-- Andy Warhol
Reading: a Chinese creation myth, as retold by Virginia Hamilton (In the Beginning, p. 21)
The space of the universe was in the shape of a hen’s egg. Within the egg was a great mass called no thing. Inside no thing was something not yet born. It was not yet developed, and it was called Phan Ku.
In no time, Phan Ku burst from the egg. He was the first being. He was the Great Creator. Phan Ku was the size of a giant. He grew ten feet a day and lived for eighteen thousand years.
Hair grew all over Phan Ku. Horns curved up out of his head, and tusks jutted from his jaw. In one hand he held a chisel; and with it he carved out the world.
Phan Ku separated sky from earth. The light, pure sky was yang, and the heavy, dark weight of earth was yin. The vast Phan Ku himself filled the space between earth and sky, yin and yang.
He chiseled out earth’s rivers; he scooped out the valleys. It was easy for him to layer mountains and pile them high upon high.
Then Phan Ku placed the stars and moon in the night sky and the sun into the day…
Only when Phan Ku died was the world at last complete. The dome of the sky was made from Phan Ku’s skull. Soil was formed from his body. Rocks were made from his bones; rivers and seas from his blood. All of plant life came from Phan Ku’s hair. Thunder and lightening are the sound of his voice. The wind and the clouds are his breath. Rain was made from his sweat. And from the fleas that lived in the hair covering him came all of humankind.
The form of Phan Ku vanished in the making of the world. After he was gone, there was room then for pain, and that is how suffering came to human beings.
Reading: by the religious scholar Karen Armstrong from A Short History of Myth (p. 8)
An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity. Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel in the face of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.
Reading: by the Unitarian Universalist minister Terasa Cooley from an article entitled “Into the Beyond,” which appeared in the UU World magazine this spring. The article has provided worthwhile food for thought for our Board of Trustees…
I believe we are on the edge of a new phase in history—a phase that requires not just new technical skills but also an entire culture shift. When printed books were introduced, a religious transformation followed—because people could read the Bible and understand it for themselves. When radio and television appeared, we developed a consumer mentality, where we shopped around for what we wanted—channels, products, even churches—but we didn’t have much say in creating them. Now, with the Internet and social media, not only can we find what we want, anywhere in the world, we also can shape what we want or even create it ourselves.
Our Religious Evolution
A Sermon Delivered on September 21, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.”
When I was a child, raised in a Unitarian Universalist home, I was taught a variety of different creation myths, in the course of the religious education classes I attended. And I liked them. I liked to imagine what it might have been like if the whole universe had hatched from a giant egg. And long before I was old enough to understand the subtleties of Eastern philosophy, I wondered about the meaning of yin and yang, and the mystery of its two toned circular symbol.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways.” Or at least that’s what I thought I would do.
As a child, I caught on quickly that these stories were myths, not accounts of what actually happened at the dawn of creation. For one thing, there were so many different stories told in different parts of the world. They couldn’t all be right.
When I was a child, I thought that once I was grown up, I would have the big questions of life all figured out. Science, I thought, provided certainty. Science would provide the definitive answers to any questions I might have.
If I were a child today, any notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing God would be easily displaced by all-powerful technology and the all-knowing internet. True confessions: in this day and age, I spend less time reading the timeless classics of religious history, and much more time consulting the wisdom of Wikipedia. And my search for truth is powered by Google.
My trusty, dog-eared pocket copy of the Tao te Ching now gathers dust on my bookcase. What I carry around today as a source of spiritual inspiration and insight is this – my trusty iPhone. (And now that the new iPhone 6 was released this week, my old iPhone 5 seems like a clunky relic of times long past.)
Today, the story of evolution has taken the place of gods like Phan Ku, who created mountains, valleys and rivers with an enormous chisel; or like Yahweh, who created humans from the dust of ground, molded clay into shape, and then blew air into our nostrils, filling us with the breath of life; or like Elohim who created everything in six days, after simply saying “Let there be light,” and there was light.
We can think of ourselves as sacred mud, shaped by God’s hands, or we can think of ourselves as human fleas, who jumped off God’s hairy back. But if anyone asks me where we humans come from, as an adult today, I would probably answer along the lines of the story Darwin told.
The world wasn’t made by giants wielding chisels. Humans weren’t created on the same day as all other living creatures – cattle and creeping things, fish of the sea and birds of the air – all of which are subject to our dominion. But rather we are the product of a six billion year process of very gradual evolution, the amazing emergence of life and endless adaptation in the ongoing interplay between organism and environment.
The biologist Ursula Goodenough sees evolution as an epic story that can serve as the basis of a global ethos. She says, the story of evolution can help us come to terms with the ultimate questions with which humanity has forever grappled, questions like:
- Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
- Where did the laws of physics come from?
- Why does the universe seem so strange?
The story of evolution can inspire a sense of mystery and wonder. It can open our minds and hearts to nature’s sacred depths. (The Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 167)
* * *
As a child, I figured myths are remnants of ancient, long-ago civilizations. Myths are stories people invented to explain the world in which they lived, before they knew better. The stories they told, before they realized the earth isn’t actually flat, but round. And that earth isn’t the center of the universe, with stars, sun and moon circling around, but is simply one planet among millions and billions of others.
Just as evolution provides a framework to understand life’s emergence, our religious beliefs have evolved as well.
Karen Armstrong says that our oldest myths can be traced to the far-reaches of human history. Certain myths are associated with the Paleolithic period, from 20,000 to 8,000 BCE. She calls them the myths of the hunters. In these earliest mythologies, the sacred and the secular were not two separate realms, but rather closely related.
“When these early people looked at a stone, they did not see an inert, unpromising rock. It embodied strength, permanence, solidity and an absolute mode of being… Its very otherness made it holy. A stone was a… common revelation of the sacred… A tree [with its] power to effortlessly renew itself [embodied] a miraculous vitality denied to mortal men and women.” (p. 16-17)
Other myths arose in the Neolithic period, from 8,000 to 4,000 BCE, when our ancestors formed early agricultural societies. Their emerging agricultural understanding led to a deeper appreciation for the fertile and creative energy that pervades the entire cosmos. They began to imagine the energies personified as sky gods and earth goddesses. Armstrong calls these the mythologies of the farmers.
Still other mythologies took shape amidst the rise of early civilizations, when the first cities were built in the Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then later in China, India and Crete.
As civilization grew more complex, the complexity of our mythologies evolved as well. And slowly the great religious traditions we know today took shape: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in the Middle East.
The sixteenth century marks the beginning of what Armstrong calls “The Great Western Transformation.” Gutenberg had just invented the printing press, which contributed to an unprecedented interest in scholarship and learning throughout Europe. An increase in literacy and easier access to books created an information explosion. And this, in turn, led to a religious transformation.
“The Western achievement relied on the triumph of the pragmatic, scientific spirit,” Armstrong writes.
“Efficiency was the new watchword. Everything had to work… Unlike myth, logos must correspond to facts; it is essentially practical; it is the mode of thought we use when we want to get something done; it constantly looks ahead to achieve greater control over our environment or to discover something fresh.” (p. 119)
This new period of religious evolution is particularly interesting for us, because this is when Unitarian Universalism emerged as a distinct religious movement, first in Europe and then in the United States. The first Unitarian congregations were formed in the sixteenth century, and they were infused with this new spirit of science and rationalism.
Our Unitarian Universalist forbears distinguished themselves by approaching religious scripture in the spirit of the scientist, the scholar, and the skeptic. They challenged religious doctrines that didn’t make good sense to them. They rejected beliefs, which, from a scientific perspective, seemed like superstitious fictions, rather than solid facts.
* * *
Today, when we say something is a myth, we often mean it isn’t true. “A watched pot never boils” – that’s a myth. Just this morning I was watching our hot water kettle, as I was making my first cup of tea – and the water boiled just fine.
From the perspective of the rationalist, the pragmatist, the literalist – a myth is a mistake. But this in not the only way to understand the meaning of myth.
Frederick Buechner writes:
“The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of man, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus—they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.” (Wishful Thinking, p. 65)
* * *
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child,” and I thought that being an adult meant giving up childish ways. I thought being an adult meant putting aside myth and make-believe. I thought being an adult meant being reasonable and rational, sensible and scientific. I thought a sense of mystery and wonder, curiosity and amazement were for children. I thought that once I was an adult, I would have acquired a sense of certainty, and all the questions that confounded me would be answered.
But this is not the way I experience adulthood now. Sure, as an adult I know more than I did when I was child, but I also know there is much more that I don’t know. With every year I grow older, the questions grow deeper and broader.
The older I get, the more I can appreciate the tales of the mythical Muslim sage, the holy fool, Nasrudin:
When Nasrudin was an old man, he was sitting in a tea shop with friends, looking back on his life, telling his story. “When I was young I was fiery – I wanted to awaken everyone. I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change the world. In midlife I awoke one day and realized my life was half over and I had changed no one. So I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change those close around me who so much needed it. Alas, now I am old and my prayer is simpler. “Allah,” I ask, “please give me the strength to at least change myself.”
* * *
Perhaps the next step in our religious evolution is to realize that we don’t need to reject our myths, but rather we need to rediscover them, re-imagine them, re-shape them, so that their truths are relevant for our world today.
Karen Armstrong says,
“We need myths that will help us to identify with our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’.” (p. 136)
* * *
Terasa Cooley may be right. Maybe we are on the edge of a new phase in history. She says our task today is to provide the right questions, not the right answers. “We need to encourage curiosity and create a framework for people to interpret the massive amount of information out there, not just learn facts.”
Cooley says, “in order to be relevant, our congregations must also find ways to embrace cultural and technological changes. If you like the church you have now—I’m not going to lie to you—you might not be able to keep it, at least not exactly the way it is. The church that speaks to and serves the next generation will not be the same. But that has always been true.”
* * *
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways.” This is what Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians. Even as adults we see only dimly, and our knowledge is incomplete, but we know one thing: love never ends. Paul says, faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.
Our deepest human desire is and always has been our longing for love. Love guides us towards transcendence. Love leads to ecstasy, to life lived more intensely. Love allows us to see that we are all brothers and sisters, that we are one with the whole of humanity.
May we remember the myth and greatest miracle of our evolution: that we creatures created by love, and that we have the power to create ever more love.
May we have the courage
To use our powers.
And may we use them wisely.
Amen.
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