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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
February 6, 2011
Reading:
The Faith of a Theist
Rosemary Bray McNatt
Early in my ministerial internship, I was responsible for leading
the congregation in a period of prayer and meditation. After the
service ended, a long-time member pulled me aside. “When you were
praying this morning, you were addressing your prayers to someone,
weren't you?” she asked. “Yes, I was,” I said. The woman looked
incredulous. “You don't think there's really someone there, do you?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I really do.”
Becoming a Unitarian Universalist was the path that led me back to
God. Brought up in an African American Roman Catholic home, I
measured my childhood days by the feast of the saints and the holy
days of obligation. By the time I was ten, I found my youthful
devotion challenged by the rigidity of the church and deeply damaged
by its rejection of women's gifts, even when those gifts were as
small as my desire to serve Mass as my younger brother did several
times each week. My spirit crushed, I tossed aside both the church
and all thoughts of God before I reached my teens.
Not that God wasn't due for some serious criticism from me by that
time. The unfairness of life, the poverty and racism I knew from
personal experience, the violence that was present all around had me
asking tough questions about the God my mother clung to with such
fervor. I informed her that whatever God she thought she knew had
done her precious little good and that I was fed up with all this
religious mythology.
My mother, bless her, was more than used to her oldest girl. She
simply looked at me and said, “Just keep on living, baby. You'll
find out.”
In my late twenties, I married my college sweetheart, an African
American Unitarian Universalist by birthright. (And) I started
attending the Community Church of New York to live out the fantasy
of being a dutiful young wife. After a time, I began to pay
attention, not just to coffee hour, but to the hour before that,
when the community gathered amid the banners representing the great
religions of the world. I sat beneath those banners and heard from
the pulpit and the pews the deepest longings of my heart. I learned
about the similarities among the great religions of the world, about
their common hopes and aspirations for humanity. I heard about the
beloved community. And I heard about all these things in the context
of freedom, the freedom to think for myself about God and about the
world.
No one required me to make promises I could not keep. There was no
list of beliefs that determined whether I was in or out of favor.
And most importantly, there were no gatekeepers who decided on my
worthiness or unworthiness. Everyone in the sanctuary, including me,
was part of a glorious creation.
But as my mother told me earlier, I kept on living. I kept on living
in a world filled with tears and tragic events that had no easy
explanations. I kept on facing great joy and deep disappointment. I
kept on being confronted by hopeless situations that unexpectedly
came to amazing conclusions. Thanks to the freedom I found as a
Unitarian Universalist, I continued to ask what it was that I was
experiencing.
And then, one day, God spoke. On retreat at a women's conference in
Wisconsin, I joined with other participants in a sacred spiral
dance. Asked as part of the dance to speak to the divine and listen
for an answer, I joined in, impatient, skeptical, and freezing cold.
As I made a perfunctory list of my concerns, I could suddenly feel a
Presence in me. It was a Presence that made itself felt in every
cell of my body, and it was followed by a Voice, neither male nor
female, and utterly unlike anything I had ever felt. The Voice made
itself heard in my body, and it told me clearly, lovingly, “Don't
worry, my child, don't worry.” And then the Voice and Presence left
me, and left me changed forever.
Most of the great Western theologians agree at least on this: God is
beyond naming or full understanding, yet we human beings nonetheless
are called to make the attempt. It is the free faith of Unitarian
Universalism that makes my attempts worthwhile. Because of this
faith, I can be confident that my search for the Divine is
structured, not by static institutions or individuals, but by the
God who continues to call me and whom I continue to question.
Because of this powerful freedom to believe—and to doubt—I live in
trust, believing the truth of the mystic Julian of Norwich's
proclamation, “all will be well, and all will be well, and all
manner of things will be well.”
Abridged from The Faith of a Theist: There Must Be a God Somewhere
By Rosemary Bray McNatt
www.uua.org/publications/pamphlets/theologicalperspectives/151239.shtml
Sermon:
The psychiatrist C. G. Jung was once asked by an interviewer, “Do
you believe in God?”
This was Carl Jung, who was Sigmund Freud's disciple and for a time
his designated successor—Jung, who ultimately broke with Freud for a
variety of reasons, including their contrasting views on religion.
For Freud, religion was a vast illusion, a childish response to the
challenges and horrors of life. But Jung saw something different: a
pathway into the depths of the soul. For Jung, each religion offered
a set of stories and symbols that led into deeper levels of being
and touched something universal that resides at the core of
existence.
So when Jung was asked this question, “Do you believe in God?” he
paused, looked for a moment like he was struggling for words, and
then said, “I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the
experience of being gripped by something greater than myself,
something that people call God.”
This morning’s sermon is the second in a series in which I am trying
to articulate varieties of belief held among Unitarian
Universalists. As a free faith, we offer an openness to different
beliefs, all contained within this one religious community. Last
week, I considered Unitarian Universalist Christianity, in which the
life of the man, Jesus, is the central reference for one’s
spirituality. Next week I’ll turn to Unitarian Universalist
humanism, which offers a religion and system of ethics without God.
Then I’ll move on to paganism and mysticism. But today, our topic is
Unitarian Universalist theism. That is, a belief in God, however we
might define that term.
From the start, I have to admit that my categories overlap.
Unitarian Universalist Christians are often theists too—but not
necessarily. There are Unitarian Universalists who find themselves
inspired and challenged by the example of Jesus but who do not
believe in God. There are other Unitarian Universalists who do not
consider themselves Christian but who believe that we participate in
something greater than ourselves that draws us toward what we can do
and be.
This morning I’ll offer three ways of thinking about God that we
find among Unitarian Universalists. These are not exclusive to UUs—we’ll
find them among others as well. They are also not mutually
exclusive. Some would contend that they simply are different ways of
describing the elephant, so to speak. But perhaps they’ll offer ways
of thinking about the experience that Rosemary Bray McNatt described
as a loving Voice and Presence that changed her forever. Or what C.
G. Jung described as “the experience of being gripped by something
greater than myself.”
● ● ●
From time immemorial, human beings have peered into the mystery of
existence and wondered about what they found. Some have conceived of
a vast power that exists at the center of being. A calm and
implacable force that serves as the foundation of all. A spirit that
sustains life itself—a kind of sacred electricity—humming at the
core of existence.
This is the God found in early religions—pre-Jewish, pre-Christian,
pre-Islamic. These early peoples lived at the edges of the
wilderness. Whatever fragile advances they made were vulnerable to
being reclaimed by that wilderness. They sought assurance that the
world—their world—would hold together. That what they depended upon
for life would not disintegrate.
And so as they looked into the mystery of existence, they perceived
something that resists chaos, that creates and sustains the world: a
force of order and coherence that keeps things from falling apart.
As civilization developed, the perception of this power changed. It
was still what sustained existence—and could be found deep within
each living being. But its primary function was no longer just to
keep the world from falling into chaos. Now it offered something
more: enlightenment. The Buddha taught his followers to meditate, to
live with compassion, to let desire slip away. In so doing they
found union with this power at the center of being and gained
release from the pain of this world.
This sense of an impersonal force at the center of creation
continued to be invoked. Some found it in the principle of reason.
The force that brings coherence to the universe was seen as a
rational power, accessible to human understanding. Our world was
seen as operating by coherent rules and principles. This is the
concept of God called deism. According to the deists, the world is
like a big clock—constructed according to principles that we can
understand—and then left for us to maintain.
“What, then, is God?” In this view God is the structure of the
universe, the force at the center of being that creates and holds
things together and operates by principles that are available to us.
This God is accessible to those who make the effort of learning and
understanding. The Buddha taught that anyone who followed his
principles could attain enlightenment. Others, from the Greek
philosophers to Western scientists have believed that the secrets of
the universe were available to human study and discovery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's term for this God was the Oversoul. He wrote,
“There is a deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is
accessible to us. Every moment when the individual feels invaded by
it is memorable. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to
whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as
insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.
“Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal
beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the
eternal One.”
Today, this concept of God continues. The feminist Mary Daly asked
“Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb—the most active and
dynamic of all?” That is, a dynamic, impersonal force at the center
of existence. As we tap into that source, we achieve understanding
and inspiration to become who we can be.
● ● ●
Others have peered into the mystery of existence and found something
different.
These people have encountered a God that can be experienced in human
terms. This is the God Jesus addressed as, “Father.” This is the God
Moses experienced as choosing him for a special mission. This is the
God that guided the prophet Mohammed and that led him to success
after success. This is the God that becomes involved in the everyday
struggles of our lives.
Sometimes, the experience of a power greater than any of us is
identified as “love.” The sense of being loved absolutely. What is
God? A force or being that can somehow express love.
Sometimes the experience of a power greater than any of us is
described as leading a person to what is true and right—a kind of
advisor or trusted friend who shows us the way. What is God? A guide
who helps us find the pathways that are ours.
Sometimes the experience of a power greater than any of us is known
as joy, acceptance, forgiveness. What is God? A force at the center
of the universe who forgives our sins and transgressions, who
accepts us unconditionally.
Sometimes this God is experienced as a power drawing us toward each
other. Relationship. Connection. A divine force that overcomes what
stands between us and encourages reconciliation, justice,
compassion. What is God? A force at the center of the universe who
brings us into relationship.
And sometimes too people find a God who suffers with us. Who endures
the struggles we endure as a companion, as a fellow traveler subject
to the sorrows we too endure. In a book on religious experience, one
person reported his experience of God in this way. He wrote, “I met
with a very severe accident at work; at times the pain was
excruciating, and yet, unmistakably, I felt a presence at my side as
if someone was sharing the pain with me.”
Another described her experience of God in terms of love, “I was
deeply distressed,” she said, “One evening I was sitting in a chair
in our small study in the dark and became conscious of a Presence in
the room just as you know when anyone else enters a room by their
personality. I felt a golden, glorious feeling of love.”
What, then, is God? A force that somehow is able to relate on human
terms. That brings us together, supports relationship, offers hope,
and that may be experienced as acceptance, forgiveness, as joy. This
is a God who can be talked to, prayed to, imagined as a person if
necessary and addressed with human words and thoughts and feelings,
a God who brings us closer to each other.
The contemporary Christian theologian Carter Heyward put it this
way, “For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of
our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is
to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in
history is love.”
● ● ●
The experience of “something greater than ourselves” leads others to
yet another concept of God. Here, the experience is not that of an
impersonal yet accessible power at the center of being. And it is
not that of a force that can be known and addressed in personal
terms and with human categories. What these find as most
characteristic of God is a sense of “otherness.” For them, God is so
completely different from what we experience in everyday life that
we cannot pretend to understand. In the Old Testament Book of Job,
God tells Job, “My ways are not your ways,” and this same message is
confirmed by those who feel they have come face to face with God.
Human words do not exist to describe what they have encountered.
Rudolf Otto, who wrote a classic work called The Idea of the Holy,
characterized the experience of God as something “wholly other.” He
wrote, “The truly mysterious object is beyond our apprehension and
comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain
irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something
inherently 'wholly other,' whose kind and character are
incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil
in wonder.”
One person described such an encounter, “I was walking along a road
in my home town approaching an incline where the road branched and
straight ahead was an old flint wall covered with ivy. I had the
feeling of everything opening out (or a veil being lifted) and a
wonderful feeling of lightness and freedom. It's so hard to
describe. I remember feeling exquisitely happy and saying to myself,
'So that is what it is all about.' I cannot say what I saw—it was
like infinity and a radiance at the same time. Very, very brief and
then I was amazed to find myself still walking along the road.”
In the mystical religious traditions, God is considered beyond human
understanding and control. Instead of trying to understand God and
instead of seeking relationship with God, the faithful are urged to
open themselves to the vast mystery of God. To set aside
preconceptions and be available to what may be revealed.
The medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart, put it this way, “God
is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being. God is
nothing. No Thing. God is nothingness. And yet God is something.”
What is God? In this view, God is beyond our comprehension. Hence,
we must approach the divine with humility. God is not a genie who
will grant wishes and not a pet who will fetch things upon our
command. Whatever this force may be, it is greater than our
understanding, greater than our control.
For at the center of creation is mystery: the nothingness which
Meister Eckhart claimed is “something.” As one person put it, “A God
comprehended is no God.”
● ● ●
As I was writing this sermon, I kept hearing words in my head by
that famous theologian, Dr. Seuss, who proclaimed, “One fish, two
fish, red fish, blue fish. Black fish, blue fish, old fish, new
fish. This one has a little star. This one has a little car. Say!
What a lot of fish there are.”
Same goes for concepts of God: What a lot of fish there are.
Dr. Seuss continues, “Yes. Some are red. And some are blue. Some are
old. And some are new. Some are sad. And some are glad. And some are
very, very bad.
“Why are they sad and glad and bad? I do not know. Go ask your Dad.”
In this sermon I have offered a few ways of conceiving God that we
may find among Unitarian Universalists.
There is the concept of God as an impersonal force, yet available to
human effort and understanding. Whether through tools of reason,
meditation, yoga, artistic creativity or a variety of other
techniques, this force is accessible to us. We can understand it, we
can experience it, we can even use it to our benefit.
There is the concept of God as a being who can in some sense relate
to us on a personal level. This is a God who cares: loves us, guides
us, forgives us, offers salvation. This is a God to whom we may pray
and from whom we may expect a response.
And there is the concept of God as mystery: as beyond human
categories of perception and understanding. Yet the contemplation of
this mystery is not without human benefit. Those who experience this
mystery feel that they have been given an irreplaceable gift, a
glimpse into a world beyond that changes their lives in this world.
Are we obligated to choose one and only one of these concepts of
God? Or must we choose any at all? No. What we offer in a UU
congregation is the freedom to explore and wonder, to let your own
thoughts and experiences guide you to the belief that is authentic
to you, right here, right now.
I’ll conclude by returning to the book from which I read for the
Time For All Ages, What Is God?
So, if you really want to feel God,
You can close your eyes
And listen to your breath go slowly in and out,
And think how you are connected to everything,
Even if you are not touching everything.
Try to feel how you are connected
To your Dad, and how you are part of your Mom,
Try to feel how you are part of your whole family,
Like your brother or sister, your grandparents,
Your aunt or uncle, cousins, even your friends.
And try to feel how all of those people,
Are part of a whole bigger family,
And how all the families of the world,
(Even those we can't see or touch),
Are really a part of you and your family.
And if you can start to feel God like that,
Then maybe you will soon feel the whole answer,
To that very, very big question that everyone asks,
“What is God?”
● ● ●
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