“There is a long religious tradition that stressed the importance of recognizing the limits of our knowledge, of silence, reticence and awe…. One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of.”[Karen Armstrong] In this service may we open our hearts and minds to whatever new ideas may come along. We never ask you to believe what your preacher does, just to think about what he has to say. May we enter into this moment with that spirit.
We live in a confusing world these days, particularly when it comes to the God part of religion. While Fundamentalists of all persuasions think they know exactly what God is or isn’t, one of today’s most thoughtful religious scholars, Karen Armstrong, says: … despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkable undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept. Many people in the pre-modern world went out of their way to show that it was very difficult to speak about God. Armstrong says that while theologians have always believed: “it was important to put our ideas about the divine into words,” they have acknowledged that the words they used were never quite adequate. Because of this, the actual practioners of religion have tried to devise ways to: “subvert normal patterns of thought and speech to help the faithful understand that the words we use to describe mundane things were simply not suitable for God.”
God is an idea I’ve been struggling with ever since I was a child. I can remember in my early twenties arguing about God late at night with my former wife – night after night. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons we didn’t get along, although she’s now a Unitarian Universalist, too. Though I’d been raised a main line Christian, I could no longer believe in the kind of God described in the creeds and worship of the church in which I was raised. I could no longer believe in the sort of God to whom I could appeal for what I wanted in life. A liberal arts education and personal experience made it impossible for me to believe in that kind of deity.
So did going to theological school. I did the bulk of my work at Starr King, our UU school in Berkeley. I learned most of what I learned about theology from Bob Kimball, a brand new prof at Starr King fresh out of grad school, and Durwood Foster, an equally fresh prof who taught across the street at Pacific School of Religion. Both had been teaching assistants at Harvard for Paul Tillich who, at that time, was probably the most important American theologian, though if you listened to Tillich’s heavy German accent you might have trouble imagining him to be American.
The Harvard University Press at that time was in the process of publishing Tillich’s three volume, Systematic Theology. Understanding what Tillich was trying to say in those dense volumes was difficult, complicated by the fact that when Tillich got to Volume Three he had changed his mind about some of the things in the earlier volumes. So, when it came to Tillich’s conception of God, Kimball and Foster disagreed about what Tillich was saying. Foster said: “Tillich believes in God, which he calls the Ground of Being or Ultimate Concern.” Kimball disagreed, saying: “Tillich says the God who is God is beyond all knowing.” Tillich believed that using the very word God was idolatry.” The one thing that Kimball and Foster agreed on, was as Karen Armstrong puts it, the myths people have constructed to talk about God were “never intended as an accurate account.” They’ve been ways of using poetry, story, and metaphor to describe what’s beyond the words we use.
“OK,” you say, “I understand that, but does this mean that the Divine isn’t something with which we can have a relationship?” No. I believe that Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy is something we can experience. What I don’t believe is that like a Supernatural Being up in the sky who has a personal knowledge of us and is concern about our lives. Given the billions of light years worth of existence out of which we’ve evolved – and all the other life forms that must have evolved with us – it seems egotistical to believe that there’s some All Pervasive Something or Someone that knows us. Yet, there have been times in my life when I’ve felt a relationship with Something that goes beyond all describing. I felt this when something really deep broke through in a relationship with another person: love. I’ve felt this when I’ve experienced something miraculous, like the birth of a child. I’ve felt it when I’ve been drawn into the beauty of something, like the fluttering aspen in the golden fall light. I’ve felt it when an absolutely new idea has broken free in my mind. I think Foster was right when he said Tillich was talking about this when he described the Divine as the Ground of Our Being, an Ultimate Concern, or we might say, Something Transcendent with which we can feel in touch.
It’s because of this that Armstrong talks about being religious as not so much having to do with what we believe as how we experience life. She talks about how a musician, “losing herself in her music,” feels like she’s in another world; how a dancer in motion becomes “inseparable from her dance,” or how a skier, feeling “entirely at one with himself and the world,” soars in the air and feels like she’s “touching the face of God,” as a poet has put it. One of the reasons people created the world’s various religions, says Armstrong, is to provide them a “discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of heart and mind.” But, she cautions, it’s the discipline of religion that most people want to do away with these days. They’d like God to take care of things for them without having to go through any trouble on their part.
Forrest Church, one of the most insightful Unitarian Universalist ministers of recent times, died recently of esophageal cancer. As he faced his disease, Church thought a lot about God and religion. Though he had begun his ministry as a skeptic, as the years went by he found himself more and more alienated by the arguments of such anti-theists as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, critics who assume that the only people who are religious are those who trash science and reason and want us to believe in the “inerrant” and unchangeable truths of their scriptures. What such critics of religion don’t understand is how thoughtful, intelligent people can find a deal of meaning in a religious approach to life, as do Unitarian Universalists.
In talking about this shortly before his death, Forrest Church told Bob Abernathy, a reporter for Public Television, that he believed that one of the things that sustained him was the personal relationship he had developed with Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy. This didn’t mean he had come to believe in the kind of God that Dawkins and Harris reject – a God who cared about him. Church said: “I don’t pray for miracles. I don’t pray to cure my incurable cancer.” What he prayed for was the strength and courage he knew he had to “receive and consecrate each day that I’m given as a gift.” Church said: “I have no idea what happens after we die, and so I go with Henry David Thoreau who, when he was asked about the afterlife, said: ‘Madam, I prefer to take it one life at a time.'”
When Abernathy pursued Church about the relationship he believed had with the Divine, Church Forrest said that believing in the loving kind of Spirit Universalism affirmed connected him “with that grace and power” he believe is available to all who are open to it – the Whatever It Is that is “greater than all and present in each,” as Emerson put it. Church went on say that it’s the love affirmed by Universalism, – “the love that is the “light” that’s meant to shine “through every religious window” – that saved his life, even though it wasn’t going to prevent his death.
Church went on to say: “The greatest of all truths is that love never dies, that every act of love that we perform in this life is carried on and passed on into another life,” so that centuries from now our love survives. That, he says, rather than trying to get us in contact with a God we can’t know, “is the work of religion.” “The secret of it all,” says Church, “is that it’s not about me.” He says, “I have preached on living in the present for my entire career. Only in the here and now” can we live and love “in ways that will redeem the day.” One of the redeeming things about the otherwise horrible reality of having to face a terminal illness, says Church, is that he found it made those he cared about “more vital and more present.” It made each day more meaningful to him because he was able “to unwrap the present and receive it as the gift it is. You walk through the valley of the shadow,” he says, and find “it’s riddled with light.”
Church’s life wasn’t without its problems, but it was riddled with light – the kind of light that isn’t there if we take life “lightly,” if you don’t mind my twist on the word. Church was the son of a hard-driving and thoughtful U.S. Senator who took life very seriously. Church not only had a ministerial degree, he had a PhD in religion. So he obviously took the life of the intellect seriously, like Karen Armstrong. So, I’d like to come back to her description of theism, the sort of theism that helped Church approach the end of his life with such depth, love and courage.
In A Case for God, a recent book, Armstrong looks at the evolution of religion since the time of the ancient cave paintings discovered in France, one of the first visual evidences of an artistic quest for what we might call the spiritual. Although there is some controversy about this, some believe the paintings were just graffiti, most scholars have come to believe the people who lived in these caves painted what they did as a way of trying to ensure they would be able to obtain the food they needed to survive. These early humans also took care in burying their dead – burying them in a manor that seemed to be aimed at making their journey to wherever they were going as peaceful and loving as possible.
Thinking of how human beings through all the time since have tried to use their imaginations to create rituals and symbols like this that would make some sense out of their lives, Armstrong writes: “Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art,” is to help us live “with the realities” for which there are no easy explanations and problems we can’t solve, like: “mortality, pain, grief, despair and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.” In the face of this what people discovered was: “that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of it’s tether and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible,” they were able to experience “a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage.”
This, I believe, is the essence of the religious quest. Those of us who think of ourselves as religious are trying to find to find answers beyond what science and reasons can provide us – something that help us deal with “the terror, disappointment and sorrow” that come finding out that we have an incurable disease” – a source of meaning that help us be able to die in peace. What helps is faith – not a blind faith or one that depends on magic – but one that, as Armstrong puts it: “enables us to break out of the prison of selfhood.”
Breaking out of such a prison includes getting rid of all the child-like notions of God. Tillich said such images are not only unhelpful; they’re idolatrous. Most of the such images just make God more powerful versions of us, like the superheroes of the Greeks and Romans, the “God Who’s Going to Getcha” of Fundamentalism, or the “God Who’s Gonna Make You Rich” of those who preach the Gospel of Prosperity. It’s also God of the “There Ain’t No God” of atheists, like Harris and Dawkins, “who demand the withdrawal of respect from all things religious.”
At a Unitarian Universalist General Assembly many years ago – at a time before our adoption of the Flaming Chalice as the symbol of our faith – Saul Alinsky, the great organizer and social activist, gave an address in which he said that he thought the symbol for Unitarian Universalists ought to be a question mark, because if you turned a question mark upside down it became a plow with which to till the earth – to till it so things could grow out of it. I like the idea of a symbol that suggests we live our lives in ways that will allow things to grow out of them. It’s this kind of symbol that, for me, points to Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy. The word Emerson used to describe this was Oversoul: that Spirit, that Informing Whatever, with which we can be in touch when we reach for the courage, strength and conscience that lie inside of us. If we approach life as though what matters is being in touch with this source of courage, strength and conscience – and Church would add love – I believe we would be coming close to, “touching the face of God.”
Let me end today with the reading that would have come earlier in this service if we hadn’t been welcoming our new members, which we had such joy in doing. It would have come from the book from Karen Armstrong that I’ve been quoting – and I’m paraphrasing just a bit:
From almost the very beginning, men and women have engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some way to enhance and fulfill their humanity. They did this because their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historically sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. The point of religion was to live intensely and richly in the here and now…. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they seek to retain peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearn for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality. Instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspire to live generously, large-heartedly and justly, and to inhabit every single part of their humanity…. They try to honor the ineffable mystery they sense in each human being and create societies that protect and welcome the stranger, the alien, the poor and the oppressed. Of course, they often fail, sometimes abysmally. But overall they find that the disciplines of religion help them to be, deep down, what they want to be.
May the discipline of our Unitarian Universalist faith help us to live like this, whether we believe in God or not. It helped Forrest Church – and it can help us.
Our Benediction comes from the writing of Forrest Church, brought to the attention of our Program Council by Sue Parilla:
Want to reboot your spiritual life? Before you begin, a simple suggestion: “Think small. Dream possible dreams. Set out to climb a single hill, not every mountain. Soul work needn’t be strenuous to be high impact. You can begin transforming your life with a single phone call. Or by writing a kind letter. Or by opening your blinds to let the sun flood in. Don’t say it’s nothing. It’s everything, for you have now begun.
One Who Is Awake
A Buddhist Story Taken from The Case for God, a new book by Karen Armstrong
One day a Buddhist priest came across the Buddha sitting in contemplation under a tree and was astonished by his serenity, stillness and self-discipline. The impression of immense strength channeled creatively into an extraordinary peace reminded him of a great tusker elephant. “Are you a god, sir?” he priest asked. “Are you an angel … or a spirit?” “No,” the Buddha replied. He explained that he had simply revealed a new potential in human nature. It was possible to live in this world of conflict and pain at peace and in harmony with one’s fellow creatures. There was no point in merely believing it; you would discover its truth only if you practiced this method, systematically cutting off egotism at the root. You would then live at the peak of your capacity, activate parts of the psyche that normally lie dormant and become a fully enlightened human being. “Remember me,” the Buddha told the curious priest, “as one who is awake.”