The Rev. Burton Dean Carley

The Rev. Burton Dean Carley

1001A Berry Street Essay

Speaker: The Rev. Burton Dean Carley, parish minister, First Unitarian Church of Memphis, and UUA Trustee

Prepared for UUA.org by: Jone Johnson Lewis, Reporter; Margy Levine Young, Editor

Full Text of The Berry Street Essay 2005: The Way Home by the Rev. Burton Carley

The Berry Street Scribe, the Rev. Alice Blair Wesley, opened the meeting with a history of the Berry Street Conference, which began in the spring of 1820 when William Ellery Channing wrote a letter to Massachusetts ministers “known to be liberal” to propose a gathering. The Berry Street Conference has been held every year since 1820, save one (during World War II), for a total of 185 papers on issues of current concern by respected colleagues.

These essays, Wesley reported, have never been collected… until very soon. A project is underway to find, scan, and post online as many of the essays as can be found. She asked for help: funds are needed for the project, but also needed is a search of church archives for lost essays, to be sent to Wesley.

The Rev. Barbara Merritt introduced the 2005 Berry Street essayist (full text of essay ), the Rev. Burton Carley. Carley spoke on the theme of going home. “I want to go home – not to what used to be – but to a new creation that is our salvation.” In a talk more poetry than prose, he described the deep longing for the belonging that is home. “Has anyone seen it?” he asked. We need to acknowledge that we are exiles, and strangers, and escape the everyday – habits, distractions, abstractions, and preconceptions – that keep us from the journey.

A symptom of losing our way is to be incapable of change. He quoted W.H. Auden: “We would rather be ruined than change.” “We suffer,” Carley cautioned, “under the illusion that to know us is to love us.” He pointed out that the achieving life is never satisfied, and that “a mind stuck open is as useful as a window stuck open.” We tend to cling, he said, “to any position that nurtures our self-righteousness.”

We must, he stressed, relinquish the illusion of control, and realize our need to be in right relationship. “This little light of mine” is less useful on the journey home than the light provided by others.

Our history as Unitarian Universalists is one of leaving home, Carley noted, and we enjoy calling ourselves a movement. But, he added, the journey is not all. “The purpose of a journey is to arrive somewhere.... The fugitive life is exhausting.”

Clergy, he warned, can end up like the servers at a salad bar, serving up whatever people want at that moment. Instead, ministers need to live out their call to ministry. He stressed the importance of stripping away the “dross” to make religion relevant, through deeper and wider connections. Diversity, he added, is not sufficient to calling people into covenant – we should ask, instead, “How do we belong to each other?”

We need, Carley continued, a sense of “we” that “affirms the dignity of difference” and acknowledges our dependence on the other. We need covenants that are intergenerational, linking past, present and the future.

Ministry can show the way home – through arranging our relationships rightly. Ministry practice has to do with showing a vision, and practicing mission. “I have not 95 theses, but one,” Carley concluded. “The evidence of a changed life for us is getting home. I may not make it there, but I am going there nonetheless. Oh, God, I pray that I am not alone.”

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