High on a mountain overlooking the city of Geneva is the spacious house that was the summer home of French Philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson wrote of the “élan vital,” the vital force that drives life and the evolution of life. A few miles below the home of Bergson, Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in October 1553. His major crime was denying the Trinity, a crime punishable by death. His major accuser was John Calvin.

One of Bergson’s books is TWO SOURCES OF MORALITY AND RELIGION, the prophetic and the priestly. The prophets tend to be solitary figures who challenge the established order. The priests nourish a community, providing the communion of continuity. It is possible to see Servetus as a prophet and Calvin as a Priest. In the book, A MARYRED SOUL REMEMBERED, Andrew Hill argues that Unitarians owe more to Calvin than to Servetus. For our congregations are maintained more by the community building of pastors, than by the challenges of prophets.

The story is told that once God was having a conversation with the Devil. God said, “I’m giving humanity a great gift, religion. It will enable them to resist your temptations.” The Devil said, “Go right ahead. You give them religion. I’ll organize it.” Bergson found place for both the prophet and the priest, for Jesus the prophet, and for Paul, the organiser. Like Elijah, Servetus was stubborn and single minded. He was not a “team player,” but more of a Don Quixote who tilted at windmills. Of course, none of us are like that! I have been known to tilt at windmills. I have been known to follow a lonely path, dreaming an “impossible dream” like “The Man from La Mancha.” I am not satisfied to be only the priest, the community builder. To me, part of the calling of every minister is to move beyond the givens: to think and act “outside the box.” Servetus built no community, but he left us a heritage of SOUL. He would follow the truth even into the hell of being burned alive.

As scientist. Servetus discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood. As a religious seeker, he taught what we can call the “Ruach Hagofen,” the breath of the Holy. So the meditation masters teach, “follow your breath.” Trapped in the organised business of life? Stop and be still. Get out of the box of reason. Pay attention to your breath. Breath in, breath out. Breathe in hope, “Esperanza!” In Spanish, the very word for hope is linked to “inspiration,” breath. As long as there is breath, there is hope.

Last Saturday, our interfaith group had a session on LIFE OF SOUL. Think of all the ways the word soul enters into life: from Soul Food to Soul Mate. From Faust who would sell his soul to the devil, to Don Quixote, who would “march into hell for a heavenly cause.” There is the “soul of a nation” and the “SOUL OF THE WORLD.” Individuals and nations that lose their souls become empty shells. They crumble and die. Can an individual soul make any difference? Yes. One example is Rosa Parks who died two weeks ago in America. Blacks were required to stand up in the bus, when whites wanted their seat. Rosa was tired. She refused to move. Her stubbornness started the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That boycott made Martin Luther King, Jr., a national figure in the civil rights movement. Thousands refused to board buses. They walked to work. One said, “My feet are tired, but my soul is at rest.” Yes, we become weary in well-doing. We become tired of the “War of Civilizations” and “The Battle for God.” Yet, when we finish a march against the war in Iraq, we know “My feet are tired, but my soul is at rest.”

Servetus lived in a time much like our present so-called “War of Civilizations.” Henry the VIII had problems with divorce, like Prince Charles today. In 1553 as Servetus died, “Bloody Mary” became Queen of England. In shifting alliances she married Philip II, the very King of Spain, who later would send the Spanish Armada against England. We condemn “Bloody Mary” for religious zeal, which led her to burn alive an Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of Protestant Clergy. But what of leaders today who are willing to destroy cities and cultures “in order to save them?”

During the life of Servetus, the new invention of the printing press was changing the world, much as television and the internet change our world today. Christian nations were locked in an ongoing battle with Muslim nations. The last Moorish Kingdom in Spain was defeated in 1492, the very year in which Columbus discovered America. In 1529. Vienna almost fell to the Turks. Over hundred years later in 1683, it took a Polish Army to save Vienna from conquest by the Ottoman Empire.

Today, we are haunted by bombs, bird flu, and natural disasters. A cartoon shows President Bush talking to God. He asked, “God, why are so many terrible events happening?" God replies, “I’m trying to disprove intelligent design.” In the time of Servetus, Europe was also haunted by death. Luther lost two brothers to the Black Death. In England, the rosy faces of those dying from the plague inspired the song “ring around the rosy.” As in America today, there were predictions of the apocalypse and the second coming. .

As a boy, Servetus was apparently puzzled as to why the Jews and the Moors refused to accept the doctrine of the Trinity1. To them it spelled “Tri-Theism” and conflicted with their great affirmations, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One,” and the cry of Islam, “There is no God, but God.” Servetus found that Mohammed was ready to admit that Christ was the greatest of Prophets. Then, when Servetus studied the Bible, he was amazed to find nothing about the TRINITY. The word is not there.

He became a prophet, declaring that the Trinity is not in scripture2. While professing a deep devotion to Jesus, he noted “how much the tradition of the Trinity has become a laughing stock to the Muslims.” Servetus dreamed of reconciling Christian, Muslim and Jew. For all to share mutual respect in the worship of the ONE GOD. This vision inspired Francis David in Transylvania, a land between Christian and Muslim. In the Diet of Torda, the Unitarian King proclaimed, “There shall be no compulsion in matters of religion.” The words are straight from the Quran. Not always observed, but often quoted.

Servetus, like the Muslim Sufis, found God everywhere3. He wrote, “It is my fundamental principle that all things are a part or portion of God and that the nature of things is the substantial spirit of God.” To this universalism of Servetus, Calvin shouted back, “Wretch, if one stamps on the floor does one stamp on your God?” Prophet and Priest collide. So where Luther proclaimed, “The priesthood of all believers,” a 20th Century American Unitarian Universalist proclaims, “The prophethood of all believers.”4 Servetus experienced the Holy as a universal soul, animating all things. Last week we observed not only the end of the Muslim Ramadan, but also “All Souls Day.” It is fitting that three of the most effective UU Churches are named, “All Souls.” In too many Churches and Mosques, the Priests and Imams preach the salvation of some and the damnation of others.

There comes a time to stop talking to God and to listen. To breathe in hope and exhale anger. To stop seeing the world as divided between “us and them.” To the individual with Soul, there is always a third party to every encounter. You may call the third party Truth, or Love, or the Holy. But the sense of a greater Soul is essential to the health of our own soul. There is something bigger than the both of us. No book or concept can contain the wholeness of the Holy: Not the Trinity or even the Ninety-Nine Names, which Muslims have for God. Even the word “God” can separate us from God. Let go of words. In “soulful” moments, when we are most alive, we no longer listen to music, we are music.

“And God … breathed into the human form the breath of life,
and the human form became a living soul.”

1.- Hunted Heretic , Roland H. Bainton, Beacon Press 1953.
2.- Islam and the West, Christopher Walker, Sutton Publishing, 2005, p. 99.
3.- Stephen Schwartz, “Mirror for Muslim Reformers,”
4.- The Prophethood of All Believers , James Luther Adams, edited by G.K. Beach , Beacon Press, 1986.