A World of Pure Imagination

Rev. Marisol Caballero
March 30, 2014

The way we speak about our beliefs is powerful. Language can either serve to connect or distance us from others, based on our emotional associations with the words chosen by others. We will explore the possibility of religious language as limitless metaphor and poetry.

Yesterday, I learned the happy fact that a group pugs is called a grumble. My soon-to-be in-laws are a pug-owning family, so there is a constant grumble underfoot in the kitchen during every major holiday. Being a lover of words and their multiple meanings, I searched out other nouns to describe congregations of animals. Among the best were: a flamboyance of flamingos, a murder of crows, a memory of elephants, a business of ferrets, an unkindness of ravens, a prickle of hedgehogs, and a piteousness of doves. As cute and hilarious as these are, they all make some sense, don’t they? Each collective noun describes either the behavior or an attribute of the animal. I remembered that a colleague’s wife had once named our meeting of a group of ministers a “cackle of ministers.” That’s pretty accurate.

It delights me to think that each of these spot-on collective nouns originated in someone’s imagination and the terms stuck. Among new terms accepted into the Oxford Dictionary are cyberespionage, selfie, and mochaccino. Last week, I was called out by our high school youth for trying to coin the term, “sing-along-ability” when giving them guidance on hymn selection for their upcoming youth-led service.

As many of us do, I love playing with words and giving them new meaning. I am a fool for a good pun. For example, this past couple of weeks, I’ve been under the weather and when the doctor told me that it was caused by a virus, my fiance declared that I had “gone viral.” I can assure you that I have stretched the mileage considerably on that joke.

But, as much as I enjoy entertaining nuanced definitions of familiar words, I can say with some confidence that I am in good company in admitting that I have had some squeamishness around words such as: God, faith, prayer, salvation and sin. Many in this room, no doubt, have come to Unitarian Universalism from other faith traditions who use these terms in specific ways, and many of the ways that they are commonly used have left still, bleeding, gaping wounds on many. That pain, those memories and the suspicion of those who will wield such words as weapons, are real.

Although, in her attempt to find a happy medium between head and heart, my mother did cart us around occasionally between the Catholic Church and every flavor of Protestant Christianity available in Odessa, TX, I had been exposed to Unitarian Universalism early enough that my family’s “church hopping” did not rock my UU foundation. For the most part, I was sure that we would always return to our tiny UU fellowship, where we didn’t have to turn our brains off. At least that is how I saw it, as an inquisitive child. I would have made a terrible “Handmaiden,” too. At our little fellowship, we talked a ton about the beliefs of others’ religions. We learned that, as UU’s, we drew value and wisdom from each. We even had a beautiful mural on the wall, with portraits of prophetic men and women throughout the ages, including Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi, though we didn’t really talk much about the value of Jesus’ teachings.

In West Texas, I experienced some of the worst expressions of Christianity: a P.E. coach telling me that I worshiped the devil in 5th grade, a 7th grade classmate began her six-year attempt at attempting to persuade me to attend her church with her because she was genuinely worried about my soul not making it to Heaven, and, at age seventeen, the rage-filled screams of a disgusted call-center co-worker when she found out that I am gay and she had been sitting next to me for weeks. And, I have heard stories from others that my own seem like a walk in the park.

I, like the many who find their way to UUism, wanted to distinguish myself as much as possible from the Christianity that I had known, that I found myself often explaining my faith by talking about all that UU’s don’t believe in and lacking a clear vocabulary to explain what it is that we actually do believe. I could speak to shared ideals and point to the Principles and Sources, but failed miserably at sharing descriptions of how this faith moves my spirit.

Blogger, John Halstead, touches on this an article published this week entitled, “The Baby is the Bathwater: Why I haven’t joined the Unitarian Church,” “William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism in America, wrote in 1820 that Unitarians had sacrificed “imagination and poetic enthusiasm” to “the rational and critical power”. Emerson bemoaned the lack of enthusiasm in Unitarianism. Theodore Parker decried the absence of a “deep internal feeling of piety”: “Most powerfully preaching to the Understanding, the Conscience, and the Will, the cry was ever, ‘Duty, Duty! Work, Work!’ They failed to address with equal power the Soul, and did not also shout, ‘Joy, Joy! Delight, Delight!'” Orestes Brownson, a Transcendentalist who converted to Catholicism, wrote of Unitarians, that they “had pronounced the everlasting ‘No.’ Were they never to be able to pronounce the everlasting ‘Yes’?” And Unitarian minister, John Trevor, a generation later, regretted the absence of “enthusiasm and personal abandonment” in Unitarianism: “It is the last word of the Old Gospel, sifted small through the riddle of the Intellect; not the first word of the New Gospel, bursting up irresistibly from the Spirit.” These were all men who had great respect for Unitarianism and its ambition to advance social justice, but who found it lacking in something essential.”

In other words, we are great at walking the talk, but we improve on our ability, as Unitarian Universalists, to talk the walk. We need language adequate enough to express and sustain our experience of our transcendent spiritual experiences. In 2002, the then-President of our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, Rev. Bill Sinkford, preached a controversial sermon, “the Language of Reverence,” in which he pointed out that our Seven Principles does not contain one traditionally religious language, but rather focuses on lifting up our shared ethical ideals. He posed the question if this language, while beautiful in its aspirations, was sufficient; if it was “up to the spiritual task [of nurturing and describing “the reality of our religious experience”] and whether we need to expand our lexicon.” Sinkford says, “We believe that our religious theological pluralism is good- it certainly distinguishes us from most of the religious world. But our religious breadth can work against our religious depth.”

In an effort to strengthen the depth of the way we speak about this faith we love, Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar explores this topic in her book, “Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language.” In it, she acknowledges that, In some congregations, worship and community life may be rich with the lexicon of God, prayer, salvation, and sin. In other congregations, although the hymns and anthems may be replete with words like holy, grace, and soul, it is only in the music that this vocabulary is used. For many, it seems easier to sing these sentiments than to say them. We allow a broader margin for metaphor and poetry in our singing than in our speaking. And, in still other congregations and families, these words may not be merely absent, but shunned.”

Further on, Harrison Nieuwejaar names what I later discovered as I entered St. Edward’s University’s Religious Studies Department and then again when I left Texas to attend a liberal Christian seminary in New York City- there is value in common vocabulary, yes, even in traditionally Judeo-Christian words. If we, as the heady UUs we can be, can relax into our imaginations and consider meanings of such traditional religious words that exist outside of the narrowness of our exposure to fundamentalism, we may avoid our own, flip-side version of fundamentalism and enjoy a greater openness to the spirit.

She says, “even as I urge us to use religious language more broadly, I caution that we must hold these words lightly, using them to point and suggest, not to define. These words will serve us best if we allow them to be elastic, perhaps not meaning precisely to me what they mean to you, or to your Jewish neighbor, or to your Lutheran in-laws, but pointing in the same direction, capturing the essence of a shared experience, a shared longing for a deeper spiritual life. We need to go bravely into the tangle of words, wrestle with them, find which of the traditional words can become useful to us and identify which new words are needed.”

Once, as I was leaving a guest preaching gig at a small lay-led congregation here in Central Texas, a woman from the worship committee ran out after me and said that she was glad that I had spoken about prayer, as she finds that most of the staunchly Secular Humanist congregation has very negative attitudes about such things and she has learned not to bring them up. She asked me for advice on what she could say the next time someone from her church is upset that she adds the language of prayer to the service. I told her to simply introduce the language of prayer to those who dismiss it as nonsense as poetic device. God is a word that can have a concrete understanding, as with the image of a guy in the clouds with a white beard who passes judgment on humanity, but god, with a lower case “g,” can be a metaphorical, nuanced, admittedly limited word that does not correspond to any object, but may correspond to every living thing, or a feeling, or a peace that surpasses all understanding… This word can mean a mountain of layers of meaning and depth that, when we begin to release our defensiveness around it and other religious “trigger” words like it, we may find that we have more in common with members of other faith traditions than we thought.

Muslims, for example, have ninety-nine words in Arabic for Allah. Among them are attributes, such as: The Just, The Awakener, The All-Forgiving, and The Protecting Friend. It is said that there are actually one hundred, but that the last is yet unknown.

Harrison Nieuwejaar asserts that, for UUs, “God has been put in a box and has lost its rich metaphorical meaning. We need to open that box and let an expansive breeze of ideas and images and associations again infuse this language. We need to reclaim textured meanings, but we have a strong cultural tide to row against, a double tide of fundamentalism and atheism. The fundamental views- both theistic and atheistic- are the ones that get the most airtime and thus become accepted as the shared cultural understanding of God.”

When boxed in, words like God, prayer, sin, and salvation can seemingly serve to keep us safe from those whose narrow views of what such words can mean and tuck us away from the memories of such encounters. But, is adopting our own brand of fundamentalism, an “us/them” fervor, helping us to heal and grow and fully enjoy our spirituality to the fullest?

Also, when we restrict the meaning of language of reverence, as Sinkford coined, are we missing the opportunity to build connections with our neighbors through a common vocabulary?

This conversation was all the rage in UU circles in the middle of last decade, but I don’t believe it has yet become passe, as the character of Unitarian Universalism, by and large was to distance ourselves as much as possible from “God language” throughout most of the twentieth century. That just means that we have at least a century’s worth of baggage to now sift through. We have embraced the fallacy that a certain group of people who we love to point fingers at, have sole ownership of this language of reverence, that such language only speaks of the implausible, that we embrace science over myth. We speak as if there exists no awe, mystery, or transcendence in the natural world, as if we never have cause to connect with one another through clumsy, yet movingly authentic attempts at describing the indescribable.

Each of these terms, alone, could be its own sermon. And, indeed, I have spent some time in past sermons teasing out a few of them, but what I would invite us all to do is to fumble around a bit, as awkward and uncomfortable as it might be, with using traditionally religious words to speak of our religious experience. We will try this together. We have before us the expanse of our imaginations’ poetry as well as the infinite possibilities to which the limitations of spoken language restrict us.

I will leave you with the words of the late Rev. Forrest Church, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776