An Ocean with Many Shores
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, February 3, 2008
John Crowley
Call To Worship/Opening Words:
The Elephanta Caves, on an island in the Arabian Sea just off the coast of Mumbai, India, are a spectacular sight even from a distance. They are set in a steep, heavily forested mountainside, the trees coming down to the water's edge. Monkeys scamper through the underbrush and swing, howling and screeching, through the treetops.
Once inside, these temple-complex caverns open up
into dusky, mysterious splendor. And there, by the light of hundreds of
glimmering candles, towering in the gloom, is a huge statue-image of the Hindu
god Shiva, the Creator and Destroyer of the world, in all his masculinity. This
sculpture-idol, which evokes the procreative powers of nature, is so powerful,
so charged with the life-force of the faithful, that day and night the
cave-temple hums with the comings and goings of thousands of pilgrims and echoes
with their songs and chants. The entire island is suffused in spirituality.
The opening words are taken from Deepak Chopra's How to Know God:
"God has managed the amazing feat of being worshiped and invisible at the same time. Millions of people might describe him as a white-bearded father figure sitting on a throne in the sky, but none could claim to be an eyewitness. A substantial majority of people in America believe in God - as many as 96 percent, according to some polls.
"What would the facts be like if we had them? They would be as follows. Everything that we experience as material reality is born in an invisible realm beyond space and time. This invisible source of all that exists is not an empty void but the womb of creation itself. Something creates and organizes the energy of the universe. It turns the chaos of quantum soup into stars, galaxies, rain forests, human beings, and our own thoughts, emotions, memories, and desires. It is not only possible to know this source of existence on an abstract level but to become intimate and at one with it. When this happens, our horizons open to new realities. We will have the experience of God."
Reading #1:
Meister Eckhardt -- Four Sayings
Reading #2:
From Honey from the Rock (#38) by
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
There's an old Hasidic story told of Rabbi
Elimelech of Lyzhansk. One day the rabbi looked out of his carriage and was
surprised to see a group of people following behind it. The next day this
happened again, but the group of people walking behind his carriage had grown
larger. Still not understanding, the rabbi asked his coachman why all these
people were trailing behind the carriage. The coachman explained to him that the
people only wanted to follow after great wisdom and holiness, and that was why
they were walking behind the carriage each day. Rabbi Elimelech thought about
this awhile, and decided that they were doing the right thing by following after
the carriage. He then got out, and from then on joined the people walking behind
the empty carriage. For the rabbi had remembered the teaching that: "One
who is too filled with himself has no room for the Holy One." Which is
another way of saying that God only inhabits empty carriages.
Sermon:
Last year (2007) our Unitarian Universalist Association, the UUA, ran a National Awareness Campaign in Time magazine with the caption: "'My God is Better than Your God' - Is this any way to talk about religion?" Ten years earlier, in 1997, the UUA surveyed Unitarian Universalists nationwide. Almost ten thousand UUs responded. One of the survey questions had asked people to check off, from a given list, which one personal theology best fitted their theological perspective. While "Humanism" was the top choice with 46 percent, over one quarter named as their primary theology earth/nature-centered spirituality or mysticism, which is what our service today is about.
As Unitarian Universalists we celebrate religious diversity within community. This disturbs some people looking at us from the outside - this idea that a community of worshipers with diverse religious beliefs can be grounded in a unitary faith. Why is this so? How can we understand why others see us as being so different? "Freedom of religion? But of course!" they say.
But religious diversity within a single faith just doesn't sit very well within the cultural framework that we find ourselves born into. This cultural framework, or worldview, is not something that we built ourselves. Instead, it's something we inherited from the people who came before us - in fact it's so old that it traces back to even before the ancient Greeks. So strong is it, that it has indelibly shaped modern society's lens of perception, the particular way we civilized Westerners view the world and our place in it, and therefore our society's dominant cultural values and beliefs. Let's unpack this to see why it is important here.
This is a worldview which since the first Egyptian pharaohs has been obsessed with pursuit of the universal essence, the ideal, the normative, the patriarchal. It's a worldview that calls for unceasing struggle to transform non-order into order, the simple into the more complex. A struggle to achieve mastery over nature, to always be able to explain, to control, and to strive ever for perfection - perfection if not in this world then in a life beyond the grave. In this worldview, chaos, randomness and inexplicable diversity are associated with cosmic darkness, void and evil - think witchcraft, or polytheism, or atheism, for example.
It shouldn't surprise us then, that doctrinal monotheism and religious exclusivism could take root and grow out of this pre-existing worldview - in other words, the belief we frequently hear that mine is the only true god and the one true religion, and all others are idolatry and heresy. This is the hostile current that we UUs, our Hindu brethren referred to earlier, and countless pre-modern societies such as the Native American societies now destroyed by Western civilization, have had to swim against.
Humans haven't always been this way. Archaeologists tell us that after 30,000 years ago, all human societies had material symbols, religious ideas and spiritual practices, and that these activities were rich and varied. For example, carved stones and painted scenes on pottery shards recovered from sites in the Balkans and the Ancient Near East from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago show that the preliterate, farming communities of that age did ritualistic dancing. But by about 5000 years ago dancing scenes all but disappeared from pottery artifacts in those regions. This was the time - between 6000 and 5000 years ago -- when large-scale irrigation agriculture, walled cities, and state religions institutionalized by powerful kings emerged in the Ancient Near East. These kings and their priests sanctified carefully chosen myths, and channeled people's spirituality into religions designed to strengthen their power and control. (For example, to establish unquestioned patriarchal rule in ancient Babylon, the creation myth was changed to have the new male god, Marduk, slay the ancient fertility goddess, Tiamat.) Ways of worship and spiritual expression that the earlier hunter-gatherers, herdsmen and farmers had known became closed off. Thenceforth, Western civilization became the oddity - the odd-ball - of humans' three-million-year history on this planet.
But the capacity for spiritual knowing and expression that our ancient forbears enjoyed is still alive in us today - we might think of it as hardwired in our DNA. God, or Ground of Being, or Spirit of Life doesn't deprive anyone, including those of us who are atheists, skeptics or agnostics. Theologian Karl Rohner observes that even the experience of an atheist is the experience of God, and as Christian mystic Wayne Teasdale likes to remind us, we are all spiritual beings who happen to be having a human experience.
Even as organized religion tightened its grip on the ancient mind in the West (the Occident), there arose during the Axial Age an unstoppable countercurrent led by insightful men and women who, in the centuries to come, would recognize that when an organized religion hijacks human spirituality, something precious, something sacred is lost.
The Buddha was among the first to see this. Perhaps the Buddha's greatest gift was the paradoxical insight that not-knowing was the key to spiritual knowing. That rather than allowing ourselves to be filled up with scripture, dogma, liturgy and ritual by powerful figures whose aim is to manipulate and control us, we must instead empty ourselves of these kinds of things before it is possible for us to become spiritually enlightened. In Buddhism, spiritual knowing can only proceed from a prior state of not-knowing, a state in which we are void of preconception and judgment, and totally open to unmediated experience in the present moment.
St. Paul tells how Jesus empties himself to become fully human (Philippians 2:6). In this same vein, seventeenth century German poet and mystic Angelus Silesius writes:
The emptier I become, the more delivered from me,
the better I understand God's liberty.
God is sheer nothingness, whatever else he be.
He gave it, that it might be found in me.
When I am neither you nor me,
then I begin to be aware of God - as nothingness.
To become nothing is to become God.
While most mystical traditions use the term "God" or something like it, modern mystics do not view God as a separate and remote supernatural being. Nor is God nothing more than a mental construct, something we might imagine or wish for, but the only true reality is the secular, material world. Most mystics believe God is real, both immanent and transcendent in this world of our experience and the cosmic order. Buddhists, who do not recognize a divine force, see the ultimate reality as non-dual consciousness.
Mysticism is not detachment from the external world, but rather embracing everything that is. For detachment leads to an incapacity to love. Mysticism is the natural, human response to our quest for spiritual fulfillment. It wants to do what the organized religions have failed to do. It is both a theology and a way of life. The theology is that there is another level of existence which is present now with us and all around us, which we cannot comprehend with the mind, which is independent of space and time, and to which our spirits may return after the time of this life is over. But this other level of existence is not a different reality than the one we know. It is a different domain, or level, of the same reality. There is only one reality: we are one with the universe and fundamental consciousness, the Spirit of Life. And even in this life we can become transformed and actually enter this other level of existence.
As a way of life, the mystic's goal -- the goal of the spiritual quest -- is to have direct, unmediated apprehension of the Ground of Being, or God, in this life. Union with the Godhead in the present moment of the eternal now. Wayne Teasdale identifies two paths, the inner path or the way of contemplation, and the outer path, the way of action: especially social action in service to others. Whichever path we are inclined to take, depending on our nature, they eventually converge, he says, in what he calls 'unitive awareness.'
It's difficult to grasp this idea of emptying ourselves to make possible higher levels of awareness and ultimately union with the divine. Perhaps it will be less difficult if we look at it as the Buddha did: a process of removing obstacles, a stripping away of obstacles to mystical consciousness and experience. "Prepare the house," said Saint Teresa of Ávila, "and the Lord will come." "It is our birthright," adds Thomas Keating. We'll consider now some of these obstacles, as the great wisdom teachers have identified them for us, remembering that for every obstacle there is a corresponding opportunity.
The emptying that the mystics talk about always involves surrender, surrender of the ego to the higher order, the divine mystery. This capacity to surrender presupposes that we've done what psychotherapists call "inner work"; sometimes a messy process but a necessary one for spiritual emancipation.
A second obstacle is the illusion of separateness. The dominant Western view has pictured God, the natural world, and humans as separate, and even alienated from each other, as in St. Paul and St. Augustine. Buddhists and Hindus have long known this view to be false, and with recent insights from philosophy and modern physics, we Westerners, too, can know that it is wrong. Both mystics and the neo-pagan theologies, such as worship of the goddess, celebrate this new awakening: the exciting realization that the divine force, the natural world and human consciousness are one and the same reality. Separateness is indeed an illusion.
Another obstacle to divine awareness, or enlightenment, is the mistaken idea in the Western world since the High Middle Ages that we can know God through intellect. That we can somehow achieve spiritual knowing through our faculty of reason. Intellect and reason are important for survival and prosperity in the everyday world, but they fail us when we try to use them to enter the spiritual realm. Blaise Pascal cried out, "the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know," and the Sufis have a saying: "When the love of God comes, reason disappears." The now-discredited notion that we can discover cosmic truth through unaided reason is rooted in the illusions of permanence and control.
Christian, Sufi and Jewish mystics share the conviction that when the emptying process we have been discussing occurs, our divine nature naturally unfolds and blossoms, like a daffodil in the spring, as the Divine pulls us toward Him. For God has planted an impulse in each of us, an impulse to find Him. And He is calling us; He gives us lots of clues and signals. He wants us to reunite with Him. The prophet Muhammad says in one of his sacred sayings: "Take one step toward God and God will take a thousand steps toward you." Jewish mysticism tells of an "attachment," or "adherence," or "cleaving" to God (devekut), where emotion itself has been transcended and a deep immersion within the divine Self has taken place.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to spiritual knowing is ego inflation - being all puffed up, vain, pompous, proud, presumptuous, or grandiose. Ego inflation is related to the illusion of separateness mentioned earlier. Tribal societies used ritual and taboo to contain, or moderate, four human inclinations they saw as destructive of the social fabric and barriers to spirituality: greed, uncontrolled anger, free-riding on the backs of others, and self-aggrandizement.
Donald Evans writes in his 1993 book Spirituality and Human Nature: "Spirituality consists primarily of a basic transformative process in which we uncover and let go of our narcissism so as to surrender into the Mystery out of which everything continually arises." Recall that the great mystic Jesus of Nazareth said, "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted (Luke 18:14). Rumi, the 13th Century Sufi mystic used these words: "If you could get rid of your self just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe, would appear on the mirror of your perception."
Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Kotzk was a fanatic for attaining truth through negating ego inflation. "Ego is the enemy of spirituality! It is your ego that stands between you and God!" he would rail. "There's only room enough in this world for one ego, yours or God's. You pick!" But there was another who was wiser than he, and that was the great Baal Shem Tov. Before he died, Rabbi Baal Shem Tov, who was called Besht for short, instructed his flock on how to seek out his successor. "But how will we recognize him?" his disciples asked. "You will ask him this question," the Besht replied: "How does anyone get rid of their conceit?" "And if he knows the answer, he is our new teacher?" asked the disciples. "Oh, no," the Baal Shem Tov said. "For anyone who claims to know how to be free of conceit is a liar. Conceit comes with having a sense of self, and the self cannot get rid of itself. And to think that it can do so is the height of conceit."
Dr. Robert Moore is a Jungian psychologist who lectures at Chicago Theological Seminary. The truth, he says, is that while ego in itself is healthy and necessary, we're all inflated to some degree or another much of the time. It is futile to try to rid ourselves of our ego inflation entirely or permanently. The inflation always keeps coming back. However, what we can do is, first: stay aware of how our inflation may be manifesting itself in our thoughts, feelings and behavior. And second, Professor Moore says, if we are going to regulate our inflation successfully we must engage in close, personal relationships with others - a spouse or partner, family, or beloved community - for the interpersonal mirroring and feedback which only relationship with others can provide and which is essential to keeping the individual ego in check.
Modern, complex society champions the primacy of the individual self. It allows and even encourages us to place ourselves on a high pedestal. When we do this, Dr. Moore adds, we find that we are increasingly deprived of genuine community. Deprivation of community, an unfortunate consequence of unregulated ego inflation, poses yet another obstacle to spiritual growth. Wayne Teasdale writes:
"We are social beings who grow in relation to others; we are defined through our relationships with them. Our ancestors lived their lives in the bosom of a supportive tribe. Every need was met within the context of that tribe. The tribe was community. When we moved out of tribes and into extended families, and then into nuclear families, we gained greater freedom and mobility, but something was lost: a fundamental sense of security based on the experience of belonging. We must seek to rediscover and recover community in our lives. Community gives us psychological balance, promotes healthy human development, creates stability in the midst of change, and acts as an anchor that gives us focus and calm - a timeless, restful, and deeply human order… the whole complex of spiritual life. All are nurtured through the group."
When Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is in your midst" (Q 79: Luke 17:21; Thomas 3, 51, 113), he was addressing community in the present tense. The "Kingdom of God" is a central Judaic metaphor denoting a state of being that is available to all of us, regardless of status, in a world in which people conduct their lives under the sovereignty of God's teaching. Jewish mysticism later identified the Kingdom with shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God in this world. Jesus experienced this, and he wanted to teach others that this could be there for them, too. It is not somewhere else, in some heaven light years away. As a present reality it is a way of living at ease among the joys and sorrows of this world. The experience of "entering the Kingdom of God" is like a rebirth, or awakening, or enlightenment. To be fully actualized as a human being is to be divine.
Paul and others changed the meaning of Jesus' words, "The Kingdom of God is in your midst," in two crucial ways. First, by equating spiritual knowing with "salvation" and placing it in some future time when Paradise will be restored, Paul took the Kingdom of God out of the present and reified it, he made it an abstraction. Second, by the fourth century, Christianity's handlers and shapers had recast the pursuit of salvation as an individual enterprise. This second way in which Jesus' words were misconstrued requires explanation.
While a personal experience might give us a glimpse of God's Kingdom, some Jesus scholars believe that Jesus felt it can only be lived in community, and that he was a builder of alternative spiritual community. Bruce Chilton writes: "The meaning of Jesus' famous words, 'The Kingdom of God is in your midst,' is all too easily twisted in their English translation. These words are typically taken to mean that the Kingdom is the possession of each individual, but the fact is that the term for 'your' here is plural in Greek, as it would have been in Aramaic, and refers to a community, not a single person…" "The Kingdom of God is in your midst" means it is in our midst, it is already among all of us together in community. This is what Jesus intended, but his intent was corrupted. Chilton concludes: "The heroic individualism of a great deal of Protestant Christianity rests in large measure on a misbegotten English rendering."
Strip away much of Paul and the many other alterations and embellishments of Jesus' words that followed later, and scholars find that the historical Jesus, the man, was a first-century Jewish spirit person, a mystic, and an alternative community builder.
A few years ago, a neo-pagan leader from
Milwaukee, a Wicca, was interviewed on national TV. At one point in the
interview the host asked her, "Tell us, do you believe Jesus was
divine?" "Yes, of course he was," she replied, "but no more
so than you or I."
Benediction:
"Spiritual Knowing"
Spiritual knowing is a participatory knowing. We participate with God in the dynamic co-creation of a self-creating world. When we and the divine force join together in spiritual practice, it calls forth not only the intellectual knowing of the mind, but also the emotional and emphatic knowing of the heart, the sensual and somatic knowing of the body, and the visionary and intuitive knowing of the soul.
The Universalist God doesn't care whether people see him, or her, as one or as multiple figures. God is ever ecstatic as when the sun circles the globe each day peoples everywhere, such as the worshipers of the Elephanta Caves, join with him or her in the co-creative process. Let us therefore empty ourselves and give expression to our natural spirituality, alone and in community, that we may experience the divine - whether we choose silent meditation, yoga, chant, ecstatic dance, exploring the labyrinth, reconnecting with nature, performing social services, communing with beloved others; or at times just working in the garden, quilting, or washing dishes. Whichever spiritual practices work best for each of us are the very ones God wishes for us, for the ocean of emancipation has many shores.