Spiritual Aeronautics, Part I

March 21, 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: Writing Your Creed

Jonobie Ford

My topic has undergone a metamorphosis since I first proposed it for a service. When I suggested the topic of writing a creed, I was planning to tell you about the intellectual and technical aspects of writing, how I thought the attempt was an empowering exercise, my suggestions for structure, and so forth. And while trying to write that, I ran up against my old nemesis of writer’s block. I realized, after pushing at the block for a while, that the problem was that the topic I was “trying” to write about had somehow turned too heady and intellectual to really be appropriate as an affirmation of faith. The problem is that although I think that figuring out what you believe by writing it out is important, I don’t think my talking about it in the way I had planned does justice to this podium.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you a neat and tidy view of my religious beliefs, by sharing my creed and explaining what it means to me. Today, I’m going to show you the less orderly side of my beliefs.

I started thinking about my creed and its relation to my daily life. When I think about what keeps me on the treadmill even though I’m exhausted and don’t feel like running another step, and when I think about what sends me to work each day, I can’t point to any part of my written creed and say, “That’s the principle at work here.”

I think that means that there’s something rather important missing. My creed contains an important statement of my beliefs, but if it’s not capturing what’s driving me each and every day, it’s definitely missing something. I wish I could share advice on how I fixed that, but honestly, I haven’t, and I’m hoping that I’ll figure out how to by listening to more of Davidson’s sermons, reading more books that speak to me, and just by going out and living some more to try to further my understanding.

A large part of my current creed’s purpose is to point to the transcendent and wondrous in the world. One of the things I’ve noticed is that I always try to put religious sentiments in poetic language; not to obscure the meanings, I think, but because it seems to me that poetic language is the most appropriate language for handling religious ideas. It imbues them with a sense of beauty and importance.

Sometimes, it feels as if modern life has lost much of this beauty and sense of wonder. As Karen Armstrong says in her book A History of God, “One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. One of its consequences is that we have edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world.” My current creed reflects this desire to imbue life with a sense of spiritual or holiness.

Keeping the transcendent and wondrous in mind is important while thinking about religion, but it’s equally important to stay grounded in what it is that drives me, day in and day out, to live, to work, and to play. That’s the part I think I’ve left out of my creed, and that’s the part that’s the hardest for me to compose. I don’t yet know the answer to that piece; and even though I believe it’s somewhere inside me, I haven’t yet figured out how to write it down.

I’m left suspecting, and hoping, that, like my creed, I’m still a work in progress.

PRAYER

The theologian Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

It sounds so easy, but often seems so hard. Let us focus today on what makes us come alive, that we may go and do it.

Let us seek those things that know our true name and make them our friends. And those places where we feel safe, real and cherished: let us seek them as well, and learn to dwell near them.

Let us muster the courage to listen for those voices that demand only the best from us, and let us grow comfortable in their company. For they are angels of our better nature, and we need their hard, honest, faithful voices in our ears.

Of the paths ahead of us, let us choose the most true path, even though it be a demanding one. For our calling is a high one. We are made, as scientists and poets have told us, entirely of stardust; of the stuff of gods are we made. And that noble origin grants us much honor, and a task.

The task begins with asking what makes us come alive and going to do it. Because more than anything, the world needs people who have come alive. Let us seek that which makes us come alive, nothing less. Amen.

SERMON: Spiritual Aeronautics, Part I

It isn’t easy writing a statement of what you believe, as Jonobie found. Then when you’ve written one, then look at how you’re living, it seems to leave out so much of what really drives you. It isn’t easy.

And one reason it isn’t easy, as ironic as this sounds, is because we have already inherited the words and the styles in which we’re supposed to be thinking of our beliefs. In our culture, beliefs are supposed to involve God, sin, and salvation, even if we don’t think of our lives that way. And not any god, either. Just that one taken from the religious scriptures of Jews and Christians.

If we say “Well, I don’t think God is a useful concept, I think in terms of trying to be awake rather than living in illusions” – if we say that, we’ll be made to feel that we haven’t done it right, that we didn’t use the right materials, even though it would be a perfectly good Buddhist statement.

We’ve inherited this set of religious luggage we’re supposed to use. One suitcase says “God” and is filled with over 25 centuries of traditions, poetry, fantasy, feeling, wisdom and nonsense, all packed in that suitcase under the word “God.”

Another suitcase may be called Sin, and it too is loaded with centuries’ worth of stories, a lifetime of personal experiences, the teachings of our childhood church, our classmates, and the low-level religion we see in the media. It isn’t a neutral word; it comes to us already packed with other peoples’ meanings.

And there are more suitcases in this set of spiritual luggage. Salvation, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, Jesus, angels, demons and the whole array of fanciful and metaphysical concoctions of millions of believers over dozens of centuries.

All that luggage is really a kind of partial do-it-yourself kit, a set of materials or recommendations, for us to use or reject in building our own adult faith, though we’re not taught to think of it that way.

But if we just use the luggage we’ve been given, without ever unpacking it, we will never grow up spiritually. Rather than owning our beliefs, we’ll be owned by them. When we repeat beliefs we’ve learned from others, we’re using words with meanings given to them by others. And to live others’ beliefs in others’ terms is in a sense to live someone else’s life.

So in thinking about how to unpack all this luggage, and how to prepare for the kind of personal spiritual trip that might be a whole lot more honest and relevant for us, I decided to try something a little heady to shed a certain kind of light on all of this.

My focus in graduate school was in what’s called language philosophy, and my dissertation was on the philosopher who was the giant behind language philosophy. (My dissertation title: The Legitimate Heir to Theology: A Study of Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of Chicago 1988.) I’ve never preached on his complex thoughts or that kind of philosophy, but a little of it might be a useful way to think about this.

Language philosophers say that most of our confusions come from putting things in the wrong way. Don’t let that sound too abstract. It is very close to the Buddhist teaching that we live in illusions we have created by our ways of thinking, so the freedom we need comes from changing the way we think about the problems.

That’s why, whenever we’re dealing with powerful words, and all kinds of jargon, we always need to ask what we think we mean by words like Truth, love, justice, America or God. Without knowing what we mean by these things in plain ordinary language, we literally don’t know what we believe. And if we follow, or swallow, the word when someone else is using it, we may be following something really untrue, unjust, un-American or ungodly. I’ll give you a real-world example, from a House Bill now before the U.S. Congress that most of you may not have heard of.

It’s called the Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 also known as H. R. 3799, introduced into the House of Representatives in Washington last month by Representative Aderholt, R-Alabama, to limit the jurisdiction of Federal courts in certain cases involving the invocation of God as the supreme authority of the United States. It would amend the United States Code to prohibit the Supreme Court from reviewing cases in which federal or state officers have used God’s rule “as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”

What this says is that those in power may define God in their own way, use their allegiance to their God to trump every law or restraint in the country, and that their behaviors may not even be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

This bill comes with a very specific definition of God in mind, one that Pat Robertson has been advocating openly since at least 1978, when he wanted the Supreme Court prohibited from questioning or overriding his concept of God.

I’ve checked with the Washington office of the UUA, and nobody thinks this bill has a chance of getting anywhere, though they think it is a scary sign that it was even introduced.

You know the concept of the word “God” packed in the luggage of this bill – as well as the implicit concepts of truth, justice and America – is a narrow and brutal concept that would discriminate against women, gays and lesbians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and anyone else who didn’t fit the shallow and finally vicious mold of the worst kind of fundamentalism.

That’s why it is so important to understand that God isn’t a being, a critter, anything that exists in time and space, but is a concept, an idea. If it’s a critter, than we don’t get to vote about what the critter is like. But it’s a concept, like Justice and America are concepts. So it is terribly important that we do accept our creative role in defining that word, or rejecting it as just not being language that is useful to us.

Many people here lost all interest in God when they thought he was a Guy in the Sky, and knew that the idea of a supernatural being was useless, if not just insulting.

And this loss of faith doesn’t only happen in religion. It can happen with all our most powerful concepts. For some, it happened a generation ago to the word “America.” I remember vividly when radicals in the Vietnam War era burned American flags because they accepted the administration’s definition of America as an invading warrior nation, rather than accepting their role in challenging and changing that definition of the concept of America to something nobler.

And for many poor people in our society, the word “Justice” has mostly died as a useful concept, because the kind of justice they see is designed to exclude them.

Most of our really powerful concepts have been defined down, dumbed down, to levels too low to be either admirable or useful – words like Truth, Justice, America or God, for instance. It’s as though someone held a contest to define these words, and the dumbest answers won.

I have a refrigerator magnet given to me by the president of a church I once served that says “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys.” As you might imagine, that was a church with some colorful problems!

I do like that refrigerator magnet, but there is a more elegant way of putting this. It comes, as so many of my favorite images come, from the Greeks.

I talked a couple weeks ago about the Greek image of the human soul as a spider sitting in the middle of a web, feeling and attending to all her connections to the world around her.

But they also had other images and stories. For their word psyche meant both “soul” and “butterfly.” They’re saying that growing a soul is like the metamorphosis from something that crawls along the ground like a caterpillar, to something that flies, that soars.

And it can happen, they say, only by changing from one thing into another. It makes it sound natural, automatic. How hard could it be when even caterpillars can do it?

Still, if you have had gods die, or if you’ve lost faith in America, Truth, Justice, Love or the rest of those powerful words, you know there is nothing easy about it. It can feel awful, and cosmic. Because those most powerful abstractions are like guiding stars that we follow. We hitch our wagon to the star. And when a star like a concept of God or America or Justice dies, it can feel like, “Well, there was just that one star and it went dim, so the heavens must be dark now.”

But what language philosophy – or Buddhism – would say is that what really died was a word, a way of talking about something important to us, so we need to grow into other ways of thinking about those things. We need to find a structure of thinking, a grammar of ultimacy that is useful to us and worthy of those things that are most sacred to us.

For me – as our ministerial interns and worship associates have learned, sometimes to their dismay – it must be done in ordinary language, because that’s where meaning is really located, I think. Jonobie spoke of going to poetry to preserve the feeling dimension of her beliefs, and that’s important too. But first, I think, we need to know what on earth we actually believe, before we augment it with poetic and metaphorical images.

So instead of using jargon like saying “I try to live as God wants me to live,” I think things like “I try to live by the highest values I can find.” Instead of the poetic statement that “I know God loves me,” I think less poetic things, like “I’m all right. In the grand scheme of things, I believe I can be a valuable part of all this.” I don’t say, “I want to work for social justice” – since “justice” is a word like God, that is defined differently by every ideology. I say I want to work toward a society in which individual rights are balanced by individual responsibilities, where we accept our freedoms at the price of being equally committed to the freedoms of all others. It lacks poetry. I could make it more poetic by saying “The whole human sound goes up only from the full choir,” though that still doesn’t make a good bumper sticker. But I know what I mean by it, and so do you when you hear it. So for me the clarity of thought and expression are more than worth the loss of poetry or easy jargon.

I’ll admit that putting beliefs in ordinary language takes away some of their magic and their sparkle. They suddenly sound very down-to-earth, not quite as grand as thinking we are serving “the truth that passeth all understanding.” But we know who we are and what we believe, in ways others can also understand. There is a kind of integrity there that we lose when we don’t understand or own our beliefs. Ordinary language can still express truth that passes understanding; it just won’t allow truth that bypasses it.

Think of that House Bill 3799 again. If I got to define the word “God” there, got to determine what it meant and how it was to be used, I’d be happy with it. But I don’t, and neither do you. An immensely powerful word has been put in a political bill, carrying with it a terribly narrow, ignorant and bigoted meaning and hiding an equally dangerous and bigoted agenda. All those things are hiding inside that three-letter word. God may not be like a being, but it is like a Trojan Horse; an immense amount can be loaded inside that single syllable. That’s why loaded language, like a loaded gun, is potentially so dangerous, why it’s worth asking just what we mean by words like God, justice, America and truth.

Buddhists say that powerful words and symbols are like fingers pointing at the moon, so a word like “God” would need to point toward an ideal world in which all were accepted as children of God, in which women, gays and lesbians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and others were all equally embraced as citizens. But you know, as I do, that’s not what the framers of this bill have in mind. They’re not using the finger to point at the moon. They’re not giving us the moon, they’re giving us – well, you can finish that sentence.

When we accept the prepackaged meanings of powerful words like Justice, America or God, we are like caterpillars gnawing on the leaves in our small part of the garden, inside a fenced yard whose boundaries are no bigger than the vision of those who have given our powerful words their meanings.

This is the caterpillar stage: not looking up, no concept of the great amount of space there is to live in, because we’ve accepted a definition of life, Justice, America or God that is too small to allow life that grows beyond narrow limits. And when we do grow beyond them, and oppose them, that narrow world often grows quite mean.

You know this, if you’ve ever been part of a community – religious, political or social – where you outgrew the group’s notion of truth, justice, God or America. You can lose friends, relatives, and relationships by outgrowing their vision. Once you can see beyond their horizons, for you they become terribly earthbound, limiting, too small to contain the life you are growing into. Everyone here has probably experienced some form of this.

Then what do you do? Do you go back where it’s safe, ignoring the little voice that says you don’t really believe this stuff? Or do you listen to the voice saying you are somehow commanded to become more, bigger, healthier than your group will endorse?

Yes, sometimes the little voices telling you to ignore the rules of others are the wrong voices, and may even be dangerous. I mentioned people like Curt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday a few weeks ago, as people who listened to the wrong voices and lost their lives. Sometimes, we need to listen. But sometimes, those little voices are the angels of our better nature, and we need to heed them.

That’s the need for metamorphosis. It’s when a turkey decides it’s not really a turkey but is an eagle. Or, for a better biological metaphor, it’s like when a caterpillar grows into its true calling as a butterfly. It requires a metamorphosis. Changing gods, changing centers, probably changing communities and losing some friends.

If I lived in the community that had produced House Bill #3799, it would make my skin crawl. No matter how much I might love those people, I couldn’t be around them, couldn’t live in their world or with their notions of Truth, God, Justice or America. To me, they would be as caterpillars, and I would have to leave them or die.

They wouldn’t support my growing away from them. And they wouldn’t think I was becoming a butterfly, either. They would see me as deluded or damned, would threaten me with their hell and withdraw the protection of their community.

To grow away, to grow up spiritually, sometimes we have to leave a whole world, a whole way of being. It can be one of the noblest things we ever do, but it isn’t quick and it isn’t easy.

And it’s a transformation we usually have to do out of sight, tucked away inside something like a cocoon. That’s the next part of spiritual aeronautics: the cocoon.

Like so much in spiritual growth, it is seldom clear just how to do it. We have teachings like that Buddhist insight that the great teachers and teachings of the world are like fingers pointing at the moon. But it’s hard to see the moon, especially when it feels like the sun has gone out.

Still, there are clues. And I will leave you until next week with one that you heard earlier. It comes from the theologian Howard Thurman, who said: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We weren’t meant to be caterpillars. Or turkeys.