Transcendence

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 25, 2015

Transcendence: to connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life. In this first of a series of sermons on the religious values that are the foundation of our religious community, we will explore the meaning and experience of transcendence.

Call to worship

Come into this place of worship, where we live our values and mission together:

Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe of the unity of life

Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

Come into this place that, through our values, we make sacred together.

Reading

Paradox
by Chris Jimmerson

I am in the leaves glowing green from backlit sun. I am in the freshly mown grass, and I flow throughout all in drops of water.
I expand through distant galaxies and rise upon stormy winds.

And yet, I am not.

I am one and many.
Here, where time has no meaning, or perhaps, all times exist at once.
Here, where place has no meaning and yet it is possible to exist in all places at once.

And yet, I am not.

I cease, melting into nothingness and yet into everything.
I know the heart of the raven and the swift reflexes of the dolphin,
even as these, too, blend into the whole.

Light. Darkness. Movement. Stillness. Glowing fires. Freezing snow. Hurricane. Blizzard. Stones. Mountains. Sand. Oceans.

Unity.

I am.

Sermon

Several years ago, I was serving on the board here at First Unitarian Universalist – this was before I went to seminary – and we were in the middle of a series of sessions with the congregation to discern what are now our values and our mission.

The folks on the board had gone through one of the sessions first. Our job after that was to listen deeply at other sessions, as other church members participated in the process.

I’ll never forget the first session where I was there to listen. I walked into Howson hall on a Saturday morning to find a group of folks who I knew were almost all self-identified atheists.

Now, I also knew from having already been through the process, that a major part of it involved people sharing their “experiences of the holy”, so I was thinking to myself, “I wonder how this is going to work?” Twenty minutes later, we were passing around boxes of tissue, as people told of times when they had felt connected to something larger than themselves, when they had experienced awe and wonder, when their hearts had expanded. So, there our group of atheists sat, in a church fellowship hall, dabbing tears from their eyes over sharing stories of experiencing the holy.

It was beautiful and moving and, well, holy.

What this exercise did was help us determine what values we had in common, as revealed through these experiences, as well as to reclaim that word “holy” for ourselves. Then, combining these values with the results from some other exercises we did, the board was to suggest what the congregation held as its key purpose or mission. That’s how we got the statement we still have on our wall and say together every Sunday.

I start with that story because we do not talk about our values as often as our mission, nor about how both came to be determined – that the values came first – the mission emerged out of our values. It will be important to remember this process as we live out and continue to assess our values and mission, as we grow into our future.

So, this morning, I am beginning a series of sermons on each our five religious values, starting with the one we list first, because you know, “Transcendence in Twenty Minutes or Less”, easy, no problem.

I actually do think it is important that we start with our religious value of transcendence, because I think there are good reasons we ended up citing it first.

Here is one of them. After those sessions I just told you about, we compiled the number of times each value was expressed by folks in the congregation and created one of those Word Art graphics that shows those that were mentioned the most often in a larger font size. Perhaps partially as a result of the way the sessions were structured, this is what we got.

Transcendence (and related words people had used to describe their experiences of it) were clearly the largest in the graphic.

It is important here to describe what folks meant by transcendence because one meaning of the word can be to overcome, to rise above, and certainly, we do, for instance, try to transcend oppression through our social justice efforts. What people were talking about here though was more of an experience of transcendence, an experience outside of their day-to-day experience of life, an awe and wonder of the unity of life.

Science has begun to examine these types of experiences and has found that what people label as transcendent experiences vary as to what seems to cause them, the exact nature of the experience and the degree of intensity. However, there does seem to be a common set of characteristics to them that includes:
– a sense of belonging and connectedness with others and with all of creation
– Closely related to this, a sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all that is
– An altering of one’s normal sense of space and time
– An acceptance of paradox
– A perception of beneficial changes in perspective and behavior afterwards.

These characteristics are remarkably similar to the way our folks described their experiences on that Saturday morning in Howson Hall.

Here is another reason why I don’t think it is all that surprising that transcendence as a value emerged so strongly here at the church. While as Unitarian Universalists, we come out of a tradition that has certainly always had a strong element of rationality and reason, so too has our tradition always contained a strain of finding truth and beauty through personal experience. And these two can sometimes be at odds.

Our Transcendentalist forbearers provide the obvious example. In the 1800s, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker got themselves into trouble with, not just the conservatives of their time, but also their fellow Unitarians, by saying things like the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the bible didn’t literally happen. Reason says that doesn’t make any sense. Parker even went on to say that true Christianity would exist even if it were to turn out that Jesus had never lived.

Tell that to a fundamentalist even today. Then run away very, very quickly. And yet, the Transcendentalists were also reacting against the overly rational, dry worship and preaching styles of the Unitarians of their time. They found it devoid of personal spiritual experience. Emerson left his ministry and found what he clearly described as transcendental experiences through self-reflection and nature. He wrote:

“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

I have always thought that is a beautiful passage. Well, except for the transparent eyeball part. That’s just kind of Éweird. But then when he went on to explain it as “I am nothing; I see all” it sounds very similar to “the sense of both dissolution of self and a flowing or expansion outward toward a sense of unity with all” that I mentioned earlier.

This influence is with us even today. Our Unitarian Universalist association of congregations lists six sources from which we draw wisdom and spirituality. The very first source is stated like this: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

I think Emerson has also handed down to us a tradition of pushing back against the idea of hierarchical or vertical transcendence wherein our experience of it can only occur through a God that is “up there”, and they can only be mediated by the institution of the church and its religious authorities.

That’s how the little Southern Baptist church we went to when I was a child was. God existed in some elevated, holy realm, while we sinners wallowed down in the physical realm. The preacher and the deacons at the front of the church were holier than the rest of us, so we were not allowed to go up there except to get saved (or if we were part of the cleaning crew). The communion was brought to us lowly ones there in our pews.

Now, even then I didn’t like this, so, one Sunday when I was six years old, the time came in the service where you could go up front and say that you had been saved that day, so up I went and got saved. I don’t really remember having some transcendent experience of Jesus washing my soul clean or anything. I was six. I think I just wanted to be up their with the holier than thou people, the cool kids. And, please, no cracks in receiving line about me later becoming a minister.

Emerson believed in a very this worldly God that, to oversimplify a bit, was both the unity of all things and that also existed within all things. There was a spark of the divine in every person, so one did not necessarily need a church to experience transcendence.

Jerome A. Stone, a current day Unitarian Universalist theologian take this a step further by removing God from the experience altogether. Citing a perspective called religious naturalism, Stone speaks of these experiences as horizontal rather than vertical transcendence. He gives two examples.

In the first, he tells of the time that he got a call letting him know that his father had died. His daughter, who was eight years old at the time, came into the room where he had slumped into a chair. She asked what was wrong. When he told her, she said, “Oh daddy”, got in the chair with him, and wrapped her arms around him. Stone says he had the experience of transcendence as is typically described, only its source was the gift of love and comfort offered by his daughter, rather than by the grace of some God.

Similarly, he tells of having another of these experiences during the late 1960s. He was participating in weekly marches to demand a housing ordinance regarding racial equality in the city where he was busily attending graduate school. He says that he was pulled to do so by a moral demand coming, again, not from some God, but from a sense of ethics and compassion.

Interestingly, the theology that appeals greatly to me personally maintains this idea of horizontal transcendence but also includes a concept of the divine. Process relational theology, to oversimplify a bit again, conceptualizes the divine, as an ever-evolving process that is itself the sum total of every process of becoming (or evolution and change) throughout the entire universe. These processes of becoming include me, you, the rocks, the plants – all that is – we are all ever-changing and interconnected in ways that are beyond our normal, every day understanding.

The divine, whether seen as a metaphor or an actual presence, also holds all of the creative possibilities that are available to us in each moment. In this worldview then, we experience transcendence when we get a glimpse of the true depth and complexity of that interconnectedness – a sense of deep belonging that drives in us a love for all of creation and that lures us toward creativity, justice and beauty.

Hey, it’s a pretty theology, whether you agree with it or not! So that’s just a few of the ways some Unitarian Universalists have thought about these experiences. There are many, many other ways of viewing them throughout the world’s religions and, more recently, through various psychological and neurological theories about them.

So, as I thought about this first of our values, I struggled, not so much with their source nor what may be going inside with them, but instead with why they seemed to be of such value to us. What do they do for us? I was reading shame and vulnerability researcher Dr. Brene Brown’s latest book when I had a realization about these experiences that I really did not want to accept at first. That happens to me a lot with Dr. Brown’s work, so she pisses me off. And bless her for doing so.

I think at least one of the things we draw from these experiences is a greater capacity and willingness to allow our hearts to break wide open – an ability to love wholeheartedly, even though doing so will inevitably involve loss and heartbreak.

A while back, it was a very cold night, so we had the fireplace going. At the time, my spouse, Wayne, was suffering the worst of some very serious, potentially life-threatening health issues. He was lying on the couch across from the fireplace, covered with a blanket, sleeping. Our two ridiculously spoiled Basenji dogs had curled up on the couch beside him. It’s funny how our animal friends know when we are not doing well. They were 13 and 14, about as far as their expected lifespans go.

I sat in a chair looking at them, thinking about the thousands of years dogs and humans have been gathering together next to a fire and how many times a similar scene must have been occurring across our hemisphere in that very moment.

And I had that transcendent experience – that sense of deeper connection and belonging – that sense of self both dissolving and expanding outward toward an ultimate love and a beautiful unity.

And yet, it was achingly beautiful, because my heart was breaking over the potential for loss in my immediate, very real, every day world.

And my heart grew larger – large enough to withstand such loss – filled up with a deep understanding that I would not give up one single moment of the pleasure and joy and love they have brought into my life.

Now, I want you to know that Wayne is doing much, much better and that so far the pups are still going, still spoiled and still misbehaving.

If we think back to all of the examples of these experiences I have talked about just in this sermon, they all involved this sense of our hearts breaking wide open: our folks in Howson Hall moved to tears by one another’s stories; Jerome Stone’s story of being offered grace by his young daughter over the loss of his own father; his story of participating in marches because the world as it was what not the world he longed for; even Emerson’s description of our experiences of transcendence through being in nature, I think involve a sense of loss, because we know it is all temporary – all of the life around us will also end and be replaced – and even the very rocks in the hillsides will eventually dissolve away and be transformed into something new.

Abraham Maslow, who founded humanistic psychology, called these experiences “peak experiences”, and he thought that they generate within us a set of values that are more life-giving and life-fulfilling – values that have to do with connection and belonging.

I think he was right. And if I am correct that these experiences help us to break our hearts wide open so that they grow and can love more fully even though we will know loss, then perhaps the biggest reason we put transcendence first on our list is because the rest of our values emerge out of it. It takes courage to love wholeheartedly, knowing our hearts will be broken and yet also knowing that it is still worth it.

Loving whole-heartedly is the very essence of compassion. It is at the heart of the empathy required to create community.

Together, these make possible the ultimate reason I think we gather in community, transformation – the growth that changes our lives and heals our world.

Throughout time, ritual, prayer, music, poetry, meditation, art, singing, working together for a just cause, intentional silence, the things we practice here at this church, have all been known to be capable of generating this state of transcendence.

It’s pretty fantastic then, that we have chosen to value it so much.

Hallelujah and amen.

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