SERMON: "My Spiritual Journey"
Rev. Paul Beedle
November 12, 2006
Almost ten years ago my internship supervisor and I were sitting in his office trying to have a theological conversation. Part of the routine of a parish internship is theological reflection, and the way we did it was, he would assign me a theological topic for a short reflection paper, and the paper would be the jumping-off place for the conversation. This time he had asked me to write about my idea of God. I couldn't find the reflection paper in my files – which after so many moves doesn't surprise me (I'm pretty sure it's in there somewhere) – so I don't know what I wrote. I also don't know what I said, exactly, in that conversation. What I remember about the conversation is that I tried to talk about experiences I have had that I find it meaningful to describe as “experiences of the presence of God.” My supervisor had a hard time discerning from what I said what my idea of God was. At last he said, “Well, if God to you is something that makes you feel better or makes things work out for you, that's OK.”
I felt frustrated and disappointed and even a little hurt that, first of all, that's what he thought I was saying because I in no way find that to be an adequate idea of God (so I took it a bit personally), and secondly that he would say that such an idea was an adequate starting point for our conversation because it certainly wasn't an idea I wanted to spend my precious ministerial training time on. Of course, those feelings showed, and in turn he felt hurt and angry – the word he used for my attitude was “insulting.” It was not the best moment in our relationship as mentor and mentee. Happily we got past and through that encounter. But I've often thought about it, and recognized a certain impatience in my make-up that is really more an impatience with myself for not having the words when I need them, not being able to convey what my feelings or intuition or muscle-memory or whatever it is tells me, that informs my understanding or views. And I recognize that because anyone's interior life is invisible to others, but feelings do often show outwardly and those feelings have to be read somehow, and it's always possible to take things personally as both I and my supervisor did on that occasion – because of all that, I recognize the need for everyone's sake that I let go of that impatience as much as possible.
What I think I was trying to say to my supervisor – because this is usually where my thoughts start when I try to talk about my idea of God – is that God is a symbol and God-talk is a language that I feel comfortable using (because I grew up with it) to describe real experiences. I use it not as a metaphor or a mere idea or as part of a philosophical system, but as language to describe a dimension of real human experience – a dimension I know directly and which is and has been testified to by many people around the world. And here's your chance to feel what my supervisor felt. it's not something supernatural, It's real and arises from human nature and the nature of the universe. There are times when I have new insight, or my feelings shift, or things work out in a way I hadn't imagined or worked toward but can appreciate, or I and others feel deep kinship and connection with one another, and in those kinds of experiences – not necessarily only in those – I might feel or say: “Aha! there's the presence of God.” But it's like Elijah at the cave: God is not in the wind, or the fire, or the earthquake, but in the sound of fine silence. God is not something that makes things work out or makes me feel better. But when those things happen – sometimes – there's the “Aha!”
And God is not the literary figures that go by that name in the Bible. So, my experience is like Elijah's at the cave, but nothing that story has to say about the nature of God necessarily gives any insight into the presence of God that I'm talking about. And that's the best I can do. Are you feeling frustrated yet? insulted? Well, let me try to describe how I got to where I am.
I grew up, as I said, with God-talk and the Bible. I went to Presbyterian Sunday Schools and learned Bible stories and Christian teachings and traditions, and I went to worship services together with my parents and my sister. I know that many Unitarian Universalists today did not grow up in families that regularly attended religious classes and worship of some sort. And I'm curious: as you're willing and able, would you stand if you did not grow up in a church-going or temple-going family? [Thank you – please be seated.] Because my family was a churchgoing family, I will be talking about my spiritual journey as a religious one. I know many people like to say of themselves, “I'm not religious, I'm more spiritual.” But I really can't say that. For me, it's both equally.
I think I understand the distinction folks are usually trying to make when they say that. Not for everybody, but I think for most folks, what it means is that they find deeper meaning and more accurate and helpful understandings by exploring their own lives than they do by exploring one tradition and its teachings. Anyway, I resonate with that interpretation of “more spiritual than religious.” I think that the spiritual is more important than the religious for individuals and for families. Personal and family spiritual practices – and pastoral practices like weddings, child dedications, memorial services, and so on – are what's important for finding meaning and peace with our lives. Religious traditions and teachings exist to support and shelter spiritual practice and to serve society as a voice of collective conscience. And as I said last week, there are conservative and liberal approaches to religion: the conservative giving more weight to the content of the tradition, the liberal giving more weight to the experience of spiritual growth and realization of social conscience. And so it's important to me that I'm a religious liberal – the content of the tradition must serve life and spiritual growth to be worth preserving – but it's also important to me that I'm religious: that I unite with others to affirm the values and virtues we all strive toward. Worship is important. Religious community is important. That's why I say I'm religious.
I stayed active in church through my teenage years mostly by singing in church choirs. Music was a very important part of my spiritual journey. It has always been important to my inner life because it helps me work with my feelings. And since so much music is religious music, it has always served as a tool for my spiritual discernment. I write music as a hobby, and more and more over the years my compositions have tended to be religious music. One of them was performed and recorded by the community choir I sang with in Riverside, California. We produced two CDs that year, one with religious music, one with secular music. Guess which one my composition was on: the secular one, of course! I was disappointed that a song that begins and ends with the words “Do you hear the earth sing a thousand songs? Do you hear them, friend? They are meant for you” (or the second time, “they are sung for you”) could fail to be understood as religious music, but there you are. I'm a religious liberal, and the editor was not.
Through high school, college, and on into business school, my spiritual journey was one of letting go. Scholars of mysticism or theology call the type of journey I had in those years a via negativa – a “negative way.” In theology, that means trying to give your idea of God by saying what God is not. Indeed, those were the kind of theologians I enjoyed most in seminary: the ones who said things like, “God sees, but of course God does not literally have eyes so God does not see, but nevertheless God sees.” Do you see? I loved that, because it's about not getting hung up on forms or particular symbols or sets of symbols, it's about seeing through the symbol to the reality it's meant to represent. Joseph Campbell used to talk about moments of rapture when a symbol becomes transparent to transcendence. That's the kind of thing I mean when I talk of experiences of the presence of God. It's the experience of a deeper or wider or mysterious-and-invisible dimension of reality that we are not normally conscious of as an immediate experience but that we can name and remember and use to know how to live, indeed we feel we must retain it somehow in our memory and in our living.
Anyway, letting go of forms and traditions and images and ideas I had learned as a child, without letting go of that sacred dimension of life and reality – I call it sacred, but “transcendent” or just “larger” will do – that was what my spiritual journey was about from around the time I was 15 until my mid-20s. I let go of all the traditional theology I had learned in church – the Trinity, literal heaven and hell, supernaturalism, predestination, the lot. I was casting them off like the dance of seven veils. The big one, for me, was letting go of the idea that God is some sort of supernatural being that exists somewhere. That came early in college. It was hard work to recast that symbol as something that described something real, and I believe natural and possible for anyone, in human experience. It was a Godsend, so to speak, that I discovered mysticism, which is all about divine and human presence. “The soul has lifted moments,” as the old hymn says. That's the presence of God. And what is God? I have no words, that's why I need the symbol.
From my mid-20s until now, I have been rebuilding my connection to a religious tradition. Unitarian Universalism is the only religious tradition for me. While we might paraphrase Will Rogers and say “I don't belong to any organized religion, I'm a Unitarian Universalist,” it's no good saying Unitarian Universalism isn't a religion. To say that is a mistake. Some Unitarian Universalists will insist on making that mistake, but that doesn't mean it isn't a mistake. We have a tradition whose core is “we need not think alike to love alike” and “if we agree in love, no disagreement can do us any harm.” Our tradition represents the great lesson that everybody should have learned in the aftermath of the Reformation. Lutherans celebrate Luther, and Presbyterians celebrate Calvin, but the real hero of the Reformation was David Ferencz who stood firm against Catholic and Lutheran and Calvinist hostility and said, “if they teach me something better, I will gladly learn, but we need not think alike to love alike, and that's the point of religion.” And he left behind a glowing coal in the eastern reaches of Hungary, in the land beyond the forests, which for nearly 500 years has survived persecution and oppression by Christians and Communists alike. And over those centuries it has evolved different forms and practices from age to age and place to place, but it is constant in its devotion to people's real-life religious experiences and the quest to name and understand them as truly as possible and to unite and help each other toward spiritual growth in religious community. The lives of the people and not the content of the tradition are what it's all about.
I've been saying for years that Unitarian Universalism is an institution devoted to mysticism, because of the three elements of religion – religious experience, religious thought and religious institutions – we have always downplayed religious thought and institutions when we talk about the core of our faith, and focus on religious experience which is sometimes shared but most often individual. Religious thought? Love is our standard [1] and beyond that our religious thought is a quest with no creed. Religious institutions? Service is our prayer – how to live and how to serve life, including that dimension that I refer to as the presence of God. But what's the source, the glowing coal at the heart of our faith? It's life itself, human experience and what it all means and what to do with it. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? That's the core.
Some say ours is an “anything goes” tradition, because individual experience and expression are so cherished. Some say our tradition has been overwhelmed by the individualism of American culture. But it's not American “rugged individualism” that produces the individualistic tendency in our faith, it's the often individual nature of mystical or religious experience, and hence the need for the individual – the only one in a position of authority on the matter – to name it. Emerson is usually misread that way. He was not a rugged individualist, but a mystic.
So if you notice me talking a lot about Unitarian Universalist history and tradition, if you notice me talking about shared religious practices and religious institutions, it's because that's where the passion is on my spiritual journey right now. And if I seem in some situations at a loss for words, it might be because I am, or it might be because I think your words are more important at that moment, that for you to put words on your religious experience or simply on your feelings is more important than for me to supply them as a voice of tradition. From the pulpit, yes, I'll speak for our tradition as best I can. But one-on-one or even in small groups? In such situations tradition can crowd the spirit. We are of the free church tradition, where we recognize how important it is for the spirit to have room to move.
I have tried to do a couple of different things this morning. I have tried to give you a sense of the kind of spiritual journey I have had and where I am on it now. I have spoken at length about our tradition because this is David Ferencz Sunday – the Sunday closest to November 15th – and that's what I do on David Ferencz Sunday. And I hope in these words you have heard an invitation to participate more deeply in this tradition by sharing, in worship and in small groups and in your friendships with one another and with me, more of your own spiritual journey and experience. May all of us feel invited and safe and free to share our religious experience and spiritual journeys with one another, and may we feel together the presence of God (or Whatever). So may it be. Amen.
[1] Song of Songs 2:4