The Idea of the Holy
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Opening Words: from Rumi
To praise is to praise
How one surrenders
To the emptiness.
Reading: A Community of the Spirit by Rumi
There is a community of the spirit,
Join it, and feel the delight
Of walking in the noisy street,
And being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
And be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
To see with the other eye.
Open your hands,
If you want to be held.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
The shepherd's love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.
You moan, "She left me." "He left
me."
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
Widening rings of being.
Sermon:
Today's sermon is meant to be part one of a three part conversation that we can have over the next three months. We'll begin with the idea of the holy, then next month when I'm here we'll talk about the idea of God and in March we'll talk about the idea of Jesus and the Christ. Besides being interesting and fun for me, and ideally, for you, this will give us a sort of common point of departure for April, when we celebrate Easter together.
I am not trying to persuade you in any of these sermons to adopt my own views on things. I'm trying to give us a common vocabulary, and bring in here some of the more interesting ideas that have been knocking around in theology over the last century or so. Unless you have enrolled yourself in theology school (which I know that some of you have but most of you have not) it's unlikely that you've stumbled across these ideas. To me they continue to be important - defining of the human experience. We orient ourselves toward what we think of as ultimate reality, so these ideas are important. To you they might seem unimportant or silly. But at least if I put the ideas out here where we can all look at them, we'll have a common point from which to depart - which, in a UU congregation, is about as good as it gets.
So, today the idea of the holy, next month God, and in March Christ. What we are talking about in each case is the sense of something larger than the self, the sense of something other than the self and the sense that the other is inbreaking here, though it may originate elsewhere.
Inbreaking becomes increasingly important as we move from the numinous, which we'll talk about today, from God to Christ. And inbreaking is also extremely important if you happen to be a minister who spends her time trying to persuade people that taking care of the physical Earth is a religious responsibility. Incarnation becomes very important then too. If you don't see that now, you'll see it by Easter, I promise.
If you find this whole process interesting, after this sermon, I'm quite open to staying around after church today to discuss it, and to answer any questions you might have. We can make a pattern of that for the next few months if you'd like to.
The idea of the holy is the title of a theological work by Rudolph Otto, as well as the title of today's sermon. Otto was a German theologian of the "crisis" period for theology that followed World War I. Religion went through a crisis at that point in history because after the deaths of so many thousands of young men in such a pointless fashion as trench warfare, it really became impossible to believe in the God of classical theology. Impossible to believe in that God, or, if one insisted on believing in him, impossible to find him worthy of worship.
In 1917 this was a serious crisis. The theologians in Germany and elsewhere (though Germany has always had a special place in the development of Christian theology) were raised on a faith in a God who was immutable, all-knowing, all-powerful, unchanged and unchanging, and the cause of all that occurs in the world. If that God existed, he had just either caused or permitted the senseless slaughter of an entire generation of young men.
I also want to tell you, because I think that a lot of people are still unaware of this, that among my clergy colleagues in Protestant and Catholic churches, no one believes in that God any more. Sometimes this doesn't get across to the pews because ministers who don't believe in that God think that their parishioners still do. I think we'd all be pleasantly surprised, if we were all more transparent.
I don't want to dwell in that negative conversation, though. What I find more helpful and more interesting, personally, is to look at the ideas that might still make sense. This is exactly the conversation that has been going on in the theological academy during the last century or so. More of it should be getting out of the academy, I believe, than typically does.
Some theologians responded to the crisis provoked by WWI by looking in a more rational and logical direction. Alfred North Whitehead, one of my favorites, was one of these. More on him next month, I imagine. Others looked in what we might think of as the opposite direction - toward the trans-rational, or toward what Otto called the "suprarational." This, for him, was the idea that we have of the presence of the holy - a perception of a presence - which is above or beyond thought and analysis.
Being a good German theologian, of course, he then went on to think about it and analyze it.
Otto talked about something he called the "numen" or the "numinous." This is something he defined as the holy "minus its moral factor….and it's rational factor altogether." The numen or the numinous refers to the feeling of the holy - a feeling which is like no other.
Otto refers to an earlier voice in this conversation - that of Schleiermacher - and Schleiermacher's definition of the fundamental religious experience - a feeling of complete dependence. Otto is describing the same thing, but describing it differently, and both are recognizing that they are pointing toward a unique attribute of the living experience, but one that does not lend itself well to human language.
Otto says that the idea of the numinous cannot really be taught. He says we can bring to the notice of someone that we have had a certain experience of its presence, and then, he says, "we must add: 'This X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and the opposite of that other. Cannot you now realize for yourself what it is?' In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes 'of the spirit' must be awakened." [pg. 7]
For Otto the numinous has several elements or qualities. There is "creature-feeling" by which he means a sense of insignificance of the creature in contrast to that which is supreme [pg.11]. There is also what he calls Mysterium Tremendum - the great mystery which fills one with a sense of overpowering awe and dread - in a positive sense. Otto says this feeling is produced by the contrast of the "creature as the work of the divine creative act; in the other, impotence and general nothingness as against overpowering might, dust and ashes as against 'majesty'. It is the contrast of the idea of "the annihilation of the self, and then, as its complement, of the transcendent as the sole and entire reality." [pg. 21] This element of the numinous is not meant to be entirely benign - anything of such majesty, energy and power has the power to consume all that comes before it. So our sense of its presence is reverent but also dreadful.
And finally there is the element of the mysterium itself, which is something so wholly other from ourselves that we can only respond to it with blankness, stupor, wonder and with fascination. While we tend to want to rationalize this experience and to describe it in accordance with religious doctrine and our human moral categories, the actual mysterium is so wholly apart from our creatureliness that our categories do not extend to it, moral or otherwise.
Otto has a lot more to say about the numinous and its applicability in Christianity in particular. He thought that Christianity was the clearest revelation of this idea. I think it matters not at all whether you agree with him on that. What's useful here is simply his idea that this thing called the numinous exists, is universal in human experience, and has one more crucial quality - that of being a priori. That is, when you see it, you recognize it. It was already there.
Maybe this is already a book report instead of a sermon, and I hate that, so that's probably enough about what Otto has to say. Time to talk about why this might be important to us right now.
Theologians are good at laboring things to death, but then, after all the talk, there is that little light shining. It's the light that brought you here. It's why you bother to get up and get dressed and get here by 9:15 in the morning when you could be sitting home over coffee reading the Sunday New York Times. You may have gotten so engrossed in whatever committee you're on that you even forgot that, but at some point when you decided you needed to be here with these other people in a worship service it was because you saw that little light, and having seen it you had to take some time to explore what it is and what it means for you as a human.
I think that a lot of the problems we associate with theology are actually problems that occur from institutions attempting to perpetuate themselves. The ideas are only harmful if we let them become tyrannical in the service of corrupt institutions. Other than that, they're just ideas, and they may turn out to be helpful ones at that.
How is the idea of the numinous helpful? Because it helps us to put words to the sense that I would submit most of us have that there is more here than meets the eye. As someone with heavy moralistic tendencies and a heavy tendency to subject everything to rational analysis, I also think it's really useful to think about what that thing might be if we consider it stripped of its moral and rational content. There is, before us, a world, a universe. We exist within it. It speaks to us. We sense that there is something here which pre-existed all that is here - it may drive what is here, it may not, but we suspect its presence. We apprehend it. We see it disappearing around the corner. We hear it in a Beethoven symphony, or the Mozart requiem. We hear it in the sound a baby makes as it murmurs before sleep.
If I may make a bold statement, the entire American capitalist structure is specifically designed to destroy our sense that this thing exists or that it has any value. And yet you are not at the mall this morning. You are here.
So in some sense you are acknowledging that you believe in the numinous, and that it does have value.
Here's the kitchen table version of all of this. Some of our congregations have developed a kind of defensiveness toward traditional theology, particularly Christian theology. This, I believe, is a terrible mistake. I'm talking about these things here because you asked me to show up consistently for a while to help you take the next step toward forming a successful church. I think one of the things you need to do that really well is an openness toward all kinds of religious ideas.
I think a lot of our membership has decided that we need to keep the institutional church but get rid of theology. And seriously, if I were forced to choose, I'd do just the opposite. But we can't really make that choice. Because theology lives in the institutional church. Oh, sure, it lives in the religious academy, as a museum piece to be taken out occasionally and poked and prodded and looked at and have papers written about it, but lived theology happens in church. These ideas are here to help us deal with the situation we find ourselves in - human, weak, frail, guilty, inadequate, powerful, loving, ambitious, hopeful. We are, in other words, alive, in a very confusing and frequently very cruel world and we are trying to find a path through all of this to a good life - to a life well-lived. These ideas are the ideas that specialize in helping us to do that.
So we need both theology and the institutional church, because at their best they are in humble service to each other. And I'm exploring this single idea with you today - the idea of the numinous - because it is the foundation of every other idea we could talk about. If there is something here which is greater than all - which is bigger than what we see - then our responsibility as humans is different than it would be if that thing weren't there. If you can accept the existence of this thing, if this description of the universal experience of the presence of the numinous rings true for you, then you have taken the first step toward your development as a religious person.
Then we can stand at this late point in human history and acknowledge that there are still things about divinity which can be held as true. There are things about the idea of the holy which can be kept, when so much has been destroyed, and these things - not capitalism, not comfort, not global economics, not a strong defense - but these things, are the things that will save us as people.
Then we can start to look at the other places where the idea of the numinous is talked about. One of those places, of course, is scripture - scripture of all kinds including Biblical scripture - which tends to be the last place we look. If we understand scriptural story, including Biblical story, as a dated, human, historical examination of the same thing that Rudolph Otto is talking about - as the theology of their day - then we can also give ourselves a new point of access to them. We can be voyagers through the world of those ideas too, and not make the sad mistake of throwing away one of the greatest collections of the historical wisdom of people simply because other people have done stupid things with it.
We can reappropriate the religious dialogue for ourselves, fearlessly and faithfully. We can be a church. Is this an odd thing for someone as relentlessly rational as I am to want in January of 2007 when the oceans are rising, and the surf is up in Chicago, and the world is coming to an end? I don't think so. On my last day I want to know that I spent my life wrestling with my own best self, and that my best self carried the day 51% of the time. All the other work I do may make no difference in the end - there are powerful forces arrayed against me on the environmental front. But if, in the midst of it, I did my best to be a worthy human being then I will have no apologies to make. If my church supported me in that struggle (as it also worked tirelessly in more concrete ways to make the world less cruel for people and other living things) then it will have no apologies to make either. In a struggle of such scale, ideas of great depth are called for. At the heart of all of them is this one - the idea of the holy. The knowledge that we can stand on the battlefield in the face of all that has been lost and know that the numinous is real and is present and waits for us.
You don't have to believe in it exactly as I'm
talking about it, or exactly as Otto described it. But I do believe that you
have to believe in something beyond what is immediately visible. The times cry
out for ethical human beings, and for works of great imagination even as the
economic power of the day does all it can to crush imagination in each of us in
its infancy. If we fail this time, it will be for the last time, and it will be
a failure of imagination. But have faith, my friends. Look at the dark point in
the painting, listen to the pause when the singing stops. Something still shines
there, something is still singing. And it changes everything.
Benediction:
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
Widening rings of being.
Go in peace. Happy new year.