Faith Possibilities

An excerpt from “The Choesn Ones,” from The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. Griffels, David. 2014.

[In 1982] the last-ever passenger tire was built in Akron by a man named Richard Mayo, who paused afterward to look into a newspaper camera, a sturdy man in a V-neck T-shirt, thirty years on the job, his gloved fist perched on his hip, the other against his forehead, hands unsure what to do with themselves. The furrowed brow, the narrowed eyes, the strain at the corners — this was a look shared by men across a vast and hard-to-harness region, one defined ultimately and elliptically by water, by the Great Lakes and the Wabash and Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, routes of entry and departure to and from cities where the certainty of old factories was sagging and imploding.

Until then, for as long as anyone in my city could remember, Akron had been known as “the rubber capital of the world.” Like most manufacturing cities in the industrial Midwest, this was plenty enough identity, and the reputation carried far enough and wide enough for the people here not ever to feel obscure or irrelevant, and this reputation rested on a civic infrastructure that provided solidity and security. Akron was the birthplace and the center of the world’s tire industry, the most singular and therefore the most overtly significant supplier to Detroit’s auto industry. Which, yes, represents a stature something akin to being the Ralph Malph of the American industrial belt, and also a civic identity that requires being inordinately passionate about radial tires. (In defense: the profoundly intertwined, ultimately tragic histories — personal and corporate — of the Ford and Firestone families would have sent Shakespeare positively apeshit.) Anyhow, what more did we need to know? All the major American tire company world headquarters were here. Much of the production. Virtually all the high-tech research and development. The headquarters of the international rubber workers’ union. 

Tire-building was the city’s defining profession. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands had made a good living at it, generation after generation. And then, one afternoon in August 1982, suddenly and completely that was gone. 

What Richard Mayo…Akron…the Rust Belt from Pittsburg to Detroit experienced in the early 1980’s was an utter loss of security. Not only was Mr. Mayo out of a job, but so were all his friends that he’d worked with, some for 30 years. His skill set matched their own, and there were no more jobs in his trade in his hometown.

We have all felt lost at times in our lives.

Individually, and as a nation, we have felt lost at times in the past. Perhaps right now, this is how you’re feeling.

I would love to be able to stand up here and tell you “Just do these five things, and everything will be better/make more sense and like a sitcom, in just 27 minutes we’ll all be hugging and laughing at the lessons we just learned.”

I could tell you that, but I promised that I would never lie in the pulpit.

I mean, trust me, if I knew what those 5 things were, I would share them.  My favorite aunt and I used to ask each other were the operator’s manual for our lives was. “Have you seen my manual?” she’d ask me, and I her.


I’m afraid that moving away from that feeling of being lost is going to take some effort, and the path itself may be less than direct.


So what can you do when you feel lost?  You can have faith.

Now, aren’t you glad you came to church today?  We’re all done, let’s go have coffee!



There are different kinds of faith, of course.

There’s blind faith, which is supposed to be a type of faith that never questions. Often we like to think that we’re above that kind of thing here, after all, we’re Unitarian Universalists, but we too practice blind faith.

That chair you’re sitting in right now, did you wonder, before sitting in it, if it would hold you? Were you concerned that it’s structural integrity might be compromised?  Probably not, you just sat down in it, believing without knowing, that all would be well.


One of the great gifts of this congregation is our Director of Lifespan Development, Rina Shere. Today is Rina’s one Sunday off a month, during the week she and I were talking about this topic and navigating it. During our discussion, she said something wonderful, which I’m going to share with you in a moment.

When I was younger I had a friend named José, and he was one of the few other Latinos in my high school. Toward our senior year he and I had a couple of classes together and began to hang out quite a bit. In the fall of the next year José started school at the University of Michigan, and his new roommate was a born-again Christian.

Upon their arrival for classes in their freshman year, this roommate began to really work hard on bringing José to Jesus, and even back then, this sort of freaked me out. But since José and I were friends, I tried to get along with this guy. He tried to tell me about Jesus, too, and I told him that I frankly wasn’t interested in his Jesus, but I was glad it worked for him.

José was less successful at resisting this guy’s charisma, of which he had plenty I might add. I was sure he’d end up as some kind of televangelist with a very own sex scandal of his own some day.

So José and I began to drift apart after a while, because like many new converts, his new faith became the center of José’s life, and it became increasingly important to José that I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior.


Aside from the sadness of losing my friend to his new faith, there was one burning sadness within me about the whole thing.

It was kind of a jealousy, really, but it wasn’t an angry jealousy, more of a sadness.

The more José believed in his Jesus, the more José was convinced that Jesus was with him, his constant companion through thick and thin, that José was never truly alone to face the world.



I have to admit that there are times when I feel alone. When I feel like I could really use a boost of energy to deal with some thing, or event, or person. When I wish that I had some extra or additional source of strength that I could tap in to for a moment when facing seriously unhappy or upsetting events.

I wonder if you also have these moments….


José has Jesus for this, and I don’t.

I don’t because I don’t believe in the same kind of God that José does. My faith is not the same kind of faith.

On Sunday mornings, in most every church in our nation, the pastor tells people about the friend they have in Jesus. I can’t tell you that.


What I can do, for today, is quote Rina Shere.  When Rina and I were talking about this topic, she said to me that she often relies on what she calls “The Reservoir of Human Caring.”

She and I agree that we humans have each other to turn to, to rely on, to inspire us to be the best person we can be, and to bolster us up in times of need.  And it is for us, not to turn to a theology that we would LIKE to believe, but rather for us to turn to a theology that resonates with both our hearts and our minds.

For you, that theology might well and honestly be, a theology of The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and if that is so, that is fine. But yours might also be a theology of “I believe in what I can experience with my five senses,” or “the scientific method of proof.”

Here in this church we strive to make meaning in our lives, and in this pursuit, we look to many sources of inspiration.

This morning is the Autumn Equinox, the place of balance between Summer and Winter. Today there will be as much sunlight as there is moonlight. It’s a time of turning.

What new leaf have you been waiting to turn over?

Today is a terrific day to turn that leaf over.

Wednesday begins Rosh Hashanah for our Jewish friends. It is the beginning of a new year. There is forgiveness sought and offered, and there is sometimes a tradition of casting stones into water to symbolize the letting go of things from the past.


This morning I shared with you the story of the last tire ever made in Akron, Ohio. It was thirty-two years ago. Mr. Mayo worked thirty years making tires, so he was probably approaching fifty years of age when he pulled the last tire off the line, looked at his empty hands and wondered just what the Hell he was going to do.

Perhaps you’ve had a moment or two in your own life when you looked around you and wondered what you were going to do, too. Where you wondered how you’d get through.


There are times when you have to do something extraordinarily difficult for many Unitarian Universalists. You will need to go to the Reservoir of Human Caring and ask for a little sustenance.

I’m not sure why this is so hard for us, as a people. I have some theories, though.

One of them is that we are a proud group of individualists. We love to offer help! For us, helping others makes us feel good, makes us feel like we’re making the world a better place.

But to need the help, that makes us uncomfortable.


One of the great advantages of being a minister and getting the great privilege of writing and offering sermons to a congregation is that while you’re all looking at me, I’m looking at all of you. And the great thing is that I get to see you almost each week.

I see you when you come in all happy and you sit up very straight and there’s an air of happiness swirling around you.

I see you when you walk in, somewhat slowly, shoulders bent forward under the weight of some problem you have.

I see when I preach something to you and it strikes a chord with your spirit or your mind.

I get to see you.

And deeper we get to know each other, I’ll be able to see you even more clearly.

But I know that in this church, like the one I last served in California, and the ones I served before, I know that there are people who are in need of help.

That, because of who we are, rugged individualists who like to help more than be helped, I know that we shy away from asking for the help that we need that might make our lives easier.


On this day of balance between the warmth and the cold, between there being more light than dark and soon more dark than light, I’m asking you to turn over a new leaf.

Come to the Reservoir of Human Caring. Come not just to deposit caring into it, but come also to rest near it, and to have someone offer you kindness.

This community cannot solve all problems, or even all your problems, but it is filled with caring people who, like you, get a deep sense of well-being by helping others.

So, sometimes you help others, and sometimes you ask for a little help.

This, not a unified theology, a unified belief system that we all, to varying degrees believe in, this coming together in mutual aid, this is our covenant.

This is why we come here.

We come here because we are and are striving to be a sanctuary for all who enter, to reflect the diversity of the local community, and to work toward a more just and sustainable society.  We see ourselves as a joy-filled gathering of people banding together to make the world better.


But we are also here for when life is difficult.


We are a people who are grieving, a people who are dealing with serious illnesses, a gathering of people who are trying our best to find our place in this world.

We have struggles around jobs, either the one we have, the one we lost, or the one we’re hoping to find. We struggle with depression, anxiety and for some of us, downright poverty.


But here we also have each other.

I like to imagine that Richard Mayo, our hero from the tire story, went home that night, after the photographers left, after the lights in the factory were turned out for the last time, I like to imagine that Richard went home to his wife, and in the privacy of his own home, she held him to her, and said “We’ll figure it out.”


In times of trouble, we have our common humanity.

Come into this circle of caring. Offer the help that you can, but also ask for help when it is most needed.

We may not have a supernatural force to ask for help, to turn to in times of despair, but we have each other, our community, our covenant.

May we all be so wise and brave as to ask for help when it is most needed.


© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
September 21, 2014

Deconstructing Faith

Our opening hymn this morning might seem/feel a little old fashioned, O God Our Help in Ages Past, and it was chosen deliberately.

Its words, concluding in verse 5: O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, be thou our guard while troubles last, and our eternal home.

This is the way that most western people engaged with their concept of God, until the 20th century, and it could easily be said that most people who practice religions that come from the Middle East still do.

The three largest religions in the Western World are the Abrahamic Trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The practitioners of these three faiths trace their origins to the same man, the father of their peoples, Abraham.

In the Torah, in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 22, God tells Abraham to take is his son Isaac up to the mountain and sacrifice Isaac, testing Abrahams obedience to Yahweh.  Abraham does as he is told; he builds the altar, gathers the wood, ties up his son Isaac, and as Abraham is just about to put his knife to his own child, God tells him to stop. God then delivers a ram to be sacrificed, and because Abraham is so obedient, God tells him that his children will populate the nations of the world.

This has actually come to pass. Jews, Christians and Muslims live in every nation around the globe.


In more orthodox faiths, people may turn to God for help, as in ages past, so too, today. People who have this kind of relationship with their God invoke the help of God, or Jesus, since the either party is generally felt to be a regular, daily presence in their lives.

I hope that people who feel this way will always be comfortable in my presence, that I never say anything to offend their sense of their own faith—just because my own faith is radically different from theirs.


I was once in an interfaith clergy lunch, and around the table were clergy of many flavors. There was a Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, an Orthodox Priest, a Lutheran Pastor, an Episcopalian Priest, a Congregationalist minister, and several non-Abrahamic ministers…Buddhists, Sikhs, etc.

I looked around the table, and most of the clergy I knew at least by name, having worked in interfaith things with them over the past couple of years, and I chuckled.  When Kathleen, the Episcopal Priest ask me why I was laughing, I said:

Well, as I look around this table I see the journey of my religion. First we were Jews, then we left Judaism. Then after the reformation, along with the Lutherans and Episcopalians, we left the Catholic Church, in the 16th century. Then the Calvinists, represented by our Congregationalist friend, left the Church of England, and then the people in my faith formally left the Congregationalists just about 250 hundred years ago.

Each time we had a theological disagreement, we just packed our bags and started a new church, until that church got too stuck in its ways, then once again, we packed our bags and moved on. I’m just wondering when that will happen to the Unitarian Universalists, and what the new group would be called, and if I would be leaving with them.

Kathleen just shook her head and smiled at me.


Our faith is a liberal faith. This does not mean that we are universally political, but rather that we are a people who are gathered, and part of our religious task and duty is to be self-reflexive, to ask ourselves “What do I believe, and how does it serve me and my life?”

We are not the only liberal faith, by the way, the United Church of Christ is our nearest cousin, as one example, and they, too, spend a good amount of time thinking about their faith.

So while there was a time, not so very long ago, that a hymn like the one we just sang, was included in Singing the Living Tradition, published in June of 1993.

The theology of a God to whom we can turn for protection may seem very old fashioned to many of us, but it’s not too far back in our past.

I have here with me two older hymn books.  The Red One and the Blue One. If you want to engage in some real church nerdery, you should read some of the lyrics in these older hymnals, and see just how far we have, and haven’t come, from a more orthodox understanding of a God to whom we can turn in times of trouble. You can actually trace the theological development of Unitarian Universalism in the lyrics of these books.

From our Teal hymnal, the supplement, you can see where we’ve moved since 1993.


I’ve been talking with you for a few minutes about an old, or older understanding of God and faith with an eye on the global.

But now I’d like to talk with you about the specific, the individual.

If you think about God, the concept, the deity, think about the image of God that comes to your mind.

How old were you when you encountered this image of God that you’re carrying with you?

In my travels, often I have found that if people are arguing with God, it’s this very God that you’re imagining right now.

As adults, they are struggling with the concrete idea of God that there were taught as children, when their adult self can only be satisfied with a more nuanced understanding. This is part of human development. As children first we think of all four legged animals as “Dog.” We think of all adults as being parents, because that’s our model.  As we grow, though, we come to understand that all four legged animals are not dogs and people live a variety of lives, not all of them including children.


Part of what allowed me to become a minister of this faith is that I’m not only allowed to wrestle with this image of God, I’m encouraged to challenge it. To look for nuance, to try to figure out what part of that narrative, or any others, sits well with my mind and my spirit.


Here we are encouraged to deconstruct God and faith, to see what does and doesn’t speak to our soul and intellect.

Stated in a clumsy and over simplified way, Jacques Derrida encourages us to invite a little chaos into the order of our universe. One of his challenges to us is to consider the idea that there is no Ground Zero for common experience.

By this, he means that no one person has the exact same experience as any other.  On the surface one can easily agree, but the problem appears when you then try to craft a collective narrative.


Going back to Genesis for a moment, the story about Abraham, Isaac, the ram and God; each of these beings has their own version of the events that took place, how they felt and what the ramifications of that moment brought into their own life.

Derrida says that these differences are so profound that a common narrative can’t be created.

But we are a species who’s very development has relied on narrative story.


Let’s step back a little bit from Derrida and reconsider faith.

Certainly few, if any people, in this room consider the text of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim texts to be the absolute, true word of God.

In a sense, we are already sort of practiced at considering and rejecting the most common of narratives about religion.

After all, we are here.

Sitting together, atheist, Christian, agnostic, pagan and more.


What would it be like if you could completely let go of the collective narrative of what God and Faith mean, and re-discover what they mean to you?


What if you could divorce the idea of Faith from big-box churches, from churches who rhythmically chant anti-gay slogans, or who wish to keep “women in their place”?



Can you imagine a deeply lived faith that frees you? That encourages you to live boldly in concert with your highest ideals?

Follow Jacques Derrida’s thinking and release yourself from the anchor of the common, the falsely collective narrative and into your own fully realized version of reality.


For centuries faith was inspired by, lived and enforced by fear.  Fear of the night, fear of the stranger, fear of an angry God, fear of Hell.


We do not need to drag these fears along with us any longer.

As John Caputo said in the interview that Amy read earlier,

“I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth.

There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god-under-denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?... If you cease to “believe” in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position, for which you will require new propositions.

Imagine a debate in which a theist and an atheist actually convince each other. Then they trade positions and their lives go on.

But if you lose “faith,” in the sense this word is used in deconstruction, everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on.”

As religious people, a non-creedal people who require no allegiance to a singular doctrine, we have the freedom and the duty to cease believing that which we do not or cannot find to be true.

We can arrive, with intellectual honesty and spiritual purity, at places like atheism, or agnosticism, or panentheism, or Christianity, or Buddhism or any combination of these and more. What matters more than where you land, is that you jump into the sometimes disquieting process of examination.

That you let go of the anchor we have always known, the default, the “give me that old time religion,” theology that no longer carries a deep meaning for us.

It is also important, I might add, that we do not engage in this practice once, say when were in college, and then sit for the next 50 years, secure in the knowledge that we have figured it all out.

At 46 I know that I have not figured it all out, and therefor I can say with some certainty that when I was at university, I didn’t have it all figured out, either.

It’s true, we get busy with life. With demanding jobs, partners, children, keeping up our homes and our laundry. The mind reels sometimes at all that must be done.


Let me add one more, never ending task to your list.

Examine your faith.

Do not be afraid to explode it out, and look at all the parts. To examine it’s nooks and it’s crannies to find both gems there and things to discard.


I will admit that some of post-modernism is to me a little bit scary and a little bit annoying.  I was happy being a modern person. I didn’t have any desire to go post anything.

I like the security of having a common narrative. And even though I don’t enjoy having to strike out on my own, understanding that my experience is utterly different from everyone else’s…

truth be told it feels a little lonely sometimes…

I am up here encouraging you to do the same.

In your own way, of course, guided by your own fence posts and markers.


Our goal is to find that which is the truest to us. To arrive at an understanding that was reached in a process steeped in integrity.

To let go of the old, the tried the true, and try them again.

Some may fit, some may not. Undoubtedly, you can be surprised by what you discover about yourself and the world around you.


If our goal is to live deeply and authentically in our truth, then we must invest some time into finding out what is true…for us.



When we have invested time and energy in this pursuit, we will find people around us who’s own truth with intersect with our own.

Perhaps, likely, it won’t be a point for point match with our journey, but we will cross paths now and again, and when we do, it affords us to look at each other with admiration and acknowledge the work we’ve both done, and celebrate our commonalities.

Let go of that image of God you’ve been carrying with you since you were six. Cease letting that image have power over you, either in your obedience or resistance to that image.

Recently, I came across this poster.  I took this photo with my phone, so please accept my apologies about the image’s quality.

The image is of 5 boys, about aged 11 or 12.  Each of them is wearing a football outfit, complete with pads and helmets.

Also in the picture is a violin case, and one of the boys has taken the violin from its case and is playing it for the other boys.

The caption reads “Celebrate the Whole Boy.”

What this image demonstrates is literally a game changer.


This photo is clearly playing on stereotypes of masculinity. But instead of asking a question like “Is there a conflict between what a young man is supposed to be and what this young man appears to be?” the photo evokes questions like “Why is there a conflict between the two?”

“Why must gender stereotypes rule our lives?”

“Why is making beauty wrong or unmasculine?”

If we change the questions, we get whole new meanings from our lives.

Take your religious journey, your faith—ask new questions of it.

May wondrous discoveries of new answers be yours.


© Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to:
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
September 14, 2014