Unitarian Universalist Rev. Joel Miller still remembers the “covenant” of the Columbus, Ohio congregation in which he grew up.  It began:

“Love is the doctrine of this Church; the quest for truth a sacrament; and service is our prayer.  We dwell together in peace, seek knowledge in freedom, and serve all people in fellowship…”

These vows became his “spiritual touchstone,” the code he tried to live by.  Most others in that congregation also walked their talk, so these words endured the “acid tests” of time.

Touchstones and acid tests weren’t just clichés to Rev. Miller.  Before becoming a UU minister, he was a jeweler, like his father and grandfather before him.  In that role, he used an actual touchstone to do many acid tests.

Jewelers for over 2,000 years have used an acid test to identify the type and quality of gold in a piece of jewelry. When a customer wants to know if an old family wedding ring is really gold, Miller did an acid test.

Step one was rubbing the ring against a touchstone, a smooth, hard, rectangular rock.

Step two, was making rubbings on that rock from three small sticks of gold–each stick containing a different and known quality of gold.

Step three was to spread a drop of a special acid called Aqua Regia (nitric and hydrochloric acid) across all four rubbings.

That acid dissolves all metals but gold, so the amount of gold left in each rubbing reveals the quantity and quality of the gold in it. Sometimes the ring’s rubbing matched a pure gold stick; sometimes it matched a 14K-gold stick (58% gold); sometimes the acid made the ring’s rubbing bubble-up fast, turn green, and disappear: showing that the ring was gold-plated and basically had no gold at all.

This acid test became, for Miller, a metaphor for the way people treat each other in hard times.  Some people’s words and deeds don’t match, revealing their claims to be false and empty—to have no gold.  His UU friends’ behavior, in contrast, matched closely the words of this covenant. Encounters with them demonstrated to Miller over years of “acid tests” how golden those words were to them.

April 5, 2024