Spiritual Aeronautics, Part 2

28 March 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH: Theological Mistakes

Henry Hug

Those of us raised in a Judeo-Christian household were told at an early age that God created the universe, including the earth and all its beings. We had no concept of the Big Bang when I was a young boy, but it occurred to me and many of my friends and classmates; then who created God? Well, we were told that God existed forever. I think that was the origin of what came first, the chicken or the egg.

Let me give you a little of my background so you know where I am coming from. I was born and raised in Argentina, where there was no separation of Church and State. The Constitution required that the President be Catholic, if only nominally. There was no divorce; abortion was illegal, but widely practiced in private hospitals for middle class people and back alleys for those not so fortunate.

But worst of all, religion, Catholic religion was taught in all public schools. 5 to 10% of our classmates who were Jewish, Protestant or from atheist families were herded to another classroom where they were taught “Ethics”. A course taught by Catholic teachers in a course heavily tainted with Catholic dogma. If that doesn’t make you detest the clergy, nothing else will. (Present Company excepted)

Having lived under the dictatorship of Juan Peron in the 40’s and 50’s I saw firsthand the pernicious effects of an unholy alliance of church and state can do. The same could be said for Spain’s Franco, Portugal’s Salazar, Italy’s Mussolini and even Germany’s Hitler.

My mother was a very devout Catholic and my father was an agnostic or at least a non-practicing Protestant, his parents being French Calvinists. I seem to have inherited my father’s genes rather than my mother’s teachings.

As I went on to college I remember talking with two of my classmates about something more elaborate than the chicken and the egg argument. This time it was about all the “Omni’s” that God was, omnipotent, omniscient, omni benevolent, etc and more absurdities came to view.

If God was omni benevolent, why was there war and famine? Why were children born with severe congenital defects? Why did a young mother die of cancer or a young father die in an accident leaving their children orphaned? That list could go on and on.

Then came this “omniscient” thing. That was supposed to mean that God knew what everyone was doing, because, as Catholic dogma taught, everything was in the present for Him. That of course would mean that He (Or She as the case may be) knew what we would do, the next minute, the next day or the next year. That was another conundrum. If She knew what we would do, then there was no free will, our entire future was preordained, just as the past could not be changed, neither could the future.

Well, it turns out that we were not wrong, or at least someone with far more knowledge of these things came to our rescue.

This book (“Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes”) explains it in much better detail than I can in the few minutes allotted. It was written by Charles Hartshorn.

How many of you knew Charles Hartshorn? He was a member of our church; he always sat there in the fourth row. That is hallowed ground (Sir or Madam). At 5 foot 2 tall, he was a giant of a man.

Harvard educated, professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Emory University and finally at UT. Also visiting professor at the Sorbonne in Paris and Oxford in England. He died in October of 2000 at the age of 103. If you joined the church in 1999 or later you would not have met him because he was very frail and unable to attend church services.

He used to say that he wanted to be the first philosopher to live in two millennia and three centuries.

By less than three months he missed this one of his ambitions.

He wrote or co-authored 20 books and more than 100 articles, the last one when he was 99 years old.

His obituaries occupied about a quarter of a page in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post among others.

Most of his writings were well over my head, but this one; “Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes” was written for the layman such as myself and explains these contradictions much better than I have today. I feel vindicated after all these years.

Finally, I would like to quote from another centenarian who was a bit of a philosopher, Nathan Birnbaum… He was better known as George Burns the comedian, who once listed the attributes of a good sermon. He said: “A good sermon should have a good beginning and a good ending. And the two should be as close to each other as possible.”

PRAYER:

In so many ways, our world seems divided between those who are alive and those who are afraid.

We know those styles, of being afraid and being alive. And we know how the first suffocates the second. We know well, even intimately.

Let us remember that persistent optimism can break through the most rigid obstacles, just as tender green blades of grass will eventually crumble even concrete.

Let us remember that trust is more empowering than suspicion, and that almost all people can be trusted, if we will see them as our brothers and sisters rather than as disposable people to be dominated.

Let us be witnesses and workers for a world in which fear’s insidiousness is overcome by the persistent optimism of faith, hope, love and work, given force by people who have come alive.

Amen.

SERMON: Spiritual Aeronautics, Part 2

A sermon title like “Spiritual Aeronautics” is such an ambitious name. It could almost cover a year’s worth of classes in religion. I was thinking what a very small part of that I’m really trying to work with in these two weeks, and thought that maybe borrowing some concepts from Hinduism might clarify what I can and can’t hope to do here.

Hinduism has four different paths, or disciplines, or yogas, to fit four very different kinds of people, because we have different styles of being spiritual. Jnana yoga is salvation or wholeness through understanding, insight. That’s closest to our Western intellectual religious traditions, including Unitarians. Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion and love, and we have tried to include a bit of that path with the many candles in the windows. Karma yoga is the path of action or works, like the people here who are more interested in social action than sermons. And Raja yoga is the meditative path of insights into your own soul’s divine nature, which we don’t really do here as a group.

But of the four paths, the first one is the one most characteristic of Unitarians. Salvation, wholeness, through understanding, through a more complete kind of knowledge. What do we think we believe and what kind of coherence do those beliefs have in our life and the world we’re living in? Those are the kinds of questions behind what I’m trying to do with you this morning.

One bold rule in the study of religion I learned a couple decades ago comes from this approach to religion. The rule is that the first word in religion should always be No! No to the nonsense, the superstition, the empty jargon, the idiosyncratic beliefs we tend to exalt as though they had an authority from beyond us.

And when I hear stories like Henry told about his school experiences in Argentina, I always think he was more serious about religion by saying No than the pious priests were by chanting old statements whose meaning and relevance to real life they couldn’t have explained.

In terms from last week, they were giving the students a set of fully packed luggage, packed for a trip in which Henry was not interested. Many of you can probably relate to this business of having been given fully packed religious luggage for a trip you weren’t interested in taking.

Those stories always irritate me because the best religious teachers in any tradition always said No to this kind of nonsense, no matter how often it is packaged for take-out by the masses of that religion. It’s like the Greek image I used last week of spiritual growth as the metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a butterfly.

I really like that image. So I was momentarily disturbed when, after the service last Sunday, Hannah came out to the line. She was nearly cackling with glee as she told me “I hate to burst your bubble, but only 2% of caterpillars become butterflies. All the rest get eaten!”

OK, I hadn’t thought of that. I figured some of the caterpillars must get eaten, but not 49 out of 50! Still, I’m not giving up a favorite metaphor that easily. In fact, this new information just makes the metaphor that much better. For significant spiritual growth is hard, and not many want to do it.

And one reason that so many spiritual caterpillars never become butterflies is because they are eaten by doubt, fear, or intimidation.

Henry’s concern with theological mistakes (literalisms in a field that can only be done symbolically) has happened in all ages.

A second century Christian thinker named Tertullian once said that people hated Christianity because they were ignorant of it, and once they stopped being ignorant, they would stop hating it. But he is also famous for asking, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Athens meant the philosophy, culture and education of the Greeks; Jerusalem meant Christian faith. And he said faith and intelligence can and should be separated. It’s hard to combine those two statements, and what Tertullian was really demanding was not understanding but obedience. But religion has mostly been taught so poorly, especially in church-sponsored schools, that it has kept people ignorant.

Almost every great religious thinker has written against the dumbing down of religion, the fact that it is treated like caterpillar food when it’s meant to help people learn spiritual flight. Many early Church fathers protested, and throughout the centuries the best religious thinkers have attacked the versions of Christianity that were like religion for caterpillars.

In the 19th century, the Danish existentialist and Christian thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote a wonderful piece on this, not using the image of caterpillars, but using the image of geese.

The Tame Geese: A Revivalistic Meditation,

by Soren Kierkegaard

Suppose it was so that the geese could talk – then they had so arranged it that they also could have their religious worship, their divine service.

Every Sunday they came together, and once of the ganders preached.

The essential content of the sermon was: what a lofty destiny the geese had, what a high goal the Creator (and every time this word was mentioned the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese; by the aid of wings they could fly away to distant regions, blessed climes, where properly they were at home, for here they were only strangers.

So it was every Sunday. And as soon as the assembly broke up each waddled home to his own affairs. And then the next Sunday again to divine worship and then again home – and that was the end of it.

That was the end of it. For though the discourse sounded so lofty on Sunday, the geese on Monday were ready to recount to one another what befell a goose that had wanted to make serious use of the wings the Creator had given him, designed for the high goal that was proposed to him – what befell him, what a terrible death he encountered. This the geese could talk about knowingly among themselves. But, naturally, to speak about it on Sundays was unseemly; for, said they, it would then become evident that our divine worship is really only making a fool of God and of ourselves.

Among the geese there were, however, some individuals which seemed suffering and grew thin. About them it was currently said among the geese: There you see what it leads to when flying is taken seriously. For because their hearts are occupied with the thought of wanting to fly, therefore they become thin, do not thrive, do not have the grace of God as we have who therefore become plump and delicate.

And so the next Sunday they went again to divine worship, and the old gander preached about the high goal the Creator (here again the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese, whereto the wings were designed.

So with the divine worship of Christendom. Man also has wings, he has imagination… (Soren Kierkegaard, from A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, p. 433)

Both Kierkegaard’s geese and the ancient Greek caterpillars were creatures that clung to the ground rather than rising to their high calling of spiritual flight.

In some ways, this clinging to the ground could come from one of the foundational metaphors of Christianity. In the Bible, there is a passage that has Jesus saying to Peter that he was the “rock” on which Jesus would build his church That was a pun, for in Greek, and especially in Aramaic, the words for “Peter” and “rock” are the same. Jesus never said such a thing, for several reasons. One was that he did not come to build a church. Another was that, of all the disciples, Peter was the one who didn’t get it at all.

Nearly all of the better thinkers have always spoken against low-level or literal religion, in favor of the higher kind. Still, that picture of faith as a rock – the “Rock of Ages” – has been a central part of literal versions of Christianity ever since. It’s the image of adding creeds and other beliefs to that “rock,” building a kind of “mountain,” and the idea is that if you stand firm on that mountain you will be secure.

There have always been those who used the concept of God to empower the church and the rulers and to frighten the people into obedience rather than empowerment. It’s telling and typical that as soon as Jesus was dead, Peter won a vicious power struggle with Mary Magdalen over whether the religion built on the name of Jesus should make people empowered or obedient, fearful or alive. Like Kierkegaard’s geese, they seemed afraid of those who actually lived with courage and trust. Those who founded the religion about Jesus founded it for the 98% who get eaten alive by doubt and fear. I think this was a move of profound faithlessness, a faithlessness that Jesus never showed. For he believed the power, the acceptance, the wisdom we need is available equally to all of us here and now.

But any religion based in fear, trying to save you, give you a rock to stand on, is a religion made to empower the leaders of the church and the empire at the expense of ordinary believers. Jesus would have hated it.

Since the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels sixty years ago, we have many more gospels and writings from the first centuries, which give us a much different understanding of Jesus’s teachings than traditional Christianity has taught.

One of the most pointed and revealing comes from the Gospel of Thomas, probably written in the 50s, a couple decades before the New Testament gospels. Here, Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

(Gospel of Thomas, #70, translated by Elaine Pagels).

The real Jesus never spoke of sin and repentance; he spoke of illusion and enlightenment, of growing from simple to mature awareness. That’s what honest religion is about: awareness and enlightenment, not memorization or obedience.

In graduate school, I got to work with some very good theologians who were also honest, and who used their faith to fly rather than to crawl. It was a revelation to me. I remember talking with one of my teachers, a Catholic theologian named David Tracy, still one of the leading Catholic thinkers. He once defined Christianity as his myth. I asked him what he meant by that; I said it sounded like he was saying he knew Christianity was a fiction. Of course it is a fiction, he said: a profound and useful fiction, for him even a necessary or ultimate fiction. It contained the myths and stories within which he chose to live, and those stories let him rise above where he would be without such imaginative myths.

I remember being surprised, as though there must be some kind of a law against theologians being allowed to be this honest. But almost all the good ones have been that honest in their own ways.

This may be the turning point that marks a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a goose taking flight: the ability to hold lightly to one’s beliefs, to understand that they are not truths like rocks are truths, but are truths the way really good stories are truths. But doubt, fear and intimidation from family or friends can eat you alive here, can pick you off like a caterpillar.

Many beliefs can be adequate, but only if you own them rather than being owned by them.

Maybe “flying” is rising above beliefs, knowing they’re useful fictions, holding lightly to them. Like theologians who call Christianity their necessary fiction, useful fiction, even the ultimate fiction.

Buddhists sometimes speak of beliefs as a raft you used to cross over a difficult transition in your life. But it would be a mistake, they say, to then pick up the raft and carry it on your back forevermore just because it was once useful. No, put down the raft and go on. Likewise with beliefs. It is wiser to see them as rafts that might help you cross rivers but not mountains, so to speak.

Others speak of beliefs as a ladder that gets you to a certain height, so you can see better. But once you’ve seen more clearly, remember not to worship the ladder, but to set it aside and go on to your next challenge, where you might need a raft instead, or a still different kind of belief.

Maybe fixed dogmatic beliefs are the caterpillar stage of religion, and the butterfly stage is the ability to hold lightly to them, knowing that life itself sustains us, that life is bigger than beliefs, and that “all will be well.”

Or remembering that wonderful saying from Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, that “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

See how this comes together? Both the Greeks and Kierkegaard are mocking the religion of superstition and fear that Henry had taught to him in Argentina and so many others have had taught here.

Orthodoxy is like a religion of rocks, piled on each other to make a mountain on which to stand to feel safe. That’s a religion for caterpillars, and it’s a terrible misuse of a good mountain.

I can imagine what Kierkegaard would do with the image of his geese on top of a mountain, just standing there. How he’d be saying, “Look, you’re already in the sky! Now all you have to do is hold out your wings, the wings the creator gave you, and let the wind lift you up.”

One of the most important of religious lessons is that the highest religious faculty is not memorization, but imagination, not obedience but awareness. We must help shape the gods we will serve, must help provide nuance for the myths out of which we will live.

I think again of my teacher David Tracy’s wonderful definition of Christianity as his myth, his ultimate fiction. That is using beliefs in the right way, as imaginative tools to help you bring forth what is within you rather than not bringing forth what is inside of you and being eaten alive by fear. It is using beliefs as a launching pad for your spiritual growth and flight, rather than treating beliefs like a pile of rocks to stand on.

I am going to end with a story. I’ve told you several stories so far, about religions of piles of rocks, about geese who refuse to fly, about caterpillars and butterflies. So I’ll end with a story I won’t bother to interpret for you. You’ll get it.

It’s adapted from a story I read in Rachel Naomi Remen’s book My Grandfather’s Blessings. This story came from one of Remen’s patients, who had spent her life striving for success, building a career that never fed her, and creating levels of stress that may have led to the cancer she had. During treatments for the cancer, she re-examined her life, saw it in a new way, and had a kind of revelation, which came to her in an odd dream.

I dreamed, she said, that I saw a woman building a mountain. Rock by rock, she was building a mountain, piling innumerable heavy rocks on top of each other, climbing to the top and piling more rocks as her mountain grew bigger and bigger and she ascended higher and higher. At last it was a truly magnificent mountain, rising high into the sky covered in snow-capped peaks, impressive from any angle. And she stood there, on top of her mountain of rocks, triumphant and alone.

I marveled, she said, at what an amazing accomplishment it was, building a whole mountain and then ascending it, standing there on top with your arms stretched up to the sky. The woman, of course, was me, so I also felt great pride at the scene.

But then something frightening and terrible happened. As I stood there atop the huge mountain, there suddenly appeared a large crack near the mountain’s base. The mountain shook. The crack grew bigger, shot upward, and the whole mountain began collapsing in on itself. My feet slipped off the rock, and the rocks all began turning to dust and falling to earth.

Then, she said, just as the whole irrelevant thing crumbled beneath me, I suddenly discovered that I could fly.