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© Davidson Loehr 2005
6 February 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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Prayer
Let us gather up our souls.
1. From personal interactions, let us gather up our souls:
— from relationships where we have accepted duplicity rather than integrity, let us gather them.
— from those places where we have promised to be true, but have not delivered on our promise, let us reclaim our integrity.
2. From our roles at work and in business dealing, let us gather up our souls:
— from those days when we return home grateful that we can have higher standards in our personal lives than we do at work, let us reclaim what must be ours.
— rather than playing mute and compliant roles in businesses we know to be cutting ethical corners, let us speak up, however we can, to wonder whether we can’t all do our work with more integrity, so we don’t all have to check our souls at the door.
3. And from our nation’s actions at home and abroad, let us gather up our souls, rendering to Caesar only what is Caesar’s, and keeping for our own souls what is most holy and inviolate.
— When we find high words being used to achieve low ends, let us look into our hearts and find a way to speak out.
In all that we are and do, we need to come from a place of integrity and authenticity that is only available to people who have taken care to own their own souls. It is that center from which we need to live, and which we seek.
So let us gather up our souls from all the places where they have become misplaced or dissipated, like strangers to us. Let us gather up our souls.
Amen.
SERMON: God
Let’s start simplistically, almost at cartoon level: The body politic doesn’t have elbows or kneecaps. And Lady Justice doesn’t have breasts, even though our former U.S. Attorney General spent several thousand dollars to cover them. Cupid is a myth, too. There isn’t any little baby flying around shooting people with arrows making them fall in love, even though falling in love sometimes feels almost that capricious.
You can learn a lot about the kind of creatures we are by the way we put together our myths and stories. We make everything seem human, even when it isn’t. We do it because we relate to it better if we think of it as human-like.
Look at our cartoons. We have all these cartoons with mice, cats, dogs, and an occasional goblin, and they all seem to think and talk just like we do. So they aren’t mice, cats, dogs or goblins at all.
They are projections of parts of ourselves, playing out plots familiar to us. We project those life situations out like movie projectors project images on screens in front of us. Then we study them as though they came from somewhere other than us, and we can be caught sending e-mails to people quoting a line from a cartoon character that seemed really wise. Isn’t this funny?
It’s not that we think all cartoons are wise. Most are just funny or goofy. Only a few seem wise, and we know the difference. When we cut out a cartoon and put it on our wall or refrigerator, most people can figure out why we would put it up. They see what it’s about. We are the ones who judge whether it’s useful or not. Cartoons that aren’t useful we finally just stop reading.
But most of our projections are useful. They let us back off to get a better perspective on ourselves. We do it in movies, too. And music. If you want to hear what’s on the minds of people between about 15 and 40, listen to the lyrics of popular music.
I don’t know why we do it this way. I’m reminded of a famous definition of religion by a sociologist of religion about thirty years ago, when he said religion is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant.” (Peter Berger) It’s audacious, but it’s just what we do in our religions, isn’t it? No matter how they do it, all our religions manage to propose some scheme for reality, and find us a special place in it.
Hindus say we are parts of the infinite and eternal powers of creation, maintenance and destruction. They made that up, but it’s a good story.
Buddhists say no, we’re not, but we can rise above the whole indifferent mess of the world and find a perspective that transcends even the gods. Taoism has its story about the coming and going of everything, the eternal flux where everything is either coming to be or passing away, and they say we can find a kind of comfort in imagining ourselves as parts of that story.
When we make stories for fun, we might call them cartoons and expect people to laugh. But when we’re really serious, when we think the stories we have made are really about the way things are, then we don’t create cartoon characters. We create gods. Those are our most serious stories, the trump suit of stories. That’s where we project our grandest ideas. Sometimes, our worst sides get projected onto our gods as well – like the times we have our gods sanction smallness, violence or hatred.
We seem to be walking projectors, casting on the wall both our insights and our shadows.
Plato once said life for most of us is like people sitting in a cave watching the shadows cast on the wall ahead of them by people and animals walking by outside. Something about that seems right, doesn’t it?
Still, we confuse ourselves with all these projections, because we can’t seem to remember that all our stories, all our religions, all our gods, came from the imaginations of some of our ancestors. Then the gods get passed down to us without that story about how they really began.
But think of Lady Justice. Well, no; let’s take a closer example. Think of Lady Liberty. You can see her standing on top of the capital building in downtown Austin. And she looks like a large woman. But we know we couldn’t take Lady Liberty out for some coffee – free-trade coffee, of course – and ask her what this “liberty” business is about. She doesn’t exist except as a projection and personification of our own dreams of justice, and our certainty that justice, at its best, is one of the ideals that all decent people must try to serve. Sometimes we need to gain independence from our projections, to gather up the ideas and ideals they are supposed to serve, and reclaim them.
I was rereading Karen Armstrong’s classic book called A History of God this week, and had forgotten how candid she is in talking about this. For those of you who don’t know who Karen Armstrong is, she is an English woman who used to be a nun, then left the order and became a religion scholar. She has said that she still lives within the discipline, but now her discipline is spending eight to twelve hours a day in London’s libraries, doing her research. She has written books on God, the Buddha, and Mohammad, among others I want to read you a few paragraphs from this book she wrote in 1993 which has become a kind of classic in religious studies. She begins by talking about growing away from the Church:
“Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so…. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown. (xviii-xix)
“Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines…. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years. (xix)
It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality “out there”…. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world. (xx)
Karen is really telling the whole story here, but it sounds like I’m revealing secrets, telling you that the best religion scholars are quite candid about saying that of course God doesn’t exist, or course it’s a projection the way we project other stories. But they also want to say that “he” is the most important thing in our world.
The reason that “he” is in quotation marks is because what is so important isn’t God, but the high ideals we have projected onto him for safekeeping.
And what it means when someone like a Karen Armstrong grows away from God as one of the “childish things” she has put away, is that she doesn’t think the symbol God or the stories our ancestors created about him do justice to our high ideals, and she can honor them better without the projected pictures and stories of God flickering on the screen.
I want to talk with you about God, but the two most important things you need to know about God, about all the gods, are that, first, they were invented many centuries ago as vehicles to carry and guard our highest ideals. That’s why scholars say it’s the most important reality in the world. But the second thing you need to know is that the reality is not God, not any of the gods; the reality is the importance of our highest ideals.
And they don’t have to have the symbol of gods to carry them, as Karen Armstrong found, and as I suspect many of you have also found.
In the Golden Age of Greece – those centuries that produced their great playwrights, that produced poets and philosophers like Pindar, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – they did what Karen Armstrong has done. They reclaimed their highest ideals from the myths of the Olympian gods. Neither Socrates, Plato nor Aristotle cared much about the gods, and Plato tried to write myths that would replace the Homeric myths of Zeus, Apollo and the rest of them. Plato and others believed the stories about the gods had become like cartoons. People weren’t served by worshiping them any more, and needed to reclaim the treasures the gods had been created to guard. The priests controlled the stories about the gods, and used those stories to empower themselves more than the people.
But they were not about to give up their highest ideals. Instead, they rescued them from the gods, and made them the sacred center of society during Greece’s golden age. They called them the paideia – the word just means the highest ideals of the culture. They said they were the most sacred property of their society, and that all people had a sacred duty to live, teach, and honor these high ideals, just as former ages had honored them indirectly in the form of the gods the more ancient Greeks had imagined and projected.
And the biblical prophets made the same kind of move that the Greeks were making about the same time. They began attacking the low meanings the priests were loading onto this concept of God. They rejected the distant God who demanded only sacrifice and obedience, and insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. (Armstrong, p. 44) They were gathering up their souls.
The prophet Amos said that the people had misunderstood the nature of their covenant with this God. The priests were saying it made them the special people, the chosen people. Amos said No, being associated with this God meant responsibility, not privilege. (Armstrong, p. 46)
What Amos was doing was what all the prophets were doing, including Jesus. They were reclaiming the high ideals as things which must be written in our hearts and lived out in our lives, not hidden in a temple to be bowed down to as we listened to bad priests misrepresenting them.
I want you to understand what this means. It means that they all saw – even if they didn’t put it this way – that God is a part of us. God is the vehicle our ancestors imagined, on which they projected our highest ideals. And the gods are only useful as long as the represent the highest ideals. When they are kidnapped for low and mean purposes, we need to reclaim our ideals from them.
Still, there’s something audacious about thinking we have the right or the authority to reclaim our highest ideals. We project them out onto Lady Justice or Lady Liberty, onto idealistic visions of America, onto God, and then it feels that they are out of our hands, entirely above us, things we could never aspire to reclaim.
Yesterday I read a story of just this sort of thing happening that is worth sharing with you. Last night in California there was a special ceremony with a lot of very old Japanese Americans, to pay tribute to some even older white Americans. The story goes back sixty years, and most Americans don’t know about it.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, a kind of racist frenzy seemed to spread through our country, and over 110,000 American citizens with Japanese ancestry were arrested and imprisoned in detainment camps until the war ended in 1945. The part few know is that several hundred white American teachers volunteered to follow them to the camps, to continue teaching their children.
Their little-known stories took center stage last night when the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo honored more than 200 of the camp educators. Among them, museum staff tracked down 53; more than half were expected to attend the dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
Glenn Kumekawa, a retired professor who was sent to a detainment camp in Utah at the age of 14 was one of them. Speaking of the teachers, he said, “They gave to us the link to the America we knew: the sense that not all Americans were racist, not all of them saw us as a threat but saw the potential we had as individuals.”
“Inside the camp, when every public indication was that we had no future, you had these teachers saying, ‘Yes, you do matter. They were the best of America,” Professor Kumekawa said. “They gave us assurance and hope by believing in us.”
When it came time to teach about U.S. democracy, teachers like Margaret Crosby Gunderson told her students at the Tule Lake camp not to give up on the Constitution; that the nation’s flawed political leadership was to blame for their unjust internment, [but that most Americans still honored the high ideals their leaders were betraying].
Another former teacher being honored was Mary Smelzer, who is now 89 years old. She is short and round with a cap of silver hair framing her face, and her memory remains sharp. As a member of the anti-war Church of the Brethren, she and her now-deceased husband, Ralph, opposed the internment. She taught math at the camps, her husband taught science.
The couple’s real goal, however, was to help people leave the camps. After six months of teaching, they set up a hostel in Chicago and later in New York through their church networks. They figure they helped resettle 1,000 Japanese Americans inland, away from the West Coast military zones.
Later in life, Mary Smeltzer went on to distribute relief aid in Vienna, join the Peace Corps in Africa, run a friendship center in Hiroshima and broker race relations in Illinois. Today she does volunteer reading with juvenile delinquents. Asked why she reached out to the internees, she replied with a laugh: “It’s just part of me. It’s just part of being a Christian, being a peace person, part of doing what I think is right.” (By Teresa Watanabe, LA Times Staff Writer, 5 February 2005)
These teachers reclaimed the high ideals they had projected onto America when America no longer honored them. That’s what Plato did with the ideals formerly projected onto the Olympian deities. It’s also what the biblical prophets did when their own ideals were higher than those their priests were giving to God, and what Karen Armstrong did with God. They gathered up their souls and owned them in a way we can’t do without that courage.
You can’t tell the story of God without telling the story of us. For the truth is that in the beginning, we created our gods in our image, or at least in the image of our highest and most life-giving ideals, like the compassion those teachers showed in the Japanese detention camps sixty years ago. And unless we remember that our highest ideals are only on loan to God as long as those who speak most loudly for him continue to serve them – unless we remember that, then we will see God’s corpse turned into a hand puppet by our worst preachers and politicians: a hand puppet to serve their agenda at the expense of our souls, and the soul of America.
It’s easy to think of other examples where we reclaim and reframe our high ideals from institutions that can not be trusted to serve them. Lawyers challenge the idea of Justice in the practice of sending mostly poor people to death row – the poor who can’t afford clever lawyers like Ken Lay and other higher-level criminals. We challenge the idea of “God’s will” and “Love” when we set up shelters for battered women. Their battering husbands often come to the shelters, accompanied by their ministers, demanding that this beaten and bloody woman be returned to the man who “loves” them because it’s “God’s will.” We know better. And we reclaim the concepts of love, respect, responsibility, and justice when we convict a Catholic priest of child abuse that has been covered up by the Church – sometimes for decades.
The history of religion, like the history of politics, is punctuated by those times when people rescued their high ideals from religions, politicians and nations that were no longer interested in serving them. When we look back, it is those people whose courageous actions we admire – just as I suspect you did when you heard the story of those teachers in the internment camps.
The story of God, like the story of America or the story of Justice, Compassion, Love and the rest of our high ideals, is a story about us. It is about whether we recognize those times when the most precious treasures we have, our highest ideals, need to be rescued from those who are violating them, no matter what kind of costumes they wear or political and judicial offices they hold. We do this so we can gather up our souls and be more whole – as people, partners, parents and citizens.
I said these things to remind myself, and hoped you might like to listen in.
