"Bringing It All Together: Dana Greeley and the UUA"
Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, October 9, 2005
This year in Religious Education at Second Unitarian our theme for the year is Unitarian Universalist history. Since we have adopted the rotational model, we thought it best to focus on one historically significant Unitarian Universalist each month. In many ways, I thought the hardest part was trying to figure out which figure best embodies his or her time period. You have heard already a bit about Francis David and Susan B. Anthony, two of the historical heroes that RE is talking about this year. But this morning I want to introduce you to another: Dana McLean Greeley. Dana Greeley is the last person that RE will talk about this year. They won't get to him until June, but in thinking about what he meant to Unitarian Universalism in the twentieth century, I thought it would be good for us to consider his life and work today.
In some ways it is a bit peculiar what we call history. You can get High School text books in American History that talk about the Vietnam war and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. I hear that and I think, "That isn't history. I was alive then!" But as the song goes, "Time makes you older, children get older, and I am getting older too." For some of my colleagues, they might feel similarly about Dana Greeley. I know plenty of people who actually knew the man, so it is strange in a way to think of him in the same company as Channing, Parker, Barton, and Deitrich. But I advocated for teaching our children about Dana Greeley because in my mind, we would be remiss in our children's religious education if they walked out of here all grown up not knowing who this person was. So after giving this impassioned plea in the name of all that is good, true and right about Unitarian Universalism because Dana Greeley was alive, it occurred to me, "When was the last time I mentioned him upstairs?" So here you go.
To sum him up in just a few sentences, Dana Greeley was the first President of the Unitarian Universalist Association and was one of the pivotal figures who moved the Unitarians and Universalists together into what we now call merger in 1961. In short, he was the midwife to the birth of an institution that had been conceived in the previous decades. Indeed, the notion that the Unitarians and the Universalists should become one liberal religious movement was first proposed in 1856 because at the time, some felt that the theological differences between the two churches were negligible. It was exactly one hundred years later that the Joint Commission on Merger was convened that eventually lead to the creation of the UUA. Thus setting the precedent for our denomination: sometimes it feels like it takes a hundred years before an obviously good idea is put into action.
But if the theologies of the Unitarians and the Universalists were so similar, what was the hold up? I think Warren Ross names it right on the money in today's reading. The problem was that William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism, lived on Mt. Vernon Street on Beacon Hill in downtown Boston, and Hosea Ballou, one of the fathers of Universalism, lived on Pinckney Street on the other side of Beacon Hill in downtown Boston. While only mere blocks from each other, in the minds of the Boston Brahmins, this was the gap between heaven and earth. In some ways it's a microcosm for the dance the Unitarians and Universalists did over the course of that century. From the outside the differences seem so insignificant as to be amusing. From the inside, however, each of those denominations, both Unitarian and Universalist, thought the differences were paramount. As Hosea Ballou is quoted as saying in the reading today, Universalists were looked down upon as being uneducated, unsophisticated, rural, and poor. They were farmers, hicks, and hillbillies. Despite the fact that he was a powerful preacher, Unitarians often made fun of Hosea Ballou because he had a funny accent. The Unitarians were accused of being overly intellectual, elitist, and cold; what Emerson once referred to as the "icehouse of Unitarianism." Unitarians lived on the good side of Beacon Hill that faced Boston Common rather than the Charles River. Sounds silly to us, but then again we live in a pretty segregated city that might appear silly to someone from outside too. The Unitarians went to Harvard, taught at Harvard, held political office, and basically were the movers and shakers of nineteenth century New England. They lived in what some have called "The hub of the universe."
So it was not theology but rather class and culture that kept the two denominations separate for far too long. I share this with you to illustrate that Dana Greeley, and the other leaders who worked so hard to bring the Unitarians and Universalists together at last, had the weight of history on their backs. They did what many previously well-intentioned Unitarians and Universalists had only dreamed of. It was not without precedent. Thomas Starr King, the namesake of the UU seminary in California, was born to a Universalist minister, and was one for a time himself. Eventually he became a Unitarian and moved to California. He started the Unitarian Church in San Francisco and was very active in politics, often credited with saving California for the Union cause in the Civil War. But Thomas Starr King, influential as he was, was only one man. His personal spiritual journey leads him to become a Universalist and then a Unitarian. But imagine if whole institutions had a spiritual life. How could they make a similar transformation when both Unitarian and Universalist traditions have roots centuries deep? How do you get them to come together when both are afraid of losing their identity to the other; how do we choose merger instead of sub merger? Not easily.
The modern idea of a merger between the Unitarians and Universalists was initially the dream of Fredrick May Elliot, then president of the American Unitarian Association. Elliot, who is probably just as worthy of study as Greeley is, was worried about the future of Unitarianism in the face of the Great Depression. So he looked around the religious landscape in America and saw the Universalists, who were hurting for members and money even worse than the Unitarians. It also helped that Fredrick May Elliot's wife was a Universalist, so I am sure he had some extra motivation for pursing a common tradition. As Elliot made the first connections with the Universalists and had just got the ball rolling, he died while in office. Dana Greeley was elected to be, what would turn out to be the final, president of the American Unitarian Association.
Greeley was raised in Boston and had about as a pristine Unitarian pedigree as one could have without being an Elliot! Dana Greeley was a fifth generation Unitarian. He was extremely active in the youth group, and even became president of the national youth association for the Unitarian Church. As a boy he was very good at athletics but not a particularly gifted student. He tells the story of when his daughter sent in an application to go to college. She had to write an essay about herself in which she says that she didn't do as well as she could have in school because her father, Dana, would come up to her some evening when she was about to study and say, "Well this or that youth group is meeting tonight why don't you come with me to Church!" Apparently this was also the reason for why Greeley himself was not a better student. Which in a way sets the tone for his life, and probably the main lesson we UUs have to learn from him. A friend of mind once told me, "Dana Greeley was an institutionalist to his bones." It is a rare thing among we Unitarian Universalists, who seem so intent on being individualists, to have periodically in our history people who have cropped up to set down some key institutions among us to keep our liberal faith alive. It is a shame that Henry Wentworth Higginson and Henry Whitney Bellows are not more highly valued in the UU psyche. We cherish the prophets and poets like Emerson, who couldn't say enough bad things about the Unitarians of his day, and we neglect the institution builders, like Dana Greeley and Henry Whitney Bellows, who build the institutions that live on long after they have died and touch so many lives.
Greeley shares with us in his autobiography, 25 Beacon Street and Other Recollections, the day his sister died. He came from a large family. Greeley's sister Rosamond died when he was eighteen, and she was fourteen, of a ruptured appendix. The family minister came by to see the family in this dark hour, and took Dana for a walk. Probably to give his parents a break, he reflects later, but it would prove to be an important event. As he was talking to his minister at the time, it occurred to him that he should enter the ministry himself. How often in life do we find that in these moments of heartache and grief there is some bright light: Dana Greeley's call to ministry! He would have a similar experience of being compelled to the ministry while reading Jabez Sunderland's biography of William Ellery Channing and thinking that it was the best biography ever written.
Greeley attended seminary at Harvard Divinity School and studied with Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of Process Philosophy. He graduated after three years and took his first ministry in Lincoln Massachusetts in 1932. He enjoyed it but stayed only a year and half before moving onto to Concord New Hampshire as their minister, and acted as a sort of minister-at-large for the State of New Hampshire. Then in 1934, through what could only be described now as the "good ole' boys network," he took over as minister of the Arlington Street Church in Boston; William Ellery Channing's famous pulpit. He followed Samuel Elliot after the latter had retired from the AUA presidency. After the elder Elliot decided that he could no longer be their minister they went for someone young and got Dana Greeley at the ripe old age of 26. Actually that was the same age Channing was when he became minister at Arlington Street.
The nineteen fifties were a hard time for the Unitarians and Universalists, and liberals in general in this country. Politically you had the rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare going on. Religiously you had the Neo-Orthodox movement of Barth and Neihbur, which sought to do away with progressive liberal religion and revive the ideas of the sixteenth century Reformation. The Unitarians and Universalists began to wake up that despite their social and cultural differences if they did not band together soon, then neither of them would survive for long. History really pushed the two denominations together, but Dana Greeley's leadership made it a reality.
Greeley was a very charismatic fellow. Phil Giles, the president of the Universalists at the time of the merger who worked closely with Greeley was impressed with his oratory and fundraising skills. "Whenever he left on a trip he always had a list of names in his pocket, and if the plane stopped anywhere along the way he'd get off and go to a phone and ask somebody in the community for money. And he could write a better speech on the back of an envelope than most people in a week's time." But he refused to get in a car that Dana Greeley drove because, "He used to scare the hell out of me. He had a great disregard for traffic rules; he was always too busy talking."
As President of the newly formed UUA, both the people who loved Greeley and those who loved him not, agreed that the early UUA took on the personality of its first president. He was optimistic to a fault. He took on too much and started far too many programs than what the UUA could afford to do. In fact shortly after his presidency the Association faced a financial crisis that it took nearly fifteen years to recover from! But that was Dana; the future was always bright.
He was extremely interested in international friendship and ecumenical work. As president of the UUA he was an observer at the Second Vatican Council in Rome. With Nikkyo Niwano the founder of the Buddhist group Rissho Kosei-kai, the group I studied with in Japan, they founded the World Council on Religion and Peace. It was a group that brought religions together to build relationships and address social problems constructively. When I was in Japan, I would ask the Rissho Kosei-kai students at the Seminary what they knew about Unitarian Universalism. Most knew only one thing: that Dana Greeley was one. Greeley was also interested in peace issues, initially to address the nuclear arms race in the Cold War, but soon became an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. In his autobiography he says that at one point he even considered resigning his post as President in order to do international peace work full time.
When Greeley's two terms were up, he went back into the ministry and served the Unitarian Church in Concord Massachusetts. The institutionalist cannot leave the Church. The Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams once said that liberal religion requires something he called "social incarnation." That is to say that Unitarianism cannot just be a nice idea we contemplate from time to time in the privacy of our studies. Some Unitarians have had to do that. But Unitarian Universalism really comes to life, it has a transformational impact on our lives and in the world, only when it takes the form of an institution. Now I have as healthy a skepticism of power as any UU, but without a Church or an Association, there is no embodiment, no vehicle in history, for our liberal religious faith. We make it come to life simply by coming to Church, being on committees, arguing about resolutions and amendments at the Annual Meeting, and by bringing over a casserole to one of our fellow members who is going through a hard time. Each one of those acts is a spiritual practice that strengthens our covenant together, and makes this Church the wonderful place that it is. Dana Greeley reminded us that Francis David was right, "We need not think alike to love alike." We weaken ourselves, and actually do a disservice to our own tradition, by being scattered and isolated. There is power in coming together whether it is as members of a single Church, or many Churches forming a single Association out of two others. In either case, it is a sign of spiritual health and maturity. Dana Greeley helped to ensure that the faith he cared so deeply about would live on more than forty years after he first took office. May it continue well into the future. Amen Blessed Be.
Let us now rise and sing what was the processional hymn at the first service when the Unitarians and the Universalists merged together in 1961. Number 145 "As Tranquil Streams."
Recommended Reading:
Greeley, Dana. 25 Beacon Street and Other Recollections
Ross, Warren. The Premise and the Promise; the Story of the Unitarian Universalist Association