-- Albert Einstein
Reading: by Tamin Ansary from an essay entitled “A Secular Mystic” (Faith: essays from believers, agnostics, and atheists edited by Victoria Zackhaim)
When I was a kid growing up in Afghanistan as part of a family whose status in society derived largely from its religious credentials, God was a word I heard routinely. People didn’t say, “Tomorrow, I’ll do such and such.” They said, “If God wills it, I’ll do such and such.” But no one ever specified who or what they meant by God. In devoutly Muslim Afghanistan, it was deemed unnecessary.
One day, however, when I was about five, I was playing with our neighbor’s son, Suleiman, and he warned me not to do some naughty thing because God would grab me by the forelock, pull me up through the sky, and punish me. Evidently, the sky was a solid blue screen behind which God was always sitting, always watching, rather like those postal inspectors who watch mail sorters through one-way glass to make sure they’re not opening people’s letters.
I looked up and thought, Okay, maybe the blue-screen idea is plausible, but this other concept? Some powerful being sitting up there watching us? A being with arms that could reach, fingers that could grab, and a fanny that could sit? That, I had trouble buying.
I asked my American-born mother if it were true, and she gave me a circuitous answer about different people believing different things, and what I got from her hedging was no, it wasn’t true. Suleiman’s “God” was a myth. Only later did I have the vocabulary to understand that my mother was an atheist….
…After soliciting my mother’s view about this matter, I consulted my father, and he just smiled. A Muslim, he said, could not think of God as having arms or fingers, or grabbing a forelock, or sitting in some spot; these ideas were heretical. He told me about an ancestor of ours, Sheikh Sa’duddin, a Sufi mystic… “The Sheikh saw God everywhere,” my father expounded. “He believed everything is God.”
“Everything?” I gulped.
“Everything. He saw God in the trees, the clouds, the dirt – everywhere he looked, he said, ‘This is God.’”
Reading: by my colleague Bruce Marshall from a book entitled A Holy Curiosity: Stories of a Liberal Religious Faith (p. ix)
I once was at the podiatrist’s having my feet examined. While the doctor checked one foot and then the other, he told me about his life. As a boy, this man had trouble with his feet and suffered much pain. That ordeal piqued his interest in podiatry and led him to devote his life to curing feet.
In that encounter I may have happened upon a truth of the human condition, for my troubles have also led to my profession. With me the issue has not been feet. Rather, I am pursued by a set of questions. Who am I? What do I trust? In what do I find meaning? How do I understand death? Who or what is God? What brings me hope? From my struggles with these questions of human existence has come my calling: the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
This experience shatters an assumption I used to make of how people choose their life’s work. I had thought that people make a career of what they do best. Those good at tinkering become mechanics. The best students become teachers. The people with the most perfect feet become podiatrists. Those with answers to life’s questions enter the clergy.
But I had trouble answering life’s questions, and I still do.
Reading: by Christina Baldwin from Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest (p. 36)
A List of Free Questions, from the Ridiculous to the Sublime:
What’s for dinner?
Who am I?
What am I supposed to do with my life…?
Who am I supposed to be doing it with?
Will I have fun?
What is the nature of spiritual fun?
Will I recognize it when it happens?
Is there a God out there, or is He/She/It all in here?
Is He/She/It laughing at all the silly questions I ask?
Are these silly questions?
Is there life on other planets?
Do they care about life on this one?
Do I care about life on this one?
What would I be willing to give up to save the world?
What are life’s real essentials for me?
A Curious Faith
A Sermon Delivered on May 17, 2015
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
As some of you know, but I am sure many do not, we had a congregational consultant named Mark Ewert visit us a few weeks back. We paid good money to fly him in from Washington, D.C. He spent the weekend here, meeting with a bunch of our volunteers and leaders, observing how we do church, what we do well and what we could do better.
He had a lot to say about things we do well. He remarked on our beautiful building, our sound governance, our solid finances, our strong lay leadership, our support and care for one another, and our fine religious education program. He said this is a “strong, vibrant, and spirit filled congregation.”
He mentioned two things we could do better. We would benefit from a clearer and more compelling vision for our future - how we, as a congregation, want to make a difference in the world, he said. And we could be better at making this place truly intergenerational. We are passionate about providing a religious home for all ages, and we work hard at it. Nevertheless, Mark had the impression that on most Sundays our church is divided into two separate groups: adult activities upstairs, kids classes downstairs.
Our Teacher Recognition this morning was a wonderful reminder of the good things that happen downstairs on Sunday mornings. Ideally, not only the teachers, but all of us would spend time downstairs with our younger religious seekers.
Teaching is a great way to get to know our kids. Contrary to the notion of religious instruction as a one-way process of conveying a body of religious information from a teacher to a student, our idea of religious education is a two-way street, a back-and-forth, in which both young and old pose questions and offer answers, and engage in a process of joint religious exploration.
This is how we have approached religious instruction for a long time now. I still like the way the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing put it two hundred ago, when he said:
“The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs… In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish spiritual life.”
The great thing about religious instruction, when done right, is that it awakens the soul of both student and teacher, both young and old.
* * *
Children are uniquely qualified to serve as fellow travelers on our religious journeys, because they are curious and ask good questions.
Tamin Ansary was just five years old when he first questioned the religious assumptions that everyone around him seemed to take for granted. Everyone spoke of God, as if God’s existence and God’s nature were an indisputable fact. As simple and straightforward as the sight of the sun.
But it was by questioning the concept of a God as someone sitting behind the blue screen of the sky, ready at any moment to reach down and pull us up, that Tamin was introduced to the more subtle teachings of Sufi mystics, and encouraged to imagine a different kind of God – a God who is everywhere and everything.
What is God? That is one of the Big Questions with which religion grapples. It’s closely connected to other big questions, for instance: What is the meaning of life and death? What is our place in the cosmos? What is good and evil? And how should we live?
When I was a child, my minister, who was also my teacher, boiled the big religious questions down to just three: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?
* * *
Religious questions have long fascinated Bruce Marshall. He was drawn to the ministry hoping to find answers. But over time he realized the questions will always remain with him. He writes:
“I listen to people speak of God and the attributes they give to this Being, and I wonder if there is a God I can experience. I think about death and how it changes everything, and I wonder how I should live, knowing that I will die. I meet difficult times in my days and in those of people close to me – times of struggle and suffering – and I look for that which may sustain us. Where do we find courage to face life’s terrors, and seek its possibilities?
These concerns keep at me. I may not have final answers, but I do have considerable experience dealing with the questions.”
* * *
It was Albert Einstein who said,
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when [one] contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
Einstein’s insight may be well-accepted in the realm of science, but his celebration of curiosity and questioning is not accepted as whole-heartedly in other fields – especially religion.
In a book published just last year entitled Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, the British author Ian Leslie reminds us that
“our oldest stories about curiosity are warnings: Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge, Icarus and the sun, Pandora’s box. Early Christian theologians railed against curiosity: Saint Augustine claimed that “God fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” Even humanist philosopher Erasmus suggested that curiosity was greed by a different name. For most of Western history, it has been regarded as at best a distraction, at worst a poison, corrosive to the soul and to society.
There’s a reason for this. Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask… In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point, as everyone from Galileo to Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs could have attested.” (p. xiv)
Curiosity is an innate human trait. It is a restlessness of mind and heart that drives us to explore the world around us, and engage with the people meet, eager to understand their thoughts and feelings. Curiosity takes us outside ourselves, and reminds us how we are part of a much grander scheme, concerned and connected with everything.
But even though we are endowed with a natural curiosity, it is easy to lose sight of its significance. It is easy to forget that in order to thrive curiosity needs to be consciously cultivated.
As Ian Leslie writes:
“Curiosity is vulnerable to benign neglect. As we grow older, we tend to become less active explorers of our mental environment, relying on what we’ve learned so far to see us through the rest of the journey. We can also become too preoccupied with the daily skirmishes of existence to take the time to pursue our interests. If you allow yourself to become incurious, your life will be drained of color, interest, and pleasure. You will be less likely to achieve your potential at work or in your creative life. While barely noticing it, you’ll become a little duller, a little dimmer. You may not think it could happen to you, but it can. It can happen to any of us. (p. xix)
* * *
People often assume that religion is in the business of providing final answers to the biggest questions of our lives. But I think this is a big misunderstanding of the religious enterprise. Like Bruce Marshall, I was drawn to Unitarian Universalism, because our faith celebrates not religious certainty, but a holy curiosity. Our clergy are not experts at providing definitive answers, but are rather experienced guides and fellow travelers, who help us grapple with the questions that consume us. They help us consider possible answers, and then support us as we move beyond those answers, and come up even better questions, designed to lead us toward to deeper truths.
Good questions mean a lot to us. This is why many UUs are fond of the words of the German author Rainer Maria Rilke, who in a letter to a young poet wrote:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
The American author Ingrid Bengis makes a similar point. She writes:
“The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon you consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you “come to terms with” only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.”
* * *
In our liberal faith, we are committed to a never-ending search for truth and meaning. This search will go on and on. No matter how many amazing truths we discover along the way, our questioning continues, because we know there is more yet to be known, more yet to be understood.
Christina Baldwin shares this view. She writes, “In… the spiritual quest, it is the questions that count. Our quests are defined by the questions we raise and write about, whatever is most compelling to us at any given moment.” (p. 33)
Questioning is not always easy. Yielding to our own curiosity means acknowledging that we don’t know. It means giving up the familiar, it means letting go of old certainties, in order to move toward something new, mysterious, and as yet unknown. It’s scary. We don’t know where our questions will take us. And yet our questions urge us on. Whether we like it or not, sometimes life itself seems to be posing us questions. And if living life to the fullest is our aim, we have little choice but to grapple with them.
For instance, Christina Baldwin writes,
“When my friend Lynne was dying of cancer at forty-three, her suffering and death raised many questions, in her mind and in the minds of her family and friends who cared for her. These questions were different for each of us, but the process of questioning and coming to acceptance was a holy thread that bound us all together. We each went through a level of personal transformation – Lynne too, in the resolution of her quest, which she reached before dying. Our questioning gave the suffering some sense, even if there were no answers.” (p. 39)
Life happens. For better and for worse. And when something happens, we ask Why? Our curiosity can imbue any event with spiritual significance. Anything that happens in our lives, can be a source of understanding, a source of learning, a source of joy – if we know how to remain curious and ask the right questions.
“Curiosity is a state of heightened awareness,” Christina Baldwin says.
“Culturally, this has been considered a child’s activity. By the time we’re grown, we’re supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life’s miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars.” (p. 41)
We can cultivate a curious spirit. We can cultivate a frame of mind that opens our eyes to miracles all around us. We can cultivate a questioning mind that will take us beyond old stories of gods hiding behind the blue sky, and toward new stories that tell us the sacred is everywhere, out there and in here. New stories that will teach us to care more deeply and help us figure out how we can save the world.
Whenever we gather here, may we see that we are all both teachers and learners.
Regardless whether we are young or old,
may we learn how to look inquiringly and steadily with our own eyes,
to touch inward springs, and to awaken the soul.
May we remember that life is a journey,
a spiritual quest, propelled forward by the questions we ask.
Wherever our journey takes us, may we be guided be a holy curiosity.
Amen.
