An address by F. Jay Deacon
June 13, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
An address by F. Jay Deacon
June 13, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
Whoso does not dance, does not know what comes to pass. To the universe belongs the dancer. The whole on high has part in our dancing.
These lines, attributed to Jesus, turn up in the Acts of John, from the late Second Century, when its writer, and its readers, were up against the overwhelming force of an imperial power that wanted them silenced. It was no June picnic. And ironically the institution that nearly succeeded in obliterating it was the Church itself, but it survives the institution that eventually rose to silence all of those earliest voices except for its own official voice in the four acceptable Gospels, and in Paul, and in a few other writings. It survives despite the authority of the Church and its councils and bishops.
And there are these lines, in a section with the odd name "Round Dance for the Cross."
It was condemned as heresy. Pope Leo the Great, in the fifth century, decreed that such writings "contain a hotbed of manifold perversity," and "should not only be forbidden, but altogether removed and burnt with fire."
But as Elaine Pagels has shown, the Acts of John survived, copied and shared secretly among those who dared.
What was especially horrifying to the orthodox was the mystery you were supposed to learn in the course of doing this dance. On Jesus' lips the secret was this: "See yourself in me who am speaking." See that this passion of dying and rising that he undergoes is yours and mine. See that the divinity is yours and mine, that it is in us and we in it.
Then something happens. You see differently. You experience differently. It is not about believing in something out there. It is about a transformation of consciousness in here. It transforms everything. It transcends suffering.
And so, in a time that is, well and truly, more threatening than the time when the Acts of John was composed — there might be something here for us. Let's see.
Here's why it matters to me. The author of the Acts of John was fully aware of what was going on, the threats he faced. His head was not buried in the Middle Eastern sands.
And here we are, understanding what is going on around us, even if it's not fit to print in the New York Times, but there's always the Guardian and Democracy Now and the BBC, and a few other independent truth-tellers.
And here we are, embracing, proclaiming, nurturing a vision of a fairer world, and in our more rational moments our chances of success seem minute. The old order cannot continue, we know. We have to cross a threshold, we know: — but how?
We ourselves were brought up into a world, educated and conditioned by a world — that still thinks tribally and mythically. Consider the facts of the moment. A president who can allow himself totally to disregard the despoiling of the earth, the contamination of the ecosphere, the imminent climatic cataclysm, all in order to service the oil and coal industries and pander to the national greed and self-indulgence. How could he do it? He can do it for the same reason President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt could do it: The Second Coming. He believes in it. What happens to the Earth is far less important to him than what happens to the right-wing political agenda, which is, of course, God's agenda.
And here we are — as we are — facing the urgent fact that all this must change: — and who are we? I, too, was raised on beliefs drawn from scriptures that come down to us from a time that knew nothing of DNA destruction or climate change or, more positively, of the possibilities of continuing evolution.
I puzzle over the real possibility that Aurobindo's words — Aurobindo, the great twentieth-century Indian mystic — that his words might ever become fact:
In anguish we labour that from us may rise
A larger-seeing [hu]man with nobler heart,
The executor of the divine attempt.
From us may rise? from us? And I am supposed to try to live like the better world we dream, the nobler humanity — and build it? I, with my moods and limited expectations of human possibility including my own; — I who could obsess this week about a perished hard drive (!), hardly knowing how to exist without it?
Who am I to do this, and you and all of us together?
So here we are in the Second Century with whoever it was writing the Acts of John. The problem the Church had with him was that he obviously didn't take his religion, and the resurrection, and all that stuff, literally. His Jesus — as you find by reading the Acts of John — was constantly changing shape, appearing sometimes as a small boy, sometimes as a beautiful man; sometimes bald-headed with a long beard, sometimes as a youth.
We might go farther than that. This numinous figure appears to us sometimes as the Buddha, or Krishna, or one of thousands of Hindu gods, or perhaps one of those oracles of Concord, and finally, in ourselves. They're actually all one, actually all parts of us as we are parts of it.
But the thing is, that second-century writer lived it. Experienced it in his gut and didn't just swallow it as dogma.
So maybe in his account we might discern a message from the heart of things despite the ancient censors.
This shape-changing Ideal was a strange and hopeful force within him. There was a narrative to his experience.
Now we, too, live within a narrative and write its next chapters. Our Unitarian Universalist heritage of faith is a magnificent and ennobling story. And it's a whole lot more real to me because it's actual history in the far more recent past, and stretching, as we extend it, into the future.
His spiritual story was a still kind of Jesus story, only not quite the one the official Church told. His great wisdom-figure had inspired his disciples to give up everything to follow him. Had cast scorn on the self-serving entrenched Powers That Be; had laid siege to the perverted values of wealth and material possession and privilege. He'd called people to return to the lessons of Nature and spoken of a Commonwealth of Heaven that is here and now, it's all a matter of consciousness. He'd dared to challenge both the abusive Roman occupiers and the skin-deep sanctity of the Roman-run Temple. For this he'd been executed and now more than a century later the author of the Acts of John still endured the same abusive government.
In the Christian church, this is the season called Pentecost. It goes back to a story in the New Testament Book of Acts.
In the story, the disciples are in a major funk following their leader's execution. Disillusioned and depressed. The bottom had fallen out and they're hiding in this attic room.
And here is what happens. But remember you're hearing the description of an inner event; it isn't history, the outer details are made up, the stuff of imagination and ecstasy. The Book of Acts:
And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them.
So it comes.
Rushing mighty wind.
Tongues of fire.
Ecstasy, ecstatic spontaneous speech and dancing and they're out in the street and people think they're drunk and disorderly — a few verses later that's what they're accused of.
The difference it makes: because, after all, many people regularly get lost on dance floors in the heavy bass beat of the music and the flow of alcohol with its loosening effects and the rush of adrenaline and all enhanced by a hit of the drug of choice, but what difference does it make? A little release. That's worth something.
But there is another Ecstasy, and it is expressed in that ancient round dance and those ancient tongues of fire. It is not the property of any religious tradition in particular. It is something beyond and other than the dogma and institutions and authorities that arose after it, and in a way, deeply subversive of them and always severely threatening to them.
In the Book of Acts they're accused of being drunk. And they reply that they're not drunk and they fall into quoting the prophet Joel who quotes God who says
I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh
And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy
And your young men shall see visions
And your old men shall dream dreams
Yea, and on my mensservants and on my maidservants in those days
I will pour out my spirit.
Now we all have our boundaries beyond which we aren't up for going, boundaries of the mind beyond which we have no mind to think. At the turn of the last century there was a movement now called Pentecostalism that read this passage and they saw something revolutionary. Get this: "Your sons and your daughters shall prophecy and on my menservants and on my maidservants I will our out my Spirit." That's what it says, so they started ordaining women. They were the only Fundamentalists and darn near the only religious people period to do that. Only the Universalists were already ordaining women, so far as I can see — beat the Pentecostals by 37 years. Still, they did something revolutionary; but then the boundaries of their minds came up quickly, and they couldn't move beyond the text of the Bible to a living everflowing Spirit that could ever say anything new, and there is no progressive edge left to them.
But this isn't really about them, it's about us.
In our religious history it was Emerson calling the old rigid Unitarianism "corpse-cold Unitarianism." It couldn't rouse itself to face the challenge of the times.
And here we are: you and I come here bearing our own burdens and hurts and fears and thwarted possibilities. We know we have to cross the threshold of a dying era. How is that supposed to happen?
The Pentecost I'm interested in is the breathtaking moment when some chemistry of Spirit ignites the weighty, solid, rigid materials of our lives, so lifeless and unmoving, and transforms them entirely.
Then the same reality that has overwhelmed us reveals its hidden meaning, takes on a new configuration, something nobody could have predicted, and the moment involves us fully.
Fully. Intellectually. Spiritually. Bodily.
Intellectually, yes, of course. Emerson compared this inflow of Divine to a lantern — each new transforming insight that comes to us is like a lantern that you turn on all the facts that are already laying around in your mind, and all the litter and rubbish becomes precious in this new light, in this new configuration.1
It means approaching new thresholds of thought and passing through them into the uncharted territory beyond to make truth bigger, more whole, more all-encompassing.
Spiritually—because it shakes and expands our grasp of what is ultimately important and true. It goes right to what it is we are living for, what in our lives and with our lives we are really serving, what our lives are about and what it is that is worth living and dying for.
Bodily, physically—It's a passionate thing; it releases energies and involves our activities and our checkbooks, sure, and it involves the rhythms between body and mind, the unity of life, making sexuality and spirituality friends, reconnecting the disconnects.
It may be that the greatest spiritual voice in the twentieth century was Aurobindo, whose words I have read here before —
Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.
Earth shall be made home of Heaven's light . . .
The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.
And all the earth become a single life.
If we want spiritual growth or intellectual growth or a fuller life, we cannot skip over any part. We have to engage consciously both mind and body, equally, intensely, fully. Maybe that's what the Transcendentalists were doing when they walked, and walked, and walked. And protested and agitated. That is what the meditator is doing — engaging the whole of the bodymind.
There is the fire and rushing mighty wind in the biblical Acts. And in the heretical Acts of John, the dance —
Whoso does not dance, does not know what comes to pass. To the universe belongs the dancer. The whole on high has part in our dancing.
And what does it mean to us, really? This is the hard part, the rewarding transformational part, and I hope I'm listening to this.
It means that, one day, when you are engulfed in fear, in the terrible weight of a depression, in a nameless anxiety — or maybe, one day when you feel disconnected and detached, bad case of anomie — or you feel very attached and connected to a tedious rut without a wisp of freshness in the stale air of a small place, and you are learning nothing new but locked instead in a circular motion —
It can come. It can come like a rocking jolt configuring your world your reality new
it comes together like a gestalt, comes with power, an astonishing burst of energy
a dimension to things you didn't know about, hadn't taken into account, and there it is
a seed bursts open sprouting something you didn't see until now
the usual restraints on your thinking and acting lifted
usual inhibitions fractured demolished to dust
And there you are, one day, having what Emerson called "the day of days, the great day of the feast of life, . . .when the inward eye opens to the Unity in things . . . and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds.2
Ecstasy. A passionate sensuous state in which something involves you fully in the flow of its color and smell and beauty, the unity of all life, the rhythm of the dance. To let it wash down over you. It comes from somewhere behind the mind, an activity beyond thinking. But there are things we can do, and patterns of life we can adopt, that can open our lives to this flow of grace.
There is often a price to pay for living that way. But the little story of the Gnostic Round dance we read earlier speaks of a wisdom that allows you to suffer without suffering — that transforms an experience of dread, and gloom, and sorrow into something else.
The Spirit is the fire when we are so fully one with life and with our lives that a chemistry seems to occur like a blaze that unites wood with oxygen. And why should it not be so? Our bodies and our minds hold great life-wisdom, memories older than our lives, truth larger than anything we are conscious of.
"Ordinary people," writes Jean Houston,
"have the meansto develop their body-minds and innate capacities
to levels of use and understanding
abundantly able
to deal with the challenges of the time.
They can learn to think, feel, and know
in extended and enhanced ways,
become more creative, and aspire
within realistic limits
to a multidimensional awareness.
Once we understand the . . . limits
we impose on ourselves
by myriad
false concepts,
outdated mind sets,
shrunken aspirations,
and irrational taboos,
we become able
to achieve a larger freedom
to think, to dream,
to experience,
and to reinvent ourselves, —
To demand new ways of being
is a constant movement of mind and body and spirit,
which is simultaneously
dance
and work
and prayer.
It is the
discovery
and development
of one's potential
for the
creative rebuilding
of self and earth.
One is in a state of
rhythm and resonance
between inner and outer worlds;
and being in a state of rhythm,
one finds oneself
in a state of grace."3
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
Slowly the noise and tumult of our lives dies away and we gather ourselves, draw the disparate scattered parts and particles of us together, re-collect the fullness our our selves, feel the entireness of our being.
And here, at the core of ourselves, there is a silence where the aching emptiness opens into fulness, and the tensions fall away, and the tightness, and the clamor
And here there is clarity of vision and our sight is restored
And here is a power that ignites the lifeless rigid stuff of our lives and brings it to life
And calls us to tasks to fulfill in our time.
And so we gather, and so we listen, and wait,
In the silence.
From the Book of Acts, composed in the early second century, chapter two:
"And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them."
From the Acts of John,
a second-century Gnostic writing:
Jesus told us to form a circle, holding one anothers' hands, and he himself stood in the middle, and said, Answer Amen to me. So he began to sing the hymn and to say:
Grace dances. I will pipe: dance all of you. Amen.
I will mourn. Beat you all your breasts. Amen. To the universe belongs the dancer. The whole on high has part in our dancing. Whoso does not dance, does not know what comes to pass.
Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in me who am speaking. You who dance, consider what I do, for yours is this passion of humanity which I am to suffer. If you knew how to suffer, you would be able not to suffer.
And from Jean Houston, Life Force:
To demand new ways of being is a constant movement of mind and body and spirit, which is simultaneously dance and work and prayer. It is the discovery and development of one's potential state of rhythm and resonance between inner and outer worlds; and being in a state of rhythm, one finds oneself in a state of grace. The boundaries of body and soul open, boundary after boundary falls away, until we reach the final and ultimate knowledge, which is movement in creative form.