In the Absence of God
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 25, 2011
The words in the prologue were enough to let me know I was hooked on the book. They read, in part: "Digging beneath my immediate mind, which distracts itself with pizza, paper clips, and the rising and falling of the Dow, I uncover old dwellings, a house, a temple, and a town square once occupied, believed in, faithfully tended. I stumble...My mind wanders through layers of rubble, discarded beliefs, outworn creeds, broken hopes, and false saviors...I never arrived at the promised vision...I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ with as much heart, mind, and soul as I could manage; but he failed to save me from death's dominion and the fear of nothingness...I trusted Freud to lead me down to an underworld from which I returned wounded with little redemptive wisdom other than a sermon of coping....Marx, in whom I never believed taught me better than he knew the dangers of all utopias...Tired of pure reason I dreamed the dark kingdom of Dionysus, an orgy of the senses (until) I learned what Apollo know: Order may be sweet...A skilled archeologist might map more layers, passions, person, and places I thought might save me - from what I'm not certain - and give me peace at last...Should I mourn and build again? Clear away the debris, prepare a new edifice to house my spirit? Wherever I stand, tectonic plates tumble. I am earthquake prone. Not a good insurance risk."
Okay, truth time: I knew I'd buy and read this book even before I read its opening words. They're by one of my theological mentors, Dr. Sam Keen, whose stuff I've been reading for the past 40 years or so beginning with his early work To A Dancing God. I took a five day summer series course from him two summers ago. It was a joy to meet and converse with someone I'd long known through his work. He was putting the finishing touches on this latest book of his then, so I knew it would be near the top of my reading list when it came out towards the end of last year, and I got into it this past summer.
The full title is In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred. Without, I hope, insulting Mr. Keen by boiling his fine book down to a single sentence I'll say it's about - as his prologue suggests - where one goes when the gods of both the religious and secular realms come up short and fail the seeker. While my journey hasn't exactly paralleled the one San Keen writes about; with some adjustments here and there I could have written a personal odyssey quite similar to Keen's Prologue.
Sam Keen, as noted, is a philosopher and a theologian and a writer. But it was a novelist, the late John Updike, who also captured the dilemma Keen faces in the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. In Updike's early novel Rabbit Run, Harry owns and operates an automobile dealership in the fictitious town of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Rabbit Run was the first of four Rabbit novels Updike would write. Rabbit is a nickname from Harry's earlier days of glory on the Brewer High School basketball team, where he was known for darting around the court like, well, a rabbit. Now he's just a guy trying to make a living and raise a family.
Updike's Rabbit doesn't have the same kind of language or knowledge base or life experience as does Dr. Keen, but he is having a similar kind of struggle of the spirit, or crises of meaning. Harry isn't a church-goer but he befriends the local Episcopal minister, a Rev. Eccles, and the two become golfing companions. Their trips to the golf course give Harry and Rev. Eccles a chance to talk about Harry's vague and largely undefined spiritual yearnings - yearnings he barely even knows he has.
One of my favorite passages in the annals of American literature is a conversation between Rabbit Angstrom and Rev. Eccles as they're driving off for a round of golf. After the two have a brief exchange about religion we get this passage, with Harry speaking: "Well, I don't know about all this theology, but I'll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this" - Harry gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood, half brick one-and-a-half stories in little flat bull-dozed yards holding tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the ungrandest landscape in the world -" somewhere behind all this there's something that wants me to find it."
Be it a fictitious car dealer or a real life philosopher/theologian and writer, Rabbit Angstrom and Sam Keen are each dealing with the same thing: A reaching beyond themselves for something that will give their lives some greater depth or meaning - not quite knowing what the "It" is that they seek; but knowing that everything they've tried so far has come up short. "Wherever I stand tectonic plates tumble, I am earthquake prone." "Somewhere behind all this there's something that wants me to find it."
Updike quite purposefully gives his character the last name of "Angstrom." It's a play on the German derived word "angst" meaning kind of nameless and largely unfocused anxiety or sadness that one can live with well enough, but it keeps hanging around.
Throughout the four Rabbit novels Harry never quite finds God - or a God equivalent. Updike takes his readers through this ordinary guy's life, with its ups and downs, in the latter half of 20th century middle-class America, as he tries to make some sense of his life. In the fourth and final Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest an aging Harry Angstrom, now a grandfather, dies of a heart attack in a one-on-one game of basketball with a young African-American fellow some 40 years or more his junior. He goes back to the activity that gave him the highest point of his life, the closest he ever got to God one might say, when he was in high school.
What Updike's readers get in the character of Rabbit Angstrom is a life lived in the absence of God, or in the absence of some higher unifying purpose, if you prefer that language. It's not a completely barren life. It isn't one devoid of any kind of meaning or purpose. Harry does well enough for himself, even with his occasional infidelities. (Updike couldn't have written all he did if he couldn't have written about marital infidelity) It just that Harry's life never quite reaches the level of fulfillment to which he aspired, or the glory he'd known on his high school basketball court.
Okay, let's leave Rabbit to his rest and go back to Dr. Keen. His book is about where one goes after the encounter of the absence of God - the absence of a Supreme Being, that is to say. Keen regards such an encounter as a promising beginning point rather than an end. He's writing about where one goes after clearing the forest. Some of our "new wave of atheists" as I call them - people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins - do a pretty good job of clearing the forest of outworn beliefs and superstitions. But that's really as far as they go. He doesn't mention them by name, but I'm sure they, and others, are those to whom Keen refers when he writes about "the voices of the new a-theologians who condemn the violence of religious fundamentalism but (who) are angry at a God in whom they do not believe..." I liked that line. Sam's observation does raise an interesting question: How much energy does one really need to spend debunking the existence of a God you don't believe in? My own answer is, not much.
The next step, as I've come to see it, when it comes to where one goes in the absence of the God of Supernatural Theism is to cultivate a particular way of looking at and being in the world. This gets us to the subtitle of Keen's book: "Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred". He's not just writing about Absence; he's also writing about Presence. He's writing about how we go about being really and truly "Dwellers", in the world and universe which we inhabit for however much time we given to inhabit it. His book is about moving from a sense of Absence to a sense of a Greater Presence. So, after he writes about the failed Gods of both religion and secularism, and on how his personal tectonic plates kept shifting around on him, Keen goes on to this:
"I think it is better to dwell in the desert under open spaces, look for hidden oases, make a hearth, light a fire, cherish sunrise, noonday, moonset, a flight of Canada geese, an ant empire built an arm's length away, the comfort of touch, the language of glances, smiles, laughter, tears - sacred moments. Be thankful for the myriad hints of a G-d present in absence, in the longing without end."
Indulge me now, for a few minutes if you will, so I can bring some of my personal journey into these thoughts. I said earlier that I could have written a similar prologue about my life as Dr. Keen does with his. I think of my own journey as moving through four lands, with each land containing similar components as those of Sam Keen's. I'm in a reflective mood this year, so I'll take you across my landscapes of the spirit, if you will.
My first land was characterized by the sin and salvation style of worship services in the evangelical Baptist church in which I was raised and where my father was a Deacon. It was actually a safe and loving place - for those on the inside who were "saved," that is. The kindly minister, who spent his whole parish ministry career with that one church, was the first person I wanted to be like when I grew up. I was honored when a man as highly regarded as he was took a personal interest in a nerdy, no-where junior high kid like me. This was where I preached my first sermons; and found that I kinda liked it.
I wasn't too long for this land, however. Due in large part to my college experience I managed to find my way to a second land of liberal, mainline, social activist, American Protestantism. This was the land that characterized my seminary days and my early years in the ministry as a university chaplain a la Gary Trudeau's Rev. Scot Sloan of the Doonesbury comic strip. While I never lost my affection for my hometown minister, my minister mentors in those days were people like Martin Luther King, William Sloan Coffin, and the Berrigan brothers. These were folks I only met very briefly in passing, but they epitomized for me what it meant to live an authentically religious and spiritual life. I still admire them all greatly. Dan Berrigan is the only one of those who is still alive.
Then, come the mid-70s, I took this little excursion into the humanistic psychology movement, which consisted in part of hanging out with some very bright and rather crazy people in the Bay Area for a few summers. (I'd better save those stories for some other time should I ever choose to tell them at all). Craziness aside, however, this era and landscape did prove to be a time of some real soul searching which led me to leave the land of, even, the liberal Christian ministry (so long, Scot Sloan); and declare myself a humanist and an agnostic if not an atheist when it comes to the rejection of the idea of a Supernatural God. I was hanging pretty loose at the time, and figured I'd see where things in this third land might take me. After a few fits and starts it was while moving through this land that I found my way to the Unitarian Universalist ministry.
Well, I said there've been four lands, which means there's still one to go. My travels have not exactly been like the one Dr. Keen describes in that I never really felt betrayed so much by a religious or secular god as I did just feeling I'd gone as far as I could go across one particular landscape and that it was time to move on to the next piece of territory. But I still come out in about the same place as he does.
As good a name as any for this fourth land is The Land of the UU Ministry. I've been in this land longer than any one of the others I cited--some 33 years in all, with 23 of them right here. And I must thank you for giving me a land in which to wander. It has been a land where I can search for the Sacred, whether that search involves any kind of God or not. I rather like Keen's short-hand G-d, as he writes it, indicating a search for that which cannot be fully named or fully known. The land I move through now is the one that comes after the Absence of a Traditional God; a land in which one can seek to dwell in the Presence of the Sacred.
There's also a ten-dollar, high falutin' theological term for this land which I've invoked before with you as I've tracked my journey from this pulpit. It's called "pan-entheism." It's not meant to be one more stab at a definition of God so much as it is a life stance, a way of looking at and living life. It is a particular way of encountering the world we live in - a mind-set to allow us to see life in a certain way. It's not a stance we can continually maintain - but it is one we can come into now and then. To use one of Sam's metaphors - it's like the occasional discovery of a hidden oasis in a desert. Pan-entheism holds that there is something of the Sacred and the Holy contained within the ordinary or the everyday - or even in the fallen and broken places of life. And if we can stay open to it, that sacredness will, on occasion, break through.
There is a passage in the writings of the Hindu poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore that describes what I would call a pan-entheistic moment. I don't know the particular experience to which he's referring, but these are his words: "I suddenly felt as if some ancient mist had been lifted from my sight and the ultimate significance of all things laid bare...and no person or thing in the world seemed trivial to me or unpleasing." That, I feel, is what it means to truly realize life; to see no person or thing in the world as trivial. From the standpoint of panentheism, Tagore is describing a "God moment." You may call it what you will - the experience is far more important than the name. This is not a standpoint that will protect one from life's tragedies, pain, and sometimes terrible absurdities. There is no God in this kind of theology for one to get angry with or enraged at. Rather this is a perspective for keeping faith with life in the midst of its blessings as well as its curses.
To pick up an earlier thread, I consider it one of my life blessings to have a place where I can pursue some of these questions of meaning, and share my wanderings through my lands of the spirit with others. I've also learned on this journey that one can live a perfectly good, full, and meaningful life without giving much concern to who or what God may be - absent or present. Some of these folk find their way into this, and the other UU congregations I've served. I've been, and continue to be delighted to know them and interact with them.
But I've still got just enough of the Harry Angstrom in me to at least get a sense, as he did, that "somewhere behind all this there's something that wants me to find it." And there's still enough of the agnostic in me that forces me to admit that, like Harry, I'm never going to fully know what that "something" is. But even so, there remains enough of the religious and spiritual journey maker in me to keep me on the voyage.
A couple more quick points before closing: I've used terms like "sacred" and "holy" to identify a presence or force or power which I believe, as I've been saying, is contained within the world of people and events and nature that surrounds us - and not somewhere beyond it. If pressed to give a precise definition of such terms as sacred or holy I can't really do it. But then I cannot give a precise definition of such things as beauty or love or peace either. But I still believe in them and believe in them deeply.
I would offer as well that to cultivate an awareness of the sacredness and holiness of life, in the manner of panentheism, is to be sensitized as to when that sacredness is violated. I am not speaking of, or advocating for, a kind of "feel good" spirituality that is purely inner directed. To truly dwell in the presence of the sacred is to be called to justice making - to be called to stand on the side of love. To truly dwell in the presence of the sacred is to be sensitized to, and angered when, the sacred is violated When human lives are willfully abused, mistreated, or denied certain necessities of life - like, say, food and shelter, the sacred is violated. When the natural world is unduly despoiled or desecrated purely for the sake of human greed, the sacred is violated. When lives are diminished, trivialized, or destroyed due to hatred, bigotry, prejudice, or just plain indifference, the sacred is violated. When innocent lives fall prey to the drums of war the sacred is violated - however sound - or not - the rationale for the use of force may be. A true engagement with the sacred, then, leads one not only inward, but outward as well to a fuller and deeper engagement with his or her world.
One of my continuing goals in the ministry I'm privileged to share with you is to offer a safe and accepting land - or series of lands - for each of us to make our journeys of the spirit, just as I've been able to make mine. May we continue to learn from one another; and may we all be blessed by the Spirit of Life that enfolds us all and holds us together.
Stephen Edington
September 25, 2011
