Crossing Over. Sermon written and delivered by Rev. Jennifer Youngsun Ryu. Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists. Williamsburg, Virginia

Transcription

1 Crossing Over Sermon written and delivered by Rev. Jennifer Youngsun Ryu Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists Williamsburg, Virginia Sunday, March 16, 2008 In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost. You may recognize these words as the opening to Dante s Divine Comedy. I first read these words many years ago, during a time in my life when everything seemed to be falling into place. I didn t feel lost or in the dark. I was a college graduate with a good job, and finally, a little disposable income. My free time was for playing and partying with friends. Nothing seemed to be missing. Yet these words startled me: in the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost. There I was, in the middle of the road of my life, choices branching out like limbs on a great tree and I didn t know where I was supposed to go next or what I was supposed to do. Dante s metaphorical use of these simple images to describe his spiritual life resonated with my own interior landscape. Standing on the surface of my stable, well-oriented life, I caught glimpse of an unfamiliar world, and that world was within me. Metaphors can bring us to unfamiliar places in our interior landscape--places where literalism can t take us. They transcend separation and duality. They carry us from the material domain of proof and evidence to the spiritual domain, where nothing can be proven, measured, or even seen with the eye. Most people are familiar with metaphor as a literary device found in fiction and fables, proverbs and poetry. Metaphor speaks to a part of us deeper than the rational mind. It resonates with the emotions and with the spirit, and this is what moves us to act. 1

2 Sometimes we are moved so profoundly by a piece of music or a scripture or poetry that we begin to change our lives. Looking back on that time when I read those words by Dante, I recognized that this was the first in a long line of spiritual experiences that led me to ministry. Metaphors take on special importance in the spiritual domain. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell has said, spiritual truths that transcend time and geography must be borne in metaphorical vessels whose meaning is found in their connotations, not their denotations, [not] the hard, factual casings of their historical reference. The Buddha preached a similar message: A man walking along a highroad sees a great river. He collects sticks and foliage, makes a raft, paddles across the river, and reaches the other shore. The raft or boat is the dhamma, the teaching, offered as metaphor. It helps us reach the other shore. Metaphor is uniquely able to take us from one shore the shore of our waking consciousness, to the other shore an undiscovered awareness, enlightenment. Why is metaphor uniquely able to inspire us, to move us to spiritual depth better than literal language? When metaphor is used to give meaning to something in the material world of time and space, there is a concrete parallel between the metaphor and that something it s trying to describe. Take this example: the congregants responded to the pledge drive with a tidalwave of generosity. Or, plans to repaint the sanctuary purple set off a storm of controversy. When we move to the spiritual domain, there is no such concrete parallel because the metaphor points to something not anchored in human time and geography. Give us this day, our daily bread doesn t mean just food for the body. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin doesn t mean that we should stop working. The literal image of daily bread points to a human being s need for spiritual sustenance. And the literal image of lilies of the field points to our need not to struggle so hard with our lives, to surrender a little bit more. Metaphor will always be needed to travel from the familiar shore of the material world to the undiscovered shore of the spiritual, where we must make a different kind of meaning. 2

3 That shore is not a location on a map. It is a heightened awareness of your interior landscape. It is a new consciousness of the inherent harmony between yourself and the rest of the world. What else waits on that other shore? Another journey, to yet another shore. The spiritual journey takes us to a destination that leads to another destination, and on and on. Talking about spirituality is difficult, especially in our present culture because it has become overly literal and overly materialistic. People want a concrete, literal definition of everything, including spirituality. Writer Annie Dillard speaks of this difficulty and of the longing that still exists in spite of it: "Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy....it is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that, which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under evergreen trees. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few. (from Teaching a Stone to Talk) People are, of course talking about religion and spirituality all the time, but much of it is quite literal. If we listen to our neighboring preachers, we would hear some of them talking about God as if he were an actual being with superpowers, living somewhere up in the sky. We would hear them talking about Jesus being born of a biological virgin and being then literally brought back to life exactly three days after his execution, or talking about bread and wine being turned into literal flesh and blood. When a community continually interprets its spiritual stories literally, those stories become concretized. Spirit departs, and all that s left is a hard, factual husk. If the Buddha were listening to some of these preachers, he might direct their attention to that parable of the man and the boat, in which he goes on to say: Now suppose that, after he reaches the other shore, he takes the boat and puts it on his head and walks with it on his head wherever he goes. Would he be using the boat in an appropriate way? No. A reasonable man will realize that the boat has been very useful to him in crossing the river and arriving safely on the other shore. But once he has arrives, it is proper to leave the boat behind and walk on without it. This is using the boat appropriately. In the same way all truths should be used to cross over; they should not be held onto once you have arrived. You should let go of even the most profound insight or the most wholesome teaching (The Gospel According to Jesus, by Stephen Mitchell) 3

4 To me, it looks as if religious literalists are wearing boats on their heads. To me, this is no way to move toward spiritual transformation. The efforts of human beings and human institutions to grab exclusive claims to spiritual truths have stripped the vitality from sacred texts. Metaphor hardens into dogma and it can no longer carry us over. Religious leaders from all faiths should stop trying to put spiritual lightning in a literal bottle. They need to claim a transcendent spiritual truth through metaphorical interpretations, instead of literal ones. Unitarian Universalists have been rejecting claims of historical truth by traditional Christian churches for a long time. It s ironic then, that they ended up in the same place. Both made the same literal interpretation of the Bible. But one used the literal interpretation to embrace the text, and the other to reject it. They both ended up rejecting the power of metaphor to carry them to greater spiritual depth. In the early history of American Unitarianism, in the 19th century, some of those ministers swept out every bit of mystery and miracle from the Bible. The story of the great flood and an arc that could hold two by two of all the earth s creatures? Not scientifically verifiable, so the entire story was cast aside as trivial and useless. The story of Jesus feeding the masses with loaves and fishes? A physical impossibility, so it was also cast out. This led to what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the corpse-cold Unitarianism of that time. Thanks to him and other Transcendentalists, poetry, mystery and metaphor returned to the faith. But even with this move toward more metaphor, some of us still reject an entire text, just because of the rigid meaning given to it by literalists. It s a kind of guilt by association. So just because some people use the Bible to support their homophobia, the entire Bible is dismissed as useless to one s spiritual growth. Or rejecting the literal interpretations of the Koran, the entire faith of Islam is rejected. People often ask me what Unitarian Universalists use as sacred text. I tell them that we don t limit our concept of sacred text to just one book or even to books. We look for sacred meaning in unlikely places and find all kinds of things that move us closer to the holy. There are a hundred was to kneel and kiss the ground, even as there is just one ground. Being a liberal faith means that we are open to multiplicity and plurality, as expressed in the UU Six Sources, which includes our Judeo-Christian roots as well as Earth-based and World religions. This openness to different ways of knowing may explain why we re comfortable using metaphor, especially in its literary form. We tend to use a lot of poetry. UU s love Rumi, Thoreau, 4

5 Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, and Mary Oliver. You can find all of them in the back of our hymnal. Being open to metaphor is part of the Unitarian Universalist temperament. But I wonder, does it hold any deeper significance in our spiritual journey? Is it vital to our faith, something lifealtering? Or is it just aesthetically pleasing and doesn t push anyone s religious authority buttons. In some ways, the 21st century Unitarian Universalist faith is like a shore on which many boats are beached. This is the shore of the material life and getting and spending in which we all participate. We re pleased to stand on this shore, looking at the interfaith flotilla of boats. We sing their songs, we read their poems and listen to parables about these boats. Many of us are moved by these poems and parables, so much so that we take these boats out for day trips and long weekends. Others have been out in their boat for years and years. But some of us hesitate and end up getting stuck on that shore. We long for wholeness, for a life beyond the accumulation of wealth or even knowledge. We long for deeper connections with other people, with the Earth, with something universal that is hard to name. But we can t seem to loosen our grip on reason and rationality enough to push off from this shore. To have the wholeness we are longing for, we have to get into one of those boats and let it carry us to the other shore. From solid ground, through choppy waters, to the unexplored destination that is our self. What keeps us on the shore? What keeps us in that mode of spiritual sightseer? We re wary. We re afraid of losing control, losing our bearings, surrendering to a greater power. All of these ideas set off bells in our minds. Maybe it s the cult warning bells going off. Don t get sucked in because just when you start to let go, that s when they bring in the cool aid! I m making a joke here, but the fear of losing control is real. Also, when you re standing on this shore, you can t see the other shore. And so, many of us, trained as we are to think logically and rationally, we want proof of where we re going a picture, a map, something--before we get into one of these boats and shove off. And here s the bind. It s ironic that our inner landscape is actually an unexplored destination, but it often is. We can t come to know it if we re not willing to launch ourselves from the shore. But we re not willing to launch until we have some proof that the journey will be successful. The wish for proof is a vain one. If proof could be provided, the destination wouldn t be 5

6 something transformative. There is no proof. But there are metaphors, and that s the way out of the Bind. Listen more deeply for metaphor. Listen for the ones that resonate with you. Read poetry to your loved ones. Recite morning prayers. Read the holy texts. Sit down and listen to music and let it carry you to the other shore. Trust other people who have been out in their boats, trust the universe. Trust yourself. Trust that there is a reason you re sitting here in church this morning other than because you re having a nice time and get to see your friends. Take a risk. If you haven t already, launch one of those boats, be it the Buddhist boat, or the Christian boat or the Muslim boat, the Pagan boat. Or fashion your own boat with sticks and foliage from all the great sources of wisdom, then push off to the next unexplored shore. May it Be So. Amen References used: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor by Joseph Campbell 6