Last weekend, as part of the parents' weekend festivities at The Citadel, where my step-son, Bobby, attends school, Karen and I attended the football game, in which the Citadel Bulldogs defeated the Western Carolina Catamounts in overtime, 30-27, and where I had an epiphany regarding Unitarian Universalism and Paganism. It is not often that I have an epiphany at a football game, but I did last week.

        Even if you never have attended a major sporting event, you probably know what tailgating is.  Hours before the big game, fans set up awnings and grills and coolers and party until it is time to go into the stadium. Many of these are informal-people just claim sections of parking lots behind and in-between cars.  Many of them are well-organized. You can see row after row of big tents for alumni groups, fraternities and sororities, and business groups. Of course, some of these tailgating parties can be pretty elite-they charge big bucks and require special passes. Still, as the appointed hour approaches, everyone fills into the stadium and all these little groups become one-or at least one for each team: one cheering section, one spirit, one people.  Then, after the game, if not after the after-party, everyone goes their separate ways again.

        The Sunday morning service is our opportunity to come together each week as one spirit, one people, and one faith tradition.  If UUs collectively were to start tailgating before services, which is a fascinating idea by the way, there would be a tent for the atheists and the Christians and the Jews and the Buddhists and so on. And there would be a tent for all the people who object to the idea of being labeled as part of someone else's tent. And, there would be a tent for the Pagans. Indeed, among the officially recognized affiliate groups of the Unitarian Universalist Association, there is the UU Christian Fellowship, the Conservative Form for Unitarian Universalists (it's a small group), Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness, and the Covenant of UU Pagans, otherwise referred to as CUUPS. Before I focus on paganism, though, I want to finish this illustration of how it is that we UUs are able to celebrate both unity and diversity.

        We are united in our covenant to promote and affirm the principles and sources of Unitarian Universalism.  We've always thought it more important to know what they mean than to recite them word for word, and to be honest, I doubt I could do that. We believe that we can allow each of us to express the meaning of our principles in his or her own words without compromising our faith. That's why we remain creedless. History teaches us that that it is the very effort at conformity, the insistence on everyone agreeing to be the same, that produces the most division. So, although you may say it differently, I humbly suggest that what draws us together as one spirit, not just on Sunday mornings, but in all of our daily lives, among other things, is our commitment to religious freedom, to full inclusion in our society, and to the use of reason in moral decision making.  Like the football game, we have enemies. We unite not just in our affirmation of our principles, but to defend ourselves and others from those who would give public benefits or burdens based on religious beliefs, those who would exclude from our society those who differ from us on any number of grounds but which I may summarize by saying families that look different from theirs and those who would corrupt knowledge itself by replacing the standards of science with the standards of a particular belief system.

        All of these things that we affirm and defend still leave a lot of room for differences among us on the nature of the ultimate reality and of humankind.  Our commitment to religious freedom is not something we embrace just for the sake of getting along, though that's a pretty good reason. Rooted in the substance of our shared faith as Unitarian Universalists is our belief that truth transcends religion, that no faith group has an exclusive claim to revelation.  So, we insist that truth may be revealed from a variety of sources, and we have attempted to describe them with the sources printed in our hymnals on the unnumbered page after the title page. The first of these sources is our own direct experience. You see the others there: prophetic words and deeds, wisdom from the world's traditions, Jewish and Christian teachings, and Humanist teachings. There's one missing there because it was adopted by the General Assembly of the UUA after the hymnal was printed in 1993, and that is "Spiritual teachings of the Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature."  That was added to the by-laws of the UUA in 1995.

        Pagan comes from a Latin word that means "country dweller" and came into common usage as a religious term when Christians used it to describe everyone who was not Christian or Jewish. For the most part, that meant followers of the Greek and Roman religions and their pantheon of gods who are so familiar to us-Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Mars, and so forth. Eventually, this term also came to describe the Celtic religion.  The Celts were a people who emigrated from Eastern Europe into Northern France, the British Isles, and Ireland over 2000 years ago. As the Roman Empire expanded, the Celts eventually were pushed farther and farther north and by the year 43, when the Romans completed the conquest of Britain, they were located almost exclusively in Ireland.  They thrived there until St. Patrick brought Roman Catholicism to Ireland in the 9th century.  Arguably, that marks the end of what scholars call classical paganism. Besides Halloween, which I'll discuss in a few moments, we also owe the Celts for the practice of throwing salt over one's shoulder and kissing under mistletoe.

        In the epistles of the Christian testament, pagan is used interchangeably with heathen to refer to any non-believer. By that standard, of course, even Hindus which had been around for 4000 years and Buddhists, which had been around for 500 years would qualify as pagans. However, that would be taking the term out of context.  To distinguish pagans from other historical religions-and by historical religions, I mean those the enduring faith traditions that have written texts-the term pagan over time has come to describe religions that are polytheistic (which includes both masculine and feminine deities) and nature-based. That is, the stars and planets and the elements of nature-earth, wind, water, and fire-are considered divine and there are rituals intended to honor the elements of the cosmos and the planet earth.  Arguably, the term pagan today may be applied to Native Americans, African tribes, and Australian aborigines. Because the word pagan, however, is so identified with the Celts and has such a negative context within the dominant Christian culture, we now use the phrase earth-centered traditions to describe religious systems tied to nature and the cosmos. So, don't be caught off-guard if people use these terms interchangeably or incorrectly. Earth-centered traditions also are referred to as primal religions because they came first; they preceded by tens of thousands of years the historical religions that endure today.

        More important than the labels is our recognition of the contribution to our faith as Unitarian Universalists and to our Western culture in general of these traditions that honor nature and the cosmos. In terms of belief and practice, there hardly is any part of the world's historical religions that is not adapted from earth-centered traditions.

        As some of you may remember, last December I gave a sermon that discussed at length the relationship between the many rituals and practice associated with Christmas that are, in fact, pagan in origin. In particular, I noted that the Catholic church created Christmas when it did to coincide and eventually to co-opt the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Likewise, the celebration of All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day on November 2 was created by the church to co-opt the Celtic holiday of Samhain (sow-en) which is not spelled anything like it sounds, it is spelled S A M H A I N.  

        The Celts had four major festivals, each tied to a season. Samhain was celebrated on October 31 and marked the new year. Though we associate winter with death and dying, that was not the case in the pagan traditions. The winter solstice was a time of celebration of new life because it marked the time when the days began to grow longer as the Sun made its return. It was autumn with its falling leaves and brown grass that was associated with death, and it was for the purpose of honoring the dead that the Celts celebrated Samhain. The Celts believed that, during the days around October 31, the gates between the living and the dead were opened, and they went both ways.  Ghosts and spirits from beyond could come back to haunt the living and the living could communicate with the dead.  

        To compete with this holiday, the Church moved All Saints Day, a feast day to honor martyrs and saints, from its original date on May 13 to November 1. In Old English, it was called All Hallows Day, which meant that Samhain then was on all hallows eve, which is where we get Halloween.

        Halloween and All Saints Day share much in common. Because a sense of identity is a common human yearning, the remembering of ancestors is very much an attribute that all of us share, though we may enact it in very different ways. One of the differences between modern humans and proto-humans or other animals is the burying of the dead with some kind of ceremony. Anthropologists date the earliest graves to 80,000 b.c.e.  There are cave paintings of ritual burials that date back to 15,000 b.c.e.  Thus, the ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust reference in the bible says what primal religions had been saying for thousands of years.  

        This, of course, is not the only thing the historical religions adapted from the earth-centered religions.  Another is the idea that the earth is subject to the powers of gods up in the heavens and that these gods descend from heaven and interact with humankind.  One of the misconceptions about earth-centered traditions is that they worshiped objects in nature as gods themselves. Keep in mind that I'm painting with a broad brush here and there may be exceptions, but more often, these traditions associated elements of nature with gods up in the heavens. In the Greek religion, Poseidon was the god of the sea, and the sea was divine in the sense that it belonged to a god, but the sea itself was not god and Poseidon himself lived in the cosmos.  That kind of relationship is typical of Native American, Celtic and Aboriginal religions.

        As I noted, though, these gods typically did not stay up in the heavens. In the Roman and Greek religions, these gods often mated with humans to give us so-called demi-gods-half gods. The emperor Augustus was the product of such a divine marriage, and Romans considered him divine. At the time of Jesus and the early church, the coins of the realm showed a divine Augustus ascending into heaven to be at the right hand of their gods. You see the same thing in the ancient Egyptian religions in the story of Osiris and Isis. So, the idea of a divine savior descending from the heavens and assuming human form crosses almost all cultural and religious lines.

        As a brief aside, I am going to go out on a limb here and say something to which I know some of my Christian friends will disagree. I hope we can do this respectfully, though, and true to the spirit that faith is strengthened by such challenges. In my humble opinion, most of the divisions within the Christian faith and most of the violence those divisions have caused are related to differences about Jesus and not what he taught. I respectfully suggest that the stories about Jesus-his birth, death, and resurrection-are interpretations of the historical person rooted in the pagan traditions that dominated the culture in that era. Further, though the institutional church certainly would disagree with this, I respectfully suggest that one is no less a Christian for acknowledging that and centering one's faith on the teachings and the life of Jesus.  On the other hand, and this is for my secular, if not anti-religious, friends, just because we may with our modern sensibilities dismiss the miracle stories and the doctrines about the person of Jesus, it does not mean that the meek will not inherit the earth, that peacemakers are not to be blessed or that we will not be judged in some way for how we treat the least among us. To my non-Christian friends, and especially to those wounded by those claiming to be Christians, beyond the elements of the tradition that we simply cannot believe, there is in the Christian faith a message of hope, reconciliation, and love that can deeply enrich our lives.  That's the end of that little aside. Let me return to paganism, which also has elements than can deeply enrich our lives.

        Another of the attributes of all humankind is the belief in an unseen transcendent power.  It may be beyond the sky or in the wind, but it is unseen and not subject to human will.  To my hardcore secular humanist friends, I respectfully suggest that you, too, believe in unseen transcendent powers. Gravity is one. Gravity is a concept. When you release an object and it falls to the ground, you are observing the effects of gravity. Gravity, itself, though, is not something that you can perceive and it is not subject to human will. Arguably, all of nature, including the essence of the cycle of life and death, is composed on unseen transcendent powers.

        The earth-centered traditions understood the importance of honoring the relationship between humankind and these transcendent powers.  The religions of Abraham-Judaism, Christianity and Islam-have God stopping the Sun to give the Hebrew people more time during the battle of Jericho and parting the Red Sea to allow Moses and his people to escape the Egyptians.  These are distinctly different ways of imagining the relationship between creator and creation.

         Now, jump ahead and think about how the destruction of the wetlands over many generations compounded the tragedy of hurricane Katrina. At one end of the spectrum you had the far-right evangelists proclaiming Katrina to be the wrath of a vengeful God for the all of those sinners in New Orleans, which had to leave the people of Alabama and Mississippi wondering just how good God's aim is. I suspect for most of us here, that explanation doesn't resonate.  For others, though, it was an easily predictable event, something that can be reduced to a good computer model.

        I humbly suggest that the earth-centered traditions show us another response. It does not require that we abandon the scientific process or a belief in a supreme, creator God, however you may fit in there.  What they teach us is the interconnectedness of humankind, the planet earth, and the rest of the cosmos. It is possible without worshiping the wind or water to show them reverence.  It does not diminish our faith in the human capacity for change and for good to acknowledge that there are powers beyond us that are beyond our control.  With respect to the world in which we live and must share with every other living thing, a little humility may do us a lot of good.

        To sum up, whether you are a secular humanist, a theist, a mystic or some combination of those and other traditions, the earth-centered traditions may strengthen your faith.  More important than particular beliefs and practices is the recognition in the earth-centered traditions that all humans have the same yearnings: to acknowledge the transcendent, to relate to the world in which we live, to create an identity through an awareness of both our ancestors and descendents. If we can see how the great enduring religions of the world all adapted so many of their beliefs and practices from the primal religions, we can find the common ground that will allow us to live together in peace, nurturing the planet that sustains us all and honoring the practices that give the varied peoples of this earth their own sense of identity and purpose.

        May it always be so,

        Blessed be.