For a number of years, I referred to myself as an atheist. Prior to that, I had been in various Christian communities where the god(s) people believed in didn’t always match what other Christian communities claimed. When challenged, people might point to what’s written in a book. Or they might point to personal experience. Or to the words of a person they consider to be authoritative and trustworthy. Whatever it is that convinced them, they believed that should be sufficient to convince other reasonable people. And I ceased to be convinced. 

The more I explored the lineage of modern Christianity (and other spiritual traditions), the more I realized that people often use religious words we never bother to define, even for ourselves. The question of whether one “believes in God” is a rather meaningless question unless we can arrive at a common and relatively precise definition. And definitions of god/dess(es) or other expressions of divinity change over time. 

For instance, I’m convinced that many vocal evangelical Christians in the U.S. today don’t define their god in a way that their ancestors would recognize. There’s an illusion that people have been talking about the same thing for centuries, because we use consistent words. But if we continually redefine the words and forget what they used to mean, we’re only fooling ourselves. Or trying to fool someone else.

So much of the past is either obscured or intentionally rewritten to support biased agendas. We can’t even agree on the history of the very young nation we find ourselves in. How can we expect to have a genuine and consistent understanding of any religious lineage? 

One thing that is writ large in our spiritual heritage, though, is a practice of redefining and reclaiming. When other faith traditions define “God” in a way that seems harmful or oppressive, Unitarians and Universalists have historically rejected other people’s exclusive right to define what’s holy. A piece of our lineage in Unitarian and Universalist theology is to trust our own inner wisdom to determine the definitions we embrace for spiritual language. 

Of course, some Unitarian Universalists reject spiritual language altogether. When we do this, we allow other people to define the terms. We give other people power over our spiritual lexicon, and then we rip the pages we don’t like out of the book. That can feel powerful. We like feeling defiant sometimes, I suppose. 

There’s another alternative available to us, though. We could recognize that we have authority over how we define spiritual terms—that no one else can define god/dess(es) or the divine for us. We can go as far back into our lineage as we like and find something worth carrying forward. Or we can reinvent and reshape our relationship with the holy, reclaiming words that were once given painful definitions.

All of that takes work, of course. And it’s vulnerable work. It’s work that’s best done in community, and it’s work that can be guided by the values we affirm as UUs. Redefining and reclaiming spiritual words isn’t a requirement, obviously. But it is a way some people address some old wounds. And it’s something that can deepen our connection with what matters most to us.