This election week reminds me of 1988 when George Bush Senior ran for President. Remember? He claimed to be the candidate of the "mainstream" and warned of those dangerous, out-of-mainstream liberals. Well, fourteen years later, the political discourse in Massachusetts and pretty much everywhere no more challenges us or the disastrous assumptions on which society's been running than it did then.

Last weekend was the district fall rally, at Hopedale, where a few of our spiritual forebears attempted a very out-of-mainstream experiment, the Hopedale Community, in the 1840s and 50s. So my job in the keynote address was to compare Hopedale with the Brook Farm commune, and Fruitlands, and the Northampton Association of Education and Industry — all four of which were way-out-of-mainstream experiments in living out a larger and more far-seeing vision. They were all committed to the immediate ending of slavery when American society at large seemed quite prepared to tolerate it for quite a long time to come, or even defend it. They all questioned the system of capitalism and set out to create an egalitarian culture. They were all critical of greed, materialism, and religious superstition and despotism. And they were all extremely critical of the existing political structures and players.

But Hopedale, and its leader Adin Ballou, were so convinced of the utter corruption of the system as it existed that they had effectively removed themselves. In joining the community they all pledged not to participate in the political system at all — not to serve in the military, not to seek or hold any public office, and not even to vote, ever.

And there are times when the political process seems so thoroughly subverted and cynical, when we are faced with the best political leaders money can buy, that I think the folks at Hopedale were right, and I am tempted not to vote. But I think they were wrong about that.

In any event, that experiment was halted abruptly when one wealthy shareholder bought the whole thing out and turned it into his own private business in 1856. Hopedale continues in the form of the town of Hopedale, and in the form of the Hopedale Unitarian Parish — just as the Northampton Association continues as the village of Florence, and as this congregation.

The people involved with Hopedale dropped out of the political process, and pledged themselves to nonresistance, which means that, on the one hand, they didn't participate, and on the other hand, they pledged never to challenge the existing political order by revolting against the government, but to be its obedient subjects. Yet by the mid-1840s, other of our spiritual forebears, those associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, were participating fully, campaigning for radical candidates, meeting with President Lincoln, strategizing with their own Senator Sumner, and arming John Brown for his plans to liberate slaves by force, which took the form of his assault on Harper's Ferry in 1859, which pretty much precipitated the Civil War, which ended slavery.

They chose pretty much opposite courses to the same goal. But — none of them dwelt in what anybody would call The Mainstream.

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And in these times of ours, times of no less peril and no less promise than theirs: — when our nation is plummeting down a desperately disastrous course; when two-thirds of children have no health coverage but the super-rich get tax breaks; when the world's climate is changing dramatically but our nation officially refuses to recognize it and only pours more, and more, and more, pollutants into the earth and sky and sea; when our nation is preparing to ignite an inferno in the Middle East; when human and civil rights are falling to superstition and prejudice — yes, a time no less perilous, and yet I say, no less promising, than theirs: —

I want to talk about this place where we are required to dwell, we who continue this far-seeing, prophetic religious tradition of Unitarian Universalism, this place I am calling the Edge.

We live in the magnificent light of the witness of our own spiritual forebears — far-seeing visionaries who saw through and beyond the mass delusion of American slavery, through the barely-challenged assumptions about authority and truth, about gender and sexuality, about the nature of the cosmos.

Unitarian Universalist spirituality is about edges. Those spiritual forebears of ours have never dwelt in the mainstream: not Ralph Waldo Emerson, not Margaret Fuller, not Chales Burleigh or Bronson Alcott or Moncure Conway or Theodore Parker, not Susan B. Anthony or Channing or Murray or Adin Ballou.

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There are a lot of ways of being out of the mainstream. Some are crazy and build survivalist compounds in the prairie. Others are prophets. It takes a certain discernment to tell the difference and our fear of being "over the edge," off the charts, can drive us to the comfort of the mainstream. But we belong to a religious tradition of prophets.

None of those who went before us and gave shape to this great religious tradition, this far, far too obscure religious tradition of ours . . . none of them received their vision of life or their brand of spirituality from the vaunted authorities of their day, or from the crowd. Emerson talked about a place within the innermost soul of every person from which alone must flow this spirituality of the edge. He spoke of another, inner temple where the cardinals and televangelists never had much influence. He said:

While the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every one, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely, it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. What another announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject. . . . The absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. The doctrine of [our] divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution.

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Going through my papers and possessions — an inescapable aspect of moving — I'm flooded with memories. A traumatic break with my former religious affiliation, in a church defined by creeds, creeds tying it securely to the Conventional Vision of religion as it is practiced as far as possible from any edge or boundary of the human spirit. I grew up in the mainstream. But I have other memories. Seasons of listening to voices from somewhere I had not yet been from across a boundary, from rooms never entered, possibilities not contemplated. Moments of decision where choices were made on behalf of that new reality. When life is no longer what it was. And is not yet what it is going to be.

Maybe you know the feeling of an edge, maybe sometimes feel the presence of an edge. Maybe, like me, you get pretty tired of edges.

Edges are demanding places and they can be lonely places. But you and I are edge-dwellers. By necessity but by choice too we are people who push our own frontiers and those of religion and society, too. The discontent we feel won't let us have it any other way.

But we get tired of the edge. We have often heard inner peace and tranquillity described as the highest religious values, the chief object of our religious quest. But today I speak in praise of unrest, the discontent you feel at the edge.

"Edges are important" — so says William Irwin Thompson —"important because they define a limitation in order to deliver us from it."

When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before. We feel safe and secure when we can stand confidently at the center of things, but when we come to an edge, we feel nervous and unsettled.

The edge is the time before dawn, the moments before creation begins.

So I'd like to suggest three characteristics of edge-dwelling.

And the first is awareness: — a willingness to know. To let go so that we may know. A quality of awareness that you get only when you do what the biologist T.H. Huxley urged when he wrote:

Sit down before fact (or truth) like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

Gandhi put it more plainly. He said "the seeker after truth must be humble as the dust."

It is possible to possess a far greater awareness than we do. But when we allow ourselves a new awareness, we're back on the uncomfortable edge having to do something about the consequences. Consequences that society as a whole does not often welcome.

I personally expended a large measure of my life energy for many years blocking a reality, the truth about myself, a truth that puts me out of the mainstream. And in so doing I was souring my relationship with reality. It was possible for me to know the truth about myself sooner than I did. To do so meant finally making a choice about my relationship with truth. I had to cross a boundary of awareness. Every human being faces such moments. What it is that our coming out has to do with is different, but the point is the same: we have to establish a relationship with truth. It's a matter of welcoming awareness instead of blocking it out through the intentional repression of consciousness. I had blocked the awareness of my own personal reality in the name of religion. In the name of religion I had maintained a safe boundary to my awareness, staying as far as possible from the edge. And when I allowed myself to approach the boundary and move it, it was the most powerfully liberating thing I had ever done.

Statistically most Unitarian Universalists are come-outers in terms of religion. Most of us came from somewhere else. We'd seen an edge. And the edge had defined the limitations of our lives and we were driven by a basic discontent about the narrow boundaries we found to human experience, awareness, and the quality of justice in the world. We have to push boundaries.

The consequences of finding an edge and touching it bring about immediate change. The hesitation is over and we wonder why we waited so long, how we ever tolerated living in that cramped little space.

I remember only vaguely a fear I once had of what would happen if I let go the idea that the Bible is more inspired or true than any other great literature that humans have produced. That awareness was obvious enough to me but I was a minister in a Christian church and that otherwise obvious awareness would have led to unemployment — so I just let that thought remain unthunk.

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Human consciousness has grown plenty since the ancient prophets' visions. Sometimes it seems that all religion is capable of doing is returning to ancient dreams as if they were the final vision. Maybe quote St. Paul. Make doctrines out of the dreams of others.

But the religious act consists not in returning to ancient dreams,

but in the dreaming.

And religion has served either as a lock on the past, or as an engine of evolution.

There are new bibles, many new bibles, to be created as a sign of a spiritual unfolding of the human spirit in our time. Walt Whitman said,

We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say they are not divine; I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still.

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There are other forms of awareness that invite us. Awarenesses from the frontiers of science about the nature of reality, which are immediately rejected and denounced by many religious leaders as heresy. Awarenesses you can hear in the voices of people who have been oppressed in our society, whose protests of injustice are prophetic.

Those are some awarenesses that may disrupt our lives. Each brings us to an uncomfortable edge, but there isn't any more growth if we retreat from the edge, is there? and new awarenesses bring new necessities.

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And that's the second characteristic of life at the edge. Our awareness leads to commitment and a struggle.

And that's because all of life is one and interdependent; it is an intricate web of interconnectedness. Therefore what we choose and do matters, has implications far beyond the scope of our ability to see. We must re-assess our relationship with the world, with nature, with each other because nothing exists in isolation, no one lives in isolation. A covenant we may define as Love binds us and that Love, which holds life together, requires of us commitment. And so the Jewish liturgy for Yom Kippur prays for forgiveness:

For the sin of silence
For the sin of indifference.
For the secret complicity of the neutral.
For the washing of hands,
For the crime of indifference,
For the sin of silence,
For all that was done,
For all that was not done.

Awareness has to translate into commitment. When knowledge and awareness do not lead into commitment and action, our senses become dulled — we lose our clarity of perception. Knowledge and awareness evaporate.

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And my third characteristic of life at the edge: a perception. The perception that we have the power to act because we are a part of a vast system of life and as such the energies of the universe flow through us and we are filled with divine radiance. By divine radiance, I mean what some people mean when they use the G-word. I mean the sum total of reality, all the powers and energies of the universe. By that definition, we have the attributes of divinity, we are godlike, and those who went before us and spoke of a God-Up-There spoke in fact of qualities and powers we know because they flow in us, and they are our qualities and power. Visionaries like the architect and theologian Paolo Soleri and the poet Rilke have turned the imagery about God around, saying we are not so much children of a God who has always been as we are parents of the God who is coming to be, through our courage and compassion and creativity.

Now maybe you're kind of spooked and offended by the idea of being godlike but it's only a crazy idea if what you mean by God is some kind of potentate superperson who sits in a cosmic controlroom with knobs and levers, always in control of everything, never losing battles or making mistakes, never having things go wrong, never being surprised. For me, there is too much senseless suffering, too many epidemics and famines and floods, earthquakes and war, for me to believe in that kind of God. To be like God is not to be all-powerful, always having things go your way. The divinity that is in us is a struggling divinity, a risk-taking divinity operating in the realm of uncertainty and experiment and evolutionary change and surprise.

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People who live on the edge are people who are aware, people who are committed, and people who know their power.

This may seem audacious. There is an audacity about the great mystic Aurobindo's words:

In anguish we labour that from us may rise
A larger-seeing [hu]man with nobler heart,
The executor of the divine attempt.

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Sometimes, out there on the edge, you don't see much evidence that what we're trying to do can be done. We don't see anything that looks like the kind of world or the kind of lives we're trying to create. And it just isn't there and we feel kinda foolish. Like we're trying to create something out of nothing.

The Hebrew God we read about in the book of Genesis created ex-nihilo, out of nothing.

I spoke a little about NOTHING last week. We've learned that the mystics were correct about nothingness and darkness. They said that there's a lot there. They said that all creation, all giving birth, comes out of darkness and nothingness. Theoretical particle physics has a name for nothingness: they call it the vacuum state. And those scientists say that a vacuum state is full of energy. The nothingness is full of potential somethingness. Stars suddenly appear out of the darkness. And out of the emptiness of our lives or the desperation of our situation, the nothingness that doesn't seem to go anywhere, we give birth to magnificent somethingness. You could say that human creativity, or Unitarian Universalism and nearly everything innovative comes out of some religious and cultural vacuum state!

So to conclude I would like to tell you about Professor Tom Driver's account of "chaos day." In keeping with his style of a sort of "gestalt theology," he liked to begin his classes at Union Theological Seminary in New York by reading some great piece of religious literature and then having his students act it out.

One day he used a story from the Bible that had, among its characters, God. An attempt to get somebody to play the part of God led to an intolerable tension, everybody on edge, no takers. I can't do that, each student reasons. Long pause. Finally somebody named Susan says she'll do it, that is, if the group approves of her being God, lets her do it. She moves to the center of the circle, sort of. Not quite the center. Kind of tentatively sits somewhere near the center not sure if this is OK to do, then nervously slips back to the side, then nervously back to the center.

This goes on for awhile. Nobody knows what to say, can't really offer her any support in being God, and the whole thing is going nowhere. It's become intolerable. They've never been anywhere like this before, always letting someone else be God and stay up there in heaven. The tension's awful. Then finally, whaddaya know, a student lets out a primal scream and then goes catatonic and falls forward on the floor, where he stays for the rest of the class. Several more primal screams from others, who start racing around the room in desperation. A fundamentalist is crying out for the real God to intervene and stop this havoc. Somebody else standing on a windowsill giving off prophecies. They want help and direction and nobody knows what to do.

Susan had no idea how to be God. The student who did the primal scream didn't know, either. He knew he had to do something but had no idea what, and having done something, that is, scream, he couldn't take responsibility for having done it or following through on it, so he went catatonic. The others sank into frenzy.

When I imagine that biblical story of creation I think of what it would be like to be the Creator of the Universe on the day before creation — feeling a stirring of potential from within, the stinging discontent. Hesitate — the hesitance is essential. When you hesitate, you question your own willingness both to do the act and to take responsibility for doing it. Not just letting out a primal scream and going catatonic. Do it and take responsibility for it.

And something happens, and it happens more easily than we think. I love the image of the divine breath in the Genesis myth of creation. Is it the wind, or the divine breath, or the spirit, that sweeps over the water? But — these three are all one word, both in the Hebrew, and in the Greek. The Spirit is the Wind is your own Breath. When you know that the spontaneous uncontrolled wind is the same as the divine spirit is the same as the breath within you, it's a whole lot easier to live at the edge, to cope with the uncertain territory around the boundaries. When you know that it's the vast energies of the universe that pulsate through you, somehow it all comes down to taking a breath, it's as natural as breathing, natural and uncontrived. You just do the next thing, take the next step.

Not waiting for a heavenly potentate to make it happen, no, not at all. The life within us is no less than a divine radiance that breathes through our strivings, our yearnings, our longings and loving and hoping, through our earthiness and bodiliness and sensualness, through the tears and passion and struggle we feel here at the edge, at the boundaries of life.

Readings

I want to read two expressions of hope, a passionate hope that in both cases demanded not less than everything of the writers.

The first is

From the 19th-century Unitarian and Universalist minister Adin Ballou, founder of the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts.

Let us look forward with confidence to the reign of universal love and peace, os long prayed for by the wise and good, so long predicted by the noblest prophets of past ages. Let us labor, suffer and pour out the offerings of holy self-sacrifice to hasten its coming . . .

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And the second is

From the twentieth-century Indian philosopher and poet Aurobindo:

Savitri, 1949

How long shall our spirits battle with the Night

And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,

We who are vessels of a deathless Force

and builders of the godhood of the race?

In the vague light of [our] half-conscious mind,

Where in the greyness is thy coming's ray?

Where is the thunder of thy victory's wings?

Only we hear the feet of passing gods.

All we have done is ever still to do. . . .

The new-born ages perish like the old. . . .

Baffled and beaten back we labour still;

Annulled, frustrated, spent, we still survive.

In anguish we labour that from us may rise

A larger-seeing [hu]man with nobler heart,

The executor of the divine attempt

Equipped to wear the earthly body of God . . .

. . . . . . . .

The unfolding Image showed the things to come.

A giant dance of Shiva tore the past,

There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;

Earth was o'errun with fire and the roar of Death

Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;

Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns toward life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Forerunners of a divine multitude

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvelous dawn, . . .

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,

Approaching eyes of a diviner [hu]man,

Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul.

High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,

Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways

And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods,

Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth

And justify the light on Nature's face.

Meditation

I am conscious that every week, people enter this Great Hall full of so many things — sorrow, yearning, fear, gratitude — coming in quest of some inner reckoning, some profound encounter. I was so very gratified by your response last week to my request that we really enter these moments of meditation and quietness very deeply, not moving about until afterwards: so today again I ask that we enter that sacred space where, for someone, some transformative moment might come.

We greet this brilliant November morning with gratitude for the snowy ground beneath our feet, this noble Earth; and for heavens above and the sun that parts morning clouds and from its urn of gold pours light to light all this splendor, our home, this valley.

And for the warm bonds of affection, and the care of friends, we are glad, and thankful.

And for the stirring of life and spirit within, we are glad, so very glad, and thankful; and for the stirrings of life and spirit around us, animating this community with care and love.

So may this splendor and beauty and this love quicken our minds and hearts, with expectancy, that in our lives, out of our hearts, there will surely unfold new graces, and powers for good, and energies of love; —

And so may we find strength to forgive, and to arise again, and to lift those who have fallen, and to lift again the burdens we must bear and take up the works we must do in this time; — strength to pursue again this path of discovery and transformation, with courage and overflowing joy, so that we might know the promise and possibility of our humanity.

Let us be together in silence.

Gather

I know that the past was great and the future will be great,

And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,

And that where I am, or you are, this present day, there is the center of all days, all races,

And there is the meaning, to us, of all that ever has come of races and days, or ever will come.

Parting

Words for parting from Judy Chicago

And then all that has divided us will merge

And then compassion will be wedded to power

And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind

And then both men and women will be gentle

And then both women and men will be strong

And then no person will be subject to another's will

And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many

And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance

And then all will cherish life's creatures

And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth

And then Everywhere will be called Eden once again.