Sermons, Prayers, and Reflections from First Unitarian Church, Des Moines, IA (2023 - ) and Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation, White Plains, NY (2013-2023)
2025-01-14
Freedom
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord.’ She then bore his brother Abel. Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of the ground.
In the course of time Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the soil, and Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock. The Lord paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed.
Cain was much distressed and his face fell.And the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you distressed, and why has your face fallen? Surely, if you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin couches at the door. Its urge is toward you. Yet you can be its master.’
Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Come, let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.
Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’
And he said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’
Then He said, ‘What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! Therefore, you shall be more cursed that the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.’
Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is too great to bear! Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid your presence and become a restless wanderer on the earth -- anyone who meets me may kill me.’
The Lord said to him, ‘I promise, if anyone kills Cain sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.' And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him.
Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
In this passage, the Chinese servant, Lee, is talking to Samuel about those sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis.
Well, the story bit deeply into me and I went into it word for word. The more I thought about the story, the more profound it became to me. Then I compared the translations we have — and they were fairly close. There was only one place that bothered me. The King James version says this — it is when Jehovah has asked Cain why he is angry. Jehovah says,‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin....
Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible. It was very new then. And it was different in this passage. It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order.
And I began to stew about it. I wondered what the original word of the original writer had been that these very different translations could be made....
I respectfully submitted my problem to one of these sages, read him the story, and told him what I understood from it. The next night four of them met and called me in. We discussed the story all night long.... Every two weeks I went to a meeting with them, and in my room here I covered pages with writing....You should have sat through some of those nights of argument and discussion. The questions, the inspection, oh, the lovely thinking — the beautiful thinking.
After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too — ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’...
The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel — ‘Thou mayest’ — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’ — it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’...
Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win....
It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man....
Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this — this is a ladder to climb to the stars....It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.
I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed — because ‘Thou mayest.’
As we think about our theme of the month for January -- Vow -- and reflect on the Great Vow of our life, we confront the fact that we can say all kinds of noble and lofty things about our purpose here on Earth, yet we often find ourselves not being our best selves. We may have done the exercises for discerning and articulating our vow, yet we find ourselves breaking it. The Christian tradition calls this sin – which I suggest we think of as not being so much about breaking God’s rules as failing to live up to our own ideals of what we want to be. Can we be free – free to live by our vow, as we want to?
Steinbeck's character Lee is awfully excited by the idea that we are free, we can choose not to sin -- to keep our vow and live by it. Why does Lee get hooked by one verse from Genesis 4, plunge into two years of intense exegesis about it, and conclude that ‘thou mayest’ is humanity’s ladder to the stars?
The story of the conflict between Cain and Abel reflects the real conflict in the Ancient Mid-East between the tillers of the ground and the keepers of sheep. It is also one of many times in the Hebrew Scriptures that a parent or parental figure’s real or apparent preference for one sibling over another causes trouble.
For Lee, the key verse, Genesis 4:7, comes before Cain kills Abel. Cain is feeling sad because Yahweh “paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed.” Yahweh says, Why so sad?
“If you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin couches at the door. Its urge is toward you. Yet you can be its master.”You can be its master. The King James Version says, “Thou shalt rule over” sin – which Lee reads as promising that humans will triumph over sin. The American Standard Version says, “Do thou rule over” sin – which Lee reads as a command, an order to triumph over sin.
The Hebrew word here is “timshel,” and of the 20-odd major translations into English, the only one that uses “thou mayest” is the 1917 JPS (Jewish Publication Society) Translation of the Tanakh. (The Tanakh is the same 39 books as what the Christians call the Old Testament, arranged in a slightly different order.) The 1917 JPS translation would be the one in use by English-speaking Jews of Steinbeck’s time. If Steinbeck consulted with a Rabbi -- and apparently he did -- the phrase they would have talked about was, “thou mayest rule over” sin. "You can be its master," is from the New JPS Translation, 1985. It’s a mix of “you’re allowed” and a sort of “Si, se puede” (yes we can) encouragement. You can be sin's master.
John Steinbeck's East of Eden is a literary exposition on the Cain and Abel story, and, in particular, gives attention to this one verse. Steinbeck, through his character, Lee, puts the emphasis on free will: thou mayest. And, for Lee, free will is a really super nifty thing. Free will is what, he says,
“makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice.”What is Lee talking about?
Here’s what I have to say about that: Determinism is ultimately beside the point, but it does serve the purpose of helping clarify what is the point -- what is at stake when we strive for greater freedom. What will turn out to be at stake, I will argue, is relationship, community -- all of us welcoming each of us. Through love are we free. And through freedom we can be what we really, deeply want to be, can live by our vow.
Determinism raises an important question: If freedom means you get to follow any impulse that happens to come upon you, whence do those impulses come? Your desires are produced by some combination of genetic predispositions and environmental influences. You get to choose, but you don’t choose the factors that will cause you to choose the way you do.
Everything is the product of causes – with the possible exception of certain quantum phenomena which, some physicists say, are entirely uncaused. Under certain conditions the spin of certain particles is absolutely random – NOTHING caused it to spin the way it is spinning and not the other way. So, if quantum phenomena can be uncaused, can human behavior be uncaused? Well, what if it can? That is not what freedom looks like. If you saw somebody moving about randomly – muscles contracting here and there without cause or reason – we wouldn’t say she was free. Quite the opposite. We’d say she was in the grip of – enslaved by, we might say – some bizarre and horrible neurological condition.
Determinism makes a very logical point. Everything that happens is either the product of causal conditions or it is random. Neither products of causal conditions nor random action is free. "Free will" is an incoherent concept.
This logical point is sound, but the sort of free will that is thereby defeated is not the sort of free will that any one who yearns for freedom is yearning for. They aren't yearning for some incoherent concept, but for something very real in our experience. What is it?
People who are yearning for freedom are yearning for liberation from some force or condition in their life. It might be a slave master or prison bars or an addiction or mental illness or poverty or bad habit or impulsiveness. Someone yearning for freedom isn’t looking to become uncaused. They just want certain causes removed so that happier causes can, instead, dictate their actions. They would like to be guided by purposes that make sense and are rewarding rather than by someone else’s commands and by threats of painful punishment. They would like to have certain specific constraints removed. They would like to be guided by the better angels of their nature rather than by their demons.
Nor does determinism mean we can’t hold people responsible for what they do. One of the causes at work producing human behavior is the social practice of holding a given person responsible for a given action -- and if that practice of holding each other responsible works – if it helps maintain an orderly society -- then let's keep the practice. Moral disapproval sometimes works. There are a lot of things I don’t do because the moral disapproval of those around me has taught me not to do that. The key relationships in our lives include a shared language of moral deliberation, and that’s often a strong causal factor on our behavior.
For instance, we don’t shout inappropriately in public. For people with Tourette’s syndrome, that doesn’t work. We say they aren’t responsible for what they do – which is to say that the shared language of moral deliberation – praise, blame, censure, punishment – is an ineffective causal force for making them change that particular behavior.
Much of the time, though, holding people responsible through use of moral language works just fine. If your teenager has misbehaved and then protests that causes made him do it, you can just reply, “Of course. And now let’s see if being grounded will cause better behavior in the future.”
So what I’m saying is this: Thou mayest – you get to choose – doesn’t mean your choice is undetermined, not even a tiny bit. The mixture of influences you didn’t choose and genetic inclinations you didn’t choose – maybe with some randomness thrown in that you also didn’t choose – wholly determines what you will choose.
But that’s beside the point because the important question isn't, "Are your actions determined?" The important question is, "What is freedom actually experienced as?" We don’t experience freedom as uncaused action, so when the determinist points out that there is no uncaused action, this fact is irrelevant to the experience we’re talking about. The real question is how do we experience freedom, and how can we experience more of it?
I think there are three conditions for feeling free in what we do: that our own moral deliberation -- alone or through discussion with others -- is a significant cause of what we do; that we are physically and mentally able-bodied and able-minded; and that all our tastes and preferences are taken into account; none are suppressed.
One: We experience freedom when one of the causes is a shared language of moral deliberation. When an action happens reflexively or habitually or driven by obsessive-compulsive tendency or by any other mental disorder, we don’t experience it as being as free as we do when the language of moral deliberation can play out in our minds and when there’s a real possibility that we will actually carry out the conclusion of that deliberation. When we say that depression, schizophrenia, and mania aren’t free choices, we’re saying that talking – blaming, scolding, threatening, ostracizing – doesn’t do much good.
We experience freedom not when our action is uncaused. It’s always caused. But when language – particularly the language of deliberation – is a key factor among the causes, then we experience freedom. Ultimately the moral language with which we deliberate is also produced by causes -- environmental inflences and genetic predispositions -- but that doesn't matter. When those causes filter through moral deliberation, the resulting actions feel more free.
Two: We experience greater freedom when the causes that are coming from our own body, including our brain, are within the range of normal and healthy, rather than including mental or physical illness.
Three: We also experience greater freedom when all our tastes and preferences – howsoever unchosen those tastes and preferences are – are allowed at the table. We don’t, in the end, have to act to satisfy every taste, but not squelching or suppressing or denying that we do have the tastes we have is a piece of the experience of freedom.
In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the character, Lee, is excited about the Hebrew word timshel, translated as, "thou mayest." The possibility of acting where there is neither a command ("Do thou") nor a guarantee of an outcome ("Thou shalt") is indeed exciting. It’s very engaging.
When no particular authority is commanding and the outcome is up for grabs, then we are called upon to use moral deliberation. Then we bring all our tastes and preferences to the table – they all get to be considered even if they aren’t all gratified. Then we can pursue purposes with integrity with an overarching sense of who we are.
How can you get more Timshel – more of that experience of freedom – in your life? In other words, what might I say today that might function as a cause to help your action be less caused by causes you don’t like and more caused by causes you do like?
Practice attention. Just notice what’s at work in you. Noticing that you’re angry, or that you’re scared, noticing the tightness in your chest or throat or shoulders or stomach, noticing the heat rising on your skin, or the contraction of hair follicles that is that hair standing on end feeling – just bringing conscious awareness to these feelings gives them less power over you. Not zero, but less.
Noticing hunger, just paying attention to the sensations, opens up a greater experience of freedom. If we don’t much notice what the hunger really feels like, then we just reflexively grab a bite to eat. But if we do notice it, possibilities of choosing otherwise come into view. We bring our own language of deliberation into the situation, and it might produce a different outcome than just unthinkingly responding. Or notice when you’re not hungry. Am I reaching for some food when I’m actually not hungry? Noticing where that impulse or habit to eat might be coming from, if it isn’t coming from hunger, allows us the feeling of greater choice – which is to say, it brings the language of deliberation into the causal mix.
If sin is anything that isn’t manifesting your best self -- something that you did that came from an impulse that you would rather have overridden -- the reminder that you have choice – that is, the reminder to bring conscious deliberation into the mix – can be helpful at keeping you on track of your vow.
An example comes from a young woman who struggles with injuring herself, and sometimes with impulses to suicide. She wrote a blog post I happened to come across while I was scoping out thoughts on Steinbeck’s East of Eden novel. She wrote:
'A few weeks ago my friend Austin told me about his favorite passage from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. In this part of the story, the characters discuss the different translations of the Bible story about Cain and Abel. They found that each translation used a different phrase to describe Cain’s relationship with sin. The King James version says “thou shalt” conquer sin, whereas the American Standard one says “do thou rule.” But the Hebrew word used is “timshel,” which translates to “thou mayest.” And that means there is a choice. With “timshel,” Cain would have a choice to either rule over sin or not. As I sat on the floor listening to Austin speak, my knee shaking with the anxiety of the thoughts in my head, I felt the power of timshel. I knew that while my head was telling me to self-injure, that I needed to self-injure, in reality the words in my head were not “thou shalt” but rather “thou mayest.” I had a choice, and I was able to choose to be safe.' (Emily Van Etten, "Timshel")Yes. I certainly want to affirm her power to choose to be safe. Of course, one passage from Steinbeck is not a cure-all. Her struggles returned. Still, any time we can manage to move into the space of conscious choice, bring the forces at work in us into the light of self-awareness, we do, temporarily, open up a little more freedom to follow our vow. At the same time, we should also remember that, in Genesis, immediately after Yahweh tells Cain, “you can be its master,” the very next two sentences are:
“Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Come, let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.”So one little reminder might not do much. Cultivating the habit of constant self-awareness, always noticing the needs, feelings, desires as they arise, this is the practice of freedom. We do this not to suppress or reject the parts that we don’t like, but to own them and embrace them.
To hold ourselves fully responsible – that is, response-able; able to respond to – all of who we are – to own and re-integrate all of ourselves, all the terrible things we’ve done and said and felt and failed to do or say – this is the practice of freedom.
Psychologists use the term “dissociation” to describe a range of detachments from reality. It often has to do with distancing ourselves from a part of ourselves. In extreme cases, it is multiple personality disorder, as the Dr. Jekyll self seeks to sequester and banish the Mr. Hyde self. We are all prone to some form of dissociation – we want to identify with the parts of the self that we like, and get rid of the parts we don’t like. Freedom comes from embracing it all.
Cain is banished from the presence of Yahweh and goes to the land of Nod, East of Eden. Freedom comes from bringing your inner murderous Cain back from the land of Nod (the land of nodding off, the land of sleepy unawareness), back into the full presence of the awakened self -- and owning the responsibility for all of who you are. Not indulging every whim, but not suppressing any either. Neither indulging nor suppressing, but aware of and responding to. We do not rule over our sin – the impulses we will regret -- by banishing it, but by welcoming it into the community of self, by recognizing the legitimacy of its needs.
At the end of East of Eden, the servant Lee begs for the father Adam to give his son, Cal, his blessing. “Don’t leave him alone with his guilt...Let him be free,” pleads Lee. And Adam, as he is dying, whispers one word: “Timshel!” "He thus affirms that Cal has indeed, by accepting responsibility, demonstrated that he is capable of ruling over sin."
In the end, freedom and responsibility are not something we can do by ourselves. We need each other creating the community that can show all of us, all of our parts, back into relationship. You have to do your part, but you don’t have to go it alone. Indeed, you can’t do it alone.
Freedom means no one is banished – no part of you is banished. And that takes all of you welcoming all of who you are, all of us welcoming all of us.
A British band called Mumford and Sons has a song titled “Timshel” (video below). Some of the lyrics echo the East of Eden passage we've been looking at:
“And you have your choices,But the song lifts up also the crucial role of one another.
And these are what makes man great
His ladder to the stars.”
“But you are not alone in thisTimshel: we can do it. Si se puede.
And you are not alone in this.
As brothers we will stand
and we’ll hold your hand,
Hold your hand.
I can’t move the mountain for you
But you are not alone in this."
Thou mayest rule over sin – that is, we just might overcome all banishment, heal from our dissociations, enter into a welcoming responsibility. We may become whole through love. We need all of us. That's our ladder to the stars.
2025-01-05
Vow
Happy New Year! It's a time of starting fresh -- a time of making resolutions for the new year. New Year's resolutions are famously short-lived. I want to suggest something different: not a resolution, not a specific goal, but a vow. Not a destination, but a direction in which we point our lives. Our resolution, then, every day, is to go as far in that direction as we can.
I want to begin this exposition on life vows with some thoughts about hope. I have wrestled with the question of what hope is. Is it just wishful thinking? In common usage, that's all it is. But if hope is wishful thinking, then I don't see how that would count as a significant spiritual quality.
Yet hope often is so counted. Hope is listed with faith and love as the three theological virtues, as Paul says in 1st Corinthians: “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” In the Christmas season, see we often see peace and joy added to make five: peace, hope, faith, joy, love. Those five words are emblazoned on many a Christmas card. What is hope doing on this august list?
The 17th-century Dutch-Portugese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” I think he meant that hoping things get better involves fearing that they might not – and fearing things will get worse involves hoping they won’t. It’s basically the same feeling. It’s worrying about the future. Whether we call it hope or fear, it’s a function of living in the future instead of living in the present, and also entails a certain judgmentalism: things SHOULD be this way, and SHOULD not be that way.
In Buddhist teachings, it’s called attachment if we want it and aversion if we don’t want it, and spiritual practice helps loosen the grip of both attachment and aversion. So aren’t hope and fear just other names for attachment and aversion -- forms of nonacceptance? If hope is no more than wishful thinking – simply a wish for something to happen in the future – then how does that warrant being in there with peace, love, and joy? And if hope is more than wishful thinking, what more is it?
Then about 10 years ago, I came across this passage from the Czech writer and statesman, Vaclav Havel. It gave me a way to understand hope as more than mere wishful thinking and as something spiritually valuable. Havel said:
So for a number of years I have been preaching Vaclav Havel’s line, whenever the topic came up, that hope is the “certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” This Christmas season, however, I find myself lighting more on something Havel said a couple sentences earlier – that bit about
So last month, as I reflected with you on the Advent candle of Hope, I said: “Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. Hope, then, is the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope."
And there we have our introduction to our January theme: Vow. It matters that we intend something, and act on that intent. Hence our question: what do you intend?
In the middle of winter, let us recall the closing lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day.”
“Vow” is our word. “Goal” is not quite the right word for what we’re talking about. It’s fine to have goals, and in some areas of life you need them. The thing is, when you select a goal, you need to have an eye on what you have a chance to succeed at. But a vow is a commitment to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. It is the direction in which you point your life – not a destination. A goal may have a time frame: expand the business X percent in 2025, or lose Y pounds, or bench press Z pounds by the end of this year. A vow is the never-completable work of your life.
Goals can suck you into always working for the next accomplishment – as if the purpose of life were to accomplish things. We are human beings, not human doings. We need time to just be, to appreciate the wonder of this moment, to drink in the joy we are always submerged in if we only notice that we are. Remember that before it asks its concluding question, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” begins with other questions:
And at the same time, there needs to be a rhythm in our lives. We then bring that grounding back from the field into our daily work. Mary Oliver’s work was being a poet – bringing to the world the insight and the joy that poems can bring. Her idle stroll was the grounding for her to give the world this poem – one of her most beloved. So from the grounding in your human being, what sort of human doing particularly calls to you? What will you vow?
You must know that you are enough – that you are whole and you are perfect, just the way you are. And that is not easy to know. Our culture is so oriented toward accomplishment. We are bombarded with the constant message to do more and get more. To undertake to really know the truth that you are whole, complete, and perfect exactly as you are is deeply subversive and countercultural. And if you do glimpse this truth for a moment, the insight quickly slips away again. Re-remembering it is the ongoing work of the rest of your life. You need to know that you are enough.
And, second, you need to serve – serve something higher or wider -- bigger -- than yourself. But since serving is also a path to remembering your inherent wholeness and sufficiency, let us say that the rhythm is one of inner work and outward manifestation. There needs to be that rhythm in our lives. We cannot bring the wholeness of our self forward to bless the world unless we are engaged also in growing deeply familiar with who we are.
The great Christian theologian Howard Thurman, born in 1899, advised:
Finding your rhythm might not be easy. Another writer, coincidentally born the same year as Howard Thurman, E.B. White, commented on this difficulty.
A little over a year ago, in December 2023, I gave a sermon here called, “What is your great vow?” Some of you might remember. I talked about the wisdom of recognizing that you’re not in control. I mentioned Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the mid-1980s that showed that the motor signal is headed to the muscle several hundred milliseconds before we become conscious of it. We have already begun the action before the apparatus of conscious decision-making comes on line. For most of day-to-day life, consciousness isn’t deciding what to do. Rather, consciousness’s job is to come along after the fact, notice what we’re doing, and make up a story about how what we’re doing is what we meant to do. All day long, it’s going: "I meant to do that. Oh, yeah, I meant to do that, too." But the meaning-to-do-it trails behind the beginning of doing it.
Our brains create a running commentary on what it notices we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. It seems to you that your intentions precede and determine your actions, but that is an illusion.
Why, then, did evolution bother to give us consciousness at all? One plausible suggestion, offered by Janet Kwasniak, is that
Conscious brain has no idea what’s going on in the subconscious, so conscious brain just makes up a story. And yet, the subconscious is listening to that story – and starts taking it into account. It listens with a skeptical ear at first, but if the story is referenced repeatedly, the subconscious wiring adjusts.
Say one time you did a favor for someone. Maybe you did it for purely self-interested reasons. But you happen to have been asked why you did it, and you fabricated a story – not from any intent to deceive, but because it’s the job of conscious brain to invent rationalizations – and say your story was that you care about the well-being of others. Sub-conscious brain was listening to that story. It was not entirely sure whether to believe what it heard, but it made a note – a sort of little, “huh!” If it so happens that you have other occasions to tell that story about yourself, then the story gets reinforced a little more. What began, as all our explanations of our own behavior do, as an after-the-fact rationalization, can eventually become an authentic driving force.
And, get this: you can give thought beforehand to the sort of story you want to tell. So what is your vow – the mission of your life? This is the story you can train yourself to follow -- the story you can build into an unconscious habit of action.
The first task to discern your vow. Take your time, reflect on it. Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays writes that
There are some exercises included in this month’s “Vow” packet. These are exercises I’ve selected and adapted from Chozen Bays’ book, The Vow-Powered Life: A Simple Method for Living with Purpose. These are exercises for exploring your self – your background. What sort of sense of the purpose of a life to you pick up from significant adults in your life as you were growing up? What strong reactions against the behaviors of significant adults helped form you? What tragedies or injustices made a powerful early impression on you? Who were your heroes in childhood, in youth, in young adulthood? What were the values they represented? How would you want to commit to serving the world if you knew you had exactly and only five years to live? Thinking about the mission statements of businesses, what mission statement might you make for the business of you?
Exploring these questions, what overarching primary vow emerges for you? These exercises are in the packet. Each of them asks you to do some writing. I recommend handwriting it – in your journal, or on a legal pad or notebook paper. There’s something a little more potent about seeing it there on the physical page in your unique handwriting that came from your unique body. It’ll also help to share the process with others. You’ll have a chance to do that in your Connection Circle this month – and it’s not too late to sign up to be in a Connection Circle. If you’re not in one, or don’t make it to your Connection Circle this month, find others to share it with. When you articulate what feels like the Great Vow of your life, repeat it to yourself every day. For instance:
What starts as after-the-fact rationalization can gradually become an authentic habit of action. And you, and the world (as if there were a difference), will be better for this. May it be so.
I want to begin this exposition on life vows with some thoughts about hope. I have wrestled with the question of what hope is. Is it just wishful thinking? In common usage, that's all it is. But if hope is wishful thinking, then I don't see how that would count as a significant spiritual quality.
Yet hope often is so counted. Hope is listed with faith and love as the three theological virtues, as Paul says in 1st Corinthians: “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” In the Christmas season, see we often see peace and joy added to make five: peace, hope, faith, joy, love. Those five words are emblazoned on many a Christmas card. What is hope doing on this august list?
The 17th-century Dutch-Portugese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” I think he meant that hoping things get better involves fearing that they might not – and fearing things will get worse involves hoping they won’t. It’s basically the same feeling. It’s worrying about the future. Whether we call it hope or fear, it’s a function of living in the future instead of living in the present, and also entails a certain judgmentalism: things SHOULD be this way, and SHOULD not be that way.
In Buddhist teachings, it’s called attachment if we want it and aversion if we don’t want it, and spiritual practice helps loosen the grip of both attachment and aversion. So aren’t hope and fear just other names for attachment and aversion -- forms of nonacceptance? If hope is no more than wishful thinking – simply a wish for something to happen in the future – then how does that warrant being in there with peace, love, and joy? And if hope is more than wishful thinking, what more is it?
Then about 10 years ago, I came across this passage from the Czech writer and statesman, Vaclav Havel. It gave me a way to understand hope as more than mere wishful thinking and as something spiritually valuable. Havel said:
“HOPE in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. HOPE is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”I like that. Hope is understanding that things make sense – this life, this existence, this earth and cosmos. It all has a sense to it – it is not meaningless. In support of this interpretation of hope, one might point to the fact that the opposite of hope, despair, does seem connected with a pervading feeling of meaninglessness.
So for a number of years I have been preaching Vaclav Havel’s line, whenever the topic came up, that hope is the “certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” This Christmas season, however, I find myself lighting more on something Havel said a couple sentences earlier – that bit about
“an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed.”To work for something because it is good – not because it stands a chance to succeed. Ah!
So last month, as I reflected with you on the Advent candle of Hope, I said: “Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. Hope, then, is the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope."
And there we have our introduction to our January theme: Vow. It matters that we intend something, and act on that intent. Hence our question: what do you intend?
In the middle of winter, let us recall the closing lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day.”
“Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?What is your vow?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
“Vow” is our word. “Goal” is not quite the right word for what we’re talking about. It’s fine to have goals, and in some areas of life you need them. The thing is, when you select a goal, you need to have an eye on what you have a chance to succeed at. But a vow is a commitment to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. It is the direction in which you point your life – not a destination. A goal may have a time frame: expand the business X percent in 2025, or lose Y pounds, or bench press Z pounds by the end of this year. A vow is the never-completable work of your life.
Goals can suck you into always working for the next accomplishment – as if the purpose of life were to accomplish things. We are human beings, not human doings. We need time to just be, to appreciate the wonder of this moment, to drink in the joy we are always submerged in if we only notice that we are. Remember that before it asks its concluding question, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” begins with other questions:
Who made the world?These are not the thoughts of someone goal-driven – but they are joyful and deeply wise. We need sometimes to stroll idly and blessedly through fields all day, for this is how we connect with our inherent wholeness and completeness, how we release the demons that tell us we are never enough, never sufficient.
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?”
And at the same time, there needs to be a rhythm in our lives. We then bring that grounding back from the field into our daily work. Mary Oliver’s work was being a poet – bringing to the world the insight and the joy that poems can bring. Her idle stroll was the grounding for her to give the world this poem – one of her most beloved. So from the grounding in your human being, what sort of human doing particularly calls to you? What will you vow?
You must know that you are enough – that you are whole and you are perfect, just the way you are. And that is not easy to know. Our culture is so oriented toward accomplishment. We are bombarded with the constant message to do more and get more. To undertake to really know the truth that you are whole, complete, and perfect exactly as you are is deeply subversive and countercultural. And if you do glimpse this truth for a moment, the insight quickly slips away again. Re-remembering it is the ongoing work of the rest of your life. You need to know that you are enough.
And, second, you need to serve – serve something higher or wider -- bigger -- than yourself. But since serving is also a path to remembering your inherent wholeness and sufficiency, let us say that the rhythm is one of inner work and outward manifestation. There needs to be that rhythm in our lives. We cannot bring the wholeness of our self forward to bless the world unless we are engaged also in growing deeply familiar with who we are.
The great Christian theologian Howard Thurman, born in 1899, advised:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."What I’m saying is that the ongoing process of coming alive has a rhythm: the inner work, which might look like meditation, or might look like idling in a field all day just noticing stuff, and the outward manifestation which looks like some form of service.
Finding your rhythm might not be easy. Another writer, coincidentally born the same year as Howard Thurman, E.B. White, commented on this difficulty.
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”The rhythm of savoring the world and saving the world can be challenging – but keep at it, and you’ll get the hang of it.
A little over a year ago, in December 2023, I gave a sermon here called, “What is your great vow?” Some of you might remember. I talked about the wisdom of recognizing that you’re not in control. I mentioned Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the mid-1980s that showed that the motor signal is headed to the muscle several hundred milliseconds before we become conscious of it. We have already begun the action before the apparatus of conscious decision-making comes on line. For most of day-to-day life, consciousness isn’t deciding what to do. Rather, consciousness’s job is to come along after the fact, notice what we’re doing, and make up a story about how what we’re doing is what we meant to do. All day long, it’s going: "I meant to do that. Oh, yeah, I meant to do that, too." But the meaning-to-do-it trails behind the beginning of doing it.
Our brains create a running commentary on what it notices we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. It seems to you that your intentions precede and determine your actions, but that is an illusion.
Why, then, did evolution bother to give us consciousness at all? One plausible suggestion, offered by Janet Kwasniak, is that
“the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action....This marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions were 'ours' or just happened.”The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened” – if it was apparently not a result of some particular behavior of mine -- the effects on my wiring are different. What we call “volition” is not a generator of behavior but only a perception that a behavior is ours. This illusion that intentions precede and determine action, then, arose as a by-product of the way the brain learns from experience.
Conscious brain has no idea what’s going on in the subconscious, so conscious brain just makes up a story. And yet, the subconscious is listening to that story – and starts taking it into account. It listens with a skeptical ear at first, but if the story is referenced repeatedly, the subconscious wiring adjusts.
Say one time you did a favor for someone. Maybe you did it for purely self-interested reasons. But you happen to have been asked why you did it, and you fabricated a story – not from any intent to deceive, but because it’s the job of conscious brain to invent rationalizations – and say your story was that you care about the well-being of others. Sub-conscious brain was listening to that story. It was not entirely sure whether to believe what it heard, but it made a note – a sort of little, “huh!” If it so happens that you have other occasions to tell that story about yourself, then the story gets reinforced a little more. What began, as all our explanations of our own behavior do, as an after-the-fact rationalization, can eventually become an authentic driving force.
And, get this: you can give thought beforehand to the sort of story you want to tell. So what is your vow – the mission of your life? This is the story you can train yourself to follow -- the story you can build into an unconscious habit of action.
The first task to discern your vow. Take your time, reflect on it. Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays writes that
“You cannot discover your vows by thinking. Your vow lies within you.”It lies within you. How can you bring it out, articulate it, and make it conscious? You can’t just think it out, Chozen is saying.
There are some exercises included in this month’s “Vow” packet. These are exercises I’ve selected and adapted from Chozen Bays’ book, The Vow-Powered Life: A Simple Method for Living with Purpose. These are exercises for exploring your self – your background. What sort of sense of the purpose of a life to you pick up from significant adults in your life as you were growing up? What strong reactions against the behaviors of significant adults helped form you? What tragedies or injustices made a powerful early impression on you? Who were your heroes in childhood, in youth, in young adulthood? What were the values they represented? How would you want to commit to serving the world if you knew you had exactly and only five years to live? Thinking about the mission statements of businesses, what mission statement might you make for the business of you?
Exploring these questions, what overarching primary vow emerges for you? These exercises are in the packet. Each of them asks you to do some writing. I recommend handwriting it – in your journal, or on a legal pad or notebook paper. There’s something a little more potent about seeing it there on the physical page in your unique handwriting that came from your unique body. It’ll also help to share the process with others. You’ll have a chance to do that in your Connection Circle this month – and it’s not too late to sign up to be in a Connection Circle. If you’re not in one, or don’t make it to your Connection Circle this month, find others to share it with. When you articulate what feels like the Great Vow of your life, repeat it to yourself every day. For instance:
I am here to love and understand this world and the beings in it, that thereby they might be helped to grow in understanding and love.That’s mine. Whatever yours turns out to be, once you have it, use it. Repeat it to yourself, and use it to explain to yourself why you did certain things you did. Let it be the compass needle that points your way. Sub-conscious brain will be listening to that story. I wrote this sermon, and have now delivered it, because I am here to love and understand this world and the beings in it, that thereby they might be helped to grow in understanding and love.
What starts as after-the-fact rationalization can gradually become an authentic habit of action. And you, and the world (as if there were a difference), will be better for this. May it be so.
2024-12-23
Advent
First Sunday of Advent
Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the first Sunday of advent. Advent is a time of anticipation or expectation – of preparation and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. In the Christian tradition, it is a time of spiritually preparing for the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. In preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the first Sunday of Advent, the theme is Hope.
And as we light our chalice, we also light the first candle of advent, a purple candle signifying hope.
Reflection: We enter Advent – the season of preparation, of expectation, of reflection on the celebration which is to come. This first Sunday of Advent the theme is hope. Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. As we reflect in these days about what Christmas means for us, what it could mean, we consider in what ways we see love becoming incarnate and in what ways we can lend our intentions to those incarnations. Where can our hopes combine with hopes of others to promote love, and build justice, for justice is what love looks like in public?
Second Sunday of Advent
Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the second Sunday of Advent -- a time of anticipation, expectation, reflection, and preparation for Christmas. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And in preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the second Sunday of Advent, the theme is Peace.
And as we light our chalice, we also light the first and second candles of advent – the first purple candle signifying hope and the second purple candle signifying peace.
Reflection: The invitation of Advent is to reflect and spiritually prepare for the celebration which is to come. This second Sunday of Advent, with the second purple candle now lit, the theme is peace. Also, the first candle is re-lit. The first one is hope, the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Now the second purple candle is peace. The peace at issue is conveyed in the Hebrew word, "Shalom," which implies wholeness, harmony with oneself and others and with the universe; healing of damaged relationships; and justice, fairness, and equity for all. We set our intention to what we can do to contribute to worldwide shalom, yet none of us can, by ourselves, make peace real. The path to peace calls for coordinating with others, revising our intention in light of their intentions and their needs. We cannot do it by ourselves, yet no one else can do for us what is our part to do.
Third Sunday of Advent
Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the third Sunday of advent: a time of anticipation, expectation, and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. For some of us, it is a time of spiritually preparing for the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. December 25 is our day to particularly celebrate this fact. In preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the third Sunday of Advent, the theme is Joy.
And as we light our chalice, we also light the first three candles of advent – the first purple one signifies hope. The second purple one signifies peace. And today’s candle, the pink one, signifies joy.
Reflection: The invitation of Advent is to reflect and spiritually prepare for the celebration which is to come. This third Sunday of Advent, with the pink candle now lit, the theme is joy. Also, the first two candles are re-lit. The first one is hope, the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. The second one is peace: the letting go of attachment to results, the assurance that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well. Now out of that hope, and that peace, emerges joy. Not happiness, which is a passing mood, which comes and goes according to circumstances, but rather abiding joy. Joy is the fulfillment that comes from connecting with something beyond ourselves. Some of us conceive of it vertically – something higher, or something deeper. Or we might conceive it horizontally – not a higher power, but a broader power. Joy is the connecting with a wider reality than our narrow self-interests. It is the embrace of common cause with all beings. Happiness is mutually exclusive with sadness, but joy abides even in the midst of sadness. Indeed, a sharp awareness of the world’s pain, its griefs and losses, is essential to the complete connection and identification with the interdependent web of all existence – a connection and identification that is the ground of joy. We are one.
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the fourth and final Sunday of advent: a time of anticipation, expectation, and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, December 25 is our day to particularly celebrate this fact. And in preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the fourth Sunday of Advent, the theme is love.
And as we light our chalice, we also light all four or our Advent Candles – the first purple one signifies hope. The second purple one signifies peace. The third candle, the pink one, signifies joy. And the final purple one signifies love.
Reflection: Dear Spirit of Love, We have lit your candle, the candle of love, on this fourth Sunday of advent. We know love is continuously becoming flesh and dwelling among us – in the birth of every beloved child, and in every act of caring and kindness -- yet this is the time of year that we, by convention, direct our attention to celebrate that fact: the fact that thou, love, art born, and born again and again, and that thou art what saves us. The advent season invites us to grow toward this celebration of love, to grow into that celebration over several weeks, preparing ourselves, deepening our appreciation of the message. We have lit again today, as we first did three weeks ago, the purple candle of hope: the assurance that it matters what we do. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope. We have lit again today, as we first did two weeks ago, the purple candle of peace: the acceptance that comes to us when we let go of attachment to results. We offer up to the world what we are. We do what we can. We then leave it up to the world what to make of it. This is peace. We have lit again today, as we first did last week, the pink candle of joy: for out of hope and peace emerges joy, which comes from connecting with something beyond ourselves, whether something higher or something wider. Happiness is a passing mood, but joy may abide even in the midst of sadness. And now, as the culmination of advent, we have lit the purple candle of love. “And the greatest of these is love,” for love is the fruition of hope, peace, and joy – yet also the ground from which hope, peace, and joy grow, in an ever-widening virtuous cycle.
2024-12-15
Christmas Music
"Sing a song of Merry Christmas"
Wolfgang A. Mozart; arr. Walter Ehret
“Merry Christmas” we say. But it’s easy to find ourselves with no time for merriment. Our Choir’s opening song urged us to “Put care away this holiday.” I hope that’s possible. May you have time for merriment. May you have time to put care away this holiday.
As I looked over the five choir pieces for our Music Sunday, I noticed that there are two, in some ways opposite, ways to put care away this holiday. One of them is merriment, cheer, gaiety – a little bit rowdy, a little bit loud – a time for raucous belly laughs. But this is also a season for peace. To find the calm assurance of inner peace -- this, too, is putting care away – and relishing a calm and peaceful delight. Not the belly laugh, but the quiet smile.
Christmas is for both the boisterous and the peaceful. More on the boisterous side of Christmas, the next Choir piece is about Wassailing. Why do they call it wassail? Because it’s good for wassails ya. Actually, “wassail” comes from the Old Norse for “be healthy” – used as a drinking salutation, like, “to your health.” Nowadays, wassail denotes a beverage made from mulled cider, ale, or wine and spices. The verb wassailing has two traditions: there’s the house-visiting wassail, and the orchard-visiting wassail.
The orchard-visiting wassail comes from cider-producing regions of England. People would go to apple orchards and recite incantations and sing to the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year. They called this wassailing.
The house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, shlepping an enormous wassail bowl with them, and singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl exchange for gifts – traditionally, food, drink, or money. Both the house-visiting wassailers and the orchard-visiting wassailers were there to confer blessings – a blessing on the trees, in one case, and a blessing on the house, in the other case, to protect it from evil spirits.
I have seen carolers – and have even been a caroler – but I’ve never seen people actually wassailing – either the orchard-visiting kind or the house-visiting kind. At least, if they were carrying around a large bowl, I didn’t see it. I understand actual wassailing still goes on in western England and Wales. Americans: not so much. But we do like to sing about it. Wassailing has become, for most of us, a metaphor.
Our lives, lived day to day, are indeed a "wandring so fair to be seen" – as we traverse our days giving and receiving the blessings of life and companionship. And as we go through life, our interactions are a mix of marketplace transactions and nonmarket values. On the one hand, I’ll trade you a drink for some gift from you. There’s that transactional way of viewing it. On the other hand, there’s love and joy being shared – and the human bonds that transcend markets.
"Here We Come A-Wassailing"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Ryan O'Connell
Almost every recording artist feels the need at some point in their career to put out a Christmas album. Even Bob Dylan, bless his heart, put out one. I like Bob Dylan, but after hearing his Christmas album once, I have not wanted to hear it again. The record labels are not, however, cranking out Halloween albums, or Labor Day albums.
Think of all the Popular Christmas songs written in the 20th century: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snow Man.” “All I want for Christmas is You,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “Silver Bells,” “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” New ones come out every year.
Those are fun. I like them. But in my mind the real Christmas Carols are the ones from the 19th Century. These are the ones that seem to me to get under the surface of Christmas and speak to a more fully resonant meaning. “Joy to the World,” “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” “Do you hear what I hear?” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Deck the Halls,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels we have heard on high,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – you know – the ones in our hymnal. I mean, a 20th-century song like, for instance, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” may be catchy, and even kinda poignant, but it’s not hymnal material.
Of course, the 19th-century also produced some very popular tunes that were just for fun: Jingle Bells, for instance – which is also not in our hymnal.
The thing is, Christmas, as I was saying, has these two very different moods: on the one hand, the merry and festive -- and on the other hand, the peaceful, the quiet bliss. If you were going to pull off a holiday that pulls together such opposite moods, how would you do it? With music. You sing Jingle Bells, and you sing Silent Night – you sing about laughing all the way, and you sing about “all is calm” – and you keep going back and forth until the two moods start to seem like one thing after all. And maybe they are.
Sing to us about the Carols of Christmas.
"Carols of Christmas (Love is All Around)"
Clark William Lawlor
As we noted earlier, our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And yet the holiday is called Christmas. It’s a Christian holiday – and isn’t the Christian story about love being made flesh and dwelling among us is a bit more... specific?
Sometimes we use the word “supernatural” to describe the difference between the traditional Christian account of Christian and a more “naturalized” version. Some people believe in supernatural stuff going on, and some people don’t, and there’s the difference. Some people tell a supernatural story about Christmas – and some people don’t go in for that. The thing is, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn’t as clear as we sometimes imagine it is.
That distinction is a cultural product, and it has shifted over time. The very idea of supernatural – that is, the sort of line we draw between what we call “natural” and what we call “supernatural” -- is all fairly recent. And it’s not always clear where or how the line is to be drawn.
For instance, it has occurred to me – and might have occurred to you -- that the ghosts depicted in the movie "Ghostbusters" are not supernatural. You might think that if anything counted as an example of a supernatural entity it would be ghosts – and that people who don’t believe in the supernatural, therefore do not believe in ghosts. But if “ghost” means the sort of entity fictionally depicted in Ghostbusters, then ghosts are entirely natural.
Why do I say this? The ghostbusters use nuclear-powered backpacks to shoot a stream of protons at the ghost, and then they contain it within a metal box. If something is susceptible to physical protons and a physical box, then that something is a physical thing. The entities are fictional – and the physics involved is fictional, too -- but it’s still recognizable as physics.
There is a history of uncertainty about where to draw the line between natural and supernatural. There was a boom in seances in the 1920s and into the 1930s. This was the time when radios were first coming out. If invisible disembodied voices could speak to us from afar through the medium of a box, then why couldn’t the spirits of the dead speak to us through a medium? If radios were natural, then maybe seances were, too. Or if seances depended on something supernatural, then it sure seemed as if radios did too.
A lot of people were unsure about where to draw that line between natural and supernatural. Today, our physicists propose that there might be something called dark matter. The way that galaxies curve in their rotation, the way galaxy clusters form, and the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation seem to require a lot more mass out there than we can see or detect – so physicists hypothesize that the mass is there, but it’s a different kind of mass that’s invisible, undetectable – dark matter – which they estimate, has a total mass of more than 5 times the mass of all the visible matter in the universe. Is dark matter supernatural? If you say “no,” then why not?
Physicists are divided on the question of whether quantum indeterminacy is irreducible – but if it is, that would mean there’s no natural law that determines certain quantum phenomena. Would that make them supernatural?
They more you look at this notion of supernatural, the more elusive it becomes. It’s not at all clear what, if anything, it could mean.
There are, in fact, a number of approaches to Christmas that quite explicitly ground the basic story in nature. "The Holly and the Ivy" is quite an old Carol – one of the few that might go back to before the 19th century, though the earliest known publication was in 1833. "The Holly and the Ivy" - and Doughlas Wagner’s riff on that carol -- “Now the Holly Bears a Berry” -- seem to emphasize the continuity between the natural and the human. The holly brings forth berries – and Mary brings forth her babe. There is wonder there – a kind of awe inspiring magic – in the way that life brings forth life, but there’s nothing we could call supernatural, unless we called everything supernatural.
It’s all natural, through and through. And that’s just super!
"Now the Holly Bears a Berry"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Douglas E. Wagner
"Peace, Peace"
Words and Music Rick and Sylvia Powell; arr. Fred Bock
Wolfgang A. Mozart; arr. Walter Ehret
Sing a song of Merry ChristmasWhen I was a kid, at this time of year, I heard the usual carols on the radio. Intermixed with them, however, in our house, we played Tom Lehrer albums. To some of you, I dare say, this will also be familiar – and for some of you, perhaps, not – after all, it’s been more than 65 years since Tom Lehrer’s Christmas Song was released. It goes, in part, like this:
Put care away this holiday.
Sing a song of Merry Christmas.
Put care away this holiday.
This is the time to sing Noel.
This is the time to sing Noel, Noel, Noel!
This is the time to sing a bright Noel, so
Sing a song of Merry Christmas,
a joyous song of Christmas --
Put care away this holiday.
Christmas time is here, by gollyThe holidays can be stressful. Christmas – and Hanukkah, too – have been so thoroughly Commercialized for so long now that we don’t even think to complain about anymore. It’s just how things are. The shopping and the preparations – maybe the travel, or the hosting of relations that travel to you: so much to do!
Disapproval would be folly
Deck the halls with hunks of holly
Fill the cup and don't say when
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings
Advertising wondrous things
God rest ye merry merchants
May ye make the Yuletide pay
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and – buy!
“Merry Christmas” we say. But it’s easy to find ourselves with no time for merriment. Our Choir’s opening song urged us to “Put care away this holiday.” I hope that’s possible. May you have time for merriment. May you have time to put care away this holiday.
As I looked over the five choir pieces for our Music Sunday, I noticed that there are two, in some ways opposite, ways to put care away this holiday. One of them is merriment, cheer, gaiety – a little bit rowdy, a little bit loud – a time for raucous belly laughs. But this is also a season for peace. To find the calm assurance of inner peace -- this, too, is putting care away – and relishing a calm and peaceful delight. Not the belly laugh, but the quiet smile.
Christmas is for both the boisterous and the peaceful. More on the boisterous side of Christmas, the next Choir piece is about Wassailing. Why do they call it wassail? Because it’s good for wassails ya. Actually, “wassail” comes from the Old Norse for “be healthy” – used as a drinking salutation, like, “to your health.” Nowadays, wassail denotes a beverage made from mulled cider, ale, or wine and spices. The verb wassailing has two traditions: there’s the house-visiting wassail, and the orchard-visiting wassail.
The orchard-visiting wassail comes from cider-producing regions of England. People would go to apple orchards and recite incantations and sing to the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year. They called this wassailing.
The house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, shlepping an enormous wassail bowl with them, and singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl exchange for gifts – traditionally, food, drink, or money. Both the house-visiting wassailers and the orchard-visiting wassailers were there to confer blessings – a blessing on the trees, in one case, and a blessing on the house, in the other case, to protect it from evil spirits.
I have seen carolers – and have even been a caroler – but I’ve never seen people actually wassailing – either the orchard-visiting kind or the house-visiting kind. At least, if they were carrying around a large bowl, I didn’t see it. I understand actual wassailing still goes on in western England and Wales. Americans: not so much. But we do like to sing about it. Wassailing has become, for most of us, a metaphor.
Our lives, lived day to day, are indeed a "wandring so fair to be seen" – as we traverse our days giving and receiving the blessings of life and companionship. And as we go through life, our interactions are a mix of marketplace transactions and nonmarket values. On the one hand, I’ll trade you a drink for some gift from you. There’s that transactional way of viewing it. On the other hand, there’s love and joy being shared – and the human bonds that transcend markets.
"Here We Come A-Wassailing"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Ryan O'Connell
Here we come a-wassailingChristmas is indeed heavy on the music. No other holiday is submerged in its music the way Christmas is. There are a few Easter songs – not many. For the 4th of July, we have a number of paeans to patriotism, but they don’t inundate the air the way that Christmas songs and carols do every December.
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand'ring
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you
a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.
We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door;
But we are neighbours' children,
Whom you have seen before.
God bless the master of this house
Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table go.
Almost every recording artist feels the need at some point in their career to put out a Christmas album. Even Bob Dylan, bless his heart, put out one. I like Bob Dylan, but after hearing his Christmas album once, I have not wanted to hear it again. The record labels are not, however, cranking out Halloween albums, or Labor Day albums.
Think of all the Popular Christmas songs written in the 20th century: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snow Man.” “All I want for Christmas is You,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “Silver Bells,” “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” New ones come out every year.
Those are fun. I like them. But in my mind the real Christmas Carols are the ones from the 19th Century. These are the ones that seem to me to get under the surface of Christmas and speak to a more fully resonant meaning. “Joy to the World,” “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” “Do you hear what I hear?” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Deck the Halls,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels we have heard on high,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – you know – the ones in our hymnal. I mean, a 20th-century song like, for instance, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” may be catchy, and even kinda poignant, but it’s not hymnal material.
Of course, the 19th-century also produced some very popular tunes that were just for fun: Jingle Bells, for instance – which is also not in our hymnal.
The thing is, Christmas, as I was saying, has these two very different moods: on the one hand, the merry and festive -- and on the other hand, the peaceful, the quiet bliss. If you were going to pull off a holiday that pulls together such opposite moods, how would you do it? With music. You sing Jingle Bells, and you sing Silent Night – you sing about laughing all the way, and you sing about “all is calm” – and you keep going back and forth until the two moods start to seem like one thing after all. And maybe they are.
Sing to us about the Carols of Christmas.
"Carols of Christmas (Love is All Around)"
Clark William Lawlor
Christmas is coming, the air is dark and cold.The next piece, in a few minutes, will be "Now the Holly Bears a Berry," which is a variation on "The Holly and the Ivy." This evocation of the natural world in connection has me reflecting on the ways that Christmas may be taken to be about something beyond nature. And yet, this particular carol embeds the Christmas story completely within nature.
We gather together, the young and the old,
Singing carols of Christmas, ‘round a warm fire's glow,
Sharing stories and laughing, as we shelter from the snow,
CHORUS: Singing, "Joy to the world", "The First Noel",
As we sing on this "Silent Night," knowing all is well.
"Do you hear what I hear?" Listen to the sound,
For even "In the Bleak Midwinter," love is all around.
The frost on the windows, the snowflakes drifting down,
We all build a snowman, there's magic all around.
The kids open presents: pajamas or a train,
Then we circle 'round the piano, and start a new refrain,
CHORUS
Oh, come, let us “Deck the Halls,” “The Herold Angels Sing,”
Oh, “What Sweeter Music, can we bring?”
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
Oh, “Have Yourself a Merry little Christmas.”
CHORUS
As we noted earlier, our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And yet the holiday is called Christmas. It’s a Christian holiday – and isn’t the Christian story about love being made flesh and dwelling among us is a bit more... specific?
Sometimes we use the word “supernatural” to describe the difference between the traditional Christian account of Christian and a more “naturalized” version. Some people believe in supernatural stuff going on, and some people don’t, and there’s the difference. Some people tell a supernatural story about Christmas – and some people don’t go in for that. The thing is, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn’t as clear as we sometimes imagine it is.
That distinction is a cultural product, and it has shifted over time. The very idea of supernatural – that is, the sort of line we draw between what we call “natural” and what we call “supernatural” -- is all fairly recent. And it’s not always clear where or how the line is to be drawn.
For instance, it has occurred to me – and might have occurred to you -- that the ghosts depicted in the movie "Ghostbusters" are not supernatural. You might think that if anything counted as an example of a supernatural entity it would be ghosts – and that people who don’t believe in the supernatural, therefore do not believe in ghosts. But if “ghost” means the sort of entity fictionally depicted in Ghostbusters, then ghosts are entirely natural.
Why do I say this? The ghostbusters use nuclear-powered backpacks to shoot a stream of protons at the ghost, and then they contain it within a metal box. If something is susceptible to physical protons and a physical box, then that something is a physical thing. The entities are fictional – and the physics involved is fictional, too -- but it’s still recognizable as physics.
There is a history of uncertainty about where to draw the line between natural and supernatural. There was a boom in seances in the 1920s and into the 1930s. This was the time when radios were first coming out. If invisible disembodied voices could speak to us from afar through the medium of a box, then why couldn’t the spirits of the dead speak to us through a medium? If radios were natural, then maybe seances were, too. Or if seances depended on something supernatural, then it sure seemed as if radios did too.
A lot of people were unsure about where to draw that line between natural and supernatural. Today, our physicists propose that there might be something called dark matter. The way that galaxies curve in their rotation, the way galaxy clusters form, and the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation seem to require a lot more mass out there than we can see or detect – so physicists hypothesize that the mass is there, but it’s a different kind of mass that’s invisible, undetectable – dark matter – which they estimate, has a total mass of more than 5 times the mass of all the visible matter in the universe. Is dark matter supernatural? If you say “no,” then why not?
Physicists are divided on the question of whether quantum indeterminacy is irreducible – but if it is, that would mean there’s no natural law that determines certain quantum phenomena. Would that make them supernatural?
They more you look at this notion of supernatural, the more elusive it becomes. It’s not at all clear what, if anything, it could mean.
There are, in fact, a number of approaches to Christmas that quite explicitly ground the basic story in nature. "The Holly and the Ivy" is quite an old Carol – one of the few that might go back to before the 19th century, though the earliest known publication was in 1833. "The Holly and the Ivy" - and Doughlas Wagner’s riff on that carol -- “Now the Holly Bears a Berry” -- seem to emphasize the continuity between the natural and the human. The holly brings forth berries – and Mary brings forth her babe. There is wonder there – a kind of awe inspiring magic – in the way that life brings forth life, but there’s nothing we could call supernatural, unless we called everything supernatural.
It’s all natural, through and through. And that’s just super!
"Now the Holly Bears a Berry"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Douglas E. Wagner
Now the holly bears a berry, as red as the roseOur Choir began this morning with “Sing a Song of Merry Christmas” which urged us to put care away this holiday. And may you indeed make time for merriment this holiday season. But I’ve been saying there are two ways to put care away: one is with boisterous merriment, and the other is with a calm and blissful peace. With the choir’s closing number for this special music service, we circle round to the peace theme. Peace, peace, peace on earth, good will to all. Joy, love, singing together. The choir will invite us, at a certain point, to join in a chorus of "Silent Night."
And Mary wrapped her baby in warm swaddling clothes.
And Mary bore her baby, for all to come and see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.
Now the holly bears a berry as white as the snow,
And Mary held her baby in her arms long ago.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.
Now the holly bears a berry as black as the night,
And Mary laid her baby in tghe moon's crystal light.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.
"Peace, Peace"
Words and Music Rick and Sylvia Powell; arr. Fred Bock
Peace, peace, peace on earth - and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Now let us all sing together of Peace, peace, peace on earth.
Peace, peace, peace on earth -- and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild;
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.
Now let us all sing together of
Peace, peace, peace on earth.
2024-12-01
Awe and Wonder
It is December. The holiday season descends upon us. It’s a good time to experience wonder, and even maybe a touch of that intensified sense of wonder that we call awe.
Sometimes when you think you are out of fuel – running on empty or running on fumes, it turns out the fuel you have keeps you going -- for eight days. Sometimes some energy comes out of you that leaves you wondering: where did that come from? You didn’t know you had it in you. Hanukkah invites us to consider that sort of wonder.
And then there is the number one source of awe. When psychologist Dacher Keltner asked people all over the world to submit accounts of their experiences of awe, he found that experiences of awe tend to come from one of what he calls the eight wonders of life.
Big ideas or epiphanies tend to trigger awe. That’s one.
Two, being present at a birth, or at a death brings awe.
Three, mystical experiences of transcending wonder and mystery are awesome.
Four, art and visual design can inspire awe, as can, five, music.
Six, nature can awaken awe in us, and we experience awe in, seven, collective movement like in dance or team sports.
But Keltner found that the number one source of awe was not any of these. The thing that most often inspires awe in people, more common than nature, or spiritual practice, or music, or losing yourself in a whirling dervish: is seeing people unself-consciously display the goodness they are made of. Witnessing human strength, courage, kindness, perseverance against difficulty is what most commonly leads people to feel awe. “Around the world,” writes Keltner, “we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”
And what is Christmas all about? Well, it’s about a baby. The story carries us in our imagination to a poor woman, away from home, giving birth to a little baby. Being present to a birth is one of Keltner’s 8 sources of awe, but Christmas is also about the birth of love in human hearts. It’s about love becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And when we see that happen – and it’s happening all the time: people doing something good, something loving, something kind, something courageous and difficult – that’s the most common source of awe we have. The wonder and awe of love becoming flesh and dwelling among us – even within us – that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
Wonder is itself a wonder. What an amazing thing that we should be beings who get amazed, a wondrous thing that these animal bodies – yours and mine – should be built to experience wonder and even awe. The capacity for wonder is apparently not unique to humans. The chimpanzees – whose branch on the evolutionary tree split off about 7 million years ago from the branch that eventually led to homo sapiens – also seem to experience wonder. Jane Goodall noticed the wonder or awe that chimps seemed to feel in the presence of a waterfall. There doesn’t seem to be any utilitarian purpose for this. It doesn’t seem to confer any reproductive advantage, so how did natural selection select for the capacity for wonder? For these chimps it looks actually risky. They could slip on the rocks. Chimps can’t swim, so the risk of falling in could be life-threatening. Jane Goodall explains:
It turns out various loud stimuli – machinery, boisterous people, or waterfalls -- can elicit chimpanzee displays. But what about that sitting quietly and staring at the waterfall afterwards? That’s just what I – and most people – would do at the foot of a waterfall: quietly gaze.
Philosopher Jesse Prinz identifies three components of wonder. There’s the sensory.
Finally, there’s the spiritual. “We look upwards in veneration;” our heart swells. Wonder is what we experience when we confront mystery.
Dacher Keltner’s definition of awe is similar. Awe, he says, is
The more we attend to the details of what the physicists say about it, the weirder and more mysterious it gets. For instance, physicists say that matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. That's handy for scientific purposes, but from a wider standpoint, it simply replaces one mystery – the mystery of matter -- with two mysteries -- space and mass. Why is there me? Why is there anything? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where am I – what is the meaning of this geographic location, or this stage in the arc of my life?
These are the questions that admit of no settled answer. You might have provisional partial answers, but it might be better to not even have that much. Just be in the mystery, without grasping after an answer. What sort of place is the universe? What is life, and how does it happen? What is consciousness, and how does it happen?
Scientists seem to have a lot to say about these, so maybe they are in the category of things to figure out. On the other hand, the scientist's stories leaves us with just as much mystery as ever. When the physicists say that, you see, there are 11 dimensions, and billions of parallel universes made possible by different pathways taken by photons – or when biologists tell us about the chemical equations of the reactions inside a cell, reactions which, they say, constitute and define life – or when neurologists say that consciousness is an emergent property of 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses – one may reasonably feel that such steps toward solving the mystery don’t really clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live.
Knowing the science merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Before the science, there were elaborate theologies. Knowing the theology, likewise, merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Wonder and awe are, we might say, a kind of falling in love: with our world, with ourselves, with the experience of being alive.
Wonder is typically expressed in the form of a question, which might fool us into thinking an explanatory answer is being sought. It is not. The point of love is to love, not to explain it, figure it out, or solve it. The point of wonder is likewise not to get an explanation, solution, or answer. The point of wonder is to wonder – to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe -- bounded by humility, by gratitude, and by joy.
What is your number 1 source of wonder? Is it a starry sky? A mountain top view? Charlie Parker’s saxophone playing? A murmuration of starlings? There are contexts we can place ourselves in that encourage wonder. And then sometimes wonder descends upon us in the midst of the perfectly ordinary.
Thomas Merton wrote about an amazing experience of wonder he had in 1958 on a street corner in Louisville. Merton, then age 43, was a Trappist monk who had spent most of the previous 17 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky – most of that in silence. On a rare trip to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the Abbey, he had a sudden and stunning experience of wonder. He described it in his journal:
I raised the question earlier: Why do we have experiences like that? What practical function could they serve? Why would natural selection favor a capacity for such experience? We might also ask the opposite question: Why doesn’t it happen to more of us more often?
Writer Raymond Tallis wonders why wonder isn’t a constant, or at least greater proportion, of life. Why am I not “for the greater part of my life transilluminated with awe?” he asks. Why do I not “pass through the world open-mouthed with amazement and joy”? We are surrounded by, submerged within, wonders of sight, and sound, and smell, the wonder of every single thing, and of all things together – of what Philip Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being.” Is not our proper state of mind one of “metaphysical intoxication”? So many wonders and yet so little wondering.
We perish for want of wonder, thought Chesterton, though we are surrounded continuously by wonders. Whatever the mysterious process by which we became the sorts of beings with the capacity for wonder, why aren’t we exercising that capacity ALL. THE. TIME? Well. Daily life presents barriers to wonder. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety. As Raymond Tallis writes:
We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight. Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up our diversions and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch. Tallis writes that
(1) the purposive focus of work;
(2) a similarly purposive focus on our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening,
(3) allowing ourselves to be bored.
Boredom says that
We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had in Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.
The way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice. Indeed, what makes a practice a spiritual practice is that it cultivates wonder. Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. Over many centuries – as the development of human civilization afforded the leisure to pursue wonder, that wonder led us to create art, as a way of expressing our wonder. Wonder led us create religion, as way to tell a story about awesome creation, and to have rituals to reinforce the wonder. Wonder led us at last to create science – the exploration of nature’s wonders. Writes Jesse Prinz:
From time to time we all need to reconnect with that original experience, the seed from which art, religion, and science all grow – and just sit at the foot of a waterfall. Just sit and gaze.
May we all find or take time to do so.
Sometimes when you think you are out of fuel – running on empty or running on fumes, it turns out the fuel you have keeps you going -- for eight days. Sometimes some energy comes out of you that leaves you wondering: where did that come from? You didn’t know you had it in you. Hanukkah invites us to consider that sort of wonder.
And then there is the number one source of awe. When psychologist Dacher Keltner asked people all over the world to submit accounts of their experiences of awe, he found that experiences of awe tend to come from one of what he calls the eight wonders of life.
Big ideas or epiphanies tend to trigger awe. That’s one.
Two, being present at a birth, or at a death brings awe.
Three, mystical experiences of transcending wonder and mystery are awesome.
Four, art and visual design can inspire awe, as can, five, music.
Six, nature can awaken awe in us, and we experience awe in, seven, collective movement like in dance or team sports.
But Keltner found that the number one source of awe was not any of these. The thing that most often inspires awe in people, more common than nature, or spiritual practice, or music, or losing yourself in a whirling dervish: is seeing people unself-consciously display the goodness they are made of. Witnessing human strength, courage, kindness, perseverance against difficulty is what most commonly leads people to feel awe. “Around the world,” writes Keltner, “we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”
And what is Christmas all about? Well, it’s about a baby. The story carries us in our imagination to a poor woman, away from home, giving birth to a little baby. Being present to a birth is one of Keltner’s 8 sources of awe, but Christmas is also about the birth of love in human hearts. It’s about love becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And when we see that happen – and it’s happening all the time: people doing something good, something loving, something kind, something courageous and difficult – that’s the most common source of awe we have. The wonder and awe of love becoming flesh and dwelling among us – even within us – that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
Wonder is itself a wonder. What an amazing thing that we should be beings who get amazed, a wondrous thing that these animal bodies – yours and mine – should be built to experience wonder and even awe. The capacity for wonder is apparently not unique to humans. The chimpanzees – whose branch on the evolutionary tree split off about 7 million years ago from the branch that eventually led to homo sapiens – also seem to experience wonder. Jane Goodall noticed the wonder or awe that chimps seemed to feel in the presence of a waterfall. There doesn’t seem to be any utilitarian purpose for this. It doesn’t seem to confer any reproductive advantage, so how did natural selection select for the capacity for wonder? For these chimps it looks actually risky. They could slip on the rocks. Chimps can’t swim, so the risk of falling in could be life-threatening. Jane Goodall explains:
“The chimpanzee's brain is similar to ours. They have emotions that are clearly similar to those that we call happiness and sadness and fear and despair and so forth. So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality? Which is, really, being amazed at things outside yourself.”She goes on to say:
“I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are, but they can’t analyze it, they don’t talk about it; they can’t describe what they feel.”Hmm. Being amazed at things outside yourself is part of spirituality -- as is, for that matter, being amazed at things inside yourself. The larger part of spirituality, it seems to me, is the making meaning of things, of life, of this existence. So describing the feelings of wonder or awe – which is how we place those feelings in a context of meaning – is itself a big component of spirituality. If the chimps can’t describe what they feel, then I’d say they have a seed of spirituality, but that seed hasn’t sprouted into spirituality. That seed is wonder, and it does seem that the chimps are experiencing wonder. It’s true we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing chimp’s mind. Let’s remember, we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing human’s mind. We don’t know what’d going on in each other’s minds – or even in our own mind. We are mysteries to ourselves.
It turns out various loud stimuli – machinery, boisterous people, or waterfalls -- can elicit chimpanzee displays. But what about that sitting quietly and staring at the waterfall afterwards? That’s just what I – and most people – would do at the foot of a waterfall: quietly gaze.
Philosopher Jesse Prinz identifies three components of wonder. There’s the sensory.
“Wondrous things engage our senses — we stare and widen our eyes.”That part, we have in common with chimps, and some other animals. Then there’s the cognitive. Wondrous things are beyond what we can cognitively comprehend. There’s something perplexing about them. Whether the chimps experience this component is less clear.
Finally, there’s the spiritual. “We look upwards in veneration;” our heart swells. Wonder is what we experience when we confront mystery.
Dacher Keltner’s definition of awe is similar. Awe, he says, is
“Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”This is not mystery like a whodunit. It’s not the kind of mystery you can figure out. This kind of mystery, you don’t solve. You live the mystery. Who am I? Who is asking that question? What is this world? What is matter?
The more we attend to the details of what the physicists say about it, the weirder and more mysterious it gets. For instance, physicists say that matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. That's handy for scientific purposes, but from a wider standpoint, it simply replaces one mystery – the mystery of matter -- with two mysteries -- space and mass. Why is there me? Why is there anything? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where am I – what is the meaning of this geographic location, or this stage in the arc of my life?
These are the questions that admit of no settled answer. You might have provisional partial answers, but it might be better to not even have that much. Just be in the mystery, without grasping after an answer. What sort of place is the universe? What is life, and how does it happen? What is consciousness, and how does it happen?
Scientists seem to have a lot to say about these, so maybe they are in the category of things to figure out. On the other hand, the scientist's stories leaves us with just as much mystery as ever. When the physicists say that, you see, there are 11 dimensions, and billions of parallel universes made possible by different pathways taken by photons – or when biologists tell us about the chemical equations of the reactions inside a cell, reactions which, they say, constitute and define life – or when neurologists say that consciousness is an emergent property of 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses – one may reasonably feel that such steps toward solving the mystery don’t really clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live.
Knowing the science merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Before the science, there were elaborate theologies. Knowing the theology, likewise, merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Wonder and awe are, we might say, a kind of falling in love: with our world, with ourselves, with the experience of being alive.
Wonder is typically expressed in the form of a question, which might fool us into thinking an explanatory answer is being sought. It is not. The point of love is to love, not to explain it, figure it out, or solve it. The point of wonder is likewise not to get an explanation, solution, or answer. The point of wonder is to wonder – to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe -- bounded by humility, by gratitude, and by joy.
What is your number 1 source of wonder? Is it a starry sky? A mountain top view? Charlie Parker’s saxophone playing? A murmuration of starlings? There are contexts we can place ourselves in that encourage wonder. And then sometimes wonder descends upon us in the midst of the perfectly ordinary.
Thomas Merton wrote about an amazing experience of wonder he had in 1958 on a street corner in Louisville. Merton, then age 43, was a Trappist monk who had spent most of the previous 17 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky – most of that in silence. On a rare trip to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the Abbey, he had a sudden and stunning experience of wonder. He described it in his journal:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness,... The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.’ It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes:... A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. They are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers! Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed ... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”That’s a powerful wonder. How did that happen to Thomas Merton?
I raised the question earlier: Why do we have experiences like that? What practical function could they serve? Why would natural selection favor a capacity for such experience? We might also ask the opposite question: Why doesn’t it happen to more of us more often?
Writer Raymond Tallis wonders why wonder isn’t a constant, or at least greater proportion, of life. Why am I not “for the greater part of my life transilluminated with awe?” he asks. Why do I not “pass through the world open-mouthed with amazement and joy”? We are surrounded by, submerged within, wonders of sight, and sound, and smell, the wonder of every single thing, and of all things together – of what Philip Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being.” Is not our proper state of mind one of “metaphysical intoxication”? So many wonders and yet so little wondering.
We perish for want of wonder, thought Chesterton, though we are surrounded continuously by wonders. Whatever the mysterious process by which we became the sorts of beings with the capacity for wonder, why aren’t we exercising that capacity ALL. THE. TIME? Well. Daily life presents barriers to wonder. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety. As Raymond Tallis writes:
“No one chasing after a bus has the time to be astonished at the intricate coordination of everyday life that ensures that buses run to timetables and that we can act in accordance with goals that are at once singular and abstract.”A focus on caring for others, doing good in the world, requires solving the problems that need solving, focusing on the practical needs. This reduces the world around you to two categories. Everything is either an instrument that will be helpful for your purpose or an obstacle that threatens to thwart your purpose. It is a noble thing to have goals, purposes, to pursue accomplishment – at least, it is when those goals and accomplishments involve making the world better, easing suffering, improving the overall quality of life of the inhabitants of this planet.
We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight. Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up our diversions and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch. Tallis writes that
“Even the most elevated pleasures, designed to open us up to the world in such a way that we might wonder at it, may be assimilated into the flow of unthinking dailiness.”We work frenetically and then play frenetically because if we don’t we might be . . . bored. Ah, boredom. These, then, are the three main barriers to awe and wonder:
(1) the purposive focus of work;
(2) a similarly purposive focus on our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening,
(3) allowing ourselves to be bored.
Boredom says that
“indifference is the appropriate response to things around us. The ordinary is indeed ordinary. To take it for granted is precisely the way to take it. There is the uneasy sense that, though we urge it on ourselves and on others, wonder is somehow insincere, fake, sentimental. After all, a state you can enter only when it’s convenient, and which is convenient only when there’s nothing serious or important going on, must itself seem nonserious or unimportant.” (Tallis)We speak appreciatively of child-like wonder, but most of us would rather be known as a serious adult: productive, on the one hand, and erudite, on the other. Boredom is for serious people, who expect or want or need life to give them serious work and serious play. Boredom makes that demand and signals that it is not being met. But boredom precludes wonder – just as wonder precludes boredom.
We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had in Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.
The way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice. Indeed, what makes a practice a spiritual practice is that it cultivates wonder. Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. Over many centuries – as the development of human civilization afforded the leisure to pursue wonder, that wonder led us to create art, as a way of expressing our wonder. Wonder led us create religion, as way to tell a story about awesome creation, and to have rituals to reinforce the wonder. Wonder led us at last to create science – the exploration of nature’s wonders. Writes Jesse Prinz:
“For the mature mind, wondrous experience can be used to inspire a painting, a myth, or a scientific hypothesis. These things take patience, and an audience equally eager to move beyond the initial state of bewilderment.... Art, science, and religion, are inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us. They also become sources of wonder in their own right, generating epicycles of boundless creativity and enduring inquiry.”That’s a long way from a Chimp staring at a waterfall with no way to describe it.
From time to time we all need to reconnect with that original experience, the seed from which art, religion, and science all grow – and just sit at the foot of a waterfall. Just sit and gaze.
May we all find or take time to do so.
2024-11-24
There Is No God, and She Is Always With You
READING
The living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources. In 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. The first UUA bylaws, adopted that year, 1961, identified sources of our living tradition and included mention of one of those sources as:
Today we celebrate our Humanist heritage. A key document of American Religious Humanism is the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The entire manifesto is relatively brief -- just a couple pages. Here are some excerpts which will give you the flavor of the document (including the male-dominated language of the time). This is about one-third of the entirety (See the full "Humanist Manifesto I" HERE):
There is no God, and she is always with you. What do I mean saying this?
Our reality – the reality that we live our lives in, the only reality possible – is populated with concepts. Reality has houses, streets, cups, chairs, trees, stars, ourselves, and other people in it – which is to say, we have concepts of all those things. Reality also has abstract things, like the number 7, abstracted out from any particular collection of 7 objects and just there before our minds in its pure seven-ness. Reality has abstract things like freedom and love, like greed, anger, and ignorance, like music and the rule of law – also abstracted out from any particular example and present to mind as a concept of what all members of a set of examples have in common.
Reality has some things even more abstract, like the square root of negative one – which is not a real number. It’s an imaginary number, but it’s part of our reality. Other imaginary things, like unicorns and dragons and Harry Potter are also among the concepts that populate our reality. Most of us know who Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina are. We understand that our concepts of them are in the category of “fictional characters,” but they exist for us as concepts nonetheless.
But part of the concept of God is that God is way beyond the capacity of our limited, finite human minds to conceive. Whatever your concept of God is, it’s wrong, because it’s just one more limited, finite, human concept. The concept of God thus cancels itself out as a concept. If I ask you to think something that’s unthinkable, you can’t do it. Think something that, not only can you, now, today, not think, but that no human or collection of humans jointly will ever be able to think. You can’t do that, of course – because, if you could, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. So we can have no concept of such a thing.
Reality is populated with concepts – even concepts of fictional and imaginary things – but the concept that can’t be conceived is not among them. It can’t be part of our reality – can’t be invoked as an explanation, can’t be prayed to or cursed, can’t interact with us or our world. That’s how I would unpack, “there is no god.”
At the same time, there is always something with us that is just outside our capacity to think it. We might want to call it the mystery, but even the name “mystery” is a concept. For that matter, “always with you” is a concept, too – yet I think it is inescapable. If, as noted, our thought – our understanding, our awareness, our love – is limited, and finite – yet also growing, or, at least evolving, changing – then there is always that toward which our aspiration may be pointed, even if we can’t quite conceive of what it is.
It's a something, and it’s always there.
And it is fertile and fecund, it bears new life, so I call it “she.” So I wanted to put that out there at the outset. I’ll be circling back as we explore today our fifth source:
The minister of this congregation back then was Rev. Curtis Reese. He had been preaching from this pulpit I am now honored to occupy some of the ideas that would later come to be identified as humanist – though Reese wasn’t calling it that then. This Des Moines congregation hosted the 1918 gathering of the Western Unitarian Conference, and a minister from Minneapolis named John Dietrich came down for the event. Dietrich and Reese got to talking and discovered that they had each been developing a conception of religion without God. Dietrich called it humanism, and that’s the name that stuck. Through the years that followed Dietrich and Reese collaborated in developing, promoting, and organizing the humanist movement that culminated in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto.
The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 had 33 original signatories, 15 of whom were Unitarian ministers, including Dietrich and Reese. One Universalist minister was a signatory, as were 17 other prominent public intellectuals who had been brought on board with the project.
When I re-read that manifesto, I am stirred and moved by the boldness of these Humanists 91 years ago – by their vision and their hope. The implicit critique of traditional religion – which, for them, pretty much meant Christianity – is valid. The West's religious tradition has often not harmonized well with the understandings emerging through the work of scientists. The West's religious tradition has sometimes obstructed rather than aided progress in addressing modern social problems. It has often separated people rather than bringing them together. So the Humanists said, “Let’s do religion. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life, and we need that. But let’s have religion without God."
Today we still live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their understanding about something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.
Today we still live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present as science their views about something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that their devotion to something they call God goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different readings.
Today we still live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”
Today we still live in a world where countries that social scientists measure as “high on religiosity,” venerating something they call God, also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.
No wonder it would seem important to Humanists 91 years ago as well as today to call for a religion that doesn’t have this thing called God in it.
In recent years we have seen a real renaissance in religious humanism – even though it’s often not labeled that. Try typing “Spiritual Atheism” into your favorite search engine. You'll find there's a LOT out there exploring and developing the idea of religion and spirituality without God. It’s a New New Atheism, much of which sprang up in the wake of the New Atheism.
“The New Atheism,” as it’s called, refers to a spate of books grouped together that came out about 20 years ago now. This included:
The New New Atheists argue that atheists, instead of deriding religion should steal from it because, as de Botton says: “the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”
“Faith,” as Karen Armstrong points out, in the New Testament, is the Greek word psistis, which means trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment. When Jesus calls for greater faith, he’s not calling for people to cling harder to a set of propositional beliefs. He’s calling for engagement and commitment. “Spirituality,” as growing numbers of spiritual atheists are saying, isn’t about spirit-stuff as opposed to material stuff. It’s about claiming the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.
This idea of connecting with the religious impulse rather than denying it is just what the Humanist Manifesto called for 91 years ago. And speaking of good ideas that we can draw from the traditional faith traditions, one of those ideas, which is, in fact, a staple of Christian Theology going back centuries, is that there is no God. Yes, that’s right. John Scotus Eriugena, a 9th-century Christian theologian, made an argument somewhat similar to the one with which I started this sermon. Eriugena wrote:
To understand this, let’s look again at that fifth source of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share:
It may have started that way, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple. The sanction against idolatry ended up pointing the Hebrew people toward something more important than statuary. Just as a statue is fixed and static and unchanging, a person might also have certain ideas, beliefs, concepts that become fixed and static. The commandment against idols evolved so that it was understood to be not just about statues, figurines, or graven images. It’s about any concept or thought-pattern that has become fixed and rigid. By abjuring graven images, the Hebrew people were subtly reoriented toward a conception of God as dynamic, unfolding, and always beyond whatever you can imagine, always other than anything you think.
The divine creative movement of the universe is dynamic, changing. Human understanding is ever unfolding. Idolatry means clinging to a fixed, static conception; closing ourselves to new learning. Thus we see that it actually is quite apt for this mention of idolatry to be included in our humanist source. The guidance of reason and the results of science continually overturn our idols, challenge what we think we know. Moreover, this is really the point that I think John Scotus Eriugena was on about.
Any time someone says God exists, she has some idea of what this God is that exists. This is problematic because any concept at all, if you’re stuck on it, is an idol. As soon as you have an idea of God – any idea – smash that idol and return to a stance of total openness to whatever the world might present to you without forcing it into one or another of your preconceived conceptual categories. This is humanist teaching warning us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
Don’t even make an idol of your own past statements or beliefs. If you find yourself saying things that contradict other things you’ve said, that’s OK. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
In a sermon I gave last March called, “The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal,” I suggested that, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ were to point to any or all of the following:
There is no God – that is, there is no possible concept that can encapsulate all of the wonder and the paradox that is this dear life – the wonder and the paradox that is directly staring us in the face every moment, saying, “hey you, knock over the idols of what you think you know and wake up.” Whatever you think you know, this moment has something new and fresh to teach you. Are you listening? Are you looking? Always. For there is no God, and she is always with you -- whispering: “Pay attention.”
Amen.
The living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources. In 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. The first UUA bylaws, adopted that year, 1961, identified sources of our living tradition and included mention of one of those sources as:
“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”In 1985, revisions of the principles and sources were adopted, but that language about humanist teachings was retained without change from the 1961 bylaws.
Today we celebrate our Humanist heritage. A key document of American Religious Humanism is the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The entire manifesto is relatively brief -- just a couple pages. Here are some excerpts which will give you the flavor of the document (including the male-dominated language of the time). This is about one-third of the entirety (See the full "Humanist Manifesto I" HERE):
"The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world....SERMON
In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism....
Today man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion....
We therefore affirm the following:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process....
Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values....
Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method....
We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, [or] deism,...
Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained....
In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being....
We assert that humanism will:
(a) affirm life rather than deny it;
(b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and
(c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few....
Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”
There is no God, and she is always with you. What do I mean saying this?
Our reality – the reality that we live our lives in, the only reality possible – is populated with concepts. Reality has houses, streets, cups, chairs, trees, stars, ourselves, and other people in it – which is to say, we have concepts of all those things. Reality also has abstract things, like the number 7, abstracted out from any particular collection of 7 objects and just there before our minds in its pure seven-ness. Reality has abstract things like freedom and love, like greed, anger, and ignorance, like music and the rule of law – also abstracted out from any particular example and present to mind as a concept of what all members of a set of examples have in common.
Reality has some things even more abstract, like the square root of negative one – which is not a real number. It’s an imaginary number, but it’s part of our reality. Other imaginary things, like unicorns and dragons and Harry Potter are also among the concepts that populate our reality. Most of us know who Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina are. We understand that our concepts of them are in the category of “fictional characters,” but they exist for us as concepts nonetheless.
But part of the concept of God is that God is way beyond the capacity of our limited, finite human minds to conceive. Whatever your concept of God is, it’s wrong, because it’s just one more limited, finite, human concept. The concept of God thus cancels itself out as a concept. If I ask you to think something that’s unthinkable, you can’t do it. Think something that, not only can you, now, today, not think, but that no human or collection of humans jointly will ever be able to think. You can’t do that, of course – because, if you could, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. So we can have no concept of such a thing.
Reality is populated with concepts – even concepts of fictional and imaginary things – but the concept that can’t be conceived is not among them. It can’t be part of our reality – can’t be invoked as an explanation, can’t be prayed to or cursed, can’t interact with us or our world. That’s how I would unpack, “there is no god.”
At the same time, there is always something with us that is just outside our capacity to think it. We might want to call it the mystery, but even the name “mystery” is a concept. For that matter, “always with you” is a concept, too – yet I think it is inescapable. If, as noted, our thought – our understanding, our awareness, our love – is limited, and finite – yet also growing, or, at least evolving, changing – then there is always that toward which our aspiration may be pointed, even if we can’t quite conceive of what it is.
It's a something, and it’s always there.
And it is fertile and fecund, it bears new life, so I call it “she.” So I wanted to put that out there at the outset. I’ll be circling back as we explore today our fifth source:
“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”First, then, I want to celebrate our humanist tradition which continues to inform who we are as Unitarian Universalists. The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, a portion of which is included in the above Reading, was very much a product of developing Unitarian thought. A key moment – perhaps we might say the beginning of American Religious Humanism – or, at least, the first coming together of the people who, working together, would systematically develop and spread American Religious Humanism – happened 15 years earlier, in 1918 – and it happened right here in Des Moines, Iowa.
The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 had 33 original signatories, 15 of whom were Unitarian ministers, including Dietrich and Reese. One Universalist minister was a signatory, as were 17 other prominent public intellectuals who had been brought on board with the project.
When I re-read that manifesto, I am stirred and moved by the boldness of these Humanists 91 years ago – by their vision and their hope. The implicit critique of traditional religion – which, for them, pretty much meant Christianity – is valid. The West's religious tradition has often not harmonized well with the understandings emerging through the work of scientists. The West's religious tradition has sometimes obstructed rather than aided progress in addressing modern social problems. It has often separated people rather than bringing them together. So the Humanists said, “Let’s do religion. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life, and we need that. But let’s have religion without God."
Today we still live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their understanding about something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.
Today we still live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present as science their views about something they call God.
Today we still live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that their devotion to something they call God goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different readings.
Today we still live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”
Today we still live in a world where countries that social scientists measure as “high on religiosity,” venerating something they call God, also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.
No wonder it would seem important to Humanists 91 years ago as well as today to call for a religion that doesn’t have this thing called God in it.
In recent years we have seen a real renaissance in religious humanism – even though it’s often not labeled that. Try typing “Spiritual Atheism” into your favorite search engine. You'll find there's a LOT out there exploring and developing the idea of religion and spirituality without God. It’s a New New Atheism, much of which sprang up in the wake of the New Atheism.
“The New Atheism,” as it’s called, refers to a spate of books grouped together that came out about 20 years ago now. This included:
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004)
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
- Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006)
- Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007)
- Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2008)
- Chris Stedman, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2013)
- Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (2013)
- Nick Seneca Jankel, Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age (2018)
- Todd Macalaster, Looking to Nature: Exploring a Modern Way of Being Spiritual Without the Supernatural (2020) -- and just this year appeared:
- Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Belief Required (2024)
The New New Atheists argue that atheists, instead of deriding religion should steal from it because, as de Botton says: “the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”
“Faith,” as Karen Armstrong points out, in the New Testament, is the Greek word psistis, which means trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment. When Jesus calls for greater faith, he’s not calling for people to cling harder to a set of propositional beliefs. He’s calling for engagement and commitment. “Spirituality,” as growing numbers of spiritual atheists are saying, isn’t about spirit-stuff as opposed to material stuff. It’s about claiming the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.
This idea of connecting with the religious impulse rather than denying it is just what the Humanist Manifesto called for 91 years ago. And speaking of good ideas that we can draw from the traditional faith traditions, one of those ideas, which is, in fact, a staple of Christian Theology going back centuries, is that there is no God. Yes, that’s right. John Scotus Eriugena, a 9th-century Christian theologian, made an argument somewhat similar to the one with which I started this sermon. Eriugena wrote:
“We do not know what God is. God himself doesn’t know what he is because he is not anything. Literally, God is not, because he transcends being.”Got that? This is a Christian theologian saying that God does not exist. Eriugena doesn't mean that God is nonexistent in the way that, say, my Ferrari is nonexistent. Rather God transcends the categories of existence and nonexistence, being and nonbeing.
To understand this, let’s look again at that fifth source of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share:
“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”It might seem a little strange that this reference to idolatry is in there. “Warning against idolatry” is probably not among the first things that come to mind when you think of humanism. Or when you do think of the repudiation of idolatry, your first thought probably wouldn't be humanism. Your first thought would more likely be the first of the Ten Commandment (or the first two Commandments, depending on which tradition is doing the counting):
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:" (Exodus 20:3-5, KJV)What’s the big deal about graven images? you may wonder. Historically, it seems to have been a tribal thing: the neighboring tribes made statues that represented their deities, so the Hebrew people, to be distinctive, insisted on having no deity statuary. Nor, for that matter, any angel statuary, nor thing-in-the-earth statuary, nor thing-in-the-water-under-the-earth statuary. No figurines of elephants or parrots or fish: none of that. For the ancient Hebrew people, this was part of how one affirmed one’s loyalty to the tribe. They said: “We’re the people who don’t do that – so don’t do that.”
It may have started that way, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple. The sanction against idolatry ended up pointing the Hebrew people toward something more important than statuary. Just as a statue is fixed and static and unchanging, a person might also have certain ideas, beliefs, concepts that become fixed and static. The commandment against idols evolved so that it was understood to be not just about statues, figurines, or graven images. It’s about any concept or thought-pattern that has become fixed and rigid. By abjuring graven images, the Hebrew people were subtly reoriented toward a conception of God as dynamic, unfolding, and always beyond whatever you can imagine, always other than anything you think.
The divine creative movement of the universe is dynamic, changing. Human understanding is ever unfolding. Idolatry means clinging to a fixed, static conception; closing ourselves to new learning. Thus we see that it actually is quite apt for this mention of idolatry to be included in our humanist source. The guidance of reason and the results of science continually overturn our idols, challenge what we think we know. Moreover, this is really the point that I think John Scotus Eriugena was on about.
Any time someone says God exists, she has some idea of what this God is that exists. This is problematic because any concept at all, if you’re stuck on it, is an idol. As soon as you have an idea of God – any idea – smash that idol and return to a stance of total openness to whatever the world might present to you without forcing it into one or another of your preconceived conceptual categories. This is humanist teaching warning us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
Don’t even make an idol of your own past statements or beliefs. If you find yourself saying things that contradict other things you’ve said, that’s OK. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
In a sermon I gave last March called, “The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal,” I suggested that, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ were to point to any or all of the following:
- community-forming power;
- love;
- the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;
- the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
- origin;
- any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;
- the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
- the cosmos.
There is no God – that is, there is no possible concept that can encapsulate all of the wonder and the paradox that is this dear life – the wonder and the paradox that is directly staring us in the face every moment, saying, “hey you, knock over the idols of what you think you know and wake up.” Whatever you think you know, this moment has something new and fresh to teach you. Are you listening? Are you looking? Always. For there is no God, and she is always with you -- whispering: “Pay attention.”
Amen.
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