Self culture was a common practice in the lovely world of nineteenth century Unitarianism. The term may seem a little strange to us. Self culture is, in a sense, something like what we think of as “personal growth” or “growing one’s soul.” And personal growth, just like self culture, is central to Unitarian Universalist religious life. Self culture and personal growth both urge education, personal reflection on beliefs and morals and the pursuit of authenticity. So our worship services are geared to accomplish these good things. We provide numerous opportunities for education and reflection across a very broad spectrum of tastes and inclinations. Thus has it ever been in Unitarian Universalist congregations.

There are elements that are common to what we ordinarily think of as personal growth and its precursor self culture. But there is also a very important discontinuity. Self culture as it was understood in the earliest generation of Unitarians had an ingredient which we lack today in our practice of personal growth. Tragically, that missing ingredient can make our own practice of personal growth problematic. Certainly we still learn things and reflect upon things. But once you can see the missing element it becomes clearer that our learnings and reflections can lose much of their force. So it is likely important to identify that missing element.

So what is the missing element? There is a bit of cultural history which must be digested in order to understand that which we lack.

The earliest Unitarians in America believed that each individual had been endowed by their creator with a unique palette of talents and interests. Developing those talents and interests was not believed to be merely a good idea. The gift came from God and we were obligated to grow our soul or fill out the framework with which we had been born. To do otherwise was an affront to the big guy, the One who one doth not dare annoy. Imagine, if you will, that this God is like a stern but devoted father who gathers his children around the dinner table each day and asks, “And what have you learned today?” Knowing the question will come, everyone thus makes sure they will have some kind of answer.

When Emerson wrote in the mid-nineteenth century he observed however, that the power of the stern Puritan Father God had become a spent force. People in his era, he felt, were not as fearful of nor as driven by the God who would brook no compromise. Rather, he felt that people’s real motivation was simple success in life. Indeed, at the time in American history the country was just beginning to feel its mercantile oats. Factories were just being built, trade was blossoming. And given the relative poverty of the young nation following the Revolutionary War who could argue with success? Well, Emerson did. He wondered if the soul of the nation had become entirely a slave to material well being—no matter the cost. He mourned the loss of the power of the Puritan Father God who had kept the American colonists’ minds concentrated on serious matters of faith and morals. But he also believed that such a deity could not be put back up onto its throne. So he sought instead to build self culture as a natural drive of the human species. It was not God who demanded obedience to his will but rather nature itself as a dispersed God which urged us onward. Our job as individual human beings was to remain attentive to the inner stirrings of the conscience which was deeply connected with that natural realm. When Emerson wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century about being true to yourself it was about a self that was embedded in the divine natural world.

Emerson was among the first in our culture to put a pin in the Biblical balloon. He was in part motivated by the looming discoveries of science but also because of what he experienced as the rampant hypocrisy among the faithful who claimed to be faithful interpreters of the Bible. Emerson was also among the first in American culture to become familiar with the texts of other religions, notably Hinduism. As has since become common knowledge, but at the time was very exotic knowledge, Emerson discovered that there was an entire continent of people who knew nothing about the supposedly universal truths of Biblical Christianity. Considering these challenges, Emerson sought to discover some kind of alternative version of an authoritative world view. He believed it would come from the world of nature and that our natural environment provided, in a sense, the text, the authority for what human beings were to be and to think. Nature was for Emerson an improvement upon the more parochial Biblical text.

The unfortunate part about Emerson is that his writings tend to be very opaque. He is not easy to read and even harder to understand. And so while the national culture has always maintained a certain level of affection for Emerson and the transcendentalists in general, his actual prescription for what could be authoritative for human culture was never all that widely adopted.

But there was yet another sense of fundamental reality, a text of sorts, that had become adopted by much of American society upon the demise of an exclusively Biblical culture. Charles Krauthammer correctly identified that cultural text in his column this past week. It was something we call “American Civil Religion.” Its God was a deist god, a generic all purpose god who had set the universe in motion at the beginning of time. From this perspective the world was a static entity and eminently knowable. Human culture existed for the purpose of rationally explaining the mechanics of the world and the mechanics of the human beings who lived upon it. That knowledge would help us thrive and design a human society that made sense given what we could know about the world.

Each of these three larger world views, Biblical, Emersonian, and American Civil Religion, can be thought of as a kind of curriculum that guided human understanding. And these curricula provided an extremely important element that was vital for the project of personal growth. Each provided a broadly conceived sense of what could be reliably known and understood. Each placed limits separating what was acceptable from what could be dismissed. The limitations set by the Biblical perspective are easiest to conceive—what’s in the actual text is acceptable. Anything that disagrees with that text is not. Now we frequently notice that almost everyone is very selective in their choice of texts to support arguments and we commonly think of that as a fault. But while the practice of textual proof may be riddled with errors the concept is still quite elegant. Biblicists will admit that they themselves may get it wrong but that there is a theoretically always a better understanding of the text just around the corner.

American Civil Religion also provided a distinction between what was acceptable and what was not. By and large, anything that was rational and logical was acceptable, anything that was judged to be irrational and illogical was not. Now it could also be said that reason and logic were sometimes used to support some amazingly irrational ideas. If you visit the Science Museum of Minnesota in Saint Paul you can see a display of an Automatic Electric Phrenometer. Phrenology was thought in the mid nineteenth century to be a serious scientific discipline by which character traits were supposedly determined by indexing the bumps on your skull. Seriously. It was a wildly popular scientific discipline for many decades. There are few, if any scientists who take phrenology seriously today, although on October 1 of 2007 the State of Michigan began a tax on phrenology services. But the point is, just like Biblical interpretation, errors in science or logic can be made but a better understanding is always just around the corner.

The role that these two world views played in personal growth can perhaps be most easily conceptualized if you think of them as a kind of college course. Let’s say the class was entitled “Your Life.” In the Biblical school they would hand you a Bible, perhaps some commentaries on the Bible. That is the material you would have to master in order to grow your soul. In the American Civil Religion school the books they would hand you might be greater in number but still not the entire library of possible books. The growth of your soul would follow upon your achieving some mastery of American political documents and writings such as the Federalist papers and scientific texts although perhaps of the popular kind such as written by Carl Sagan.

In each of these imaginary schools the students can have many spirited conversations because they share a large host of common assumptions and a sense of loyalty to their discipline. They may even disagree but the disagreements are not usually fatal because they share so much more in common. Of course the Biblicists and the Civil Religionists can’t really talk with each other because they believe they share almost nothing in common. They just avoid each other.

The important role that the curriculum plays for the students in each imaginary school becomes apparent when we compare these two with a third imaginary school. You walk into this third kind of class, “Your Life” and ask, “What should I read?” And the professor says, “Whatever you like.” Uh-oh. So it could be anything from Jane Austen to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. And you look around the room and notice that everyone is reading what they like. You might ask for clarification. “What am I supposed to learn?” The answer comes back, “Whatever you like.”

This third school is the real curriculum for our current efforts at personal growth. But because there is no description about what constitutes mastery it is really no curriculum at all. And this is what we lack in our current efforts for personal growth. There are no real authorities. Everything is provisional. What you think is important may be important to no one else. In this school everyone inhabits their own mental island. Conversations are difficult because you have no idea if the island you live on looks anything at all like the island someone else lives on. In this kind of environment we have a tendency to be a little defensive about our views and cautious in sharing them lest we jeopardize our job or relationships with our neighbors or our family. Really engaging with people with whom we disagree is so disagreeable that we just don’t do it. But that’s not a problem because - they don’t want to engage with us as well. But we still want others to know that we are not empty headed muffins so we are tempted to lob thought grenades, somewhat like mental bumper stickers, “Take that you bunch of ignoramuses.”

Well, growing your soul without a real curriculum is very very difficult. It is hard to notice that it is missing because, well, it is missing. But there are deep consequences which follow from its absence.

The first and most readily noticed consequence is that absent a curriculum there are no limitations regarding what we need to understand to grow our soul. We are responsible for knowing everything and everything is probably very important. We each feel there is an unending list of potential demands upon our time and ingenuity. It’s much as Judith Viorst described in her poem “Self Improvement.” There are an infinite number of diet prescriptions to follow, self help programs to adopt, books to read, exercise regimens to follow, medical advice to heed, professional journals to read, investment tips to pursue, therapies to seek.... It is impossible to know when you have gotten it “right,” because there is no “right” to be gotten.

Viorst, of course, makes it all seem rather humorous, and it would be if all that mattered was simply finding the will to at some point scream out, “Enough. I’m going to eat this donut if it kills me!” And it probably will—or not.

Even so, making choices among the infinite supply of possibilities would be much easier if it weren’t for the presence of other people. The fact that we do have to live with other people even if we are on separate mental islands creates another suite of unfortunate consequences. There is the constant fact of competition as a hallmark of our society. Intense competition exists in every facet of life and is fueled by such very real desires as not wanting to look like a fool or not lose your job or your spouse or your house. We have to keep ourselves buffed and toned in so many ways lest we lose out to the competition. So we are understandably reluctant to stop the infinite search for total personal growth. There is a current Cadillac commercial which brilliantly captures the spirit of our age. One line in the script, spoken forlornly, tells about your being individual, the nail that sticks out, only to get hammered down by the competition. Sigh. Or the commercial continues—you can be the hammer! Cue Led Zeppelin music and off the driver roars in victory! Yeah, be the hammer! In a world in which we are all encouraged to be the hammer we find ourselves surrounded by an unrelenting aggressive pursuit for—what? To get a Caddie?

There are numerous other consequences but one final one I wish to mention concerns our apparent inability to find solutions to solve our collective problems as a society. In a society in which there is no common agreement about a life curriculum everyone is thus free to follow their inner muse wherever it may lead. This means that everyone is an expert and everyone feels entitled to their opinion. Entitled in fact or not, the sentiment makes disagreement almost impossible to navigate.

To give you an recent example of how common this phenomenon has become we need look no further than the recent survey we conducted here. The answers that people gave reflected the usual very broad spectrum that one will find in almost any Unitarian Universalist congregation, particularly when it comes to opinions about worship. There are people who hate hymns and people who love hymns, there are people who like the sermons, there are people who don’t like the sermons. There are people who want greater sobriety, there are people who want greater expressiveness. There are people who want sermons to focus on intellectual matters, there are people who want them to focus on spiritual matters. Some people find intellectuality very spiritual, others think intellectuality and spirituality are very distinct. Some people want the sermon to be about overcoming personal ills, others only want sermons about the ills of the world.

Suppose there was a different sort of question: What is the correct number of hymns for Unitarian Universalist worship? What is the correct amount of sobriety/expressiveness, intellectuality/spirituality, etc.? I suspect the only real answer that any of us could give to this sort of question is, “The amount that I prefer.” Unfortunately our preferences, while they are real, are not really translatable for each other. So we remain, each with our distinctive opinions, with no real way to negotiate the differences. The best we can manage is a certain amount of polite forbearance and patience with each other. “Okay, you got the hymn ‘God of Grace and God of Glory’ last week. This week, my turn and I want ‘Let It Be a Dance We Do’ cha cha cha.”

But serial satisfaction of mutually exclusive preferences does not a worshiping congregation make. Yet is it really the case that we cannot find some kind of common ground? Perhaps we should just settle on one end of the spectrum or the other and those who disagree can just go elsewhere? I can assure you that if we took that route, in any particular direction, we would lose some perfectly amazing wonderful people.

There is yet another option which I would encourage us to pursue, which would be to devise a curriculum appropriate for the age in which we find ourselves. The hallmark for success in creating that curriculum would be its description of a reality that transcends our differences. Such a curriculum would support our recognition that even as we may differ in important ways, there is still yet a higher calling which encourages us to find support with one another in a mutual search for a deeper and more profound understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.

Is such a curriculum possible? Of course. You may have noticed that there is a dangling sermon particle. I have not done more than introduce the outline for Emerson’s conception of self-culture. And he, I believe is essential to our future. I am mindful of the fact that, as it was said by a few in the survey “sermons are sometimes too long.” So we will not explicate him now—that will have to wait until after the new year. But Emerson’s insights are fundamental for us and astonishingly enough, that which he described about human reality over 150 years ago has been deeply confirmed by very recent advances in the scientific study of human consciousness. From that perspective it turns out that there is a surprising and amazing vision of our future, a very good future, which awaits us.