Past Perfect, Future Perfect....Present Tense

Hi,  thanks for stopping by my blog.  I so appreciated the positive feedback on today's service and the sermon.  I want to make sure folks understand my statements about the past-perfect and future-perfect ideas really imply no judgement or blame on my part--not about Matthew or Roger's ministry or about the financial choices the congregation or board made about our current home.  They are there as illustrations of the fuzzy nature of looking back or forward.  High Plains is an amazing congregation that, from my perspective, has made consistently good choices over the years that, like any choices, sometimes turn out the way we hoped and sometimes not.  The point is to see where we are now and respond thoughtfully and faithfully--as I know we will.  --N

Past Perfect, Future Perfect...Present Tense
a sermon for High Plains Church UU, May 20, 1012

So does anyone actually pay attention to the title of the sermon? Does it create expectations for you? So I titled this sermon “Past perfect, future perfect...present tense” which, a couple of months ago when I came up with it, I thought was pretty clever. I, of course, then have to write a sermon to go with that title which isn't always easy. It's like trying to place the cherry on top of a sundae when nothing much else is in the little parfait cup. And, I'll tell you, I rewrote 80% of this sermon at 4:00 this morning when I realized I wanted to say something different.

So who are the real grammar geeks in the audience? Come on, don't be shy, in as over-educated a group as this there's bound to be some. So who wants to define the past-perfect and future-perfect in terms of tense? See, you call yourselves geeks but really, you can't quite figure out if it's affect or effect, who versus whom—and here I am asking you to define the “past-perfect” or pluperfect.

Now, I would be lying to you all, if I don't admit I had to look it up. This stuff is confusing—hell, there's a reason they call it “tense.” The past-perfect refers to an action that happened before another past action. “Things had been fine, until I gave the sermon title to the worship team.” And that gap between the one action and the other—both now done, not to be undone—both in the irretrievable past is the past-perfect tense. Now mind that gap, we'll talk about it more in a few minutes—that gap between past perspectives is important. What are some other examples we might come up with-- “this place had been fine, until Matthew left” or “the congregation had been on track, until Roger came” or, for that matter, “I had been really enjoying church, until Roger was forced to leave.” Do those sentences so familiar to anyone? Have you written that history for yourself or this church?

Future perfect isn't that different—an action that takes place before a time in the future. Example from ten days ago: “it's ok to write the sermon next week, because nothing will have happened that might make that difficult.” “Will have” is the key here. “It's OK to take on this mortgage because the church will have grown or the golf course will have made enough money by the time we need to start paying it back.” The future-perfect is all about assumptions. And here's that gap again—between what we planned, past and future, and what is. Mind the gap.

Well, now that I've caused disturbing flashbacks to college writing 101 in two-thirds of the audience, and made somewhat vague references to the London subway system, we can move on to the real subject. Whatever we tell ourselves about the past or the future, what we actually have to work with is the present---and that can be pretty tense too.

That pesky gap, the one that opens up between where we thought we would be today and where we actually are—and between where we are with what we plan for the future—that frustrating, painful, exciting, confounding gap often goes by another name as well. Change. And I don't know about you, but I feel like I could happily be spared a fair amount of change these days.

Change. How many times do we hear that change is the only constant. It's such a trite saying—but it's also certainly true---the only things that don't seem to change are the inanimate and the dead—and I say “seem” for even both the never-alive and the once-alive are acted upon by the universe and do transform over time, coming from the stars and eventually returning to them as well. So all changes, everything is in flux, and yet for something so absolutely pervasive, so completely inevitable, it can be so hard for us. Harder for us, we assume, than for the rock because we have the twin curse and blessing of awareness. We are such paradoxical creatures—so resistant to change and yet, on some level we are absolutely hardwired for change and challenge—indeed every single being in this room is changing at a frantic rate—we are aging, digesting, growing, repairing, learning, dying. I don't say much with certainty, but this I can make as an absolute pronouncement—not a single person here, man, woman, or child will leave this place exactly as they were when they entered. It is a physical, temporal, and hopefully spiritual and intellectual impossibility. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said it 2500 years ago—you cannot step in the same river twice---the river is different and, more importantly, of course, so are you. At his death, the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, said that all things were vayadhammā saṅkhārā ---a wonderful Sanskrit phrase that both implies that all things are subject to decay, to change, and that all experiences are, in some sense, unsatisfactory because of this ceaseless entropy.

As many of you know, the theology that motivates my thinking most deeply is Buddhism, and I think basic Buddhist psychology is correct in it's diagnosis about why we struggle so much with something so inevitable and essential to our nature. Change is difficult for us because of the gap that almost always opens up between the course we've set for ourselves and the actual road we find ourselves on. And the degree of symptoms we feel—the anxiety, the anger, the sadness, the frustration---are often directly proportional to the distance between what we think should be and what actually is. And so we resist change because we know we may wind up someplace we don't want to be—and the loss of that future perfect state, which was never actually real, is too hard and we fear we won't be able to adapt to a new reality.

I think we experience this in ways both large and small all the time. I experience it when writing sermons frequently---it is, after all, a somewhat odd thing to sit down and try to be insightful—and where a sermon winds up isn't always where I thought I would be—and that can be, to be honest, stressful. I can see in the, sometimes quite great, distance where I thought my sermon would end up, and yet, here I am, someplace quite different. And the more I struggle and try to get back to where I had projected myself into the future as my goal, the more stressed I feel, the more tense I get---and the recipe for trauma, both large and small, is undergoing unpleasant experiences in a state of tension.

This applies to relationships as well—and to groups also, not just individuals. Where we thought we would be as a congregation, the hopes we had, that future perfect, or at least future-pretty-good state, we had anticipated and where we find ourselves are likely two different places emotionally, spiritually, financially—and the more we struggle, the more suffering we experience. And loss recapitulates other losses—so the past-perfect intrudes—how good things were then before something else happened. And yet again we find ourselves in the present...tense.

Now please be clear, I'm not saying that just ignoring one's sadness at past disappointments or dismissing the genuine pain that arises when our hopes are dashed is the way to happiness. Those emotions are real and important, and need to be honored and, in some sense, metabolized. I am not in anyway saying that those hurt by past actions of the minister or congregation should be told to “get over it.” Nor am I saying we shouldn't mourn the loss of those hopes and goals that have now changed. What I am saying is that awareness of these gaps, indeed acknowledging them fully is needed before we can realign ourselves with what is and reduce some of the tension we may feel.

This is a time of transitions. The person we called to be our minister has left, our director of faith formation, Laura, just resigned, we are struggling with growth, both generally and with the move from a pastoral to program-sized church, and just yesterday we had what I believe was the first memorial service in this space for Ulf Fagerquist, now of blessed memory. Change is endless for us as individuals, families, communities, and countries. And there is a catchy name for those individuals and groups who don’t master change, anyone know what it is…those who don't learn how to deal with change are sometimes call “extinct.”

So given the ubiquity of change, the inevitability of change, the question then must be—how do we deal with it—as individuals and as a congregation of people bound not by theology or dogma but by shared ideals and hopes. And this sermon, indeed this church, is useless unless we take the events in the life of this church as opportunities to reflect on our lives more broadly—I think there are few people here because they feel the fate of their immortal souls depends on their time in these seats. We are here by choice, because of what this community brings to our individual lives—and, of course, the converse is also true—you are here because of what your individual life with all its gifts and foibles can bring to the life of this church and this free faith.

For me coping with change comes down to a few beliefs. First, that we need to really acknowledge where we are broken and not try to hide or deny it. Joe played Peter Mayer's song, Japanese Bowl which talks about a technique of pottery repair practiced in Japan for many years call Kinstugi. Instead of discarding a cracked pot, they used gold solder to repair it—the resulting pot has these lovely lines of gold. There's no effort to hide the repair—the piece if often considered more beautiful and more valuable for the evidence of having endured brokenness and having returned to a new wholeness—never the same, but not simply shattered either.

I recently went through some specialized training to become certified in some treatments and interventions for secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. The instructor began the day by handing out 3x5 cards and asked each of us write three things that we have suffered with as a result of the work we do---the room was full of nurses, chaplains, social workers, and others who are repeatedly exposed to the victims of traumatic events—like many of my peers I've lost track of the number of tragedies I've witnessed—cancer and car accidents, suicides and child abuse, shootings and overdoses, I don't know how many deaths. I took my card and jotted down my top three negative effects from my work—it didn't take long. He then asked us to stand, and walk around the room holding the card at chest level, allowing people to read it and to read theirs in return. You could feel the room tense up. We thought we were just engaging in a little self-reflection. I certainly didn't anticipate sharing what I'd written.

I stood and started wandering the room of 50 or so professionals. I saw what I was intended to see—that I wasn't alone in my struggles and that my experience was ordinary not exceptional. We tend to think that our sufferings are unique, our particular brand of brokenness is ours alone. I can tell you right now, that the moment I openly acknowledged how hard some of my work as a chaplain has been, I found more healing than I expected. Confession, as our Catholic brothers and sisters know can be a powerful source of healing. Some here may, knowingly or not, have a sense that somehow we're unique in having an unsuccessful ministry. We aren't of course, ministries end for many reasons, but the pain and concerns are what we'll have to address in the next few years as we move forward. And more generally speaking, the pains we honor and hold up to the light are the ones that lose their power over us. It's the wounds that we keep sealed up—pushed down that keep intruding on the present. Pain is in some ways like food, the only way to derive any nourishment from it at all is to digest it. Pain and food that just lie in our bellies never going anywhere make us sick. And, my experience of seeing some of the worst things that can happen to people has also shown me that there is nothing that cannot eventually be a catalyst for growth and even strength. Viktor Frankl survived the death of his spouse and horrible tortures of a Nazi concentration camp and yet found ways to find beauty in life and went on to found a school of psychology that teaches that we cannot control many of the events in our life, but we can control how we respond to those events—and our response is really what shapes our reality far more than the naked facts of our experience.

Since we cannot escape change, the question again then becomes how do we go with the tide, rather than getting swept away by it. Despite the enormous complexity of our bodies and minds, we are, at some level, incredibly simple creatures. We have two primary autonomic or involuntary nervous system sides: sympathetic and parasympathetic. Our response to anything that scares us is pretty much the same one our ancestors experienced when seeing a saber-tooth tiger---fight or flight—that is to say that the sympathetic nervous systems shifts into high gear. We release adrenaline and a bunch of other hormones which then go to work on us---getting us as ready as we can be to face the challenge, pulse jumps, breathing quickens, muscles tighten, gut shuts down. The problem is that our problems are rarely lions or tigers or bears anymore. Now the fear is primarily generated by overfull email inboxes, confrontations with difficult bosses, traffic jams, and the constant buzz of cellphones—and for some of us, the far more pressing problems of serious illness, financial struggles, and the like. Now, I am not trying to minimize anyone's fears and worries. The feelings are important and real and I'm not suggesting you repress them, but spending huge amounts of time sympathetically dominant is incredibly bad for you—and tends to lead the very things we fear most—illness, depression, and failure. It is possible though to feel the emotions without all the associated stress reactions.

I want to share with you two quick ways to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance. First, as you are willing and able, let your eyes defocus and try to expand your peripheral vision—really bring that awareness to the sides, let that visual field open up. Sympathetic vision is tight and narrow and when we force ourselves to shift to a broader visual field we also shift ourselves toward the parasympathetic.

Second, again as you are willing and able, I'd like you all to sit up straight and sit on your hands—now kind of feel around to find your ischial tuberosities or the the sit bones. Without getting in a lot of trouble with the UUA I can't help you find them personally. Just kind of feel around.

See now, this is a beautiful thing, this is trust, you're all, in church, feeling your bottoms, just cause I asked you to—I love y'all.

OK, found them, now bring your hands up, really, stop grabbing your bottoms, and feel the tops of your hip bones—the iliac crests. OK, now visualize those four points—the sit bones and the top of the hip bones. Draw an imaginary rectangle connecting them. See that rectangle in your mind—now expand that shape, open it up, make it larger. Relaxing all those muscles in that lower core area. If you're doing it right, you should feel yourself relax some. This works for most folks and works because what your declenching, especially when you're feeling stress, are the muscles that then compress the lower portion of the vagus nerve which also controls a lot of our stress response.

And by the way, if you've ever practiced meditation, at least part of the effect comes from this shift the stress-oriented tightness of the sympathetic nervous system to the open, ready, and relaxed states of the parasympathetic.

I don't know who the next settled minister of this congregation will be—male or female, gay or straight, theist or atheist, young or old, black or white, Hispanic or Asian. The one thing I can tell you is that they will staggeringly, frustratingly, joyously human—flawed and broken, gifted and brilliant in his or her own way. Those of us who have felt called to ministry, made our way to ordination, and had some experience learn that we are blank screens to some extent upon which a fair amount of projections are made. You see us through the filters of your memories and hopes, fears and needs. And likewise, we react through filters of our own history---and both sides of that equation need to react to the current reality and less out of past negative experiences and expectations.

Still, one of the strengths of our tradition is that we have no strong hierarchical priest-hood. Yes, ministers have special training, experience, and hopefully bring a certain perspective to congregational life, but ultimately we are lenses through which the energy of the congregation is focused. And this is the real work we need to do—reconnecting with our own sense of commitment to this community. I want to say that again, the work we need to do is reconnecting with our own sense of commitment to this community.

Overall, I guess what I'm saying is twofold. First, the more we can reduce the gap between where we are and where we think we should be—either by adjusting expectation or action—the less we tend to suffer. The more we can let go of the past-perfect stories and the future-perfect fantasies, the less we will experience the present as tense. Second, what I just told you is pretty tough and so we will inevitably experience fractures in our sense of wholeness---fractures from both broken dreams and past pains. And since we all have been and will be broken in this way, we should try to cultivate a gentleness for our companions and for ourselves. We should find rituals of healing and understanding that allow us to show each other these broken places so that together we might fill them with gold—and find new meaning and perhaps even beauty in the very places we felt most torn apart. And, when we feel stress, feel the tension building in us, find ways of releasing it—meditation, exercise, or just feeling your bottom. I am serious, if you can release that physical tension and shift more toward the parasympathetic system, you will experience less as traumatic and more as experience.

The past is never perfect, and I'll spare you the suspense, the future won't be either. The question before us is the one each of us faces every day. How do we live in the present moment, fully aware of our limitations and brokenness, while still having the courage to act? And I think the question itself is the answer—courage, awareness, and action. In a few minutes we'll hear Joe's rendition of Leonard Cohen's brilliant song, Anthem. The chorus, as some of you know and I've quoted before, is wonderful. “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” So we've collectively, and some more than others, sustained a few cracks. But those cracks are the opportunities for growth, let us fill them with gold and let them shine. We must live, as we always have in the only place accessible to us, the present, tense as it may be.

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I want to take a moment to point out just some of the resources available during this time without a minister. The caring team has done and continues to do an amazing job of supporting the basic needs of congregation members in need. They can also use help, so I'd like you to consider what we're calling micro-volunteering, just agreeing to do a single task—cook one meal for example.

I'd also like to call attention to the pastoral care team. These folks have special training and experience and have done a great job of supporting a number of our members who are dealing with some kind of acute or on-going challenges. I met with them recently to discuss our various roles. We will be working together to meet the pastoral needs of the church before the interim arrives. I will be available for any, for lack of better term, high-intensity pastoral needs—deaths, serious illness, and so. Any of the pastoral care team can call me if they think someone needs another level of care. I'll either provide that care myself or make a referral to another resource.

Cake or Death: A sermon on humor and spirituality

Cake or Death.
How many people have heard of Eddie Izzard? I'm a pretty big fan of the British stand-up comic and actor. I want to play a brief bit of one of his skits.
Eddie Izzard on Cake or Death
Cake or Death. It seems a pretty easy choice.
This sermon came to be after I was asked to preach on light in the midst of the dark, to preach about the role of laughter and joy in religion and spirituality.
It seemed a good topic then and seems a pretty good one today. Am I the only one who feels a need to take another look at the Book of Revelation? Health care is a mess, corporations are people when it comes to speech, but not when it comes to torture, Super-pacs have effectively put our democracy on ebay, our food supply chain is designed to make us fat and corporations rich, 97% of scientists believe in evolution compared with only 32% of the general population, some of our political class want to take women's rights back to the beginning of the last century--if not earlier.
Of course, all of the difficulties and dangers of the world are starting to take on a new meaning for me as I move into my third year of fatherhood. I'm having a great time, my almost 3-year-old Benjamin makes me smile and laugh all the time. I've even started having some confidence in my ability to be a parent. Most every day, however, some helpful person reminds me how overwhelming parenting can be or tells me to “just wait” until goes off to school, or starts puberty or goes to college—then we'll see who's having a good time. To which I want to say, thank you. Thank you very much. I had already been worried, now I can really settle into some prime, irrational anxiety. Thanks.
It is in these moments that I need to do three things. First, remember to breathe—greatest advice I've ever received or given—just breathe. Second, remember that I am blessed with community—not just you all, but others as well. We are only truly human and grounded when we in community. I am, as most of you know, a hospital chaplain and the one thing I see over and over again---the grease that eases life's sticky passages is connection—the more you have consciously sought connection, the easier life will generally be even in the face of tragedy. Third, I need to remember the healing power, the profound sacredness, of laughter.
For this morning let us think together on three elements of holy laughter—choice, community, and consciousness. All three are profoundly spiritual and important in our identity as Unitarian Universalists. And I do feel a need to connect this with spirituality and Unitarian Universalism. Making folks laugh is a noble enough goal, but I'm not sure its enough for worship. These sacred hours we spend together, when we share together our wisdom, our faith, our fears and our love. For them to mean something we have to, more often than not, touch on that which is beyond the mundane, to make a conscious choice to aim toward the sacred.
But we can still, indeed must still, laugh as we do this. Losing our ability to laugh at ourselves, is the first step toward forgetting that all religions are merely windows through which the light of the Divine pours through. Too much seriousness is like an accumulating layer of dirt on these windows—before you know it, the light gets blocked and you spend your days trying to decipher mystic patterns and perceiving apocalyptic visions in the patterns in the grime. Laughter cleanses our eyes, our souls, our faith---laughter, it turns out, does windows.
By the way, how do you describe a schizophrenic Buddhist...someone who is at two with the universe.
I didn't write all my own material this morning—I've tried to draw from several traditions. I'll share with you traditional wisdom stories from Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism---as well as a smattering of UU jokes that have been around the proverbial block a time or two. Regardless of the source, I've tried to tie everything together to offer some ideas about why a sense of humor is a critical part of spirituality.
Let's start with a story from the Islamic tradition.
One day the news went out that Mullah Nasrudin, the great Islamic Sufi mystic, had suffered a significant loss. His one and only, much loved donkey had gone missing What a loss, how terrible everyone said. When his neighbours heard the news they felt so bad for him they decided to go to Nasrudin's house and help him to find his donkey. So they came to the wise man's home and found him smiling and praising God in gratitude They couldn't understand it and asked the Mullah: " Mullah aren't you sad about loss of your donkey?" The Mullah laughed and said, "I am happy because God has been so good to me.” His friends were still confused. Nasrudin shook his head and smiled, “Don’t you get it? If I had been riding that donkey, I'd be lost right now too!”
For me the first message of sacred laughter is that of choice. We don't have a choice about much that happens to us. Life unfolds as it will, but we always have a choice about how we respond. Within the Buddhist tradition they sum this idea up by saying that “pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.” “Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.” I see this over and over again, in the midst of tragedy so intense it sometimes literally takes my breath away. With precious few exceptions, events come to us all that cause pain, events that shatter our hopes, events that we wouldn't wish on anyone. These things simply happen, indeed it is one of the great tasks of religion to answer the question---why do bad things happen to good people? For the most part, the Unitarian Universalist answer is—I don't know. We don't spend much time trying to tease out the cause, we mostly focus on response. God's plan, karma, fate, or simple random chance—we don't, as a community share a single answer, nor does our history offer a clear systematic theology of evil. What we have now, and what is completely consistent with centuries of Unitarian and Universalist faith is that regardless of why it happened, we can use our freedom, innate wisdom, and goodness, and our community to get through.
Choice is not just individual though, it belongs to us as a community and as part of our spiritual inheritance. Because our religious forebears lived and died for tolerance and the use of reason in religion and the right of the individual to follow their own innate wisdom—because of these precious beliefs we are for the most part freed from the idolatries of the mind and spirit that afflict so many other faiths. We don't suppress questions, indeed we encourage them.
Some time ago now, Julia and I were at a friend's home for dinner. Conversation eventually turned to a Air Force Academy Cadet who happened to visit High Plains on a morning I was preaching. After the service he was, apparently, rather upset with some of the “heresies” I proclaimed. I can easily imagine an exchange he might have had with one of our members, the young man sputtering “I couldn't believe the sermon this morning, I didn't agree with practically anything that was said.” To which any self-respecting UU might have happily replied, “Oh well, then you'll fit right in.” We all know the joke about a busload of UU's who die in a crash. They find themselves at a fork in a road with a sign saying “Heaven to the left” “Discussion about heaven to the right” and the whole troupe heading right.
When you join this open-source spirtuality, when you begin to identify yourselves as Unitarian Universalist, you affirm more than perhaps anything else the value of freedom. You leave behind what seems to be the increasingly narrow dogmatism of many faiths. There are tremendous rewards for this choice but also a cost. The cost, as many of us have found and occasionally lament, is the sense of surety and security that comes from letting clerics and texts dictate your reality in this world and the one to come. The reward, well, the reward is a sense of humor. Laughter only comes out of freedom for to laugh is to see difference, to recognize contradictions and paradoxes, to be aware of irony. To see the profound gap between what we hope for and what is reality is to be aware of the tension inherent in existence—and in that space between what we dearly hoped for and what we feared might happen, in that space we have a choice of how we respond. I see this in my work as a chaplain and in my own life. Do we choose “cake” or do we choose “or death”?
An angel appears at a meeting of religious leaders and tells their leader that in return for his unselfish and exemplary behaviour, God will reward him with his choice of infinite wealth, wisdom, or beauty.
Without hesitating, the leader selects infinite wisdom.
'Done!' says the angel, and disappears in a cloud of smoke and fire.
Now, all heads turn toward the leader, who sits surrounded by a faint halo of light.
One of the others whispers, 'Say something.'
The leader sighs and says, 'I should have taken the money.'
Now, obviously, I’m not suggesting anyone should laugh when given a diagnosis of Leukemia or smile when someone you love dies. Nor should we laugh off every insult and injury. We have to cry sometimes, to struggle sometimes, to scream and rage against reality sometimes—else how do we know when life is sweet? I doubt there’s a person in this room who has not at some time enjoyed an unexpected reprieve—the truck just misses hitting you, the diagnosis is benign, the lost child found playing at a friend’s house, the slide on the ice that comes to a gentle stop. Sometimes the laughter bursts forth at these times in sheer giddiness as the tension leaves so suddenly it does literally feel like a weight lifted from our shoulders.
The fact is, religion is often absurd. For a long time I expressed that sentiment out of a highly critical analysis of religion in general. Church father Tertulian famously once said, "I believe because it is absurd." That kind of attitude drove me nuts, still does a lot of the time, but more and more I feel that the absurdity of religion is only exceeded by the absurdity of real life. Cake or Death, laugh or die—the choice is ours.
Humor and laughter are not just individual responses, but are an integral part of what binds us together as humans—they are part of what creates community. To laugh together is to create bonds, and community is the second aspect of laughter I want to talk about.
Laughter, scientists and sociologists tell us, predates speech by tens of thousands of years, maybe even millions of years. Infants laugh way before they talk. Those born blind and deaf laugh. The ability and instinct to laugh is not learned, it is part of what it means to be human at the deepest level. We are wired for laughter. Groups laugh far more than individuals. Laughter is profoundly social—and that perhaps is the key. Laughter reminds us that we are social beings, that we are connected. When we laugh together, I feel happy, I feel love. Nothing else feels that way. I think of some of the most exciting things I've ever done. Racing against a thunderstorm while climbing a mountain in the Cascades. Driving a motorcycle at 130 mph. That's all adrenaline. That all makes me aware that I am alive. But to be surrounded by my community sharing laughter tells me why it's good to be alive. G.K. Chesterton, an English journalist said, “It is the test of a good religion if you can joke about it.” We are bound together as a community not because of shared dogma, but because of shared ideals. Of course, sometimes it's hard to know just what those ideals are—a trait we make fun of ourselves about:
“How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?” “We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that a light bulb works for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose an interpretive dance about your personal relationship to your light bulb and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service. We will explore a number of light bulb traditions including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted; all of which are equally valid paths to spiritual luminescence.”
The third aspect of laughter I want to speak about this morning is consciousness. Now the truth is that what I'm actually talking about here is awareness of ego as a component of spirituality, but I was trying to find something that worked with choice and community and consciousness has more alliterative value than ego. There are two modes of awareness or consciousness that are important here. First is how a sense of humor is a natural outgrowth of spiritual development. May I be saved from those who are excessively earnest—I don't trust people who are too sober. I like people who can laugh at themselves, their beliefs, and me for that matter. I'd rather hang out with Trickster Coyote from the Native American tradition than with Yahweh any day. Yahweh seems entirely too serious to me. There are some signs of he has a sense of humor—the giraffe, the platypus, my baldness.
I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of people I'd consider holy or advanced souls or on their way to enlightenment. I've also met a number of people who thought they were in this category. Perhaps the most significant difference is how easily the truly wise laugh—at themselves, at their foibles and failings and even at their faith.
One day a rabbi is overwhelmed with the spiritual realization of how small he is in the grand scheme. He falls to his knees in the synagogue and shouts out over and over again, “I am nothing, I am nothing.” The president of the congregation sees this act of piety and falls to his knees, beating his chest, also exclaiming, “I am nothing, I am nothing.” The janitor for the shul sees the two men and rushes to their side, “ I am nothing, I am nothing.” The second man nudges the first and says, “Hey, look who thinks he's nothing.”
The second aspect of consciousness is how it can be happily derailed by humor. Humor can often lance through the tangles of intellectualism to show us wisdom that isn't linear and remind us of truths that aren't logical.
Mara, sort of the Buddhist equivalent of Satan, is walking the earth one day with one of his demons. The demon observes a man stopping suddenly to pick up a shining item. The demon looks to Mara and says, “Did you see that? That human just found a piece of the Truth.” Mara nods and walks on. The demon sputters and exclaims, “Aren't you worried that he discovered a Truth?” Mara smiles and says, “Don't worry, he'll just make a belief out of it.”
Cake or death. It seems like such an easy choice. What are you going to choose today, tomorrow, and the day after? It seems like such an easy choice. And yet, how often do we choose “or death”? How often do we avoid the risks inherent in genuine community for the safety of solitude, the safety of the expected. Perhaps the most basic platitude about life is that each of us ends in death. We all go there eventually---but we don't have to go there in tiny increments every day. If we are wise enough to bring holy laughter instead of mundane practicality or fateful resignation, if we bring a sacred smile or subversive giggle to more of our situations, we can develop the skill of choosing “cake.” Laughter is often our response to the unexpected. It can be so hard to look for the “cake” choice in the midst of the difficulty, but there almost always is one—people with cancer can laugh, those locked in concentration camps found things to smile about, indeed I'm sure they had to---for the alternative to “cake” is “death.” We find ways to cope, adapt, and eventually laugh or we most assuredly perish. We can learn, as a spiritual practice, to be aware of the choices in front of us and to consciously reach out for the laughter, for the healing it brings, for the community it builds, and for the awareness we all come here to find.
I want to close with one more story from the Islamic tradition starring the wise fool Mullah Nasrudin who, in this final tableau, is sitting with some friends drinking coffee, discussing their eventual deaths:
"When you are in your casket,” one of the friends asks,”and friends and family are mourning, what would you like to hear them say about you?"
The first man says, "I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor of my time, and a great family man."
The second says, " I would like to hear that I was a wonderful school teacher who made a huge difference in our children of tomorrow."
Nasrudin says, " I would like to hear them say... LOOK!! HE'S MOVING!!!"
Cake or death. Blessed be, amen, and namaste.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Skeptical, Practical, Mystical

Skeptical, Practical, Mystical

Over the last few years I've been retooling my theology some. Over the years I've discarded, or in some cases lost, so much that I once believed in that I realized that the tapestry of my faith was looking a bit threadbare. I needed some new threads to weave in—ones that are both stronger and more colorful than the one's I'd let go. [And isn't that the beauty of Unitarian Universalism, when we see a gap in our faith we have the freedom to go out and seek that which we need and bring it home to share.] A combination of working with a Jungian psychologist, a Catholic priest some of you met recently, Father Bill, becoming an older parent, as well as some reading and meditation led me to realize some specific needs I have for my spirituality. I hope to always have a fluid, evolving spiritual life, but three themes will, I imagine, remain steady. Of my faith, I choose that it be skeptical, practical, and mystical.

Way too many years of the academic study of religion left me with a lot of knowledge about how religion functions sociologically and how all religions morph over time and steal from other traditions. Someone once said, “The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night." I now feel that way about theology. I cannot take religious claims at face value—I know too much about how they're made. And I don't want a religion that flies in the face of basic science or far worse, common sense. I don't require everything about it to be literal, but it cannot simply form a bulwark of denial against reality. Skeptical.

I also want my spirituality to be practical. I have little interest in argument for argument's sake. I love a good philosophical discussion as much as the next fellow, but at the end of the day I want my faith to have a clear, noticeable impact on the quality of my life and world. My faith should encourage me toward wholeness and growth—and moving toward justice in the world. I like author Barbara Kingsolver's take on this, “I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.” Practical.

Finally, and I know this may seem at some odds with my other two qualities, but I do want some sense of the mystical. I define this need for mysticism in two ways. First, to paraphrase David Eckel, a professor of mine at Boston University, mysticism is the experience of union or communion with a larger reality. My spiritual practices have to engender experiences that get me out of the narrow confines of my own ego and make me feel connected to and part of something larger than myself. Second, I also include the meaning of mystic here as “inspiring a sense of mystery, awe, or wonder.” I want a faith that inspires me, surprises me, leaves me staring slack-jawed at the wonder of it all. Too much logic and science makes Nathan a dull boy. My faith needs wonder. Mystical. 

 

And so, having come up with this pithy little triumvirate, I set about trying to see what such an animal would actually look like in the wild. My immediate concern was that this may be an endangered or even extinct species. Does such a thing exist? Everywhere I look I see religions that are mystical, but not practical—too much self-absorbed naval-gazing that doesn't actually move out into the real world of oppression and injustice. Some strains of Christianity suffer from this through an excessive focus on apocalyptic mythologies. Some American Buddhists also suffer from an excess of self-absorption, ironic in a faith that seeks to do away with the ego. Some perspectives offer plenty of skeptical, but no mystical—all head, no heart, no art. Finally, some are too focused on the outer world—lots of marches and occupations but no meditation. I'm not trying to be excessively demanding here, I just need a rational god, if there is one, and well-balanced diet for my soul, if I have one. So I thought, read, lived, and struggled with these questions and challenges looking for another path. 

 

Julia and I love to spend time up in the Salida/Buena Vista area and I happened to pick up a flyer for their yearly lecture series during a weekend trip. Michael Dowd, a pretty well-known name in UU circles, was giving a talk later that summer entitled, “Evolutionize Your Life: How a Meaningful, Science-Based View of Human Nature and the Trajectory of Big History Can Help Each of Us.” That sounded pretty-darn promising. Julia is the plan-maker par excellence, so I asked her to help make sure we were up there for Rev. Dowd's talk. Salida is a little further than I normally go to hear a talk, but I was really struggling with these questions of faith and I had some hope that Dowd's perspective might be helpful. I went, and I was amazed and inspired. How many have heard Michael or his wife, Connie Barlow, speak? I highly recommend them, and I'll just say right now I think we should make a strong effort to bring them in sometime soon.

I haven't the time this morning or the expertise yet to recreate Michael's talk—nor would I want to. That said, a lot of what I'll talk about this morning is directly inspired by his work and I've liberally incorporated his insights. I'd like to speak about just a couple elements of his talk that have touched me and helped me move in the direction of reclaiming an awe-inspiring, consistent, coherent theology. One made me hopeful for a sense of the past, one made me hopeful for the future, one I'm still trying to figure out. I hope you find them as exciting.

Stardust

One of my favorite bands is Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and one of my favorite songs of theirs is Joni Mitchel's Woodstock. Twenty-some odd years ago, while lying in a small room in Kuzuha Japan, a friend and I were listening to the song. I opened up the CD case and read the lyrics and were blown away. “We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil's bargain, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” I loved the metaphorical quality of the lyrics—I had no idea that they weren't all metaphor. The concept that we are stardust is literally true. 

 

You see, one thing I think we can lose in Unitarian Universalism is a sense of place in the Universe—perhaps mostly for those of us who are not theistic or connected through a strong earth-based connection. My friends who are more traditionally religious have this clear sense of a personal god. They have this comforting belief that even amidst the chaos, pain, and suffering that is all but inevitable in a human life, God has a plan and so each individual has a place in the cosmic plan. Matthew 10:29-31 expresses this quite beautifully, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." I don't know about the sparrows, but it doesn't take much omniscience any more to count the hairs on my head. Hell, my toddler can do it. I don't believe in a god who is in sovereign control of the universe. And yet, I so want to have a sense of place within the universe and not just be a small, ultimately insignificant mote of dust on a slightly larger mote of dust. I'd like to think that I am connected to the whole in some real way. 

 

Some of our most beloved and learned scientists offer insight on this sense of alienation that lies at the intersection of science and sacred. The holy prophets, one living, astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, and one now of blessed memory, Carl Sagan, both connect us to the universe at a deep level by pointing at the origins of our very being. In the beginning, the sages tell us, the universe burst forth in a brilliant explosion that brought forth the most humble element—hydrogen. From this simple beginning, the stars ignited and blazed. As with most beauty, raw material combined with pressure and time gives birth to the new and breathtaking. In this case, the heavier elements like carbon and nitrogen burst forth as the stars themselves die and cross the vast distances and time to form the earth and then, of course, after billions of years more, something grows out of the earth, the universe has finally reached a level of complexity that allows the cosmos to contemplate the cosmos. Human beings emerge. Seemingly so individual, so separate. And yet, each of us here is made up of atoms that were almost entirely born in the infinite heat of an incredibly distant star aeons and aeons ago. We are, quite literally, stardust. Parts of us have been around for billions of years. I don't think a carbon atom has consciousness, but I can't help but wonder at what some of my atoms have seen as they careened across unimaginable distances and through countless iterations of inanimate and then animate life. 

I know this is different than the kind of connection one gets in a personal relationship with the Judeo-Christian God, but if that framework no longer can hold for you, spend a moment acknowledging the literal truth of your ultimate ancestry. You are a child of the stars, and I believe blessed with that same beauty and brilliance. Your millions-times-over great-grandparents smile down upon you every night and ask only that you shine like they do—each beautiful and unique. And if you want magic, majesty, and mysticism, just remember that the stars you see in sky no longer exist in that state. That light is years old—in the case of Polaris, the North Star, it is close to 700 years old, and yet we see it right now. We can't see too much further back without help, but the Horsehead Nebula light is 1500 years old, and the Pillars of Creation were destroyed 6000 years ago by a supernova, but we won't see it for another 1000 years. And the Hubble Deep Field Image looks back almost 13 billions years old to see around 10,000 galaxies. To look up is to look back in time—and that is magical.

It was just Ash Wednesday this week and, as I have for years now at Memorial, I distributed ashes to Christians who want them. The traditional liturgy includes a line from Genesis, “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” It is a touching ritual actually, but this year, as I said the words from that ancient text, in my heart, I couldn't help but hear, “From stardust you came, and to stardust you shall return someday.”

Increasing Diversity, Increasing Complexity, Increasing Cooperation

The second idea that Michael talks about that I found genuinely hopeful was what there is a clear overall direction to evolution, sometimes called 'evolution's arrow”—not one driven by an external force or designer, but as a natural consequence of the process itself—though I make no claims to understanding how such a process began—and I don't mean this as a backdoor invite to some theistic explanation, though I don't discount such reasoning either. Evolution is the story of simple structures coelescing into more and more complex structures. In terms of straight biology, life starts as single-celled organisms and progresses, primarily as a result of external stressors, to multi-celled ones to lizard to furry things to us—incredibly complex creatures imbued with not only self-awareness, but millions and millions of little single-celled bacteria now living in our guts in a symbiotic relationship. This simplicity to complexity has a fractal-like quality in that at each level of resolution you get this move from simple to complex. The universe moves from simple elements, hydrogen, to more complex ones like Oxygen or Carbon. Life goes from simple single-celled to more complex multi-cellular forms. And Dowd points out that civilization moves in this direction as well. We go from small roaming tribes to clans to simple villages to city-states to modern countries to global alliances and interconnections. And along the way, at each level; universal, biological, sociological; there are increasing levels of cooperation as well. 

 

I am tremendously pessimistic at times, but even still, I cannot deny that we have far more interpersonal and international cooperation than at any point in human history. We are, and rightfully so, aghast at the wars we now engage in, but war is less frequently the answer now than it was in the past, and we cooperate on so many more things than we fight on the battlefield for. We are making progress, slow though it may be.

I see us as evidence of progress. We are a religious tradition that has, over centuries, increased its commitment to openness, to science, to interfaith understanding and wisdom. Last Sunday I went to the ordination of one of my chaplains. As I sang the hymns and read the words, I was convinced that we are the future of religion. It may take a very long time to get there, but to echo the now famously paraphrased words of our ancestor, Theodore Parker, when he said, in 1853, "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." Our sight may be limited, but our aim is consistent on the goal of true wholeness and invitation into relationship for all humanity. We have a better story and one that rings true with what our brightest minds have proven—that human beings are not in the world, we are of the world, as Rev. Dowd say, we grow out of the earth like a peach grows out of peach tree. We understand the interdependent web of existence and seek to find our right and responsible place within it. We have a better story, one that understands that the creation accounts of a thousand religions are true stories, even if they are not literal stories—and our ability to see that the power of metaphorical truth is more important in matters of religion than literal truth means that we will support and promote a free and responsible search for meaning for all people. I could go on, and engage each of our principles, but suffice it to say that we have the better story, and we should be far more willing to let our light shine. 

 

There is one final insight from scientists like Sagan and sages like Dowd that I'm still trying to understand the implications of for my own understanding. Let me quote Dr. Sagan:

“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.”

It has taken 14 billion years for the universe, at least locally, to achieve self-consciousness. As is often the case, our wisdom traditions intuited what we now now scientifically. Hindu myths talk about a cosmic consciousness that was lonely and so split it's consciousness so that it might now others, but then forgot that is was ultimately one. We are creatures that have grown out of the universe, this earth and yet our actions so often display a forgetfulness of this basic fact. I'm still figuring out what this means for me theologically. What does this journey toward awareness mean and what are its implications. But also more concretely, what does this mean ecologically. How do I act, eat, move so that I show my awareness of connection and responsibility to a global ecology and community. 

 

And so I went to hear Rev. Michael Dowd, and I was inspired. I started finding a set of understandings that were skeptical, practical, and mystical. Dowd spent his hour or so talking about what he calls “evidential theology”—theology that doesn't dismiss science, but rather draws the sense of awe, mystery, and inspiration from the scientific history of the universe. He told a story of the universe and its awesome unfolding, he told what can be a new mythology. One that can blend science and true religion; one that can ennoble our journey and not denigrate discovery. I am now a convert to this new mythology, though I am just learning it's tales. It is tale that can unite us and help move us forward, both as a specific faith tradition in need of common language and as an interfaith community. What Catholic reporter Jane Blewer brilliantly called, “A single tale of such holy and mysterious content as to capture the soul – scientific in its data, mythic in its form.” I hope we as a community will explore this new mythology together: skeptically, practically, mystically. 

Amen, blessed be, namaste.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsehead_Nebula

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_creation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_deep_field

http://thegreatstory.org/

On the use of reason in religion: the third and last of a trilogy of sermons for High Plains

A note for All Souls folks, the beginning of the sermon is slightly different from the one I gave at All Souls on 2/5/11 but the overall message is the same.  Thanks for having me as a guest minister, it was great to be with you all.  -n

Roger, Amanda, and I took on three central tenets of High Plains Church:  The Divine is Love, Everyone Matters, and Reason is Useful in Religion.  Here is my contribution from 12/4/11.  I've included at the end the quotations Julia read before the sermon as folks asked for them.  Thanks, -n

Reason is Useful in Religion
a sermon for High Plains Church, Unitarian Universalist 12/4/11
adapted for All Souls 2/5/11
Rev. Nathan Mesnikoff ©2011

The Divine is Love, Everyone Matters, Reason is useful in religion. Three central tenets of our community and not a bad summary of Unitarian Universalist history and theology. All three, in their own way, are wonderfully subversive thoughts that fly in the face of centuries of tradition that preach a very different view. Many of us grew up in religious settings where we were taught that God's love comes with very specific demands, that some are not accorded that love due to variations in belief, practice, or lifestyle, and with the implicit message that questioning is not appropriate and reason is dangerous to faith. Many of us found our way to Unitarian Universalism because at a deep level we intuited, knew that damnation and Hell were not part of the Universe's deepest truth, as Amanda talked about: the divine is love and overcomes all. Many of us came because we discovered that which separates us is never more important than what bonds us together as human beings sharing one beautiful, fragile planet and that none of us will ever be truly free when so many are imprisoned by racism, sexism, ageism, consumerism, homophobia or simply by poverty and ignorance or Fox News. Or as Roger talked about, everyone matters. Likewise, many here and in our congregations across the country, across the world and across generations, have come to Unitarian Universalist communities because we believe that the careful use of rationality is integral -- not antithetical -- to genuine spirituality.

One thing I want to lift up is the consistency of our beliefs over centuries. I fear that we don't know our history terribly well. Those of us who make our way through the forest leading to ordination read quite a bit of Unitarian Universalist history. Ministers aside, how many here today have read a book on UU history?

So UU Thought 101. Do we believe in Original Sin? No, and let's start here as we look at the role of reason in our faith and our historical emphasis on rationality. On some level, our predecessors' rejection of original sin created a space for the role of reason in religious life. Even the noted early humanist Erasmus wrote, “Faith cures reason, which has been wounded by sin.” People believed that we just weren't clean enough to think well. Until we freed ourselves from the spectre of the depraved, enfeebled status of humanity following the fall from grace by Adam and Eve, reason could not stand on its own as a valid arbiter of theological propositions. This is still a reason some faithful people distrust science and human wisdom—we are too inferior, too weak on our own, and so we turn to the supposed Word of God rather than the Power of Humanity to explain our universe. I think this is a tremendous mistake and leaves us reliant on outdated information. Rev. Michael Dowd speaks of this when he says that relying on texts like the Bible as a source of factual knowledge is like not having updated your GPS in 200 years and still thinking that the Oregon Trail on horseback is the way to go. We need current maps to help us make the post-modern journey in a complex, multicultural, deeply polyvalent world. Or as Galileo put it, “The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go."

We heard Julia read several quotations about the use of reason. There have been so many heroic figures in the on-going conversation about reason and religion. Galileo, Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams, Jefferson, Emerson. What binds them all together, theist and atheist alike, is the core belief that, however we came to possess this gift called reason, the ability to look at a proposition and determine its value to us, the ability to set aside our passions and consider facts and realities, however we have come to it, reason is a glorious faculty and one that should be celebrated not dismissed when it raises an inconvenient hand in the back of the class. Reason is not the enemy of faith. Reason is not the enemy of faith, indeed it is its salvation. For to believe anything which cannot hold up to simple reason is to live in willful ignorance. And here it is, the core of what I believe we mean when we say that “reason is useful in religion,” that we covenant with each other not to be believe specific propositions, but to be intrepid explorers of truths, especially our own. That revelation, whether from Jesus, Buddha, Darwin or Einstein, revelation is the FIRST step, not the last step. Truths presented to us by any prophet-scientist or poet-detective are handed to us for our own examination of relative benefits and defects. Someone out on the cutting edge “discovers” some new land, a fresh vista to explore. But we must make our own home in this new world. In matters of spiritual, and for that matter scientific, truth, we should avoid being armchair travelers—reading exciting accounts from the safety of our current position, but never venturing forth to see for ourselves. And, we do this too often in our tradition. Coming to church should not be your only spiritual practice. And the use of reason can be one such practice—seek out new ideas and challenges to current beliefs. Do not be satisfied with your current understanding.

No principle however, no matter how wonderful, can be safe from misuse. The use of reason is no different. We have to be careful not to elevate reason so that it becomes an end in and of itself. When we raise rationality above all else, we run the risk of reductionism. I went this way myself in graduate school and am having a very hard time stepping back from it. I was talking to a friend about this problem once and she asked me to give an example. After a moment of thought, I said the excessive use of reason, especially in matters of spirituality and art, can leave you in a situation not unlike someone who loves their dog tremendously, and decides the best way to love the dog even more is to dissect it to see if you can discover what makes the beloved animal so adorable and friendly. At the end of the process, you know more, but you may have killed what you loved and likely haven't gotten the answers you thought you were looking for. Rationality is a fantastic tool and one that should be rigorously applied to most lines of inquiry, but to seek justification for all faith positions in terms of scientific evidence is to subject spiritual beliefs to a level of scrutiny rarely, if ever, applied to other beliefs. No one asks you to justify exactly why you like Jazz over Classical or Indian over Mexican for dinner. As French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has reasons that the head knows not.” And some evidence suggests that, in many things, we make a sudden, snap, intuitive judgment first about many issues and then find evidence to support our position. I think there are limits to faith—especially in the public sphere, but there should also be some modest boundaries on pure reason. It would be a poorer world if there were no room for intuition and personal experience.

And so, one thing I want to decouple from Reason is Atheism. The two are not necessarily synonymous. To make them so is to risk making the wide varieties of theistic faith a mere caricature—to believe in any god is to be a fool. There are certainly proponents of this equation, that to be truly rational, one must abandon all conceptions of a transcendental power or divinity. While I think that a strong rationality renders inedible almost any traditional conception of divinity—no old white man in the clouds, no jealous angry god micromanaging our daily lives, no pearly gates, fiery pit---rationality does not render all ideas of god defunct. I'm thinking here of theologians like the lesbian, feminist, Episcopalian Carter Heywood, who writes in her book, Saving Jesus from Those Who are Right, “I am not much of a theist,” but goes on to speak of “godding,” the finding of sacred reality in the holy relationship between two beings. She also says, and I wholly agree, “the primary aim of theology--[is to] generate the passion and the intelligence, the commitment and the vision, to help us make history in just and compassionate ways.”

Although I tend toward the agnostic, I don't have any problem with a belief in god or gods or goddesses for that matter. I don't take issue with beliefs in an afterlife or reincarnation or transmogrification of the soul onto the next vibratory level of cosmic existence. I enjoy speaking with people who believe all sorts of things that I do not. As a hospital chaplain or when I'm acting, as I am today, as a parish minister, I value the diversity of human belief. It gives me a tremendous range of metaphor and analogy to draw on in both my ministry and my life. As most of you know, I lean more toward Buddhist conceptions of reality, but happily receive communion when offered, adore Islamic poetry, and will chant with Hare Krishnas or the Benedictine Sisters I'm friends with up at Benet Hill. I am of a like mind with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “...it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” I hope to be an honest agnostic acknowledging that I can no more prove the non-existence of any particular deity than anyone can prove the existence of said being. There is no argument for or against that is truly convincing and I no more expect someone to prove the existence of their god as a predicate for respect than I demand someone prove their love for their spouse or a particular artist. I believe that human beings have an incredibly broad set of options when it comes to explaining basic reality.

All that said, I do draw a line—and I think it is one that we, as a faith community, must stand up for. I reject the use of religion as a basis for policy decisions that affect anyone who is not a willing participant in that faith. The beliefs some Christian hold about the age of the earth and the origins of life are not to be taught in schools to our children--except as cultural studies. There is no reproducible observable proof to substantiate the creation story of Genesis. And I do not accept the Bible as being any more authoritative about factual matters than other great works of literature. I adore Moby Dick and Winnie the Pooh and believe they both contain honest, valuable wisdom--but I don't think they are useful texts on either whale or bear biology. “'Pooh?' 'Yes, Piglet?' 'I've been thinking...' 'That's a very good habit to get into, Piglet.'” Any set of cultural ideas more than fifty years old needs serious review from time to time. The ethics of the Bible have some use, and their lasting influence cannot be denied, but I don't accept stoning as punishment, the moral dangers of eating shrimp or pork or the catastrophic quality of a couple of guys kissing. And I'll let you guess how many times Julia has "submitted to my authority" in the past 15 years.

And this is where our stance on rationality needs to have some teeth. The private world of the believer is theirs and I will deny no one the right to their own conception of reality---as long as it doesn't hurt me, my community, or my planet. The Second Coming is not a plan for solving a global environmental crisis. “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” is not a basis for human rights. American exceptional-ism, if it exists, stems from the brilliance of the ideals we once held to, not the providence of some divinity.

And here is my problem -- my paradox. I genuinely celebrate diversity—religious no less than racial, cultural, sexual, or musical—but I kind of hear myself saying, “believe whatever you want, just don't let it influence how you vote, act, or organize your life or community.” How can someone be a dedicated Christian, believe the Bible—even if not literally, then at least seriously—and be willing to comply with my demand not to carry its tenets into the world? They can't—and it is unrealistic to think it ever was or ever could be so. I have every interest in advancing the gospel of science and the embrace of reason, but I have no interest or intention to force people to follow such a path. And so we cannot cede the public stage to those who dismiss good science or pander to willful ignorance. We must be, individually and corporately, a voice that proudly claims that reason is useful in religion. I agree with the Book of John, 8:32 “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

We represent a deeply American religion, imagined as Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and others wanted. Any idea is welcome to the stage, but it must be willing to submit to careful examination and defended not on the basis of its age, but on its merits and its ability to help humanity. The public interest must overwhelm private enthusiasms. I like the fact that no part of my mind has to be left behind in submission to any particular piece of theology. I can look closely at every part of my Unitarian Universalist faith. And if the principals are a bit bland, they are not unreasonable, unacceptable, or irrational. We can allow for private differences in belief while keeping our public sphere of common faith acceptable to all. We are the model for how interfaith dialogue can and should happen--allowing for particularity while reinforcing and celebrating commonality. What we lose in certainty and uniformity, we make up for in inquiry and courage.

The fire of reason, the energy of reflective inquiry that we Unitarian Universalists value keeps our beliefs from stagnating and becoming so inflexible or brittle that we must defend them at any cost—including sacrificing human life or dignity. We must keep these fires BLAZING—always willing to ask difficult questions of ourselves, of each other, of our community, of our government, and of our faith. When new discoveries are made in the fields of evolutionary biology, psychology, physics, and poetry we must be there, learning from those who have traveled bravely to the frontiers and brought back images of new vistas. We must fear nothing new, deciding for ourselves after careful and honest study what serves our goals of wisdom, freedom, and equality.

Minister and historian of Unitarian history Earl Morse Wilbur, who wrote what is still perhaps the definitive history of Unitarianism, proposes that what has characterized Unitarianism over the centuries has less to do with theology and more to do with a commitment to three themes: complete freedom of religious thought, tolerance of differing views and practices, and the unrestricted use of reason.

Reason used in the service of love and toward the end of justice and equality is what we strive for. We must be the first modern religious community to truly embrace change and growth. We must embrace the paradox of holding nothing and everything sacred. We must worship no idols whether they be of gold or comfortable myths. We are Unitarian Universalists, and we embrace diversity. Others have the right to have their own opinions, but they do not have the right to their own facts¹. Science and rationality have been and will continue to be the best hope for human progress and justice. Not a sterile cold inquisition, but a brave, creative inquiry into the world in here and out there. The meek may some day have the earth, but the rest of us will go to the stars. And reason, yoked together with love and justice—and then carried out into the world, will take us there.

Quotations read by Julia

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

--Buddha

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. --Galileo

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. --Thomas Paine The Age of Reason

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since. --Abigail Adams

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. --Emerson

1Adapted from the famous quotation from Daniel Patrick Monynihan

Stalin, Einstein, and My Wife

During college, I lived in Japan for a year. It was a wonderful experience. My homestay family lived in a massive apartment complex outside of Kyoto--row after row of big white towers.

A friend and I decided we would try make it to Mt Fuji over a long weekend in October. Other Westerners we knew had had luck hitchhiking around Japan, so we thought we give it a try. Never mind that Kyoto to Fuji is roughly the same distance as the Springs to Amarillo, Texas: the train was expensive, we were broke, and Japan was considered a pretty safe place to hitch.

We got a late start; it was a miserable, rainy evening. Our first ride didn't take us far, and after hours of standing by the side of the highway--cold, wet, and tired--we called it quits and bought train tickets home. A couple of hours later, exhausted and disappointed, I walked up the short flight of stairs to my family’s apartment. Thankfully the door was unlocked so I didn’t have to dig through my gear for the key. I put down my pack, took off my jacket and shoes. The apartment seemed different somehow--different art on the walls, a lot of strange jackets on the hooks by the door. The door to the dining room was closed, sounds of conversation and laughter floated out. I felt a bit hurt. I go away for a few days and they redecorate and have a party--nice. Disgruntled, I headed for my room. I slid open the door and immediately noticed that my futon was in a different place, and all my stuff was gone. By now I was more than a little upset and getting angry. I then noticed the startled, and somewhat frightened-looking, teenager sitting at a desk in the corner. I asked him who he was, where my stuff was, why he was here. He stammered something, but it didn’t matter as realization was slowly dawning. I apologized and left—quickly. I had, of course, walked into the wrong building. Everything had looked the same. The walls, the windows, the doors, all were in the same place—but the details were different and that was what mattered and what I, in my exhaustion and desire to be home, had missed.
Now I’m sure we all have stories of missing the trees for the forest. But why did I make such a silly mistake? I relied too heavily on the large structures that were the same and ignored the details that should have made it clear I was not actually home—and I want us to avoid walking into other people's theological homes and assuming they're ours.

Now, as a minister, strangers and friends routinely talk to me about religion. A friend back in Boston had made a comment that I had heard many times about how all the world's religions are at their core, the same. She asserted that the mystics say that they are. She felt that they "had to be the same." She wanted to see mystical experience as something that connects all of us, all religions, across culture and time. My response to her became this sermon.

My friend isn’t alone in her feelings about religion. We’ve all heard the metaphors: many paths up the same mountain, different waves upon a single ocean. The late Rev. Forrest Church, in his excellent intro to Unitarian-Universalism, A Chosen Faith, uses the image of various windows in a cathedral—one building, one sun, but different patterns shine through the stained glass—these varying patterns of light are the various expressions of the divine we call the world’s religions. These metaphors and analogies resonate with us. They seem intuitive and speak to our desire for unity. But metaphors are appealing specifically because they take complex ideas and transform them into homey, accessible images. The map is not, as they say, the territory. We have to ask ourselves where these metaphors come from and whether they actually reflect reality or simply our wishes—not just for unity, but for simplification of an increasingly complex world.

Let's look at mysticism for a moment as an example of how these matters aren't as simple as they seem. I'm going to borrow a former colleague's definition of Mysticism as “the experience or feeling of union or communion with some kind of ultimate reality.” But does having a basic definition, a common set of characteristics, mean all mystical experiences are the same? Remember, we don't want to get confused by the large structures and miss the details that tell us we aren't actually home.

Traditional Jewish mystical experience usually describes a journey to heaven or a vision of the divine chariot and throne. A Jewish mystic learns the various prayers and meditations that will guide him safely past the angels guarding the heavenly palaces, he prepares to see the strange beasts that pull the chariot. He does not have experiences that lead him to believe that he has no soul, has lived many lifetimes, and is essentially one with the universe. He wouldn’t think these were a weird mystical experience; he would think something had gone terribly wrong. But, Jewish mystics, as I said, don’t have those kinds of experiences. Buddhists, on the other hand, do, and would be just as distressed to have experiences involving angels, divine chariots, eternal souls, or supreme beings.
Mystical experiences tend to happen to people of deep faith and long practice. They almost always conform to cultural norms and expectations. They confirm belief systems instead of blending them. Indeed they are among the most specific of religious experiences. Hindus don't have visions of Jesus, Buddhists don't experience the trickster Coyote leading them to their totem animal.

So maybe mysticism isn't a good basis for comparison or unity—what about other elements of religion? Concepts of the afterlife—heaven and reincarnation are pretty different; one god, many gods, no god; individual soul, universal soul, no soul. Even conceptions of time itself can be exact opposites. Is time purely linear or does it run in cycles? What controls our lives—God, Karma, blind chance? In each case, we see over and over how specific religions are. Sure, you can say all the details are just centuries of culture and myth, but what do you actually get when you strip away all the particular, peculiar traits that makes Buddhism Buddhism and Judaism Judaism.

A lot of these points of comparison don't really work all that well if you take seriously a tradition's claims for itself. We might want to ask why we try to make all these faiths match up in the first place. Why do we seek for these commonalities? What do we think we can do once we discover them? What do we hope to get out of studying other religions?

To answer these questions we have to think about inheritance. In this case what we have inherited are Enlightenment-era attitudes toward religion. The Enlightenment saw the rapid ascension of reason over faith during the 18th century. Inspired by a growing confidence in science and human capacity, liberal thought blossomed. The philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up the spirit of the time in the short phrase, "Dare to think." The Enlightenment was a product of its historical circumstances and grew out of the many decades of political turmoil and terrible, religiously-inspired conflicts following the Protestant Reformation. Conflicts like The Thirty Years War saw almost a third of Europe’s population dead by their end—almost seven million people.

The suffering and terror of the wars of religions as well as growing religious diversity deeply influenced the Enlightenment thinkers. Many of them came to believe that traditional religions were just an inevitable source of strife and a tool of those in power to control the masses—which, I might add, is a not uncommon view among modern UU's. We are, perhaps more than any other religious tradition, children of the Enlightenment.

Philosophers of the era sought to separate "natural religion" from "revealed religion." By "natural religion" they meant something akin to what people now call "spirituality," whereas "revealed religion" had the negative connotations now summed up in "organized religion." Spirituality suggests personal belief, a lack of dogma or structure, authentic experience. Organized religion brings to mind ritual, hierarchy, dogmatic theology, priests in big stone buildings, maybe nuns with rulers for some of you. One represents all that supposedly is good, intuitive, and natural about religion; the other all the political and power issues that accumulate on top of "true" spirituality. Nowadays, you can find many folks who say they are “spiritual, but not religious.” That is a phrase and sentiment born out of the Enlightenment.

Natural religion, to them, was not only more authentic, but was also seen as reducing the potential for conflict by focusing on what they thought to be the essential elements of true religion. If this core, this essence of religion could be substituted for the divisive rigid structure of various dogmatic sects then people could live in harmony. The religion that was safe for the public sphere was that which everyone could agree upon. This sounds pretty good—leave off all the problematic, divisive, conflict-producing junk that has accumulated on top of the pure religious drive of the rational human being. Again, sounds like us.

One catch, of course, is that most of the people doing the thinking I’ve been describing were some form of Christian. With that in mind let's rethink those descriptions of "natural" religion—a focus on individual belief, dismissal of empty ritual and mediating priestly figures, use rational thought to understand true religion. Sounds a lot like the Protestantism we all know and, in some ways, all participate in. As they say, "in America, even the Jews are Protestants." (And I guess being here this morning, I’m living proof.) It's easy to come up with a core of religion, if most people in the room are more or less the same religion. Think of how easily most Protestants move between denominations—grew up Baptist, went to Methodist church in college, now Presbyterian cause the church is close. It gets harder as you go out in the wider world—and yet we tend to carry our categories with us. I'm reminded of the true story about a theologian who visits Japan. He observes an elaborate Shinto ritual and then asks the Shinto priest to explain their theology. The priest thinks for a moment and then says, “we don't have theology, we dance.” We look for the large structures that are familiar and miss the details that tell us this isn't our home. These attitudes about what constitutes “religion” may not be ours by choice, but they are deeply woven in the American culture, and perhaps are even stronger elements in the warp and woof of our UU history.

As we know many of the founders of this country were Unitarian or Deists and were deeply influenced by Enlightenment philosophy—Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Adams: theological ancestors to us all.

You can see this Enlightenment, Deist heritage clearly in our founding document--the Declaration of Independence.
When in the Course of Human Events [human events—not god’s plan], it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them [notice the separation of the "laws of nature" and of "nature’s god"—the space between god and the natural world—not god’s laws.] , a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
Basically that says if you are going to break up with someone, you should give them a reason. The next part are some of the most beautiful and important sentences in history.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident [self-evident—no need of a priest or a king or a revealed piece of scripture-we can see this for ourselves]. That all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights [rights not derived again from some musty tome of antiquated church canon—directly from God], that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed [again from human powers, not divine or royal]

We are a country deeply influenced by the Enlightenment. So we have this Enlightenment inheritance—a desire for explanation, a faith in human reason and the authority of individual conscience, a quest for essences or core characteristics. How do we wind up spending this inheritance?

One place is how we understand religion. We tend to follow our Enlightenment forebears in looking for an essential strand in the various religions, and our inheritance encourages us to look at individual beliefs, personal interpretation and rational philosophy and to want to discard what we see as extraneous—ritual, hierarchy, dogma. We unintentionally look for what is, more or less, Protestant in what we look at—and in the process strip away what we don't consider essential.

The Enlightenment was an amazing time in human history. Modern political theory grew out of it—concepts of human rights, democratic governments, separation of church and state. All wonderful contributions to our modern consciousness and to our liberal faith. But like all philosophies, movements, theologies, groups and individuals—there are blind spots.

We go to the Other looking to find ourselves—too often using other traditions as mirrors showing us what we want and expect to see. We tend to carry with us the general Enlightenment view that rational “men” come to similar conclusions—a possibility perhaps, if by multicultural you mean Unitarians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and maybe a few Quakers to shake things up a bit. The founders of this country, even with often brilliant foresight, could not have imagined the scope of the cultural and spiritual diversity which we face. With this diversity it becomes even more important to be aware of our own prejudices and motivations. We see more and more that there are different rationalities, different ways of being.

There are, of course, similarities and even commonalities, between religious traditions. Do religions function in similar ways in different cultures? Sure. Are there common structures in different religions? Yes. Are there family resemblances in related religions? Of course. Do religions address common human experiences? Yeah. But even given all that, the world's great religious traditions are not the same, they're not even the same internally and yet we treat them like vast monolithic structures. An American Buddhist in Boulder has very little in common with a Buddhist farmer in Sri Lanka. And if we're honest, a modern Unitarian Universalist has significant differences from the Unitarians and Universalists of the past.

I read once that human beings can be reduced to around three pounds of calcium, 27 pounds of carbon, maybe 10 gallons of water and a handful of other chemicals. All of us in this room share this basic structure. We are united by these core facts—we are, in this, the same. But knowing we have this in common, reducing us in this way doesn’t seem to move us very far-intellectually or spiritually. It doesn’t tell me how Einstein is different than Stalin is different from my wife Julia or from Tim Oliver or Diane McRae, or anyone. I don’t want to know how we are all the same. I want to know how each of you is unique. Focusing on what is similar can lead to a sort of tunnel vision. We look for what we expect to see and miss far too much.

As we spend the coming months together—exploring, learning, engaging these other religions, I hope we can be aware of the assumptions we bring. Too often we reduce other traditions to what we want from them. We treat the traditions like a Chinese menu—we take a dish from column A, another from column B, and we cobble together a meal that isn't all that nutritious though it's easy and tastes good. As Roger said last week, one of our goals is to hear stories of how other people have “seen the rabbit.” We want to try to really understand not what we can take from Buddhism, but why someone dedicates themselves to being Buddhist, or Muslim, or Wiccan, or, God forbid, Christian. If we are to be agents of understanding, we have to first understand. Knowing and embracing that our understanding will be limited, incomplete. We want to know not how they're like us, but how they are truly unique, different, even mysterious. Our aim this year to see the rabbit, and resist the temptation to make a stew of it.

At our best, Unitarian Universalism is growing into a new and unique religion. Finding our own wisdom and practices, inspired by the world's traditions and our history. On our less good days, we can sometimes have a sense that we know better than other folks, right? We see through the illusion and self-deception of orthodox religions. We know that their religions aren't “true” in some sense—we look past their superstitions to see the wisdom behind the story. We can take their rituals and practices, combine, adjust and rearrange them and make them our own. Doesn't sound very attractive? Ask yourselves hard questions this year. What is important? Is it being on the same mountain, or is it being on a path? What are we really interested in---the calcium, carbon and water—or the living breathing faith that inspires our friends and neighbors?

We shouldn't be too seduced by similarities—they're comfortable and easy, but they also tend to be weak and simple—incapable of doing the heavy lifting of actual compassion and action, of understanding and spiritual practice, of love and the challenge of relationship. Finding the similarities is easy, easy to feel comfortable with, easy to understand. But it is in genuine engagement with the Other where we learn, where we take risks, and where we demonstrate our liberal faith.