Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 25, 2015
Rev. Chris Jimmerson joined by our First UU seminary students deliver homilies on the language of reverence in the first our “We Gather” alternative services. Chris asked each of our three seminarians to offer a short homily on this question: “What does the concept of the divine mean to you?”
Chris Jimmerson’s Homily
Several years ago, Unitarian Universalists began to have a discussion around what we called “a language of reverence”, a religious language that acknowledges our sense of awe and wonder over this spectacular world and universe in which find ourselves. And despite our differing beliefs, and though there is still some debate about the use of such language in our religious communities, this language of reverence has over time seeped into our vernacular.
If you’ve been hanging out with Unitarian Universalists for any time though, have you noticed what we do when we use such language? We go like this:
“God – whatever that means to you. Including nothing at all.”
“Holy – but if you really don’t like that term it’s OK, and we all understand why you might not and would prefer to think of it as, maybe, a sense of wholeness. Perhaps”
Now, the equivocations are understandable. Some of us come out of religious backgrounds that wounded us and within which such terms were wielded like weapons. Others may associate such terms with superstition and a belief in the supernatural they do not hold.
I got to wondering though, what if we could truly reclaim the language of reverence for ourselves? What if we could stop equivocating and just accept that each of us, humanist or theist, Buddhist or earth-centered naturalist – or any other of our many worldviews -just allow each of us to embrace such terms in ways that have meaning and power within our own ways of making sense of our world and our lives.
So, as an experiment, I asked each of our three seminarians to offer a short homily today on this question: “What does the concept of the divine mean to you?”
And yes, “absolutely nothing” was an allowable answer as long as they could follow it with something like, “This is what I think is ultimate – something I am a part of but that is larger than myself.”
Then, I realized that if I was going to ask them to answer such a question, I was going to have to do so also.
“Well, hells bells,” as my grandmother used to say when encountered with something perplexing or difficult.
I realized I can’t define or describe the divine. Rather, it’s an experience I have in this world and in this reality.
It is an experience I have sometimes had while hiking in nature and suddenly having a sense of my smallness in the vastness of things and yet also transcendence because of being a part of that life and creation.
It is an experience I have had when walking down the streets of a bustling city amidst throngs of humanity and suddenly feeling this overwhelming sense of oneness and connection with all of humanity.
And, hells bells, that brings me back to an experience that happened with grandma.
I go back to this story a lot because it is still the strongest of this type of experience that I have ever had.
I was very close with my maternal grandparents. They took care of me and helped raise me after my parents divorced when I was still very young. Later, they welcomed my spouse Wayne into our family with open, loving arms. They wanted him to be at all of our family gatherings and life events, including when the time came that we lost first my grandfather and then my grandmother.
Of course, they knew that we were in a loving, committed, romantic relationship. Grandma used to call us, “Her boys”. Still, we never explicitly discussed the true nature of relationship with them. Grandpa was a Deacon in the First Baptist Church of Groves, TX, after all, a small town in southeast Texas. We learned later that we could have.
Wayne and I were visiting my grandmother in the hospital for what we all knew could be one of the last times. She had congestive heart failure and told her doctors that she only wanted to be kept out of pain – no more treatments; no more resuscitations. We’d had a good long visit, and we went to her bedside to say our goodbyes, she took us both by the hand, looked me right in the eyes and said, “Take care of each other”.
That room filled with love. The love held us. It was like a loving presence was supporting us and comforting us within our connections with each other and all that was and ever will be.
For me, when we get a glimpse of the true depth and expansiveness, the wondrous beauty, of our shared existence, the love that’s possible within the complex, fragile, ever changing web of all existence of which we are part, as we did in that hospital room, the only words I have with enough symbolic power to point toward such experiences are words like “Divine”.
Still, as the Buddhists might say, even then, they are like a finger pointing at the moon, but they are not the moon.
And I’m OK with that. For me, leaving some mystery is a part of it, and so the language of reverence is what best helps me recapture at least something of that sense of awe and wonder – that power to be found within love and human connectedness, this spectacular world and universe within which we find ourselves.
Amen.
Nell Newton – Homily on understanding the divine
Here was the class exercise: turn to a partner and tell that person about your understanding of God. We’re in seminary, so this kind of thing is expected. I turned to my new friend Lyn and we looked at each other. “You go first” “No, you…” Politeness trying to buy time. Why is it that we balk at talking about something so essential?
Lyn jumped in “For me, God is Love. That’s all.” I nodded.
“For me, God is the way that the stars and grass and I are all becoming all at once. The air we are breathing together is God and the way that I’m coming to see how very little separation there is between us, and that all of us are co-creating the universe together. My holy scripture is DNA and I have no real words for what God is but I know it when I stop maintaining this sense of separate self and just breathe…” I paused, terrified that I would now be escorted out of the building for having spoken some heresy. It’s a liberal seminary, but still… I wasn’t quite sure that my sense of the divine was appropriate or safe.
We blinked at each other. Lyn finally said, “Wow… I wish I could talk about my god like that. Now my god feels a little simple.” I grunted “Well, I wish I could have as clear and succinct an understanding as your god. Then we laughed and hugged and agreed that our gods were good enough for who we are. And that is good. And both of our gods were present at that moment. And this moment. And this moment.
There are technical terms for the differences between our understandings of the divine: Kataphatic and Apophatic.
Lyn’s understanding is Kataphatic:
– is a positive way of describing what god is.
– Kataphatic theology and prayer can be summed up by the way it states how god is like something: “God is Love”, “God is relationship”, or “God is good.”
– God can be understood, known, described. That’s positive.
My babbling felt dangerous and useless because my understanding of the divine is Apophatic – which isn’t really negative, but it doesn’t fit into words.
– Apophatic prayer has no content.
– God cannot be known through any analogy or imagery.
– There is no noun or verb or adjective that works.
– So one simply rests with the unknowability, the uncertainty.
– In the Hebrew “Elohim”, a word for the holy, it is plural, but it’s not a noun for a thing- it’s a verb about process. It roughly translates to “We are becoming” or “that which is becoming”. That’s pretty close to my understanding of the divine.
A couple of weeks ago I told Lyn that I had found the correct terms for our theologies. We laughed at how we had both felt so self-conscious talking about our understanding of the holy.
How we each felt that we were inadequate or insufficient to the task. But we weren’t. And how we had found something truly holy in sharing.
Meditation – Drops of God
Tess Baumberger
God, God is water sleeping
in high-piled clouds.
She is gentle drink of rain,
pooling lake, rounding pond,
angry flooding river.
She is frothy horse-maned geyser.
She is glacier on mountains and polar ice cap,
and breath-taking crystalline ideas of snowflakes.
She is frost-dance on trees.
And we, we are drops of God,
her tears of joy or sorrow,
ice crystals
and raindrops
in the ocean of her.
God, God is air wallowing
all about us,
She is thin blue atmosphere embracing
our planet, gentle breeze.
She is wind and fearsome gale
centrifugal force of tornado and hurricane,
flurry of dust storm.
She is breath, spirit, life.
She is thought, intellect, vision and voice.
And we, we are breaths of God,
steady and soft,
changeable and destructive.
We are her laughter and her sighs,
atomic movements,
(sardines schooling)
in the firmament of her.
God, God is fire burning,
day and night.
She is sting of passion,
blinking candle,
heat that cooks our food.
She is fury forest fire
and flow of lava which destroys and creates, transforms.
She is home fire and house fire.
She is giving light of sun and
solemn mirror-face of moon,
and tiny hopes of stars.
And we, we are little licking flames
flickering in her heart,
in the conflagratory furnace of her.
God, God is power of earth,
in and under us.
She is steady, staying,
fertile loam, body, matter, tree.
She is crumbling limestone and shifting sand,
multi-colored marble.
She is rugged boulder and water-smoothed agate,
she is gold and diamond, gemstone.
She is tectonic plates and their motion,
mountains rising over us,
rumble-snap of earthquake,
tantrum of volcano.
She is turning of our day,
root of being.
And we, we are pebbles
and sand grains,
and tiny landmarks,
in the endless terrain of her.
God, God is journal of time marching
through eternity.
She is waking of seasons, phases of moon,
movements of stars.
She is grandmother, mother, daughter.
She is transcending spiral of ages
whose every turn encompasses the rest,
history a mere babe balanced on her hip.
She is spinning of universes
and ancestress of infinence.
She is memory, she is presence, she is dream.
And we, we are brief instants,
intersections, nanoseconds,
flashing gold-hoped moments in the eons of her.
God, God is.
And we, we are.
That Which Holds All
Nancy Shaffer
Because she wanted everyone to feel included
in her prayer,
she said right at the beginning
several names for the Holy:
Spirit , she said, Holy One, Mystery, God.
But then thinking these weren’t enough ways of addressing
that which cannot fully be addressed, she added
particularities, saying,
Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love,
Ancient Holy One, Mystery We Will Not Ever Fully Know,
Gracious God, and also Spirit of this Earth,
God of Sarah, Gaia, Thou.
And then, tongue loosened, she fell to naming
superlatives as well: Most Creative One,
Greatest Source, Closest Hope –
even though superlatives for the Sacred seemed to her
probably redundant, but then she couldn’t stop:
One who Made the Stars, she said, although she knew
technically a number of those present didn’t believe
the stars had been made by anyone or thing
but just luckily happened.
One Who Is an Entire Ocean of Compassion,
she said, and no one laughed.
That Which Has Been Present Since Before the Beginning,
she said, and the room was silent.
Then, although she hadn’t imagined it this way,
others began to offer names.
Peace, said one.
One My Mother Knew, said another.
Ancestor, said a third.
Wind.
Rain.
Breath, said one near the back.
Refuge.
That Which Holds All.
A child said, Water.
Someone said, Kuan Yin.
Then: Womb.
Witness.
Great Kindness.
Great Eagle.
Eternal Stillness.
And then, there wasn’t any need to say the things
she’d thought would be important to say,
and everyone sat hushed, until someone said
Amen.
Note
Additional homilies delivered by Susan Yarbrough and Erin Walter will be added as they become available.
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