Are We Mystics?

Perfect definition. We take our own calls. Not only does it imply a democratic spirit, but it also expresses our commitment to directness. When it comes to theology, we take our own calls. No priests, Bibles, or theologians needed as go-betweens. We know what we feel to be true. We follow our hearts and minds as truth evolves.

Wonderful as this style is for our individual needs, it is problematic. From beyond our walls, we can seem pretty vague. I recently heard about a young man searching for a church to belong to, and he told his aunt, "Now, the Unitarians, you don’t know what they believe." You have to be pretty independent to feel comfortable here. Many people try us for awhile and then leave looking for something with more religious content. Let’s face it, we are small. Our total numbers in North America are maybe a quarter of a million if you count every child and newcomer. Compare that to many 10's of millions of Catholics and at least that many Southern Baptists. Clearly we don’t appeal to a large number of folks. We need to ask why.

Part of it must be P.R. Not enough people have heard of us. Recent efforts have brought more folks to us. This last General Assembly in Boston had 7,000 plus attendees. I remember back in the early 90's when 2,000 attendees was a triumph. Our vitality has increased, as it has historically during politically conservative times.. But we are still small. We are considered elitist with the highest education level of any religious group. We are left of center in general on the political spectrum. But more than anything, I think we require that people be very independent minded to come through our doors and stay. For many, the problem with UU-ism is there is no there, there.

A vigorous conversation is going on about this now. The Commission on Appraisal is a body elected by the General Assembly to study important issues in current Unitarian Universalism and they have been charged with the task to evaluate how we might define our core theological beliefs. We need to be more clear about who we are religiously if we want to attract more people. Good deeds are not enough to define us. Charities of all kinds perform good deeds. What makes us a religion? We are a community, but what makes us different from a club?

At the same time this inquiry is going on, our current UUA President, Bill Sinkford, has initiated a wide discussion about the use of traditional religious language. He calls it the "language of reverence" and he thinks we need more of it. So do I. What I hope to do in this sermon is to clarify what the basic theological issues are and how we might come to some agreement about what we already believe implicitly, if not explicitly about those issues. Here goes!

I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist but I went to a liberal Christian seminary. This was very good for me. I found out that there are a lot of Christians who are very liberal politically and theologically. My theology professor posed the basic theological issues in this way. To have an adequate theology one must deal with these questions:

What is the nature of the human? What is the nature of good and evil? What happens when we die? What is the nature of Jesus Christ? What is the nature of the Divine or God?

That’s it. An adequate Christian theology is supposed to have answers for these questions. I think they are worthy questions. The Jesus Christ question of course is culture bound and may or may not be an issue for you. However, we do come out of the Protestant wing of the Judeo Christian tradition and the question definitely has some relevance. So, these are the basic theological questions. Most traditions give you answers. I think it would help to have some suggestions. Maybe we could have theological suggestions instead of answers. Here are my suggestions about how most UU’s think about these questions already. We do have some basic agreement on some of these issues..

What is the nature of the human? Guess what! We already have an answer to this one. It is the most clear and direct theological answer we have. It is the first principle in our statement of principles and purposes. We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Period. This is the humanist core of our faith. We believe that all human beings are capable of living a positive life given the will and the right circumstances. This is a radical belief and there are days when I don’t believe it. Good thing we don’t have a creedal test. But I try to believe it. It is very optimistic. We UU’s are known as having this "very high view of the human".

The Universalist part of our history (U’s and U’s merged in 1961) was so emphatic in their optimism about human nature back in the early 1800's, that they believed God would not send anyone to hell. Rather, they believed that retribution for sins was something we experience in our lifetimes. That was the corner stone of the Univeralist theology.

Related to the first question, the nature of the human, is the second: what is the nature of good and evil? If we think human nature is inherently worthy and dignified, we probably think that people only do bad things under duress. Do we think there is evil in the world? Many a sermon has been written suggesting that we UU’s take sin too lightly. We do not really deal with evil very directly. We have no more to say on the subject officially. We just refer to that first principle in addition to the principle supporting the use of democratic principles which we tend to believe brings out the best in people and society.

Evil is a big subject and a complex one. There are different categories. One is the tendency of human beings to fail and miss the mark. We have no confession or apology in our regular service or as part of our practice. We do promote self improvement through our religious education programs for adults and children. We believe in human potential and encourage development. Our approach to human flaws is to be supportive and show each other new possibilities. We encourage spiritual growth in our congregations, say our principles. Again, this is a very accepting and loving approach. We trust people to do the right thing as much as possible. Overall, we believe in goodness, truth and beauty almost to a fault.

The second category of evil is broader and refers to death in general and to the bad luck and tragedies that happen in the course of life. This is the down side of life itself. We die, we have to deal with that fact and we have no formal statement or theology about this. Most of us look to nature and figure we only live on as we are remembered after death. Tragic death is another thing. The unexpected traffic accident, the cancer diagnosis, the epidemics of nature. I can say pretty safely that few if any UU’s believe such bad things are the punishment of an angry God. Though it is nowhere officially in writing, we generally agree to disagree with those traditions which attribute bad luck to cosmic pay back. Most of us take it as the randomness of nature, which doesn’t make it any easier and may indeed make it harder. Senseless loss can be harder. We don’t have a very comforting answer to the theological problem of death. We don’t generally believe there is an afterlife, though of course individuals are free to have their own understandings.

I am not sure war goes in the first or second category of evil or needs a category all by itself. As UU’s we are not committed pacifists if we can be persuaded that a cause is just. In general we have honestly wrestled with issues of war and peace through our history.

So you see, we do have implied theology, if not hard and fast theology, on the issues of the nature of the human, of good and evil, and the afterlife.. What about Jesus and God? Controversy about the nature of Jesus started the whole Unitarian story. In 325 A.D. at the council of Nicea, the doctrine of the Trinity was accepted as the established theology of the Christian church. The heretical Arians, or Unitarians, were left out in the cold. Arians followed a man named Arius, who believed that the nature of Jesus was more human than divine. All through our history as Unitarians this has been the theological corner stone of our faith: the

human Jesus. We have seen him as a great prophet and teacher, but not a divine lord. Again, we have no current statement of faith regarding the nature of Jesus, but it is implied throughout our history and literature. It has been explicit in the past. Jesus is most meaningful to us as a human being, and exemplar for how to live according to love. I think it is unfortunate that we do not draw on this tradition more often in our worship and spiritual life.

Ok, now we are finally getting to the real point of my sermon. What about God? Do we have any written beliefs or creeds about God? Should we? God no!!! Said the Rev. Roberta Finkelstein in answering that question when it was put to the Commission on Appraisal about their current work. This is about defining who we are in general, not about forcing people to believe things or to accept statements of belief that make no sense to them. That would betray our entire heritage of honest searching. But let me make a few comments about religious language. I think that is where we get hung up.

Religious language should be understood as poetry, as metaphor for our purposes. We need to keep it loose, because the meanings are always evolving for us as individuals and for us as a movement. But I do believe very strongly that a religious group needs to hold in common some sense that there is a higher than human power. If you have a knee jerk negative reaction to the word "God", redefine it. The image of a mean old man with a beard is just one image of the countless possible ones. Here are some of the many ways one could understand that higher or greater than human power. Feel free to translate when you hear the word God. Many of these terms are already used in our services. Oversoul, Source of Life, Spirit of Life, Big Mind, Ground of Being, Great Mystery, the Whole, Life Itself. For those of you with a strongly scientific mindset, even the Big Bang can be understood as a higher power. The point is, we didn’t cause it. We are part of something greater and we did not get here by ourselves. The most important reason for having a God- concept, says my mentor, Roy Phillips, may really be just to assert that we ourselves are not God. One of the most important religious values is humility and we are weak in that area. To assert that we are part of something larger than ourselves and that there is a great deal we don’t understand and a great deal we have to learn is a religious stance. It is a religious assertion. It is saying to the universe, tell me more, teach me more, I have so much to learn. Spiritual maturity in every tradition requires grappling with and mellowing the individual ego.

My sermon title today is "Are We Mystics" because I believe we are. Being a mystic is one way to understand being in relationship with a higher power. We are part of something greater than ourselves. Mystical experience is affirmed right there in the UUA principles as the first source. "the living tradition we share draws from many sources (the first being) direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life". Here, again, "we take our own calls" Mysticism implies that we directly feel that we belong to the whole. That we feel awe and wonder in the face of life. Transcending mystery and wonder...the forces that create and uphold life....are those not ways to understand God, or higher power?

I once heard a non-UU minister say "scratch a Unitarian, get a mystic". He saw it, and I think he was right. Looking in the American Heritage Dictionary, I was reminded why many people might not want to be called mystics. The third definition for mysticism was "confused and groundless speculation; superstitious self-delusion." Bummer. But the first two definitions were more what my understanding is. 1. A spiritual discipline aiming at union with the divine through deep meditation or contemplation. 2. Any belief in realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension but central to being and directly accessible to intuition. OK, that is more like it.

One reason I married Perry is to prevent myself from getting too flaky. I count on him to read and critique my sermons. When he read this one, he said, be sure to say how to reconcile reason with mysticism. This is important. We do not ever have to abandon reason, but to recognize it as a tool. Intuition and reason both have important roles to play in our lives. Mysticism is empirical, in that we test our beliefs by our own experience.

From the books of Matthew Fox, I learned that I am a mystic. Matthew Fox was a Catholic priest who rediscovered and popularized the medieval mystics in the 1980's, and was later forced out of the priesthood. I think maybe he was a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it! I learned that we can all know the joy of union with the whole of life. I learned that mystics are not hermits. They do not run away from life but feel deeply imbedded in it. I learned from Fox that the comfort we gain from this sense of mystic belonging gives us more energy to do good work in the world. In his book "On Becoming Musical Mystical Bears" Fox makes very clear that being a mystic and being a prophet go together. When we know we belong to the ground of being, we seek to serve because we belong so deeply. In the same way, Mahayana Buddhism teaches that the enlightened one knows the union of all that is, that little mind is part of Big Mind, and that we belong in the market place serving.

It occurs to me to wonder whether Matthew Fox would want to be called a UU without knowing it. I bet he wouldn’t. My hunch is based on knowing many liberal Christians well enough to know what they think of Unitarian Universalism. My hunch is that even though Matthew Fox believes in Original Blessing instead of Original Sin, even though he is wise enough to know that religious language and story can be understood as metaphors, he would feel we do not take theology seriously enough. We are not humble enough before a higher power, is what I imagine he would think. Much as he might sympathize with our radical theological freedom, he would think that we are somehow missing the point of religious life...gratitude, acceptance, humility, service....in the context of a blessed and mysterious Creation.

I would like to see us not be so afraid of religious language. Theology means "words about God". I believe we need to recover the language of reverence to be taken seriously as a religious body in the world. Other liberal denominations such as the Quakers, the United Church of Christ and the Reformed Jews all maintain a reliance on a higher power as central to their faith. They use the word "God" and know it is widely interpreted according to conscience and evolving personal understanding. But there is that core faith. We are part of something larger. I think we need that. I think we need that to be more explicit in explaining who we are. Not as a formal creed. God no! But at least as a suggestion, or even an affirmation, such as, "we affirm that spiritual maturity requires humility in relation to the mysterious whole of creation."

We tend to abandon people theologically. Many of our UU people are longing for more theology, more religious language. Adult religious education classes that deal with the Bible and theology are very popular these days. Many of our newer members do not come to us in the same way as they did in past generations. In the past Unitarian Universalists were come-outers, that is, they had grown up in a religion that felt out dated and oppressive. Religious language did not fit the scientific twentieth century mind set.

Many of our newer members come from no religious background at all and are hungering for something that feels more spiritual, more theological but without the limits and requirements of more traditional groups. They need us, and we need them. We need to be more mainstream to fulfill our destiny and even begin to fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s dream, that all Americans would eventually be Unitarians (U-U’s). I am not so naive to suppose that will ever happen. But we could make it to a million. What do you say?

Our best higher power tradition, the one that we are most comfortable with, is that of the transcendentalists of the mid- nineteenth century. Most of us feel the power and awe, the mystery of life in nature, where they found it. We know the experience of transcending mystery and wonder. Are we mystics? Can we share our open way in religion with more people by being more explicitly religious, by affirming our mystical heritage? What do you think?

Prayer 7/27/03

Spirit of Life...

We, your children, gather here to renew once again our awareness of our connection to you and to each other. Here may we be our most authentic selves as we unburden our hearts, heal our wounds, recall our blessings, restore our faith. Here may we be nurtured and thereby become ever more able to be nurturers ourselves. In these difficult times, may our hope and zest be rekindled as we meet these dear fellow travelers and join our energies together in this house of worship. May we know ever more deeply the inter-relatedness of life - every part and particle, the eternal one, in which we live and move and have our being. We give thanks for life and in our gratitude arise to serve. Amen.