Spirits – Holy and Otherwise – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

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September 30, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Come holy spirits.

Enter the hearts of those who believe that

Love is better than hate

Understanding is holier than bigotry

Peace is more blessed than war

Come, holy spirits,

enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.

Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.

We confess to too many smallnesses.

We confess that we are too often selfish,

serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.

We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.

And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.

And so come, holy spirits.

Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to high callings.

We will make ourselves ready.

Come holy spirits, come.

Amen.

SERMON: Spirits – Holy and Otherwise

For me, the subject of the Holy Spirit begins with a biographical story. When I was six, I hated the Holy Ghost.

I was in a Presbyterian Sunday School, which I loved because the teacher loved children and told us wonderful stories each week.

The cement-block walls were an awful chartreuse color, but there was a color poster of a blue-eyed, brown-haired Jesus surrounded by six-year-olds, so it was a friendly place to be.

Then one Sunday, with no explanation, the wonderful old Sunday School teacher was gone, and taking her place was this horrible woman who seemed to hate both stories and children. She tried to teach us theology, but we all heard it as another story – though not a very good one.

The title seemed to be “Trinadee,” and it started out OK.

First, there was this God up in the sky. Well, Superman and Captain Marvel were up there, so there had to be room for a God. That was fine.

Then this God had a son. But we had his photo on the wall and he liked kids, so that was ok too.

But then, there was – this ghost. The only mental picture I had was of Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and it was a ridiculous image to try and fit into that story. When she finished, she asked us if we understood. I didn’t even understand why she’d ask that about a story.

Trying to be nice, I said, “Well, it’s a pretty good story, but next time leave out the ghost.”

I didn’t yet know the word “apoplectic,” but that’s what she became. “It is not a story!” she screamed. Well, a six-year-old knows a story when he hears one, so I said, “Yes, it’s a story and it’s not a real bad one, but the ghost is dumb. Leave out the ghost.”

From there, things escalated. She told me that Jesus doesn’t like little boys who call this a story, and I said, “Well, then you can leave out Jesus, too.” So a couple things happened that day. First, my happy childhood Sunday School experience ended. And second, by virtue of wiping out two-thirds of the Trinity, I became a Unitarian.

Ironically, when I grew up and understood what the concept of the Holy Spirit was about, it became one of my favorite religious ideas. We are embodied spirits. I agree with the mystics on that: we aren’t primarily bodies; we’re primarily spirits, wearing bodies.

Honest religion, the theme of the sermons this fall, is a phrase with two words. Honesty is easy enough to do if You’re not afraid of crossing other people’s comfort zones or boundaries of orthodox thinking.

But also to be religious means we must be concerned about seeing and saying the highest ideals to which we can aspire. Not because God commands us to, but because those ideals help define the healthiest and most deeply fulfilling life and world.

And the highest of the spirits is, as nearly all religions have said, a spirit of compassion and love for others, that can over-ride smaller and more self-serving ambitions. The Catholic Church, and after them almost all of Christianity, calls it the Holy Spirit, and that seems the right name for it. St. Augustine write in the early 5th century that the great gift of the Holy Spirit was the gift enabling you to love others as yourself – and that if you didn’t get that gift, you didn’t get much.

Even though the idea of one single holy spirit vastly oversimplifies how complex we and our many spirits really are, it’s useful for speaking not about the spirit but about our own longing for the sense of peace that could come from stilling our quarrelling voices, of raising our own selfishnesses to the higher level of equal concern and compassion for others. You can find this yearning expressed simply and poignantly in some of the great religious poetry.

Here’s just one line from a famous Catholic prayer called “Come, Holy Spirit”. See if you can’t feel the yearning from which this prayer could come: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.”

Don’t you wish it were that easy! In real life, we usually have to tend to a variety of different spirits that drive us. But the larger hope or wish is that we could just be filled with an overriding spirit of compassion and love that could somehow automatically choreograph all our disparate voices. So some of the religious poetry can speak to this yearning of ours, whether we think in terms of gods or not.

Here’s part of another, a poem written by a woman named Edith Stein, who the Catholic Church made into St. Benedicta. She seems to have been one of those rare people who was filled, possessed, by this spirit of love. Just listen to these dozen or so lines from her poem and see if they don’t have an emotional, a spiritual, effect on you, as she stands in awe of this gift within her:

Novena Of The Holy Spirit

by St. Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me

And illumines the darkness of my heart?

You lead me like a mother’s hand,

And should you let go of me,

I would not know how to take another step.

You are the space

That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.

Away from you it sinks into the abyss

Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.

You, nearer to me than I to myself

And more interior than my most interior

And still impalpable and intangible

And beyond any name:

Holy Spirit eternal love!

One thing this spirit business is about that’s frustratingly right is that it seldom seems to be under our control. We can control our behaviors under most circumstances, but it’s much much harder to control what we wish we could do, how we feel, what we love or hate. Those things seem to be beyond our direct control. You can quit smoking or drinking, but not wanting a smoke or a drink as easily. We can be nice to someone we hate, but it’s a whole lot harder to want to be nice to them! The reason – and this is really what today’s sermon is about – is that this spirit business is not only much more complex than Western religion implies, but also very different. So I want to talk with you about spirits – holy and otherwise.

The word “spirit” is a rich, multi-layered word. If you look up synonyms, you find things like vital essence, presence, disposition, and my favorite, enthusiasm. The Greeks turned spirits into daimons and gods, for they saw people filled with these powerful dispositions, and saw the same dispositions appear in every generation, as eternal presences that outlived us.

That word “enthusiasm” still contains this ancient history. It comes from the Greek en-theos, which means “filled with a god.” And we are indeed filled with gods, filled with spirits that are the most significant thing about us.

Sometimes we call this character, which also comes from a Greek word meaning a deep kind of mark that identifies us, which is what our guiding spirits do. And we are still driven by spirits you can recognize in the Greek stories of gods and daimons. They are still with us, thirty or forty or more centuries after the Greeks first noticed them:

Harpies. You hear someone screaming “I’ll tear that creep’s arms off! I’ll rip out her hair, gough out his eyes! She’ll never escape my wrath, never! I’ll make him suffer forever!” (Add the wordless screaming “Harpie” sound) We’ve all heard this voice, maybe from our own mouths. It’s the spirit of unmitigated rage and vengeance. These are the voices the ancient Greeks called the Harpies: dangerous, vicious supernatural forces of rage and vengeance.

Or you hear somebody say that “Of course might makes right, and the fact that the US is the mightiest military power on earth gives us the right to invade and occupy Iraq, sell off its assets, take control of its oil, kill over 700,000 of its people, and if they don’t like it, let them try to stop us.” This is the voice of Ares, the Greek god of war.

Or someone does something absolutely destructive and dumb, and says they couldn’t help it because they were in love, and You’re hearing a modern incarnation of Aphrodite, the goddess the Romans called Venus.

You could go through the rest of the ancient Greek gods and daimons and recognize them from people in your own lives, maybe from your own life. The Greeks saw these spirits as so powerful and everpresent they sculpted statues of them, and built temples to them.

In some ways, one of the most interesting of the ancient Greek Olympic deities was the goddess Hestia: the only Greek deity not drawn or sculpted, though there were altars to her. Hestia makes it more clear that these spirits are invisible dynamics, not really supernatural male or female deities. And Hestia is invisible but terribly important. She was the goddess of the hearth, the home. She represents the feeling, the presence, that makes a house feel like a home, or a church service feel like a worship service. It may be invisible, but everyone knows whether it’s present or not, and its presence makes all the difference. We are embodied spirits. When you meet someone you knew in childhood but haven’t seen for many years, what you really recognize as you talk with them is that spirit or character that was distinctive about them. “

“Character” is a word that meant a very deep identifying mark, and a famous Greek saying was that your character is your fate: its style will determine who and what you will be, and how people will remember you.

So the spirit that You’re expressing at the moment gives you your character at the moment. And the spirit that comes to define your life defines your character and your fate. You can probably think of people in your own lives who come to mind, people you can and do sum up very simply: she’s so selfish, He’s so vain, she’s so very caring, He’s such a trustworthy friend.

And while we’re on words, there’s the great German word “Zeitgeist,” which means the ‘spirit of the times.” Whole eras can be defined by spirits. Classical music was defined, as many music historians have said, by the spirit of Apollo, as Romantic music was defined more by the spirit of Dionysus. The Hippie movement of 35 years ago was defined by the spirits of peace, sexual liberation and individual freedom, and those spirits – I think they were mostly the four goddesses Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, and the wildcard god Dionysus – choreographed much of that generation, as some here can remember.

It choreographs, defines, drives, is the god that rules for better or worse. This is where the Greeks had a more honest and accurate picture of human nature than our Western religions have.

Our Western religions want to talk just about the Holy Spirit, as they want to talk about just one god, as though there could ever really be just one dynamic in charge. The Greeks saw that we have numerous spirits in us, several or many drives that push us in different directions, that They’re seldom compatible, and that the real goal in life is achieving some nuance, and the ability to moderate the quarreling tendencies we have. The Greeks originally had twelve Olympian deities, though not all sources agree on the same twelve. But they were saying they could identify at least a dozen styles, dynamics, biases, spirits that we can always find driving the lives of ourselves and others. And the gods and spirits seldom agree, and usually bicker, just as they do in our own mind and our culture.

That’s where Zeus came in. As the top dog among the Olympian deities, the Alpha Male among the gods, his job was to try and harmonize all the bickering voices. That’s our job, too: to harmonize the bickering voices that drive us. There were gods that neither Zeus nor the Greeks respected, even though they had to acknowledge their power. Ares, and god of war, wasn’t respected by Zeus because he was all passion and no reason. And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was also all passion and no reason.

In the stories about Aphrodite, almost no one’s life was made better by crossing her path. It ended badly or tragically for the humans, this passion that followed lust wherever it led, everything else be damned. Without using our reason to play the role of Zeus and balance the often selfish voices within us, we are unlikely to live wise or fulfilling lives, and unlikely to be much blessing to others.

One of the themes in these sermons is our task of evolving beyond the chimpanzee politics that are rooted very deeply in us, the notion of power gained to serve our own selfish ends rather than to serve others. And this is where we tie back to chimpanzee politics. Because each one of these spirits – with the exception of the Holy Spirit – is selfish, concerned only with getting what it wants, no matter what harm it does to us or others.

Hermes is a sneaky guy nobody can trust, very clever at using words to persuade anybody of anything. He creates advertising campaigns that sell Americans on eating unhealthy food and becoming unhealthy people, or cars that guzzle gas and pollute the air, or a thousand other gadgets that run up credit card bills so tens of millions of people are buried under interest rates of 20-30%. Even in ancient Greek mythology, neither humans nor gods could trust Hermes. He was always out for himself.

But so were the other spirits.

The god of war destroyed Germany seventy years ago, and may yet destroy America in our lifetimes. The spirit of Apollo can make organizational or corporate clones of people, subordinating them to structures of authority and ignoring their humanity because that spirit can’t see their humanity. Zeus’s philandering, his sense that the Alpha Male need not be faithful, destroys trust, commitment, and the relationships upon which we and our society depend.

His wife Hera’s fury at being betrayed by Zeus and her endless search for revenge, like Poseidon’s inability to stop carrying a grudge – the entire Odyssey is driven by Poseidon’s ten-year grudge against Odysseus for killing his son – these have some justice to them at first, but soon become so selfishly obsessive that they destroy the lives of others around them. Any single spirit is selfish. We are mostly driven by just a few of them, and our hardest job is like Zeus’s: creating a harmony between our conflicting urges and desires, that can let us be a blessing to ourselves and others.

In modern medicine, we describe cancer as a kind of growth that cares only about reproducing its own kind of cells, even if they kill the body. Left untended, that’s what individual spirits or gods do, too.

They each in their own way further the art of chimpanzee politics by being unable to see anything beyond what they want right then. This includes, many many times in Western history, the God of Western religion. Dishonest religion and bad priests have so often turned that god into a blood-thirsty demon rather than a spirit that could be called holy.

If we’re going to do honest religion, we need to talk about gods. So let’s understand gods. They are not critters in the clouds. They are imaginative constructs, concepts, leading us to centers of psychological and sometimes natural power. And religion – as any Buddhist can tell you – is not about gods. So in honest religion, we can ask – and need to ask – how useful these gods are for us today, as we try to find ways toward healthier ways of being that are less selfish, more integrated, and more compassionate toward the much larger world around us.

And here, I think the idea of Zeus is really much more useful than the idea of the Hebrew god Yahweh. God can’t pull all of our various drives together well, because the obsession with monotheism – which is really mostly an obsession with priestly and political authority – can’t recognize how many other spirits really are present in our lives and our world.

And Western religion almost never invites us to identify with God – that could get you burned at the stake, or committed to an institution – but to worship him, through the rules and rituals made by the people who dress up in his clothes and talk in holy words. That’s not helpful.

The Zeus story, understood psychologically, teaches us that we are the ones who must learn to play the role of Zeus within our own little circle of spirits, mediating and moderating between our various desires to serve – not our own selfish interests, but something larger, more inclusive, more life-giving to ourselves and others.

Here’s what that sounds like in pretty ordinary language. This is from Felix Adler, the Jewish intellectual who founded the non-theistic Ethical Culture Society back in 1876:

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear. (An Ethical Philosophy of Life)

To add a little to that, it’s usually by finding the right gods, the right spirits in others that we can bring out the right spirits in ourselves.

This is close to the Buddhist idea of the sangha, the holy community where healthy transformation is possible because health and wholeness are held as the norm by the community, and the lower spirits of selfishness are disempowered. We can talk about honest religion all we like. But without the commitment and discipline to have a community that can discredit our persistent habits of working only toward the things we like, we’ll just be doing chimpanzee politics. Then your money and your energy and hopes will go to fund a social club to please the most clever and manipulative, whether in a church, a club or local or national politics. That’s chimpanzee politics.

It’s also human history and human nature. But it is that selfish part of human nature we’re here to evolve beyond, by seeking the community of bigger, better, less self-serving spirits. we’re seeking Holy spirits rather than merely clever ones. It is one of the most important of all human aspirations, and the only adequate goal for honest religion anywhere.

Still, the eternally frustrating fact is that, as the Greeks saw over 3,000 years ago, these spirits are not under our direct control, and it often feels like the most we can do directly is open our hearts and minds, and pray that they come into the larger place where we’ve made them welcome.

So we’ll end with a prayer, on behalf of this church, but also of all honest religion anywhere.