by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given at First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

March 26, 2000

My son Madison has been visiting me for this past week, and wanting to get his perspective on my sermon topic, I asked him, "What does the word ecstasy mean to you?" "That’s easy," he said. "It’s a drug." "Yeah, I know that," I answered. "But what does it mean besides a drug?" "It’s lost its other meanings to people my age," he insisted. "When you say ecstasy, you mean a drug." He told me that he has heard about the "raves" that are held in the Bay Area, where he’s in school—masses of people gather in an atmosphere of colored lights, smoke, repetitive rhythms and of course the drug ecstasy—it’s passed out at the door, he says. It becomes the catalyst for communion, as the participants dance all night—they come for the closeness, the connection, that their ordinary lives don’t allow.

Would that it would be that easy to have ecstasy just passed out at the door—I mean, the kind of ecstasy I’ll be exploring today. I would love to give you some as you walk out the sanctuary, but a pill just won’t do it. I want you to have something that stays with you longer than the morning.

The drug itself (MDMA) has an interesting history. It was first synthesized shortly before WW I by the German pharmaceutical company Merck. It was briefly prescribed as a dieting aid, and another story has it being developed as an appetite suppressant for German troops. But since the drug makes the user feel like loving everyone, it surely would have been quickly disqualified for use in combat. In fact, when it was used in the early 90’s in experimental therapy sessions for traumatized Nicaraguan soldiers, 75 per cent of the subjects said they wanted an end to all war, and some talked of loving everyone, including the enemy. What would happen, I wonder, if we slipped some of this stuff in the water supply of all our world leaders?

During the rave, participants apparently just feel everything more intensely—all their senses come alive. They get energy, and report that they develop empathy and insight. Some have just open-hearted conversation, others say they experience full-blown mystical rapture and feel at one with all that is. They say they are dancing inside the music; sound becomes a fluid medium in which the dancer is immersed. There is a cost, of course—there is no free lunch with any drug. The comedown a few days later involves fatigue, emotional burnout, and mood swings between elation and desolation. I do not recommend this as a way to go.

Why, we might ask, has the ecstasy-induced rave become such a phenomenon? Could it be that the "greed is good," the Me Decade of the 80’s traveling on into the ‘90’s, has left us with a less than satisfying sense of community? Could it be that the fragmentation in our society—alienation from parents, alienation from purpose--has led to the desire in our young people for something, anything, to bring them together, so they can feel connection and love and caring?

After our conversation about the drug ecstasy, I kept pushing my son for other meanings of the term. And he just couldn’t come up with anything. He said, "It’s not a word I hear these days." So maybe we’d better begin by considering the meaning of the word this morning—though I have to confess the irony in trying to talk about ecstasy, when the experience by its very nature goes beyond where words can reach. Still, words are what I have. The term ecstasy comes from the Greek ex stasis, which means "to move beyond statis," beyond the solid or fixed, into movement. The Latin root is ex stare, which translates "to stand outside one’s self," as in transcendence. It means to go outside, to go beyond what you know, what you believe is possible. Now we’re beginning to get some sense of the fear of ecstasy, to understand why we flee such experience. To go beyond what you know, what you believe is possible. That is unnerving.

In fact, rational thought and self-control are obliterated when one is in the throes of ecstasy. Ecstasy has to do with the senses, with bodily experience, with modes of knowing beyond the cognitive. It is not merely pleasure. One would normally expect pleasure from hearing certain music or eating a fine meal, but ecstasy goes beyond that. It is not euphoria. It is an experience that moves us beyond what we would expect in the normal day-to-day course of events. There is a loss of self, a dropping away of ego, sometimes a lack of awareness of time or space. Worldly desires no longer matter, and one is transported into a realm of pure joy, which is beyond limitation, beyond sorrow. There is a sense of liberation, a deep certitude, a knowing that all is as it should be. It is sometimes referred to as "divine madness." It is mysterious, poignant, filled with grace and thanksgiving. Such extreme experiences are rare, unless you are a saint—but they are the touchstones which will allow us to recognize the windows to ecstatic experience in its lesser forms.

When we are children, we live in an everyday kind of ecstasy that is expressed as we shout and jump and spin until we drop; when we smell a freshly mown field for the first time; or even such a simple thing as opening a new box of crayons and looking with wonder at the array of colors. But as we grow up, we develop an ego that sets boundaries between the self inside and the world outside—the me and the not-me. We learn rules, structure, obedience, and duty, and gradually the ecstatic mind of the child grows into the more rigid and conventional way of the adult. And that is as it must be—we all have to be socialized, that our society might have order. But after a while every spontaneous impulse, every emotion, must struggle through a thicket of socially conditioned responses, and we lose the wonder and awe of living. We come to believe that reality is this reduced awareness, this cookie-cutter approach to living—whereas the truth is that we have sold our birthright: our original innocence, our deep passion, our connection with the sacred. I can remember walking down the street one beautiful fall day with my older son Kash when he was just a toddler. He bent over and picked up a colorful leaf, held it up to me, and said with shining eyes, "Look, Mommy, a leaf, a leaf!" I could not see the miracle. I could only see the yard to rake.

Even so, as adults, with our senses dulled, we sometimes receive ecstatic experiences as sudden, unexpected gifts, little whispers of God’s passing over the waters of our lives. Think about the times in your own life when you have been somehow relieved of the burden of self and have moved to a place where you feel open to the "something more" underneath the "what is."

Nature is a common path to the ecstatic. Irma Zaleski tells this story from her childhood in Poland. She writes: "When I was little, in Poland before the War, we used to spend nearly every summer at my grandmother’s house in the mountains. She lived alone, in a house built by a local craftsman on the edge of a torrent. The noise of its rushing waters was the background of every moment of our holidays, and the first sound of eternity which I learned to hear. My grandmother was the kind of grandmother that everybody should have. She was brilliant and wise, although a little bitter at times. She had lived through wars, revolutions, a bad marriage, and the death of two children. What saved her sanity, I believe, was her love of beauty and a passionate interest in all the things of the mind. . . . . Above all else she loved the beauty of the mountains among which she lived and among which she eventually died.

"I must have been five or six at the time. One night, I was awakened by my grandmother leaning over my bed. There was a noise of a great storm outside. Grandmother picked me up and carried me out onto a big veranda . . . "Look!" she said, and turned my face toward the mountains, "Look, this is too beautiful to sleep through." I saw black sky, torn apart every few seconds by lightning, mountains emerging out of darkness, immense, powerful, and so real. Thunder rolled among the peaks. I was not frightened . . . I was awed. I looked up at my grandmother’s face and , in a flash of light, I saw it flooded with wonder and joy. I did not realize it then . . . but what I saw was ecstasy. My grandmother was the first to point out to me a door to joy."

Art is another door. I remember keenly the time I visited Florence, Italy, and saw Michaelangelo’s magnificent David. The day was hot—not just hot, but sweltering, punishing hot. The lines were long. People were grouchy. I was grouchy. Finally I stood before the statue. It was huge, much bigger than I thought it would be. The first thing that captured me was the sheer beauty of the piece, from every side, every angle. I kept moving around it and looking and looking and every time I looked, I saw perfection of form. And then of course I thought of the Bible story. Here was the shepherd boy who defied the giant. The raging tyrant brought down by a boy and a simple slingshot. That, and faith. Most statues are of the heroic variety—bold, brave men dressed in arms. But David had no such look. His face had the innocence of the boy, an innocence and a humility that allowed the faith that allowed the deed. I was taken into a place beyond time, a place of perfection and peace.

Such experiences for me are rare, I have to say. I am in my head most of the time, and you just can’t think your way to ecstasy. The experience that did bring me most deeply into ecstasy was birthing my babies. My first son Kash was born in Liverpool, England, where my husband was doing a residency in pediatric surgery. All the way through the pregnancy, I was deliriously happy, having at last nothing to prove, nothing to do to justify my existence. I was carrying life, and I simply gave myself to the miracle. That said, though, as I got closer to the time of delivery, I recognized that my body was no longer my own, and that it would be at the mercy of whatever the birth demanded, and that was frightening. My labor started on the very day it was predicted to, and it went on through the night. The English believe that a little pain never hurt anybody, so I pretty much got through it on my own, until the last phase. I couldn’t believe that anybody thought breathing exercises could control this kind of pain. But after about 20 hours my son was born, and I entered into another state of being altogether.

My husband came in to check the baby, to see that he was all right—after all, he spent his days operating on babies with congenital deformities. And then he left. And the attending doctor left, and nurses left. I was there alone on the birthing table, and the baby, cleaned and wrapped, was nearby on another table, crying his lungs out. The lights were turned low. Everything disappeared then except the baby and me—the pain, the needles, the steel and chrome. The baby cried and cried, and I knew that was all right. After all, he had just left home. I felt connected with every woman who had ever birthed a child. I knew for the first time in my life that I loved something, someone, more than I loved my self. In fact, where was this "self" we speak of? It was gone, it had become part of what is. My very own flesh had turned into the flesh of another, life had come from my body, and I was, in the simplest of terms, living in the midst of a mystery that was beyond any knowing.

Perhaps the most readily accessible path to ecstasy is that of sexual union. Maybe that is because it is then when the body simply takes over and finds its own way. The thinking, planning, controlling are done. The whole point is to surrender to another. To go out of your mind. To come into your senses. The whole unfolding of passion, from approach, to pursuit, to surrender is an experience in which we feel full of life and at the same time empty of self. Every human being has an unquenchable thirst for wholeness, and a shared passion takes us to that place of unity and peace. We arrive there through the power and mystery of sexual union with another, but the longing is ultimately a longing to experience the larger source of aliveness, the Sacredness within ourselves. Ecstasy that comes to us through joining our body with another’s is not about technique, is not about seducing or controlling or conquering. It is about loving this specific other and at the same time loving the fullness and sacredness of life itself.

Other ways of getting past the self. One is through ecstatic religious experience. Tom read to you earlier some of the poetry of the Sufi poet Rumi, who was the leader of an ecstatic tradition of the Muslim faith. Rumi stood against conventional religious piety and legalistic rigidity. He wrote: "Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive. Jump into experience while you are alive!" His spontaneous poetry and the whirling and chanting of his followers were not simply emotionalism, but rather a dismantling of the false self. The seeker is lifted to a state of consciousness where individual existence is seen for what it is: dependent upon another order of Reality. God becomes everything; the seeker becomes the servant of the Source of All Being. Similarly, today we have charismatic movements in every religious group. These emerge from a wish to have direct, unmediated experience with the Holy. We have these charismatic movements, as I said, in every religious group —well, I guess except Unitarians. No people fear the Holy the way we do. No people distrust our feelings more. We don’t have to handle snakes, but I wish we could give up just a little control, that we might be overtaken by the Spirit more often. But then that’s another sermon.

There’s a piece of us—even us Unitarians—that wants to give up control, that wants to touch the "more" behind the everyday reality. Because, really, when you think about it, it’s boring to trudge along in the given paths. Is life just birth, and school, and work, and debt, and death? I don’t know about you, but this prescribed route, this public herd, doesn’t sound very appealing to me. As one writer said, "We live like castaways on a desert island, who have forgotten where we came from." We live in an anti-ecstatic society, suspicious of the flesh, doubtful of our spiritual nature, embarrassed by mystical experiences, careful that our feelings don’t give us truth that our rational mind can’t handle. Maybe ecstasy, instead of taking us away from what we deem to be reality, is in fact a kind of waking up to reality, waking up and connecting with the Source of our Being. Maybe life is not about wanting to be a millionaire or getting our kid into a prestigious school or getting a promotion or even saving the earth—maybe life is really about falling in love with the world over and over again, maybe it’s breaking our hearts open over and over again to what is not self.

And yet to give one’s self away like this is too much like dying—it is, in fact, a kind of dying, and again, we are afraid. When we let the current of our passion run freely, it might take us into the rapids and over the edge. This "self" that we have developed, that we think is real, might get away from us. We would like to pursue the aliveness of passion without going through the death of surrender, but it doesn’t work that way. Getting high doesn’t work. Grasping at love doesn’t work. The call is for the death of the old self. I think of the words of Goethe, who calls our urge to die and be transformed, a "holy longing," saying it is like a moth drawn toward the flames of a candle. He writes: "I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death." And his conclusion to the poem says it clearly: "And so long as you haven’t experienced/ this: to die and so to grow,/ you are only a troubled guest on this dark earth."

I think back to a conversation that I had with a teacher that I had had in seminary. She was in her sixties, perhaps, when this conversation took place, and she had lost her second husband a year before. She was, though, and always had been, a very sensual woman, a woman who drew men to her. I asked her, "Are you seeing anyone just now?" And she said, "I don’t think it’s a man I want." "What do you want?" I asked. And she answered, "Union with God." I believe all ecstatic longing is ultimately a longing for God. And please don’t get hung up on the word God. A longing for the Sacred, the Holy, the Other, the Mystery, the Beloved, the Ground of Our Being. All these are words for something we cannot name and can never know, but nevertheless that to which we must surrender all. The irony of that! The nameless fear it engenders. And the absolute necessity of it.

We do not, we cannot, live out of time. But when we invite ecstatic experience, when we let the door of our heart fly open, we get a glimpse of the Divine. We can never again not know what we know. We have a pledge in that moment of the eternity that is at the heart of all being. When God comes to us, we should know that God never comes alone. God brings beauty. God brings love. God brings joy, joy that is like unto no other. It is the joy called "no more wanting"; it is the water that slakes the real thirst of our living; it is the light that leads us home.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved, we come this morning confessing that we are afraid of your invitation to a larger life, and so we pull back. But we come with our wanting, still. Wanting to give our truest gifts. Wanting to connect with other human beings as if they mattered. Let us not be ruled by fear. We pray that we would be led to your living waters, and we pray that we would have the courage, then, to drink from that stream. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now and let the door of your heart fly open. Let the Holy enter in whatever form it will come. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome to this house of worship. If you come needing comfort, may your heart be eased. If you come needing companionship, may a friend be near. If you come needing new life, may you find your true path. Come and let us worship together.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.