Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Holy Now’
Rev. Rod Debs
June 4, 2006
Story: This is a walking stick that a friend gave me. If I push this stick into some very good soil, if I water it and make sure it has just the right amount of sunshine, do you think it will grow leaves and branches and become a big tree? Maybe it could grow into a tall bush? If it should grow leaves and branches, that would be a miracle!
If I threw this stick onto the carpet, do you think it might turn into a snake? I don’t think so either. That would be a miracle, too!
What if this bottle of water suddenly turned into grape juice! Would that be possible? Impossible! Maybe, as a magic trick! If it really happened, turning water into grape juice would be a miracle too.
This is my cat’s stuffed toy; I think it’s supposed to be a psychedelic turkey. It’s not alive, right? What if suddenly it came to life? Would that be a miracle?
So, what is a miracle? Making dead things come to life, like a toy turkey or a walking stick? Turning a stick into a live tree or a live snake, and turning water into grape juice?
Now really, I don’t think they are miracles! I think they are fun stories or magic tricks!
Let me tell you what I think is a real miracle! It’s a real miracle that those bushes outside are alive and grow at all! Plants are a miracle. Real live animals, all kinds of bugs and birds, running and swimming and flying animals, some deep in the ocean and some so small you can only see them with a microscope – that anything is alive at all is a real miracle.
What are some amazing things in life that we might appreciate as being miracles?
Look at your hand. See how it turns and your fingers move when you want them to? That’s a miracle! It’s a miracle that you breathe air and eat food. It’s a miracle that you can walk and run and spin around and dance. Laughing is a miracle.
Every second of your life you are surrounded by miracles! You are a miracle! We are swimming in amazing miracles like a fish swims in water. I hope you never forget how amazing everything is all around you. Every common thing is a miracle if you realize it.
Message: In St. Louis, this year at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, poet Mary Oliver will present the Ware Lecture, one of the historic highlights of our yearly GA’s. This morning, I invite you to consider the question Mary Oliver raises in her poem entitled “Spring” (House of Light, 1990):
Somewhere / a black bear / has just risen from sleep / and is staring
down the mountain. / All night / in the brisk and shallow restlessness / of early spring
I think of her, / her four black fists / flicking the gravel, / her tongue
like a red fire / touching the grass, / the cold water. / There is only one question:
how to love this world. / I think of her / rising / like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against / the silence / of the trees. / Whatever else
my life is / with its poems / and its music / and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness / coming / down the mountain, breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her-- / her white teeth, / her wordlessness, / her perfect love.
The black bear, her perfect love; coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting, wordlessness. Mary Oliver writes: “There is only one question: how to love this world.” I think she’s right. The only worthy occupation is loving this living, breathing world and, of course, figuring out how.
About a decade ago, seven hundred UU ministers gathered at our Salt Springs Convocation and struggled with the question, “What is the center of our faith?” That event initiated a lot of further contemplation and trial balloon sermons.
For many Unitarian Universalists, God cannot be the center of our faith, that damning king and judge made in our own human image. Some translate `God’ to mean the life-force connecting us all in “the web of life.”
You’ve heard me reframe the idea of God, abandoning the projection of God as a white-bearded dude in the sky, rather, speaking about this unfathomable reality beyond our human ability to comprehend. Just as ancient Hebrews forbid idols, molten or graven images of God, they also forbid verbal images, God-names as idolatrous. Verbal and mental images, imaginations of God we hold as ideas in our minds are no less idols than physical images. They are merely human attempts to grasp, to frame unfathomable reality.
Buddhists speak about sitting with a calm mind and paying attention to “the way it is” as it presents itself to us. Pay attention, they say. Be awake, aware of the way it is. Perhaps religion is a posture, a posture of calm and humble attentiveness before reality as it presents itself. Wordlessness.
UUA President Bill Sinkford raised some UU temperatures by calling for a language of reverence. We may not agree on a name for that central something worthy of our religious sentiments, but might we not at least embrace the language of reverence?
A number of my UU colleagues have begun referring to “The Holy.” I heard it at the UU Minister’s Convocation so many years ago. I wondered if it wasn’t just code for God, the same all-powerful creative force but without the shape of a man. Then I reviewed the seminal work first published in 1923, Das Heilige by Rudolph Otto, and translated in 1958: The Holy.
Rudolph Otto wrote that religion starts with experiences of “overpoweringness.” It’s not that we suddenly grasp the truth as by revelation, but that we are grasped by an experience of overwhelming awe, wonder, ecstasy or even horror. We are grasped by a sense of mysterium tremendum et fascinans (mystery that is both overpowering and fascinating). The point is that we do not suddenly get a grasp upon what is holy. Rather, the source of religion is an experience of being grasped by something that takes our breath away, that chills us to the bone, that flushes us with emotions we cannot express, shaking experiences that melt us to a puddle.
For some it is death of a loved one, the brutality of war, the butchering of an animal. For some it is the ecstasy of making love, childbirth, a tiny hand reaching up into yours. For others, first-hand experience of a volcano, an earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, lightning, house-fire, of disease, mutilation, genocide. Experience of the blazing sun, of crashing rivers, the oceans, that view from a high mountain peak, of forests. Close contact with our four-legged animal companions, with winged and scaled, creatures of all kinds. Exploring planets, stars and constellations, and microscopic life forms. The driver’s feeling in a formula car, on a motorcycle, locomotive, jet airplane, rocket, nuclear bomb, and then there’s gene-splicing. Where is the end of the wonders that grasp us in wordless, overpoweringness?!
To be grasped by awe and wonder is the origin of religion. To be religious, is to pay attention. Religion is a posture of attentiveness to overwhelming, unfathomable reality, but also to the simple, insignificant gifts of the moment. Unitarian Jacob Trapp (1899-1993) wrote: “I am amazed to the point of ecstasy at the miracle of awareness. Life brings me its freshness as an ineffable gift.” To be sacrilegious is to be self-absorbed, to pay no attention to the wonders that embrace us, moment by moment, to disdain our companions on life’s journey.
Mary Oliver writes: “There is only one question: how to love this world.” The journey of religious faith, is an exploration of what is worthy of our wonder and attentiveness. Various religions show us different ways of paying attention, in different cultures and times.
This morning I want to warn you of one deception that lies in the nature of human language that diverts our attention from the wondrous reality of being alive. As a child I read the book Treasure Island. What a wonderful pirate story and island fantasy! I read Swiss Family Robinson, a kids’ version of Robinson Crusoe located on an island world that challenged exploration and invention. The Black Stallion series caught my fancy including The Black Stallion and Flame, each book painting a desert island with horse companion. Come to think about it, Peter Pan had “Neverland,” and Tom and Huck had their island and raft on the Mississippi. Many books present a mythical alternative world to explore full of adventure and discovery.
It is language itself that lures us to the realm of pure ideas and away from experience and all its illusions. In the story of “The Cave” in Plato’s Republic, the philosopher sought to release the slaves chained in the cave of images of images. For Plato, the realm of pure ideas was more changelessly “real” than our experiential reality with its sensory misperceptions, lies and chicanery.
From simple language, our useful communication about the real world, tables and chairs and people and animals, we get the word `table’ and the idea of “tableness” free of imperfections that we experience in real life. No splinters, no wobble, no stains nor gouges. From the noun, `table’ we get the idea of the pure form of Table, perfect “tableness.” For Plato, this realm of pure forms had a greater reality and worth than the imperfect world of experience.
It is a short leap of imagination from the verb “to be” (“This is a cow.” “I am happy.”) to talk about “being” in itself and to wonder at perfect “being” free of the particularities of everything that is. . . something or other.
It has been a short leap of imagination from the adjectives “powerful” and “good” and “loving” and “righteous” for us talking primates to begin writing and painting our projections of perfect power and goodness, perfect love and righteousness, Gods in an ideal earth we call heaven. It is written down as revealed to us in ancient texts of Scripture.
Nouns and verbs and adjectives taken out of their context of human communication about particular things in real life experience, appear to our imaginations as perfect ideas, more worthy of our attention. Goodness perfected in God seems to our imagination to be more worthy of our attention that the imperfect goodness we experience in human society and in the world. Language itself seduces us from being grasped in awe and wonder at the world and to the realm of pure ideas, ideologies and otherworldly idolatries.
My colleague Kendyl Gibbons writes: “The holy is nothing but the ordinary, held up to the light and profoundly seen.” “The Holy” is not some abstract supernatural something. There are only holy moments wherein we are awake and paying attention. Then we are grasped by simple beauty, simple kindness, little energies, little surprises, tiny gifts -- water, air, breath, shadows, the sweet earth. The holy is only in the particularities of living.
What would it take for us to draw our attention away from our idol images of ideal worlds and ideologies? What would it take for us to come home to this world that presents itself to us moment by moment? What would it take for us to be awake, to pay attention to the way it is?
Mary Oliver wrote: “There is only one question: how to love this world.”
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver (House of Light, 1990)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?