A sermon for Yom Kippur by F. Jay Deacon
September 26, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
A sermon for Yom Kippur by F. Jay Deacon
September 26, 2004
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
I want to begin with the central thesis from last week: that underneath all the clutter in our minds, when all that is stripped away: —
There is an essential creative energy — and since it is beyond the capacity of language to name, you can call it what you like, knowing that no name is adequate: that Ground Luminosity, that Zero Point Energy, Universal Consciousness; The All; the Uncreated and Deifying Light; luminous, naked awareness; to the Buddhist, Rigpah; to the Jewish mystic, the Shekhinah.
But we are full of hurt; we act out of a legacy of pain and cruelty, sometimes even confusing that pain the screams in our hearts with the voice of God: — and so, the special relationship between religion and war.
Yet — before and beyond and underneath all the junk — that luminous emptiness, the very energy from which all this Universe sprang and continually springs. We must start there. Not with the hurt, but with this great, boundless creative energy.
The High Holy Days take us to Creation, the marvelous appearance of the world of Life out of the Void. The gift of the breath of Life, and it comes with the question: how are you spending this life of yours; do you know that you are mortal?
The assumption is not that we are born with some Original Sin, depraved already. No — it's that we are perhaps Nature's highest achievement, full of promise, but often missing the mark. That's the meaning of that old word "sin."
It's true that sometimes we crash and burn. The remarkable thing is that we can fly.
And the High Holy Days come to us with that ancient call, expressed in the Hebrew word, t'shuv, to turn, to turn back to some essential truth in ourselves.
I am going to hazard a dangerous word here, an F-word. Please follow this, consider it. You may, at the end of the day, decide to keep the particular word out of your vocabulary. No problem. But I am going to introduce the word "faith," here.
I want to talk about good faith and bad faith. Our religious goal is good faith — a life that keeps faith with that greater Universe of Life, that creative essence at the heart of all things, at the heart of us.
As you know, faith has often been equated with "belief." Once, after a spirited interaction before an assembly of classes at Naperville North High School, near Chicago — an event that faced a fundamentalist minister — with the predictable anti-gay sentiments — opposite me, several curious students came up afterwards, and one of them seemed intent on pressing me for my beliefs. I said, I try not to have beliefs. I discerned on her face a sort of . . . puzzled look. A minister who tries not to have beliefs? What next?
But "beliefs" are not what, at its best, religion is about at all. At its worst, "beliefs" is its preoccupation.
"Beliefs" are the acceptance of statements without evidence; too often they are the acceptance of the intrinsically unbelievable, of absurdities and nonsense. And some call that faith!
Listen. We live in times when peace means war, when democracy means the silencing of dissent, when freedom means slavery. So it should not surprise us if this good word "faith" means, on the lips of some, "beliefs." But let us remember that peace is still peace, and democracy and freedom and faith remain.
And faith is not a set of opinions about God and Jesus and the afterlife. Faith is life, life lived. In good faith.
It is life lived in good faith with what is within you. It is life lived in good faith with what is around you.
And it's life lived in good faith with what undergirds it all, the creative energy from which we ourselves, and all this world of life, spring, new, in every moment.
Consider then the Buddhist sense of this word faith.
The American Buddhist writer and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg — in a book that has happily made its rounds around this congregation, a book called simply Faith — writes:
Faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there the underlying thread connecting the moment's experience to the fabric of all of life. It opens us to a bigger sense of who we are and what we are capable of doing.Faith enables us, despite our fear, to get as close as possible to the truth of the present moment, so that we can offer our hearts fully to it, with integrity.1
Though save the world we must, no one of us individually is called to save the world. Each of us is called simply to be faithful.
And what might it mean, to be "faithful"? An answer can be found in the way Buddhism has all along defined faith: to draw near, to place the heart upon, to set forth.
To draw near to that luminous emptiness at the heart of things, yes. And to draw near to the truth of the present moment and not flee from it; to draw near to my own existence, to the life that is given me: to see it with eyes wide open, and be here.
The fidelity of the heart: To place the heart upon the object of my faith. Well, what is that? Is it Life Itself? is it that luminous emptiness at the heart of things? is it the essential creative energy from which my life and all being flows? is it a vision of the possible? Is it something like those seven principles of our Unitarian Universalist faith?
What to I value and cherish?
And faith is to set forth.
It comes down to something Sharon Salzberg says:
Faith is the animation of the heart that says, "I choose life, I align myself with the potential inherent in life, I give myself over to that potential. The spark of faith is ignited the moment we think, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to try."2
It is to take the next step, because only from that place can more of the path ahead be seen. It is to move into the unknown, meeting whatever the next moment brings. It is the acknowledged possibility that our lives can be different.
Faith. Drawing near to what is real and true, to the truth of our own lives, to the Life and creative Energy at the heart of things. Setting your heart upon it. Going forth, taking the next step. In faith.
But we have become false, to some extent or another, and our public life has become false. And the message of Yom Kippur is that at the heart of us there is truth and life and good, and it is time to turn to it.
I learned that there are really two kinds of religion, two kinds of faith. Ken Wilbur uses a couple of exotic terms and calls them exoteric and esoteric. But maybe you get the idea. One begins with some external authority — it begins with things-out-there. The other begins with things-in-here — with an inner truth.
"Outer" religion is mythic religion, built upon beliefs in mythic events believed to be concrete and literal. Moses parted the Red Sea. The world was created in six days. Jesus was a God born of a virgin. The earth, which, after all, needs to be supported, is sitting on an elephant, say many Hindus, which begs the question of what supports the elephant, but they have an answer and it's a large tortoise. If you ask what supports the tortoise they'll tell you a serpent and if you ask what supports the serpent they change the subject. Lao Tzu was 900 years old when he was born and Krishna made love to four thousand cow maidens.
If you begin to doubt, it's because you don't have enough "faith"!
Many have tried to draw meaning out of these myths by turning them into allegories, as if to say, "I know what you really mean by that," but the truth is that the original mythmakers lived in a time when things were not subtle, not allegory: They really believed it, literally. There is nothing wrong with drawing meaning out of ancient myths, but that is never where the other kind of religion, or faith, begins.
The other kind of faith is a religion of interiors. It is mysticism rather than mythology, and it doesn't believe things. It has no need to take its stand against science. It does not need to claim to be the only way. It is hungry to learn.
This other kind of faith must first:
find the light beyond every form,
and then,
must find the formless beyond the light.
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."
The relationship is prior to our understanding of it. We exist in relationship to a larger Life. There is something in our being and in our consciousness that can knows it.
In my own movement beyond a mythic faith I knew a kind of terror that I might find out something that would upset my faith — er, I mean, beliefs. I looked for things to bolster my arguments, but I didn't really want to learn, and so had to ignore anything that had the potential to change my mind! It isn't just governments that do that.
Religion can make very bad faith.
Religion that considers "faith" to mean "beliefs" can become a never-ceasing fount of mindless superstition
— a stagnant and static repository of outworn beliefs that breed hate, suspicion, contempt, violence —
Once I held such a set of beliefs and thought it was faith. And that so-called faith was wreaking havoc in my life. It was making me false to myself and making me a distinctly uncreative, even destructive, presence in the world.
And so I have to say this:
To hold on to a faith that is really just a set of beliefs, to practice a faith that is simply the acceptance of statements without evidence; to believe what is intrinsically unbelievable, consisting of absurdities and nonsense —
Leads to bigotry, the denial of rights and dignity, a life of supreme irresponsibility, even war and terrorism.
That kind of faith has made the United States a menace to the world. It has put this nation into a position of bad faith with the air and water and earth and has set the world on a rapid course to cataclysm and the end of this human experiment.
That is bad faith.
And I say it is bad faith to hold onto that kind of religion, to ignore the contradictions, to silence your mind, to close your eyes to the consequences the way our government and corporations have shut their eyes to the warming of the air and seas, the poisoning of the atmosphere, the exploitation of the earth's people.
The Yom Kippur call to us — to turn — is a call to good faith.
Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Living faithfully, inwardly, outwardly, and in relation to that vast, unseen dimension of all Being?
Can we turn: The great good news is that all this Universe, all of Being, everything that is, including you — possesses an inherent power for self-transformation. This is the day of the world's birth.
There is something that is always, already there, after you've stripped everything else away, after you've been broken open. What remains —
— open, empty, naked like the sky, an endless ocean, all creative, always, everywhere, flowing with new creation, a fountain of freshness in lives that may feel stuck or stagnant.
Let us hear the call. Let us turn, return again, to what is real and true in us,
free from all that would distract us from our path —
— and set forth in faith.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
2 Salzberg, 16.
Born of love to love, we grow weary, heavy with regret, sorry for ourselves, and afraid to know what might have been.
Look now to the cities:
See the broken streets, poor and decayed, and all afraid.
See them and ask: What have we done?
Behold the water and air and soil, and see:
Still we beat plowshares into swords, and make spears out of pruning hooks.
Disfigured lies the human form divine, estranged from its center! "Your iniquities have separated you from your God."
Vision fades as the Presence recedes; the voice grows still.
We are alone, all alone, our meaning unremembered.
Here, now, we need not be alone with our failings.
Let us recall, together, blessed moments when clouds parted and the sun appeared.
We looked. We saw.
There was healing and the joy of hope.
Life of life, turn us to the heights where human goodness finds its dwelling; lead us home.
Who can say: I have purified my heart, and am free from sin?
There are none on earth so righteous that they never sin.
Cast away all the evil you have done, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.
A new heart will I give you, a new spirit put within you. I will remove the heart of stone, and give you a heart that feels.
Once more Atonement Day has come.
All pretense gone, naked heart revealed to the hiding self,
We stand on holy ground, between the day that was and the one that must be.
We tremble.
At what did we aim? How did we stumble?
What did we take? What did we give? To what were we blind?
Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep! Rouse yourselves, you slumberers, out of your slumber! Examine your deeds, and turn.
Remember who you are, you who are wasting your years in vain pursuits that neither profit nor save. Look closely at yourselves, your ways and your deeds, every one of you!
On this day the fate of nations is in the balance _ for war or peace, for famine or plenty.
So too with every single creature: life and death are in the balance.
Every mortal's record is set forth: our acts and our schemes, our thoughts and desires.
— I have modified this, from Gates of Repentance: The New Union Prayerbook
for the Days of Awe. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform), 5738/1978.