A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 7, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 7, 2004
Not so long ago a member of a previous congregation was asked, in anguish, even disgust, by someone who was dear to her — asked: "Why can't you just believe what you were taught? Why do you have to go to that place?" So many folks out there — so very many — seem so sure about their bibles and the tenets of their churches and what one must believe, what God thinks and wants and requires on matters ranging from who may get married to whom, to just what happens after you die.
Until my mother no longer had an attic in which to keep them, I had, left over from a past life, the one I lived before I was a Unitarian Universalist — I had an attic full of great fat books explaining all about all these things in intricate detail and with a relentless certainty. People have died for the crime of disagreeing with what was in those old books.
Why couldn't John Murray — founder of Universalism in America — believe in Hell? Why did Emerson insist: What [another soul] announces I must find true in me, or wholly reject, and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
In ancient Greece, Anaxagoras said the sun wasn't a god, and people were aghast, scandalized. Why can't you just believe what we taught you? Because he couldn't believe that the sun was a god, they declared him an atheist.
Of course, Jews in the Hellenistic world were unbelievers because they didn't believe in the Greek city gods; and the early Christians were atheists because they didn't believe in the Roman gods.
In the fourth century Bishop Athanasius exiled the proto-Unitarian Bishop Arius from Alexandria because, since he didn't believe Jesus was God, he was obviously an unbeliever and an atheist.
The Protestant reformer Calvin executed his opponents, including the proto-Unitarian Miguel Servetus, by decapitation and slow burning, calling them "hissing serpents" and "Satan's spawn," because of what they didn't believe.
Andrew Hill, our minister in Edinburgh, likes to point out the fact that the Free Church of Scotland has called the Scottish Unitarians "atheist cattle."
I heard an Episcopalian priest friend of mine explain what I am to somebody. "A Unitarian Universalist," he declared, "is somebody who believes in one God at most!"
Unitarians and Universalists are unbelievers when it comes to most of the religious beliefs most people in this world hold as immutable truth.
There is an interesting biblical story — in the New Testament — that ought to give true believers some pause. It's the story behind the Christian season of Lent, actually — the season that began on Ash Wednesday. In it, this promising young Galilean, whose mind is full of all the teachings and certainties he'd learned as a child — things everybody knows and nobody questions, but things they know secondhand, don't know in any deep-soul way, personally, but everybody knows it, or so they think. Everybody knew the ancient beliefs about the Kingdom of God and how the throne of David was going to have to be restored. Conventional religion, correct doctrine. But he withdraws into the wilderness for forty days and nights of sublime and sometimes frightening silence. He's tempted with the familiar easy answers but in the silent clarity of that wilderness he knows the old answers won't work and he comes out with a new vision. And he procedes to become a great teacher and even prophet, but if you listen carefully to what little is still preserved of his teaching — listen to that and not the creeds that were later piled up in his name — you will find his teachings remarkably belief-free.
Now let me make a distinction.
Traditional religion is about beliefs. Believing things. Skepticism is about questioning things, not assuming and believing.
And from there, we can find our way to the real item: faith that has nothing to do with beliefs, but faith as Sharon Salzberg2 defines it: With faith we move into the unknown, openly meeting whatever the next moment brings. Faith is what gets us out of bed, gets us on an airplane to an unknown land, opens us to the possibility that our lives can be different. . . . Whatever takes us to our edge, to our outer limits, leads us to the heart of life's mystery, and there we find faith. —
Or faith as the gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels3 defines it: faith that has nothing to do with beliefs — and I particularly love this — but is the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love. The trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love.
You may remember Elaine Pagels' name. She wrote The Gnostic Gospels. But whatever is a gnostic? In the ancient world, they were the people the ancient church warned believers about — this class of people known as gnostics. Essentially, they trusted their inner light, what, as we would say, they knew in their gut. And what they knew was that there is no discontinuity, no divide, between divine and human. Yes, there's more to Being that what we can grasp through our senses, and weigh and measure — but you can say that about us, too. Our lives flow into Life Itself.
As a movement, gnosticism first arose a full century or so before Jesus, among Hellenistic Jews. To them, the demarcation between God and humans was not a fixed barrier. They imagined a God whose titanic body took up the whole Kosmos. Our world was once indistinguishable from God.
We generally know things through our senses as they are touched by a world outside ourselves. But the ancient wisdom says that our consciousness can to come into contact with things in a much more direct way. We can move beyond the forms of things and their outer appearances to what is inside them,
and see the world in a grain of sand
and see eternity in an hour,
and see the universe in ourselves.
In Aurobindo's words:
"To see all things in the self and the self in all things — to be aware of one being everywhere."4
You see what that means? Universe equals God. So of course, deep down, we have knowledge of the divine, always were part of the divine. Gnosis is a personal knowledge.
Harold Bloom, the Yale professor who recently brought out a book about Gnosis and calls himself a Gnostic, says the best definition of Gnosticism was not written in Alexandria 1,800 years ago, but was written in America in 1831. And her it is:
"It is by yourself without ambassador that God speaks to you." And this:
Were you ever instructed by a wise and eloquent man? Remember then, were not the words that made your blood run to your cheeks, that made you tremble or delighted you,—did they not sound to you as old as yourself? Was it not truth that you knew before, or do you ever expect to be moved from the pulpit or from man by anything but plain truth? Never. It is God in you that responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another.
That, of course, was Emerson, in one of his Notebooks. Harold Bloom says he is writing, and I quote him, "in the conviction that Emerson is right, and that a great many of us are Gnostics without knowing what it is that we know," about "Gnosticism as the spiritual alternative available right now to Christians, Jews, Muslims, and secular humanists."5
I have had many interesting conversations with evangelicals — including myself, because I once was one. Once after the service in Oak Park I had a conversation with an evangelical whom one of our members had met on the street and they got to talking about religion and she invited him to the service.
He had a religious experience; and overlaid on that, he had a theology and knew a lot of stuff, like where we are going after we die, and like the fact, he is sure, that the two of us are bound for different destinations. I believe we shared something, too. But he would have none of that: because I could not share his beliefs, it was inconceivable to him that we each had an awareness of, and a relationship with, the same larger Life — a gnosis.
Way back I thought about the way he does. But my skepticism kicked in. Had to. I know too much about the text of the New Testament — that all mixed in with some beautiful notions and creative ideas, it's full of very unoriginal borrowings of religious features from the ancient world, historical impossibilities, inaccuracies, severe internal contradictions, problems with the original text, and, worst of all, fantastic circular arguments. No, worst of all, fundamental contradictions between what you're suppose to believe
and
my own Gnosis. Ah.
We shared a Gnosis. Something we both knew, in a personal way. But, if I may say so, he had too much belief. Gnosis doesn't need belief. It loves skepticism.
And often I think: how much deep human connection and spiritual communion is lost to us because of beliefs.
John Alexie Crane, an elder statesman among our ministers, has characterized UUs as rational mystics. Or, your could say, skeptical Gnostics. Now these words, "skeptical" and "Gnostic," are not usually put together. And what we have to do is to make use of these two ways of seeing, alternately. They have something in common.
The skeptic is not a believer.And the Gnostic not a believer.
The Gnostic makes a good skeptic because both avoid, at all costs, belief.
We will have to set our minds free to think, see, perceive in another way.
It's time religious leaders faced the most fundamental questions with ruthless honesty. And for all of us, is there not a moral obligation to run our own thoughts — to take responsibility for what we affirm and say, to recognize the consequences — and not simply to turn our minds over to dead apostles and church councils, and then blame them for the consequences!
So I come to one of the great unheralded religious thinkers of modern times, William James Potter, who was our minister in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Some of the leaders of 19th-century Unitarianism thought Rev. Potter was an unbeliever, and they took his name out of the directory of ministers, along with Theodore Parker; in fact, they declared Rev. Potter a "Parkerite," which meant something like unbeliever. But Potter said that what really matters is the contact the human mind can have with "the vitalizing and sustaining Energy of the universe." And he said "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 . . . recognize that the human soul is conscious of a life that . . . opens outward into the whole infinity and eternity of things, and is a natural, inherent part of the universal order.6
Whoa, that sounds pretty crazy. Not only does he not seem to believe in all the traditional things we taught him. But good grief! He seems to want us to have some kind of direct experience with the "vitalizing and sustaining Energy of the universe"!
But what is the alternative? Pre-formed anwers to pre-determined questions? Life is not like that.
We can only draw near to the truth of the present moment by participating in it, and in the flow of things, the present moment dissolves into the flow of time and eternity. What seems certain, impermeable, unchanging — is not really so simple or so certain. If we look closely — there is always more than meets the eye, and it is an unceasing movement, fluidity, pourousness, and motion — and we, you and I, are part of all this. We're not separate from this ever-flowing Mystery of Life. It is in us, and are lives are embedded in it.
And so, as we say so often — No ancient oracle, no ecclesiastical authority, nothing — can tell you what is true. As the great spiritual teacher Krishnamurti used to say, "Don't believe the speaker." We just have to know this Mystery of Life firsthand, know it in our gut. And we can't take this moment's understanding and freeze-dry it for all time, into something solid, so that it becomes just another bible or creed. We must enter this flow, live close to our hearts, keep the pores of our being open to the Divine Wind — and let our understanding, our gnosis — continue to unfold. When we do this in a community, listening to the witness of one another, as well — our quest is made very much more rewarding.
But for all this, we need some silence. And what is this silence that we need — like? Next month, there will be a solar eclipse. But you'd have to go to southern Africa or Antarctica to see it. There will be another one in October, but you'd have to be in the north Pacific or Alaska to see it. Anwhere else, you won't see the sun's corona because here, 93 million miles away, the ambient light in the Earth's atmosphere is brighter than the corona. Because we're embedded in the Earth's atmosphere, we are blinded to it by the ambient light in our atmosphere. Astronomers and photographers will go where they have to, to catch that subtle magnificence. We, too, are surrounded by ambient noise. We have to find some silence.
And then — it's not that we can believe anything we want. Those who believe anything they want live in institutions, try to leap from tall buildings with the thought that they have the ability to fly. No, if we believe at all, we believe what we must, out of an inner necessity, and we hold those things as working truths, always subject to revision and new light.
The great United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in his Markings: "The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding without, and only the one who listens can speak." The ancient mystic St. John of the Cross spoke of this life lived close to the soul as a life of listening, and he said that below and beyond the babel and tumult, he heard silent music. At their best and most vital, spiritual traditions call us beyond and beneath the fragile facade of beliefs to a journey, to a deeper listening, to trust what we know in our guts — our gnosis — and to trust what, through participation in this great drama of Life Itself, we are coming to know. And that is the only source of the faith we need: the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
6 William James Potter (1829-1893), "Religious Sentiment in the Light of Science," pp. 19-20.
We gather, drawn by a hungering for what is real and true, and we know that no institution, no authority, can dispense the treasure we seek; it cannot be had at second hand.
Yet into this place we come, hungering, hoping — as journeyers, to find entry to greater capacities for knowing, a more penetrating sight, a wisdom, that is deeper, and broader, and higher; for capacities of soul and heart and mind.
We come in friendship, as those who have shared sacred pathways, who share sacred tasks, who face unknown tomorrows.
We come in humble trust in the light that fills our eyes, the dreams that fill our deepest hearts, the urgent wisdom that will come clear to us, — that the calling will fit our talents, that the work is ours to do, that there is strength in us, strength and wisdom that the day will reveal, day upon day, on this sacred pathway that calls us onward.
Let the tension, and the anxiety, and the fears fall away. Let us walk on, in the name of what we hope and love, led by the truth of our hearts, that speaks quietly, beneath and beyond the noise and the tumult, in this silence.
Hildegard of Bingen — those are her words in the first hymn today — also wrote this:
The Word is living,
being, spirit,
all verdant greening,
all creativity.
From the Gospel of Thomas:
verse 70.
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is wthin you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Here is a Gnostic credo from the second century of the Common Era:
What makes us free is the Gnosis
of who we were
of what we have become
of where we were
of wherein we have been thrown
of whereto we are hastening
of what we are being freed
of what birth really is
of what rebirth really is
From the essay, "Montaigne, or, The Skeptic," by R. W. Emerson.
The ground occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the evidence of its [the mind's] perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. . . . Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic . . . The [spiritual person] finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. . . . Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors can not put the statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith, and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth.