I, am a Universalist

I made this up. Entirely. It is the result of a lot of personal thought and study. I have been a member of the LDS church for my whole life and I'm starting to drift away from it a little bit. It is what I believe. I am the only Universalist. Although apparently there is a school of thought on Wikipedia that shares the name. I was unaware of this before coining the phrase.

This essay takes the format of somebody asking me what I believe. It is a short story/essay/opinion piece. It was not my intention to offend anyone.

When people find out I don’t attend any particular church, they do one of two things. The first is shake their heads in disbelief, and the second is to ask

“Why not?”

My honest answer is that I really don’t enjoy the experience.

“You feel the spirit though, and there are so many nice people!”

“No,” I say “The kind of politics you find at church are a particular dreary blend of equal parts overly ambitious and sorrowfully pathetic. It reminds me of Congress. As for the spirit, it is little more than emotional awe. We feel it at the onset of something beyond the scope or our comprehension. Or something that is seemingly so.”

“So you still believe in god, right? You have a problem with the people but you still believe in the gospel?”

“The people will always be the lesser part of any institution. Since the point of an organization is to group people together to achieve a higher purpose. Charities, fortune 500 companies, you name it. I don’t take issue with the holy gospel because the people are often haughty, rude, and in your face about their beliefs. Don’t take this the wrong way and get all offended. I’m not saying everyone at church is a social juggernaut with a cult following and a spot on the music program every other month. There are wonderful people at church. Nice people who genuinely care about the wellbeing of their fellow members. Their motives are pure, and through them I have received several hot meals and learned a great deal about myself. The people then are not my primary concern with church attendance.”

Here I pause and wait for them to ask what my primary concern is.

“So what is your primary concern?”

“Treating something that is imperfect, as the be all and end all of our existence as sentient beings. It is a cure-all. A wonder drug. Something you might see advertised on QXC. All the bells and whistles of our mortal existence supposedly explained by a textbook called the bible. The dreams and emotions and feelings of the human heart trivialized and simplified by the supposed miracle of prayer. The gospel seems to be treated as an infallible entity that bows to no other, and takes its place as unquestionable master of the universe and the complex laws that govern her.”

“How do you know that it is not?”

“Have you witnessed with your own two eyes, perfection in its truest form?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Is anything truly perfect? Without blemish, without mistake, without error? Perfection is escapist. It is what we aspire to because we have so many problems buried in our troubled minds. We are imperfect beings.Take our mortality, for instance. A perfect being would not die because it would end its perfection, rendering it imperfect.That would be a mistake, and perfect beings are not capable of mistakes. Anything that is mortal is not perfect, and what are we? Mortals. What have we invented for centuries? Stories, and our mortality, and our humanity is conveyed in all of these stories. What is your gospel but a collection of stories enhanced by supposed divine intervention? I will not comment on the existence of god. I am not qualified to do so. I know at least one thing. I still believe that magic exists, because what we call miracles. Extraordinary events that defy explanation do happen. Truths that are stranger than fiction are magical to me. Who knows if the cause of them is divine or otherwise. Our perceptions are all colored by individual experience and complex hidden biology. Or genetics. Things beyond the scope of Proverbs. Only partially explained by science. Science to me is a tool for exploring our world, but it also is imperfect. The moment we subject ourselves to worshipping any entity, we lose something. We lose something to that entity that we deserve to have for the betterment of our own self. So as a man who believes still in magic, and does not worship science, and also does not attend church. What on Earth do I believe?”

Here I pause for a moment and allow them to digest what I have put forth.

“So... They say after a moment, what is it that you believe? Surely it is not in nothing. There is not any hope in nothing.”

“I like to call myself a ‘Universalist.’”

“What do they believe?”

“We believe in the stars in the sky at night. The hum of the wings of a dragonfly. The head of a baby emerging, fresh life, from a mother’s womb. The miracles are all around us. We believe in perception, in love, in understanding and learning. In smiles, laughter, sadness, growth. In the cycle of life. The snow, the rain fall. . Universalists believe most of all, and hold sacred above everything memory, experience, emotion, and the way through which we convey these feelings is the art of poetry, of storytelling. Dark nights around a campfire, huddled together against impending darkness.Grandpa with all his wisdom sits on a charred log telling us of ghosts, monsters, demons, of life, of dark. A mother reads to her young son, in muted candlelight from a storybook that her mother read to her.Where do Universalists worship? What is our great synagogue, our chapel, our mountainous cathedral? It is the library, where else could we go but to the center, the compendium of knowledge accrued through thousands of years of human experience?

A universalist does not belong in a church where acceptance is expected as unconditional because they see it as their right to question everything. Most of all Universalists understand the importance of scale. That is the reason we call ourselves Universalists. We gaze into the stars, into the heart of the cosmos, and we see how much we do not know. How much we do not see. Endless galaxies, billowing nebulae, stars shining ten times the brightness of our own blessed sun. We understand that we are a pixel, a speck, a quirk, a mote of dust suspended in orbit in our own little corner of a tiny galaxy.

We find solace in our relationships with other humans. In peace. In tranquility and mediation. In great glorious music that carries with it a message of its own. In tears, hugs, gentle kisses. We claim no dominion over our fellow man, we have morals simply because it is right. It is right and proper to help a friend in need and expect no returns. It is right to serve a fellow man, and be in service of that man, and not in the service of a being buried unseen far above us. If god is real he will smile upon us in service of one another. If he is not, the man in need will still have his needs met.”

“What of death? Do you fear death? Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“Death, to us, is simply the next step. An unsolvable mystery that must be experienced to be fully understood. It s the next great adventure. Another step in a long journey. Death is very sad to us. It marks the end of human experience. The loss of so many poignant memories. If Universalists were in possession of unlimited resources we might make it a tradition to launch our dead into deep space in a sealed rocketship. So that they may be finally reunited, and to surf about forever in the dreams they felt when they looked up at night, or meditated alone in the forest at midday. As for an afterlife, all that may be confirmed of it, is the legacy that is left when we perish. The children, the grandchildren, our work, whatever mortal footprint we leave in the muddy ground back home.”

“What do Universalists believe about mistakes, repentance. You argue against perfection, and yet you seem to have a high standard among your people.”

‘As of now Universalism has been spoken of as if there were more than one member. In reality, I am the only one. I am not on a mission to proselyte, to set out on a journey across the Earth to convince everyone that my worldview is the correct one. I am the only Universalist I know of. At least the only one called such a thing. I have one commandment. It is the rule by which I exist. It is to feel. To feel to the fullest, and through those feelings to create memories that act as a shield to time and decay, sickness and disease. To feel the love of my wife, my children, my friends. To feel the wind in my hair, the sun on my back. To feel the taste of food in my mouth. To love art, to love poetry, stories, music, and being alive. To always be learning something new. What more can I hope for but to feel happiness? That is, after all, the base of most human action. To seek out happiness in whatever form and clutch it to our breasts in hopes that it will become permanently affixed to us. It will slip away though, and we will need to search for it once more. Such is the way of the universe, and the lives of those spent tucked in its rolling infinity.”

“I see.” They say, but they really don’t. Being a Universalist requires accepting unknowables as unknowable. To understand that there are not answers to be had to some questions.

Universalists understand that you can always trust truth, if you can’t, then it is no longer truth. This is always true. The question lies in determining exactly what is true, and what isn’t. Some things may appear to be true, or not true upon our first impression of them, but it is only upon our feeling or experiencing of them that we may know exactly what is and is not real or true.

I find it difficult to trust what another person has felt, because feeling is unique. We define happiness the same way but do not feel it in the same way, and it is not brought on by the same things (although some people may share certain aspects of our happiness).

Another important thing to consider is that partial truths may exist as well, and may be difficult to discern from the lies they are buried in.

So, truth is a concept that must be discovered through effort, by whomever wishes to discover it. It will be felt by the so-called “truth explorer”, and when it is, they will know it is so because it will resonate in a way few other things can. They will trust it because they have experienced it, and they will know very strongly and deeply within themselves that it cannot be false.

The particularly religious call this concept “faith.” Upon reading this passage they will think. I have felt God. I know that God is there, and he has touched my life in so many ways. I have said before that I can make no claim on the existence of God. My feelings on that issue are my own, and my experience in search of that God color those feelings. Perhaps God has touched your life. In that case you have a feeling that you define as the truth of God, and by extension the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is your truth, and it is yours through experience and yours alone. I cannot base my existence on the beliefs of others. My personal efforts to find God have not been conclusive. I turned to Universalism because it was a truth that I felt very deeply inside myself. I choose to gaze into the vastness of the Universe and think how tiny I am. How I am such a small part of its vastness. It is truly a humbling and awe-inspiring feeling to realize how petty my deepest concerns and worries are when looked at through a cosmic lens. Perhaps God stares back. If he does then I must congratulate him for existing, if he does not then I am no more unhappy for it. That is the beauty of being a Universalist. It inspires in me a desire to appreciate everything for what it really is. To love the little things, all the more.

It is what I believe, and who I am now. After all, shouldn’t our deepest beliefs be a reflection of ourselves?