"What do you do after you say hello?"
When we meet someone, we look for commonalities--places where we can connect and share. I am sure we would find much we have in common. We would find that we take joy in many of the same things. We also would find a lump forming in the throat of one of us when the other shared a poignant experience. I have fallen short of my expectations at times like you have. At other times, like you have, I have far exceeded what I thought were my capabilities. I have lived enough to take these short-fallings and over-reachings both as life's graces. All in all, ministry is sharing the common moments of our lives and finding a certain grace in them.
"What does Paul Hull believe," you might wonder? Would his beliefs be compatible with our congregation? Someone once asked me if I was a Christian, and I said, "Yes, I am inspired by Jesus' teaching, but I am also a Buddhist and I am also inspired by earth-centered spirituality. That makes me a Unitarian Universalist." This makes my orientation decidedly interfaith.
A better way of explaining my beliefs is to say . . . .
- First, I believe that the spiritual or religious experience is universal to all of humanity. That is why I am a Universalist.
- Second, I believe in the unity of all things--that behind the many lies the One. That is why I am Unitarian.
- Yet, I believe that the nature of this ultimate Oneness is forever veiled in mystery. Some call this mystery God, as I do most often, but most of the time I prefer to embrace the questions and experience the mystery as best as I can.
- Because I believe that religion arises from the human experience of mystery and wonder, that is why I am a humanist. The human experience comes prior to any conceptualization of it. In the process of conceptualizing, the religious or spiritual experience moves into the realm of religion--the institutional expressions of that religious experience.
- Because I sense a mystery behind everything, that makes me a mystic. My sense of the mystery moves me to a strong sense of spirituality, to look deeply and broadly for the ways that the spirit moves in life.
- I too am a scientist and engineer by training and experience. I am passionate about how science informs religion and religion informs science. I believe that religon must be congruent with science, but science must not become "scientism" whereby science steps out of its domain and makes pronouncements about morality, ethics, and religion.
- Finally, I am a Unitarian Universalist because I believe that human beings need communities of depth, right living and compassion--places where we are held close in times of need and where we are encouraged to move along our own spiritual paths to wholeness.
Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where we are encouraged to look beneath the surfaces for the deeper meanings and experiences of living. Our Unitarian Universalist congregations are the best places that I have found to experience communities of depth, right living, and compassion.
A Celebrating Ministry; A Celebrating Life. An essential element of a community of depth is celebration. Whether I become your minister or become the minister of another congregation, the ministry that I will do will be a ministry of celebration of life. That celebration of life will be through worship, helping each other find ways of turning difficulties and tragedy into growth and new possibilities, helping each other maintain a spiritual practice, and just plain having fun together and laughing a lot.
When I owned and managed my engineering company, I met a man in his mid-eighties who too had founded his engineering company, but many years earlier. He told me (as nearly as I can recall) one morning at a workshop that I was doing for his company, “My health is not good. I have a lot of aches and pains. Yet I awake every morning thankful for another day of living, and I feel blessed.”
A trailride in the West on Silver,
but I am not the Lone Ranger.
I think it a sacrilege, to those who have gone before, to not celebrate life. So I try each day, through the pain, loss, and heartache that life hands everyone from time to time, to never forget to be thankful and celebrate life.
To me the best way to celebrate life is to live, day-to-day, a life of depth, right action, and compassion. This I bring to my ministry: always encouraging our UU members and institutions to live celebrating lives of depth, right action, and compassion.
