Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

November 16, 1997

The part yearns for the whole. The incomplete, for the complete. The self, for that which is beyond the self. In the words of the Hebrew scripture: “As a deer pants for brooks of water, so my self longs for You, O God.” In all cultures and in all times, this yearning is felt. We give names to the unnamable. We say the Tao, we say Atman, we say Jehovah, we say King of Kings and Lord of Lords, we say the Goddess, we say Beloved, we say She Who Is, we say the Ground of Our Being, we say Father, we say One Whose Name I Cannot Know, we say Holy One, we say Higher Power, we say the Divine, we say the Infinite, we say Ein Sof, we say Oversoul, we say Allah, we say Yahweh, we say Gaia. “As a deer pants for the water.” Thirsty, desperate for that which gives life.

At the same time that our spirit yearns, we are in a world in which truth is known through the senses, through observation and experimentation, through logic. We will not accept what we cannot see. “Show me,” we doubting Thomases say. “Let me place my hand in the wound. Then I’ll believe.” And rightly so. Haven’t we spent the last 400 years ridding ourselves of superstitious nonsense? No more hanging of witches, thank you very much. But what about the yearning? It’s still there. It’s not answered by the logical positivist. By science alone. And so we reach out beyond what we can know—and wonder if our reaching makes any difference at all, if the Great Mystery gives a flip about, well, about us, personally. About the pain and injustice in the world. About the future of this despoiled planet.

One Sunday morning during the children’s story, a minister was hoping to explain to the children that praying to God was like talking to a friend on the telephone. Using his prop, a telephone, he invited the children gathered round his feet to “just pick up the receiver and say whatever you want.” He had imagined that an older child might be the first to volunteer, but a three-year-old raised her hand, and so he handed the phone over to her. She picked up the receiver, dialed a few numbers, and then sat in silence. He looked at her, but she remained intently silent, her ear pressed to the phone. Finally he urged gently, “Don’t you want to say something?” Then in a strong voice that could be heard in the last pew, she announced, “There’s no one at home.

That child’s experience may not be far from what many of us experience when we try to–shall I say, access God. We may cry out in pain, in need, in our most vulnerable moments. “If I ever needed you, God, I need you now. If you exist, please answer. I’m on the other end of the line. I’m listening, God, for once in my life I’m really listening.” But there’s no one at home. So after this effort we just decide there is no God. There can be no proof of God’s existence, we say. True. And besides which, when I put in an emergency call, I didn’t even get “call waiting” while He was taking care of some celestial emergencies. Nothing was what I got. Nada, nada, nada.

And so I can understand when people just decide to junk the whole idea of God. Like my two sons, for example. They are now 24 and 25, and like to challenge me on any number of things, God being just one. “I don’t believe in God. That’s really an incredibly stupid idea,” my younger son says to me last Christmas. I think he wanted a good. But the truth is, I really don’t care whether he believes in God or not. It matters not. Just as I have no investment in whether or not any of you believe in God. But I do want to know the condition of my boys’ hearts. I want to know of you, my congregants, “How is it with your soul?” as Tom preached two Sundays ago.

Do you remember the parable that Jesus told about the last judgment, abut the separation of the sheep from the goats? The sheep are told that they are to be with God, but the goats are cast into outer darkness. “Why us?” ask the sheep. “Why are we saved?”
“Because I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and in prison and you visited me,” says God.
“When did we do this?” ask the sheep.
And you all remember the answer: “Forasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me.” Notice that there is no theological quiz here. Notice that you don’t have to believe Mary is a Virgin. Notice that you don’t have to be a Trinitarian. Notice that nothing is said about believing in God. No. The sheep did what they did spontaneously, out of compassionate hearts, not to try and hustle their way into heaven.¹ Give me, anytime, an honest atheist who puts his life on the line for justice, who cares about people, over a pious theist who believes that God will take care of things without human hands to do the work. What is the condition of your soul? That is the question.

Paul Tillich, one of the greatest theological minds of this century, used to be challenged by unbelievers from time to time. When someone would say, “I don’t believe in God,” Tillich would typically respond, “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in,” and as the individual spelled out his problems with the Old Man in the Sky, Tillich would simply say, “Well, I don’t believe in that God, either.” Maybe one of our problems with belief is that we have outgrown the God of our childhoods--the Santa Claus God, the Good Parent God--and we have never developed a deity more in keeping with our adult experience—or as far as that goes, the contemporary experience. It’s painful when we become existentially aware that God really is dead, as Nietzsche told us back in the 19th century. A man before his time, he said, “I have come too early . . . it has not yet reached the ears of man.” Nietzsche died on the cusp of the 20th century, and now we know the power of his prophecy. The disappearance of that divine presence has left us empty and anxious.

As James Kavanaugh puts it, “I have lost my easy God—the one whose name I knew since childhood . . . . He was a good God . . . . He was a predictable God . . . . He made pain sensible and patience possible and the future forseeable . . . . Now he haunts me seldom, some fierce umbilical is broken . . . <now> I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair . . . . My easy God is gone—and in his stead, the mystery of loneliness and love!”

So what do we do, though, when we want to know God, when we long for a relationship with the Mystery? Perhaps the mystics can help us. Their message has been essentially the same, in all times and in all faith traditions. They are an anathema to church hierarchy, for they are the heretics to theological certainty. They are the ones who say that words and beliefs are mere idolatry, that you have to enter into the presence of the Holy. And where is the Holy? Everywhere and nowhere. In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is shot through with the grandeur of God.” Let me say that again: words, beliefs, definitions are idolatry, if you reify them, accept them as something of concrete substance themselves. They simply are flashes of light that point to the Source of all light. Be impatient of words, my friends: they so easily stand between us and the Spirit.

As Unitarian Universalists, we love words, we love to hear the sound of our own voices being clever with words. I’m on E-Mail now, and I am hooked up to the ministers’ “chat line,” as they call it. Lately they’ve been chatting about God. On and on and on. Speculating, holding forth, defending. It is so boring. I felt like sending a message: “Dear Colleagues, you will never find God through this endless talk. Give it up. Bite into a crisp apple, fall on your knees in spontaneous thanksgiving, ride a bicycle through the leaves, make love as you have never made love before. Stop cluttering my line.”

It is good to not know, to just sit with the emptiness. Yes, the yearning is still there, and we may feel frightened and confused without our easy God, it may feel as if we’ve lost our faith, but as the saints always discover, these moments of deepest doubt lead to further clarity, firmer faith. If we’re willing to take the journey, that is.

If God is beyond words--is not this, not that--then God is the negation of all, is nothing. Listen to voices from various traditions. The Buddha said, “There is an unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed; therefore, escape is possible from the world of the born, the originated, the created, the formed.” From the Indian scripture, the Upanishads: “There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the highest, beyond the very highest heaven. This is the Light that shines in our heart.” From the ancient Jewish scripture, the Kabbalah: “The essence of divinity is found in every single thing—nothing but it exists. Since It causes everything to be, no thing can live by anything else. It enlivens them.” From the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: “God’s nothingness fills the entire world; His something though is nowhere.” To accept this understanding is to become truly humble, for you are overcome with awe, knowing that there is no place empty of What Is, no place empty of the Divine, and knowing that the same Divine source lives within you. At moments of greatest revelation, you are no longer an independent self, but united with all of existence. You are a conduit for the Divine.

Well, you might say, all of that sounds pretty lofty. It doesn’t satisfy my yearning. I’d like a God I can relate to, if you don’t mind. A personal God. Is that possible?

Well, you see that’s where metaphor comes in. Yes, I think we can relate to God. We can’t set up a statue and think that statue is God. We can’t find a person—whether it is Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed or whatever—and say that that is God. We can’t find a theology or a piece of music or a mountain and say that is God. God is bigger than we can say or imagine. What we can do is to find tiny sparks of light gleaming from the Divine source. These sparks give hints of the fire that permeates and animates all that is. I find it in strange and wonderful places. I find it in the taste of blackeyed peas and cornbread, fresh from the oven and layered with sweet butter. I find it in the face of the fireman carrying the body of a child out of the wreckage of a building. I find it when I get up just before dawn on Sunday morning and walk out on the front porch and look upon the morning light just beginning to creep through the branches of the two huge trees that stand there blessing and guarding me. I find it in committee meetings at this church when kindness and respect and a careful wisdom say to me, “Beauty, beauty, what beautiful people!” I find it when I hear this wonderful choir sing and I see the passion in Mark Sleger’s face as he directs. “The world is shot through with the grandeur of God.”

And although I know that God is not God’s name, I quite regularly talk to God as if God were a person. And I do that, because human love is the best way I know of getting some glimpse of the Divine. God is for me, again metaphorically, Friend and Beloved. When I pray, I tell God about the people I’m most concerned about—my children, my friends, the lay leaders of the church, those of you who are going through particularly hard times. Sometimes I get angry with God and accuse God of being a Trickster, which I’m sure is true. Occasionally I weep because of the pain of someone I love or perhaps because I suddenly realize that I have behaved in a way that was unworthy. I end by reaffirming that I am available.

Some of you have probably heard the story of the man—we’ll call him Everyman--who was enjoying a beautiful view from the top of the Grand Canyon, when the wooden posts suddenly ripped from their moorings, and he found himself plunging into the abyss. About twenty feet down, he grabbed onto the branch of a scrubby tree which grew from the canyon wall. Gasping, he looked up and he looked down. No way could he climb that sheer cliff. But below yawned the chasm, unbroken by any other tree or holding place. Desperate, he cried out to the heavens, “God help me!” Hearing only his own trembling voice, he cried out again, “Please, God, help me.”

To his amazement, he heard an immediate answer. “All right,” said the voice. And then the voice said, “Let go.”

Looking down, the man saw the huge boulders waiting below, and he knew that if he let go, he would surely die. “But, God, you don’t understand!” he yelled up.

“Let go!” the voice repeated. The man was silent. He thought a moment. And then he called out again, “Is anybody else up there?”

You see, it’s not our theology that is the problem. There are many windows in the Divine house, many ways for light to shine through. It’s the letting go that is the critical part. We long for release, but so long as we hold on, we are bound. Words, God language, belief systems, unbelief systems—all these can be mere excuses for refusing to let go.

Let go? Let go to something I can’t understand, can’t even name, can’t even know it exists? Well, that is what as known as the leap of faith. That leap will begin to answer the yearning. Let go, give yourself away. I don’t care whether you call it your highest values or your God. But give yourself to that which is greater than yourself. Let go, and see what happens. You will not be abandoned, left alone. There will be touchstones, assurances.

A story by Anne Lamott in her book Operating Instructions reminds me of the subtlety and grace of these assurances. She tells of a friend of hers who took her two-year-old to a lake resort one summer. They stayed in a rented condominium, and the mother put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of these rooms, closed all the blinds to make it dark, and went into the next room to do some work. A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside his room. He had managed to get out of his playpen and had pushed the little button on the doorknob and locked himself in. He was calling to her, “Mommy, Mommy,” and she was saying to him, “Jiggle the doorknob.” But of course he didn’t speak much English, mostly he spoke Urdu, says Lamott, but after a while he understood that his mother couldn’t open the door, and panic set in. He began sobbing. There he was in the dark, this terrified little child. Finally the mother did the only thing she could think to do: she slid her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped crying. She wanted to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that her touch was the most important thing. She kept saying, “Open the door now,” and every so often he’d jiggle the knob, and eventually, after maybe half an hour, it popped open. Lamott comments: I keep thinking of that story, how much it feels like I’m the two-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don’t speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead <I have>my friends and my church and my shabby faith. I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn’t enough, and it is.”

Who is God? What is God? I don’t know, I just work here. Perhaps God is that which responds. The response may not come in the form we understand right away, it may not come when we want it to come, the messenger may be in disguise. But in the darkest of nights, there is a light beyond all things. There will be the hand under the door, the sure knowledge that we are held by a love beyond any love we have known or could put to words. Sufficient to our doubts, sufficient to our fears, it is enough.
So be it. Amen.

¹ This variation of the parable I owe to Rev. Mike Young.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.