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© Davidson Loehr

 19 October 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

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PRAYER:

Let us trust in the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit within that implores us to seek life, truth and wholeness – let us trust that spirit.

When the voices within or around us say to do something wrong because everybody’s doing it and we can get away with it, let us answer that we can not get away with it, because the angels of our better nature are watching, and because we know better.

When we are in a moral dilemma and are urged to take the path of least resistance, let us remember that in the mor world and the world of character, resistance builds strength.

When tempted to cheat on life, or on those we love, let us remember that you can’t score points by cheating in life and love, because there is a spirit within us that knows better, and it may not give our soul back to us until we make it right.

And all of this is good news – the good news that we are more decent, more loving and more just than we often believe.

The saving truth is that we are being watched by something we can trust, and that something is the person we are meant to become. The person we are meant to become is inviting us into a larger life, a more healing truth, and a better world. That invitation may be our salvation. Let us take it.

Amen.

SERMON: The Holy Heretical Spirit

This morning, I’d like to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Tao te Ching, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. I’ll try to be brief.

I’m doing a series of sermons this fall on the three most significant Unitarian thinkers and preachers of the past 200 years. Almost everyone here will feel a deep kinship with them at that level, I think, whether you care about Unitarians or not.

Mostly today I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, easily the best known of the people we claim, rightly or wrongly, as Unitarian. He spoke to the general audience of inquiring liberal minds who wanted to know how to think about Jesus, God, the Bible, religion and salvation in the 19th century.

He also has a connection to this church. In 1892, the first incarnation of this church was founded by a student of Emerson’s. And when the church reformed in the 1950s, Rev. Wheelock’s granddaughter Emily Howson was a member, and donated the seed money to let us build our social hall, which is named after her.

We need to see this complex man Emerson against the background of his even more complex times, for they were times that shaped our world today in many ways.

When the seven-member graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited Emerson to speak in 1838, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of our country’s founding fathers, had been dead for 12 years, both dying on the 4th of July 1826, 50 years after they had signed our Declaration of Independence.

The scientific revolution was under way, and already threatening a view of the world that Christians had held for about 1800 years. Many people still believed the world was only six thousand years old, created by God in six days, and that – as Thomas Jefferson had also believed – no species had ever become extinct. But by 1803 – the year Emerson was born – a brilliant French paleontologist had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species of animals, and that collection had toured all over Europe, and then through the U.S. with P.T. Barnum’s circuses.

And two geologists had shown that the world was much, much older than six thousand years. Millions and millions of years, they thought, which we now believe to be billions of years. The most influential of these geologists, Charles Lyell, had just published his first volume eight years before Emerson’s address, and among the many who read it and had their worldview forever changed by it was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin had the second volume shipped to him while he was on his voyage aboard The Beagle, where he made his detailed observations on the Galapagos Islands that led to the publication of his book Origin of the Species, 21 years after Emerson’s address.

This was the broader stage on which Emerson spoke on that hot July day. What were we to make of religion, or of Jesus, God, and all the stories in the Bible? Where were we to stand? Where was the new truth that could set us free and make us come more alive? These were Emerson’s questions, and they’re still our questions today, 170 years later.

The Unitarians of the 1830s – including William Ellery Channing, whom I talked about last month – still believed in a supernatural religion, a supernatural God and the literalness of the biblical miracles. Emerson didn’t. He took all of this psychologically. He saw religion as the development of our innate senses of the good, the true and the beautiful, and said that these senses were like a divine presence within us, or that we were all a part of God.

This is a lot like the Hindu notion that our individual soul, or atman, is part of the universal soul, or Brahman, and within a few years, the Bhagavad Gita would be the favorite religious scripture of both Emerson and his younger friend, Henry David Thoreau.

The way Emerson saw it, salvation would mean getting in touch with these deep sensitivities we have, and living out of them – living lives of truth, justice and compassion. Heaven and hell are here and now for Emerson, not elsewhere and later.

While his attacks were against Christianity, their arguments work against every Western religion. The capacity for a noble, even a holy life is born within us. It’s part of human nature, not something put in from elsewhere. That’s shown by the fact that we know the difference between good and evil, kindness and cruelty, truth and pretense, and we are, at our best, drawn to the better options. This shows the presence within us of what theologians like to call God. Emerson put it this way: “The notion of God is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 61).” “The highest revelation is that God is in every [one of us].” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001]), p. 62)

But if that’s so, then what’s the use of figures like Jesus, Mohammad or Allah, or books like the Bible or the Koran? Well for Emerson, when these people or books can show us some wisdom that helps us come more alive, then they’re useful and probably even true for us for now. But not because Jesus or a holy scripture said them – only because these figures or books happened, in this case, to say something that also seems to be true.

It’s like saying that science books are only correct if what they say happens to be true – but it’s not true just because a science book says so. The books can be wrong. So can the prophets, so can all holy scriptures. And the way we check it out is in the real world, with our own mind and in our own heart.

In intellectual terms, what Emerson did was to convert theology into a kind of depth psychology. Religion is about our becoming all that we can be. All religions are about being all that we can be – it’s such a timeless religious truth, it’s really a pity that some advertising agency stole it for the Army. People like Jesus are examples of what all of us can become: they’re examples of our deepest human nature, not exceptions to it. Emerson said that Jesus was true to what is in you and me, and that if we are compassionate and just, then to that extent we are God. The gods are our best traits, writ large. We are the projector, they are the screen.

These were the sorts of things he said in that commencement address to the students, faculty and guest ministers at Harvard Divinity School when he was just 35 years old. He was attacked viciously for his remarks – especially by the Unitarians. The Unitarian paper called The Christian Examiner said that Emerson’s Divinity School address contained “neither good divinity nor good sense (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).” And a man named Andrews Norton, who was regarded as the most liberal Unitarian scholar alive at the time, said Emerson’s beliefs threatened civilization itself (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).

His address made him an outsider to the Unitarians. They denounced him, and closed ranks against him (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 74). It also set off a firestorm that lasted for decades. It was almost thirty years before he was invited to speak at Harvard again.

He was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister for about three years, but it didn’t agree with him, and he resigned from it. After that, he liked to say things like “Unitarianism is corpse-cold.”

He was a scathing critic of all the religion of his time. He said, “I think no [one] can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on [people] is gone, or going.”

He puzzled over people who went to church, and said “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.'” (In fact, that person was him. It was something he wrote to his wife.)

Emerson’s vision carried him far beyond the boundaries not only of Christianity, but of theism and all religions. He had faith that we had a divine impulse within us that we could trust. He saw all gods and religions as projections of our own sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Not all teachings of religions or about gods are good, of course. Some are foolish, or evil. But he trusted that we could generally tell the difference.

You can think of the Bible’s command, for example, that disobedient teen-agers or women who were not virgins when they married should be stoned to death.

You may have seen the YouTube videos of women being stoned to death by Muslim clerics, or read about fundamentalist cults in our country today where disobedient children were beaten to death. Jon Krakauer, the author of the book and movie Into the Wild, also wrote a powerful expose of fundamentalist Mormons called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (on which I preached here a few years ago), in which he recounted the story of a Mormon father murdering his daughter because she was disobedient. That father later died in a Mexican prison for other violent crimes he believed God commanded him to commit. I happen to know one of that man’s daughters, a sister of the girl who was murdered. She lives in Austin. These things aren’t just happening “elsewhere” – they’re right here among us, too.

All of these punitive teachings, Emerson believed, are evil. And I agree with him. There is nothing about any real God in any of them. And we can all see this. When we’re being honest with ourselves, we can and should trust our own heads and hearts more than we trust theologians, preachers, churches or scriptures.

All of this means that the role of churches and preachers is to offer us insights, stories and teachings that can help us become more alive and whole. And the churches and preachers are to be judged by how well they do that. If they don’t, we need to keep looking for a church and minister who meet our own deepest needs, which may not be quite the same as those of the person in the next row.

You have to take the best urgings of your head and heart seriously – what Abraham Lincoln called the angels of our better nature. Then you have to find people, places and experiences that also take you seriously – where you don’t have to check your head or your heart at the door. But don’t think the real authority lies with a church or a bible or a god. All those, including the gods, are human creations. The best of them are good, in the same way the best philosophies, psychologies or literature are. But the fundamental revelation for Emerson was that we already have the spirit – a spirit that even transcends God – within us, and need to live out of that.

The Unitarians and others of the day called all this The Transcendentalist Revolt. Do you see how radical it is? Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian – and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be – he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.

But honest religion is a style, not a position. When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it. Yesterday’s beliefs and other people’s creeds may not do it. Second-hand religion isn’t likely to give us a first-hand life. The spirit that honestly seeks truth can’t be fenced in. “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” as the poet says (James Russell Lowell) – not just out of date, but uncouth.

The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism. And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth. Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.

When we look back to people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s not too important to focus on their beliefs, because those may be out of date by now. But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them. St. Paul once said that “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Cor. 3:6), and this is what I think he was getting at. The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.

This life-giving spirit is called many things. One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy. People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics. Now don’t get queasy; that’s a good thing. The word heretic comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.” Heretics are those who choose when some small orthodoxy declares the choices closed because they – only they – have found the truth. So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions. Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.

It’s that sense of being really alive that we’ve all felt. It drives us to seek more life, and to shun things that don’t give us life. And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions.

You can see this spirit at every level of life. It is what makes plants turn toward the sun. It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them. I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment. That’s the same spirit of life we call the Holy Spirit, operating even in puppies, plants, and amoeba.

There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

And the reason it’s older than God is because it’s part of life, and part of us. It’s the energy that helps us come more alive. We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives. In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols. And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life. I used the Army’s slogan earlier about being all that you can be. So I want to use the slogan from another branch of the service to close, so they won’t feel slighted. And that’s to say that this ancient and holy spirit, like a Marine Corps recruiter, is looking for a few good men and women – or a lot of them. It’s looking for us. And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found.

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Davidson Loehr

28 September 2008

PRAYER:

Let us be pulled into spiritual paths that leave us with a good aftertaste. There is so much religious advice around telling us how we had better get in line with this or that set of beliefs being hawked by churches and preachers who sometimes just feel too slick or mean. But their certainty is too simple, doesn?t have a good smell to it and leaves a bad aftertaste.

Let us instead be lured into paths of loving others as we love ourselves, and loving ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life?s longing for itself, stewards of only the highest ideals. Such spiritual paths are very simple, but they have an aroma and an aftertaste that is still pleasing even years later.

So much in life can be identified by the lasting taste, smell and feel it leaves with us. Let us learn to be drawn to the places that smell good – that smell like ambrosia, or the subtle scent of those angels of our better nature.

Amen.

READING:

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?” “Look at our pictures, and books,? they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.” Then came in the men, and they said, “What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, “This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)

SERMON: What Do You People Believe, Anyway?

Every religious liberal has heard some version of this question from their family or friends. It?s hard to answer questions of belief in ways that are both honest and interesting. Maybe all I can do here is let you hear how I grapple with this, hoping it might help you grapple with it too.

One way of getting into the complexities of belief today is through understanding the complexities of families today. For a couple decades at least, we’ve been used to the phrase “His, hers and ours” to describe what we learned to call “blended families.” Other siblings, parents or other relatives often become at least temporary parts of our families too, as with the family who lit our candles this morning, and as with some of your families.

And what is true of our blended families is also true of the blend of beliefs we each have. Honest religious belief can never again be the simplistic kind of white-bread thing we thought it was fifty years ago.

The things we cling to today are blended families of beliefs, borrowing from all over the world map.

In old-time religion, it might have seemed enough to recite a creed cobbled together many centuries earlier by people living in a very different world, as though that could do more than make us uncritical members of a very old club with no necessary wisdom for the modern world.

Now the lights from which we find enlightenment come in many different sizes, shapes and genders, like the lights upon our altar. Men, women, children, experiences we never expected to change our life, but did. Wisdom we’ve read in self-help books, business books, snippets of Buddhist or Christian or philosophical thought, lines from movies or songs, readings from astrology, things we heard on Oprah, comments from family, friends, therapists or preachers that stick with us – all these things are blended together into our traveling carnival family of practical wisdom, using this bit today, another tomorrow, seldom noticing that this bit and that bit may even contradict each other.

We’ve been trained to think that religion is primarily about what we believe, but defining ourselves by beliefs really doesn’t work well today.

In this more complex world of spirituality, orthodoxy is always too small for real life. It creates too many theological fights, some of them deadly, that amount to a church or preacher restricting God and life to the limits of their tastes and biases, exalting a creed written centuries ago, and sometimes getting hateful toward those in the church across the street, who don’t share the beliefs.

To exalt beliefs is to give way too much credit to theologians! I’m a theologian – I got my Ph.D. in theology – and I can tell you as an insider that you don’t want to invest too much in the spoutings of theologians. You might think that there must be some secret knowledge that theologians learn, that gives them a special kind of authority not available to normal people. But I spent seven years in graduate school, and if there had been that kind of secret knowledge, I would have found it. The truth is, theologians have no secret knowledge about life, because their courses aren’t about life. Theologians are academics, and their courses are restricted to thinking about life from the perspective of their religion. But wisdom comes from living through life experiences and being able to reflect on them in ways that shed light – and that’s not what theologians do.

Here’s an analogy. Talking to a theologian is like talking to a Buick salesman. He can tell you a lot about Buicks, but don’t trust him to tell you what the best car is, because he may not know much more about that than you do. And don’t trust him to tell you whether you need a Buick, some other kind of car, or no car at all, because he has a conflict of interest. The same is true with theologians. They can tell you about their personal religion, but not whether you need it, or whether it’s better for you than other religions or no religion. They also have a conflict of interest.

So as a theologian, I want to tell you not to worry too much about gods you can’t see, and don’t trust theologians trying to tell you about those invisible gods they can’t see either. If we live like that Roman family in the reading, we’ll have a pretty sweet-smelling religion and life.

Orthodoxies and polished belief statements are mostly like advertising brochures that often have very little to do with the lives led by the believers.

Think of the Roman family in that reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were completely outside the acceptable boundaries of belief that Friar Bernard had learned, so he prayed for his God to destroy these Romans. Now that alone is incredible, disgusting, and not terribly surprising. His beliefs were making him small and dangerous, in a world that went way beyond them, the way the world usually goes way beyond the boundaries of beliefs. He was just one priest, so he didn’t have much power. But if he’d had much power, he could have been very dangerous. As we heard his disgust beginning to unfold for this generous family, he was starting to smell bad. But then his humanity trumped his theology, he realized these were cultured and caring people – lovers, even! – and his comfortable little world of beliefs was thrown out of order.

His beliefs no longer seemed so valid, because life had trumped belief. That’s how it should work. Life should always be able to trump beliefs. The Romans had a saying that we should behave as though all the truly decent people who had ever lived were watching us, and then do only what we could proudly do in front of that audience. And in this story they certainly behaved that way. Their beliefs served them and others because their religion wasn’t about beliefs – it was about behavior. If Friar Bernard’s god was watching him as the Romans believed their gods were watching them, he would have been pleased at Friar Bernard’s final frustrated wail, but not at his early arrogance of wanting those whose beliefs were outside his understanding to be destroyed.

So what do we believe, anyway? Usually when we are asked what we believe, we try to think of some polished belief statements somebody taught us, because they sound more impressive than something we could just make up. If we just make up our own words for what we believe, it seldom sounds very dramatic.

When conservatives do it, we liberals often love to pick them apart. It’s one of our favorite sports.

Someone says, “I believe in this God who created the whole universe and who loves little old me!” That’s dramatic, but pretty easy to pick apart. We can’t even imagine how vast the universe is. Billions of galaxies. We probably can’t even imagine what a billion would look like. And three thousand years ago, when the god of the Bible was first exalted by a small tribe of Hebrew people in the Middle East, they thought the whole universe was smaller than the state of Texas. I think some Texans still do.

So it’s easy fun, showing that the most dramatic conservative beliefs fall apart at second glance. On the other hand, if we try to use our own words, or slogans we hear in our highly evolved liberal groups to define ourselves by beliefs, it can get just as arrogant, and may not be very truthful. If we say we believe in deeds not creeds – what deeds can we point to that we’ve actually done, that aren’t really kind of ho-hum in the grand scheme of things?

If we say we celebrate freedom of belief – and we love the sound of that one! – how many examples can we think of involving our children, family or partner choosing beliefs that contradict ours, and actually celebrating that rather than just tolerating it? If we say we believe in fighting for justice, what examples can we think of that we’ve done that don’t just sound trivial – and justice, not just the biases of generic social or political liberals?

The trouble with using polished and rehearsed little bromides is that they will usually sound more impressive than our lives look. And religion isn’t about putting on a pious front or trying to impress anyone with our purity and righteousness. That doesnt really fool anybody, and it has a bad aroma.

When I hold myself against the highest ideals, I have to admit that I don’t look very good. I’m not out there saving the world. I don’t give a lot of time or money to really noble causes, I haven’t risked my life like soldiers have, at least not since I was a soldier many years ago. I haven’t sold everything I own and given it to the poor as Jesus asked. I can resonate with platitudes like “As long as one person isn’t free, no one is free.” They feel stirring, but I can’t think of anything I’m really doing to walk that talk that costs me much – and when I actually think about it, I don’t even agree with the statement.

You can say things like “I believe in Reason, Science, Justice, Truth, Goodness, America, Mom and apple pie,” and that sounds pretty darned swell. But how much of this has been evident in the way you lived your life during the last couple weeks?

And it gets worse. When we do something really charitable, we usually want credit for it. So then were our motives altruistic, or mostly self-centered? Jesus said to give in secret, not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and we probably all admire that degree of humility, but we seldom have it. We hope somebody notices what we’ve done, and are not above finding some sneaky way to tell them. Now maybe I’m the only one here who’s like this, but I don’t think so.

I think there may be a lot of people here who feel that it’s about all you can do to do your work, try your best to raise your children well, and have more than a few minutes a day for quality time with your partner while keeping in touch with the people you love. You might like high-sounding rhetoric, like hearing good sermons that lift up really noble aspirations, and somewhere in both your head and heart you really mean all this as much as you know how to mean anything. But your life doesn’t look like the picture of the perfect life from a spiritual advertising brochure any more than the lives of religious conservatives do.

So maybe the question is, how do you express yourself in an authentic way?

One answer is to define ourselves not by beliefs but by behaviors, and to try and act like all the most decent people in the world were watching us.

There’s a big difference between identifying ourselves with beliefs and identifying ourselves by our behaviors. The history of religions has plenty of both, and almost all the really bad ones were those who exalted rigid beliefs above decent behavior toward those who didn’t share their beliefs, as Friar Bernard did at first.

I’ll just pick two famous examples from history, from two different religions. John Calvin was the 16th century theologian who preached the gospel of original sin and human depravity, and taught it to tens of millions of Christians who followed his Calvinist theology. It’s a horrid doctrine and terrible theology, but if anything, he was a living example of moral depravity in some of his behavior. When a brilliant and impertinent Spanish physician named Michael Servetus – this was the physician who first discovered the circulation of blood – wrote an essay on the errors of the Trinity, and sent a copy to Calvin, Calvin seethed. When Servetus then had the nerve – and bad judgment – to show up one Sunday in Calvin’s church in Geneva, Calvin had him arrested, and burned alive. Worse than that, Calvin instructed the executioners to tie Servetus in a chair, lower him into the flames, then raise him up, lower him again, so in all it took half an hour before Servetus died.

And the Ayatollah Khomeini, among other hateful acts, ordered the murder of the novelist Salman Rushdie because one of Rushdie’s novels made fun of a fundamentalist Islamic belief. These were both powerful and charismatic men, regarded by their followers as God’s agents – though not, I think, regarded so by any God worthy of the name. But their behavior put the lie to their professed beliefs, and left a terrible stench in the annals of history. There was nothing of God about either of them in these actions. Genuine gods don’t care whether people buy the stories of this or that church or charismatic preacher. They care whether you are coming more alive, finding the kind of truth that makes you more whole, how you treat others, whether you’re a blessing or a curse to the world.

The goal is authenticity, not orthodoxy. And orthodoxies often offer little more than an anesthetic for those who are afraid or unsure how to be authentic.

It’s worth believing not in slick-sounding creeds but in a sweet-smelling life. And the clues to this are all around us:

1. They’re in that Roman story. The priest defined himself by beliefs and we all knew he was too small. The Romans never even mentioned beliefs, and even in the story they smelled sweet.

2. A bigger clue, and better news, is the fact that we all knew that. We could all tell the difference between the feel and the smell of Friar Bernard’s smallness and the largesse of the Roman family as soon as we heard the story.

3. And the best news is that we act on it, and act on it naturally, easily, and often. We just ordained Jack Harris-Bonham here this morning. We didn’t do it because of his beliefs. I’m not sure what they all are, and I don’t much care. We did it because he was here for two years, as an intern then as the contract minister during my sabbatical, and we came to know his heart and mind through his actions toward others. And like the Roman family, we knew this was a decent person and a blessing to the world, whatever beliefs get him there.

So what can we say about honest religion that might be useful? One thing is that there is no secret knowledge: nothing that is necessary to us is really hidden. We can hear stories like the reading by Emerson, awful stories of arrogant men like John Calvin and the Ayatollah Khomeini, we can delight in recognizing the promise of someone like Jack Harris-Bonham and ordain him to whatever kinds of ministry his heart and the whims of the world may lead him to, and we have already shown that we have almost all the spiritual knowledge we need to be saved, and to help heal the world around us. We know the difference between the stench of bad faith inflicted on ourselves and others, and the sweet smell of a life lived pretty fully and well here and now, among one another.

Religious instruction is important, to help train the moral sense that is already a part of us. But by the time we’re in our teens or earlier, the question of what’s really worth believing and how we should behave toward one another can be distilled into one very simple piece of advice: just follow your nose.

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Davidson Loehr

21 September 2008

PRAYER:

When people or experiences become doorways or windows, let us learn to look through them.

When someone or something in life opens us to the possibility of a life with more understanding, compassion or wholeness, let us gather our courage and step through that opening, from a world of the habitual into a world of the possible.

When we feel the pull of authenticity, let us bend toward it, that it may draw us into lives of greater integrity, love and joy.

Life is a series of pushes and pulls, too many trying to push us toward selling out, settling for too little from ourselves, pushing us toward the dissipation of our spirits.

But not all of life is against us. If we live among angels and demons, and have been frightened by the demons, let us remember there are angels as well: messengers from Life, from places of trust and empowerment, from a healing kind of truth and hope.

Those angels. Let us walk with those angels, in whatever guise they appear. Sometimes they even appear among those who love us. We hunger for messages of wholeness and hope. Let us listen for them, answer them, and be prepared to be transformed.

Amen.

SERMON: Unitarian Christianity

I want to spend some time this fall making us more aware of the rich history of honest religion. By “honest religion” I mean a religion that is open to all critical questions and doubts, and whose truths must be grounded in life itself, not merely the dogmas and ideologies of this or that church or cult. Last month, I talked about that spirit in the story of Gilgamesh, which is the world’s oldest story, going back 4700 years. Today I want to jump 4500 years and talk about Rev. William Ellery Channing. Most of you may never have heard of him, but he was the man most responsible for making Unitarianism into a separate American faith, nearly two hundred years ago. He did it through a very influential sermon delivered in 1819 called “Unitarian Christianity.” It’s ironic that the seeds he planted were neither Unitarian nor Christian, and would eat away at the foundation of theism and Biblical religions.

It’s a little tricky when we look back to an outstanding person who happens to have some connection with a label we also claim. Is it just mindless hero-worship? Worse, is it a kind of slobbering narcissism? “Well, they were spectacular and Unitarian. And I’m a Unitarian, so I must also be spectacular!”? That’s kind of like wearing a Longhorns t-shirt and thinking we must therefore be a nationally-ranked athlete. I have a Longhorns t-shirt that I wear to the gym, but I’m a rank athlete, not a ranked one. It’s a big difference.

Another approach to history’s gifted thinkers is to say, “Here was someone faced with the same kinds of life questions that face me, who found a way to look beyond the habits of their time, and respond to them by tapping into something timeless and life-giving. I want that too; maybe I can learn something here!” That’s what I want to do this morning.

So I want to start by backing off and describing what the spirit of honest religion is about, so we can see this William Ellery Channing fellow in the right context, so we can see how any of this might be useful in our own search for honest religion. Some historians have said it’s too bad that American Unitarianism was ever called Unitarian because it’s the wrong name – and I agree with them. “Unitarian” was the insult name assigned it by those who hated it two hundred years ago. But it was never about how many gods we should count. It was about a style of seeking honest religion, and it was the same style that has been there in all times and places, whenever the spirit of honest religion appears.

There are many ways to put this primal spirit of honest religion. One is that it is about coming alive, seeking the truth and healing our world. Another is summed up in ten magnificent words from the Christian scriptures: “Examine everything carefully, hold fast to that which is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21, NASB). Those ten words are also a pretty good summary of the scientific method, and of how we all try to make sense of things in our lives. We all try to examine everything carefully, holding fast only to what looks good, don’t we? We could say it’s just about waking up, as the Buddhists do: that we are mostly trapped within illusions we create through our odd ways of putting things, and there is a freedom in facing ourselves and our world as we really are, and finding the kind of real-world happiness that is there only for those awake enough to see it.

In every flowering of the spirit of honest religion, there is a kind of trinity that underlies their faith. And that trinity is there in the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing as well, which is another reason it’s too bad what he was doing was called Unitarian. This trinity isn’t about gods, and it can’t be fit inside of Christianity or any other religion. It’s much bigger. It’s the enduring method of doing honest religion, a kind of three-legged stool on which the business of trying to take ourselves and life seriously always stands.

1. The first leg is grounded in our experience here and now. Religion has to relate to you and your actual life, or it can’t be your religion. And we’re seldom served very well by living someone else’s religion. Religion isn’t top-down. We don’t learn the truths we need from someone with a loud voice and a lot of arrogance. We learn it from the inside out. Our inside out.

2. The second part of honest religion’s trinity is that our reason and intuition are to be trusted, and no religious teaching should ever be accepted if it doesn’t make sense to us. There is a kind of mysticism about this, because we believe that the reality inside our hearts and minds can be trusted to have something to do with the reality outside of us. When you think about it, if that weren’t true, all our knowledge would be useless in the real world.

3. The third leg of this method is the belief that we need to find a center, a focus, that we believe can guide us toward living more wisely and well, because this is about the quality of our life. We want a way to live that will let us look in the mirror in five or fifty years and be able at least to say, “You know, if I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the way I did.” If you can say that, you have won. It can take many forms, this center. It can be gods and saviors, rituals and civic duties, relationships, the psychological experience of conversion, or just waking up, as the Buddhists say. But we will worship something, and we will tend to take the shape of what we worship, so what we put at the center of our lives is most important.

The timeless quality of this spirit of honest religion is what’s behind the experience of so many visitors to churches like this. People will come for the first time and say, “My God, I’m home! This is what I was before I knew it existed. It’s what I’ve been looking for all my life. I didn’t know churches like this existed! My head and heart are at home here.” That powerful thing you’re relating to is not Unitarian Universalism, which was only turned into a religion during the 1980s – and what a sad mistake that was! It is also not Unitarianism (which is less than 200 years old in the U.S., and less than 500 years old in any form). It is not Christianity or even theism, but something far deeper and older: something primal. It’s that primal power, that primal and honest connection between ourselves and the world around us that life-giving religion is about.

Now I don’t want to get too spiritually precious about this, because you can find this spirit lots of places besides religion – there are plenty of people who’ll say you’re only likely to find it places other than religion. It comes from our yearnings, just as our gods and religions do.

I just finished reading a trilogy called His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, the British writer who wrote these teen fantasies for an audience of young people from maybe age 12-18 or so. When the first volume, “The Golden Compass,” was made into a high-budget movie last year, I read about some evangelical groups protesting because he was an atheist. At the time, I thought, “Oh, evangelical groups are always saying things like that!” But after reading the books, I think they grossly understated the power of his assault on religion. It is subtle, brilliant, deep and complete. I think the books can plant seeds of healthy skepticism about religion in many of the young people who read them – in older people, too. It’s an attack on authoritarian religion in the name of our deep human need to seek the kind of truth that makes us come more alive and become more whole.

Now this garden of the spirit of life is the garden from which the spirit of William Ellery Channing grew. His vision was not as deep or broad or ambitious as that of Philip Pullman, who had the advantage of writing a century and a half later. And Channing was no revolutionary; he disliked controversy, though he was drawn into much of it through his writing and preaching. But Channing was brilliant. He graduated from Harvard at the top of his class at age 18, in 1798. In the early 1800s, he was regarded as the best preacher in America, and was one of the people interviewed by Alexis de Tocqueville for his classic work on Democracy in America.

Channing was not a pioneer. He followed several generations of American Congregationalist preachers who taught that Jesus was just a human, that we all had a “likeness to God,” and that the creeds and rigid beliefs of the churches distracted us from the deeper message that was concerned with changing our lives here and now.

And Channing, no less than the Christians, had a trinity. But his trinity was that trinity of honest religion in all times and places:

1. He had faith in our dignity rather than our damnation. That faith in our inherent goodness rather than a crippling sinfulness is at the heart of the impulse toward honest religion in all times and places.

2. He trusted Reason, and exalted it above scriptures and religious teachings. He said if we couldn’t trust reason, then we also couldn’t trust the reason of those who try to teach us what is true.

You can shatter the creeds and orthodoxies of every religion in the world just through these first two methods.

Here are some of his words on this, so you can get a feel for his style:

“It is always best to think first for ourselves on any subject, and then [to look] to others for the correction or improvement of our own sentiments. . . . The quantity of knowledge thus gained may be less, but the quality will be superior. Truth received on authority, or acquired without labor, makes but a feeble impression.”

“Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.”

“And we therefore distrust every interpretation, which, after deliberate attention, seems repugnant to any established truth.”

He objected to the Christian trinity both because it was irrational and because it never appeared in the Bible. Like Jesus, he said, he worshiped only God.

He also found irrational and insulting the idea that Jesus came to save us from God’s wrath, or that his death would somehow change God’s mind. No, he said, Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind – think what a juvenile concept of God that involves – Jesus came to change our minds.

He granted that reason can be used badly in religion as in all other areas, but asked people to look back through history and decide whether more harm has been done by trusting reason, or by forbidding it. The historical record is dramatic and clear on this point.

3. The third part of his trinity was God, but even here he meant something very different from orthodox Christians. Here are some of his words. You can hear that spirit of honest and timeless religious inquiry coming through, and that he’s talking about something much more primal than any god:

“We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.”

“By these remarks, we do not mean to deny the importance of God’s aid or Spirit; but by his Spirit, we mean a moral, illuminating, and persuasive influence, not physical, not compulsory?.”

Can you hear that these words take him completely beyond the God of the Bible? He’s talking about high ideals and noble moral qualities, and his ideal version of them is called, by habit and convention, “God.” That’s fundamentally different from “believing in God,” as you can feel.

He spoke of a “zeal for truth,” but didn’t think it showed up often enough in religion, and wrote that “On no subject have people injected so many strange conceits, wild theories, and fictions of fancy, as on religion.” The kind of truth he sought was what he called “purifying truth” that could make us more godlike.

He also said, “In my view, religion is another name for happiness, and I am most cheerful when I am most religious.” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 [Wesminister John Knox Press, 2001], p. 15) He is not speaking as a Unitarian or a liberal Christian here. He is speaking from a far deeper and more primal place, as you can feel.

Was Channing a Unitarian? That’s hard to answer. He called his sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” though what he really brought to his liberal Christians on that 5th of May in 1819 was a kind of Trojan Horse: a gift containing forces that would eventually destroy the foundations of Christianity, theism, and Biblical religion for many. His sermon contained ideas whose logical implications would lead beyond Unitarian Christianity, the Bible and theism. That’s the sermon that all students for the UU ministry are required to read. And he later wrote other pieces defending his Unitarian Christianity against the orthodox versions, saying it was more honest, and helped form better people. But what he meant was the method of honoring reason and experience, examing everything carefully, discarding what doesn’t hold up, and holding fast only to what is good. And then, when the American Unitarian Association first began in 1825, he would not join it, and never supported it. He thought people should seek to develop themselves within local churches, but that an organization like the Unitarian Association would probably just be an agent of unneeded mischief. He said there is “no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd, even towards the best objects.”

(http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/williamellerychanning.html) “An established church,” he said, “is the grave of intellect.” (Dorrien, p. 17)

When he used the word “God”, it meant excellence that made rational and moral sense – anyone must believe in that! To put it in his language, he believed we were created in the image of God, that God gave us reason and expected us to use it, and that any faith that denied this, or that could not stand up to the critiques of informed reason, was unworthy of us, and of God. In the language of our time, he was very close to what we would call religious humanism, as all varieties of liberal religion through the ages have been.

I’ve always identified with a lot about Channing, including his deep distrust and rejection of any national organization that was bound to become a kind of club, offering a kind of second-hand religion, as our modern UUA does. But I like him mostly because he was one of the people whose vision transcended the beliefs of his time and place, of the vast majority of his colleagues and parishioners, and caught a glimpse of the kind of honest religion that really does seem to be timeless.

The insights of honest religion transcend all the gods and religions. Not because we’re bigger than the gods, but because Life is, and it is Life’s longing for itself that comes alive in us and drives us to examine everything carefully and hold fast only to that which is good.

If you’ve never heard of this preacher from the early 19th century and wonder if you should be writing his name down in case there’s a test, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to care about William Ellery Channing. And while we’re at it, you don’t have to care about Jesus or the Buddha, either. Don’t let mean and arrogant preachers scare you: religion isn’t about the gods, the teachers or the preachers. The best of them are all windows opening us to visions of life so honest and big that they might beckon to us, might lure us into following them down a richer path. To use one metaphor, they are like rainbows, suggesting that if we could only follow them, there could be a pot of gold at their end. Or in another metaphor, they’re like recipes, saying if we can add our ingredients, figure out the missing instructions and imagine how to cook them up about right, they could help us make a better life. It shouldn’t be so hard. There are just the three known ingredients, at least they don’t change much. First, we must bring our life and our experiences, the happy ones, the proud ones, the raw ones, and those times we went off the road. All of them. They’re the stuff we need to wrap into our life. Then we need to trust our reason and intuition, how it sounds and feels, whether it feels like there’s a harmony of thought and action. And then the Center. What do we tune to? What will we serve? Where’s the focus around which we want to be in a kind of orbit; the kind of center that gives us a calling and an integrity that keep life from just becom-ing one damned thing after another?

We’re going to end here before it’s cooked, because finishing the recipe is our job in our own lives. And so we leave here, as we often do, half-baked. We leave carrying some of our parts in bags or buckets, still unassembled. But we kind of know how they should go, how they need to be put together to make a whole being, our whole being.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be that? A whole being? The essential parts put together with integrity and feeling, serving a Center of Life that gives us life, learning how to walk, to dance, maybe to sing?

That wild, enticing, nearly impossible-feeling task is what we’ve always been about in honest religion. There are no secrets, we have good materials to work with in ourselves, and it can be done, step by step by step. But it can’t be done in just one week. That’s why we meet like this, every Sunday.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 7 September 2008

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

We give thanks for life and truth, and are grateful when they find us. The kind of light that can heal comes in so many forms, from so many directions. It may be that the best way to live is with the kind of openness and trust that seems so much easier for children than for adults.

When the man Jesus pointed to small children and said we must be like them if we are to enter the kingdom of God, it was a deep truth that transcended even him, and was rooted in the deepest nature of life itself.

Let us not think that religion is about swooning to the sound of heavenly words or music. It’s about coming alive in a deep and fulfilling way. Living well is more than “the best revenge” – it’s also the best religion. And it’s what generates the heavenly music, not the other way around.

Let us give thanks when we are found by the kind of truth that can set us free and make us feel more whole.

And let us try to be vehicles of that kind of truth and healing for the parts of our world that touch our heads and hearts. Those in our larger world need us, just as we need them, for we really are all in this together. And for that too we give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: Covenants

“Covenant” is a weird word. In 22 years, I’ve never preached on it, seldom used it, and get suspicious of people who throw it around like it’s something of which all really cool people should have one.

So after deciding to bring it to you as a Sunday theme, I had to try and understand it well enough to know why I think it’s worth your time to hear about it in a sermon. For me, that meant trying to learn a wide variety of covenants, both from religion and from real life, because I think the more ways we can say something, the better the chances are that we actually know what we’re talking about.

So let me start with you the way I started with myself – by talking about a lot of different kinds of covenants, so the pattern and feel of what this weird word means might come alive from several different directions. It’s actually about something pretty important, and not at all confined to religion.

One of the classic statements is from the Bible, from the book of Joshua, where the writer says that you can serve any god you choose, then ends with the famous line, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15)

Another is the famous statement of Martin Luther’s, when he decided he had to serve a different definition and style of God than the Roman Catholic Church had served for almost 1500 years, when he said, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” As I said last week, this wasn’t long before he had to hide out for a year and a half because the Church wanted to kill him. But he was sustained in his hiding out by the new faith to which he had given himself heart, mind and soul.

Probably the most detailed and demanding example is in the religion of Islam. We are in their most sacred month, the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are expected to fast during the day for a whole month, as an exercise in spiritual purification. But in addition, there are four other Pillars of Islam, expected of all. They are required to profess their faith, do the ritual prayers that occur five times a day, pay a percentage of their income each year to benefit the poor – the poor can demand this! – and at some time in their life, make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Those are all pretty dramatic. But the idea of being possessed by an idea or a cause that gives you life is not just something that happens in organized religions.

I’m a member of a local group of former military officers. It was started by a retired Air Force general I know, and most of the officers were Colonels or generals. I’m the token former Lieutenant, and the token minister. What I like most about it is the deep and powerful covenant these men made with the oath they took as officers, and how much that oath still empowers them. For the past few years, they have been mailing letters to the very highest level military commanders, some of whom they know personally, reminding them that this oath was to uphold the Constitution, not support a President who has violated his office by launching an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and systematically destroying the freedoms and civil liberties at home that these soldiers had once believed they were fighting to protect. “We have a sacred duty to uphold the Constitution,” they will say, “and we have all devoted our lives to that duty.” That’s a covenant, a very powerful one. At one time or other, most of these men have risked their lives on behalf of that covenant.

It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. The three banners we have hanging up on the front wall are inviting a kind of covenant (TO COME ALIVE, TO SEEK TRUTH, TO HEAL OUR WORLD). It is the covenant of people in almost every religion I know of, anywhere on earth. Is there a religion anywhere whose people don’t believe they are there to seek the kind of truth that can set them free, help them come move alive, and help heal themselves, their relationships with others, and whatever parts of their world they can touch? It’s very close to the definition of what it means to be religious, or just to be serious about life. And taking it seriously, giving ourselves to it, is a covenant that can be as binding as a General’s oath to uphold the Constitution, or Martin Luther’s saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

The banners and liturgical candles beneath them are reminders. Banners point to the lights because those ideals can each open us to kinds of light we need. The lights point to the banners, because we need to be lit up by plugging into only the highest ideals, and letting them take possession of us like the angels of our better nature.

The story of Androcles and the Lion also shows a kind of covenant. (I told this as the children’s Storytime at the beginning of this service.) It’s a very old story. Ancient sources insist that it is a true story, told by someone who witnessed the scene in the arena. It comes from Aesop’s Fables, and Aesop lived 2500 years ago, about the same time the Buddha lived. Androcles’ covenant was with Life. The lion was just the form of life that needed his help. It could have been a dog, a cat or a child, it happened to be a lion. The lion’s covenant was simpler. It was just with Androcles, who had probably saved his life.

And that wonderful ten-word statement of the spirit of liberal religion in the Bible that I read you last week is also inviting you into a covenant: “Examine everything carefully. Hold fast to what is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21).

I don’t want to push the examples and metaphors for this too far, but I’ll try another. If life were an automobile, the covenant would be the transmission. It is how we get the power transferred to us, how we assimilate, incarnate, the promised power of religion. Every commitment with consequences comes from a covenant.

Now not all covenants are good. Not all gods are good, and not all gods give life to us. Some drain it from us in the name of lower and more selfish aims. After all, Mafia members also have a covenant. So do those conspiring to commit a crime. Corporations that punish whistle-blowers are saying that the whistle-blowers violated an implied covenant to put the corporation above all other considerations, including truth, justice and safety. But one of the most hopeful facts of life is that most of us can tell the difference between coming alive and selling out, and we know it very early in life.

I’ve been reading some fantasy series written for young people this summer, and It’s interesting how often this idea of serving high ideals with your life comes up, and kids understand it almost intuitively, I think. One series of books was by Rick Riordan (Ryer-den, rhymes with “fire”), four volumes on Percy Jackson and the Olympians, all based in the ancient Greek myths, and a wonderful retelling of them. The children are called half-bloods, meaning half human, but also the sons and daughters of the Greek gods, and so they have the nature of their divine parents, and you can predict how they’ll act and what they’ll be passionate about.

I know you’re getting what this is about. It is really about a fundamental concept in religion and life: the question of what are we serving, and whether it gives us life, whether it and we are a blessing to ourselves and others.

Here’s another example that may not sound at all like a covenant. My undergraduate degree was in music theory from the University of Michigan, and I still remember a remark from a lecture in composition, about the French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote “Bolero” but also a lot of more complex stuff, and was regarded as perhaps the greatest orchestrator of the 20th Century. The line that stayed with me came when the professor said the most remarkable thing about Ravel was that he never published a bad piece of music. He wrote some, of course – even the best composers write some bad music. But he destroyed it before he died. He never published a bad piece of music because the idea of it violated something that seemed sacred to Ravel: only to serve the muses at the highest level possible to him, nothing less.

As I’ve reflected on it over the years, I’ve thought this really makes Ravel a lot like a saint, one of those people way more perfect than we’d ever aspire to be. We don’t hear stories of saints being really nasty, rude, cruel, or selling out to a lobbyist. I don’t know how they were in real life, but the image created of them by those who told and edited their stories was an image of someone living a nearly perfect life. That’s how Ravel was like a saint. Living the live of a perfect composer who never published a bad piece of music, no matter what the market demanded of him – and you know the market clamored for more pieces like “Bolero” (which Ravel once described as eight minutes of orchestration without music).

When you come here on Sunday, you know that I, Brian Ferguson our ministerial intern, all of our paid and unpaid musicians, our lay leaders, greeters and ushers will always be trying to serve the highest ideals we can. If you’ve been coming here for awhile, you know this, but It’s worth saying out loud from time to time. we’re serious about the time we all spend together here, because we have made a covenant with high religious ideals, high musical ideals, a covenant to serve the truths that can make us more whole, help us come more alive, help us heal ourselves and those others in our world whose lives we touch. That is as sacred as it gets, and that’s what we’re here to serve, every week.

Every week, you know this is a room where you can come to hear inspiring and challenging words. If theyre more challenging than inspiring, they may not always be comfortable. But if we’re doing our job, they will always be about coming alive, seeking truth and healing our world rather than hearing about outsourcing, downsizing, maximizing profit for stockholders, winning through intimidation or learning how to swim with the sharks, as though that wouldn’t just turn us into sharks, while outsourcing our souls.

This church, like all sanctuaries, is committed to being a nourishing place to dream of making better music with our lives, and protecting the dreamers. It is a place, and these worship services are homes, where we can dream in peace together – dreams of finding and being converted by the kinds of truths that can help us become more free and whole, filled to overflowing with life, so the world around us might be nourished by the overflow.

The goal of all this seems to be to live as Ravel did his music, only publishing the best. To the extent that we can pull it off, It’s pretty admirable.

What if the children’s author Rick Riordan and the composer Ravel are right? What if we are all half-divine, called to find that higher voice, those angels of our better nature, the healing kind of harmony, let it get inside our souls and shape us in its image? What if all the works we published in our lives had the mark of that kind of excellent spirit? We’d be eligible for sainthood, for one thing.

Here’s another way of putting this. you’re going through your life, wandering around a bit. You see this church, but you think, “Oh, that’s religion, and I don’t trust it. It isn’t honest. I know religion, and it isn’t honest.” Then you come in, hang around and listen for a bit, and you think, Oh well, I get this. It’s just ideas, abstract ideals and values, like reading philosophy books. I get it. Well, that was interesting. Ho hum.” Then one day – it can happen at any time – you become aware of a large sort of animal near you who is suffering. It’s a thorn of some kind stuck into it, a big painful thing. The animal needs your help. You’ve learned about suffering, and truth, and life, and know that even you can help alleviate suffering. It’s a little scary, but you find some courage – maybe it comes from realizing that after all you are half divine, and you call on the power and courage of that god or goddess who’s always been with you as part of your soul. So you do it. In spite of some fear, you pull out the thorn in this animal’s foot. You do it perhaps not because you cared so much for this one suffering animal, but you have learned to care for life, and this potentially powerful creature is very much alive. You heal it. It is only afterwards, when you begin to notice how much more easily and lightly you are walking, that you realize the animal, all along, was really you.

And this life-changing little drama has a sound track. It’s accompanied by a choir of the better angels of our nature, singing some of the most beautiful music ever published.