A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
May 23, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
May 23, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
To dare: Something I do too little. I know this: at certain extremities, I feel my own edges.
So, there I am musing on some lofty sentiment, likely something Emerson said, and life seems to stride up and announce, crisply, "This is a test." I think of this in small enterprises. The prospect of greater ones seems, in these times, more than a remote possibility. So a small enterprise, a small challenge this week — this extraordinary week — makes this real.
It seemed there was something faulty in my Palm Pilot. There were three sermons and four weddings. As last week approached I though What have I done, am I mad? What was I thinking when I sent out the press releases announcing a special service last Sunday night?
Yet it had seemed that something must be done, absolutely must, to mark the stunning turn of human affairs that would take hold last Monday. One little blow to drive back the current wave of repression and regression.
But where was the time or energy or inspiration supposed to come from? When questioned by myself I had no adequate explanation.
But I am quite aware of these things:
One, I could not have lived with not having tried. And two, I really cannot remember a more worthwhile worship experience, ever; and the press and the TV cameras and, thankfully, the crowd, turned up. And a third thing: the mistake was in not daring or attempting enough. (My colleagues at Arlington Street conducted at least 50 weddings!)
There are times when a harmony of inward and outward worlds opens great stores of energy. Not just mine. There were many of you who, despite long weeks nad many responsibilities, recognized hte moment and responded and made the evening unforgettable. And there was Greg's truly fabulous music. The crowd, mostly visitors, came, and the TV cameras. In some minute way Channing's words came true. Practice for the bigger things.
I know that it is possible to promise too much, attempt too much. But there are particular endeavours that don't really allow us to decline, not with integrity.
But where does it start? We know that these days require the best and the highest and the most daring of us. That's easy enough to see. It's plain enough that the world, all this world of life, trembles on a precipice. I am personally convinced that this human endeavour will not make it through another century unless truly revolutionary change begins now.
So what do you want me to do about it, I ask myself.
There is something potentially depressing about this realization. Who is ever all they might be? Not me. I notice this in every day, over and over. I fall short. We want to hear about the state of the world and the urgency of creative human action, and then again, we don't.
What the greatest of spiritual geniuses are talking about is a state of mind and consciousness. A spiritual revolution. That is the essential thing. The highest wisdom.
Sometimes under a night sky, or under the trees in my side yard, or walking on the ocean shore, it all seems so clear. There is a terrible beauty and harmony about it. It draws me into its realm. I am recalled to sanity. I feel the relative weight and importance of things.
"At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world. Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening."
Our problem is that we have not been attentive, listening. A titanic false construct of phony values has been laid over our natural human impulses like an impervious lamination, cutting us off from them and them from us. Our relation to the universe is false.
Emerson wrote,
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
And then I recall a more ancient knowledge that is part of us. In our bodies, in our guts, we still know that we are Nature. We are embedded in a larger ecology of being. There is a unitive force, a love toward all existence. We know that ours is not a separate journey.
There is an intelligence about this universe of life. It
doesn't require a belief in any supreme being to say that the Universe is in
some important sense an intelligent whole, even a living whole, an
interdependent web of life. It somehow pulled off this planet of life, the tree
under which I sit, and the mind that knows it's sitting under the tree and
noticing the beauty and being annoyed by the idiotic beep beep beep of the
construction vehicles that I cannot see somewhere in the Westhampton
woods preparing another plot of the land for another McMansion; —
a mind that can judge that noise to be unbeautiful.
There is a native Genius about us that detects through all the kingdoms of organized life a great unity.
When the mind acts with integrity, it creates beauty and wholeness: — Even as the vision of universal order in the mind of Anaxagoras led, through the sacred laws of geometry and mathematics, which are laws of the mind — to the construction of the Parthenon with its sacred goddess of Wisdom, and thence through the mind of Plato into a vision of justice and social order.
Understand it however you will, there is a human perception of beauty, justice, and social order. When we live by it we are merely living with Integrity, perceiving what every person is capable of knowing.
That state of mind is characterized by a sense that the outward and external world no longer seems so external, but resonates inwardly and personally. It's why meditation has served so many people, so well. It requires attention. What Emerson called "lowly listening."
Religions have tried to codify this vision of integrity and wholeness. Done so with varying degrees of success. But there is a danger here. You want to know what to believe, want to know what to say to somebody on the elevator between floors who asks you what Unitarian Universalists believe. You want answers nailed down to the Great Questions of life.
But truth is not some frozen thing. When I face the day attentively, as if the Universe has something more to teach me, I do far better than when I take the position that the world exists to make unreasonable demands on us.
And codes and doctrines cannot substitute for this state of mind, this greater Wisdom, this spiritual integrity. And when they are substituted, and when you impose them on a person and provide rules and codes that suppress a person's own human responses, the dehumanizing consequences can be terrible.
Then what you get is the appalling situation in which religious people look at, say, joyful people finally able to marry the person they love, and call it an abomination. Their own human responses would have been better than their dogma. Not to speak of the long history of religions setting people at war with others who, in this prepackaged system of meaning, must be labeled infidels.
And there is Emerson asking, again —
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
This consciousness, this state of mind, has been called many things. This word, "spirit," to be "people of the spirit," has been associated with it. Like any religious language, it's been abused, adopted by fanatical people.
But at its best it means living out of this state of mind — direct awareness, integrity. Obedience to an inner principle that is somehow, in ways I don't propose to explain, coherent with this Intelligent universe of life, and flowing naturally from it. Integrity is not a passive thing.
Emerson said,
only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine. . . . there is a soul at the center of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can harm the universe. . . . There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.
You will say, There, he is talking about some supreme being again. No, no I'm not. You may, you may not, believe in such a thing. I don't.
William James Potter, who was a major part of the religious movement in which our former Florence congregation played so great a part, was no theist either. And yet listen to him:
This feeling or affection is at the bottom of the whole, . . . [but] does not require a personal being or "God," but is [a] pervading all things, their source and centre, life and essence . . . But it is not essential to religious feeling or to religious action that the secret motor and life of the universe should be represented under the conception of a mighty universal sovereign seated on a throne at the centre of things . . . : it is only necessary that the fact of man's vital relation to the universe in some form should be felt and acknowledged as a source of obligation upon conduct. . .1
Does it matter?
People living out of such a consciousness act not merely out of pragmatic calculation, but with fire, passion. They take risks, they Stretch.
If you live this way, in a state of deep attention, you know about "stretching." This word, Attention, in fact, stems from the Latin attendere, meaning to "stretch." As my colleague Tom Owen-Towle put it,
One way or another, in being authentic, awake religious pilgrims, we are stretched. Oh, are we stretched! Our souls, our minds, our hearts stretched into shapes beyond our imagining or comfort level. . . . [A]ll of us who deign to be spiritual travelers are summoned to stretch, stretch, stretch ourselves all the way to the grave.
Yet when we live coherently with this highest Wisdom, flowing out of the Integrity of our own selves, there is a sense of rightness to our lives.
When we act contrary to this inner integrity, we feel fragmented, compromised, or to use Emerson's phrase, we are gods in ruins.
This "highest wisdom" will call forth our best capacities and it will give direction to our intellectual activity. And the vision that emerges will be weighed and tested by our intellect. And it won't — ever — contradict good science. Ken Wilber wrote,
We all know how to wonder, don't we? From the depths of a Kosmos too miraculous to believe, from the heights of a universe too wondrous to worship, from the insides of an astonishment that has no boundaries, an answer begins to suggest itself, and whispers to us lightly. If we listen very carefully, from within this infinite wonder, perhaps we can hear the gentle promise that, in the very heart of the Kosmos itself, both science and religion will be there together to welcome us home.2
There will be a sense of continuity, cohesion,
Integrity —
in our minds — in our deeds — ;
continuity and coherency with
the actions of planetary motion
the shifting of continental plates
the great migrations of birds and mammals
the society of bees
and
the actions of subatomic particles.
All this informs the human condition — defines us, describes its limits, displays possibilities for change and perhaps transformation.
Here is the best part, I think. I believe that to the extent that we learn to live this way, in this state of mind, we will know ourselves strong and not weak, rich and not in poverty.
The essence of it is a love for all being that enlarges and empowers me. It is insight and wisdom and hope. It does not allow me to feel overwhelmed or engulfed by the day's news, by a lying government, by a disastrous war, by secret atrocities, by the system of greed that now governs our country and is right now destroying the planet.
I named those things just now — it is the nature of attention and integrity and wisdom to name reality and face it. But attention and integrity and wisdom yield another truth: there is something greater, the wellsprings of our humanity.
It does not imagine that there was but one Jesus, or Mandela, or Margaret Marshall. It does not imagine that the stores of creativity and love are depleted. It lifts me above and beyond my own fears and imbecilities. People everywhere are feeling a call, a quickening, and an energy. To enlarge their awareness, to draw more greatly on spiritual and moral imagination.
This quality of mind knows, with Channing, that
There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.
©2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
As the doors of this meeting-house draw us out of work and routine into a community of hopefulness,
so we sense ourselves at a portal of a different world, of our making, yet strange and mysterious.
We carry long pasts, ancient, far beyond the reach of our
own days, and are come to the portal of an unknown and dangerous future,
and we gather to recall our inward resources, and to hear the subtle
rhythms and pulse of the dawning world, and its call to us, and its promise, if
only we will hear, and link our care and our energies to the promise of the
new day,
— that from these roiling ruins may rise a fairer world and
fuller lives; — that fromt he pain, new birth.
Let us hear, and attend, let us comprehend, beneath the noise and tumult, at the heart of things, the way forward, the sacred work, the new creation
in the silence . . .
from Annie Dillard, "Teaching a Stone to Talk"
p. 255
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world. Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: the hum is the silence. . . .
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
And Channing, his address on "The Union," 1829:
[Speaking of George Cabot:] He had too much the wisdom of experience. He wanted what may be called the wisdom of hope. . . . There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.