by Bruce Davis, Intern Minister

A sermon given March 21, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

When I was a senior in high school I was shaken up by a philosophy class. Like Socrates, Jim Wichterman believed that “the unexamined life was not worth living,” and he did everything he could to get me and my classmates to challenge our basic life assumptions. We dialogued our way through the history of great ideas, from Plato to Camus. Each time we grabbed onto a philosopher’s system of thought, clinging for some sense of right answers, Wichterman pulled the rug out from under us with arguments from the next one.

Time and again our religious beliefs and philosophical positions were tested and shaken. But it was our encounter with Nietzsche that really got our attention. One morning in late-winter, Wichterman stepped forward dramatically and declared, “God is dead.” He said it forcefully and with conviction, and we were stunned. Then, as if on cue, the room began to roll and shake, first one wave, then another. The hanging light fixtures were swinging wildly, and you could hear the shattering of glass in the distance.

We hurried out of the classroom caught between terror and laughter. For a youth who was entering into the search for truth and meaning, the measure of our liberal faith, the timing of the big quake couldn’t have been better. Was it a sign of God’s sense of humor? Part of the cosmic joke? Or a random event in a God-less naturalistic universe? Was Nietzsche right?

Many people of deep faith, and maybe all thoughtful human beings, come upon times when the word “God” has no life to it. A religion of experience like Unitarian Universalism can’t rely on empty beliefs or worn-out truths. Our fourth UU principle asks us to level with ourselves, to seek truth and meaning responsibly. Sometimes, in our lives as they are, the truth is, God doesn’t seem to matter—doesn’t even seem to be there at all.

So during high school and college I dropped the word “God” out of my vocabulary for a while, and I became shy to say the word in public. I couldn’t tell whether God existed or not. When I heard people using the word, I could never be sure what they meant by it.  Like the words “truth” or “beauty,” the meaning of the word “God” appeared to me to be in the eye of the beholder. During the civil rights movement I ran into some people who believed that God would uphold white privilege and racial discrimination, while my activist Quaker friends prayed to God for equality, freedom and justice among all people, regardless of race. The same word. But profoundly different implications. It is ironic that warring families, parties, factions, or nations will claim that God is on their side alone. As if their social or political position was served by God, not the other way around.

Even now I am more likely to use other words and images from the Wisdom Traditions of the world to name that One Spirit, that Infinite Essence of life. Proving the existence or non-existence of God, the lifework of Western Philosophers for most of two millennia, might not even be the right issue for us to ponder as seekers of truth. The myriad names of Deity that comes to us from the religions of the world carry nuances of Spirit image that are not measured by empirical or logical precision. Each name, as it leaves our lips or enters our ears, is itself a meditation or prayer. Yahweh… Allah… Schekina… Father-Mother… Ein Sof… Abba… Gaia… Oversoul… Shakti… Atman… Amma… Elohim… Tao… Shiva… Grandfather… Kali…. Naming and imaging Spirit has been dear to people in all ages and places. And though our worldview has tended towards scientism in the last century, such images may yet speak to us.

I do not believe that one must name a God to live religiously. Buddhism, for example, depends on the experience of being, in this moment, rather than naming and imaging a Supreme Being. Likewise, the religious humanists of the early twentieth century, such seekers as John Dietrich and Charles Potter, declared simply that theirs was “a religion without God,” founded on human values that did not depend on naming or imaging deity. Instead, the image that held them religiously was the power of human love and the essential goodness of humankind. Notice here that creating a foundational image may be necessary to live a life of meaning, even if that is not an image of Spirit per se.

We are in an era of dramatic mobility and change. Our lives are in constant transition, leaving our starting place before we have quite determined where we will land. We leave a bad job, or are downsized, but we don’t yet have a new one to turn to. A close friend or lover leaves, and we wonder if we will always be alone. We retire from a mostly-satisfying career to learn that we have to work harder than before to find purpose every day. In his excellent book Transitions, Bridges likens us to the trapeze artist. Soaring high above the ground, she lets go of one swing before the other comes to her hand. We trust during the between moments that we will find something new to grasp before gravity has its way with us.

When an image of God no longer applies to the life we actually live, most of us will let it go. However, if there has been security in that former image, it may take years or decades to leave it behind. A patriarchal and judgmental Father image of God, for example, may persist for much of a person’s life. Finally breaking free of it, there may be no new image ready to replace it. Like the acrobat we let go of God with one hand and are in spiritual free fall, hoping to feel security coming into our other hand. The rule of grace is that it is our job is to be open, to be ready for that moment of new connection. Being ready, we keep our eyes peeled. Waiting for epiphany.

The Sufi’s love their stories about Mula, the wise fool and trickster. One evening, as the bar was closing, Mula noticed that his keys were missing and began to look for them. A passer-by found Mula on his hands and knees under a street lamp, looking for the keys frantically, and for a time the stranger helped in the search. Finally the stranger asked Mula, “Where exactly did you lose them?” “On the other side of the street,” Mula answered. Taken aback, the stranger asked, “Then why are you looking for them over here?” Mula replied, “Because the light is much better here.”

Where shall we look when our lives take us to places that appear bereft of Spirit’s presence and support? In the free fall, when one image of Spirit no longer seems viable and yet no new image of Spirit makes any sense, where then do we take our search for truth and meaning?

My college years were my first spiritual free-fall. I had left the God of my Presbyterian upbringing behind with Nietzsche, awaiting revelation from an unforseen source. When I began to sense again the possibility of Spirit in my life, I found myself pulled in two very different directions. I felt drawn toward a nameless, imageless deity, ineffable, beyond knowing. It was transcendent God for whom the very name God would be limiting. At the same time I felt drawn toward more tangible and relational images of Spirit. A God I could know personally. I was caught in the paradox that I find amongst many UUs who are seekers of Spirit, between God beyond imagery and God of my imagining.

A helpful way to deal with the paradox here comes from the oral traditions of India, originating about 3000 BCE. Some seekers of God prefer to ponder the unknowable and ineffable One—a transcendent God without form. Others prefer the rich images of divinity that inform their lives—a relational God with form. Neither is right. And both are.

If we are seeking images of Spirit that speak to our lives, images that promise relational experience, where shall we look? Under the lamppost with Mula? If we seek images of Spirit in our lives, won’t we in the end just encounter shadows of our own personality? Won’t those images really be mostly about ourselves? Deepak Chopra, in his book How to Know God, is helpful here. “God cannot be just about you, but the portion of God that you perceive must be about you.”

From the time I was a toddler, for example, I have an image of warmth, sensuality, and nurture with my mother. This image is very alive in me, even now. So, it should not be surprising that one rich image of Spirit that has grown in me has been the Holy nurturing Mother. I am not alone as one who holds this maternal image of the sacred, and many of the wisdom traditions image the tender, compassionate, often feminine Spirit. Quan Yen in Buddhism, Sophia in Judeo-Christian story, or Bhavani in Hinduism. When I feel afraid or lonely, I will settle again by invoking this image of Spirit. It’s all right. Mother is there.

In our Doxology, “Spirit of Life,” we sing, “Roots hold us close.” How can we image Spirit as roots that ground us to the very foundation of existence? We sing, “Wings, set us free.” How can we image Spirit as wings that liberate us from pain or release us into the heavens like a falcon at dawn? How can images like these enrich our relationship with the spiritual dimension of our living?

But the Doxology takes an important further step in imaging Spirit. “Move in our hands, giving our lives the shape of justice.” Relationship with Spirit cannot only be passive. We can and must be moved by Spirit into just and merciful actions in our world. We can become intentional to image Spirit in a way that gives us greater power to serve. Seeing a hungry child or a drug addict with AIDS, how can we image Spirit to move in our hands, that we may become the very hands of Spirit in our world?

During seminary I was moved to work in a drop-in center for youth who lived on the streets of Seattle. There were so many, and they came and went quickly. I remember one young woman who showed up one cold morning. After warming up with a donut and a cup of coffee, she asked if she could try the pottery wheel. Gently I guided her into the world of turning clay. The clay at first moved in her hands with a frustrating wobble. Sitting and working in silence for a while, she centered the clay on the wheel. And she centered herself. After a while she started talking. About her parents. About hardships of life on the street, moving town to town. About dreams for the future. About getting off the street.  About life without God. All the while, her hands were moving with the clay. At the end of the morning she said, “Maybe God is in the clay.”

Something helpful happened between us and within her that morning that I can’t fully explain. For me, her explanation, her image of Spirit is enough, that God is in the clay. But after a few weeks she moved on to another town. A reality in working with street youth is this: you get windows opening, then closing again. It is one of the tough but true lessons of our work in this world that people show up, grow personally and spiritually right before our eyes, and then, for one reason or another, are gone. I only hope that she took her new image of Spirit with her.

It is not that you have to image Spirit to live religiously. The image of humanity’s potential for peace, goodness, and compassion is enough for many Unitarian Universalists. Each of us is unique. Each of us is on our own spiritual pilgrimage. But if images of Spirit arise in you, as the clay spoke to the hands of a young homeless woman that day, take notice. Those images may answer a yearning in you. They may be inviting you to live into a deeper dimension of your life. They may draw you into new paths of justice, of mercy. They may open a new connection with the Soul of the Whole, the Wise Oneness, the Infinite Mystery.

PRAYER

May Spirit hold us close.

May Spirit set us free.

May Spirit move in our hands,

That we may become the hands of Spirit. Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Bruce Davis.  All rights reserved.