Recently I wrote a Commentary on URI's Preamble, Purpose and Principles, and one sentence jumped out at me: "....we unite for the benefit of the Earth community." When you boil URI down to its essence, we exist "for the benefit of the Earth community." We are not building up religion or spirituality or even promoting the common good. We are benefiting the Earth community. Two questions spring immediately to mind: 1) what is "the Earth community" and 2) are we throwing out God and replacing God with the worship of Earth or Nature....thus making us a religion of sorts? A muscular pantheism or a coy animism.
Question 1: What is "the Earth community?" We didn't define our terms so I look back twelve years and guess at what we meant. We didn't mean earth with a small e, as in the land surface of the world. We meant capital E, the planet, third from the sun. In context of the vastness of our universe and the universes, the Earth is our island home where all living beings and plants are interdependent and carry the responsibility of holding up our end of the life equation along with guarding the integrity of the other life forms.
Question 2: Are we replacing God with the worship of Earth or Nature? An outside observer of URI's indigenous members carrying out their rituals at many of our meetings might assume so. A phrase such as "Divine Earth Mother" is often heard. But others words are heard as well: Allah Akbar, Jehovah, the Trinity, Higher Power, etc. What is important to note is that we would not allow words like sacred and holy and blessed to be attached to the word "Earth." We wanted to stay away from language which elevated our planet to some Divine dimension. We placed the accent on the Earth community, not on Earth Divinity. Benefiting a healthy interconnectedness of all life on this planet was goal enough for us. We didn't need to deify. Our focus was on kinship, a new model of family, in an Earth community.....a big enough tent to allow people of all the differing belief systems to find a safe meeting place.
Professor Gordon Kaufman, recently of Harvard Divinity School, argued for a vision of God as the "profound mystery of creativity" and "the ongoing creativity in the universe." He was rethinking theology in naturalistic terms......but we did not want to take one step in that direction.
