A Descent into Hell

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

March 29, 2009

A couple of months ago, as I was walking from my car into the church, I happened upon several church members who were meeting with a contractor, discussing replacement of the windows around Fellowship Hall. I stopped briefly to talk with them, and Bob McClennen introduced me to Jim, the contractor. I learned a little about composites and vinyl and wood windows, and found Jim to be a very gregarious man who obviously loved his work. As I was about to take my leave, I heard Jim comment on the color of our window frames, the entry to the church and our cupola over the sanctuary. "I'm surprised to see a church use so much red," he told us. When I asked him why, he said, "because that's the devil's color." We all got a good chuckle out of that, and I assured him there was nothing to worry about, because "we don't believe in the devil."

We don't believe in the devil. That's probably about as clear a theological statement as we can make as Unitarian Universalists. I've never met anyone in our churches who believes in the existence of Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, demons, or any other supernatural being who is the manifestation of evil. Or at least no one who's talked about it. Perhaps this is the one, great, unifying principle in Unitarian Universalism, the one thing we can all agree on! There is no devil.

I say that jokingly, because as Unitarian Universalists we struggle mightily to find our common ground. But it's also true that our Universalist roots run deep in our churches. As Universalists, we believe that if God, in fact, exists God is good and would never create human beings just to sentence them to eternal punishment when they die. The classic formulation of Universalism is that "all are saved," we believe in the universal salvation of all. John Murray, one of the founders of the Universalist branch of our faith implored ministers to "Give [people] not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God." Thomas Starr King, an ardent Universalist and a critic of Unitarians once said, "Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them… and Unitarians believe they are too good to be damned." Even our 19th century Unitarian forebears, in their quest to articulate the beliefs that bound them together, adopted a message that was strongly Universalist. It was Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke who famously said in 1886 that Unitarians agree on five points: "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of human development in all worlds, or, the progress of mankind onward and upward forever."^[1] This Universalist heritage of ours finds expression today in our Unitarian Universalist Principles, the first of which states that we affirm and promote "the inherent worth and dignity of each individual."

These words, "the inherent worth and dignity of each individual," roll easily off our tongues, and we're fond of saying in our Unitarian Universalist churches that "all are welcome, all the time." It's true that we cast a broad net, that we pitch a wide tent. It's one of the reasons that I was called to our faith in the first place, and one of the principles that led me to dedicate my life to it. But I am also concerned about our First Principle. I'm concerned that what happens with our bold assertion of the inherent worth and dignity of every person is that we can be lulled into an overly optimistic view of human nature and the world. We have been accused, and I think rightly so, of being a faith that views the world through rose-colored stained glass. It was no less than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who explained that he did not join the Unitarian church, despite its commitment to freedom and justice. Dr. King said that the liberal church was "all too sentimental concerning human nature, and that it leaned toward a false idealism. I also came to see," he wrote, "that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin."^[2]

What is it that we mean when we say we promote and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person? Are we expressing a faith and confidence in "the progress of humankind, onward and upward forever?" Or are we using this principle to turn and to keep a blind eye to the darker angels of our nature? Do we believe that everyone has inherent worth and dignity, or do we want to believe that? Is it a statement of faith that could somehow, someday, possibly be true? Is our inherent worth and dignity something that can be lost, something that can be forfeited by virtue of our actions? What of the child molester or the domestic abuser? The rapist or the murderer? Do they have inherent worth and dignity? Like Dr. King, I am concerned that we Unitarian Universalists have an underdeveloped theology of sin and evil. That we want very badly for our first principle to be true, but that deep down we don't really believe it and we don't know what to do with that internal conflict. While our principles "challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love," they don't say much about confronting the evil in the person sitting next to us, or the evil inside ourselves. What Anthony David called in today's reading "our inner ape."

When I was in Washington a few weeks ago, I made my first visit to the National Holocaust Museum. Entering the lobby, you're greeted by the diffuse light of a vaulted atrium that's three stories high. Light and air and brick and steel abound. This could just as easily be the foyer of a modern office building, you think to yourself, as you're handed an identity card and ushered onto an elevator that whisks you up to the top floor. Exiting the elevator, your breath catches in your throat as there, on the opposite wall, is a black and white photograph the size of a large living room wall. A photo taken shortly after the liberation of one of the camps. You are suddenly disoriented, almost dizzy, and there doesn't seem to be enough air in the large room.

Moving away from that stark image, you find yourself in more familiar territorty. An exhibit that explains the Nazi rise to power after World War I. The political and social upheavals in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's. Hitler's brilliant campaign to become Chancellor. You can breathe again, because you're back to a history lesson. From there you learn about how the Nazi's sought and gained control of the media, and you marvel at how they spread their doctrine of hate through every layer of society, from the oldest to the very youngest. Book burnings, mass rallys, nationalist slogans. With their propaganda machine firmly in place, they begin to single out German Jews. Their businesses are boycotted. They are required to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothing. And then comes Kristallnacht, when marauding bands of Nazis destroy Jewish businesses and terrorize the population. Now they've moved from anti-Semitism to active persecution. You know what's coming, and you wish desperately that it weren't so.

And then, a brief respite. You enter a skylighted walkway between exhibits, and realize you've been holding your breath. The catwalk leads you into a large, square vertical space that runs up as high as the skylights and all the way down to the ground floor. And the walls are covered with photographs. This is the "Tower of Faces." Pictures taken of every day life in a small village in Lithuania, dating back to the first days of photography. These are the faces of the village of Eišišk?s, a predominantly Jewish village that traced its heritage back to the 12th century, one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe. You see pictures of couples on their wedding day. Families enjoying picnics. Women working in kitchens. Children in formal gowns and in muddy shoes. Normal, everyday life.

And then you forge ahead, descending down a flight of stairs to the second level. Here you see artifacts from the Polish ghettos, where thousands of Jews were kept like so many animals in a zoo. Except they weren't given any food, or sanitation, or water. Things are getting worse. You can feel it, and the evidence is right in front of you, staring you back in the face. This part of the exhibition traces the military conquests of the Nazi regime, the vast territories it usurps. You see the reach of the killing machine. The desperation of those trapped in the inferno. A ship that carries Jewish refugees to Cuba, but is denied entry. That tries to dock and deliver its precious cargo in the United States, and England and Belgium, but is turned back at every port. You shake your head in disbelief.

Another stairway leads you downward again, your descent into Hell now inescapable. Pictures of mass graves, filled with the men and the women who dug them before they were slaughtered. The pathway leads you into a boxcar, and you stand there with your eyes closed, feeling the rough wool of the hundreds of others from your village rubbing against you, no room to sit down, the stench of human waste and fear and death overpowering you. You open your eyes and flee, knowing that others didn't have this option seventy years ago. Now, you're in the bunkroom of a concentration camp, the hard wood bunks piled five-high, where the sick and aged huddled with the younger and healthier for warmth. And across the room you see the scale model of the showers and the crematorium, the ruthless efficiency of the "Final Solution." Your stomach turns at the video of medical experiments conducted on men, women and children.

You enter a hallway, perhaps 30 feet long. On either side of you are shoes. Piles of shoes. Thousands of shoes. Children's shoes. Shoes with the soles worn through. Women's shoes with practical heels. Working shoes. And on the wall you read:

It is too much. Simply to much to bear. And then you are again in the Tower of Faces, but on the bottom floor. The faces surround you and extend skyward all around you, up the faces of the tower, farther than you can see. And you read that the entire village of Eišišk?s, the entire Jewish culture that had survived there for seven centuries, was wiped out in two days in 1941. And you realize, as you look up, that you are standing in a smokestack, just like the ones that carried the smoke and ash, the earthly remains of 6 million human beings just like yourself.

At each turn in the Museum, I looked not so much into the eyes of the victims, but the eyes of the perpetrators, and I silently asked them, as I asked myself, "Do you have inherent worth and dignity?" I asked them, "Are you the neighbor that Jesus calls me to love as I love myself?" After a journey like this, one cannot but be convinced that we are all terribly flawed and broken. That the "progress of humankind onward and upward forever" is a pipe dream. That we are all capable of acts of evil, great or small. Acts that harm others. Acts that advance our own interest to the detriment of others. Acts that damage or sever our relationships with each other and with whatever source of spirit we may claim. And that is the very definition of sin and of evil: separation from others and from whomever or whatever we claim as our God.

What do we do? What do we do in the face of this grim reality? What is asked of us as people of faith when we are forced to confront the evil that is in our hearts or that is standing right in front of us? The first thing we are called to do is to act. Our faith calls us to action. It requires us to name injustice where we find it, to stand up to it, and to do what we can to stop it. It calls us to hold accountable and responsible those who have broken covenant with us, those who have acted in ways that are at odds with the values we hold dear. And it compels us to do whatever is within our power to see that such evils do not happen again. Never again.

But our faith also demands more from us. It requires us to do what the first principle demands of us: to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Yes, we are flawed. Yes, we are capable of doing horrible things to each other. And, no, we cannot, we will not, we should never condone acts of hatred, violence or degradation. To claim that every person has inherent worth and dignity does not require us to excuse or permit such behavior. But neither can we, will we or should we strip away from any creature that which has been mysteriously granted to them by the simple miracle of their birth: that indescribable spark of the divine that resides within each of us. If our worth and dignity are truly "inherent," then we cannot lose it by the acts we commit. If we truly believe in the notion of universal salvation, that all of creation has value and is valuable, we must respond to acts of evil in accordance with that principle. As religious people, we are called to find and claim the worth in the apparently worthless, to find dignity in the face of undignified acts. We are called to find our way to forgiveness and to reconciliation. This may be the work of a lifetime, but it is the work our faith calls us to. It's the work that all the great religions of the world call the faithful to do.

At our annual General Assembly in Fort Worth a few years ago, I attended a workshop that was provocatively titled "Is Hitler in Heaven?" The presenter used this question as a jumping off point to discuss some of the finer points of our Universalist doctrine and heritage. Ultra-Universalists would have to answer "yes, he is" and more conservative universalists were led to say "Eventually, but not yet." It is certainly a challenging question. And so, my friends, I leave you today with this equally vexing question: If Hitler is in heaven, what will you do when you meet him there?

Closing Words:

These words are carved into the wall of the National Holocaust Museum as you exit the Permanent Exhibition. They are attributed to German pastor and theologian Martin Niemoller:

^[1] James Freeman Clarke in 1886 sermon "Vexed Questions in Theology."
^[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in Soul Work, p. 28.

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