SERMON Transcending Mystery and Wonder: First Source of Our Faith The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together the mountain and me, Until only the mountain remains. Those are the words of Li Po, a Chinese poet who lived in the eighth century. His was a mystical experience of oneness with nature. Here is a mystical experience of oneness with other human beings. In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud... I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Those are the words of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, who was born in France, and lived for many years in the Abby of Gethsemane in Kentucky. This reading appears on the website of Unitarian Universalist Mystics in Community. Uumystics.org.
Today we are exploring the first of our UU sources of Faith. I invite you to turn for a moment in your grey hymnals to the covenant of our associated congregations. It s about five or six pages in, and begins with, We, the Member Congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association... We often refer to these as our principles and purposes, but it is more accurate to refer to them as our Principles and Sources. What I want you to notice at this moment is the trajectory or arc or these principles and sources. They begin with the individual, with individual experience, and move outward to encompass all of the earth and its creatures. This version contains only five sources. The sixth source: Spiritual Teachings of Earth-centered traditions was added after the publication of this hymnal. The framers of our principles and purposes realized that what unites Unitarians and Universalists, is not common metaphysical belief. We do not believe the same things about God and Jesus and science and religion. But we are but we are united in ethical principles. Perhaps that is why we focus more on the principles than the sources. Painful divisions surfaced in the process of drafting these principles and purposes, and we are understandably reluctant to re-visit that pain. Nevertheless, we need to acknowledge that though we may ground those ethical principles in different sources, we are still one people, exploring our spirituality together and seeking to live according to those principles. It is difficult, hard work, requiring that we set aside our own cherished beliefs and even prejudices, in order to open our hearts and minds to one another. We grope for common language, so that we may better communicate with one another and understand one another. In our Time for All Ages, the religious person and the mystic and the scientist settled for describing these experiences as an experience of something larger. In our opening hymn, we sang of the lifted moments of the soul, when Life s great meaning breaks into our consciousness. Forrest Church liked to say that God is not God s name. God is a word which we use to speak about that which we cannot name. A Name Unnamed.
Among Spiritual Directors attempting to serve the new Spiritual Independents, as Janice Lundy puts it, an emerging term is Presence. She writes, Presence dwells in the spiritual heart, as yogic sage Ram Dass calls it, and within the true self as theologian Thomas Merton explained it. I have settled on Presence as the word which best describes my experience of God. And I finally made peace with saying I believe in God, not because I think it s reasonable or makes sense, but because of my mystical experiences. Someone said, Not all mysteries are to be solved. Some must simply be lived. (Janice Lundy, Serving Spiritual Independents: Companionship without Bias, in Presence, An international Journal of Spiritual Direction, Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2018, pp 18-25) We Unitarian Universalists describe what most would call mystical experience. in our first source: direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life. However, we name it, we know that human beings have been having such experiences for a very long time. Many writers have noted that religions begin in individual mystical experience. The Benedictine David Steindl-Rast says All religious doctrine can be traced to its roots in mystical experience. ( The Mystical Core of Organized Religion, at UUMystics.org). Frederic Buechner, a Presbyterian minister wrote, At its heart, religion is mystical. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan: each of them responds to something for which words like shalom, oneness, God even, are only pallid alphabetic souvenirs. (as quoted in An Almanac for the Soul, June 1, Iona Center. ) When I began in ministry almost thirty years ago, I was confused by all the talk of spiritual but not religious. However I had been damaged by my experience of Fundamentalist Christianity, I still somehow knew that at the heart
of religion is mystical experience. I always knew that religion began as a way to try to articulate and make sense of our experiences--a way to illustrate them, through ritual, and sometimes, a way to try to invite them again. Around the turn of the century, a doctor of ministry student Linda Smith Stowell, undertook a study of such experiences among Unitarian Universalists. Linda wanted to understand some of the generational differences among us. She felt that younger people were talking about spiritual experience differently than older people. She wrote: in Unitarian Universalism, the dominant philosophical emphases are shifting from rational humanism to naturalistic theism, mystical humanism, feminist theology and process theology. She wanted to find out, Does this shift reflect trends in our general culture? Does it reflect and/or influence the subjective religious experience of members of the Unitarian Universalist Community? So, Linda asked 157 Unitarian Universalists about their subjective religious experiences. To clarify, these experiences are interior, something which happens within the individual. Some might say their subjective religious experience includes serving others, or rationally thinking about God or meaning. But here, we are talking about what happens inside of us. From studying such experiences, we know they tend to be similar, and have one or more of six characteristics. They include: a sense of oneness or unity with something larger than one s self.; sudden strong feelings of light or joy, although, sometimes there are feelings of fear, and even terror; (Think of Scrooge s experience of the ghost of Christmas past.) a sense of intuitive certainty;
a sense of felt presence the experience of a voice, and/or the experience of a vision. Personally, I have experienced all of these at one time or another. I have had at least four such experiences, and I have shared with you in the past my vision in relation to my call to ministry. How many of you have had such experiences? (invite show of hands) The classic study of such experiences is William James book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The book began as a series of lectures at Edinburgh in 1901-02. James s definition of a mystical experience remains the standard. Such experiences, he said, have four characteristics: they are ineffable, hard to describe; they have a noetic or knowledge component; there is a sense one knows something after the experience that one didn t know before; they are transient, fleeting; one cannot live on the mountaintop ; one must descend and live a normal, daily life; Jack Kornfield: After Ecstasy, the Laundry. we are passive recipients of these experiences; in other words, we do not actively bring them about. They just happen to us. In her study, Linda Smith Stowell divided the experiences into two clusters, the first having to do with one s own interior feelings of oneness or harmony, intuitive certainty, and light or joy. The second has to do with whether there is a sense of a felt presence and may include a voice or a vision. The first cluster is reported by other research to be virtually universal. That is, all humans have them. The second cluster is believed to be less common.
Of her 157 Unitarian Universalist subjects, Linda Stowell found that 95% had experiences of oneness and harmony, feelings of light and joy and intuitive certainty. Two thirds reported experiencing a sense of a felt presence at least rarely, and 45% said they had had some experience of a voice or a vision. As Linda Stowell says, that is a remarkably high percentage for rational religious liberals. So, even we highly rational UU s have such experiences. There are some interesting age and gender correlations. We are most likely to have such experiences when we are younger, in late teen and early adult years. This may have some very important implications for religious education. We UU s often lament losing our young people in high school or college. Curiously, this is just the time they are most likely to have these kinds of experiences. The young are also most likely to be frightened by such experiences. Yet, we rarely talk about such experiences. Are we failing them in this? By not equipping them to articulate and reflect on these experiences, do we force them to look elsewhere for understanding of what is happening to them? Also, women are more likely than men to have experiences of a voice or vision. Well, perhaps it is progress to admit that we are having such experiences. But the religious questions only begin with such admission. For it leads to such questions as, is the overall effect of these experiences positive? Are they a trustworthy guide to follow in forming beliefs and making decisions about future actions? How do we understand them? Do we understand them as encountering God, or are they projections of our own minds? Do these
experiences come from outside ourselves, or are they physiological accidents, something happening in the brain? Most of these answers can only be leaps of faith. Scientifically, the jury is still out on whether these experiences originate within us or come from outside us. It is intriguing that researchers have now found what they call a god-spot in the brain. Through stimulating the brain in certain places in certain ways, scientists discovered, with a group of epileptics, that these kinds of experiences can be induced. In addition, we have known for a long time that drugs -- especially LSD-- can induce such experiences. Even so, this does not prove that the experiences are simply products of the brain. It only proves that the brain is involved in our experiencing these things. Today, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of the mind-body through which we experience such things. My recommendation is that we not rush to judgment about such things, but rather that we just sit with them, let them be. This passivity is hard for those of us who want always to be in control. It seems paradoxical that the farther we travel on the spiritual path, the more we learn, and yet, we also become aware of how much we don t know, which may allow us to let go, and give up efforts to control. We become aware that the holy can break in at any time. It appears in the most common, ordinary things. William Blake said it poetically with his famous lines: To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. When you have such experiences, I encourage you to, first of all, be aware. Do not push away the experience. Instead, be open to it. As long as you are physically safe, let go and experience it fully. Record it. Write it down. Draw it. Pay attention to what it evokes in you. Are the feelings positive? Or negative? Joyful? or Frightening? Does it motivate you to take certain actions? If so, what? Does it change your beliefs? If so, how? Secondly, pay attention to the fruits of the experience. Does it move you toward greater compassion and peace? Is it calling you to do something different with your life? Or just see your current life differently? Thirdly, find a spiritual guide whom you trust with whom to discuss the experience. For we all need to be grounded in this reality. As Jack Kornfield says, no one goes to the Himalayas without a guide. Going to the mountaintop is one thing. Integrating the experience into our daily lives is another. Sometimes, we are so moved by such experiences that we want more and more of them. We want to collect mystical experiences. We become addicted to them. But this use of them is neurotic. It becomes simply an escape from this life, rather than an enhancement of it. As Huston Smith says The goal is not religious (or mystical) experiences, the goal is the religious life. The goal is to live by these principles every day. Being addicted to psychedelic, or other theophanies can abort a quest as readily as, and perhaps more readily than, they can further it. (Forgotten Truth, 155)
For the Unitarian Universalists in Linda Smith Stowell s study, these experiences were generally positive, and thought to be a trustworthy guide for making decisions. People in mid-life were most likely to believe the experiences involved communion with God. Older subjects were least likely to so describe the experiences. But, says Stowell, we have to note that definitions of God are also changing. She wrote,... only 5 percent chose a separate reality or superior being as a preferred description of the divine. Unitarian Universalists may have reclaimed God language, but the God they are reclaiming is an immanent and/or transpersonal, interconnected force. Few agreed that the experiences came from outside of self. Several chose to write commentaries about how the divine was within or suggest that the Holy flowed like a river through everything. This is consistent with the popular process-relational conception of God as a real power which is a part of all things. (127-28) May your experiences of transcending mystery and wonder truly bring to you a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life. But remember, this is only the first source of our faith. A faith built only on our individual experience can degenerate into narcissism and grandiosity. Our individual experience is only one building block. There remain the teachings of science, and the wisdom of the prophets and the sacred writings of all the world s religions. To live fully and well, we need the balance and wisdom of all of these sources. Rev. Linda Hoddy MUUS 12 9 2018
Linda Smith Stowell, Subjective Religious Experience Among Unitarian Universalists, A Project Pressented to the Faculty of the Schoolof Theology at Claremont, May 1995