A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
March 6, 2005
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
March 6, 2005
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
This past week, as we began the 8-week program on Fundamentalism, I related something of my own experience growing up in a sleepy isolated South Jersey town far from cultural or intellectual stimulation, increasingly bored with our family's huge and oh so respectable conservative Presbyterian Church, drawn at the age of 13 or so into the fervor of the Assembly of God just down the street from it, drawn into the Pentecostal strand of Fundamentalism, then to its college in Springfield, Missouri, and briefly into its ministry — until its world closed in around me, cutting me off from the evil world, but so much more disastrously, from myself, from my mind, from my best instincts and intuitions, from my finest spiritual capacities, my own life truth.
But in that class Thursday I wanted people to imagine something else — the fervor of what they called the presence of God, the Holy Spirit — the love they felt, and of which they were unashamed, toward what they hold to be Ultimate, at the Heart of Reality. They call it Jesus. I don't, not anymore.
I had to find my own way to that transcendent reality. My relationship with the Heart of Being had to be authentic and real and my own. It could not be mediated through any third party or on the authority of bibles or churches. It is the primary relationship of our lives, and it is prior to any theologies or opinions we have about it.
So I've had an unfulfilled wish: that across the divide of theology and dogma, there could be a recognition of a common transcendent experience and relationship with the Heart of Being.
There are these transcendent moments when you see beyond the surface of things the inherent glory of being.
You are lifted out of the myopia of daily routine, deadlines, ambitions, fears, resentments, habitual ways of seeing — and you are seeing with the eyes of wonder beyond the surface of things, and you are filled with a luminosity, the light brighter than a thousand suns, and you see the glory of Being, the shining radiance of the Universe of life, and you are drenched in liquid love and lifted to a higher state of consciousness and bliss.
Was it Jesus? Buddha? the "ground luminescence" the Buddhists talk about? the Ground of Being of which the theologian Tillich spoke? the Shekinah of mystical Judaism? Emerson's Over-soul?
But there's another contravening reality: The interpretation we lay on reality creates our reality. So at least half of what we call a spiritual experience is all the ways we interpret it. And there are better and worse ways to do it. There are integral ways, and less integral ways.
Your imagined Fundamentalist friend, rapt in love and ecstasy with his Jesus. Will he rejoice in your own transported vision of beauty, with no Jesus, died and resurrected or otherwise? Will he embrace you as a friend who shares the highest of treasures?
He will know your transcendent experience cannot be real, because right in Acts 4:12 it says — we must be saved "by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth," and "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved". Plain enough. Leaves you out.
Unless your imagined friend is an Islamic fundamentalist, but your problem will still be the same.
You must be possessed of demons. Or maybe just deluded.
I understand why. He has entered the safe enclave of the saved in the midst of a wicked world. All else is demonic deceit. For him there's far too much ambiguity, too much danger, if the train isn't running down the steel rails of an infallible Bible and damn-near infallible church's interpretation of the Bible. Or Koran or whatever. He wants the world neatly tied up in the hands of a God he can understand.
The truth is that the human mind just isn't far enough evolved to penetrate the mysteries that Fundamentalists claim to understand. Our humanity and our truth and our God are evolving. To enter the life of the Spirit is to be engaged in your own evolution and with it the evolution of human consciousness. There is no standing-still stagnation of dogma and presumptive authority here.
And religious will either be a lock on the past, or an engine of evolutionary consciousness.
Fundamentalism in America began when, in the 19th century, scholars started looking at the Bible critically, with the same critical disciplines they would apply to any ancient document. They found that the Gospels, written decades after the death of Jesus by people who never knew him, consist of an artful stringing together of little bits and phrases taken from older sources, so arranged as to create the basis for a new religion and to make of their founder a God-Man sent to fulfill Old Testament prophecies, constitute his followers as the new Israel, and finally restore the Kingdom of God on earth. It wasn't so much the religion of Jesus at all, as it was a religion about a Jesus made into a god. The Hebrew Bible turned out to have been put together in four historic layers, representing different eras of the evolution of the religion and history of the Jews. They found flaws of inconsistency, contradiction, and historical error. The liberals started seeing Jesus as more of a social revolutionary than a savior. The Fundamentalists felt their faith undermined and singled out many enemies of the true faith — Darwinian evolution, communism, socialism, and of course modern biblical scholarship.
At first it tried to gain control of American denominations and save them from what it called "apostasy" — the new liberal thought. It tried to run the liberals out of the churches. And then it organized new denominations and new kinds of churches. Its ideas about the Second Coming and the end of the world developed into a new "Dominion Theology" — the conviction that fundamentalist Christians must take over the government by whatever means necessary to bring in the reign of Christ — and then came the 1980s, and the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Pat Robertson, and now the fundamentalists had a new political power. The fundamentalism that now runs the United States of America is freeze-dried state of consciousness embodying ancient fears, superstitions, and mythology. It embodies a universe of us-and-them, of a stern and punitive Father-God, of warfare against the legions of darkness, of the exclusion of pariahs who don't happen to be, say, heterosexual. It is perforce anti-intellectual, anti-science, authoritarian. You can find it everywhere, in Protestantism, in Catholicism.
Both your fundamentalist friend and you are capable of transcendent religious experience — he through a special relationship with Jesus Christ, — and you without any such special means at all. Maybe you were just meditating or deep in contemplation. Maybe it just settled upon you, in a moment of crisis, or no crisis at all, just going about your business, looking out at Nature, whatever.
Let's return to that transcendent experience of the glory, the Shekinah, the transcendent wonder and light. What was it?
To my fundamentalist friend, God is something Other, capital O, out there, looking down on his pitiable fallen creatures. He isn't prepared to grasp that at the Heart of all Being — whatever that experience was about — that Heart of All Being — whatever He, She, It is, that is ultimately who we are.
Maybe, if he could have a more fully transcendent experience, he could transcend that theology of his and let it go. I know it can happen because I was that Fundamentalist. It can happen.
I would like to ask him:
If you believe that your own human perceptions are so benighted and depraved that only an authority external to yourself, an infallible scripture revealed by God himself, can instruct you on what is true — if that is where you begin — and your Scripture warns that you are a fallen creature, now condemned to eternal punishment unless somehow you can find your way to the mercy of a savior who, through unimaginable suffering, bore the weight of your wickedness for you — the God-Man who will give you salvation if you just believe, and become a disciple —
Then tell me: do you believe that the Universe is really ruled by a God who, having created a flawed creature, is prepared to toss the vast majority of humanity — who don't believe the right things, adopt the right theology — into an eternal trash-heap, there to suffer forever?
Our experience of reality is surely bent around our interpretation of it, our expectations and beliefs about it. And the problem begins with one singularly bad idea:
authority you cannot question, dare not doubt.
Why is it that so many people seem willing to believe the unbelievable?
But suppose we begin somewhere else.
Suppose the fundamental thing is something else.
Suppose you are that magnificent achievement of Nature, that evolving splendor, the Universe becoming aware of itself in the human mind, the highest, yet striving manifestation of this Universe of Life.
Suppose you start with that. Suppose you start with your journey, your experience of life, the truth of your life. Suppose those things are the fundamentals with which you start. Suppose we bring all our best capacities — intellect, vision, intuition, virtue — into this quest.
My spiritual quest led me beyond the parameters of the old shibboleths and forced me past its boundaries. In the end shunned and disowned because I could not be an appropriate product of Central Bible College or Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I was also liberated and given a painful gift. The memories are fresh: in profound disillusionment, leaving that college in Missouri and heading home to New Jersey in the middle of my senior year in the '63 Mercury I'd scraped together the money to buy at Bighearted Bill's Friendly Rambler — it got me as far as Springfield, Ohio, but that's another story. Or at the evangelical seminary, after publishing a defense of gay people — in the third person, of course — of sitting down in the cafeteria and having the table clear out around me. A painful gift: I was alone with nobody to turn to. I had to find that what I needed, I already had. It's ways, already here, in the heart and soul of us. Nobody else can give us that.
Suppose the young life we celebrate in our second service today with a rite of dedication — suppose her life is the beginning of a grand journey into human potentiality. Her parents cannot protect her from danger, give her ultimate safety in the unknown days to come. But they can give her this: they can show her there is such a thing a love, and such a thing as valour, and moral imagination, and beauty, and fundamental trust, and compassion. They can show her this in their own lives, where these graces grow because they are nurtured in the garden of their lives.
Along this journey we suffer wounds. When these times come for us, when we feel broken, it's quite a different thing if we can imagine the experience not so much a destruction of ourselves as a breaking-open, like a coarse, dark rock that is broken open, revealing a stupendous crystal at its core.
And then we come to prize the gifts of our own vulnerability. Buddhists call Tonglen. Tonglen means that to have compassion and to care for other people — means not to run from the pain in ourselves; — instead of being ashamed of our failures, — it's possible to open your heart and allow yourself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us aware of our common humanity. Feel the pain of others, and share it.
Imagine if those running our country now could feel what it is to be poor, without healthcare, tortured, intimidated and controlled by a faraway power. Insight like that is among the most precious truth of our own lives. And with it the moral imagination that can imagine both the consequences of greed and arrogance and the likely outcome of our actions that flow from our worst impulses; — and imagine, too, our highest and noblest possibilities and the kind of world we might create.
When you begin with the fundamentals of your own life-truth, you learn not some universal authoritative story on life according to Abraham or the Twelve Disciples, but the reality of your own story, listening, watching for the Divine, the Sacred, the Numinous and Transcendent in it. And then you learn that your story is everyone's. And you are united to your race and to the whole world of life. It's as though each life is a deep well, and way down there way below the surface the individual wells are all united, all flow into a deep underground river.
If ever you could reach that underground stream without first passing through your own well, you would find there — not a home, but a museum of strange and alien artifacts. There is no other way down to reach the great Underground Stream that connects them all — except by going down into the well of your own inner depths. And there you learn that your story is everyone's story.
Surely it is our work here and our calling to nurture as rich and fervent a spiritual life as you'll ever find in fundamentalism. We live within a larger Life, bound in a covenant we may neglect or deny, but that we cannot sever. Our religion and our spiritual life is first a relationship, and the relationship is prior to our understanding of it, more fundamental than our theologies and theories about it. Our religion and our spiritual life is first a relationship, and it may as well be passionate. It may as well involve our whole soul in the fire of its burning. It may as well transform us.
If we dare let it, unembarrassed, unapologetic — a spiritual revolution will have been set in motion that no reactionary forces can stay or overcome. It would be the most magnificent energy ever yet set loose upon the earth.
Theodore Parker:
Mystery beyond our naming, made manifest to us in moments of insight, glimpses of wonder, in the powers of the human heart and mind, in the quiet when the — noise ceases: —
Life of all life, Great Energy by which we live, and see the
world alive: —
Great force of Love that rises within us and holds the
human community together —
Unfolding, evolving splendor of this living Universe, of which we are part and parcel: —
Let us feel the strength, and the unfolding possibility, that flows from this great web of Being, by which this world might yet be made the radiant home of peace and wellbeing, and magnificence and beauty.
Let this grace wash over us, cleanse us, lift us, and set us free to love and labour for the fulfilment, in our time, of our dream.
Peter Gomes, 1996:
This is the devastating theme of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, published to much dismay in Germany. Goldhagen argues that it was the cultural permission of Germany's Christian anti-Semitism, based of course upon a reading of the Bible, that allowed the nasty work of the Holocaust to be done not only by military specialists but by people whose attitudes were based upon centuries of Christian teaching. . . .
In the case of the Bible and homosexuality in contemporary American culture, the tragic dimensions of this biblically sanctioned prejudice . . . under the guise of morality makes the religious community . . . itself morally culpable.
From Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart. NY: William Morrow, 1996. p.165
Daniel Goldhagen, 1996:
Hitler, the charismatic figure, and the Nazis' anti-Weimar, anti-Bolshevik, anti-international, and antisemitic message gained ever greater appeal during these difficult times. In the election of July 31, 1932, almost fourteen million Germans, 37.4 percent of the voters, cast their lots for Hitler, crowning the Nazis the largest, most powerful political party in Germany . . . At the beginning of 1933, Weimar's President, Paul von Hindenburg . . . asked Hitler to become chancellor and form a government. . . .
In Germany during the Nazi period, putative Jewish evil permeated the air. It was discussed incessantly. It was said to be the source of every ill that had befallen Germany and of every continuing threat. The Jew, der Jude, was both a metaphysical and an existential threat, as real to Germans as that of a powerful enemy army poised on Germany's borders for the attack. The character, ubiquity, and logic of action of German antisemitism during the Nazi period is captured brilliantly by Melita Maschmann in a confessional memoir written to her lost, former childhood Jewish friend. . . .
Those Jews were and remained something mysteriously menacing and anonymous. They were not the sum of all Jewish individuals . . . They were an evil power, something with the attributes of a spook. One could not see it, but it was there, an active force for evil.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 86f.
Sam Keen, To a Dancing God, 1970
By locating the holy in the spiritual depths rather than in the heights — in the quotidian rather than the supernatural — the form and imagery, not the substance, of religious consciousness is changed.
If the promises that redeem us spring from mundane soil rather than from an authorized covenant with God, history is, nevertheless, experienced as the story of promise and fulfillment. Human existence is still sanctified by sacrifice, and we may appropriately face the mysterious givenness of life and personality with gratitude and reverence. This change in language from images of height to depth represents the religious response of the [modern] mind to the loss of the traditional metamundane myths. . . . Theology must concern itself not with the Wholly Other God but with the sacred "Ground of Being" — not with a unique incarnation in past history but with the principles, powers, and persons which are presently operative to make and keep human life luminous and sacred.
For those who no longer find in the stories and myths of orthodox religion the power to inform life with creative meaning, it may, at least, point to a locality and a method which may be useful in discovering a sacred dimension of life. And, perhaps, if each of us learns to tell his own story, even if we remain ignorant of the name of God or the form of religion, it will be sufficient.
103
Once the individual recovers his own history, he finds it is the story of every person. . . . The more I know of myself, the more I recognize that nothing human is foreign to me. In the depths of each person's biography lies the story of all. When the individual goes to the heart of his own biography unhampered by shame or repression, he finds there a universality of experience that binds him to all.