A comedian was once asked what he wanted carved onto his tombstone. The comic paused to consider a fitting epitaph, then decided on the words he’d like etched over his eternal resting place: "He died at an extremely old age."

All of us probably want to live a long time and would rather not die young if we can help it. There are other things we want, too, nice homes, financial security and so forth. Most of my neighbors right now seem to be working hard on re-seeding their front yards and acquiring a fresh crop of grass. And I can mulch and mow with the best of them. But I know that when my time comes, I don’t want my epitaph to read, "He kept a nice lawn" or even he lived a long, long time. Because how you live is so much more important than how long you happen live. Surely the reason we’re here is to make some difference in the world. Most of us would hope that we were not just "passing through" but had some impact during our lifetime. As William James once put it, "The great purpose of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it."

James was one of the founders of a uniquely American school of philosophy called pragmatism. In effect, he said that ideas should be judged by their practical consequences. The test of truth lay in concrete results. If you wanted to understand the meaning of a statement like "A diamond is hard," you wouldn’t try to analyze an abstract property like "hardness." The best way to go might be to take the stone and simply scratch a piece of metal or glass. Pure contemplation and disembodied logic tend to be philosophical dead-ends, James contended. Thoughts had to be linked to action if they were to have any grip on reality. And because actions are by their very nature dynamic, truth is also active, not static or fixed, but constantly evolving.

If these are notions that sound vaguely Unitarian, it’s probably because they are. Ours is a faith that claims to value deeds more than creeds. And most of us are less concerned with what a person might think or believe in private than with how they act and behave in public. Not that the two are unrelated. Hopefully thought has some bearing on action. Surely what we believe about blacks and whites, or men and women, or sex or God or whoever else might be in charge of the universe translates at some level into how we treat our neighbors and conduct our other business in the world. But the crucial thing about our beliefs is not whether they are true in some timeless, metaphysical sense, but whether they can be made to work in the context of a pluralistic community where opinions differ but everyone still has to get along. So the main question becomes whether your beliefs tend to promote conversation or to shut it down. Do your ideas facilitate the exchange and exploration of other viewpoints? This is a key issue. Because to the pragmatic way of thinking, truth emerges from an ongoing process of exploration and experimentation. And this pertains to moral truth as well, which isn’t handed down on stone tablets, but is rather revealed and refined in actual give-and-take of human interactions and relationships.

Probably the greatest proponent of pragmatism in America was born right here in Burlington, Vermont. John Dewey was confirmed in the Congregational Church over on South Winooski Avenue as a child, but grew more liberal in his outlook as his philosophy matured so that his funeral was held in a Unitarian church when he died in 1952. Dewey always said that he was less interested in solving the problems of philosophy than in using philosophy to solve the problems of human beings, so he was never content to be an armchair scholar. He designed a laboratory school that effected a virtual revolution in how children are educated in this country. He advocated for women’s suffrage and the right of working people to unionize. Dewey called his approach "instrumentalism," implying that words and ideas are like hands and feet. They are instruments or tools, intended to be used. And tools are judged by how well they accomplish their given task. The practical truth of an idea is the difference it makes in the world.

Unitarian Universalists tend to be people who like ideas. We’re comfortable with them. We usually score high on tests for verbal ability and conceptual reasoning. And ours is faith with a lengthy intellectual heritage, which is both a plus and a minus. On the one hand, it means that we have people like William James and John Dewey to guide and inspire and challenge us from the past. On the other hand, it sometimes means that we are overly cerebral; we can live too much in our heads. Once we have thoroughly analyzed an issue, discussed it from all angles, and arrived at what seem to be well-informed conclusions, we imagine that something substantial has been accomplished. But it’s a fact of life in most of our congregations that when all is said and done, more tends to be said than done.

Yet if James and Dewey are correct, it’s not enough to put our ideas in order; we also have to put our society in better order, which means putting our economy and our schools and our healthcare system into shape. Just believing in human dignity isn’t enough. Those principles of justice and equality that we like to say are central to our faith have to be exercised or they remain essentially meaningless, like tools that rest on a shelf without ever being used to plough or plant or harvest. The truth of any belief is gauged by the fruit it can yield.

Garrison Keillor once said that sitting in church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car. The point is that being right-minded isn’t sufficient, and unless it leads to something more tangible, it isn’t even right. To be true, faith has to be put into practice, and this is the aim of Vermont Interfaith Action. A pragmatist might say that VIA has three working hypotheses:

The first hypothesis is that organized religion can once more be a progressive force in America, as it has in the past. I happen to believe this. In fact, most of the major reforms in our nation’s history, from abolition to civil rights, have had people of faith leading the way. Whether it might become true again is a proposition that can only be determined by active experiment.

The second hypothesis is that when it comes to fundamental values of social fairness Catholics and Jews and Unitarians and Protestants may have more in common than they realize. I think that’s true as well, and I know it’s true that if our tiny denomination wants to have any influence in a land where the majority rules we need to build coalitions with other, larger faith communities. That’s being pragmatic.

The third hypothesis underlying VIA is that when people start to talk about their problems face-to-face or in small groups and then begin to act cooperatively, solutions emerge that weren’t evident or didn’t seem possible before. You might call this the democratic premise, that politics can percolate up, from the grassroots. This isn’t the trend today, when more and more decisions that affect our lives are made by well-heeled and well-connected people in distant places. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Is there some timeless truth that says the poor get poorer and the rich get richer while the middle class gets squeezed? I don’t believe in timeless truths, and the idea that the trend can be reversed is a supposition waiting to be tested; the test begins on Sunday evening, June 5, at 6:15, when we hope to gather 800 people in St. Joseph’s co-cathedral to see if the power of organization can match the organization of power in our society.

I intend to be there, and I invite you to join me, because I don’t want my epitaph to read, "He didn’t show up.’ I’d like to be remembered as one who at least tried to make a difference in the world. We may not reach the goal. In fact, toward the end of his life, John Dewey said that there might not be any final goal, in philosophy or religion or any other area of life. The point of climbing a mountain, he suggested, is to glimpse other peaks in the distance still waiting to be climbed. The best we can achieve is to maintain the motion upward.