-- Albert Einstein
Meditation: by Ralph Helverson “Impassioned Clay” (SLT #654)
Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse.
Out of the passions of our clay it rises.
We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining, or self-derived.
We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.
We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up at beauty, when our nerves are edged by some dream in the heart.
We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all that we have received.
We have religion when we look upon people with all their failings and still find in them good; when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our own heart.
We have religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is larger than ourselves.
Reading: by the Swiss-born philosopher Alain de Botton from Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (p. 11, 13)
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true – in terms of being handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets…
To save time, and at the risk of losing readers [or listeners] painfully early on in this project, let us bluntly state that of course no religions are true in any God-given sense…
I was brought up in a committedly atheistic household, as the son of two secular Jews who placed religious belief somewhere on a par with an attachment to Santa Claus. I recall my father reducing my sister to tears in an attempt to dislodge her modestly held notion that a reclusive god might dwell somewhere in the universe. She was eight years old at the time. If any members of their social circle were discovered to harbor clandestine religious sentiments, my parents would start to regard them with a sort of pity more commonly reserved for those diagnosed with degenerative disease and could from then on never be persuaded to take them seriously again.
Reading: by the American author, and devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, from a journal she kept in her early twenties. This is from one of many entries she addresses to God. (The New Yorker, Sep. 16, 2013)
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside.
I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said,”oh God, please,” and “I must,” and “please, please.” I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way… I do not want to presume. I want to love.
Oh God please make my mind clear.
Reading: by the Indian-born priest and psychotherapist Anthony De Mello, a short anecdote entitled “Clarity” (from One Minute Wisdom, p. 8)
“Don’t look for God,” the Master said. “Just look – and all will be revealed.”
“But how is one to look?”
“Each time you look at anything, see only what is there and nothing else.”
The disciples were bewildered, so the Master made it simpler: “For instance: When you look at the moon, see the moon and nothing else.”
“What else could one see except the moon when one looks at the moon?”
“A hungry person could see a ball of cheese. A lover, the face of his beloved.”
The Religious Impulse
A Sermon Delivered on February 9, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
So tell me. Why do you come to church? Why are you here this morning – when you could be sleeping in? Why did you brave the icy cold, when you could have stayed home, settled on a comfortable couch perusing the Sunday paper, or watching cartoons with your kids?
Did you come here because you are looking for God this morning? Are you here because you hope to catch a glimpse of God? This is a church, after all, a house of God. Or are you here to say a prayer, in hopes that God will hear you?
Any of these are fine reasons to come to church. But, in my experience, these aren’t the reasons most of us offer, when asked why we are here. When the question has come up in conversation over the years, I don’t recall a single instance when the answer included any mention of “God.”
Instead, most of us say we come for some time of reflection after a busy week, to find food for thought, and possibly even inspiration. We come to listen to fine music, and sing together. We come to provide some religious education for our children. We come here to see old friends, or make new friends, and feel a comforting sense of community among folks who grapple with the realities of life and death, hope and despair, and with questions of right and wrong – very much like we do. We come here to join together in a common “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” – that’s the way we put it in the fourth of our seven UU principles.
But searching for religious truth is not as simple as it sounds. The most boring question we can ask of any religion is whether it is true, says Alain de Botton, at least if we mean truth in any “God-given sense.”
Coming from a family of adamant atheists, he approaches religion with a healthy dose of skepticism. His parents taught him to always keep a cool, critical eye on the line dividing fact and fantasy. They taught him to be wary of religious beliefs that seem narrow-minded, dogmatic, and literalistic. Those expressions of religion that divide people into opposing adversarial camps of true believers versus non-believers. Religion can be divisive and dangerous. And this is the kind of religion his parents rejected.
But, at this stage of his life, he has come to see that religion is not always necessarily nonsensical. His brand of atheism is opposed only to those who believe their truths have been handed down from high heaven. A more earthly and human religion is not only more plausible, but actually very useful in this day and age.
Things become more interesting, he says, once we recognize that religion was invented to serve two central needs, which continue to this day:
“First, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions...” (p. 12)
* * *
In Flannery O’Connor’s mind, God is not dead, but very much alive. Unlike Alain de Botton, she was raised in a very religious home, in Savannah, Georgia. Her parents were devout Catholics - a religious minority in the predominantly Protestant “Bible Belt.”
In her journal, Flannery O’Connor addresses God with a youthful sincerity and an unmistakable sense longing. She is only twenty years old, but has already been confronted with some hard realities of life and death. When she was 12, her father was diagnosed with lupus. The disease aggressively attacked his immune system. Flannery was devastated when he died just three years later. She was fifteen. And she herself was diagnosed with the same disease when she was twenty-five.
Flannery O’Connor was a great author, with a very distinct perspective and literary voice, that conveyed a deep and nuanced understanding of human frailty and longing, with a healthy dose of irony, and dark humor.
Reading her journal, I don’t sense a spirituality of divisiveness or dogmatism. Instead, I detect the sensibility of a poet. Someone who is skilled at using her lively imagination to paint pictures of the mind, and tell stories of the heart.
* * *
Do you or don’t you believe in God? That question does seem to be a favorite litmus test when it comes to religion. It’s a shame that the issue is so often framed in terms of an either/or. It reduces many a conversation about religion into an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave, right-or-wrong kind of debate. I have always found it much more interesting to ask: What do you mean when you say “God”?
I confess, I have never gotten into the habit of addressing God as a person. For me, God, the idea of God, is much too multi-layered and multi-faceted, to be squeezed into someone I feel comfortable addressing as “thee.” For me, God is, above all, mysterious. I know humans have imagined God in countless fascinating, imaginative, evocative, inspiring, and very different ways through the course of history. I can’t bring myself to grasp onto one particular understanding of God, and declare it to be true. Rather, I am moved by the multitude of gods imagined by humankind over time – a colorful parade of divinity, a sacred spectacle - each aspect of which touches me differently, each of which unlocks different doorways of my psyche, each of which shines a light into a different dark corner of my soul.
* * *
Flannery O’Connor imagines that religious practice is an effort to see God, a heavenly being, whose presence is obscured by our own shadow, our own agendas, preconceptions, our own fears and desires.
Anthony De Mello imagines that our efforts to see God are themselves a big part of the problem. Rather than looking for a particular something called “God,” we should simply look at anything and everything. We should open our eyes to what is right in front of us. “See only what is there and nothing else.”
Anthony De Mello was a Jesuit priest. But his advice to the students seeking God, his explanation of revelation, has distinctly Buddhist connotations. It was the Buddha who envisioned salvation as an awakening. He compared our everyday attitudes and perceptions to those of someone dozing half asleep. There is no God in heaven above. There is no otherworldly paradise. Enlightenment means opening our eyes to the world right here, right now.
Real religion, from the Buddhist perspective, requires no supernatural miracles. The world all around is itself a miracle. And we are a part of that miracle. Religious awareness comes when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining, or self-derived.
The Buddhist teacher Joko Beck puts it this way, she says, “Any true religious practice is to see once again that which is already so: to see the fundamental unity of all things.” She writes:
“People often ask me, if this fundamental unity is the true state of affairs, why is it almost never seen? It’s not because of a lack of the right scientific information; I’ve known a lot of physicists who had the intellectual knowledge, yet their dealings with life did not reflect this awareness.
…The main reason we fail to see that which is already so, is our fear of being hurt by that which seems separate from us. Needless to say, our physical being does need to be protected or it can’t function. For instance, if we’re having a picnic on a train track and a train’s coming, it’s quite a good idea to move. It’s necessary to avoid and to repair physical damage. But there’s immense confusion between that kind of hurt, and other less tangible [hurts]. “My lover left me, it hurts to be alone.” “I’ll never get a job.” “Other people are so mean.” We view all these as sources of hurt. We often feel we have been hurt by other people.
If we look back on our lives we can make a list of people or events who have hurt us. We all have our list. Out of that long list of hurts we develop a conditioned way of looking at life: we learn patterns of avoidance; we have judgments and opinions about anything and anyone that we fear might hurt us.
…And the true life, the fundamental unity, escapes us. Sadly enough, some of us die without ever having lived, because we’re so obsessed with trying to avoid being hurt.” (Everyday Zen: Love & Work p. 169)
The religious impulse is the desire to overcome our avoidance. It is the impulse toward life.
* * *
Religious inspiration can be found looking anywhere. “Just to be is a blessing,” Abraham Heschel said, “just to live is holy.” In some ways religious truths are simple and self-evident. And yet they are also strangely elusive. Religious practice is a matter of finding ways to remind ourselves, again and again, of things we know to be true. Not true, in the sense of being handed down to us from heaven, but true in the sense of an experience that touches our innermost being. True in the sense that it somehow corresponds with our own deepest knowing.
Religious truth can be found in something as simple as the sight of the moon. When we look at the moon, what do we see? Do we see a sliver of God, obscured by our own shadow. Or do we see a ball of cheese, because we are hungry? Or do we see the face of our beloved, a reflection of our own love? Or, when we look at the moon, do we see the moon and nothing else?
In the Zen Buddhist tradition looking at the moon is the focus of autumn ritual called tsukimi. Alain de Botton describes it like this:
“Every year, on the fifteenth day of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings are prepared and shared among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene.” (p. 294)
For Alain de Botton, tsukimi is a perfect example of what religion at its best should be. Religion should help us set aside a time and place, where we can gather together, and join in simple rituals that serve to deepen their sense of community. Lighting candles, sharing a meal, pondering the words of wise women and men.
We need this kind of religion. We need a place, where we can create a supportive community, that will be there for us in times of trouble, that will help us find hope, when our mind is clouded by doubt and despair.
We were each raised in a particular kind of religious family. We each have been taught lessons of right and wrong, of where to find truth and what it means to live well. We come here to be a part of new and larger religious family. We come here to imagine a community of harmony, of love and justice, it is our task to create, and to envision a family of humanity, in which all our divisions are overcome. A family that is founded on the fundamental unity of all things.
At least that’s what I think.
What about you? Why do you come to church? What do you hope to find here? What do you long to do here?
May our answers to these questions be expressed in our every word and deed,
And be abundantly apparent, in this religious home, we call our own.
Amen.
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