Across the Great Divide (part one)

The average Unitarian Universalist congregation looks very much like your average Protestant church.  We meet in a building which oftentimes has a steeple.  Inside you are likely to find straight-row pews facing a single pulpit from which someone preaches some kind of sermon (although these can be called "reflections," "explorations," or "talks" as often as they're referred to as "sermons”).  Generally speaking all the familiar elements of your average Protestant service are there:  hymns, readings, reflection ... a collection.

There are, of course, a fair number of differences, too.  One that often surprises and confounds non-Unitarian Universalists is the way(s) we use, and respond to the use of, the word "God."  Some of our congregations are quite comfortable with this word and use it all the time without any problems.  For others the word is anathema, used only on the rarest of occasions and then usually with a disparaging tone.  Individuals within a particular congregation can vary just as widely.

For some, the word "God" stimulates painful memories.  That word has been used to justify all kinds of oppressions and has inflicted all kinds of wounds -- the destruction of native cultures, the denial of the worth of LGBTQ folk, the trauma of clergy abuse, to name just a few.  There are Unitarian Universalists who have come to this movement to get away from anything and everything reminiscent of the religious tradition(s) that did damage to them in their past.  For these people, the word "God" can be an unwelcome reminder of what they've left behind.

For others, the word "God" is simply irrelevant.  It's not that these people believe that "God is dead" but, rather, that the word "God" is as meaningless as "invisible red bicycle toasters."  Those are all real words, but they point to something that doesn't exist, never has, and never will; the words have no meaning.  And so it is with "God" for some people.

There are others in our congregations for whom the word "God" is quite meaningful, and positively so as well.  By far the vast majority of these folk don't use the word referring to an old white man who lives in the clouds capriciously sending blessings and curses on his whim.  (An understanding that was once described by a UU teen as, "a buff Santa in a toga.")  What they do mean by the word can take all kinds of forms -- ranging from a generally liberal theism to a natural humanism.  One thing they generally have in common, though, is a sense that we are not alone in the Universe, that there is something greater than we are, and that this something with which (in which?) we live is somehow fundamental and fundamentally loving.  "God is love" is how our Universalist ancestors put it.

We Unitarian Universalists like to pride ourselves on the spiritual diversity within our congregations and within our movement.  We are, we say, open to wisdom from the myriad religious traditions we humans have created.  We celebrate that within our congregations, in the same pew, there can be Christians, neo-pagans, Atheists, Jews, Buddhists, and all manner of eclectics.  And yet, in many of our congregations and for many of our members, the word "God" can be a sticking point.  In fact, its use can be a deal breaker.

Many of our congregations have responded with what might be called a theological "don't ask, don't tell" policy.  In order not to offend those for whom "God language" is either painful or meaningless, we'll make use of other language in our worship.  Oh, some of our hymns still have the "G-word" in them, but as far as possible we'll strip sermons and prayers (or "meditations") of it.  Instead we'll use, perhaps, "Spirit of Life" or "Spirit of Love."  We talk about the importance of community, of human-to-human relationships with the tacit understanding that we'll leave it to the theists among us to fill in the notion of human-God/God-human relationships.

In the two decades that I have been privileged to serve in parishes I have had many people come to me to talk about their discomfort and dis-ease with "God language."  "Why do you have to use the word 'God'?", I've been asked.  "That word is meaningless (or painful) to me," they say, and I don't doubt for a moment that this is true.

I have also had conversations with people for whom the lack of "God language" is painful.  They did not leave their previous religious communities in pain, they were just looking for something larger.  Some of these people end up leaving our congregations, returning to the churches of their youth, because even though they disagree with much of what they hear (which is why they left in the first place) at least there they can still think about and talk about God.

Others are looking for help.  They don't any longer believe that God is what they had been taught, yet neither do they believe that we are alone in an uncaring universe.  Coming into our congregations seeking guidance, they instead receive the direct or implicit message that it'll make people uncomfortable if they raise their very real questions.  In a sad irony, we end up disappointing these people for essentially the same reason their previous churches did -- an unwillingness to openly and directly engage in a real exploration of the ultimate nature of reality.

What makes this doubly sad is that no one knows -- no one can know -- what they're talking about when they talk about that which is pointed to with the word, "God."  Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential of the Christianity's early theologians, asserted that no one can say anything about God.  To say that "God is gracious," for instance, immediately opens your words to misinterpretation and serves to limit God. 

This can be understood, perhaps, as a verbal analogy to Judaism's prohibition against making images of G-d because any image could be interpreted as suggesting that the ultimate reality of existence can be diminished to the point that it could "fit" into an image.  This is also a way of understanding the Jewish practice of refusing to say the name of G-d.  "Name that cannot be named," is one formulation sometimes used instead.  Even within the Muslim tradition, which has a list of 99 names of God, it is asserted that there is a 100th name that will always remain secret.

To be sure, Augustine found a way to talk about that which cannot be spoken of.   He affirmed that  while you cannot make any positive statements,  you can still make negative statements and you can speak in analogies -- "God is not evil," for instance (instead of "God is good"), or "God is like a loving parent."  Neither of these approaches presumes to claim knowledge of the Holy.  Rather, they are like looking at the sun through one of those pinhole cameras that show you a reflection of the sun rather than the sun itself.

Hospital chaplains often find themselves in the rooms of patients who say that they don't believe in God.  Wanting to find some kind of common ground the chaplain may reply, "Tell me about this God you don't believe in.  I probably don't believe in that God either."  In other words, let's not either of us pretend that we could say what God is.  Instead, let's talk about what God is not.  Perhaps by doing this we'll back our way into talking about what is ultimate in our lives.

And isn't that, really, at least a big part of what this whole religious endeavor has always been about?  We humans are meaning-making creatures.  And while some religious traditions have tried to explain the how of life, and to insist that their particular answers are literally true, it seems much more likely that religion's place is to try and help us to answer the why of it all.

Why is there pain and suffering?  Why is there this particular pain and suffering that I'm experiencing right now?  Why do we and those we love, or anyone else for that matter, have to die?  Why are we here in the first place?  Is there a purpose to life?  My life? Why do love and justice seem to be too often impotent?  Why can't we all just get along?

The arguments over whether there is or isn't a God, and whether in any case we should make use of that word and its related concepts seem to me to be distractions.  Not that the feelings -- especially the pain -- that is often caught up in those debates are unimportant.  They matter tremendously.  Yet they all too often simply serve to separate us when what our world so desperately needs, as do we ourselves, is more coming together.

In the next post I'll suggest a way not out so much as through this seeming impasse.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Can We Be Creative and Not Change Things?

This is the reflection I offered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on July 19, 2015.

Opening Words:  Henry David Thoreau, from his book Carlyle and His Works)

Reflection:

The first time Igor Stravinsky played the beginning of the Rite of Spring, with its dissonant chords and pulsating rhythm, to Serge Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev asked him, "Will it last a very long time this way?" To which Stravinsky replied, "To the end, my dear."  (Seemingly not a very good beginning to a collaboration.)  When the work premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913, it sparked a riot.  The conductor of the premiere, Pierre Monteux, was told by one of his double-bass players that “many a gentleman’s shiny top hat or soft fedora was ignominiously pulled down by an opponent over his eyes and ears, and canes were brandished like menacing implements of combat all over the theatre.”

No one is sure whether it was the music (about which one critic wrote that it, “always goes to the note next to the one you expect.”) or whether it was the dance (which was described as “ugly earthbound lurching and stomping.”).  What is clear, is that chaos and mayhem ensued.  A member of the orchestra remembered, “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on."  Today, the Rite of Spring is one of the most recorded works in the classical repertoire.

Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony was described as “[threading] all the foul ditches and sewers of human despair; it is unclean as music well can be.”  Of Richard Wagner it was asked, “Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.”  I've heard that when Beethoven was asked what he thought about Rossini he said, "I like some of Rossini's operas.  Perhaps one day I'll set them to music."

Claude Monet’s painting style was called, “formless, unfinished, and ugly.”  Van Gogh created more than 900 works of art, yet was only able to sell one in his lifetime.  (In 1990 one of his paintings sold at auction for $82.5 million after only three minutes.)   The expressionist painter El Greco was called "mad "in his day, and his artistic style was said to be a sign of his insanity.

In literature:  Louisa May Alcott was told to give up writing and “stick to teaching.”  Rudyard Kippling was told that he didn’t know how to use the English language.  Marcel Proust had to pay for the publishing of Remembrance of Things Past, as did Beatrix Potter with The Tale of Peter Rabbit.  When he tried to publish The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carré was told that he didn’t have a future as a writer.   Madelein L’Engle’s A Wrinke in Time was rejected 26 times before it was published.  Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected 121 times.  And Gertrude Stein submitted poems for publication for 22 years before having one published

.

Do you see a pattern emerging here?  Last week I mentioned that we may resist our own creativity because of fear – fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, whatever.  This week I want to lift  up the question of why society at large seems to have such an ambivalent relationship with creativity.  On the one hand, the United States and, maybe, the Western world in general, has always praised The Artist, the Creative Genius.  On the other, the examples I just gave – and the hundreds more I could – seem to pretty clearly demonstrate that if your artistic genius is too creative … well … let’s just say that The Creator can be dismissed as The Kook.

But why is this?  Maybe because real creativity challenges the status quo.  In fact, that might be a good definition of creativity – the replacement of the old and familiar with the new and unknown.  British historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee once wrote:

“Creation is a disturbing force in society because it is a constructive one. It upsets the old order in the acts of building a new one. This activity is salutary for society. It is, indeed, essential for the maintenance of society's health; for the one thing that is certain about human affairs is that they are perpetually on the move, and the work of creative spirits is what gives society a chance of directing its inevitable movement along constructive instead of destructive lines.” 

Sounds good, but let’s return to that first phrase: “Creation is a disturbing force in society.”  The Spanish poet Frederico García Lorca went further when he wrote, “The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him …”  The artist is an anarchist, and creation is a disturbing force that upsets the old order.

There is a cartoon making the rounds on FaceBook (mostly, it seems, among colleagues).  It has a church search committee saying something like, “So we’re agreed.  We’re looking for a visionary leader who will help us to stay exactly the same.”  Creativity sounds good, unless it’s our “old order” that’s being upset.  And while so many of those artists – painters, composers, writers – who were rejected in their day are revered today, I can’t help but somewhat cynically note that they are revered today only after they are dead and their work can no longer quite so thoroughly challenge and disturb.

We usually think of creativity in what I'd call its most simple form – the arts – but I want us to look for creativity in a place we might not normally think to look:  religion.  I have always said that religious community serves two purposes.  On the one hand it is conservative in its most fundamental sense – religion exists to conserve, to preserve, the religious community.  On the other hand, the reason the religious community is worth preserving is because its mission is a subversive one.  Religions exist to perpetuate themselves so that religions can help us realize that there is more to life than simply surviving and following the dictates of the prevailing culture.

In every religious tradition I know anything about there is the same teaching.  Different words are used, but the same truth is lifted up.  “Most of us live lives of quiet desperation,” one of our Transcendentalist ancestors said.  Yet he also affirmed that there is a way of living “deep [and sucking] all the marrow out of life.”  Buddhism teaches that we live in the state of samsara, delusion, yet also that it is possible to wake up.  (The word “buddha,” in fact, simply means, “the Awakened One,” and we’re told that “all things have Buddha-nature.”  Even you and me.)  Christianity says that we are dead in sin, yet can become alive again.  Lots of metaphors are used but the point remains the same – the way life is led by most of us most of the time really is not the way life is supposed to be led.  Putting it in the practical, the mundane – our acquisitive, capitalist, consumer society; the patriarchal and racist systems in which we live; the hyper-hectic lifestyle that is expected of us is not the way to live.  The purpose of religion is to remind us of that, and to help us find a different path.

The contemporary author Elizabeth Ann Bucchianeri has said that, “It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.” I’d add that it’s not only a right, but a responsibility, and it’s a right and responsibility that’s shared by religiously creative and creatively religious folk.  Just as the spirit of creativity is anarchistic, so too is the spirit of real religion.  And it is no less dangerous, and no less threatening.

Prophets, mystics, saints … they always challenged the status quo, always lived their lives so as to be an indictment of the way things are.  Prophets, mystics, saints may today have been co-opted to the service of maintaining things the way they are, but in their day?  It really shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of today’s revered saints were so often branded heretics while they were alive.  The religious person is an anarchist, and religion is a disturbing force that upsets the old order.

Universalist preacher and teacher Clinton Lee Scott once wrote, “Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the directions of their vision.”  It seems to be human nature to look back at creative genius and see its power, yet only from that distance to give it respect and admiration.  “Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the directions of their vision.”

Perhaps even more directly, in the words of Henry David Thoreau we heard earlier, "The fathers and the mothers of the town would rather hear the young man or young woman at their tables express reverence for some old statement of the truth than utter a direct revelation themselves. They don’t want to have any prophets born into their families – damn them!”

I think it was just this that was in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mind when he spoke to the graduating class of Harvard College in 1838.  Retaining his gendered word choices, this is what he said to those promising new preachers:

“Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.”

This is not new advice.  William Shakespeare – who in his day was considered just one of a number of promising playwrights –  put this advice into the mouth of the character Polonius when bidding farewell to his son Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any [one].”  Buddha, on his deathbed, advised his friends to be their own lamps. 

The Japanese have a saying – it’s in your Order of Service: the nail that sticks up is hammered down.  We know that this is true here, as well.  There is a danger to following the beat of our own drums.  Throughout history those who dared to step off the well-trod path are told in innumerable ways that they are making a mistake, and society has myriad methods to encourage them to return to the norm (and to punish them if they don’t).  We know that this is so.

So how do we – we who so often find it so difficult to claim our creativity in its most simple form, one of the arts – how do we discover within ourselves the power to be creative in and with our lives?  That may be the key – we discover it.  We discover it over and over again rather than simply settling for having “found it.”

The great jazz bass player and composer Charles Mingus remembered, “As a youth I read a book by Debussy and he said that as soon as he finished a composition he had to forget it because it got in the way of his doing anything else new and different. And I believed him.”  The sculptor and painter Marcel Duchamp said, “I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” The Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer Frantz Omar Fanon said of himself, “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”  And it has been said of Yeshua ben Miriam (who we know best as Jesus) that, “he was always discovering his identity; he was never possessed of one.”  Or, I think we could say, he was never possessed by one.  He was always free to discover himself anew.

So ask yourself:  Who are you?  Or, perhaps more accurately and importantly, who do you think you are?  You don’t need to do it right now.  You can wait ‘till you get home.  But ask yourself, and then ask: who do you think you’re not?  Who do you think you can’t be?

The spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson wrote a thing that has been so widely disseminated that it’s often attributed to other people.  (My favorite is that Nelson Mandela said it in his 1994 Inaugural Address!)  You probably have heard it at some point.  I think it’s good to hear more than once.  She uses theistic language, which reflects her beliefs, yet it’s not really necessary to hear her meaning.  Don’t let that trip you up.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

The person who is truly alive – truly, richly, fully alive – is an anarchist, and her or his life is a disturbing force that upsets the old order.  Upsets the old order in the act of building a new one. May it be true for you.  May it be true for me.  May it be true for us all.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

On Our Knees

I have been introduced recently to the Franciscan preacher, teacher, and monk, Richard Rohr.  Since then I've been voraciously reading everything of his that I can put my hands on.  I recently encountered a line that really jumped out at me:

I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel.

Let that sink in for a moment.  Sit with it, as it were.  I've had these words circling around in my brain and heart since coming across them a couple of days ago, and I realize that I don't either.  Yet I do.

There's a paragraph that was written by a teenage member of the Unitarian Church of Ithaca, NY, after their youth group visited a local Benedictine Monastery for vespers.  (It was originally published in their church newsletter; I first came across it in the Worship Reader compiled by the Congregation of Abraxas.

“In the chapel there were only a few people watching the service, and I sat in front of them.  I wanted the sensation of being alone there.  I wanted to be open to the beauty of the chapel and the circle of monks and to the chanting.  And I see now that I wanted more than that.  I wanted thru some sort of magic to enter into the service, not simply because its forms were beautiful, but because they seemed at once mysterious and full of meaning. . . .  The monks knelt and rose and bowed; bowing, their bodies bent forward from the waist, torsos almost horizontal.  But I could not move. . . .  I was brought up I this [Unitarian] church where no one kneels and no one bows.  Physically I’m very inhibited, so that I don’t move easily.  And when has it ever been suggested that I might kneel, even figuratively kneel, before or to something?  I wanted to kneel, that’s the important thing.  But I could not. . . .  To kneel and to mean it would be frightening because there is a darkness in the kneeling and a darkness in us which we cannot reason about.  You [Unitarians] teach the fear of form without meaning, and that is right; but having avoided forms, you have sometimes avoided the darkness, and it is from the darkness that the real questions arise.” [Italics are mine.]

Not that long ago the Christian Fellowship in the church I serve held a communion service.  Afterward, one of the members came up to me and, very excitedly, told me that they had "used the original words."  By this she'd meant that they'd sung, "Let us break bread together on our knees" instead the oft used variation, "Let us break bread together you and me."  When has it ever been suggested that we might kneel, even figuratively kneel, before or to something?

That teenager sure had it right -- to kneel and to mean it -- would be frightening.  Is frightening.  It means acknowledging that we are not the Grand High Poohbah of All Existence.  As the Rev. Barbara Merrit put once put it, "Whether or not we believe in God, we must recognize that we ourselves are not God."  And that means, ultimately, recognizing that there is absolutely nothing we can do to control the Universe and our part in it.  We cannot guarantee success for ourselves and our friends and doom for our enemies.  We cannot ensure that things will work out as we wish they would -- that we always will be safe, happy, and secure.  We just can't.  And whether or not we believe that there is some kind of Sacred Something that is holding us through it all, we do need to come to terms with the fact -- the inescapable and undeniable fact -- that we are not in charge.  That can be a terrifying thing for some of us, and kneeling -- and meaning it -- can be an embodiment of this truth.

If you haven't done it in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Kneel.  Literally get down on your knees

and see how it feels.  (Not so much how it feels in your knees and hips, but how it feels in your heart.)  Bow your head even, maybe, or lift it upward.  Do this in your home in front of a home altar or, just the end of your bed.  Do this in the sanctuary, before or during the service, with or without other people there.  Do this outside, in the woods or just a corner of your yard.

Richard Rohr said, "I do not want to be part of a religion that cannot kneel."  Neither should you.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The More Things Change

In the congregation I serve -- the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA -- I hold a drop-in discussion group we call "Wednesday Wonderings."  It started with us using materials developed by Richard Foster to introduce people to the writings and thinking of a variety of Christian mystics.  Each session included an introduction to the person and then a series of bite-sized nuggets from their writing.  Most often it came from a single source, yet usually it was edited to a more reasonable size.  (Each session fit on four pages.)  We would go around the room, each person reading a section and then, although Foster included questions, we would ask each other what had stood out for us -- surprising, confusing, confirming, challenging.

The next year I took it upon myself to create similar materials by mystics of other traditions, and then this year I created three programs, each four weeks long:  one looked at the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, one looked at four key teachings of Christianity, and one looked at four texts from the Unitarian Universalist (tradition.)  The last session of this most recent program was a bit of a teaser for next year's course, in which we'll spend the year with Clinton Lee Scott's book, Religion Can Make Sense.

Scott was the Superintendent of the Massachusetts Universalist Convention.  During his career he gave a series of radio addresses, and these have been collected into this volume.  Next year we'll work our way through the entire book -- 37 chapters -- taking a chapter a week.  This past Wednesday we looked at the first chapter, "What does it mean to be religious?"

In this chapter Scott challenges the definition of religion that was prevalent in his day -- the book was published in '49 -- and which is still the majority's understanding:  that religion has to do with holding certain beliefs and engaging in certain practices.  Rather, he says,

"Religion is not the invention of priestcraft, neither is it given into the custody of any church.  Religion is inherent in our nature and has been the companion of our human kind since the beginning.  ... To be religious is to know that your highest experience is a religious experience.  To be religious is to act your best in the presence of the highest you know. ... To be religious is to take the high road when the low road beckons.  To be religious is to seek by every means of inquiry and of investigation for the truths that come not by magic or miracle, but by the only means for their reception -- the open, the eager, and the humble mind."

Earlier, in a passage that appealed to most of us, he write:

"As a matter of fact, no preacher, priest, bishop, or other professionally religious person has any inside information.  Truth is discovered by the ministers of religion.  It is also discovered by scientists, poets, prophets, garage mechanics, and housewives."

Sounds kind of like the stance of Unitarian Universalism 65 years later, no?  As he French say (and yes, I had to look this up):  plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  (The more it changes, the more it's the same thing.)

Another passage that stood out to us because of its apt description not just of his day but of ours:\

"[O]n any week except Christmas and Easter, if we were to count all the people who attend churches -- men, women, youth, and children -- the total would be less than the number of persons -- men, women, youth, and children -- who attend no religious services."

We may see the large number of "nones" as a relatively new phenomenon, yet it's clear that we're not the first to experience it.  And as for the "spiritual but not religious" dichotomy?  I think that the way Scott understands religion could serve as a bridge.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Why I'm In Favor Of Religion…

Recently someone I respect re-posted what I can only call a rant on her Facebook page. After commenting on the ways the religion he grew up in taught him that he was not okay, the author ended with this:

"This is why I am so outspoken about religion.  It's not enough to say I'm and atheist and that I simply don't believe; I am anti-religion and what it does to peoples' lives.  Life is about us, we make our own choices, and this time on Earth is OURS.  Make the most of it."

I would like to offer something of a rebuttal. Or, at least, an alternative perspective. I would like to speak for all those people — including me — for whom religion has been a source of comfort, strength, and inspiration.

The religion I know, or what I think of as religion, tells us that we are worthy, we are loved, and that we are part of something huge and miraculous. Yes, it also tells us that we are "sinners," but by this it only means that we are fallible, that we make mistakes, we make wrong choices, and that we do things, and think things, the block us from manifesting our deepest and truest selves.

I know that some people would insert God here. They would say that we do things, and think things, that block us from our union with God. I happen to find that that language makes sense to me. Yet I don't believe it is necessary for the fundamental truth to still be true. However you phrase it, the reality for most of us is that most of the time we are not "all we can be." We are untrue to ourselves, and who we really are. Most of us, most of the time, do not live up to our own ideals much less the ideals of anything we might call "God."

But that doesn't mean we should feel shame. After all, if this is true of everyone why is it shameful for it to be true of us as well? This is not some kind of condemnation or curse, it is simply a description. It's like saying "we breathe air." "We make mistakes." "We are sinners." "We do not live true to our most authentic selves most of the time." Can anyone really argue with that?

And let's talk about "god" for a minute. As I've heard it said, when the Buddha was asked if there is a God, he said, "this is a question that does not tend towards edification." In essence his argument was this: if there is a God, how should we live our lives? We should do as much good as we can for others, and strive to do the best we can for ourselves, in order to please this God.

And if there is no God, how shall we live? We should do as much good as we can for others, and strive to do the best we can for ourselves, because this is the only life we have.

The question, then, is not, "is there God"? The real question is, "how do we live a good life"? Religion, at its best, strives to help us answer that question. And I think it's always important to remember that "religion" is not a monolithic concept. It is not synonymous with "Christianity."there are all kinds of religions — from Atheism to Zoroastrianism.

That's right. I classify Atheism as a religion.  I do so because -- as I understand the term, at least -- "religion" does not have to do with any particular theological statements (or lack thereof).  The term "religion" comes to us from the Latin relegare which means "to bind together."  Religion, then, is that which helps us make sense of life, which helps us to order our own existence, which connects us to others.  By this definition, then, that poster's "Anti-Religion" is, in an ironic twist, his religion -- it helps him to make sense of the world and his place in it; it helps to order his thoughts and actions.  That's what religion does.

I will readily concede that a whole lot of truly horrible things have been done in the name of religion -- both to individuals and to whole groups.  No question about it.  There's no way to rationally deny it.  But here's an analogy:  say that someone of about my build got into my house one day and stole some of my clothes, and then stole my car.  Say this person then went on to commit a series of robberies and was caught on some grainy security video.  The police, quite naturally, might come to my house, since the robber was wearing my clothes, was about my weight and height, and was seen to be driving my car.  Their mistake would be quite understandable, but what if they decided to prosecute me anyway?

I would argue that there has been a lot of horrible things done in the name of religion, but that that's not the fault of what for want of a better term I'll call "true religion."  That was the doing of "impostor religion."  "True religion" inspired and strengthened Nelson Mandella, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  "True religion inspired the Beregan brothers.  "True religion" inspired Rumi and Hafiz.  Look at virtually every movement for social change and you'll find religion there, often leading the charge.

I am deeply offended by what "religion" has done.  I am compelled by what I know religion can do.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Another God?

I was listening to El Rushbo the other day, as I am wont to do from time to time, and he lit into a rant that I found absolutely fascinating.  Conservatism, he said, is not a philosophy.  It is not a set of policies.  It is a way of life.  It is a way of life, he said, based on values, history, and tradition.

Sounds a whole lot like religion, I said to myself.

And then what I was hearing struck me:  Rush Limbaugh was -- whether he was fully aware of what he was doing or not -- was saying that conservatism is the conservative's religion.  It is the conservative's way of life.  It is evident in what they choose to do and what they choose not to do.  It guides their thinking.  It provides direction.  Some of this, to be clear, Rush did not say in so many words.  But it certainly seems to me that all this is a logical inference from what he did say.

And if, it seems to me, that what he said is true -- that conservatism is not merely a set of policies but is, instead, a way of life -- then it seems clear that conservative's claims to be Christian are demonstrably false.  After all, the first commandment -- the very first of the ten conservatives claim to hold sacrosanct -- is "thou shall have no other gods before me."

Christianity was, in its formative years, known simply as The Way.  It is to this day not a mere philosophy, not a set of policies, but a way of life that is based on values, history, and tradition.  Yet if Limbaugh is right, these so-called "Conservative Christians" have set another god before God -- conservatism.

Maybe this is why it's so infernally difficult to understand how people who claim to revere Jesus and the Bible can behave in ways so contrary to the message of both.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Nothing Else Matters

This was the second sermon of my candidating week with the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church in Charlottesville, Virginia.  (April 17, 2011)  As it turns out, it is also the second sermon of my ministry with these good people!  I am so looking forward to many, many more.

Reading: On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.


~ Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk

Sermon: Nothing Else Matters

Well . . . it’s been quite a month since we were together here last week . . .

Only a week ago, when I stood here and told you all that none of what we do here matters in the least . . . if, that is, this is all we do; if we allow ourselves to settle for living “life that is not life” instead of continually going deeper, and wider, and higher, and discovering for ourselves “life that is life.”

I thought about how I should start this sermon this morning. I considered telling you that I believe firmly that we live in a “both/and” universe. But then I realized that that must also mean that I believe in an “either/or” universe, too, so I figured that wouldn’t really tell you anything.

And then I thought of the words my father used to tell me with some regularity, words he took originally from Walt Whitman who said in his poem Song of Myself, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I also thought of the last sermon I offered to the good folks of the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, Maine, after eleven years of being their ordained preacher. I gave the sermon my all time favorite sermon title: “Everything I’ve Said Was Wrong.” In it I looked back over all of the sermons I’d delivered over the years and demonstrated how, viewed from different angles, none of what I’d said would hold water. A humbling experience, to be sure, but a good reminder. We all – this world – contain multitudes.

So if last week I wanted to tell you that none of this matters, today I want to explain my deep conviction that nothing else matters quite so much.

During this week you’ve asked me a lot of questions, given me many opportunities to (as my mother used to say) “exercise my little grey cells.” On Wednesday night, when a group met here to discuss the topics of worship and spirituality, someone asked me just why it’s important for us to be engaged in worship at all. When Active Minds recently discussed this very topic, it was noted there that some people think that there’s no need for us to gather together in a place such as this – that a much more “worshipful” experience could be had by taking a walk in the woods, imbibing the beauty of a park. That’s true. Yet being in community, and being on our own, are two vastly different things.

I want to tell you a story. There was a Christian monk who lived in community, but was known to take long, solitary retreats to the monastery’s hermitage. He would get permission from the Abbot for a retreat, pack his bible and, perhaps, a change of clothes, and then hike down the mountain to the secluded shack the Order used for private retreats. Sometimes he wouldn’t return for a month or more.

One time, though, this monk returned the evening of the day he had set out. This was so unusual that the Abbot called for him and asked him to explain why he was back so early. The monk replied, “Father Abbot. I began my retreat as I always do, opening the Gospels at random to see what God would have me meditate upon. This morning I opened to the story of Christ washing the disciples’ feet. I settled into my meditation yet I kept finding myself disturbed in my prayer by a nagging question, one which has caused me to return to the main house.”

“What was that question?” the Abbot asked. “It was this,” the monk replied: “Whose feet can a hermit wash?’

On Wednesday night, when I was asked why we do this “worship” thing I responded that I think that there are two fundamental realities which are incredibly easy for us to forget. In fact, most of us live our lives most of the time as if they were not true, so, it is imperative for us to come together in religious community to help us to remember. Because remembering is key to living “life that is life.”

The first reality we so often forget is that we are intimately interrelated with all that is. Most of us live most of the time as if we were out here on our own; fundamentally, existentially alone. The truth, though, is that we are connected to everything that is. As I like to point out, this is true if only because we’re literally made of the same stuff – we, and the trees, and the jaguars (both the cats and the cars) are all made out of the same elements, the dust of stars. We don’t live outside of the universe; we are intimately interconnected with it. Part and parcel of it, as our own St. Ralph once said.

The second reality is that we are not the Be All and End All of all things. As one of my colleagues once put it, rather memorably, “Whether or not you believe in God, you need to realize that you, yourself, are not God.” Let me say that once again, “Whether or not you believe in God, you need to realize that you, yourself, are not God.”

These two things – that we are intimately interrelated with all that is and that we, ourselves, are not God – are apparently really difficult to remember with any kind of consistency. Nearly impossible, if we try to do it on our own.

And so we come together to remind one another.

Yet we don’t just remind one another, here, in words. Rather – and this is what I think is most tremendously exciting about all of this – at our best we remind one another because here we enact these truths, we embody these truths, we manifest these truths in how we do what we do.

We come together with others, an expression of our realization of our interconnectedness. We need one another, and here we come together with others – folks who think like us; folks who don’t; folks who inspire us; folks who irritate us; folks we know well; folks we’ve yet to meet. Yet we call one another “one community” just as we are, in fact, one with everything.

This is partly what my friend and colleague Erika Hewitt meant in the words we used for the opening: “You do not have to do anything to earn the love contained within these walls. You do not have to be braver, smarter, stronger, better than you are in this moment to belong here. . . . You only have to bring the gift of your body, no matter how able; your seeking mind, no matter how busy; your animal heart, no matter how broken.”

Isn’t that just what this place has been for many of you? Isn’t it what we all believe it can be? In a world as frustratingly fractious as ours, as foolishly fragmented as ours, could there be anything that matters more than creating beloved community like this? South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said that church should be, “an audiovisual aid for the sake of the world,” showing how the world could be.

And then there’s that other thing, that remembering that we’re not the Grand High Poohbahs of Creation. That can be a tough one. And it’s probably important to be clear that I’m not talking about what a UU high schooler once called, “that buff Santa in a toga” – you know, that bearded, Zeus-like old man in the clouds who gives gifts to all the good people and an eternity of coal to the bad ones. That’s not what I’m talking about, ‘though I might use the word “God” to describe it. Or, perhaps, Spirit of Life. Or, you know, The Force – that “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” I like to call it, “The Sacred Something.”

Whatever we call it, we enact it when we come together – because all of us is greater than any one of us. When we come together in community we acknowledge something greater than ourselves, if only the community itself.

If we do it right, of course. That’s where covenants come in – promises, expectations, commitments, responsibilities, accountabilities . . . I know that not everyone is comfortable with the language of “covenant,” yet we are a covenantal people. Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors did not bind together their communities through mutually shared creeds, as have most other religious traditions. Instead, we have always formed our community through covenant – promises made about how we would be together.

James Luther Adams, one of our movement’s greatest theologians, and a fierce proponent of what he called “the free church tradition” once wrote this:

“I call that church free which enters into covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands. It binds together families and generations, protecting against idolatry of any human claim to absolute authority. This covenant is the charter and responsibility and joy of worship in the face of death as well as life. I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship, that protects and nourishes their integrity and spiritual freedom; that yearns to belong to the church universal; it is open to insight and conscience from every source; it bursts through rigid tradition, giving rise to new and living language, to new and broader fellowship. It is a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit."

That’s what we’re trying to do here, and what else could possibly matter more than that?

Annie Dillard said, in that reading I love so well, that she thinks of those of us in church as children, “playing on the floor with our chemistry sets mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.” And I said last week that this means she thinks we’re fooling ourselves if we take what we do here seriously. And yet . . .

And yet she affirms a truth, a reality to that power she says “we so blithely invoke.” She reminds us of the “sleeping god,” and the “waking god,” and tells us that what we’re doing—whether we know it or not, whether we understand it or not—is serious business. (“We should be lashed to our pews.”)

Transforming lives – your life; my life. Healing the world—this beautiful, broken, breathtaking world. How could anything else matter as much?

This week you’ve asked me a lot of questions. And many of you have shared with me your hopes, and dreams . . . and fears. This is a beautiful community you have here. And if there’s still work to do, know that that just means that it’s a human community. Know, too, that you have done, and are doing, so much so well.

This afternoon you will engage in one of the most sacred rituals of our faith tradition – the communal discernment of whether or not to call a particular individual into your community to serve in the role of settled minister. In some ways this is a totally insignificant act – you’re voting on one minister among so many. In other ways, you are considering opening a new chapter in the life of this church, a new phase in that “adventure of the spirit.”

It’s been an honor to be among you this week, and I can tell you that it will be an honor, a privilege, and a great pleasure to write that new chapter and chart that new course with you. But that’s for later. Right now I can’t think of anything better to do than sing with you all. (“The Fire of Commitment”)