A Sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at First Unitarian Church of Orlando
November 23, 2008
At a reception I was once introduced to someone by a Trinitarian Episcopal clergy friend, who explained “Unitarians believe in one God at most.”
One God? But whatever do you mean by God? Well, what you’re about to hear is not what I learned as a kid, not what I was taught in that fundamentalist college and evangelical seminary.
In that world we talked about a god out there — wholly separate from you and me. Some kind of super-person out there who created everything and who could draw near to me or abandon me because it, or as they said, he, — is separate from me.
I lived with that for a long time but in my gut it didn’t feel right, didn’t ring true. And then I read Emerson.
I came to sense that these cells and neurons and tissue, and this mind, give expression to an evolutionary impulse at the heart of everything — give form to that intelligence and energy, make manifest some something that lies beyond the capacity of our science to detect or measure. We’re palpable expressions, we make manifest something that is unmanifest, and it’s everywhere, and it’s here, closer than your breath. And the startling insight that thoroughly contradicted my Presbyterian and then fundamentalist and then evangelical earlier beliefs was something that the Hindu Kena Upanishad declares: Thou art That. You — you’re it. There’s only one. You. Along with six or seven billion others, you’re it.
It wasn’t long before I applied for a transfer of ministerial credentials from my former denomination and became a Unitarian Universalist. My friends were baffled. How can this be a religion, they asked? It didn’t deal in the traditional religious language, the categories in which traditional religious people think and speak. It didn’t have saviors and miracles and heavens and hells. It was about spiritual experience, first-hand spiritual experience of your own, interpreted in light of how we’ve come to understand the universe; and it was about the life of this world. But what about Christ and Satan and salvation and God and all?
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It’s supposed to be fairly clear tonight. What if you go out tonight and you look up and you see that the stars have rearranged themselves before your very eyes so that they spell out “G-O-D?” And millions of people are seeing this before their very eyes. If they could be sure this wasn’t some form of mass hallucination — ah! at last! the final definitive proof for the existence of God!
But — proof of what? No matter how many people saw it, and no matter how thoroughly documented, the sighting of the stars rearranging themselves to spell God couldn’t define that troublesome word. All that throng of people out there under the stars would know is that something pretty darn weird had happened.
You come to hear about God. In one of Krishnamurti’s little books of lectures, the one called On God, at the end of the lecture about God, somebody asks him, “You never mention God. Has he no place in your teachings?” And you heard what he said to that.
When the mind is full of belief . . . it is burdened, and a burdened mind can never find out what is true. . . . You yourself must see the importance of relinquishing . . . all the accumulations of centuries, the superstitions, knowledge, beliefs . . .
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Once, in that previous religious life of mine, I was working with an ever-so-slightly progressive evangelical minister in Brooklyn in a pretty conservative Swedish church. He said to me: you know, can say pretty much anything you want so long as you get enough of the important words in — God and Christ and Salvation and so on. Then they won’t notice what you’re actually saying.
Language is a funny thing: so essential to communication, so apt to get in the way of communication. Gustave Flaubert nailed it when he wrote:
The truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.[1]
About six years ago the newly-elected president of the UUA, Bill Sinkford, stirred up a controversy. In the Boston Globe, the headline was “Words of ‘reverence’ roil a church;”[2] and in the New York Times, it was “A Heated Debate Flares in Unitarian Universalism.”[3] It seems to have started with a sermon in which he said, among other things:
[W]e have in our Principles an affirmation of our faith which uses not one single piece of religious language. Not one. Not even one word that would be considered traditionally religious. And that is a wonderment to me . . .
Well no, our Principles and Purposes, adopted in 1984 and periodically revised, are simply these:
§ The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
§ Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
§ Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
§ A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
§ The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
§ The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
§ Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
These are followed by a six-point statement of the sources from which we draw — words and deeds of prophetic men and women, wisdom from the world’s religions, Jewish, Christian, humanist, and earth-centered traditions. None of the traditional religious words. This bothers Bill, but it doesn’t bother me. And it starts, significantly, with this:
“Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” Well now, that I call religious language.
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But Bill raised an important question. How do we talk about our religious, our spiritual, experience and community? I’ve read a number of sermons that colleagues have preached in response to all this. Most of them say we really need to start using the traditional religious language again, just investing the old words with new meaning.
v
You might find it useful to do that for yourself. But I’ve seen so many people so severely injured and traumatized by that language. I saw a sign at a Gay Pride march that read “Pat Robertson uses the Bible the way Hitler used gas.” Same applies to a lot of abusive statements from the Vatican and the bishops. The words are loaded, and with all the freight and terrifying weight of the vaunted authority of church and bible and hierarchy and creed, the words hit like missiles. And these missiles are real, unlike certain alleged weapons that turned out not to be real.
Look. You say the word “God” and a raucous jangle of pandemonium goes off in the heads of your hearers — alarm bells ring, red lights flash — it’s really something. For some it’s a matter of dread and fear.
Those words began to have another kind of effect on me. My memories are still fresh. During an intensive period of education at evangelical institutions and deep involvement in their churches, the constant repetition of those words came to have a numbing effect. The mechanical repetition may as well have been profanity. It was a mind-numbing repetition of special religious lingo that shut down the thought processes and — worse — shut down any resonance in the gut with anything transcendent, locked you in a tiny room already so fully defined that there was no way out.
I think you can give those old words new meaning for yourself but I’m not so sure you can give them new meaning for our time and culture. Be very, very careful.
v
Bill is right about this: we do need a way to talk about spiritual experience and to interpret it. But do we really think there are, or ever could be, words adequate to what we mean? We’ll have to struggle with our language to say what we mean. And that’s good. The struggle will keep us from easily mouthing words with no meaning.
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Maybe that’s why, among the ecstatic and mystical religions, there is glossolalia, tongue-speaking. Maybe that is the only legitimate vocabulary of reverence. Not one word of it can be found in a dictionary, can be translated into any propositional concepts. But American Pentecostalism wasn’t satisfied with that — they figured these ecstatic utterances had to be translated out into familiar religious concepts. So they followed St. Paul’s teachings about the interpretation of tongues and supplied an interpretation — usually consisting of memorized King James Bible verses. About as fresh, immediate, and original as the Apostles’ Creed. Oh well.
“Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit,” Emerson wrote, “he that thinks most, will say least. . . . when we try to define and describe [God], both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions.”[4]
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So note the Kabbalistic spelling, G-dash-D. In an earlier time, Jews were forbidden to pronounce the Divine Name, since any attempt to speak of the Divine was bound to be inadequate, because it’s too high, too holy. The divine name was written as four consonants —Yod, Hay, Vav , Hay — Y, H, W, H — no vowels, not pronounceable and never pronounced in any reading of scripture. The only place where it was permissible to pronouncing The Name was the Temple, and by now the Temple was gone, destroyed. Now, no one spoke The Name. For a few generations, scholars did pass down the pronunciation, but eventually it was lost, and we no longer know it with any certainty. Among Orthodox Jews you can still find those who reverence the Unutterable Name by not uttering it; and who write the Name the way I did in the title, G dash D. I think they’ve got it right.
You can give old words new meaning. But it isn’t the words that count, it’s the meaning. Anyone can have a profound religious experience. Trust me, they can. But how will they interpret that experience? What meaning will they give to it? That matters maybe even more than the experience.
So many ancient accounts of God! As often as not, they are national epics created and repeated in a world quite unlike ours, stories created and repeated for political reasons, to give stability and strength to that political entity. Oh, where did we ever see anything like that?
And these stories, and the people who tell them, are always marked by special words — shibboleths — by which you can tell who belongs to the “in”-group and who doesn’t—and we repeat those words because they make us feel that we’re insiders instead of outsiders, we’re saved instead of lost; knowers of the true doctrine.
What meaning do those ancient stories hold for us? We live in another universe.
Slowly we have penetrated the depth of reality and found not gods and dragons of the deep and angels and archangels — but Leptons and Muons held together by Gluons, and we find the Universe pervaded with Light that we cannot see, and we marvel at dark matter, or is it dark energy, that keeps it from flying apart.
When I hit this pulpit, it goes thunk. We like that. We think we have made contact with the essential brass tacks of life — matter.
Not really. Not the way ages and generations before us thought. This pulpit, and the microphone, and you and I are made of cells and the cells are made of atoms and, in the subatomic realm — mysterious patterns of energy, and no solid matter at all. Right now, bazillions of protons and leptons are flying right through you! And now we know that atoms, which I was taught were supposed to be the fundamental building block of the entire universe, constitute only about 15% of what’s out there. The rest is pretty mysterious.
Our science has penetrated reality and found mysterious communication across the abyss between things, and things we thought things vanish with our seeing them. There is more than meets the eye.
But what is this Life that evolves, and what is this All of which everything we know is a part? and what is this Energy and Intelligence that insisted on exploding from nothing into something with form and substance 14 billion years ago? and what are the ethical implications of that, and what might it mean in our living? and what does it have to do with our loves and our hurts and our hopes? and what is this Universe that goes forth in a moment from an infinitely small, infinitely dense darkness and void and creates worlds and gives us life?
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Maybe you haven’t got a doubt in the world about the existence, or nonexistence, or whatever, of God. Or —
Maybe you find yourself speaking of God with a ringing . . . ambivalence.
Maybe you are a theist, which means you believe in a God who is some kind of divine cosmic super-person.
Or, maybe, like so many mystics, or like the theologian Paul Tillich, or like our own Transcendentalists, or like some kinds of Eastern religions, or like me, you sense that there is something, some central Life of the Universe, but you are not a theist because you don’t mean some personal super Somebody-out-there; no, you mean something in which all the universe, and you and I ourselves, are a part. Tillich called it the Ground of Being.
Maybe mostly you figure you don’t believe any of this stuff. Maybe you’re a materialist.
Maybe you are troubled by your own contradictions.
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Maybe we need to talk more immediately about our own firsthand experience, our own emptiness and ecstasies, our own sense of ultimate meaning — with less embarrassment, with more poetry — talk about it in ways that are informed by how we now understand the universe.
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Now let me add this. Whatever words you use — the Ground of Being, or God, or whatever — we can speak of it in the first person, or the second, or the thirdperson. Maybe that distinction can bring some clarity to your own spiritual experience. Here’s what I mean.
We can speak in the first person, as the Kena Upanishad does, when it declares, “Thou art That!” I am that! It’s what most truly, authentically, you are. That’s what Emerson is saying in his essay “The Over-soul.” It’s our truest identity. The Divine is not something out there, remote from our selves. It’s right here, always, already, here, and we are its expressions, manifestations of what many Eastern religious traditions call the Unmanifest. We are one and we can feel each others’ existence as part of our own. It’s what we are, look at from within.
We can speak of it in the third person, and speak of the evolutionary process, the life-process, looking as if from without.
And there’s the second person: Thou. When you speak in the second person, you address this Mystery, you stand before it in wonder, or worship, or gratitude this Thanksgiving week. (Or, stand before it sometimes in anger maybe, or bewilderment). You don’t have to see yourself as standing before some personal deity, some super-person in a cosmic control-room, to do that. Yet now there you are, face-to-face — this is not just something cerebral. Now something you can truly call worship is possible.
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Not so long ago, at night, the dog and I stood in silence for a long time, out on the hill in back of my house in the foothills of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, in the great quiet and darkness of Westhampton, watching as our tiny planet shaded entirely our tiny moon, and in the dark, through the crystal-clear skies, looked — at least I did, Scooby was likely smelling things — I looked into the depth of space.
What language could I offer? But the vocabulary is quite secondary to the reverence and it has to rise naturally from it. And that, I am certain, will communicate far more than outworn, tired words and shibboleths. Reverence, but not superstition. Look into the depth of space, and into the depth of ourselves, and do it in the light of what we now understand about this evolving Universe.
The Reality I am attempting to speak of — isn’t the ancient Tao te Ching about right when it says:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name . . .
v
We’ll have to free ourselves from an archaic universe with its Bibles of unquestioned authority, its heathen tribes versus godly warriors, its dragons of the sea, its angels and archangels; and its God, who is always too small, too neatly wrapped.
We have to let it go. We have to set our minds free to perceive anew and to think new thoughts.
Whatever there is to be known — the point is not to have opinions about it, dogma about it — but to come into direct relationship with it. And what relationship will it be? Bitter resentment? Passionate love? fear? despair? gratitude?
And then it comes to us again
that behind and beyond our everyday experience
there is this mysterious energy (some have called it Spirit);
there is Life Itself
and we awaken to a world that is not dead as we had thought, lifeless rock and soil
but a living organism with fire at its heart
and this living earth ceaselessly turning with the stars and planets in that immensity too vast to measure or comprehend
and all this community of the Universe: the artwork of Life Itself,
And there: human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
1 Madame Bovary.
2 By Michael Paulson, June 28.
3 May 17, 2003.
4 Nature. In LOA, 40.
5 For more on this, see Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality, Integral Books, 2006, 154-162; or, more accessibly, his The Integral Vision, Shambhala, 2007, 198-205.
Parting
Emerson's friend Bronson Alcott in 1868:
So fine, so sublime a religion as ours, older than Christ, old as the Godhead, old as the soul, eternal as the heavens, solid as the rock, is and only is; nothing else is but that, and it is in us and is us; and nothing is our real selves but that in the breast.
Readings
William James Potter, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, was one of those great 19th-century radicals who had had enough of the old language and the old assumptions that went along with it. And he wrote —
No definition of religion, I think, will satisfy the philosophy of the subject which does not in some way denote a contact which the finite mind has with the vitalizing and sustaining Energy of the universe. It is not necessary that the definition should embrace the idea of a personal Deity, not necessary that it should attempt the impossible problem, which most theological systems do attempt, of defining the Infinite; but it must, in order to cover all the facts, in some way recognize the Infinite, — in other words, recognize that the human soul is conscious of a life that is not bounded by its material organism nor by any limits which itself can measure, but opens outward into the whole infinity and eternity of things, and is a natural, inherent part of the universal order.7
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From J. Krishnamurti, On God, p. 51
At the end of a lecture about God, someone asks Krishnamurti a question:
Questioner: "You never mention God. Has he no place in your teachings?"
Krishnamurti: "You talk a great deal about God, don't you? Your books are full of it. You build churches, temples, you make sacrifices, you do rituals, perform ceremonies, and you are full of ideas about God, are you not? You repeat the word, but your acts are not godly, are they? Though you worship what you call God, your ways, your thoughts, your existence, are not godly, are they? Though you repeat the word God, you exploit others, do you not? . . .
So you are very familiar with God, at least with the word; but the word is not God. . . . I don't use that word for the very simple reason that you know it."
And on another occasion, a questioner asks,
Q: "Tell us of God."
K: "Instead of my telling you what God is, let us find out whether you can realize that extraordinary state, not tomorrow or in some distant future, but right now as we are quietly sitting here together. Surely that is much more important. But to find out what God is, all belief must go. The mind that would discover what is true cannot believe in truth, cannot have theories or hypotheses about God. . . . When the mind is full of belief . . . it is burdened, and a burdened mind can never find out what is true. . . . You yourself must see the importance of relinquishing . . . all the accumulations of centuries, the superstitions, knowledge, beliefs; you must see the truth that any form of burden . . . dissipates energy. For the mind to be quiet there must be an abundance of energy, and that energy must be still. . . . Because the mind has abundant energy that is still and silent, the mind itself becomes that which is sublime. . . . When the mind is completely still, . . . then that energy is love."
And from the ancient Tao te Ching:
There is a thing inherent and natural,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Motionless and fathomless,
It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted.
It may be regarded as the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name.
If I am forced to give it a name,
I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name . . .
Meditate
Now in the stillness of this sacred space I ask you just to be still, to relax and let everything be as it is, and to pay attention to what moves in and among us, in these moments of meditation and silence.
We gather in silence because our words fail us and our theories delude us and our opinions cannot bear the weight of our living.
We gather in silence because, below and beyond the tumult, we hope to hear silent music.
We enter the silence because we have felt a presence and a motion and a spirit that rolls through all things
We seek the silence because we have known at the core of us a central peace that has met us there and has eluded us in in the clamor,
but here we have felt enfolded by love and buoyed up by it
And what we know here we cannot speak,
Truth more true
Yearnings more sublime
Than any speech but silence.