symbols and an altered crest

Last week, I posted a response to a query regarding my beliefs and their seeming dissonance with the statements of faith of the United Church. I augmented that response with a picture, a crest fashioned from the United Church’s official crest but altered to replace the figures in the lower portion of the crest, an alpha and omega, with the atheist symbol, a capital A partially encircled with a loop. The two symbols are close enough in appearance that many missed the change altogether and at least one person thought that the atheist symbol was simply the alpha omega in a different font than the one usually used. 

The outcry has been heard and it is telling.

In response to those who wrote to ask why I did it or to advise me that I had breached the United Church’s guidelines on appropriate use of the official crest, I simply noted that the picture was an interpretive device created to augment an article on the challenge of including or welcoming atheists in the UCC. But that reasoned and appropriate response doesn’t get anywhere near the place from which some of the response erupted. It was emotional and it was angry. It was what I call “heart response”, not “head response” and my answer had been a head response.

Since my post had been a response to a question about doctrinal beliefs and my position as a minister, it seemed wholly appropriate to utilize reason in answering it. Reason allows and invites us to play with existing realities, to toss them around, toy with them, hold them up to the light to see what we can see that has previously been hidden. Reason works at finding flaws and exposing them so we can get to work and fix them. It riddles arguments with holes so that we can think our way through more carefully and fill them. It challenges our assumptions so that, when they crumble under the pressure, we can set stronger foundations to replace them. Reason collides with reality in order to dis-cover a deeper reality. It’s supposed to.

Posting the United Church crest alongside my piece on essential agreement with United Church doctrine (now that would have been outside the guidelines – I would have had to have sought and received permission to do so), seemed appropriate (before I read the guidelines) and so I did it. I can understand every symbol on that crest and honour their presence there. But my eye lingered over the intertwined alpha and omega. They are the letters at the beginning and the end of the Greek alphabet. The phrase, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” appears only in the Revelation of John (identified so as to distinguish it from the many other revelations that were floating around Asia Minor at the end of the first century), a book some believe should never have been included in the canon. It’s a rant argued to have been written as a polemic against the Christianity that eventually won out – Paul’s Christianity – written by a man who wanted Jesus’ movement to remain within Judaism, who wanted the movement to exclude Gentiles (Elaine Pagels).

Sitting next to my article explaining why atheists should be welcomed into the church, it seemed a small irony playing itself out. John of Patmos, author of Revelation, conjures the “Alpha and Omega” god who holds to the strength of the tradition and chastises and burns those who would change it. Many believe, as did John, that those who are already on the inside of the institution are the only ones amongst whom the leadership and work of the United Church should be shared. I argue that the leadership and work of the church needs to extend far beyond those who are currently within the institution’s doctrinal stance, broad though it is. Its work belongs to humanity, not just to United Church Christians; the atheists, secular humanists, freethinkers, and traditional theists in my congregation agree. The intertwined alpha and omega, juxtaposed with my article, symbolized the very exclusion I believe undermines the important work we need to do – not as a church, but as humans. It was a simple process to replace them with the atheist “A” and so press forward my point – that it does not serve the future well to remain doctrinally exclusive and the future is pressing fast upon us. That there was such an outcry against the crest I posted furthers the irony in my opinion. But, I know, that is more head stuff.

To those who chose to be incensed as a way to further their anger at the challenge being made to the church, I have neither response nor apology; you will find ways to condemn this work no matter what I say or write or do and your righteous anger serves only to distract from the real conversation that needs to take place.

To those for whom the United Church crest is a truly sacred object, however, I regret the hurt; I do not experience the crest that way and so did not anticipate that the alterations I made would have such an impact. I hope that as we continue in relationship, experiencing the tensions that are necessarily part of a challenging work, we will continue to call one another to respect and hold one another to its demanding ideals.