The ABCs of Religion

10 September 2000

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: On the ABCs of Music

A. A girl walked down a sidewalk she had walked down many times before, when she suddenly noticed a new building she had not seen before. Looking in the window, she was stopped by an odd sight. There was another girl, about her age, standing in a far room of the building, doing what looked like a kind of dance, or at least a dance done from the waist up, for her feet hardly moved at all. She seemed to be biting the end of a metal rod. She was holding the rod in her hands, out to her right side, and she seemed to have the other end of the rod in her mouth, biting it, or at least chewing on it. As she bit it, she moved a little, a kind of gentle swaying motion.

The girl could not see clearly, for the window was dirty, or cloudy. Still, it was the strangest sight! She began stopping by this building each day to watch the strange dance, always about the same, and soon found herself wondering whether perhaps she wasn’t looking into the window of some kind of a hospital where they put people who did these slow little dances while biting metal rods.

B. One day when she walked by, the window was open. And now, when the girl looked in, she heard the sound of a flute playing. It was a flute player, not a dancer, and the point of it all had not been the movement, but the music, which the girl had never heard before. “Aha,” said the girl, “now I understand!” Then, no longer interested by the spectacle, she turned to leave.

C. But the flute player saw her, and called out to her. Surprised, the girl stayed by the open window as the other girl approached. “Here,” said the flute player when she reached the open window, “wouldn’t you like to play? This is yours, after all, and it is your turn now.” With that, she handed the flute through the open window to the girl who had, until then, been only a spectator.

And then the flute player disappeared, the whole building disappeared, and the little girl found herself standing there with her whole life still ahead of her, holding a flute – and trying to remember the movements, and the music.

READING: On Reading Scripture

This morning’s reading is taken from the writings of an early 3rd century Christian writer known as Origen. Late in his life, he was declared a heretic by the Church for his belief that there was no everlasting hell, and that all souls would eventually be redeemed, making him the first “Universalist” theologian in western religion. He was a powerful thinker, however: some of his writings are still taught in graduate religion programs, and his influence on western religion has been significant.

Since Origen is not well known today, few realize what an intellectual giant he was. When he died, he left behind a massive body of writings numbering close to a thousand titles. Saint Jerome called him “The greatest teacher of the Church after the apostles.” He was born about 185, probably at Alexandria. He died, after imprisonment and extended torture, in 253. These remarks are taken from his book called On First Principles:

“Divine things are communicated to men somewhat obscurely and are the more hidden in proportion to the unbelief or unworthiness of the inquirer.”

Moreover, some of the simpler folk believe such things about God that not even the most unjust and savage of men would believe. And the reason why they have a false apprehension of these things is that they don’t understand scripture in its spiritual sense, but only in its literal sense.

There are three layers of meaning in scripture, each suited to different degrees of intellectual development and spiritual maturity:

A. The simplest folk may be edified by what we may call the body of the scriptures (for such is the name we may give to the common and literal interpretation);

B. Those who have begun to make a little progress and are able to perceive something more than that may be edified by the soul of scripture;

C. Finally, those who are most advanced in both mind and spirit may be edified by the spiritual dimension of scripture: by those parts that may be said to have been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These are the believers who are led to live sacred lives, rather than merely understanding sacred words.

How then should you understand sacred scriptures? You should understand them by knowing that these mysteries were portrayed figuratively through the narration of what seemed to be human deeds and the handing down of certain legal ordinances and precepts. The aim was that not everyone who wished should have these mysteries laid before his feet to trample upon, but that they should be for the ones who had devoted themselves to studies of this kind with the utmost purity and sobriety and through nights of watching, by which means perchance they might be able to trace out the deeply hidden meaning of the Spirit of God, concealed under the language of an ordinary narrative which points in a different direction.

In other words, we should try to discover in the scriptures which we believe to be inspired by God a meaning that is worthy of God. And here the Holy Spirit can guide us, for the Spirit calls the attention of the reader, by the impossibility of the literal sense, to an examination of the inner meanings.

In summary, all our reading of sacred scriptures must be guided by two considerations. We are seeking, with honest minds and pure hearts, for those things which are both useful to us, and worthy of God. If we keep these things in mind, we will not easily be misled.

(From Origen’s On First Principles, Book IV, adapted)

CENTERING:

By Rachel Naomi Remen

I bought a little, falling-down cabin on the top of a mountain. It was so bad that when [a friend] came to see it, he said, “Oh, Rachel, you bought this?” But with two carpenters, an electrician, and a plumber, in three years we have remodeled the whole thing. We started by just throwing things away – bathtubs, light fixtures, windows. I kept hearing my father’s voice saying, “That’s a perfectly good light fixture, why are you throwing it away?” We kept throwing away more and more things, and with everything we threw away, the building became more whole. It had more integrity. Finally, we had thrown away everything that didn’t belong. You know, we may think we need to be more in order to be whole. But in some ways, we need to be less. We need to let go, to throw away everything that isn’t us in order to be more whole.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. Not a better you, but a more real you.

SERMON: The ABCs of Religion

It’s surprising, the number of times the study of religion seems to have three levels, three stages of understanding – like the little story of the flute-player. You could call those three levels A B and C.

A. The literal or “factual” level; like standing outside a closed window thinking that the meaning of the sight must be in going through the motions because that’s all you can see.

B. The metaphorical or intellectual level; like opening the window and discovering the motions were just by-products of the music, which was the real point of it all.

C. The existential or personal level; when someone hands you the flute, and you realize that you are not just a “spectator” in life, that it is your turn.

When I began studying religion in graduate school, I began the way most of you would have – with no previous education in religion at all. I had no undergraduate courses, very little knowledge of the Bible or any other religious text. I didn’t have much of a notion of what religion was about, beyond the general understanding that on the surface religion usually seems to be concerned with gods or goddesses, and then on a deeper level, it’s concerned with some of the important questions about life. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

What I didn’t expect was to read things like you heard in this morning’s reading from the 3rd century writer Origen, which we were exposed to almost immediately. I knew that modern liberals looked on the Bible and other sacred scriptures as symbols, metaphors and myths that depicted life in poetic imagery and stories, but I never expected that the better religious thinkers had been saying this for over two thousand years. So the first time I read some of the writings of people like Origen, I could hardly believe it.

Here was a voice from almost 1800 years ago saying that reading scriptures literally is the unimaginative or uneducated sort of thing that children do. If you’re serious about understanding this subject, he was saying, the literal level isn’t even worth bothering with, because it has missed the whole point of religion. The real concerns of religion can only be understood if you grow beyond that literal level, and realize that scriptures are speaking in poetic images about a different level entirely “concealed under the language of an ordinary narrative which points in a different direction,” as Origen put it.

It was almost as though the real meanings had been protected from casual observers by being written in code – although it is the same code that most great literature and poetry have used, too. Religious scriptures are written in the code of symbols and metaphors, allegories and myths. We learned, over and over and over again during the early parts of graduate school, that a literal reading of any religious scripture, like a literal reading of good poetry or fiction, is unacceptable: it is useless to us, and unworthy of the subject of religion. It is like watching a flute player through a closed window, wondering what all the strange movements are for. This was the first level, the “A” level, of approaching any great literature, including religious literature.

It is hard to overemphasize the effect that reading thousands of pages like this from dozens of writers throughout the history of religion had on doctoral students, at least those of us with no previous education in religion. The 22-year-olds who came with an undergraduate degree in religion were already past this, but for the rest of us, it was quite a surprise.

Here you’ve come to graduate school to join the fairly small group of those for whom religion is a serious and life-long subject of study, and the first thing you realize is that most of the things you have ever heard about religion – and most of the things you’ve ever said about religion – now feel like silly children’s games. For many of us, it was a little humiliating, and a lot intimidating.

The second level, the “B” level, which Origen had called the “soul” of scriptures, showed us that the great religious writings are really concerned with existential insights into the nature of life itself. Even Origen’s notion that treasures this important aren’t meant for literalists or people unwilling to work at them was an appealing idea. After all, the same is true of music, poetry, and all the rest of the arts. It was true of most subjects covered in the humanities.

But all of a sudden, when you move from level “A” to level “B” and then look at the history and writings of religion again, simply everything changes. Because if religious writings were only meant to be taken on a literal level, then they were easy to dismiss – as though they were a simple True/False test – and we could feel smart and smug without any effort at all, imagining that all those old writers were just shallow fools compared to us! But now here they are, nearly two thousand years ago, describing the whole literal approach to scriptures as childish, and unfit for adults or other serious students of religion. Again, you can hardly overstate the impact that this has on students of religion, especially religious liberals, who pride themselves on being well-educated, at least in their own field of religion.

Nor was this man Origen alone: He was not the exception, but the rule. Nearly all of the great thinkers were that dismissive of literal readings of scripture. Many of you probably never heard of Origen. But think of Saint Augustine, whom you probably have heard of. Here was this remarkable man, writing in the 5th century, who was such a powerful and influential writer that he nearly defined Roman Catholicism for a thousand years. He has also been called the grandfather of the Protestant Reformation, because Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, strongly influenced by his works, and nearly a third of John Calvin’s major theological work was adapted from Augustine’s writings. You might expect the person who nearly invented Roman Catholic theology to be busy cranking out creeds, but it is not what you find when you read him. Instead, you find things like this:

“Some people imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth. “When these people hear that God said “Let such and such be made”, and accordingly it was made, they think – that once the words had been pronounced, whatever was ordered to come into existence immediately did so. Any other thoughts which occur to them are limited in the same way by their attachment to the familiar material world around them. These people are still like children. But the very simplicity of the language of Scripture sustains them in their weakness as a mother cradles an infant in her lap. But there are others for whom the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it (Confessions, p. 304).”

If you are a student of the arts, if you love the humanities, this kind of writing and this kind of insight has an immediate appeal to you. It is like the window has opened, and you hear the music, and suddenly you know what the instrument has been for all along. The “instruments” here are religious scriptures, in all traditions, and one of the most important things you learn in a good religious education is that the symbols, stories, legends and myths of religion are meant to make music, not dogma. They are about life, not belief. And if you just stay on the surface, you miss all of that: you miss nearly everything that sacred scriptures are about and have always been about, because you miss the “spirit” that inspired those scriptures.

Annie Dillard tells a story toward the same point, in which she describes how she learned to split wood. At first, she said that she aimed at the tops of the logs, but all she produced were useless slivers of wood. Later she learned to aim for the block – past the target – to get the job done. Understanding religion is like that. While there are some things that have merely literal meanings lying just on the surface, there aren’t many, and those that do aren’t very important. You have to aim beyond the words, to the more fundamental truths lying beneath them.

You could wonder why writers don’t just say what they mean – not just in religious literature but in all literature. Take a book like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for instance. Many people have taught that Steinbeck was saying through this book that the American Dream was only a dream for the rich few, carried on the backs of the poor, and that the only nourishment most of us will find is what little milk of human kindness we can give to one another. Well then, why didn’t he just say so, instead of writing a whole book? He could have said that in a letter to the editor!

Or take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the book some have called the greatest American novel: Why didn’t he simply say “The American Dream isn’t enough to sustain a life, even for the rich”? Why did he have to invent all those characters, and all those happenings that never happened?

Or for that matter, why can’t movies just get to the point and tell you what they’re about, and save everyone a lot of time and money? Why don’t they just make their points about good, evil, integrity and courage in a straightforward way, instead of inventing all those unlikely characters?

These are all questions from “Level A.” And the answer, which can only come from “Level B,” is that the kind of truth that literature, including religious literature, is about, is not a truth about the characters in the stories, but about life. And truths about life are most clear and most useful when told in stories that recreate a living context for them: stories that put the insights into life situations that we can identify with, and can feel. It is like Origen wrote 1800 years ago: they are a kind of truth “concealed under the language of an ordinary narrative which points in a different direction.”

And so once you get it, you think “Aha, now I understand!” like the girl watching the flute player. And you go out to teach or preach religion as great literature, written in symbols and metaphors as all great literature is, and you think you’ve got it now. This religion business took some mental gear-shifting, but it wasn’t so hard after all. You can do it all in your head.

But then you think of things like Origen wrote in his third level, about “the believers who are led to live sacred lives, rather than merely understanding sacred words.” This third level, this “Level C,” means that religion is, at bottom, not an intellectual issue at all, but an existential one: it is our lives that are at stake here. If we live only once, if all the heavens and hells in all the world’s religions are metaphors for qualities of life here and now, and if this really is all there is, then we’re not talking about mind-games. We’re talking about the fact that life is short, it matters a lot how we live it, and there aren’t many clear guidebooks.

I remember how St. Paul’s statement that “we work out our salvation in fear and trembling” took on entirely different meanings in a seminar where we were asked how we were working out our salvation. There was not a person in the room who believed in a literal or supernatural religion. You hardly ever find that in a good graduate school of religion. We all knew that both life and religion are about the here and now. But then whatever salvation there is to be is also here and now: and how are we to work it out? With our whole life at stake, how are we to live it?

You give your life over to the demands of education, and think that whatever your life was worth must then be measured, somehow, in the field of education. But what there is worth a life? Only if you are serving not just education, but the noblest demands of education: those far horizons and challenging depths of understanding that undergird the very best sorts of education. Only, in other words, if you are serving a transcendent ideal, a transcendent spirit, that spirit that gives life and significance to education.

We were mostly concerned with education, whether we were going into college teaching or into the ministry. But the questions of what makes life worth living are powerful questions in any area, because so much is at stake: your whole life!

There was a 19th Century Danish existentialist named Kierkegaard who was immensely important in my education, and in my understanding of religion and of life. He once wrote about the kind of games we play with religious beliefs when we keep them as merely intellectual pursuits unrelated to our real lives. We are like passengers on a cruise ship, he said, who spend their time arranging the deck chairs in neat little rows. And this, said Kierkegaard, is supremely funny: not because neat little rows are bad, but because the ship is sinking.

Every day, 24 hours at a time, the ship is sinking. We move each day of our lives toward that moment when we shall not move at all. Life isn’t a snapshot, it’s a motion picture, moving toward its ending. We stand there with the flute in our hands, our life before us, and we’re not sure just what the movements were supposed to be, or just how the music is supposed to sound.

Until there is that sense of anxiety, until there is that sense of “fear and trembling,” the flute hasn’t been placed in our hands, and we haven’t really felt the full impact of what this religion business is about.

This is why the language of religion is so often filled with gods and goddesses, with images of eternal reward or punishment, with such exaggerations of speech: like heaven, hell, God, creation, suffering, crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation. The language is extreme because, since we only live once, there is so much at stake – every day, the ship is sinking.

This is the third level of religion, the “Level C,” the level where it finally dawns on us that there is a sense in which every religious scripture has been written from the yearnings of the human soul, yearnings we have too.

We have a funny way of thinking about religion, especially among the educated sorts of folks who find their way to Unitarian churches. We usually think of a religion as a collection of pseudo-intellectual propositions. We judge the acceptability of those propositions, then accept or reject the parts of the religion that fit our understanding of what is intellectually coherent and defensible.

In other words – and this is quite ironic – religious liberals often tend to operate at about the same level as Christian fundamentalists do. By thinking that religion is about belief, we tend to take it at the same literal level that fundamentalists do, though we oppose them. They take their religion at the literal level. They say God is some sort of a critter somewhere up there, heaven is a literal place we go after we die, and so on. In other words, they say it is all literal and it is all true.

Often, we also take our religion at the same literal level. Yes, we say, the terms of traditional religion are talking about a God who is some sort of a critter somewhere up there, and yes heaven is referring to a literal place we’re supposed to go after we die. But they’re wrong. In other words, it is all literal and it is all false. Like the fundamentalists, most of those who attack fundamentalists operate at the same literal level, level A.

If you think about it, concepts like atheism and agnosticism and questions about whether or not you “believe in” God, are only coherent at the literalist, fundamentalist level. Once you understand that the key terms of religion aren’t literal at all, but are symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical, then words like atheism simply become incoherent, don’t they? After all: if God is Love, then what would it mean to be an atheist? Or an agnostic?

Perhaps religion is really as easy, and as hard, as ABC:

A. Have we grown past the literal level? That is the question posed to us at level A. Have we understood that all the talk of gods and angels, heavens and hells, deaths and resurrections and the rest of it, doesn’t really have anything to do with actual gods, angels, heavens, hells, deaths or resurrections? If not, then we fail before we can even begin. We fail to understand what religion is about, and are left facing a locked door. We stand outside the closed window, watching the odd movements inside, and having no way of knowing what they are really about.

B. At Level B, we are asked a second question. We’re asked if we can now begin to hear religion in a new way. Can we listen to its teachings as messages about life expressed in the poetic code language of symbols, myths, allegories and metaphors? If so, we can gain entrance to this second level of religion. Once the window is opened and we can hear the music, then we need to reframe our earlier understanding of those strange movements with the flute we had been watching from the outside. If the point of it all isn’t “going through the motions” but “making music,” then what is religion about? How now do we understand it?

C. And at Level C, it all changes again. For just when we begin to think that once we’ve got it in our heads we’ve mastered this religion business, then suddenly the flute is handed to us. Now we are faced with our own life, and the things we have been serving with our life. What are the gods we’ve served with our lives, and what kind of a life have they led us to? Is it useful to us? Is it worthy of God? There is so much on the line, and so little to stand on that is absolutely certain.

So here we are. We stand here with that flute in our hands. Ahead of us lies our whole life. We finally understand that it is our turn to make the music. So we stand here, holding the flute we thought belonged to someone else. Holding that flute, trying to remember the movements. And one reason we come to church is to listen for the music.