The quest for truth is our sacrament. The Quest for Truth as Sacrament Rev. Erica Baron March 8, 2009 As religious statements go, this one is pretty radical. In the Christian tradition, sacraments are the rituals by which an outward sign or symbol represents and helps create an inward experience of grace. For example, in Baptism, the outward symbol of water helps the Baptized person experience the inner experience of cleansing and being brought into the community of faith. In other words, sacraments are the way the community encounters the Divine. Christian communities vary as to which rituals are considered sacramental. But they tend to agree that a sacrament reveals a truth that is already known, a truth already revealed. Sacraments, then, proclaim a truth. But in our community, according to our weekly affirmation, we encounter the Divine not in proclaiming the truth, but in questing after it. We touch the holy when we search. God is most present with us when we are on the journey. As a community of questers, I think we might have something to learn from the many, many stories of quests which exist in many traditions. Human beings have told stories of seeking and journeying, of questing, for centuries. In fact, the quest is one of the most common kinds of stories in folk and religious traditions the world over. So, what do these stories have to teach us? When I hear the word quest, many things come to mind, but among the first is the image of a knight off on an adventure. The vast literature about Arthur and his knights of the round table provide perhaps the most central images of questing in our culture. And the stories of Arthur and his knights have a remarkable relevance to the religious quest. One of the themes in Arthurian legends is the quest for the Holy Grail. All of the knights of the round table are searching for the grail, but they do so individually or in small groups. They ride out in search of this holy object, in search, perhaps we might say, of the Divine. Along the way, they encounter all kinds of adventures. They might meet enemy knights, knights who are harassing, imprisoning or otherwise harming civilians. Or they might encounter supernatural monsters who are terrorizing the countryside. Dragons or other beasts. The knights are bound to fight these evil knights or beasts and to restore peace and justice to the land. Well, we could see these various adventures as a distraction. Rather than singlemindedly going after this grail for which they search, the knights keep having to go rescue people and fight bizarre knights and monsters. However, that doesn t seem to be
the interpretation of the legends themselves. These adventures seem to be presented as a part of the quest. The religious quest is also fraught with other adventures, things that might look like distractions from a single-minded search for the Truth. But if the grail legends are to be believed, these adventures have a direct bearing on the central quest. In our lives, we cannot separate the quest for truth from the quest for justice. They go together, and they are bound up in each other. We can t even separate the quest for truth and the everyday tasks of living in this world, of making sure dinner is on the table and everyone gets to their appointments and the lawn gets mowed. All of these apparent distractions are part of the quest. The knights learn their skills and values as knights in these adventures. Our lives and the work we must do to help others are a part of the quest. They are the things that shape us, and strengthen us for the quest for truth. The knights adventures very often feature rescuing damsels in distress. And the knights often fall in love with the damsels they so rescue. Now, these stories are definitely problematic. The idea that women are helpless damsels to be rescued by knights is an ancient story, one that denies the agency of women in our own lives. The idea that a woman should just stick around in some castle waiting for a knight to ride up and save her is incredibly disempowering. Not to mention that the woman in question is almost obliged to fall in love with her rescuer, again without independent agency. These themes have been tackled by feminists for generations, and quite effectively. But behind the obvious sexism in these stories is something far truer. And that is that the love we have for others, and our relationships, are also a part of the quest. Our quest for love and our quest for truth also have something to do with each other. Our relationships also shape us for the quest. At their best, intimate loving relationships make us stronger, and teach us the skills and values that will enable our search for the Divine. One of the earliest legends of the Knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail is the story of Percival. As a young man, Percival finds his way to King Arthur s court and becomes a knight. He sets off into the world in search of adventure, and is one of the knights questing for the Holy Grail. He trains under a more experienced knight, Gornemant, who teaches him about chivalry, and also about etiquette. Among other things, Gornemant tells Percival that it is rude to ask too many questions. After this period of study, Percival resumes his quest for adventure and the Grail. In his travels, Percival comes to the castle of the Fisher King. The King invites Percival to share the hospitality of the castle. Percival sees that the King suffers from a very serious wound, and wonders how he has survived. But he doesn t ask. At dinner, a most unusual procession of people comes through the hall. First, a young man comes carrying a lance which is bleeding. Then two boys process through carrying candelabras. Finally, a beautiful young woman comes in with a chalice, in which is a single communion wafer.
This is given to the King. Percival is very curious about all of this, but he remembers what he has been taught and asks no questions. After dinner, Percival is led to a chamber for the night. The next morning, the castle is deserted. He can find no one and so he returns to King Arthur s court. Shortly thereafter, an old woman arrives at King Arthur s court and finds Percival. She chastises him for his lack of curiosity and he learns that asking questions would have healed the Fisher King s wound, and allowed Percival to attain the Grail, the object of his quest. In this story find an allegory for the experience of many Unitarian Universalists who began religious life in another community. Many, many Unitarian Universalists faith journeys feature restrictive childhood faiths, faiths that cautioned against asking too many questions. Percival learned this lesson well. It is not okay to ask about the things that make you curious. One should accept the hospitality of the King and not be rude enough to question the local customs. So Percival sits through the most bizarre dinner he s ever experienced. He is dying of curiosity but he asks no questions. The result is that he has failed in his quest. Only after it is too late does he learn that the questions were the answer. Questions would have healed the King s wound. Questions would have allowed Percival to see that the chalice was the grail, the object of his quest. In many versions of this story, the health of the land is tied to the health of the king, and so the land is experiencing a prolonged drought and famine due to the wound of the king. Questions, then, would have saved the land and all the people on it. Percival s failure to ask questions dooms his quest, and dooms the King and his people to further harm. What a great metaphor for the religious quest! Questing involves questioning. It s not an accident that these words sound so much alike. They come from the same Latin root. Questions, curiosity, the desire to know more and to know more deeply, these are the primary tools on the religious journey. The quest can only be achieved by those willing to ask questions. It is in the asking that we find new insights and can interpret the symbols of our lives. We make meaning by asking questions, of ourselves and others and sacred texts. This questioning spirit is one of the things we find holy as Unitarian Universalists. While the grail stories may spring to mind first when we think of quests, there are other stories of journeys of faith or quests for truth which we might also learn from. One of these is recounted in the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. As Unitarian Universalists, we claim a wealth of sources for spiritual wisdom. We don t confine our quests to the wisdom contained in any one tradition. We allow for wisdom to be found in many places. We leave the doors wide open and don t lock the gates leading to any spiritual path.
But for many of us, that can mean that we have an overwhelming number of options. Like the speaker in the poem, we want to travel all of the paths. Many Unitarian Universalists get stuck here. We are in the middle of a beautiful forest, and we have multiple paths stretching out around us. We want to see the whole forest. We want to explore it all. And so, in a crisis of indecision, we often walk down one path for a short distance, and then go running back to the crossroads. We walk down another for a ways and then run back to the fork. We try Buddhism. We dabble in liberal Christianity. We celebrate Pagan rites. We learn about the Hindu gods. But we never commit to a path. We are stuck in the same spot in the forest for years at a time, sorry we cannot be one traveler and take in the wisdom of the whole world. Frost says at the end of this poem, I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference. But many of us get so stuck in trying to follow all the paths at once that we never let them make a difference in our lives. We never let ourselves be transformed. Now, I m not suggesting that each of us has to choose one spiritual path for all time. As the grail quests teach us, along the way, we ll encounter all kinds of adventures which will lead us in directions we hadn t expected and we didn t think we wanted to go. The spiritual journey, under taken with a whole heart, will undoubtedly have twists and turns, adventures that will take us in new directions. But I am suggesting that standing in the woods looking at the roads is not going to further our spiritual journey. At some point, we have to pick one, and leave the other for another day. Like Frost, we know that we can never come back to the same point in our lives, because even if we end up in the same forest, we will have changed. If we commit to a path, even for a little while, it will change us. This is a part of the spiritual quest, to pick a path and see where it takes us, see what transformation it brings to our life. The Hasidic story I told the children this morning is also a wisdom story that can have bearing on our spiritual quests. This is a deceptively simple story. Eisik, son of Yekel, follows a dream far away from home in search of a treasure buried under a bridge. The soldier guarding the bridge sends him home to seek the treasure under his own hearthstone. Sounds easy, doesn t it? Just go home and you ll find the treasure there. But this story tells of a part of the spiritual quest that many Unitarian Universalists find incredibly difficult. The vast majority of Unitarian Universalists come to Unitarian Universalism from another religious tradition, a tradition they left for various reasons. One of the big ones, which we ve already touched on, is the inability to ask questions. For many Unitarian Universalists, this leaving home is painful. The rejection of the faith of childhood is hard and it is often accompanied by a desire to have nothing at all to do with the religious language, symbols, and wisdom of the home tradition. This is an understandable reaction to a traditions that have proved at the least to be unfulfilling and at the most spiritually abusive.
People come into Unitarian Universalism looking for a tradition which will let them ask questions, and honor the answers they find. People come to us looking for a place to heal the wounds that childhood religious communities have inflicted. People come here looking for a safe haven, and very often they find it. Here is a place where questions are encouraged and dogma non-existent, a place to rest in the storm and recover one s strength. But for many Unitarian Universalists, this refuge is not enough. After a time often decades of rest and recovery, there comes a voice telling them to go home. There may be treasure there that was missed, treasure they never had the tools to find before, treasure that might make the experiences since leaving home click into place and make sense in a new way. Many Unitarian Universalists come to a point of returning to their childhood traditions to see if there was treasure there that was missed when they left home. Now, when I say return to home tradtions, I don t necessarily mean leaving this religious community to become a part of a Catholic church or a Protestant church or a Jewish community. What I mean is from within the community of Unitarian Universalists, within the circle of support and love and healing of Unitarian Universalism, people who take this path begin investigating the tradition they left. And as in the story, this homecoming involves some digging. It isn t as easy as walking in the door and seeing the treasure there on the table. If it were that easy, Eisik wouldn t have had to leave home to begin with. In returning to home traditions, usually Christianity, Unitarian Universalists who take this path dig deeper into the tradition, looking for its wisdom with new eyes. Having a supportive Unitarian Universalist community behind them makes this digging easier. They are still free to ask questions and to keep only the treasure they find, and don t need to move back into the house. Sometimes this means just some intentional introspection, looking inside for the good that the home tradition imparted. For example, I know of one former Catholic Unitarian Universalist who decided to see if he could find the treasure in his home tradition. In his case, he looked inside and discovered that some of his core values, particularly the importance of family, had been taught to him by his Catholic tradition. He didn t become a Catholic again. He still doesn t believe in God in the way the Catholic church does, but he has reclaimed that in his upbringing that he does truly treasure. Sometimes, this investigation of home requires more external work. Another Unitarian Universalist I know was raised in the Protestant tradition, and she decided at some point to investigate Christianity to find what was still meaningful. In her case, she did a lot of reading, of both the Bible and biblical commentary. She dug very deeply into this tradition finding the bits of wisdom that made sense and trying to live by them. Eventually, she decided that she is genuinely not a Trinitarian and does belong in Unitarian Universalism, but that there are some ethical teachings in the Christian scriptures that make a lot of sense to her, and she continues to try to live by them.
Both of these people are still Unitarian Universalists. They have remained committed members of their local congregations. And both of them undertook this search only after 2 decades in Unitarian Universalism, years which enabled them to heal their wounds and go on these journeys from a position of strength. This homecoming is not a path all Unitarian Universalists will choose to take. But for people who do, the treasure they discover is often a pleasant surprise. Quest stories are metaphors, symbols, and as such, they can help us in our own quest by telling us of some of the things we might encounter. We might come to a fork in the road and have to make a decision. We might encounter other tasks along the way, the completion of which will equip us for the quest. We might fall in love, and that too can equip us for the quest. We might find ourselves contrary to all our own expectations going back to a home we thought we had left for good. The symbols in quest stories can help us make sense of these twists and turns on the journey. There is one final bit of quest story wisdom I wish to explore this morning. Arthurian legends often feature an annual great feast at which all the knights gather. Arthur refuses to sit and enjoy the feast until he has heard a good tale of an adventure. Some knight will oblige, and then the feast may begin. At this feast, the knights tell each other of their adventures. This becomes the gathering of knights who are questing individually but with the support of the community. They swap stories, and along with the stories, the wisdom they ve accumulated. Questing individually but in a community of other questers. This is what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. We each have to choose a path through the woods. But we are always in conversation with people who have take other paths through the same woods. We cannot be one traveler and take every path, at least not very far or very deeply, but we can gather periodically around a great feast and hear the stories of the people who have taken other paths. In community, we can learn about the parts of the forest we ve never seen, and we can hear the wisdom others have encountered and learn things that will be important to our own quest. The questing knights of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rutland have a similar tradition. We go on questing individually after truth and meaning, finding symbols, asking questions, coming to crossroads. Then we gather each week to tell each other where we ve been. Someone will tell a story in the form of a sermon and then we ll all swap the stories and the wisdom we ve encountered on the journey. We even conclude the telling with a feast! So, let us be courageous in the quest for truth And let us keep coming back to this table to tell our stories, to support each other, and to prepare for the next adventure! So be it.