Awe and Wonder

It is December. The holiday season descends upon us. It’s a good time to experience wonder, and even maybe a touch of that intensified sense of wonder that we call awe.

Sometimes when you think you are out of fuel – running on empty or running on fumes, it turns out the fuel you have keeps you going -- for eight days. Sometimes some energy comes out of you that leaves you wondering: where did that come from? You didn’t know you had it in you. Hanukkah invites us to consider that sort of wonder.

And then there is the number one source of awe. When psychologist Dacher Keltner asked people all over the world to submit accounts of their experiences of awe, he found that experiences of awe tend to come from one of what he calls the eight wonders of life.

Big ideas or epiphanies tend to trigger awe. That’s one.

Two, being present at a birth, or at a death brings awe.

Three, mystical experiences of transcending wonder and mystery are awesome.

Four, art and visual design can inspire awe, as can, five, music.

Six, nature can awaken awe in us, and we experience awe in, seven, collective movement like in dance or team sports.

But Keltner found that the number one source of awe was not any of these. The thing that most often inspires awe in people, more common than nature, or spiritual practice, or music, or losing yourself in a whirling dervish: is seeing people unself-consciously display the goodness they are made of. Witnessing human strength, courage, kindness, perseverance against difficulty is what most commonly leads people to feel awe. “Around the world,” writes Keltner, “we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

And what is Christmas all about? Well, it’s about a baby. The story carries us in our imagination to a poor woman, away from home, giving birth to a little baby. Being present to a birth is one of Keltner’s 8 sources of awe, but Christmas is also about the birth of love in human hearts. It’s about love becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And when we see that happen – and it’s happening all the time: people doing something good, something loving, something kind, something courageous and difficult – that’s the most common source of awe we have. The wonder and awe of love becoming flesh and dwelling among us – even within us – that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Wonder is itself a wonder. What an amazing thing that we should be beings who get amazed, a wondrous thing that these animal bodies – yours and mine – should be built to experience wonder and even awe. The capacity for wonder is apparently not unique to humans. The chimpanzees – whose branch on the evolutionary tree split off about 7 million years ago from the branch that eventually led to homo sapiens – also seem to experience wonder. Jane Goodall noticed the wonder or awe that chimps seemed to feel in the presence of a waterfall. There doesn’t seem to be any utilitarian purpose for this. It doesn’t seem to confer any reproductive advantage, so how did natural selection select for the capacity for wonder? For these chimps it looks actually risky. They could slip on the rocks. Chimps can’t swim, so the risk of falling in could be life-threatening. Jane Goodall explains:

“The chimpanzee's brain is similar to ours. They have emotions that are clearly similar to those that we call happiness and sadness and fear and despair and so forth. So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality? Which is, really, being amazed at things outside yourself.”

She goes on to say:

“I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are, but they can’t analyze it, they don’t talk about it; they can’t describe what they feel.”

Hmm. Being amazed at things outside yourself is part of spirituality -- as is, for that matter, being amazed at things inside yourself. The larger part of spirituality, it seems to me, is the making meaning of things, of life, of this existence. So describing the feelings of wonder or awe – which is how we place those feelings in a context of meaning – is itself a big component of spirituality. If the chimps can’t describe what they feel, then I’d say they have a seed of spirituality, but that seed hasn’t sprouted into spirituality. That seed is wonder, and it does seem that the chimps are experiencing wonder. It’s true we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing chimp’s mind. Let’s remember, we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing human’s mind. We don’t know what’d going on in each other’s minds – or even in our own mind. We are mysteries to ourselves.

It turns out various loud stimuli – machinery, boisterous people, or waterfalls -- can elicit chimpanzee displays. But what about that sitting quietly and staring at the waterfall afterwards? That’s just what I – and most people – would do at the foot of a waterfall: quietly gaze.

Philosopher Jesse Prinz identifies three components of wonder. There’s the sensory.

“Wondrous things engage our senses — we stare and widen our eyes.”

That part, we have in common with chimps, and some other animals. Then there’s the cognitive. Wondrous things are beyond what we can cognitively comprehend. There’s something perplexing about them. Whether the chimps experience this component is less clear.

Finally, there’s the spiritual. “We look upwards in veneration;” our heart swells. Wonder is what we experience when we confront mystery.

Dacher Keltner’s definition of awe is similar. Awe, he says, is

“Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

This is not mystery like a whodunit. It’s not the kind of mystery you can figure out. This kind of mystery, you don’t solve. You live the mystery. Who am I? Who is asking that question? What is this world? What is matter?

The more we attend to the details of what the physicists say about it, the weirder and more mysterious it gets. For instance, physicists say that matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. That's handy for scientific purposes, but from a wider standpoint, it simply replaces one mystery – the mystery of matter -- with two mysteries -- space and mass. Why is there me? Why is there anything? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where am I – what is the meaning of this geographic location, or this stage in the arc of my life?

These are the questions that admit of no settled answer. You might have provisional partial answers, but it might be better to not even have that much. Just be in the mystery, without grasping after an answer. What sort of place is the universe? What is life, and how does it happen? What is consciousness, and how does it happen?

Scientists seem to have a lot to say about these, so maybe they are in the category of things to figure out. On the other hand, the scientist's stories leaves us with just as much mystery as ever. When the physicists say that, you see, there are 11 dimensions, and billions of parallel universes made possible by different pathways taken by photons – or when biologists tell us about the chemical equations of the reactions inside a cell, reactions which, they say, constitute and define life – or when neurologists say that consciousness is an emergent property of 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses – one may reasonably feel that such steps toward solving the mystery don’t really clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live.

Knowing the science merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Before the science, there were elaborate theologies. Knowing the theology, likewise, merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Wonder and awe are, we might say, a kind of falling in love: with our world, with ourselves, with the experience of being alive.

Wonder is typically expressed in the form of a question, which might fool us into thinking an explanatory answer is being sought. It is not. The point of love is to love, not to explain it, figure it out, or solve it. The point of wonder is likewise not to get an explanation, solution, or answer. The point of wonder is to wonder – to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe -- bounded by humility, by gratitude, and by joy.

What is your number 1 source of wonder? Is it a starry sky? A mountain top view? Charlie Parker’s saxophone playing? A murmuration of starlings? There are contexts we can place ourselves in that encourage wonder. And then sometimes wonder descends upon us in the midst of the perfectly ordinary.

Thomas Merton wrote about an amazing experience of wonder he had in 1958 on a street corner in Louisville. Merton, then age 43, was a Trappist monk who had spent most of the previous 17 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky – most of that in silence. On a rare trip to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the Abbey, he had a sudden and stunning experience of wonder. He described it in his journal:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness,... The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.’ It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes:... A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. They are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers! Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed ... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

That’s a powerful wonder. How did that happen to Thomas Merton?

I raised the question earlier: Why do we have experiences like that? What practical function could they serve? Why would natural selection favor a capacity for such experience? We might also ask the opposite question: Why doesn’t it happen to more of us more often?

Writer Raymond Tallis wonders why wonder isn’t a constant, or at least greater proportion, of life. Why am I not “for the greater part of my life transilluminated with awe?” he asks. Why do I not “pass through the world open-mouthed with amazement and joy”? We are surrounded by, submerged within, wonders of sight, and sound, and smell, the wonder of every single thing, and of all things together – of what Philip Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being.” Is not our proper state of mind one of “metaphysical intoxication”? So many wonders and yet so little wondering.

We perish for want of wonder, thought Chesterton, though we are surrounded continuously by wonders. Whatever the mysterious process by which we became the sorts of beings with the capacity for wonder, why aren’t we exercising that capacity ALL. THE. TIME? Well. Daily life presents barriers to wonder. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety. As Raymond Tallis writes:

“No one chasing after a bus has the time to be astonished at the intricate coordination of everyday life that ensures that buses run to timetables and that we can act in accordance with goals that are at once singular and abstract.”

A focus on caring for others, doing good in the world, requires solving the problems that need solving, focusing on the practical needs. This reduces the world around you to two categories. Everything is either an instrument that will be helpful for your purpose or an obstacle that threatens to thwart your purpose. It is a noble thing to have goals, purposes, to pursue accomplishment – at least, it is when those goals and accomplishments involve making the world better, easing suffering, improving the overall quality of life of the inhabitants of this planet.

We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight. Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up our diversions and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch. Tallis writes that

“Even the most elevated pleasures, designed to open us up to the world in such a way that we might wonder at it, may be assimilated into the flow of unthinking dailiness.”

We work frenetically and then play frenetically because if we don’t we might be . . . bored. Ah, boredom. These, then, are the three main barriers to awe and wonder:
(1) the purposive focus of work;
(2) a similarly purposive focus on our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening,
(3) allowing ourselves to be bored.

Boredom says that

“indifference is the appropriate response to things around us. The ordinary is indeed ordinary. To take it for granted is precisely the way to take it. There is the uneasy sense that, though we urge it on ourselves and on others, wonder is somehow insincere, fake, sentimental. After all, a state you can enter only when it’s convenient, and which is convenient only when there’s nothing serious or important going on, must itself seem nonserious or unimportant.” (Tallis)

We speak appreciatively of child-like wonder, but most of us would rather be known as a serious adult: productive, on the one hand, and erudite, on the other. Boredom is for serious people, who expect or want or need life to give them serious work and serious play. Boredom makes that demand and signals that it is not being met. But boredom precludes wonder – just as wonder precludes boredom.

We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had in Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.

The way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice. Indeed, what makes a practice a spiritual practice is that it cultivates wonder. Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. Over many centuries – as the development of human civilization afforded the leisure to pursue wonder, that wonder led us to create art, as a way of expressing our wonder. Wonder led us create religion, as way to tell a story about awesome creation, and to have rituals to reinforce the wonder. Wonder led us at last to create science – the exploration of nature’s wonders. Writes Jesse Prinz:

“For the mature mind, wondrous experience can be used to inspire a painting, a myth, or a scientific hypothesis. These things take patience, and an audience equally eager to move beyond the initial state of bewilderment.... Art, science, and religion, are inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us. They also become sources of wonder in their own right, generating epicycles of boundless creativity and enduring inquiry.”

That’s a long way from a Chimp staring at a waterfall with no way to describe it.

From time to time we all need to reconnect with that original experience, the seed from which art, religion, and science all grow – and just sit at the foot of a waterfall. Just sit and gaze.

May we all find or take time to do so.

There Is No God, and She Is Always With You

READING

The living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources. In 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. The first UUA bylaws, adopted that year, 1961, identified sources of our living tradition and included mention of one of those sources as:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

In 1985, revisions of the principles and sources were adopted, but that language about humanist teachings was retained without change from the 1961 bylaws.

Today we celebrate our Humanist heritage. A key document of American Religious Humanism is the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The entire manifesto is relatively brief -- just a couple pages. Here are some excerpts which will give you the flavor of the document (including the male-dominated language of the time). This is about one-third of the entirety (See the full "Humanist Manifesto I" HERE):

"The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world....

In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism....

Today man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion....

We therefore affirm the following:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process....

Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values....

Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method....

We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, [or] deism,...

Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained....

In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being....

We assert that humanism will:
(a) affirm life rather than deny it;
(b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and
(c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few....

Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”

SERMON

There is no God, and she is always with you. What do I mean saying this?

Our reality – the reality that we live our lives in, the only reality possible – is populated with concepts. Reality has houses, streets, cups, chairs, trees, stars, ourselves, and other people in it – which is to say, we have concepts of all those things. Reality also has abstract things, like the number 7, abstracted out from any particular collection of 7 objects and just there before our minds in its pure seven-ness. Reality has abstract things like freedom and love, like greed, anger, and ignorance, like music and the rule of law – also abstracted out from any particular example and present to mind as a concept of what all members of a set of examples have in common.

Reality has some things even more abstract, like the square root of negative one – which is not a real number. It’s an imaginary number, but it’s part of our reality. Other imaginary things, like unicorns and dragons and Harry Potter are also among the concepts that populate our reality. Most of us know who Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina are. We understand that our concepts of them are in the category of “fictional characters,” but they exist for us as concepts nonetheless.

But part of the concept of God is that God is way beyond the capacity of our limited, finite human minds to conceive. Whatever your concept of God is, it’s wrong, because it’s just one more limited, finite, human concept. The concept of God thus cancels itself out as a concept. If I ask you to think something that’s unthinkable, you can’t do it. Think something that, not only can you, now, today, not think, but that no human or collection of humans jointly will ever be able to think. You can’t do that, of course – because, if you could, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. So we can have no concept of such a thing.

Reality is populated with concepts – even concepts of fictional and imaginary things – but the concept that can’t be conceived is not among them. It can’t be part of our reality – can’t be invoked as an explanation, can’t be prayed to or cursed, can’t interact with us or our world. That’s how I would unpack, “there is no god.”

At the same time, there is always something with us that is just outside our capacity to think it. We might want to call it the mystery, but even the name “mystery” is a concept. For that matter, “always with you” is a concept, too – yet I think it is inescapable. If, as noted, our thought – our understanding, our awareness, our love – is limited, and finite – yet also growing, or, at least evolving, changing – then there is always that toward which our aspiration may be pointed, even if we can’t quite conceive of what it is.

It's a something, and it’s always there.

And it is fertile and fecund, it bears new life, so I call it “she.” So I wanted to put that out there at the outset. I’ll be circling back as we explore today our fifth source:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

First, then, I want to celebrate our humanist tradition which continues to inform who we are as Unitarian Universalists. The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, a portion of which is included in the above Reading, was very much a product of developing Unitarian thought. A key moment – perhaps we might say the beginning of American Religious Humanism – or, at least, the first coming together of the people who, working together, would systematically develop and spread American Religious Humanism – happened 15 years earlier, in 1918 – and it happened right here in Des Moines, Iowa.

The minister of this congregation back then was Rev. Curtis Reese. He had been preaching from this pulpit I am now honored to occupy some of the ideas that would later come to be identified as humanist – though Reese wasn’t calling it that then. This Des Moines congregation hosted the 1918 gathering of the Western Unitarian Conference, and a minister from Minneapolis named John Dietrich came down for the event. Dietrich and Reese got to talking and discovered that they had each been developing a conception of religion without God. Dietrich called it humanism, and that’s the name that stuck. Through the years that followed Dietrich and Reese collaborated in developing, promoting, and organizing the humanist movement that culminated in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto.

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 had 33 original signatories, 15 of whom were Unitarian ministers, including Dietrich and Reese. One Universalist minister was a signatory, as were 17 other prominent public intellectuals who had been brought on board with the project.

When I re-read that manifesto, I am stirred and moved by the boldness of these Humanists 91 years ago – by their vision and their hope. The implicit critique of traditional religion – which, for them, pretty much meant Christianity – is valid. The West's religious tradition has often not harmonized well with the understandings emerging through the work of scientists. The West's religious tradition has sometimes obstructed rather than aided progress in addressing modern social problems. It has often separated people rather than bringing them together. So the Humanists said, “Let’s do religion. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life, and we need that. But let’s have religion without God."

Today we still live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their understanding about something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.

Today we still live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present as science their views about something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that their devotion to something they call God goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different readings.

Today we still live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”

Today we still live in a world where countries that social scientists measure as “high on religiosity,” venerating something they call God, also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.

No wonder it would seem important to Humanists 91 years ago as well as today to call for a religion that doesn’t have this thing called God in it.

In recent years we have seen a real renaissance in religious humanism – even though it’s often not labeled that. Try typing “Spiritual Atheism” into your favorite search engine. You'll find there's a LOT out there exploring and developing the idea of religion and spirituality without God. It’s a New New Atheism, much of which sprang up in the wake of the New Atheism.

“The New Atheism,” as it’s called, refers to a spate of books grouped together that came out about 20 years ago now. This included:

• Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004)
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007)

These books derided belief in God and also despised faith, spirituality, religion, and religious institutions. Soon, however, books started appearing that also touted atheism, but didn’t want to deride anything. While still disbelieving in God, these authors explicitly valued faith, spirituality, and religion. These included:

• Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2008)
• Chris Stedman, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2013)
• Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (2013)
• Nick Seneca Jankel, Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age (2018)
• Todd Macalaster, Looking to Nature: Exploring a Modern Way of Being Spiritual Without the Supernatural (2020) -- and just this year appeared:
• Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Belief Required (2024)

If that first round of books constituted “The New Atheism,” then these books that followed may be called, “The New New Atheism.” The New Atheists came and went in the middle of the aughts, but these New New Atheists just keep cranking.

The New New Atheists argue that atheists, instead of deriding religion should steal from it because, as de Botton says: “the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”

“Faith,” as Karen Armstrong points out, in the New Testament, is the Greek word psistis, which means trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment. When Jesus calls for greater faith, he’s not calling for people to cling harder to a set of propositional beliefs. He’s calling for engagement and commitment. “Spirituality,” as growing numbers of spiritual atheists are saying, isn’t about spirit-stuff as opposed to material stuff. It’s about claiming the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.

This idea of connecting with the religious impulse rather than denying it is just what the Humanist Manifesto called for 91 years ago. And speaking of good ideas that we can draw from the traditional faith traditions, one of those ideas, which is, in fact, a staple of Christian Theology going back centuries, is that there is no God. Yes, that’s right. John Scotus Eriugena, a 9th-century Christian theologian, made an argument somewhat similar to the one with which I started this sermon. Eriugena wrote:

“We do not know what God is. God himself doesn’t know what he is because he is not anything. Literally, God is not, because he transcends being.”

Got that? This is a Christian theologian saying that God does not exist. Eriugena doesn't mean that God is nonexistent in the way that, say, my Ferrari is nonexistent. Rather God transcends the categories of existence and nonexistence, being and nonbeing.

To understand this, let’s look again at that fifth source of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

It might seem a little strange that this reference to idolatry is in there. “Warning against idolatry” is probably not among the first things that come to mind when you think of humanism. Or when you do think of the repudiation of idolatry, your first thought probably wouldn't be humanism. Your first thought would more likely be the first of the Ten Commandment (or the first two Commandments, depending on which tradition is doing the counting):

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:" (Exodus 20:3-5, KJV)

What’s the big deal about graven images? you may wonder. Historically, it seems to have been a tribal thing: the neighboring tribes made statues that represented their deities, so the Hebrew people, to be distinctive, insisted on having no deity statuary. Nor, for that matter, any angel statuary, nor thing-in-the-earth statuary, nor thing-in-the-water-under-the-earth statuary. No figurines of elephants or parrots or fish: none of that. For the ancient Hebrew people, this was part of how one affirmed one’s loyalty to the tribe. They said: “We’re the people who don’t do that – so don’t do that.”

It may have started that way, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple. The sanction against idolatry ended up pointing the Hebrew people toward something more important than statuary. Just as a statue is fixed and static and unchanging, a person might also have certain ideas, beliefs, concepts that become fixed and static. The commandment against idols evolved so that it was understood to be not just about statues, figurines, or graven images. It’s about any concept or thought-pattern that has become fixed and rigid. By abjuring graven images, the Hebrew people were subtly reoriented toward a conception of God as dynamic, unfolding, and always beyond whatever you can imagine, always other than anything you think.

The divine creative movement of the universe is dynamic, changing. Human understanding is ever unfolding. Idolatry means clinging to a fixed, static conception; closing ourselves to new learning. Thus we see that it actually is quite apt for this mention of idolatry to be included in our humanist source. The guidance of reason and the results of science continually overturn our idols, challenge what we think we know. Moreover, this is really the point that I think John Scotus Eriugena was on about.

Any time someone says God exists, she has some idea of what this God is that exists. This is problematic because any concept at all, if you’re stuck on it, is an idol. As soon as you have an idea of God – any idea – smash that idol and return to a stance of total openness to whatever the world might present to you without forcing it into one or another of your preconceived conceptual categories. This is humanist teaching warning us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

Don’t even make an idol of your own past statements or beliefs. If you find yourself saying things that contradict other things you’ve said, that’s OK. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

In a sermon I gave last March called, “The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal,” I suggested that, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ were to point to any or all of the following:

• community-forming power;
• love;
• the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;
• the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
• origin;
• any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;
• the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
• the cosmos.

But those, too, are concepts that could become idols. By saying “God” we are also saying more than all of these definitions. Or rather, maybe, less. We’re saying THAT – while at the same time whispering “but remember, also not THAT.” By saying “God,” we are invoking a tradition which, for all its abuses and its nonsense, also includes the reminder that all our ideas are inadequate, a tradition which calls us to smash our idols, a tradition that says there is more there than our words can say – so much more that even our truest words are also false to the fullness of the mystery within which we live and breathe and have our being.

There is no God – that is, there is no possible concept that can encapsulate all of the wonder and the paradox that is this dear life – the wonder and the paradox that is directly staring us in the face every moment, saying, “hey you, knock over the idols of what you think you know and wake up.” Whatever you think you know, this moment has something new and fresh to teach you. Are you listening? Are you looking? Always. For there is no God, and she is always with you -- whispering: “Pay attention.”

Amen.

Pardon, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation

I hear there is a Unitarian Universalist church out west somewhere, in a downtown area where parking is at a premium. People not coming to the church would sometimes park in the church parking lot. The church put up a sign:

Church Parking Only.
Violaters Will Be Forgiven.

The congregation didn’t really mind people parking there through the week – and I’ve always thought that was a clever way to advertise the forgiving nature of the church.

We’ve all been harmed, and we’ve all committed harm. I am mindful of Jean-Paul Sartre’s line that hell is other people, yet I also know that heaven is other people – that existence itself IS relationship. Homo sapiens is not merely a social species, but a hyper-social species, and our identity is formed not merely IN relationship but AS relationship. George Herbert Mead taught us that the self is a generalized other. We ARE our relationships, which is why they sometimes hurt so much.

Even with strangers, an offence is so much more than the physical effect. Imagine this scenario. You’ve been grocery shopping and are carrying three brimming-full paper grocery bags as you cross the street from where you parked to get to your apartment. Your field of vision is now somewhat limited as you cross, and then some clod walking by the other direction bumps into you. Your groceries spill in the middle of the street. Your body floods with that anger reaction. You spin around, clutching the one bag of groceries that didn’t spill, angry, loud words about to come out. In that moment you see . . . the white cane. It was a blind person. The anger drains away as you see the truth of the situation with clarity. It’s not the spilled groceries themselves that bother us so much – it’s another person treating us with disregard, whether negligent or intentional.

As the hyper-social species we are, we constantly monitor relationships – with strangers and especially with those we know well. Those relationships are continually being torn, and continually in need of repair. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, in a passage we used as this morning’s chalice lighting,

“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own. Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Forgiveness.

This word, “forgiveness,” is used in such a broad range of situations. There’s the casual forgiveness as a social courtesy, like forgiving people for parking on your lot, forgiving them for being a few minutes late. There are also those situations of much deeper emotional hurt, where forgiveness is hard to ask for and hard to give. Then there are horrific atrocities like the Charleston shooting on Jun 17, 2015, when 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered a predominantly black church and shot 9 people dead. At the sentencing hearing a year and a half later, Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the slain, told Roof, “I forgive you.” This was not a meaningless thing to say. It meant something. But what? What did it mean for Sanders? For Roof? For the audience of the media who covered it?

Sometimes we are able to unilaterally decide to stop carrying the weight of some resentment. The other person might not have asked for your forgiveness, might not have apologized, might not know that you are releasing your resentment, yet letting go of the anger is something you do for your own sake because the burden of your own resentment has been weighing you down. Do we call that forgiveness?

Other times there’s a bilateral process of two people working together toward reconciliation, intentionally engaged in an extensive process of rebuilding of trust. The forgiveness that might emerge from such a process would be more substantial.

Sometimes there’s something there that’s easy to choose to do. All it takes is saying the words, “I forgive you,” and those words are easy to say, easy to mean, and that’s all it takes.

Other times, in other cases, the heart isn’t ready. The head might compel the mouth to say the words, “I forgive you,” but the heart feels the emptiness of the words because the heart is not ready to forgive. If you say it, and your head means it (or thinks it does), but the heart doesn't, does that constitute forgiveness?

Forgiveness cannot be demanded, cannot be not required – no one has a right to say to you, “you should forgive,” say, an abusive partner or parent. Sometimes, though, victims might feel, unbidden, a forgiving grace descend upon them. No reason they should – but a feeling like that sometimes happens, and that, too, may be called “forgiveness.”

In all of these scenarios, there is some sort of shift in your relationship with another person – or with the memory of another person. It would be handy if we had an agreed-upon vocabulary to distinguish the different kinds of relational shift that may go by the name forgiveness. There are more than two distinguishable experiences that get called forgiveness, but today we’ll just be looking at two: from Danya Ruttenberg’s book, On Repentance and Repair. The book – which is the Unitarian Universalist Common Read for 2023-24, and which is the subject of our forum after the service – has eight chapters: the next to last one is on forgiveness.

There are two Hebrew words: Mechila and Slicha. “Mechila,” Ruttenberg suggests

“might be better translated as ‘pardon.’ It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender. The injured party acknowledges “that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation.”

Ruttenberg explains:

“You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me. It seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila – pardon – whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.”

Pardon requires sincerity, but not a lot of emotional display. Pardon may be undertaken in a matter-of-fact, businesslike way: The debt is considered paid, or, at least, written off. It’s closing the book on the matter – a closing of accounts. There is no further obligation.

Pardoning isn’t quite the same thing as forgiving. The Hebrew word that that would come closest to forgiveness is slicha. With slicha there’s the idea of a step toward eventual reconciliation and restoration of the relationship. As Ruttenberg explains, slicha

“includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability – recognized that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy.”

Reinhold Niebuhr called forgiveness the final form of love – and there’s a little of that flavor in the Hebrew slicha. The injured party doesn’t merely close accounts, but beholds the perpetrator with a higher level of compassion and empathy for their vulnerability.

We can say that there might sometimes be an obligation to pardon. There is never an obligation to forgive. “Forgive” is from the Old English word forgyfan – “to give, grant, or bestow.” It’s a gift. It cannot be required. If it is forced or coerced or pressured, then it’s not a gift.

Pardon, on the other hand, can be an obligation – the pentitent harm doer may, under certain circumstances, have a right to be pardoned. And what are those circumstances? It requires the five steps of repentance and repair as indicated by the 12th-century Jewish rabbi and philosopher Maimonides.
1. Naming and owning harm
2. Starting to change
3. Restitution and accepting consequences
4. Apology
5. Making different choices
An obligation to pardon arises, as Danya Ruttenberg says,

“in the context of a sincere penitent who has come to apologize – to appease, ask, make amends, implore, seek to meet the full human being they have hurt to the best of their ability. And if they didn’t do a good enough job, they came back later with their support people to help them figure out how to do it better. And after doing that, this person came back two more times, trying, and trying again, to truly see and speak to their victim’s pain.”

If they have named and owned the harm, they have committed to changing and begun to change, they have provided restitution and have accepted consequences of what they’ve done, then comes the apology. “A true apology” says Ruttenberg,

“is about trying to see the human being in front of you, to connect with them and communicate to them, to make it clear – abundantly, absolutely, profoundly clear – that you get it now, and that their feeling better matters to you. Your apology is a manifestation of genuine remorse. It demands vulnerability, and it is a natural by-product of all the work of repentance and transformation that you’ve been doing up until this point. . . . You don’t apologize at a person. You apologize to them. It’s not, of course, a petulant, 'But I said I was sorry!' It’s also not about crafting the perfectly contrite words of regret and remorse. There’s a difference between saying you’re sorry because you realize that a thing you did had a bad consequence, and doing so because you really understand that you hurt someone – and that person’s feelings, experience of the world, safety, and self all matter profoundly.”

Suppose you offer a true apology, but the person who was hurt isn’t able to accept it, cannot pardon, even after the asking and imploring. You might not have done as good a job as you think you did. The harm might be more serious than you thought. Maybe something else. At this point Maimonides says you bring backup with you – three supportive friends whose job is to help you make sure you are doing this right. They aren’t there to gang up on your victim, but as observers for your contrition and your guides to help and ensure that your contrition is clear. Here’s what Maimonides says:

“If the other person does not wish to pardon, they should bring a line of three people who are their friends and they will approach and ask for pardon. If the victim still refuses, the perpetrator must bring people a second and a third time.”

So that’s four separate apologies – the first one by yourself, and then three more with friends. At that point, if all has been done sincerely, there is an obligation to pardon – to close the books on the matter. If the victim is still not appeased, she or he has failed at that obligation and is unreasonably holding a grudge. The perpetrator should simply leave them alone at that point.

Maimonides was concerned about the victim and their wholeness. As Ruttenberg says,

“even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason.”

So Maimonides injunction of an obligation to pardon is for the victim’s own good.

Granting of pardon – closing the accounts – releasing our grudge -- “can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.”

Indeed, even without a true apology, or any apology at all, or any of the steps of repentance, I believe that if there isn’t actual trauma, then you have some responsibility for your hurt. You can’t decide what will be traumatic for you, and you can't decide to make trauma go away, though you can decide to seek therapy and treatment. Injuries that are less than traumatic afford you some room to decide how offended you want to be. We all learned as children that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” We know, of course, that names do sting, and that in extreme circumstances the hurt might even rise to the level of traumatic -- but what that little jingle taught us as children is that at least some part of how we respond to a hurt is in our own hands. We can decide whether to focus on vengeance, or to, as Ruttenberg put it, turn “our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent,” or to dwell, brooding, in the narrative of our own hurt.

And we can decide not to – decide simply to let go of the burden of our resentment. It helps if the perpetrator is penitent, but this sort of letting go of nontraumatic injuries is possible even if the perpetrator is not penitent. Lutheran minister Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber described this letting go as “actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us.” It’s freeing – and Bolz-Weber goes on to say:

“Free people aren’t controlled by the past. Free people laugh more than others. Free people see beauty where others do not. Free people are not easily offended. Free people are unafraid to speak truth to stupid. Free people are not chained to resentment.”

So this obligation to pardon is an obligation to ourselves to be free of chains that may be dragging us down. Close those books so you can move on for your own good.

For forgiveness, as opposed to pardon – in Hebrew, slicha as opposed to mechila, there is an orientation toward a reconciliation. Forgiveness can happen without reconciliation, but forgiveness is pointed in the direction of getting to reconciliation. Even where reconciliation might not be a good idea, might not be appropriate, might not be desirable to one or the other or both parties, forgiveness can happen.

It can happen – though it is often not easy. We might say the words “I forgive you,” – and say them sincerely – yet our limbic system may still be attached to rehearsing the narrative of its hurts – in which case forgiveness hasn’t really happened and the path to reconciliation remains blocked.

Another way that forgiveness may fail is the forgiver coming off as superior. Saying, “I forgive you,” may cast me as the magnanimous one, all superior. Rather than return the parties to equality, it maintains a reversed inequality.

Forgiveness may also fail due to forces outside of the ostensive forgiver. If there’s a context of the forgiveness being expected or demanded, then the mouth may say, “I forgive you,” yet the path to reconciliation and wholeness remains blocked.

Situations of abuse require an intentional and extended process if the relationship is to be repaired at all. Yet a certain concept of "forgiveness" -- as if it were easy and instantaneous -- short-circuits the process that is needed. We also have to consider the possibility that no plan or process for repairing the relationship may have enough chance of success to be worth pursuing, and that getting out of the relationship needs to be the priority.

Something Ruttenberg doesn’t mention, but that Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Rebecca Parker does, is that grieving for the injury is part of the process. Parker writes:

“The capacity to grieve unlocks the psycho-magic of passing the pain on to someone else. Grief allows the pain to pass through one with its full power. The ability to mourn is the foundation of the capacity to forgive, and it is strengthened by those operations of grace which mediate comfort and consolation to us.”

Both pardon and forgiveness release the violator from the obligation to suffer – or suffer any further -- for their violation. This is not a release from accountability. Forgiveness involves, Rebecca Parker says, "calling another to accountability, but relinquishing the desire for retribution.”

When I say accountability, I mean accounting for ourselves to one another – a relation in which we accept the task of trying to make our selves make sense to another human being – who has seen our past behavior as making no sense. The harmdoer must accept the call to accountability if forgiveness is to be genuine.

Forgiveness is a form of love – the final form, per Niebuhr -- and like love generally, it is a need. We need it in both directions. We need to love; and, in general, we need to forgive. We don't need to forgive everything -- some injuries are unforgivable -- but in general we need a capacity to forgive and to sometimes exercise that capacity. We need to be loved; and we need to be forgiven.

Sometimes, though, we may fail to do the work required to earn a meaningful forgiveness. For the fabric of relationship is all we have and all we are. Reweaving that fabric from all the ways it is rent and torn requires ongoing attention to effect accountability, and repentance, and repair. Let us attend skillfully to that work. May it be so. Amen.

Election Decompression Reflection

We are here, in the wake of an exhausting election, to process our feelings, regain our grounding, and re-orient ourselves to move forward in love. Love is at the center of what we are about as a people of faith – and so we resist the temptation to give in to hate. Our watchwords are the ones from Martin Luther King Jr. that we often quote. It’s from a sermon he seems to have delivered in 1957 in Montgomery titled called “Loving Your Enemies.”

“Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

I know it is hard to think of loving our enemies when we feel disempowered – as though our neighbors have decided that everything we learned to hold most dear is of no account -- doesn’t matter anymore: caring about other people, trying to tell the truth and live with integrity, justice, equity, rule of law. It is hard right now to say yes to the world as it is. A poem by Rosemerry Watola Trommer posted late last night is titled: "When You Ask Me If I Can Say Yes to the World as It Is -- November 5, 2024"

Today yes is made of lead.
You look at me
and I nod —
and together
we carry the weight.

The president-elect has promised mass deportations. He has promised retribution against the enemy within – which, in his mind, is you and me and people like us. The people he will appoint will set to work implementing Project 2025 which will:

• Gut enforcement of civil rights laws
• Appropriate the Department of Justice to go after its enemies.
• Seek to exclude noncitizens from the census count.
• Attack Reproductive Rights, ban mifepristone, and prosecute people who send medication abortion drugs in the mail.
• Expand Digital Surveillance to enforce laws against women seeking to exercise their reproductive rights.
• Proliferate Online Misinformation and Disinformation by ending ongoing federal efforts to combat online disinformation.
• Enact “Schedule F” reforms, that would force tens of thousands of civil servants — including in agencies that protect civil rights — to serve the president’s political aims instead of serving the public interest.
• Erase the very existence of communities by deleting the terms sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity — as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion — out of “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
• Weaken the Fair Housing Act and scale back affordable housing.
• Weaken key provisions of Affordable Care Act which helped millions of people gain health care coverage.
• End to American climate leadership on the international stage, which would harm Americans and prevent the global community from achieving climate goals necessary to maintain a livable planet.

Will the coming administration succeed at these things? We don’t know. Comedian Jon Stewart:

“Here’s what we know: we don’t really know anything. We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know. This isn’t the end. I promise you, this is not the end. And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

Tom Nichols writing in the Atlantic, said:

“The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy.... Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.... If there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers....Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.”

We are called to love – to live from compassion. Let’s remember the broader context.

For much of the last 3,000 years, much of humanity lived under autocratic rule. The briefest flash of a partial democracy appeared in ancient Athens amidst an otherwise constant crush of Pharaohs, Kings, Emperors and their vassals. Three thousand years is a long time, but this does not mean that autocratic rule is somehow "natural" for our species, nor did it become inevitable once agriculture generated surplus resources that were taxable to support standing armies. Actually, archeologists and anthropologists have been uncovering details of earlier civilizations and ways of living that exhibited all sorts of diverse political arrangements, hundreds of thousands of people living without a ruling hierarchy, peoples without kings, or kings that were purely ceremonial, or kings for a season, and then the duties rotated -- and many of them had developed some form of agriculture.

Nothing about the way humans are built, nor about the contingencies of grain agriculture, makes autocracy inevitable. For much of humanity’s time on the planet, we didn’t live under autocratic rule. Then, for a few thousand years, much of humanity did. We were beginning to work our way out of it – and if we take a step backward for a century or so, we can nevertheless return to working our way out of it. That's the broad context.

For us here today, our work is very much the same, whichever candidate had won the White House. Our task is compassion. Our task is empathy and understanding. Our task is to help one another. Our task is respect for every being’s worth and dignity. Our task is to forthrightly and creatively rise to meet all the challenging realities of modern society.

These are tough tasks no matter who is the President, or who is in the US Senate and House, or who sits on the Supreme Court. Our task is the same.

And so we gather because we draw strength from each other – and we need a little boost right now to carry out our task. We gather because we draw joy from each other – and joy is a subversive activity – joy is resistance to injustice. Let me share these words from Rebecca Solnit, and then I’ll want to hear from you.

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones. People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

In this time we need to hear each other’s voices. We need the help of each others’ words to make sense of what happened. I will invite your reflection on two questions:

• One: What is going on? As best as you can figure, how do you account for how this election went the way it did? And
• Two: What will you be doing about it?

On Repentance and Repair

Our Unitarian Universalist Association has a Common Read program. Each year a book is selected for UUs all over to read, to discuss, to have as a shared reference point. The program started in 2010, when the first UUA Common Read was Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands.
2011-12: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith, which makes the case for interfaith dialog to promote pluralism and facilitate justice.
2012-13: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
2013-14: Saru Jayaraman, Behind the Kitchen Door, which exposed the plight of restaurant workers.
2014-15: Paul Rasor, Reclaiming Prophetic Witness, in which Rasor, a leading UU theologian, makes the case for bring our liberal religion into the public square.
2015-16: Bryan Stephenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, addressed the injustice and racism of our criminal justice system.
2017-18: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear.
For 2017-2018, for the first and only time we had two Common Reads: the Mitra Rahnema edited anthology, Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity and Power in Ministry, and Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy.
2018-19: The Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Jennifer Nordstrom edited anthology, Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Environment.
2019-20: Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States.
2020-21: Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons.
The 2021-22 selection was Zach Norris, We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities – which was re-titled for paperback release as Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment.
2022-23: Nancy Palmer-Jones and Karin Lin, Mistakes and Miracles: Congregations on the Road to Multiculturalism.

And that brings us to the 2023-24 selection, Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. Fifteen books over 14 years. Eight of them, just over half, were published by our own Beacon Press, a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association that was founded back in 1854. Another four of them were published by Skinner House, an imprint of the UUA.

I caught on to the Common Read in its second year, back in 2011, when I was then serving our congregation in Gainesville, Florida, and I've read every one since then. I wanted to go through the full list today, out loud and before the community, because the exercise of saying its name brings back the memories of those memorable reads. Part of those memories is the group gatherings I was a part of in Gainesville, and in White Plains, New York, to grapple with other UUs about what we learned in the pages of those common reads.

Each book changed me. Each book brought a perspective and insights and passion that keeps coming back up for me. And to be a Unitarian Universalist means that we are connected with all other Unitarian Universalists, in a thousand UUA congregations across the US, and with sibling organizations in Canada and around the world. We share the principles and purposes and sources declared in the UUA bylaws; we sing out of the same hymnal -- and, since 2010, we’ve had these Common Reads to give Unitarian Universalists everywhere a shared experience.

The religious task, the spiritual project, is to be more fully alive, and more fully connected, to all of reality – all of the beauty and all of the tragedy. Our aim is to not be oblivious to the wonder, the awe, and beauty – nor to turn our backs on, to forget for a moment, the heartbreak, the loss, the grief, the pain. Our task is to hold vividly and simultaneously in our minds and hearts the full poignance and the interconnection of the beauty and the tragedy. Reality, I have said before, is never depressing. It sometimes hurts, but the more of reality we hold in consciousness, the more alive we are – and aliveness is not depression.

Many of our Common Reads have helped readers awaken their compassion, and that means being more fully alive. The 2023-24 Common Read – Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair – addresses many different ways that we humans wound one another. I’ll talk some this morning about the book, but you must read it. We will have a forum about this book on November 17, which gives you 7 weeks to beg, borrow, or buy the book and read it. Then come to the November 17 forum to share and hear each others’ thoughts. It’s important. For though Ruttenberg has some hard stories to tell, I don’t know if I have ever read a more hopeful book. We can repent. We can repair. We can apologize and forgive and be accountable and atone and make amends and heal and reconcile – and life can flourish. Sometimes we can even do so completely – make full amends and entirely reconcile. Often we cannot, but some sort of step in that direction can always be made.

It isn’t easy. It can’t be easy. If your gestures toward repentance and repair are easy, they won’t be transformative and won’t engage real accountability. As John Kennedy said of going to the moon, we do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Here we’re not talking about a moonshot, but about spiritual work, but still, being hard makes it worth doing. Wendell Berry’s poem “A Vision” is about repentance and repair of our relationship with the Earth, and it concludes describing the world we yet can make: “The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibilities.” It’s the hardship that makes it real.

The New Moon begins on Wednesday -- October 2nd -- and on the Jewish lunar calendar, this new moon signals the Jewish New Year: Rosh Hashanah. In Jewish tradition, the first 10 days of the New Year are Days of Repentance, culminating in Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement. That is, the tradition calls for starting each year by reflecting on the moral transgressions of the past year and sincerely repenting of that harm.

Jewish tradition distinguishes sins against God from sins against others. Sins against God would be things like idolatry, blasphemy, desecration of Shabbat, violating kosher laws, disregarding Jewish holidays, failure of gratitude for providence, and general neglect of reverence. Sins against others would be anything that hurt them or damaged the relationship. During this period of repentance, the sins against God are atoned for through confession, regret, promising not to repeat the error. Sins against others, though, can only be atoned for once the wrong has been made right, such as by paying restitution or receiving forgiveness from the victim and repairing the relationship insofar as possible before embarking on a new year. It's not enough to feel privately sorry and resolved to do better – you have to engage with the victim – except where engagement would only worsen the harm – and make things right insofar as that may be possible.

These are the High Holy days, the holiest days on the Jewish calendar – and they days dedicated to repentance. What a great idea. So with the 2024 high holy days beginning in three days, it’s a particularly apt time to be reading On Repentance and Repair – written by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and drawing on the work of 12th-century Rabbi and philosopher, Moses Maimonides.

At various times in our life, we all cause harm, we’ve all been harmed, and we’ve been bystanders to harm. As Ruttenberg writes:

“We all cause harm sometimes. Maybe its intentional, a result of a calculated attempt to gain power, or from a place of anger or spit. Maybe it’s out of carelessness, or ignorance, a reaction to fear, or because we were overwhelmed and dropped some balls. May it’s because we were acting out of our own broken places or trauma, or because, in our attempt to protect some interests, we ran roughshod over others. Maybe it’s because our smaller role in a larger system puts us in the position of perpetuating hurt or injustice. Maybe it’s for one of a myriad of other reasons, or a combination of them. We have all been harmed. We all nurse stories about the tender places where we have been bumped, cut, battered by others – by people, institutions, or systems. Sometimes, maybe, we have managed to heal completely; sometimes a scar is left behind. Other places still ache now and again. Some injuries may hinder us from being able to do things that we once could, or even cause immeasurable, even irreparable damage – to ourselves, our families, our communities, or our heritage. We also are all bystanders to harm. We read about it in the news, debate it on social media, decide when to speak up about it at work or to a family member, and witness social structures that do not deliver on ideals of equity, respect, and justice.”

Causing harm, and being a bystander witness to harm imposes some moral obligations, argues Ruttenberg. Being harmed doesn’t so much impose an obligation, but the work of healing is to see how open you can be to what the prospect of healing might entail, even if the answer is not very much. It’s often hard to hear the message that we have caused harm. There’s a tendency for the one charged with causing a harm to claim, “but I didn’t mean any harm.” In response, the slogan has emerged, “it’s not the intent, it’s the impact that matters.” The phrase goes back at least to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 paper, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” The phrase started catching on among leaders of feminist and race relations discourse, emphasizing the importance of considering the effects of actions on marginalized groups. For instance, works by bell hooks in the 1990s were regularly framed in terms of intention vs. impact. In the early 2000s, the phrase gained traction in social justice and anti-oppression movements, particularly in academic and activist circles. In the 2010s, with the rise of social media, declarations that it’s the impact, not the intent, that matters became more widespread, especially in discussions about what, for many of us, were then new concepts: microaggressions, cultural appropriation, call-out culture.

There is, in fact, a much older concept in law and morality that captures what this is all about, and that is negligence. If you have a swimming pool in your back yard, and you don’t put a fence around it, and the neighbor kid drowns in your pool, you have been negligent, and you are at fault. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to harm the child. Similarly, if you say something misogynist or racist, though you may not be in any legal trouble, you are morally negligent. You may not have intended any harm – indeed, you may not have known that what you were saying was misogynist or racist -- but you should have known. We all have an obligation to learn about what is harmful, to know what will give offense, and you’re negligent if you fail to do so.

In any case, whether we talk in terms of negligence, or in terms of impact vs. intent, the point is: you are not off the hook just because you didn’t mean any harm. Actual malice, as the lawyers say, may increase your liability, but absence of malice doesn’t mean you aren’t culpable – and that’s a moral principle as well as a legal one. We are obligated to not do harm – not merely to not intend harm – and that means we have a responsibility to stay current on the public discourse that brings to light what sorts of words and actions are likely to hurt someone.

Yes, it’s true that even if one is as current as possible, one may still blunder. When that happens, apologize. Learn from the mistake. Make amends if you can, and try sincerely not to do it again. Ruttenberg urges us to take up the work of finding our way back from harm we have done. She writes,

“I want, more than anything, to show you, to show everyone, that this work is not impossible to do, but it is work, and it can be done (though we must not be too generous with participation trophies or cookies for people doing the bare minimum).”

She then turns to Maimonides for the basic 5-step scheme of how the work needs to go.

Step One: naming and owning the harm.

In other words, fess up. A sentence or two suffices. Rutterberg’s examples:

“It wasn’t OK that I told that joke in the staff meeting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I understand it was pretty transphobic.”
“I have a confession to make. I know everybody’s been trying to figure out who ran over Simon’s cat. I feel horrible. It was me.”
“I need to admit that I overcharged customers and pocketed the difference. Four have come forward, but the truth is, there are more.”
“I know I told you all I was sick last weekend and that’s why I couldn’t come help out. But actually I went away with my girlfriend.”
“Our organization continued to solicit the donor even after we found out that his money was obtained through criminal means and the donor hasn’t been held accountable for that.”
“Our state has, for centuries, and is even now continuing to violate treaties with the Sioux Nation. Our possession of this land and our development of it constitute theft.”

There is much in our culture that teaches us to protect ourselves, be defensive, shift blame, minimize the problem, focus on how good our intentions were, or just put off an uncomfortable conversation to another day. A direct confession – naming and owning the harm that was done – sweeps away all of that obfuscation, so that is step one.

Step Two: Starting to Change – making yourself into a person that can to be relied upon to not again commit that sort of harm.

Ruttenberg says,

“The work of transformation might include tearful grappling with one’s behavior in prayer, meditation, or some other practice; making financial sacrifices that have meaningful impact both on one’s own wallet and the world; changing one’s self-conception and self-identity in appropriate ways; putting oneself in new situations both to consciously avoid the opportunity to cause harm and perhaps to experience what it’s like to not have control or power – someplace where one might get some practice in the virtue of humility. These days this process of change might also involve therapy, or rehab, or educating oneself rigorous on an issue..... The goal here isn’t merely making amends. It’s transformation.” (33-4)

Step Three: Restitution and Accepting Consequences.

Because: “Repair work isn’t really repair if the only thing that’s changed is the perpetrator.” Yet, “a person who caused harm (even unwittingly! Even with the best of intentions!) will be better positioned to truly make amends after they have gone off to do some of the work” of steps 1 and 2. (37)

Step Four: Apology.

Sometimes the steps may take a while, and you don’t have to have fully completed one step before beginning another. At some point when you’re well into step two, transforming yourself, and have begun the process of restitution and amends and accepting the just consequences of what you’ve done, it matters that you say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. If nothing else, you’re showing that it matters to you what ongoing feelings the person you hurt is having -- letting them know that, whether or not you ever return to their good graces, you do want to.

An apology “demands a sincere offering of regret and sorrow for one’s actions. It requires understanding when approaching a victim might harm them further and navigating that with sensitivity.” (41-2) It certainly is NOT “I’m sorry that you were hurt by this perfectly reasonable thing that I did.”

The victim’s needs are at the center, and that might be complicated. If it’s not possible to approach the victim without inflicting more hurt, then don’t approach. The victim may have died, or be unable to forgive. The specific context will indicate the most that can be done by way of apology. The main thing is that we understand it’s not about checking off necessary boxes or seeking an outcome that benefits us, but is a natural outgrowth of repentance work we’ve been doing all along.

Finally, step five, making different choices.

When faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, we make a better choice. That choice should happen naturally because the person making it is a changed person in the ways that matter.

There’s a lot more to understand about forgiveness and its role in healing, about atonement, about repentance in personal relationships versus harm in the public square, about how institutions and nations can repent, about how the needs of healing are and are not served by our justice system. I look forward to your taking in what Ruttenberg has to offer about that, and the riveting stories she shares by way of illustration. And I’ll see you on November 17 to talk about that.

In the meantime, Shana Tova – happy new year.

God the Adjective

God is traditionally used as, thought of as, a noun. Last week I talked about "God the Verb." Today: "God the adjective."

At this point, you might be looking forward in confident expectation to an upcoming sermon, "God the Interjection." I’m not planning to do that, although when arguments about God get going, interjections – including expletives – are likely to fly.

Speaking of arguments about God, you might remember that last March, I gave a sermon titled, “The Ontological, the Semantic, and the Tribal.” I said that an argument about God might be ontological, or it might be semantic – but at root, it’s usually tribal.

An argument about God might start off appearing to be ontological. Ontology is the study of being, existence, and how to determine if things exist. The ontological question is: does an entity exist that knows, that desires, and that creates whole worlds?

The argument might then shift to being semantic. What exactly does the word "God" mean? Is it a legitimate use of the English language to use the word “God” to refer NOT to a person-like entity that knows and desires, but only to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; or the Cosmos: “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”? Can you say that there is nothing in the universe except what the scientists describe and still call THAT “God”?

Why do people get riled up over semantic arguments about the word “God” when no other semantic argument elicits much concern or passion? I think it's because the real conflict is neither about ontology nor semantics. It’s about tribe. Are you in my tribe – do you speak the tribal passwords, affirming or denying the existence of God, adopting my tribe’s definition of the word “God”? If you’re not in my tribe, then we must fight – or else avoid the subject altogether.

There are meanings of “God” acceptable within the English language that don’t mean person-like or supernatural, so I want to ask you: Do you still prefer not to use the word because of tribal identity? You don’t want anyone to think for a minute that you might be in the Woo-Woo tribe? I think, for some of us, that’s the hang-up. We’re more interested in protecting our self-identity as members of the No-Woo tribe than we are in connecting with other people through the meanings that we share: awe, wonder, beauty, mystery, source of hope and healing that we call by many names.

Let me tell you some of my history with God. The G-word and I have had a checkered relationship. When I was in first grade, in Pinetops, North Carolina, where there was no Unitarian Universalist congregation, the neighbor kid sometimes invited me to go along with him to his church. Several times that year, I went, and as a result of the instructions given me at that Presbyterian Sunday School, there was a brief period in my life during which I did a nightly bedtime ritual called “prayer.” “Prayer” involved asking someone named “God” to do, for various friends and relations, something called “bless.”

By fourth grade, I had left behind “that kid stuff.” I was then living in a different small southern town: Carrollton, Georgia. Carrollton didn’t have a Unitarian Universalist congregation either, but it was only an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where, sporadically, I was taken to the UU church. Soon after learning there was a word “atheist,” I decided that I was one. I made this declaration at the UU church, and no one seemed very interested. I made this declaration during lunch at my elementary school cafeteria, and a palpable buzz shockwaved through hall.

The news reached an ardent and incredulous girl a few tables over. She arose, and, flanked by a silent friend to function as diplomatic observer, came over and confronted me. “You don’t believe in God?” she asked. “No,” I said, suddenly interested in the lima beans on my plate. “Do you know what the Bible is?” she pressed. I offered my considered and scholarly assessment. “Just some book by some stupid people,” I said sullenly.

She gasped. The diplomatic observer gasped. The two of them withdrew to tut-tut with others over the lostness of my soul and the rift to their social fabric that my apostasy represented. That was the beginning of my career in theology and scriptural hermeneutics. In my remaining seven years in the town’s public school system, I ventured no further discourses on religion, but that was enough. Throughout that time I was “the class atheist.”

Back then, it was clear what “God” meant – and clear -- to me – that the universe included nothing that instantiated that meaning. Now, nothing about God is clear: there’s only ambiguity and mystery – beautiful, rich, joyous ambiguity and mystery.

The theist says there is such a thing, the atheist says there isn’t such a thing, and the agnostic says “I don’t know whether there’s such a thing or not,” – but they all pretend to know what sort of thing it is they’re talking about. The universe, however, is more amazing – life is more profoundly awesome – and the Bible’s authors, editors, and redactors were wiser and more insightful – than my fourth-grade self was prepared to comprehend.

In the years after high school the issue in my mind gradually shifted from being about God to being about "God" – that is, from the ontological question about the way reality is to the semantic question about the way words are used. Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked? It’s not about being convinced or persuaded. It’s not about believing. It’s about being reminded of what we already know deep down: that this present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and even “God” to help us notice it.

It’s not about what exists; it’s about the qualities of existence: is it wondrous, mysterious, beautiful, awesome? Those adjectives are the crux of the matter, and that’s why I suggest to you today that God is an adjective.

Glen Thomas Rideout has a poem titled, "god is no noun." It’s beautiful and evocative -- and it is dismissive of the idea of God being an adjective. The poem begins: “God is not a noun and certainly no adjective.” But I think Rideout overlooks that the qualities of things are more important than the things. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a house or a cave if it’s luxurious, comfortable, warm, cozy, well-equipped, affordable, energy-efficient and conveniently-located. It’s those adjectives that matter.

It matters what we say exists or doesn’t exist – but it matters more whether we apprehend that whatever exists – existence itself -- is holy, sacred. “God” is an allusion to the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there.

Two writers – one of them who did not identify as Christian, John Dewey, and one who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- both support this emphasis on the adjectival. John Dewey said religion, the noun, didn’t do much for him. But he recognized the deep value of religious, the adjective. “Religious” referred to a kind of experience, a special quality that suffuses some experiences. You don’t have to have a religion in order to have religious experience. The noun, religion, indicates some particular religion, and any particular religion carries a lot of particular baggage – doctrines, rituals, theologies, moral dictates.

The religious quality in experience, on the other hand, requires no doctrines, rituals, or moral rules. A religious attitude “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal,” wrote Dewey. When something feels profound, or moving, or like a revelation or an epiphany – while on a nature hike, or through involvement in some project – we might say “it was a religious experience!” We wouldn’t say it was a religion.

An experience has religious quality when it results in adjustments to life’s conditions, orientation, a sense of peace and security, said Dewey. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is a unifying, connecting quality. It re-orients us, brings a feeling of peace through awareness of interconnection with everything.

Writing along lines similar to Dewey was Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis. Bonhoeffer called for a religionless Christianity. Wrap your mind around that term: “religionless Christianity.”

Bonhoffer wrote in a letter from prison: “The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329). Religion, he said, “is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”

I think Bonhoeffer had in mind the same idea Dewey had: that this noun, religion, denotes some set of doctrines and practices. No single set is necessary for giving experience that religious quality. A wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can help cultivate the religious quality of experience. In Bonhoeffer’s way of putting it, the religion of Christianity -- that is, the doctrines and practices -- was only a garment covering over the true Christianity beneath – a Christianity that had nothing to do with doctrine or ritual and everything to do with the experience of transcendence in our lives. Christians discarding the garment of their religion – Christians, that is, those who possess “religionless Christianity” – will recognize that very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – also facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God.

Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).

So that’s a little conceptual background from Dewey and Bonhoeffer.

It seems to me that God as a noun splits us apart, creates tribal division. God as a noun begs the question: what properties does this noun have? Is God loving or angry and punitive? Merciful or just? All-knowing or just very knowing? All-powerful or just very powerful? God the noun begs the question: what does this noun do? Does God intervene in human affairs daily? Or did God create the universe a while back, and is now watching it unfold, the way a child watches carefully laid-out dominos fall?

While God the noun has properties – leaving us humans to argue what those properties are -- God, the adjective is a property that we can pretty much agree on. Most people in any faith tradition would agree that life and the universe is awesome and sacred.

If God is a noun, then we must face the question of whether God is the sort of noun that the Catholics describe, or that the primitive Baptists, or the Eastern orthodox, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindu describe. If, for example, you posit God as an ultimate cause, then you can’t help but get stuck in conundrums like what caused God?

In one form of Hinduism, the earth rests upon the back of an elephant. You may have heard the story of an Englishman encountering an elderly woman of this Hindu faith. What does the elephant stand on? he asked. The elephant stands on the back of a monkey, she answered. And what does the monkey stand on? The monkey stands on the back of a turtle, she replied. And what does the turtle stand on? he asked patiently. The turtle stands on the back of another turtle. “And what does that turtle…?” he started to ask. At that point the woman interrupted him. “From there on,” she said, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

See? That's the kind of conundrum you get stuck with if divine and holy are made into a noun. We get arguments about different conceptions of that noun. “Do you believe in God?” is a question used to divide people. I believe in the adjectives, and they tend to be less divisive. I believe in green and growing, dark and peaceful, loving and kind, amazing and wonderful. I believe in the beautiful and tragic quality of life. I believe in religious qualities. I believe in awesome, in grateful, in hopeful, in joyful. I believe in full. I believe in earthy. I believe in wise, and compassionate. I believe in sufficient: this life, this world, come what may, it is enough. It will do.

I believe in a god world: a world not of our own making that supports us and sustains us, which grounds us for the meaningful pursuit of ideals. I believe in the god life, which can be experienced by people of any religion or none – a life of awareness, a life of attention to the interplay of forces, a life of deep sympathy with all of them even when it does come time to take a stand against some of them. I believe in holy, for each breath is holy. I believe in sacred, for each step is sacred: we have but to be mindful and know it.

God the noun is an ultimate cause of things. God the adjective is a quality we can perceive of the flow of all the causal forces, none of them ultimate, interacting continuously. We experience those forces adjectivally: luminescent, transcendent.

I’ll close with three further illustrations of the importance of the adjectives. First, Tagore:

"Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?"

Notice that it's the adjectives that convey the force of Tagore's words: glad, tossed, lost, broken, and fearful.

Second, the well-known e.e. cummings’ passage:

“I thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes ...”

It’s the adjectives that carry the impact: amazing, leaping greenly, blue true, natural, infinite – and yes, which cummings is using as an adjective.

Finally, a parable from the Zen tradition.

A man fleeing from a tiger came to a precipice, caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Then some mice appeared and began gnawing at the vine. Just then, the man saw a strawberry growing near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How luscious and sweet it was!

Again, it’s the adjectives that carry the punch: luscious and sweet.

Our time here is short, before the mice hand us over to the tigers. All we can do is notice, notice, train ourselves to notice – notice the god quality in every luscious and sweet moment.

Theological Hospitality

READINGS

A number of writers have been attracted to the thesis that God is a verb. Buckminster Fuller, in 1940, wrote:

Here is God's purpose –
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.”

Here’s how the poet Wild Bill Balding puts it:

God is a verb, not a noun:
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be.'
dynamic, seething, active
web of love poured out,
given, received, exchanged,
one God in vibrant community
always on the move,
slipping through our fingers,
blowing through the nets we cast
to hold and name,
confine to nouns, to labels,
freezeframe stasis,
pinned like a butterfly,
solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be' -
not pinned down by names, labels,
buildings, traditions,
or even by nails to wood:
I am: a verb, not a noun,
living, free, exuberant,
always on the move.

Jean-Claude Koven writes:

“God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. . . . When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

PART 1: HARD TRUTH AND DEEP TRUTH

On the one hand, we Unitarian Universalists do cherish our theological diversity. We like being around people with a range of viewpoints and practices.

On the other hand, though, we aren’t always able to be as hospitable to divergent religious viewpoints as we could be. Some years ago, our Unitarian Universalist Association conducted a nationwide survey of our various theological identities. It asked people to identify their own theological identity and indicate whether they felt completely welcomed in their congregation. The UU Christians by-and-large said they felt more-or-less accepted, but they were sometimes marginalized. The UU Pagans said they felt basically accepted, but sometimes marginalized. The UU Humanists also felt mostly accepted, albeit, they said, sometimes a little marginalized. The UU Buddhists said, “We’re fine.”

To think in a welcoming and hospitable way about people with diverse theological views – a way that makes everyone, regardless of their preferred metaphors for matters of ultimate concern, fully accepted and integral to the center of our congregational life, it helps to think for a moment about: Truth. The thing is, our default position – which we think to ourselves even if we don’t say it aloud – goes like this: “My way of understanding the world is true, and other people’s bizarre fantasies will just have to be tolerated – because we’re proud of our theological diversity.” So let’s think through a little bit this notion of truth so as to minimize the (perhaps unconscious) stumbling block that it can be for us. As a tool for conceptualizing this, allow me to submit for your consideration, that there are two categories of truths: call them hard truths and deep truths.

Hard truths are the domain of scientists and historians. Hard truth is also the concern of criminal trials to ascertain the hard truth of who did what. This is a kind of history, as the attorneys attempting to convince a jury of what happened on the night of 23rd are functional historians, sifting through evidence to tell a story of what happened in the past. If you find yourself on the witness stand at a criminal trial, they are not going to be interested in poetry. They do not want your creative metaphors that limn the unspeakable depths of what your soul has experienced. They want, as Jack Webb used to say on "Dragnet": "Just the facts, Ma'am."

Indeed, the methods and claims of the historian may be seen as an outgrowth from the earliest forms of criminal justice. The genre we know as history is commonly said to have been invented by the Greek writer Herodotus, whose Histories was written between 440 and 430 BCE, providing an account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was able to conceive of this new genre, this new kind of writing, and his readers were able to comprehend what he was doing, I think, only because Herodotus was building upon and extending modes of thought available from centuries of community practices for dealing with transgressors against the community’s norms (i.e., criminals).

To decide if a person was, in fact, a criminal required the beginnings of a notion of what I’m calling hard truth. Early human communities had to ascertain the hard truth of just what was done to whom. They had to consider available evidence and how best to interpret that evidence. There may not have been anything much like Sherlock Holmes-type deduction from the physical evidence, and the parties’ status in the community probably carried more sway than, to us, would seem fair, but still, there was likely something like character witnesses and some attempt to work out what most likely really happened – to discern, that is, the hard truth of the matter.

For a long time in human history, this may have been the only sphere where hard truth really mattered to the community. Outside of this need to determine moral responsibility, storytellers wove stories about the origin of the world, of how the people came to be the people they understood themselves to be, and these mythic tales were assessed by communal agreement that they were satisfying stories. Such mythic stories were not matters of “hard” or “evidence-based” truth, but they did tell deep truth with moral lessons. The stories were true by virtue of corresponding to the moral reality of the community.

Then Herodotus came along and by his example created an interest in telling stories about the past that were not just edifying and morally instructive and uplifting, but were hard true, or “evidence-based.”

Then science came along – though it sure took its time getting here. There were various methodologies of what I’d call pre-science or proto-science through ancient and medieval times, but a full-on embrace of the experimental method didn’t happen until about 400 years ago. If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say 1642. That’s the year Galileo died and the year Newton was born: kind of the center year of the transitional period into our scientific age. Scientific method doesn’t come naturally to homo sapiens brains. Our species has been around for about 300,000 years. Suppose we say exactly 300,000 years. That would mean it took us 299,600 years to grasp and adopt the scientific method, which we have had for only the last 400 years.

What science has given us in these 400 years is amazing powers of prediction and control. When you can predict what things will do, you can set up conditions to make them do it, and, boom, we’re off – steam engines, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, radios and so on to all the devices we live with today.

I hear my Mom’s voice – she was a physics professor – saying that science aims to explain our world. OK, Mom, but science is a particular kind of explanation – namely, the kind that facilitates prediction and control. The hard truths in history and in criminal law provide us our best guess about what happened. The hard truths of science provide us with amazing prediction and control. But we want more than to predict and control our world. We want also to befriend it. We need to love, and to belong, and to know how to think about what’s right and what’s wrong -- what’s good and worthy and valuable and what isn’t – and who we are. We need to know not just what has happened or what we now could make happen, but how to decide what should happen – what we want to happen.

For that we need truth that is deep rather than hard -- poetic truth that speaks to the depths of who we are and what is our place in all of this. Science and history figure into that, but they cannot by themselves convey these deep truths. A good novel is fiction, but it contains deep truths that science and history alone cannot.

I’ve said before that theology is best understood as a kind of poetry. So science and religion can have no quarrel with each other. One is in the hard truth business and the other in the deep truth business.

I know that sometimes some people have thought that what scientists were saying was a threat to what their theology said. The Catholic church tried Galileo for heresy for saying the Earth went around the Sun, not vice-versa. And a lot of people even today regard evolution as in conflict with their religious teachings. But that doesn’t mean we have to see any conflict between science and anybody's religious teachings.

Religious teachings – whether ours or someone else's – provide a person with deep truth, while evolution is a product of our quest for hard truths. It’s out of place to start citing T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on the witness stand in a criminal trial, and in just the same way it’s out of place to start citing Genesis in biology class – though both “The Wasteland” and Genesis are profoundly meaningful and important works of literature that command our attention in our quest for deep truth.

If our religious differences are understood as matters of different poetry, then the fact that some people are Catholics and some are Shinto may be regarded the way we regard the fact that some people prefer Walt Whitman and some prefer Emily Dickinson. If a new style of poetry shows up, then let us be interested, curious, and maybe even playful with the possibilities that these new metaphors open up. After all, we are a religious institution – and the human grappling after deep truth is what we’re all about.

Theological literacy helps – it’s helpful to know more about what sorts of theological options are out there. So let me give an example. Maybe for some of us this will be good practice in being sympathetic and open to ways to think about God. Maybe there’s some poetry here that you can add to your very own heart’s spiritual anthology. Radical hospitality, you see, goes beyond tolerance, beyond accepting, beyond welcoming, and embraces a willingness to be changed by the other. Radical hospitality is interested in finding new poems to add to one’s own personal spiritual poetry anthology. The example I will go into is one that some of us may know, but not, I think, all of us – or, at least, maybe we could a reminder: Process Theology.

PART 2: PROCESS THEOLOGY

Process Theology began in the early 20th century, as a development from Process Philosophy, created by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead, a mathematician turned philosopher, published Process and Reality in 1929. Western thought since Plato has privileged Being over Becoming. Whitehead flipped that. He said reality is fundamentally becoming. Process is what’s fundamental, and things are just temporary manifestations of unfolding process -- as opposed to the predominant presumption that things are fundamental and that they change is nonessential, an imperfection, a design flaw. The perfection of God, from the Platonists through Thomas Aquinas and up to modern times, was God’s unchangingness. Whitehead said change is not a bug in the system. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Change is not nonessential – it is the essence. The ultimate principle is creativity – the process of creating takes precedence over any product creation.

Whitehead gives us Process philosophy, and while Whitehead did write about the place of God in his philosophy, process philosophy did not become full-fledged process theology until the Unitarian Charles Hartshorne’s work expanded, extended, and revised Whitehead.

Born in 1897, Hartshorne lived to age 103. He was giving a talk at our UU General Assembly as recently as 1994, when he was 97. For Hartshorne’s Process Theology, God is not omnipotent. God is finite – changing and growing along with creation. Reality is made of events, not material substance. God, being finite and not omnipotent, doesn’t have full control of what happens. Rather, God engages with us in a process in which both we and God develop together. God changes. God offers us possibilities the full meaning of which God doesn’t know. As we, God’s creatures, explore the offered possibilities, Creator and Creation alike learn, grow, develop, allowing new possibilities to be offered.

Hartshorne held that people do not experience subjective immortality, but we do have objective immortality in that our experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Just as you, throughout your life, build on your experiences, developing new experiences shaped by all prior experience, so, too, God, after your death, continues to build on your experiences. Your experiences continue to contribute to God’s new experiences for all eternity.

Yes, God transcends the world, but the world also transcends God. Yes, God creates the world, but the world also creates God. We are a part of God. Our growth is a part of God’s growth. God’s knowledge is the sum total of the knowledge of all life-forms – God’s desires, the sum of the desires of life.

The emphasis on change leads to the idea that God is a verb. In the readings above, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Balding, and Jean-Claude Koven, articulate this “God is a Verb” thesis. UU minister Stephen Phinney puts it this way:

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

You might find this perspective radical or exhilarating. You might also have noticed that the God-is-a-verb people are not actually using “God” as a verb. They say, for instance, that reality is more a matter of events than substances. “Events” does convey a more dynamic quality than “substances,” but if we’re talking about parts of speech, “event” is just as much a noun as “substance” is. They speak of God as “process” and as “creativity” and as “energy.” All three are nouns. Jean-Claude Koven said God was “unfoldment,” and “infinity,” and “everything,” and “a dance.” Nouns every one. For that matter, “verb” is a noun.

Still.

The point is: there is in our life and our experience a cause for wonder, mystery, reverence. This is better thought of as a process, a dance, a creativity, a love than as a person or entity. Calling it a verb is just a way of alluding to its active doing.

But supposing – just to be playful -- we did want to be sticklers for actually meaning what we said. How would that go, for God to be a verb? Well, verbs need a subject, if we’re going to speak in sentences, so we could say: The universe gods. There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly godding along through the ages. Reality gods. I god, you god, he she it gods, we god, you god, they god. All God’s children . . . god.

And what sort of activity is it “to god”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians: to god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. Certainly not a hard truth, but possibly a deep one.

To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic with -- no, as -- mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim in the sea of mystery; to quaff from the cup of abundance. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough – ample. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are. Why would anyone want to call these activities "godding"? We might call them godding to help us remember, to help us wake up to, and attune ourselves to, the fact that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

For the medievals, to apprehend reality at its most ultimate meant to conceive of changeless eternity. Above this world of corruption and change, God was pure, immutable, outside of time. To think of God as an active verb is to emphasize the time during which the actions take place. It is to put God in time, rather than removed from time. It is to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagine it in changelessness. It calls attention to divinity as spread throughout all of nature, as manifested by the activities of nature.

Verb theology can incorporate modern science, building a deep truth with building blocks of hard truth from science “that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating, intertwining matter and energy” (Phinney). Instead of saying species just are, biologists now understand species as in flux. That hard truth can be a building block in cultivating spiritual awe and wonder at the playing out of unpredictable creativity all around us.

I have been imagining God as an intransitive verb. But let’s continue to be playful – yet at the same time heartful. What if God were a transitive verb? If reality gods, what does it god? Perhaps we could say the universe gods you, and it gods me. Reality gods the mud and the flowers alike; it gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It godded Palestinians and Hammas and it godded Israel and its militant leadership. It godded despotic governments at the very moment they were disappearing their own people and turning away aid.

There is an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. In the fullest realization of God-as-transitive-verb, everything gods everything (else). Unitarian theologican Henry Nelson Wieman, said that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained total, complete and perfect spirituality when everything signifies everything else -- or when, we might say, everything gods and is godded by everything else.

Godding, then, would be the activity of building meaning by building interconnection and relationship. The butterfly in Australia gods the weather in Chicago. You god the stars and the stars god you. Joy gods sadness and sadness gods joy.

This use of “god” seems to mean something like “connects with” or “interdependently arises with.” But more. This way of thinking maybe helps us see through the illusion that there are any separate things. Everything IS everything else.

Verbs need a subject -- that is, I said, if we’re going to speak in sentences. But what if we dispensed with sentences? Could we tell the story of life, of creation, in a language without subjects or objects, a language of only verbs, a language that perhaps the Cosmos itself speaks when it whispers to itself -- or whispers in your ear? Because it is timeless we need verbs with no tense (past tense or present tense or future tense). And because it is both one and many, we need verbs that are neither singular nor plural. Because it is infinite, the Cosmos speaks in the infinitive. So in the pursuit of poetic truth, I offer, in closing, this poem consisting entirely of infinitive verbs.

To come, to go,
To run, to jump, to twirl.
To birth, to grow.
To laugh.
To fall, to break, to cry, to rage.
To abandon.
To return, to embrace, to love.
To wound, to bleed, to weep.
To arise.
To work, to play, to smile.
To journey.
To heal.
To arrive, to arrive, to arrive.
To bless.

Amen.