The Root of It All
by Rev. Colin Bossen, August 22, 2010
Once there was a village whose residents called themselves the sun worshippers. They lived under a massive umbrella that shielded them from the sun. The umbrella was so large that it provided shade not just to the village but to miles of the surrounding countryside. To escape the shadow of the umbrella required at least a day's walk, probably more. The way to the umbrella's edge was said to be treacherous. The sunlight to be found beyond the umbrella was alleged to be deadly. The sun worshippers had never experienced the sun directly. They worshipped the sun because, in their ancestral stories, it had awesome power.
Into this village a baby girl was born. As she grew she was taught to both worship and fear the sun. She learned to always stay within the safe shadow of the umbrella. She was a curious and rebellious child. In her teenage years and when she reached adulthood she began to question the necessity of the umbrella. One day the young woman decided to venture to the edge of the umbrella and find out what the sun was like for herself.
Contrary to what she had been told, the way was not difficult. Within an easy day's walk she found herself standing at the edge of the umbrella's shadow peering into lands covered by the sun's light. Steeling her courage she took one step, and then another and then another into the sun's warm rays. It was wonderful. The sun was not something to be feared. It was a life giving force that caused the countryside to burst into verdant green and shimmer with a polychromatic multitude of flowers.
The young woman hurried back to the village to proclaim the good news about the sunshine. She wanted everyone to experience its warmth. She went into the marketplace and she visited people in their homes. Everywhere she went she told people about the wonderful sunshine she had felt on her skin.
Within a few days the young woman had become a prophet and gathered up a small following of other young people interested in experiencing the glorious sunshine for themselves. This raised the ire of the village elders. They feared that the young woman would disturb their traditional religion of sun worship. It consisted of talking about, but never observing or experiencing, the sun.
The elders went to reason with the young woman. They warned her of the chaos that would come--the vast exodus from the umbrella--from her continuing to spread her message about the sun. The young woman offered them impassioned pleas to go and experience the sun for themselves. It was, she maintained, more glorious than their sacred poetry, more inspiring than any of their religious rituals.
This was too much for the elders. They feared that the young woman's teachings would undermine their traditional religion and their society. They tried to bribe her to be silent. When she would not cease to speak she was executed for treason.
But the prophet's teachings lived on after her. Her disciples taught that she had experienced the sun and understood it better than anyone else. They urged people to leave the old fashioned ways of sun worship and begin to worship the sun like the young woman had taught. None of them, however, ventured out to experience the sun for themselves. Instead they erected smaller umbrellas, each covering only a portion of the village. On the underside of these smaller umbrellas were inscribed words from the dead prophet exhorting people to experience the sun. No one ever did though, they just repeated the prophet's words and took shelter under the umbrellas, oblivious to the true glories of the sun.
This parable comes from the work of the theologian Nels Ferre. He was frustrated with modern Christianity. He thought that instead of basking in the light of God's universal love Christians hid under false doctrines of Christ, the Bible and the church. He believed that "God alone is to be worshipped" and charged his fellow Christians that "Our faith is in umbrellas. We trust generally in the historic Jesus, in the Bible and in the Church, but have no vital, personal, all-absorbing life with God Himself."
Ferre's parable is an illustration of one of the core principles of liberal religion, that the religious life stems from our personal experience of the divine. The first source of our Unitarian Universalist Association calls us to draw from the "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder...which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life." Ferre's parable challenges us to do likewise.
The hypothesis that personal experience is the starting point for theological reflection is the bedrock upon which Unitarian Universalist theology is built. If you look just a few pages past the front cover of our hymn book you will find a list of the six sources of our living tradition. "Direct experience" is the first because for any given individual the following five only matter if they resonate with that individual's experience. There are Unitarian Universalists who find little resonance with "Jewish and Christian teachings," "Humanist teachings" or the "Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions." Others are inspired by all of them. Which of the five sources of our tradition that come after the "direct experience of...transcending mystery and wonder" are useful or meaningful to a particular individual is a product of both that individual's experience and culture.
The 19th century liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that all individuals have experiences of profound connection to the universe that surrounds them. He called this "the feeling of absolute dependence." This feeling is universal. The interpretation of it is dependent upon cultural location and personal history.
The scientific rationalist might understand the feeling as the product of a mechanistic impulse generated by the chemistry of body and mind. The theist may call the feeling a connection to God. The Christian may name it the presence of the living Christ. The descriptions go on and on. The need to describe the indescribable is as universal as the feeling of connection itself.
Just how we describe it is often a product of what we have been taught and what information is available. The scientific rationalist knows that our sense of connection is a product of brain chemistry because she studied neuroscience and keeps up with the latest scientific literature. The theist knows that the feeling is a connection to God because he has studied German philosophy and belongs a liberal religious community. The Christian names the presence the living Christ because ever since she was a child she was taught to pray to Jesus Christ and has a daily devotional practice built around him. Born to different parents, or at a different time and place, each might understand the connection differently. The Christian might have been an indigenous shaman. The theist a Hindu. The scientific rationalist a Sufi.
Louise Gluck's poem "Celestial Music" provides an illustration of how two friends can understand the same experience of connection differently. Gluck and her friend encounter a dying caterpillar. The friend, who believes in god, accepts the insect's impending death. Initially, Gluck cannot. She is "always moved by weakness, by disaster." But through the poem, and through reflection, both Gluck and her friend find the same peace. Of the moment of the caterpillar's death Gluck writes, "It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact / that we're at ease with death, with solitude."
No matter what our theological persuasion we all have joy and sorrow in our lives. It is a human impulse to seek to understand why. In the poem, Gluck and her friend both seem to reach different conclusions. For the friend there is "celestial music" but for Gluck "Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees / like brides leaping to a great height." For each the view is the product of the light being refracted through the trees. Both perceive and understand the light from their own perspective, tempered by their individual histories and cultural connections.
We each see and understand the world differently. It can be difficult to find common ground. The descriptions of reality we compose vary widely. The names for things we have been taught to use are sometimes incompatible. Sometimes our attempts to describe the world as we see it are met only with incomprehension. The gulfs between us can be wide.
I was reminded of this recently at a party. I often get drawn into theological conversations at parties. It is a professional hazard. Once people identify me as a minister they tend to skip the small talk and jump directly to weighty subjects.
This party no exception. Towards the end of the evening I was approached by a young man. When he said, "You're the minister, right?" I knew I was in trouble. When I replied "Yes" to his query he immediately launched into a discussion of the nature of good and evil.
I am not a big believer in good and evil. I understand them to be human constructs that we use to make sense of the suffering and joy in our lives. Like our poet from earlier when I look to the sky I see "Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees." The divine exists, a spark within all of us calling us to greater connection with the world around us, but I am hesitant to label the impulses it leads us towards as either good or evil. Too often the concepts of good and evil have been used to otherize and dehumanize members of the human family. Better, I believe, to name the actual dynamics of the situation--suffering caused by an ill formed economic system, joy brought on by the sunshine's delight--than retreat into the metaphors of good and evil.
The young man, however, was absolutely convinced of the existence of good and evil. He offered classical arguments about the goodness of creation, the malformation of human free will and the prospect of divine redemption. After his first few sentences I realized that there was little common ground to be found. He understood his experience of "absolute dependence" in a fundamentally different way than I did. We could debate and we argue for hours but there was no prospect of us agreeing upon our metaphysics, upon our understandings of the nature of reality. For him reality is shaped by a divine will. For me the divine is part and parcel of the universe. It is not an external force shaping our destiny. It is a useful metaphor to describe the inherent unity of all existence.
"Fine," I finally said, "we cannot agree about the existence of good and evil. Perhaps we can agree upon ethics." The young man was active in many of the same social justice movements that I participate in. We might not agree upon the nature of ultimate reality but we might be able to agree upon how to cooperate together to build a better world. As the 16th century Unitarian Francis David once said, "We need not think alike to love alike."
This is another of the core principles of Unitarian Universalism. We are a covenantal faith. In our congregations, in the words of the scholar Conrad Wright, "the members agree to walk together in mutual fellowship." That fellowship contains, James Luther Adams writes, a "divine community-forming power [that] brings the individual...into a caring, trusting...[community] that protects and nourishes integrity and spiritual freedom."
Our own experiences offer us each a glimpse of the ultimate nature of the universe. Together we can each expand of our view of the divine. More importantly, we do not have to agree upon the nature of, or even the existence of, the divine to build community together. Rather we can simply agree to accompany each other upon our life's journeys.
Unitarian Universalism is a pragmatic faith. Our liberal religious tradition urges us to focus on how we live in the world rather than what we believe about the world. Each individual understands reality a little differently. But we all have to live together. Rather than argue about metaphysics we hone in on ethics. Our communities are organized around our common covenants, our agreements about how we will live together, rather than our creeds.
Next time you find yourself in a discussion with someone of a different religious tradition with whom you disagree pause and ask yourself how their faith and yours challenge you to live in the world. You may not be able to agree upon the big issues but maybe you will find that you can agree upon small matters of ethics--that it is best to strive for love and kindness or that dialogue only works when both parties listen to each other.
Even then you might not be able to find any verbal common ground. If so, try to connect on the visceral level. Ethics are about actions more than they are about words. If it is true that we need not think alike to love alike then draw upon the common power of love.
Here I find the story of the truck stop worker instructive. The truck stop worker worked at the convenience counter. Everyday she dealt with hundreds, if not thousands, of people who stopped at the truck stop for gas, directions, food or a break from their long drive. Often these people were frustrated and weary. Every once and awhile they would take their frustrations out on her.
Some reporters from the radio show "This American Life" spent an evening observing the woman. During her shift a belligerent customer came in. He looked at the reporters, who were asking customers questions, and told them, pointing to the woman, "Ask her what she thinks about Obama and all his expletive, expletive. Is she getting free health care? Is he giving her free health care? Why should I have to pay for her health care? Wny does she deserve health care? I pay too much in taxes already."
The woman did not rise to the bait. She just smiled back at the man and sweetly, genuinely, sold him a soda and a candy bar. By the time she was done interacting with him he had dropped his gruff manner. In the radio story his final interactions with the woman seem almost apologetic. He tells the woman "Have a nice day" and he appears to mean it.
The woman probably did not change the customer's mind about anything. But through her actions she was able to get him to treat her more like a human being than a sparing partner. There might not have been shared political beliefs--in the story we never find out what the women's politics are--but there was an opportunity to connect on the human level.
This is why we Unitarian Universalists focus on covenant rather than upon belief. Our direct experiences of the world may lead us to different metaphysical or even political conclusions. However, we can build community--celebrated our shared connection--by focusing on how we live together and responding from a place of love.
Love is close to the root of our experiences of community. Love is about connection and acceptance. And it resonates deeply with that feeling that Schleiermacher described as "absolute dependence." We each might describe that feeling differently but I would wager that at some moment in our lives we all have had it.
The danger of all of this theologizing about direct experience, love and covenant is that it can take us a long way from the sunlight itself. Sometimes we talk more about the world than we experience it. In any religious community it is often easier to erect little umbrellas inscribed with the words of great teachers than to stray into the light ourselves. We can be a little bit too much like the poet and his friend in Robert Hass's "Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan." We get stuck on big concepts like "subject and object / and the meditation of desire." We forget that the glories of life are rarely found in the articulation of complicated systems of philosophy. Instead they are discovered when "Our ears are stoppered / in the bee hum." When we walk out into the sunshine itself we find that the rays are warm and the sky is cornflower blue. There's something lost when we try to describe it all.
My wish for you this morning then is that you when you find yourself in the sunlight--be it real or metaphorical--you will take a moment to put down your inscribed umbrella and simply enjoy the rays. The words you might use to describe the warmth you experience may be different than your neighbor's. That is not important. What is important is that if you move beyond words and descriptions you can both bask in the same light.
Amen and Blessed Be.