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Images of God
A Sermon Given
by Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on August 17, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
In the book of Mark, Chapter 6 Verse 4, Jesus said… "Prophets are not
without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their
own house."1 Jesus had been
preaching around, getting lots of respect, and then he went back home for a
few days to preach and everyone thought he was crazy. Hopefully that won’t
happen here! I’ve preached in other places, but nothing can beat coming home
and preaching to your parents and all your old Sunday school teachers. Thank
you for this opportunity.
I spent this summer working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, as a
hospital chaplain. Most divinity and rabbinical students are required to do
such a placement. A fellow chaplain intern described our job as "asking
impertinent questions of perfect strangers." Often I would walk into a room
knowing only the person’s name and age, and come out knowing their views on
death, life, illness, God, church, love, family, and prayer. These are not the
sorts of conversations that people usually have with strangers, or even
acquaintances and friends. It’s not a conversation about theology; it’s a
conversation about faith. The deepest, most heart-felt beliefs that we hold
and that hold us, sustain us—that is faith. I met people of many faith
traditions--Catholics, Baptists, Christians, Jews, unaffiliated, Unitarian
Universalists and more. Everyone’s faith was unique, and everyone had an
opinion about God.
Every once in a while I would search the computer system for all the UUs in
the hospital, so I could go visit them. About 95 percent of the people I saw
in Boston were, as one might imagine, Catholic, and so that occasional
conversation with a UU was always affirming and fun for me, and I thought
probably more fun for them too. The word chaplain can call to mind a priest
who is ready to give the Last Rites, or an evangelical Christian ready to ask
the patient to call upon the name of Jesus. When I met UU patients and told
them I was UU too, they instantly relaxed.
I saw one older UU man who had been hospitalized after a routine checkup
had found a problem with his pituitary gland. We talked for a long time. He
was a scientist, and an atheist. He loved studying the world and figuring out
how things worked, and being UU had let him and his wife be a part of a
community that had as much reverence for the earth as he did. At the end of
our visit, as I almost always did, I suggested to him that we pray. "I can say
a few words," I said. The UU atheist agreed. I said a prayer that rather than
being directed towards a specific deity, was a meditation about how grateful
we were that his problem was found, and solved, and that he would be able to
return with health to the people and tasks he loved. I expressed thanks for
the beauty of the natural world, and our ability to live in it and examine it,
and learn more about ourselves as we study our environment. We were praying
with thanksgiving, but never once did I need to say the word God.
So who were we praying to? The word God, for this man, was a meaningless
and off putting word; it did not express the great goodness he had found in
his fellow human beings, in the beauty of our bodies’ inner workings, in the
glory of the stars and trees and ocean. We were praying in the general
direction of out, in thanks for all that good. I knew, after the
prayer, that he had been moved in a good way when he opened his eyes, squinted
up to me, and said, "You know…my church is looking for a new minister."
In the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, called Through the Looking
Glass, Alice comes upon a wood of no names. Alice realizes that she
doesn’t know the name of anything around her, and she has even forgotten her
own name. As she continues to walk, she meets a fawn. The fawn and Alice, both
nameless, walk in peaceful, companiable silence, Alice with her arm "clasped
lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn." Eventually they reach the end of
the woods. Suddenly, the Fawn cries out, "I’m a Fawn!...And, dear me! You’re a
human child!" and the fawn runs away in terror.2
When I visited a patient, I tried to stay with them in the wood of no
names. I tried to listen without judgement or labeling. And I tried to show
them my love and God’s love in a way that they could relate to personally,
without the usual boundaries. One woman loved angels, and felt most secure and
protected when she imagined being in an angel’s care. Another person loved to
garden, and imagined God as a beautiful wild garden plot. One young man I
learned about, who was not a church-goer, would walk along the ocean whenever
he felt unhappy or anxious, and let the waves guide his thoughts towards
peace. A chaplain intern told me that her image of God was of two large,
strong hands at her back, spread out like wings, guiding her where she needed
to go. Most people’s images were deeply personal, and arose from images and
experiences in their life that touched them. They were all images of God.
Sometimes words and labels fail us, and only our imagination can guide us
home.
In the reading by Rachel Naomi Remen, we received an image of God as a lap,
a place of refuge, a place of silence. Theologians have started asking us to
imagine God as a verb, or as a moment in time. I found that the people I met
in the hospital already felt this concept as a personal intuition. Patients
and chaplains alike described God as a series of God-moments, God-flashes,
events rather than substances. One patient told me of seeing signs in strange
and happy coincidences. As she described it, it was as though God was just
happening all around her, and she got to see it happen. We don’t need
philosophers to tell us how God can defy categories of speech.
In one-on-one conversations, it was easy to find an image that struck home
to a patient’s heart, and use the image in prayer or conversation. Leading the
interfaith chapel worship, however, was a different story. Again and again my
fellow chaplains discussed their frustration with the interfaith model, not
knowing how to incorporate the liturgical elements they loved with a service
that would be open and accepting of all faiths. The metaphor that arose was
neutral mousse. Think mousse, as in chocolate, or butterscotch—only in this
case, it is neutral. There is such a thing; neutral mousse is a non-flavored
pudding-textured substance that can be purchased in enormous, barrel-like
quantities for use in co-op housing. It has no flavor and thus can be any
flavor the cook of the night feels like making it. The problem is, let’s say
your favorite flavor of mousse is chocolate peanut-butter banana. But what if
one of the people you were cooking for was allergic to peanuts? And another
person wanted to pick out all the bananas? And another person thought
chocolate was a radically inferior flavor to vanilla? There you are, left with
neutral mousse, a thoroughly tasteless and unappetizing food. When preparing
interfaith worship, we didn't want to leave someone with a bad taste in their
mouth from readings or prayers that clashed painfully with their beliefs. Yet
we also tried to figure out how we could bring God into the room without
taking all the life and nourishment out of God, and leaving the worshiper with
the bland, uninspired feeling of neutral mousse worship.
What I realized in these discussions is that worship in the Unitarian
Universalist community is interfaith, in a good way, in a flavorful way. In
every religion there are people whose faith lies outside the standard
boundaries of the community. But in our religious community we embrace that
fact. We have Christian UUs and atheists; we have humanists and pantheists.
Every time we come together for worship, we know that the person sitting next
to us may have an entirely different image of God than the one we like to
hold. I like to imagine us all sitting here in God’s lap, surrounded by trees
and friends, held up and supported by that invisible source of goodness.
What I have come to in my image of God is not something
all-powerful and not something all-knowing. What I have come to is
something all-good. I’ve met many people who see God as a source of distress
and punishment. That’s not the kind of God I believe in, and not the kind of
God that makes meaning in my life. God is not what brings suffering, but what
gives us the hope and courage to walk through the suffering and emerge on the
other side.
When I think about God as simply being a source of goodness, creating an
image of God that moves me is easy. Nouns, verbs, people, places, events—all
of these things have elements of God in them for me. Unitarian Universalists
who have traveled here from other faiths may find that there are images of God
that have the power to hurt, images that once were loved that now hold no
meaning, and yes, the images that move us and continue to move us. Our images
of God and our descriptions of God are our human ways of connecting to the
holy. God the Father, God the Mother, and God the Son; God of Light and God of
Love; wings at my back and a hand on my shoulder. God, in all God’s goodness,
is too big and too wonderful to be described in only one image or in only one
word.
We do not think that our human image of God is the ultimate divine truth.
But as Unitarian Universalists we are willing to search for the truth and
rejoice wherever we find it. There is a line in the Talmud that reads "We do
not see things as they are. We see things as we are."3
When you see God shining in the faces of your loved ones, or in the sunlight
piercing through the clouds, or in the accomplishment of a challenging task,
you are also acknowledging the God, and the goodness, within your own heart.
God bless you all; amen.
1 NRSV, Mark 6:4
2 Through the Looking Glass, 194.
3 Qtd. in Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen
Table Wisdom pg 77
Office@CedarLane.org
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