Imagine, if you will, thousands of people standing out under the starry skies and they all see—the thing goes on before their very eyes—a great cluster of stars rearrange themselves to spell out "G-O-D." They are utterly astonished and think that they have gone mad. And if they could somehow assure themselves that this was not in some way a form of mass hallucination — ah! at last! the final definitive proof for the existence of God!

But not so fast. Proof of what? They still would be without a clue as to what could be meant by speaking of "God." And no matter how many people saw it, and now matter how thoroughly documented, the sighting of the stars rearranging themselves to spell God couldn't fix the reference range of "God." Nobody knows precisely what they are talking about in speaking of such a transcendent reality. All that throng of people out there under the stars would know is that something very strange had happened.

You come to hear about God. In one of Krishnamurti's little books of lectures, the one called On God, at the end of the lecture about God, somebody asks him, "You never mention God. Has he no place in your teachings?" And you heard what he said to that.

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Once, in a previous religious life, I was working with an ever-so-slightly progressive evangelical minister in Brooklyn in a pretty conservative Swedish church. He said: you can say anything you want so long as you get enough Gods and Christs and Salvation and other essential buzzwords in. They won't notice what you're saying.

Language is a funny thing: so essential to communication, so apt to get in the way of communication. Gustave Flaubert nailed it when he wrote:

The truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.¹

When I left the household of Christian faith and happily threw myself into the spacious spiritual realm of Unitarian Universalism, more than one friend looked at our Purposes and Principles and asked how this could be religion — they didn't see any of the usual religious categories — you know, the Gods and Christs and Gospel and Salvation and all that.

Well no, our Principles and Purposes, adopted in 1984 and periodically revised, are simply these:

§ The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

§ Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

§ Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

§ A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

§ The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

§ The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

§ Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

These are followed by a six-point statement of the sources from which we draw — it mentions words and deeds of prophetic men and women, wisdom from the world's religions, Jewish, Christian, humanist, and earth-centered traditions, and so on. But it starts, significantly, with this:

"Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life." Now, I call that religious language.

So I sat up and took notice this past year when our new president of the UUA, Bill Sinkford, stirred up a controversy about religious language. It seems to have started with a sermon in Fort Worth in which he said, among other things:

[W]e have in our Principles an affirmation of our faith which uses not one single piece of religious language. Not one. Not even one word that would be considered traditionally religious. And that is a wonderment to me . . .

Following the service, he was interviewed by the local paper. Then the paper came out, reporting a few things Bill Sinkford did not actually say. The lead sentence read: "A former atheist who is now president of the UUA will push to put the word God into a new statement of principles."

Then came General Assembly: biggest ever, 7550 people registered, Prudential Center and Hynes Convention Center engulfed in UUs. It was Emerson's 200th birthday, and fabulous events to celebrate, and a profusion of spectacularly fine speakers.

The only big news stories that really got any ink so far as I could tell were these:

In the Boston Globe, the headline was "Words of 'reverence' roil a church;"²

And, before the GA in the New York Times, "A Heated Debate Flares in Unitarian Universalism."³

I heard of another one somewhere that used the term "theological firestorm." I don't think it was. You probably never even heard about it, did you?

v

But Bill raised an important question. How do we talk about our religious, our spiritual, experience and community? I have read a number of sermons that colleagues have preached in response to all this. Most of them say we really need to start using the traditional religious language again, just investing the words with new meaning.

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I want to stake out a contrary view.

Maybe it's because I've seen so many queer people so severely injured and traumatized by that language. I once saw a sign at a Pride march that said "Pat Robertson uses the Bible the way Hitler used gas." It's true. Same applies to the latest abusive statements from the Vatican and the bishops. But it's not only us. The words are loaded, and with all the freight and terrifying weight of the vaunted authority of church and bible and hierarchy and creed, the words hit like missiles. These are real, unlike certain alleged weapons that turned out not to be real.

Look. You say the word "God" and a raucous jangle of pandemonium goes off in the heads of your hearers — alarm bells ring, red lights flash — it's really something.

For some it's a matter of dread and fear. My own memories are still fresh. For me it was something else. During an intensive period of education at evangelical institutions and deep involvement in their churches, the words came to have a numbing effect. And this mind-numbing repetition of special religious lingo simply shut down the thought processes and — worse — shut down any transcendent resonance in the gut, locked you in a tiny room already so fully defined that there was no way out.

So don't tell me you can just use the words and give them new meaning. No you can't. Unitarian Universalists are one tenth of one percent of the population. Even if we think they're outworn and archaic, these words have long-established meanings. Be very, very careful.

v

Bill is right about this: we do need a vocabulary of reverence. But I'm quite convinced that we have to get there in our own organic way. Struggle with our language to say what we mean. More than that: the problem is only a problem if we actually think there are, or ever could be, words adequate to what we mean.

v

Maybe that is why, among the ecstatic and mystical religions, there is glossolalia, tongue-speaking. Maybe that is the only legitimate vocabulary of reverence. Utterance, sheer non-denotative utterance. Not one word of it can be found in a dictionary, be translated into any propositional concepts. But the tragedy of it in American Pentecostalism is that — yup, wouldn't you guess — they figured it had to be translated out into theological concepts. So they followed St. Paul's teachings about speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues and supplied, after an utterance in glossolalia, an interpretation — usually consisting of King James Bible verses — about as fresh, immediate, and original as the Apostles' Creed. Oh well.

Those with the most acute consciousness of the Divine Life know that no word is adequate to describe what it is they have touched, and out of which they live.

"Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit," Emerson wrote, "he that thinks most, will say least. . . . when we try to define and describe [God], both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions."⁴

v

So note the spelling in today's title, G-hyphen-D. In an earlier time, Jews were forbidden to pronounce the Divine Name, since any attempt to speak of the Divine was bound to be inadequate, because it is too high, too holy. The divine name was written as four consonants —YHWH — no vowels, not pronounceable and never pronounced in any reading of scripture. With the Temple destroyed and the act of pronouncing The Name outside of the Temple prohibited, pronunciation of the Name fell into disuse. Scholars passed down knowledge of the correct pronunciation of YHVH for many generations, but eventually the correct pronunciation was lost, and we no longer know it with any certainty. Among Orthodox Jews you can still find those who reverence the Unutterable Name by not uttering it; and who write the Name the way I did in the title, G-d. I think they've got it right.

God is a dangerous word. Once speak the word, and our mental memory-banks are at once filled with all the things we think we know about God, have been taught about God, believe about God, and I am sure that nearly everything we think we know about God stands squarely in the way of our knowing God, or whatever it is that there is to be known.

There are many ancient accounts of God. As often as not, they are national epics created and repeated in a world quite unlike ours, for political reasons, to give stability and strength to that political entity.

And these stories, and the people who tell them, are always marked by shibboleths — special words by which you can tell who belongs to the "in"-group and who doesn't—and we repeat those words because they make us feel that we're okay, we're insiders instead of outsiders, we're saved instead of lost; knowers of the true doctrine. You will have noticed the same thing going on in our day, in political campaigns and the political and cultural struggle raging now in our nation. In the name of God.

What meaning do these stories hold for us? We live in another universe.

Slowly we penetrate the depth of reality and find not gods and dragons of the deep and angels and archangels but Leptons and Muons held together by Gluons, and we find the Universe pervaded with Light that we cannot see, and marvel at dark matter, or is it dark energy, that keeps it from flying apart.

When I hit this thing, it goes thunk. We like that. We think we have made contact with the essential brass tacks of life — matter.

Not really. Not the way ages and generations before us thought. This pulpit, and the microphone, and you and I are made of cells and the cells are made of atoms and, in the subatomic realm — mysterious patterns of energy, and no solid matter at all. Right now, bazillions of protons and leptons are flying right through you!

We penetrate reality and find mysterious communication across the abyss between things, and things we thought things vanish with our seeing them. There is more than meets the eye.

But what is this Life that evolves, and what is this All of which everything we know is a part? and what are the ethical implications of that, and what might it mean in our living? and what does it have to do wiht our loves and our hurts and our hopes? and what is this Universe that goes forth in a moment from an infinitely small, infinitely dense darkness and void and creates worlds and gives us life?

v

Maybe you haven't got a doubt in the world about the existence, or nonexistence, or whatever, of God. Or —

Maybe you find yourself speaking of God with a ringing ambivalence.

Maybe you are a theist, which means you believe in a God who is some kind of person or cosmic super-person.

Or, maybe, like so many mystics, or like the theologian Paul Tillich, or like our own Transcendentalists, or like some kinds of Eastern religions, you believe in something, some central Life of the Universe, but you are not a theist because what you mean by God is not some super Somebody-out-there but rather something in which all the universe, and you and I ourselves, are a part.

Maybe mostly you figure you don't believe any of this stuff, and think life and the universe are some kind of mechanism and all reducible to mathematical formulas.

Maybe you are troubled by your own contradictions.

v

Maybe we need to talk more immediately about our own firsthand experience, our own emptiness and ecstasies, with less embarrassment, with more poetry. That's why I like that clause in our Purposes and Principles:

"Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life."

v

Last night the dog and I stood in silence for a long time, out on the hill in back of the house, in the great quiet and darkness of Westhampton, watching as our tiny planet shaded entirely our tiny moon, and in the dark, through the crystal-clear skies, looked — at least I did, Scooby was likely smelling things — I looked into the depth of space.

What language could I offer? We do need a vocabulary of reverence. But the vocabulary is quite secondary to the reverence and must rise naturally from it. And that, I am certain, will communicate far more than outworn shibboleths.

The Reality I am attempting to speak of — isn't the ancient Tao te Ching about right when it says:

There is a thing inherent and natural,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Motionless and fathomless,
It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted.
It may be regarded as the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name.
If I am forced to give it a name,
I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme.

And there is another line that says

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name . . .

v

I am pretty sure that religious language should be a struggle, should always be a struggle. If it can be repeated mechanically, it isn't helping us get to the real thing.

Clinging to familiar shibboleths about God only seals us into an outmoded universe with its Bibles of unquestioned authority, its heathen tribes versus godly warriors, its dragons in the sea, its angels and archangels; and its God, who is always too small, too neatly wrapped.

We have to let it go.

We have to set our minds free to think, see, perceive in another way.

Whatever there is to be known — the point is not to have opinions about it, dogma about it — but to come into direct relationship with it.

And then it comes to us again

that it is not so simple

that behind and beyond our everyday experience

there is this mysterious energy (some have called it Spirit);

there is Life Itself

and we awaken to a world that is not dead as we had thought, lifeless rock and soil

but a living organism with fire at its heart

and this living earth ceaselessly turning with the planets in that immensity too vast to measure or comprehend

and all this community of the Universe the artwork of Life Itself,

And human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

¹ Madame Bovary.

² By Michael Paulson, June 28.

³ May 17, 2003.

⁴ Nature. In LOA, 40.

⁵ From Tintern Abbey.

⁶ Excursion 1141-7.

⁷ "Religious Sentiment in the Light of Science," 1871, pp. 19-20, in Peden, 105.

Parting

Theodore Parker:

Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere.
its temple, all space;
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.

Readings

William James Potter was one of those great 19th-century radicals who had had enough of the old language and the old assumptions that went along with it. And he wrote —

No definition of religion, I think, will satisfy the philosophy of the subject which does not in some way denote a contact which the finite mind has with the vitalizing and sustaining Energy of the universe. It is not necessary that the definition should embrace the idea of a personal Deity, not necessary that it should attempt the impossible problem, which most theological systems do attempt, of defining the Infinite; but it must, in order to cover all the facts, in some way recognize the Infinite, — in other words, recognize that the human soul is conscious of a life that is not bounded by its material organism nor by any limits which itself can measure, but opens outward into the whole infinity and eternity of things, and is a natural, inherent part of the universal order.⁷

v

From J. Krishnamurti, On God, p. 51

At the end of a lecture about God, someone asks Krishnamurti a question:

Questioner: "You never mention God. Has he no place in your teachings?"

Krishnamurti: "You talk a great deal about God, don't you? Your books are full of it. You build churches, temples, you make sacrifices, you do rituals, perform ceremonies, and you are full of ideas about God, are you not? You repeat the word, but your acts are not godly, are they? Though you worship what you call God, your ways, your thoughts, your existence, are not godly, are they? Though you repeat the word God, you exploit others, do you not? . . .

So you are very familiar with God, at least with the word; but the word is not God. . . . I don't use that word for the very simple reason that you know it."

And on another occasion, a questioner asks,

Q: "Tell us of God."

K: "Instead of my telling you what God is, let us find out whether you can realize that extraordinary state, not tomorrow or in some distant future, but right now as we are quietly sitting here together. Surely that is much more important. But to find out what God is, all belief must go. The mind that would discover what is true cannot believe in truth, cannot have theories or hypotheses about God. . . . When the mind is full of belief . . . it is burdened, and a burdened mind can never find out what is true. . . . You yourself must see the importance of relinquishing . . . all the accumulations of centuries, the superstitions, knowledge, beliefs; you must see the truth that any form of burden . . . dissipates energy. For the mind to be quiet there must be an abundance of energy, and that energy must be still. . . . Because the mind has abundant energy that is still and silent, the mind itself becomes that which is sublime. . . . When the mind is completely still, . . . then that energy is love."

Meditate

We gather in silence because our words fail us and our theories delude us and our opinions cannot bear the weight of our living.

We gather in silence because, below and beyond the tumult, we hope to hear silent music.

We enter the silence because we have felt a presence and a motion and a spirit that rolls through all things

We seek the silence because we have known at the core of us a central peace that has met us there and has eluded us in in the clamor,

but here we have felt enfolded by love and buoyed up by it

And what we know here we cannot speak,

Truth more true

Yearnings more sublime

Than any speech but silence.