Reason and Reverence
Sermon by Steve Edington
February 1, 2009
Among the several lines in President Brarack Obama's Inaugural address that perked up my ears was the one where he said, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." Like much of what our new President puts out for public consumption, the words were carefully chosen; and well chosen I would say. I didn't research the matter but I feel safe in saying that it was the first time an incoming President acknowledged, in an Inaugural address, that not all Americans fit into the religious categories by which most of our citizens identify themselves. His message was that these "non-believers" are as good and faithful Americans as all the rest. I am grateful to our President for pointing that out. And it is my gratitude that makes me feel abashed to go nit-picking at a line that I actually liked. But nit-pick I will; and not, I hope, for the sake of semantic game-playing, but rather to get me launched into this sermon.
I wish there were a term available, other than one like "non-believer," to identify those people who religious explorations and spiritual searches do not fit into our more traditionally religious categories - people like me, for instance; and I daresay, many of us. I am not an adherent of any of the faith traditions of which President Obama spoke; but I do not consider myself a non-believer. I believe in a lot of things of a religious and spiritual nature. I wouldn't be in this, well, "business" if I didn't.
As I thought on all this I got the idea that maybe we should call ourselves here "The Church of Non-Believing Believers." I didn't say it was a good idea - just an idea. Actually I could go with such a name if the emphasis were kept on the word "Believers." It is true that we offer for many an escape route from dogmatism or from rote, second-hand, handed-down beliefs, which is all well and good, and greatly needed. But this kind of an escape route eventually leads to a dead-end if it fails to also lead to a renewal of belief; a renewal that involves embracing some core affirmations about life and living, and claiming a spiritual path or a journey of meaning that is truly one's own. This renewal also means claiming a language that speaks to that path or journey.
This reclaiming of a language was one of the first shots across the bow that the President of our UU Association, Bill Sinkford, whom we were privileged to have speaking from this pulpit last Sunday, got off as his Presidency began nearly eight years ago. When I introduced Bill last week I noted that he has done an outstanding job of bringing our UU principles and values to bear in the public arena on numerous issues of social justice. But Rev. Sinkford began his Presidency, back in 2001, with an in-house challenge to our UU family by calling on us to embrace what he called "a language of reverence." That challenge alone was enough to set off a few alarm bells among our more devout humanists. It was an alarm that rang out, "Oh my God he said 'God'!" Actually he didn't. Bill drew a marked distinction between God language and what he was, and still does, call a language of reverence. I'll pick up on this point a bit later.
In more recent years this same theme was picked up by another UU minister named Bill, the Rev. William Murray, in his book Reason and Reverence. That title also provided me with the title for my sermon for today. Bill Murray is a former President of our UU seminary in Chicago, the Meadville Lombard Theological School. When I was the Minister in Residence there five years ago he was moving towards retirement by having relinquished the school's Presidency and was teaching a couple of classes on ministry - which he very graciously invited me to co-teach with him for the term that I was on campus. Before entering academia Bill was for 17 years the minister of the River Road UU Church in Bethesda, Maryland, one of our larger UU congregations.
The subtitle of his book is 'Religious Humanism for the 21st Century." It's a good read, but its academic flavor - which is very well done - doesn't translate all that well into sermon material, so I'll only touch lightly on the contents here.
What both of our "Reverend Bills" (Sinkford and Murray) are attempting to do is to move their fellow Unitarian Universalists beyond a theist/humanist debate that has been playing out in Unitarian and Universalist - and then UU - circles at least since the drafting of the first Humanist Manifesto in the early 1930s. A number of Unitarian and Universalist ministers signed their names to this Manifesto when it was first released.
We got a playful rendition of that debate in the song Gil and Kathy did for us a few minutes ago. Like a lot of debates this is a healthy one - healthy up to a point that is. It does indicate the range of thought and belief that are contained and celebrated within today's Unitarian Universalism. But it's the kind of debate that should not, in my opinion, end up with a line being drawn in the sand between contending parties. That's happened in the past within our movement in ways that actually caused a certain amount of pain and friction and discord in some of our congregations.
Over the past 20 years, years which have corresponded to the time of my ministry here, we - speaking in very general terms about our UU movement now - have managed to wash over that line in the sand in what I believe are some good and productive ways. And that is largely because we are finding ways of integrating our emphasis upon the use of reason and rationality when it comes to matters of belief, with a rediscovered sense of reverence for the world and universe within which we live and move and have our being. I'd like to speak to some of those ways, some of those paths. I know I'm plowing old ground for some of you, but with new folk continually discovering UUism, as practiced in this UU congregation, old ground for some is freshly plowed ground for others which is why I do a sermon like this from time to time.
While the seeds of humanism in our liberal religious movement go back at least to the 19th century Transcendentalists - Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, and all those people who hung out with each other a few miles south of here in Concord, Mass. - it wasn't until the drafting of the Humanist Manifesto in the 1930s that humanism began creating a stir within the ranks of religious liberals. If I were to offer up an item by item rendition of that Manifesto, as well as the subsequently updated versions of it, I'd soon be looking at a lot of glazed eyes and you guys checking your watches, so I'll let that go.
What the humanist stance boiled down to was an assertion that the natural world and universe - both what we know of it and what we do not yet know - is the only reality we have. There is no realm of the Supernatural, much less a Supernatural Supreme Being who dwells in that realm. It was also a positive assertion of the human capacity for reason and creativity and for guiding our own human destinies, without any kind of Supernatural divine will or guidance. It was when I came to this position myself, with a few tweaks here and there, that I decided I was a humanist, and took it from there.
What I've learned since then is that humanism - for me anyway - is a beginning point rather than an end when it comes to the liberal way in matters of religion and spirituality. If the natural world and universe are all we have and need, what is our relationship to them, how are we connected with them, how do we rightly fit into the web of life that is continually at work within the realm of the natural? It has been the environmental movement, and the ecological movement, and the feminist theology movement that have primarily raised these kinds of questions and critiques of classical humanism. These critiques say, in effect: OK it's all well and good to talk about the primacy of the natural world and the primacy of human reason but what about the interplay between humans and nature, what about our relationship to the cosmos.
This critique and the questions it raises goes further: If there is no separate realm of the Sacred or the Holy "out there" somewhere, might not we human beings still be able to find something sacred and holy and divine, if you will, within this natural realm of our where we live and move and have our being? And what kind of language can we use to speak about our relationship to the cosmos and to speak of the sacred and the holy that we find in the ordinary and even in the mundane?
These are the kinds of questions that humanism begs more so than it answers. They are also the kinds of questions Rev. Murray takes up in his Reason and Reverence book, where he looks at how those persons of a humanist persuasion can move from reason to reverence without giving up, or sacrificing, either. The position Bill Murray comes to as he makes that move, is one he calls "Humanistic Religious Naturalism." It's a stance that resonates pretty well with me, but I must admit it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I tried to imagine the reaction if our President had said, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus...and Humanistic Religious Naturalists." Two million people on the Mall would have gone "Whaaat?" and Rick Warren would've rolled off his chair. I guess that's why the Prez decided to stick with "non-believers" rather than attempt to mention all the various beliefs that these alleged non-believers actually have.
Picking up on a thread I put out earlier, I like to think of our community here as a place where non-believers can learn to believe again in some new and different ways. On this note let me very briefly offer how my own way of moving between reason to reverence has come about, in the hope that some of it may connect with you. I've found that I don't need an alternate set of beliefs clearly laid out for me in the way that the ones I was raised in were, but rather I seek - and sometimes even find - a lens or a perspective through which to view and relate to the world around me.
I take my cues here from artists, and poets and novelists - like the wonderful John Updike who passed away this past week. In the tributes given him following his death was one that said, "His gifts were his eye and his sensibility, which enabled him to describe, with an exactitude bordering on love, how the world looked and what it felt like to make your way in it." I am neither artist, nor poet, nor novelist myself, but I try to cultivate for myself what I call an artistic consciousness. I, too, wish to see the world with love as I make my way in it - and there's something religious about that, God or no God. It is the poet or the artist who see the sacred or the holy in the ordinary and the everyday, and lift it up for us. This is not, as just noted, a belief so much as a way of looking at the world and letting the world speak to you on a deep and spiritual level.
I seek experiences that let me know - in a way that transcends reason and rationality - that I am a part of, and have a deep connection with, all of existence. Our interdependence within the whole web of life is an increasingly demonstrable scientific fact. But I need to feel that relationship as well as acknowledge it; for it is when I feel this relationship that I know I'm not alone in this world and universe, and that for all of my individualism, I'm not an atomistic being. This is what Ralph Waldo Emerson was getting at when he wrote, "I am part and parcel with God." He wasn't talking about a relationship with a Supreme Being, but a relationship with all of Life - a Life that surrounded and engulfed him. It is out of this very sense of relationship that I find my motivation for social justice work, and for my desire want to move even a few micro-degrees that moral arc of the universe which our Unitarian forebear, Rev. Theodore Parker, maintained "bends towards justice."
Finally I look for connections that will sustain me in ways that go beyond capacity for reason. Here I defer to my late colleague in the UU ministry, the Rev. Deane Starr, who passed away some ten years ago. Deane was our District Executive here in New Hampshire and Vermont when I first began my ministry with this congregation. Like me, he was raised in a near-fundamentalist setting and found his way to his own kind of religious humanism.
In 1992 Deane lost his adult son, Paul Starr, to the AIDS virus. The loss was devastating to him, as the loss of a son or daughter to a parent surely is. Deane spoke of this most painful of experiences, and how he finally came to terms with it, at a ministers' gathering prior to one of our annual UU General Assembly in 1994. To this day it remains for me one of the most moving personal stories I've ever heard.
Deane said that after he lost his son he gave up on ever finding any kind of joy in living again; that the best he was hoping for was some release from the pain. He went on to tell of how he found himself in Naples, Florida about a year after Paul had died. While there he even tried going to a church service in a church like the one in which he'd first been raised, to see what kind of sustenance or healing he might find there, and came away feeling as empty as when he'd gone in. An evening or two later he took a boat cruise off the west coast of Naples. Here's how he described that experience:
"The entire sky, from horizon to horizon, was aglow with color - reds and purples and pinks and golds. Then the colors faded and that indescribable deep, deep indigo of late twilight filled the sky. The boat turned around and headed back. There on the eastern horizon was a full and glorious moon. With tears streaming down my face, I realized that even though my son's being was scattered, he remained a part of this awesome beauty. We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings, and whether we live or whether we die, we are contained in this beauty."
Try that last line one more time: "We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings; and whether we live or whether we die, we are contained within this beauty." The belief contained in Deane's story his conclusion to it is this: There is an uncontained beauty, a greater web of life, a larger chain of being - some even call it the Presence of God - that holds our temporal lives here and holds the continuing presence or effect our lives have beyond our temporal, earth-bound and time-bound existence.
Catching a glimpse of this beauty did not remove the reality of the death of Rev. Starr's son. That remained with him for the rest of his life. But it did remind and reassure him that Life with a capital 'L' is bigger than any one of us, that its beauty ultimately transcends even the greatest of human tragedies. It reminded him, and us, and that we are indeed a part of something greater than ourselves - by whatever language of reverence we may choose to speak of it. To live with this kind of awareness and conviction is hardly to life a life of "non-belief." Rather it is to be a believer in a very profound way.
Deane passed away four years after that '94 GA. His spirit, too, is now contained in the beauty in which we all live and move and have our beings - and, I hope, has blessed us here today.
Reason and Reverence. However much of a believer or non-believer we may be, we need then both in order to meaningfully live. And we need a community like this one where both are affirmed and celebrated.
Stephen Edington
February 1, 2009
