those Church Councils of the early and mid 300’s came the idea that this was the only legitimate picture of the world and, therefore, the only basis for authentic religious community. There emerged the idea that religious community is one based on a commonly adhered to belief and doctrine, called the creed. From that moment on if you wanted to be part of a Christian religious community, you had to give up what you believed about the world, let go completely of all the experiences that formed your picture of the world that deviated from the Christian creed, and agree with the picture of the world this doctrine drew. In many cases, too many cases, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who disagreed with this picture of the world were put to death. The religion that had started out trying to live a communal ethic of love had became a religion that put people to death for believing in a different picture of the world.

That’s the irony of religious communities, and the tragedy of history. They can claim to hold to one thing, while their actions betray the very beliefs they claim to hold! Our churches and religious communities are no different. In too many of them religion is hushed, spirituality buried, and political liberalism tyrannizes the spirit in the name of religion. In too many of our churches the implicit agreement is that “the religious” is evil because it “oppressed me” somewhere else. We, too, are susceptible to betraying the spirit and being miserly and hypocritical towards it, and are protected only by remembering we are bound together by the ethic of love and the spiritual aim of our own and others’ liberation.

On these shores the ancestors of the Unitarians were the Puritans and the Pilgrims. They, too, were heirs of this understanding of religious community that placed a premium on the certainty of belief. But they initiated something new in the Christian tradition, the effects of which they themselves couldn’t have fathomed. Because what they did flew in the face of thousands of years of Christian orthodoxy and thousands of years of persecuting those who believed differently. Those Puritans and Pilgrims were no more “tolerant” of difference than the previous centuries were. But, they formed their religious community not around common belief, a creed, a common and certain and singular picture of what the world and existence was. The center of their religious community was a covenant, an agreement. As it was stated in one New England church of the early 1600’s, and became the standard saying for these covenantal declarations: “We do promise and bind ourselves one to another, to walk in the ways of God as they are made known to us.”

You couldn’t be an atheist and be in their religious community. You couldn’t be a Jew or a Buddhist or a Moslem or a Hindu either, because the God they promised to walk in the ways of was the traditional Christian God that is inflicted upon us to this day. But, you see, the core of their community was not common belief, but a promise. Like the vows between two people when they are joined. It was the promise “to walk together.” It was not a promise never to change but a promise that would guarantee that although individuals in the relationship would change, the promise to walk would not! It was not a promise to walk together just so long as they agree, because it was a bond of affection and not an agreeing. I don’t know whether they knew the distinction or not, but it didn’t take long for them to find out. This was a new form a religious community. Or, better still, it was the newest form of an old way of forming community, like those Jewish and Gentile communities that gathered following Jesus’ death. It was new because of the phrase, “the ways of God as they are made known to us.” That bit of genius means, of course, that over time we can, and may very well discern different things. We can change our pictures of the world. And we can do so without destroying or severing our bonds with one another. We, as individuals, can discern different pictures of the world. But that difference does not and can never separate us from one another. That is the covenant, the promise, the agreement, as sacred a vow made upon our sacred honor: We all hold different pictures of the world, if only slightly, and we are convinced our pictures are true ones. Some think theirs are the only true ones. But that does not separate us from one another. For, in our tradition, religious community, indeed the bond that exists among the human race, is formed by a promise, an agreement, a covenant, that all are born into. We will walk together, and seek to uphold one another, invigorate our moral sensibilities, share a deep bond of fellowship, bear one another’s burdens, stand beside one another during times of great suffering and trial, and witness this relationship to the world as the quintessential form of community that is religious. For this is a revelation of the implicit bonds that unite all men and women. We will endeavor not to forsake this bond, towards this community or the world. Because it is the connection that lies below the surface of all the religious differences and antagonisms that mark our world.

Twentieth century Jewish theologian Martin Buber called human being, the promise-making, promise-breaking, promise-remaking creature, and it is the purpose of this religious community to call all souls back to the most basic of all promises, the one creation offers us, to love all souls and by fulfilling that agreement, to be made whole and free.

In the movie, A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is put forth by the filmmaker as the film’s hero. And it’s true, that his struggle is to realize that the world is not pictured in the one and singular way he believed it must be, is heroic. In fact, his heroic struggle involves realizing it is a psychosis to insist the world be read in only one way. But, in a deeper sense, it is his wife, played by Jennifer Connelly, who is the real hero. She comes to realize her picture of the world does not agree with her husband’s. She discovers, in fact, that most people do not agree with her husband’s picture of the world, and that to the world, her husband’s picture is derived from mental illness.. And if she lived by the law of certainty of belief, she would leave him because his picture would be false to her. At one point in the movie she is sorely tempted to do so. Living with the knowledge that individuals are different is a mighty, mighty task; her situation as much as anyone’s. But, she chooses to follow the ethic of love. She chooses a deeper agreement than agreeing, and it is this deeper calling that proves to be the only thing in life that is real and true. She walks with him, and continues to walk with him, and this yields a love, an agreement, a covenant deeper, stronger, and more enduring than anything the mind can conjure. It is sacred. “Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind,” the character of John Nash says, “but an even greater gift is to discover a beautiful heart.” At the center of all existence is a heart, an agreement, a covenant, to walk in all the different ways of God, as they are made known to us. The agreement of existence is to walk in love and be free.

If you are looking for a religious community that offers a certainty of belief about God and Jesus and sin and death and humanity, I wish you well on your search. Frankly, I’ll be honest, that is not what our journey is about here. We don’t offer a certainty, only a promise. We don’t walk together seeking to agree on a certain and true and singular view of the world that was true yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We only offer a promise: If you are a religious seeker, and doubt is a part of your life as surely as is faith, and if you are looking for others who see life as an adventure of the spirit, and not as a secure port to which you have already arrived, than you may find here your religious home. This do we covenant to one another, to our larger community, and to the transcending mystery of the universe.

AMEN.

I call that mind free which masters the senses, and which recognizes its own reality and greatness; which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness. I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers; which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith and opens itself to light whencesoever it may come. I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstance; which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the Infinite Spirit. I call that mind free which does not cower to human opinion and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world. I call that mind free which does not mechanically copy the past, but which listens for new and higher monitions of conscience. I call that mind free which sets no bounds to its love; which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children. I call that mind free which no menace or peril can enthrall; which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself though all else be lost.

The Ideal Church will be a free congress of independent souls, and will be the thinker’s home. It will lead in the campaign for more truth rather than to indolently stand guard over some petty fragment of acquired truth. The student of science will handle no discoveries that it will not prize and indulge in no guesses that it will not respect. Oldest India and newest America will hold no gem of thought that will not be welcomed into its sacred scriptures. The skeptics will be the cowards who dare not exercise the reason God has given them. Over its portals no dogmatic test will be written to ward off an honest thinker or an earnest seeker. The Ideal Church will be founded on Reverence. One of its cornerstones will be the besetting presence of that Infinite Sanctity that it cannot escape. Given the freest thought, the widest outlook, and the most wholesome desire to helps one’s kind but wanting that sensitiveness to things divine, the soul is still deficient in character. Therefore, the Ideal Church must stand upon a grand emphasis of a great word: Unity. It will seek to welcome all, the low and high, poor and rich, unbeliever and believer. The time is coming when the church will have but one message to promulgate, namely: “Go, love with all thy heart, with all thy strength and with all they mind, and love thy neighbor as thyself.” For these Ethical Verities are as eternal as Deity.

I believe there is within every human being what can be called a religious impulse. It’s part of our nature. It is highly developed in some, barely distinguishable in others, and is often confused with compassion and ethical acts of goodness. It is most often confused with belief systems, with theologies and doctrines and dogma, the fruit of the religious impulse. Compassion and ethics, as well as theology, doctrine, and dogma are all derived from that impulse and are not synonymous with it. It has nothing to do with being pious and good. Those result from it. This religious impulse is the source of our loftiest, most breathtaking thoughts, ideals, and acts. This impulse is ignited in rare moments as a feeling, in the words of the father of Liberal Religion, 18^{th century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, a “sense for the unity of the original source of life… a divine unity and the eternal immutability of the world.” Two hundred years ago Schleiermacher could write that this religious impulse “is the natural and sworn foe of all narrow-mindedness and of all one-sidedness.” (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Friedrich Schleiermacher.) It is an individual’s deepest feelings of connection to existence and God. The religious impulse is something that organized religions often will smother because exercising it will compel an individual to speak freely and with no fear about what may contradict the interests of organized religion. We are trying, in religious community, to set up the conditions whereby the unique religious impulse within each one of you can be invigorated and understood, and become a guide to the future unfolding of your life.}

Last week I made the statement that in this religious community there are no theological beliefs that you have to hold. We are not organized around a central theological system of thought, or a creed, or a certain doctrine or dogma. What you do have to believe in is what holds this community together: a covenant, an agreement, which aims this community towards a bond of affection that is meant to liberate the life of the spirit in West Michigan: To walk together in relationship to one another, to our larger community, and to the transcending mystery of the universe. That we might freely experience love and give love away to others. In other words, our mission is to liberate and cultivate the human spirit so that human beings can fully manifest love. So, to be a part of this religious community you do have to believe in the idea of covenant as the highest organizing principle of religious community.

To be a part of this religious community you also have to believe in the Free Pew. To believe in the Free Pew is to place yourself and your life under a peculiar form of disciplined guidance. This disciplined guidance is designed to maintain the integrity of an individual’s unique religious impulse, while protecting the individual and the community from the worst forms of religious oppression, which halt the growth of the spirit by distorting compassion and love into tyranny.

Twenty years ago in seminary I took a preaching class that included men and women of various faith traditions. My best friend in the class, an Episcopal priest, was serving a parish and taking this class for his continuing education. One Monday afternoon he told me of an incident the day before. Following the worship service a parishioner had come up to him and confessed, “Father, I can no longer say the creed because I no longer believe it.” I asked him how he responded. “I told her, ‘Madam, you don’t have to believe the creed. You simply have to say it.’” We both agreed that this incident defined the boundary between our two different religious traditions and the difference between his understanding of the purpose of the church and mine.

My friend was showing compassion for his parishioner when he told her she didn’t have to believe the creed; she just had to say it. His compassion was for her eternal soul. And within the context of his tradition and his religious community he was demonstrating his compassion and extending it to the woman. But, from my tradition and within the context of this religious community, his compassion for her eternal soul yielded an opposite affect: tyranny. The religious impulse within her had somehow been liberated and he misunderstood the import of her account. It was a deep misunderstanding of the situation, not unlike Louis XIV of France in 1789, when a messenger delivered news of the fall of Bastille. Louis XIV exclaimed, “It is a revolt!”, whereupon the messenger responded with words Louis couldn’t understand. “No, Sir, it is a revolution.” My friend didn’t understand. His compassion, while real, would have the opposite effect to what it was meant to have! She wasn’t revolting against the creed. She had been grasped by a revolution!

It’s interesting that the word revolution wasn’t used in that sense before the time of Louis XIV. To talk of such upheaval was to say there was a revolt or a rebellion, but not a revolution. Revolution was a term from astronomy denoting the regular and predictable orbit of the heavenly spheres. They returned and, hence, completed their “revolution.” But in the latter 1700’s something changed; something new and novel appeared such that it needed a new word. Or, better still, an old word used to mean a new thing. And that change appeared through two historical events: the American and the French Revolutions.

The Founding thinkers of our own American Revolution did not see themselves as altering radically the way things are, but returning societal community to an older understanding. Society’s proper orbit was around what they called the natural rights of Man. The nature of Man was to be free, and it was only monarchies and oppressive tyrannies that distorted the liberty into which humanity was naturally created. And the French Revolution began in a similar way, in championing the idea of liberty, too. But the American Republic was formed as an experimental attempt to organize liberty into a community of freedom. Being liberated from tyranny and becoming organized to strengthen and extend freedom were two separate, though related steps. In France, though, the idea of taking liberty and transforming it into lasting freedom went askew. There were hordes of people in miserable poverty, and quickly the idea of freedom gave way to the idea of taking care of people’s needs; the social problem of poverty. Compassion replaced freedom, as the aim of humanity’s common life, and eventually destroyed both the prospect of freedom and the communal bonds that could insure its creation. Soon, in the name of compassion for those in miserable poverty, those who disagreed with the new government’s social policies were swiftly and unmercifully beheaded. It was an ultimate irony. Within institutions originally designed by the French to create freedom by sustaining the spirit of liberty, which was humanity’s birthright and had been invigorated by human experience, compassion began a Reign of Terror!

To many that come to this religious community for the first time, it is a revolution. It is not a revolt. It is not a rebellion. It is a revolution, an upheaval, a radically new thing, and a novelty that religion and freedom can coexist together. It is a liberation of sorts. But such a thing as liberation can quickly degenerate into something it is not, unless a community devotes itself to the disciplined forms that freedom needs to take. So that liberation can be towards establishing a community where the mind can genuinely and successively become free. This is the role of the Free Pew.

The Free Pew has been described as the existence in a religious community of the place where an individual can believe theologically anything that comes to mind. And this understanding is part of what the Free Pew means. The church does not regulate your thought and your belief by rewarding certain thoughts and punishing certain beliefs. But, that isn’t the larger meaning of the Free Pew. The Free Pew symbolizes a discipline of the community meant to preserve and strengthen the religious impulse within all souls. That is the aim of communal life here. And that is what makes our bonds of affection religious ones. You can think and believe anything theologically. But so can your neighbor. That’s the discipline and the larger meaning. In this community you are called to guard the Free Pew for your neighbor.

It is a discipline because no human being is content simply to experience the flowering of the religious impulse. It gushes forth in beliefs and actions we think are normative and right. It is human to do this. We take our experience and fashion an understanding of the world from it. Ralph Waldo Emerson described this, “Human beings see an arc, and assume the circle.”. We’re not certain our understandings are ultimately accurate, so we seek verification from others. We want to possess a right picture of the world. We seek others who assume the same circle. That’s how orthodoxies begin. Human beings take the religious impulse they have experienced, and fashion from it an impulse towards orthodoxy: beliefs about human beings, God, Jesus, Scripture, chosen people, Allah, which are deemed right and certain, and actions and lifestyles or orientations deemed to be godly. We join others in assuming the circle. Those who possess different theological beliefs and different pictures of the world, different circles, are deemed ungodly and defiled. And it slowly comes out of our compassion for others that we insist they see things and act upon their lives in ways identical to our own. The Episcopal priest was showing compassion for his parishioner when he told her she didn’t have to believe the creed; she just had to say it. His compassion for her grew out of the certainty of his belief system. I knew him to be a deeply compassionate believer. And to his religious understanding he was acting appropriately compassionate, calling her to disregard the revolution! And so, from the original liberation of the religious impulse, human beings begin to destroy the very impulse and idea that had come to be so powerful and authentic in their experience.

The discipline of the Free Pew is practiced in order to protect individuals from themselves by transforming an experience of the liberation of the religious impulse, into the enduring and ultimate reality of freedom. The discipline of the Free Pew is practiced in order to protect religious communities from supporting acts that stifle the expressions of the religious spirit under the cause of compassion! To love freedom within this covenanted community is to seek, protect, and maintain conditions whereby the spirit can liberate the lives of others in ways they uniquely experience it.

You can believe anything you want regardless of what religious community you’re in. That’s a given. You can simply keep that belief to yourself! But in this community, there is something greater than the given. Those who sit in these pews are called to fulfill creation by taking the community forming power that moves among human beings and fashion it to liberate the mind and the heart, and cultivate it into a freedom for all souls.

Somebody once asked me, “If the Free Pew was a form of the disciplined religious life in a Free Church, then what were its spiritual practices?” Some of the practices are obvious, and some idiosyncratic to certain Unitarian Churches. But from my experience, here are some of the practices of the Free Pew designed to protect us from our internal impulse to orthodoxy and keep our community free enough for each new person to discern the religious impulse within:

Instead of saying, “We don’t believe anything here,” or “You can believe anything here,” the discipline of saying something else: You have to believe in the Free Pew here. And then, explaining what that means about how we have to treat others to protect and deepen freedom as Ultimate, a gift from God.

The discipline of speaking up when someone has chided someone else for wearing religious jewelry, or told someone else you can’t say the word, “God” here. In other words, protecting for others the liberation of the religious impulse.

The discipline of entering the sanctuary in quietude so that each individual can prepare to listen to the religious impulse. Listening and heeding that impulse is harder work than any other kind!

When someone stands up to disrupt the service because he does not like what he is hearing from the pulpit, and doesn’t know the practices of this church. Someone needs guard the Free Pew by standing up and going over to him and gently and firmly escorting him out so that your fellow churchmen and women can continue to seek the spirit.

Educate yourself constantly and continually about all there is to know about human nature and existence, so that you can free your mind of error and cleanse your heart of all intentional and unintentional inclinations to evil. And accept that no belief carries a divine certainty and sanction, and that all good we discern is temporary and temporal.

There is a story of one of the jailed rebels of Tiananmen Square, a man named Gao Xin. Remember the Tiananmen Square incident, a little over ten years ago, an experience similar to the American or French Revolutions? Jailed in a 9X9 cell with seven others, Gao Xin recounted that the “Guards beat people every day and so many around me were executed.” Shackled, he needed a cellmate to pull his pants down so that he could go to the bathroom! “You wanted freedom,” said a guard to him, “Now we won’t even give you the freedom to move your hands.” But the religious impulse is stronger than the tyrannies of word and act. Gao Xin wrote poetry on toilet paper! That’s the religious impulse. Oppression cannot subdue it and manacles cannot destroy it. Whatever inside of him that yearned for freedom would express itself because it is of God. It is holy. Earlier on the square, when one student wore a headband reading, “democracy,” and stood near the “Goddess of Democracy,” a 27 foot tall, bleach white Chinese version of the Statue of Liberty, grasping a torch with both hands as if clinging to life itself, Gao Xin and his fellow revolutionaries implored a religious colleague of mine: “How do you do democracy?” How do you take the liberated spirit and aim it towards an enduring free community that can preserve and strengthen the free spirit and can outlast even our own impulses towards orthodoxy and tyranny? The origins of such community will not be in a government, or in religions with worn out creeds. Irreligion cannot do it; confused religions cannot either. Only a religion, which stands for human beings can, whose mission is to preserve and extend the besetting presence of that Infinite Sanctity, called the free spirit. Only a religion that takes as its sacred practice guarding the sanctity of the Free Pew can. It alone can take the religious impulse and free it towards community, and aim it towards the divine.

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, and possesses itself, though all else be lost. AMEN