By |

I am not a mother. I have no children, either those I have born or those I have adopted or fostered. I don’t have any spiritual or emotional children either. There is no one in my life who calls me Mom for any reason.

That is by choice.

I can tell you the two times in my life I have considered the idea of having children: the first was listening to one romantic partner’s wondering what it would be like to raise a child with two moms; the second was recognizing the admirable parental attributes of another romantic partner and thinking briefly that if I were 20 years younger, I might have considered having children with him. I thought about being a mother for maybe five minutes total.

childlessI am, in fact, intentionally child free. I have really never had the mothering instinct, I have never felt that biological clock ticking, have never gone wistful seeing a baby, never thought how important it would be for me to be a mother.

But that’s only half the story. Most people are willing and eager, in fact, to emphasize how I give birth to creative projects and mother in other ways. It’s as though I have to replace having actual children with metaphorical children. It’s as though I am incomplete as a woman if I don’t have some sort of children. And it’s not just some friends and acquaintances who say this, offering this heartfelt replacement for what has to be a hole in my life. Our entire culture is centered around mothers and mothering, and on Mother’s Day, we are bombarded with images of mothers and exhortations to call your mom, send her flowers, do something nice for her.

In our congregations, there is a Mother’s Day celebration, usually with flowers and women standing up – and usually, the well-meaning worship leader includes as an afterthought “those who mother in other ways” – as though I am not enough of a woman if I am not considered a mother. Now it is true that other kinds of mothers are indeed left out of Mother’s Day – and I am grateful that the Unitarian Universalist Association is taking steps to celebrate Mama’s Day. As they write on their website,

With “Mamas Day,” we hear a call to honor all those who mother, especially those who bear the brunt of hurtful policies or who are weighed down by stigma in our culture. We celebrate trans mamas, immigrant mamas, single mamas, lesbian mamas, young mamas, and others. It’s opportunity to take action to create the conditions so that all families can thrive.

Yes, this is vitally important. We don’t see enough mamas of non-white, non-heteronormative identities and abilities in the Mother’s Day exhortations. We need this Mama’s Day celebration to check privilege and honor all kinds of mothers.

But we do not need to include all women in this celebration.

We do not need to include me.

I am glad there are mamas of many shapes and sizes, colors and actions. I am grateful for those who have mothered me. I am grateful for those who have mothered others. But I am not a mama, nor do I want to be.

What I DO want is to be recognized as whole, as a complete human being with inherent worth and dignity, without needing to take on a role – physically or metaphorically – that is not mine. Now this isn’t to say I’m not nurturing; I believe I am. And it’s not to say I haven’t created some big projects and set some intriguing things in motion. I have. But men do that all the time, and they’re not considered less than whole. Why should I be? Why does my gender require me to be recognized as a mother if I don’t identify as such?

I don’t want to be recognized for something I am not. Don’t make me stand up on May 11th to accept pity and a last minute nod to my existence.

I am not a mama.

By |

I recently studied American Theological Liberalism with Gary Dorrien, and was quite taken by a chapter (from Dorrien’s The Making of American Liberal Theology, Volume 1) on the social gospelers. As I read the chapter, I found myself saying “amen” to Walter Rauschenbusch’s understanding of Christianity, that Jesus’s message was that the personal and the political cannot be separated if we are to see the kingdom manifest ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ I was impressed that Walter could find his way out from under the abusive thumb of his father and find the joy and hope preached earlier by Bushnell – the very hope that seems truly absent in the orthodoxy of the elder Rauschenbusch.

And I found myself thinking this is remarkably familiar territory – I have never read Rauschenbusch or other social gospelers before, yet I had read these ideas, with a different spin. The light dawned when I arrived on the pages discussing the Federal Council of Churches. I knew from other study that Unitarian John Holmes and Universalist Clarence Skinner also wrote on the social gospel… yet they were absent. Mild curiosity turned to earnest consideration as I learned that the Unitarians and the Universalists were omitted from the Federal Council of Churches, all the while being frontrunners on the social gospel.[1] So I wondered: why might that be?

As it turns out, both Holmes and Skinner were critics of Rauschenbusch and the social gospel promoted within the Federal Council. So I turned to the more familiar of the writings, Skinner’s Social Implications of Universalism, for answers.

Written in 1914 while serving as Professor of Applied Christianity at the Crane Theological School of Tufts College, Social Implications begins with a flat indictment:

The fact is that the traditional Protestant Church is dying, dying hard with colors flying and battling heroically, but nevertheless dying. The theology upon which it is built is dying; the individualism which called it into being is dying; the social order which it expressed is dying. Why should it not also die? (pg 1)

Indeed, Skinner is going after orthodoxy; he spills pages of ink arguing against the “religions of authority…who render stupid obedience to the established social order” (pg 9). He notes with derision that the traditional churches have been “so feeble” in social action because of “inertia inherited from the medieval ages when humanity lacked social dynamic” (pg 42). He argues that given the new age, “only those theologies which frankly and persistently align themselves with the world, and openly champion its potential goodness, can logically enter the great reformation of the twentieth century” (pg 48).

Skinner-DrClarenceRussellAnd it is there where Skinner shifts his attention from only skewering the orthodoxy to also calling out the liberal church. Any theology that sees salvation as coming “by escaping from a world which is inherently unsavable” – even in part, as Rauschenbusch promotes – is “individualistic, anti-social, medieval faith” (pg 49). He suggests that because of the emphasis on the death of Jesus, the church has inherited vicarious atonement which “has no social dynamic in it” (pg 55) – and that it is the social dynamic that is the actual ministry and religion of Jesus. “No dogmatic theologies about Jesus ever saved any one in society or out of society” he writes (pg 57), wondering why personal salvation should be necessary if the core of Jesus’s teachings are about social salvation. Instead of salvation being found in a statement of belief, a rite or sacrament, salvation, and Christianity itself, is “life lived in the open in the midst of the push and pull of social forces, and thus implies and demands a social context” (pg 59).

Skinner continues his arguments against the liberal church (particularly the hopeful theology of Bushnell that many social gospelers found attractive) in his section on “Hell and Salvation;” on the plus side, “liberal theology has successfully driven these nightmares [of a wrathful God and a brimstone hell] from the minds of enlightened men” (pg 63). Yet he thinks they have whitewashed the story, doing away with “moral accountability”; rather, the ideas of heaven and hell essential elements of religion. He makes this clear: “Universalism has not abolished the idea of hell. It has humanized and socialized it” (pg 63, emphasis his).

It is because of the hell on earth, then, that salvation is purely a social act as well; Skinner argues that “there is no royal road to salvation…it is as much subject to the natural law of cause and effect as is punishment” (65). Old ideas of heaven and hell are anti-social; thus, the need for personal salvation is anathema to the real salvation: saving ourselves in the here and now.

Skinner’s book is of course, largely an argument for Universalism, suggesting that its long history of social consciousness, open arms, and trust in a loving God will one day be at the center of a unified church. He believes that others will come around when they realize the truth of Universalism and let the medieval faith fall away completely. And obviously, that has yet to occur, if ever.

But the Universalists wanted to be at the table with the other social gospelers; that they and the Unitarians were sidelined left these two humanity-centered denominations to flounder and eventually find themselves. As Unitarian Universalists, we work alongside modern social gospelers, gently reminding them that we’ve been here for a long time – and welcome to the party.

 

By |

brigid4There is a moment
In every undertaking
There is a moment
When everything is still… too still.
There is a moment
When nothing, nothing, NOTHING comes…
When the mind is frozen.

It is a scary moment
It is a frustrating moment
It is a moment where you doubt every part of yourself
Why can’t I do this?
What is wrong with me?
How am I supposed to write this
Sing this
Speak this
Perform this?
I have nothing interesting to say.
I have nothing new to say.
I have nothing to say.

There is a moment when all hope seems lost
And the very thing you knew about your self
That you have something to say
And a way to say it
That very thing you knew about yourself has
Vanished.

Writer’s block.

The mind isn’t so much a complex organ of thought and deed but rather a frozen tundra of grey matter.

But then…
There is a moment.
A spark.
And another.
And another…
…a spark ignites a flame.
There is a moment
When the frozen tundra of the mind begins to thaw…
Quickly.
And suddenly you are on fire.
You race for your laptop
Notebook
Guitar
Floor space
Piano
Sketch pad

You can’t write, draw, move, play,
sing fast enough for all the ideas coming.
There is a blessed, welcome moment
When you have been ignited
By the flame of creativity.

There is a moment
When you are stimulated
And your perspective shifts
And your mind-body-spirit explodes
And you are left standing
In the wake of what has been revealed.

There is a moment.
A very sweet moment.

By |

Today begins Thirty Days of Love – a month of reflection and action centered around the idea that love is the ultimate guiding force. Across the denomination, people are meeting, learning, reflecting, and doing, guided by our Standing on the Side of Love campaign.

Some of us are also writing.

About a month ago, the UU Bloggers Workshop was created as space for support, learning, and collaboration. We thought, we shouldn’t just help each other become better and farther reaching bloggers – we should have public conversations and coordinated explorations. Thirty Days of Love seemed a perfect first such collaboration. Over the next thirty days, bloggers will write and reflect about love and our way forward to create the beloved community – with posts collected here for easy browsing. Together, we’ll take on this big, incredibly expansive compulsion to do good in the world – that crazy little thing called love.

I get to go first.

____

In reality, Unitarian Universalists are talking about love all the time; many of our congregations use an affirmation each week that begins “Love is the doctrine of this church.” Easily half our readings and hymns contain the word love. More contain “compassion,” which seems to be the preferred word these days. But I like the word “love.” It’s both simple and complex; it’s particular and all encompassing. Love is central to all of the world’s religions. It is a guiding force for our exemplars and pioneers. Love is everywhere – in our practices, prayers, and in our sacred texts.

handsIn fact, one of the most famous passages in sacred texts is about love is found in the New Testament:  I Corinthians 13.

We hear this passage all too often, most often at weddings. It’s poetic, yet as CS Lewis says, it has become so commonplace that it has lost its potency. But a closer look shows that this, perhaps the most famous passage in the New Testament, tells us how we are with each other and how we act in the world.

This passage is a digression of sorts:  In this first letter to the Corinthians, Paul is addressing a number of divisive issues that are coming up in the church, including the question of “spiritual gifts” as a measure of one’s worth. Paul addresses them this way:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

For the Corinthians, and indeed most of the early Christians, the spiritual gifts were signs that God was working in their lives. These gifts are not unlike our own – where they embraced prophesy, healing, and speaking in tongues, we embrace prophetic witness, reason, and generosity.

Now these gifts themselves are fine – in fact, just as Paul preached on them to his flock, we preach on our gifts. They are important ways in which we move through our days, putting our faith into action. Some of us are great at hospitality, others at caring for one another, others still at speaking with a prophetic voice, or using intellect to understand the world. But the problem in Corinth – and the danger among us – is when the gifts become a sign, a shibboleth if you will, that divides the believers from the non-believers, the good UUs from the bad. The gifts are not the thing. They are useful to encourage and develop, but they are not THE thing.

The thing… is love. Without love, Paul says, “I gain nothing”… and frankly, neither does anyone else. Love is what allows our gifts to function.

And what a thing it is:

Love is patient.    Love is kind.
Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way.
It is not irritable or resentful.
It does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Paul may not be able to tell us exactly what love is, but he sure knows it when he sees it.

How many times have we gotten irritated when our justice endeavors run into road blocks? Maybe the volunteers don’t show up. Maybe we don’t get the donations we expected. Maybe the people we’re helping don’t seem to appreciate it. There’s a sign that we may not be acting out of love.

How many times have we limited ourselves? Expected the worst, so we didn’t go the full distance? There’s a sign that we may not be acting out of love.

How many times have we been so angry at the injustice in the world that we’ve become paralyzed?  There’s a sign we may not be acting out of love.

How many times have we been so proud of our own actions that we look down upon those who don’t – or can’t – do as much justice work? There’s a sign we may not be acting out of love.

How many times have we simply gotten burned out? There’s a sign we may not be acting out of love.

I told you it’s not easy.

But love is permanent. It is eternal – and as the song says, there is more love somewhere. Paul emphasizes this point in the next three verses, which I have tweaked a little for our own time:

Love never ends. But as for our prophetic witness, it will come to an end; as for speaking truth to power, that will cease; as for intellect, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we reason only in part, but when justice and inclusion is complete, the parts will come to an end.

He then continues with two somewhat puzzling thoughts; first is this:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child, but when I became an adult I put away childish things.

My first thought always is “really? I can’t be a kid anymore?” But Paul is saying that we should put aside the petulant, smug, judgmental, and boastful side of promoting our gifts. We don’t want to be that way… and most of the time I don’t think we are… but it’s a danger, and one we should remember. When we act as adults, we put love first.

The second puzzlement comes in the next verse:

For now we see in a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully even as I have been fully known.

Mysterious, and yet: glass in the first century wasn’t clear – they hadn’t quite perfected that yet – so “seeing through a glass darkly” is seeing something obscured by grainy, opaque glass. In other words, we can’t see everything, or know everything. Our knowledge is NOT the be-all, end-all. Because, remember, if I have not love, I am nothing at all.

Put it another way: we can’t know every effect of everything we do. We can only act in love, with our best and highest intentions. Maybe you don’t know the effect your actions will have, but if you do it as an act of love, that is enough. And when you show love? People are not just helped and healed themselves. The also know you in ways you can’t anticipate. They see your generous heart, your kind spirit. They see your passion and compassion, your earnestness and forthrightness.

Paul concludes:

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three. And the greatest of these is love.

No matter what else is going on, it’s all about love. Love is where we begin – whether it is with each other, with the Divine (however we define it), with our families, our communities, or our world. Without love, anything we do is half a loaf. It’s ineffective. It’s uninspiring. It can cause bitterness.

I think about how large corporations are forced to pay for things like cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico after an oil spill… when philanthropists give large amounts of money just for the tax breaks – and those acts always feel empty to me. Yes, the money is important to solve the issues, but if they walked through the world in love, they maybe wouldn’t have caused the problems in the first place.  What if we shared love from the start – not just when things get bad, but pre-emptively?   Maybe that’s what Paul is getting at. and what all of our songs and activities and organizations for social justice are about too: starting from a place of love so that the world is better nurtured from the start. In her book Blessing the World, Rebecca Parker implores us to “Choose to bless the world.” She writes,

The choice to bless the world can take you into solitude to search for the sources of power and grace; native wisdom, healing and liberation. More, the choice will draw you into community, the endeavor shared, the heritage passed on, the companionship of struggle, the importance of keeping faith, the life of ritual and praise, the comfort of human friendship, the company of earth, its chorus of life welcoming you. None of us alone can save the world. Together—that is another possibility, waiting.

Together, we must share love, because it IS the greatest gift of all. Ultimately, it is all we have. It burns in us – it is our pilot light, which we can keep low and hidden under a bushel… or we can turn up so it is a beacon bright and clear – a beacon stoked by hope and faith. Everything else may fade away,  but first and always, we must love.

 

 

 

 

 

By |

I love words.

I love their power to evoke emotions, actions, ideas, images. I love how a carefully crafted phrase can roll gracefully and deliciously like a warm cinnamon bun, or jar us like an unexpectedly bitter orange.

And more, I love that as Unitarian Universalists, we delight in words, and all that they can evoke. We memorize quotations from great thinkers and doers, we wrestle with words long laden with pain, we use as many words as we can to understand our world and the Divine. We continue to find new ways to describe the expansiveness of our extravagant welcome. We continue to explore theological and philosophical ideas in our deep-seated earnestness to understand the understandable through reason and fact.

This is why I am a reader. I want to see how others are thinking about things, describing things, wrestling with things. I love those moments when a phrase catches me and lives in my mind for hours or days or weeks. My vast collection of books are filled with post-its marking pages, sections highlighted, words underlined, and occasionally a conversation with the author scribbled in the margins.

This is also why I am a writer, and why I continue to blog, whether I have one reader or thousands. I love using words and playing with words to explore the joyful, thoughtful, and painful. I love writing papers for my courses. I frankly even loved writing the essays for the Regional Sub-Committee on Candidacy (but don’t tell anyone).

I am also a talker. I’m one of those people who best processes ideas out loud. I make decisions best when I talk them through with someone. I love class discussions and small group discussions and Q&A sessions. I love preaching and teaching and leading workshops.

Yes. Words matter to me. To us. Our fourth principle, the responsible search for truth and meaning, relies largely on words.

But are the words we say to each other enough? Is it enough to read each other’s blog posts and sermons, to absorb books and podcasts, to relish in the reading and the talking, to let words rule? What of the UU who says “worship is my least favorite part of being a UU”? What of the UU who says “I dislike music in a service. I’d rather just hear a sermon and some readings”? What of the UU who says “I don’t want spiritual experience, I want to do social justice”?

If we followed their lead, we probably wouldn’t need to come together for services.

If we followed their lead, we could sell off the beautiful buildings and instead build server farms where we host blogs and online books and occasional chats.

If we followed their lead, we would stop being a religion.

Obviously, I am not saying we don’t need all the words and intellectual stimulation. But I don’t think it’s enough.

In 2009, I chaired our congregation’s Stewardship campaign; part of our campaign included a call for pledges of  Time, Talent, and Treasure. In our planning, we all agreed that members should be willing to make an investment in all three, but what did Time mean, exactly? Was time the hours spent in Sunday services and at church-wide events? Or was it okay if someone didn’t come to church but attended a small group ministry once a month? Do we ask for a commitment to the one hour a week that everyone shares (as opposed to the many more hours we share in small groups, committees, task forces, etc.)? What of the people who feel like the Sunday worship was a waste of time – a wasteland of intellectual stimulation?

To them I say that worship still matters, whether you think you’re getting anything out of it or not.

Without worship, we are nothing more than an intellectual social club with a service focus. Without worship, we forget how to enact the deeper parts of ourselves, which long remember the rituals of our ancient ancestors. Without worship, we become isolated, away from the interconnected web of which we are a part. Without worship, we lose touch with the sacred.

And more…without all the elements of worship – sights and sounds, touch and scents, words, music, movement, and silence – we are missing ways to access our own Divine spirit, as well as that which we define as Divine that is outside ourselves. We can think about, write about, talk about, intellectualize about this spiritual dimension all we like. But that thing inside us – the divine spark, the soul, the spirit, the human consciousness – that thing needs to be activated and engaged for us to really understand. There’s a scene in The Matrix, where information is uploaded to our hero’s brain:

The scene doesn’t stop there. Lawrence Fishburne’s character, Morpheus, takes Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo,  into a room where they actually fight.

Engagement matters. And for most of us, we find that the habit of weekly worship provides the best chance we have of that engagement. And it’s not just about our individual selves getting engaged; it’s about the group experience. For several years, I was what they call a solitary practitioner in the pagan tradition. I held rituals, by myself. I meditated, sang, danced, incanted, by myself. And half the time, I gave up before I had finished, because it felt empty or I felt silly. When I was in ritual with even one other person, suddenly there was meaning. A shared experience. A connection. What I read and studied suddenly became real.

It’s this connection that then leads me on to act. just being with other people in scared space makes me want to be a better person, more engaged, more connected. They don’t tell me to, I feel it. I sing it. I smell it and touch it and taste it. All the books and blogs and discussions in the world cannot replace that.

So what do we do about it? How do we create communities that have room for all of it, such that  even the woman who dislikes worship can find and make meaning?

I think back to the question my stewardship team wrestled with – what we mean by Time. As we reimagine what congregations look like, when and where they meet, we need to recognize that every opportunity to gather is both an opportunity to engage our intellects and to worship. And this is more than lighting a chalice before a committee meeting starts. It’s about action – doing something besides talking (like singing or meditating to start the meeting), or taking an intellectual idea and physically applying it to the world (like going down the street and showing the homeless woman you value her inherent worth and dignity). Every time we gather, we should be making meaning, engaging our minds and our bodies. Every time we gather, we should be engaging in worship – in making worth and meaning.

This isn’t easy. it’s one thing to say that the Buildings and Grounds Committee are “stewards of our sacred space” – it’s another to make taking out the trash a spiritual endeavor. It’s one thing to say the pot-luck should be a communing of our spirits – it’s another to let go of the random gossip and griping and actually show care for each other.

But it can be done. We need all the words – and touches and tastes and actions and images – we can get our hands on. Our souls demand it. Our denomination’s future depends on it.

By |

After the service Sunday, we had a small group conversation – what some congregations call a talkback but which Saratoga calls “church chat.” It was a lively discussion about the series of sermons I just wrapped up on God – over three weeks, I talked about the transcendent, the immanent, and the creating-creator aspects of the Divine as we see them in our principles and our hymns.

During the conversation, one member asked me “did you put process theology at the end on purpose?” The question was probably meant to tease out my own beliefs, which I addressed – yes, process theology clicks for me, and it feels like a broader idea of God that encompasses the transcendent and the immanent.

But I think there’s more to it than that. And I have been thinking about it a lot. There are many reasons I put this  relational, creative, dynamic God at the end of the series – and what I keep coming down to is that this image of God – this ever-expanding, ever-changing Divine energy/spirit/infinite all – doesn’t coerce us but rather entices us toward beauty and goodness. This creating-creator God embraces us in the family of humanity and shows us infinite possibility in every choice we make. This way of being in the world, with each other, as artists of time and space, as painters of beauty and truth, as sculptors of dignity and justice, is what we are each called to be at each moment.

This calling vibrates through the hallowed halls of our theological house. Our Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian-Universalist roots call us to choose, at each moment, a path toward goodness and healing, to create a community of well-being, to reach out.

This creator, creating, relational, dynamic God IS the God of Unitarian Universalism. This is the faith that calls us to action. This theology is how we make our way in the world. And we must make the choice, at every moment, to act. How will we act?

And more to the point, how will I act? What choices do I make? How am I an artist of creation, painting and weaving and sculpting my corner of the universe to make it more compassionate, beautiful, healing, just?

I put the God of process theology at the end of the series because we cannot just sit and sing and think about God. We have to do. We HAVE to take an active role. Life is not a spectator sport; we must all act in this participatory universe.

By |

 Listen here.

In my first semester of seminary, I took a course in systematic theology from Dr. James Cone, known as the father of black liberation theology. Dr. Cone is a force of nature – a slight black man from the backwoods of Arkansas, with incredible passion and intellect, and who at age 73 can literally run circles around even the fittest 20-somethings I know. His class lectures were a tour de force – right off the bat, he encouraged us to build our own theologies; he said that his job was to show us how theology worked and then we were to build a theology that worked for us.

The first time I heard this introduction, I was enraptured. The second time – the very next week, I thought “okay, he really wants us to get this point.” By the third week, it was clear that Dr. Cone would pretty much say the same thing for the first 20 minutes of class each week, and we all became a little less anxious to get to the lecture hall on time.

I tell you this story because I feel a little like that – for those of you who have been here for the first two parts of this sermon series, my introduction will seem a bit familiar. On the plus side, this is the last week of this series, so unlike me and Systematic Theology, you escape another 10 weeks of the same introduction.

For those of you here for the first time, the good news is that it won’t take long to get up to speed. Our working metaphor is the universal translator from Star Trek that allowed the crew of the Enterprise to understand the languages of everyone they encountered without struggling with Google Translate. The problem – not just for the Enterprise crew but for us, without universal translators – is that even when we understand the words, we don’t always understand their context; much like strangers to western culture wouldn’t understand the image produced when we say “Juliet on her balcony”, we aren’t well equipped to understand the narrative imagery other cultures use to communicate. Thus, we have to build our own universal translators – especially when it comes to talking about God.

What we know is that we struggle when we talk about religious ideas with others, because our ideas vary greatly, even when we use the same word. Now of course as Unitarian Universalists, we try to mitigate that problem with many words to substitute for “God” – spirit of life, creator, infinite all, the divine – we have such a litany of names to whom we pray it’s a wonder we ever get to the prayer itself.  But the word “God” – as laden as it is, is a kind of shorthand that lets us get into the real questions, about the nature of the Divine.

It’s this nature that we’ve been exploring – not just in general, but in how we Unitarian Universalists understand it – in our principles, in our theology, in our songs.

Two weeks ago, we looked at the transcendent God – the God that is above and separate from us, and who – for us anyway – is loving, forgiving, and comforting, the God we sing of in hymns like “immortal, invisible, God only wise.” Last week, we looked at the immanent God – the God that is in everything: the trees, the rocks, the animals, the air, the fire, and the people; this is the God we sing of in hymns like “for the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies.”

But of course, being a pluralistic faith, there are other ideas of God in our faith tradition, imbedded in our hymnals – this week, we’ll examine an idea of God that seems somewhat new but is in fact much older: this is the god of process theology.

Now one of the struggles in talking about this particular aspect of God is that it is a fairly new way of thinking about God, and the language is still morphing. We have narrative imagery, but not a concrete word or phrase to describe that imagery. When I sent the descriptions for this sermon series, I called this god the creating-creator God. But I could have just as easily called this god the relational God, the dynamic God, the responsive God, the big picture God, the persuasive God, the changing God.

Why such difficulty? Perhaps it will help to look at what we mean by process theology and where it comes from. Now the scientists and engineers among us are going to like this next bit – because process thought starts with Einstein.

More specifically, it begins with a mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead, who was fascinated with Einstein’s work, in particular, quantum physics, where we see that everything is in motion; everything – from the biggest bodies of mass to the tiniest quark, is in motion; it turns out that everything we thought was fixed, stable, and solid, is actually vibrating, changing, and shifting. Whitehead realized that this didn’t just apply to the physical world, but to the metaphysical world as well, and he developed a philosophy that proposed that events are the discrete base of reality, not matter. Essentially, the core of Whitehead’s philosophy is “if it seems static, don’t trust it.”

Soon, process philosophy found a home in theological circles; Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb realized that if everything was an ever-changing event – then surely God and all of creation was equally ever-changing. Instead of a transcendent God – above us, creating the rules of nature but not in nature; or an immanent God – present in the material world; this God is as mutable as the quark – at once a vibration and a particle. This God – like us – is always being created, is always creating, is always happening; this God – like us – is eternally becoming.

Now in Unitarian Universalist thought, our ideas of God – or the divine, the collective unconscious, the universe, the infinite – is one of benevolence. God is good and wants what’s best for us. Thus, when we apply process theology, we find a God who isn’t controlling us but is inviting us to imagine, to grow, to dream, to create – enticing us toward goodness and wholeness. This God invites us to be architects, as we see in hymn number 288, All Are Architects; please join me in singing verses 1 and 2.

I used a word a few minutes ago that I’d like to reflect on – “becoming.” What does it mean to be always becoming rather than being? This is a bit contrary to what we think of in the Eastern traditions, where nirvana is a state of being. Yet I think we can find, even in Buddhism, the idea that we are ever-changing, always striving for that nirvana.

My own understanding of becoming comes from thinking about concepts of time. There is the idea that time is linear, with a rather causal past, present, and future. But there’s also an idea that time is not linear; rather, we have all that is known, the eternal now, and then all that is unknown. At every moment of the eternal now, we have a choice; we create reality in relation to all that is known and all the possibilities of the unknown. In that eternal now, we are constantly becoming.

In process thought, time is not linear; instead, it is unfolding in many directions all at once, each new moment ripe with possibility. Each new moment carrying the known, offering an opportunity for creativity, always becoming, always in that eternal now. We are always making choices, small and large. When applied to our faith’s call to action, we know that our choices lead us to fight for economic justice, reproductive rights, immigration reform. Our choices lead us to follow this call from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

Another aspect of this God of process thinking is that God is relational – perhaps the most relational reality of all. Human choices to hurt others hurt God. And maybe that is evil – when we make choices that hurt others. Process theologian Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki suggests that “In positive choices, we blend our own interests with the interests of the wider communities within the world. In negative choices, we secure our own interests against all others. Process thinking affirms that God calls us beyond violence toward communities of well-being.”

Like the immanent God we spoke of last week, the creating-creator God calls us to action, to “come build a land where we’ll bind up the broken” and “I’ll bring you hope, when hope is hard to find…” and “ ‘til there is peace for us and everyone, we’ll take one more step…” We also hear the call in hymn number 6, Just as Long as I Have Breath. Let’s sing verse 1.

So when we embrace the idea that we are not just experiencing God in all living things, and not just experiencing God as a big eternal separate idea – but are experiencing God as co-creative force calling us into communities of well-being, we see a God that is a Living Whole of which you and I and others in the “cosmic conversation” are active parts and partners. In a “participatory universe” where all have a role in the construction of reality, God participates in all life and every act of creation. And we in turn must participate too. Einstein put it this way:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

And we see our place in the whole of the universe reflected in hymn number 22, Dear Weaver of our Lives’ Design. Let’s sing verses 1 and 2.

 

When I first read about process theology in our Wellspring spiritual deepening course a few years ago, I felt as though the Universe opened up to me with a resounding Yes. If I’d been reading in the tub, I would have been like Archimedes jumping out naked and running through the streets shouting Eureka! For the first time, I discovered there was a theology that matched what I believe: process thought jives with my Unitarian belief in human potential and reason as our way toward truth and meaning; it jives with my Universalist belief in universal goodness and love, which propels me to serve my human family. And apparently, I am not alone. UUs all over are realizing that we understand this idea of God intimately. As Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar points out in her book Fluent in Faith, process thinking affirms many of the threads in our theological heritage:

We are a part of an interconnected web of life in which each affects all. There is a sacred spark, a spiritual energy and power, in each of us. It matters what we do with our lives. The great, ultimately unnamable mystery of life is a call to goodness and love. As we choose love, decide for love, stand on the side of love, we are part of the growing God in the universe. This is process theology made real.

This creating-creator God affirms our long-held belief in the goodness and progress of humanity; we find this in James Freeman Clarke’s affirmation of the “the progress of humankind onward and upward forever.” In the early 20th century, John Dietrich, considered the father of religious humanism, spoke of a ‘cosmic theism, which “interprets God as the indwelling power in the universe rather than an individual, separate power.”

No wonder this God – this creating-creator, relational, dynamic, responsive, big picture, changing, becoming God – is so familiar. And our hymnal shows it; the Center for Process Studies did an extensive review of a variety of hymnals – ours, along with hymnals from the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ – and named 349 out of 414 hymns as representing this creating-creator God – that’s 85%. And that’s not even the teal hymnal, which further reflects this god of process thought.

This God…who is an artist and reminds us, as Arthur Graham puts it, that “Each of us is an artist whose task it is to shape life into some semblance of the pattern we dream about. The molding is not of self alone, but of shared tomorrows and times we shall never see.”

Yes, this is most assuredly a god I believe in – to me, this God encompasses the transcendent and the immanent and brings us in deep relation to the wide universe. This is the God who reminds me that everything evolves – not just life forms but thought and ethics and understanding and relationships. This is the God who reminds me that truth and revelation are not static but are forever unfolding. This is the God who reminds me to be open to the eternal now, to be open to becoming. This is the God who persuades me gently with love and compassion and the promise of a new day. This is the God who accompanies me, as God accompanies all of creation, on this journey. This is the God that is at the heart of our universal translators; this is the Unitarian Universalist narrative image for God.

This is the God I pray to when I sing “our world is one world – what touches one affects us all” and when I sing “we are blessed with love and amazing grace, when our heart is in a holy place” and when I sing “when we live in deep assurance of the flame that burns within, then our promise finds fulfillment and our future can begin…” and when I sing “woyaya…woyaya…”

 

We live in a participatory universe. We do not leave things up to a remote God….we act with the divine energy…we too create out of mystery….we share in the opportunity and responsibility of creating reality. We are all artists…creators of what is, and what is becoming.

By |

 Listen here.

Last week, we started cobbling together our own universal translators. Unlike the Star Trek universe that Gene Roddenberry created, we aren’t equipped to automatically understand the many different languages of many cultures, and even if we were, we wouldn’t always know what people really meant. What we know is that real communication relies not just on vocabulary and syntax, but also on the metaphors and idioms we use. We rely more heavily on narrative imagery than we realize – the example I used last week was that of Juliet on her balcony; to those of us immersed in western culture, we understand this phrase to indicate young romantic (and maybe doomed) love. And every culture – whether a local culture or a corporate culture or a religious culture – uses different and sometimes confusing narrative imagery to communicate. Thus, we have to build our own universal translators – especially when it comes to talking about God.

What we know is that we struggle when we talk about religious ideas with others, because our ideas vary greatly, even when we use the same word. Now of course as Unitarian Universalists, we try to mitigate that problem, with many words to substitute for “God” – spirit of life, creator, infinite all, the divine – we have such a litany of names to whom we pray it’s a wonder we ever get to the prayer itself. But the word “God” – as laden as it is, is a kind of shorthand that lets us get into the real questions, about the nature of the Divine.

It’s this nature that we’ve been exploring, not just in general, but in how we Unitarian Universalists understand it; last week, we looked at the transcendent God – the God that is above and separate from us, and who – for UUs anyway – is loving, forgiving, and comforting. I am sure it amazed some people that this God even exists in our hymnal, but we found many songs and readings expressing this very idea of God.

But of course, being a pluralistic faith, this isn’t the ONLY idea of God we find in our hymnal – so this week, let’s look at a different idea, one that may seem a bit more familiar to many of you – particularly those who are big fans of Emerson. This is the immanent God.

The immanent god is the divine presence seen in the material world – the god that permeates the mundane. It is also the God that inhabits the material in visceral ways. It is the god we saw in the verses we sang this week in Down the Ages – “the present God-head own where creation’s laws are known.” It is the God that sometimes makes the choice to come to church difficult, as nature beckons for its own communion.

The spiritual practices of the Hindus perhaps most explicitly explain this narrative image of God; they begin with the concept of sacred perception, where the devotee enters into a state where they can truly receive the image of the deity as given by the deity.

It is a visceral, real, tangible experience. For Hindus, the deity isn’t just represented in the statue or image; the deity is in the statue or image. The Divine is immanent, present, touchable, seeable, knowable. And this isn’t a one-way experience; the deity is present with, knows, communicates, and touches the devotee as well. The devotee begins by bathing, dressing, adoring, and anointing the statue; once properly clothed and honored, the deity is fully present, and allowed to be seen by others. And… they understand the deity to be fully present and fully whole everywhere at once.

The Hindu understanding of the immanent God was especially attractive to the early Transcendentalists; encountering Hindu texts meant that for the first time, Americans were exposed to a view of the divine that wasn’t transcendent; that is, separate and above us. Henry David Thoreau was one of the earliest American readers of the Bhagavad Gita, and the ideas of the immanent Divine spoke deeply to Thoreau, as well as other transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. They began to see the same fully present and fully whole divine presence in nature. The idea that God might be in the trees and rocks and the very water they sat by was remarkable and expansive in a time when Unitarian theologians sought to limit God to being, as William Ellery Channing described, the creator of nature, not within it.

We don’t see much of the immanent God in the Abrahamic traditions; occasionally, the immanent God appears in the rocks, or in the air, or in a burning bush. We do, however, see it in the words of the mystics. Let us look at responsive reading 607, by the Islamic mystic Hafiz.

By and large, the immanent God is not represented in Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. Thus, it was quite a remarkable shift for Unitarians in the 19th century to embrace the immanent God in nature; to us in the 21st century, it feels, well, natural. We resonate with the words William Wordsworth uses to describe God in his poem “Tintern Abbey”:

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

And we find this immanent God in nature quite vibrantly in hymns such as number 25, God of Earth. Let’s turn to this and sing verses 1 and 2.

I have encountered this god several times – perhaps the most memorable was during a trip to England about a decade ago. A friend and I went to Avebury, the less commercial and more interactive version of Stonehenge. We began at a collection of stones at the center of the village, the center of the concentric circles of monoliths placed there by a long-ago people. And we touched the stones; they were warm, and they gave off an almost imperceptible vibration. We went to the next stone…and the next…and touched every stone in the inner circle. Something clicked for us, that we needed to commune as our ancestors might have. Soon, we were going over streams, through corn fields, and over rocky cowpaths to touch every stone in Avebury… because for reasons we could not explain, we had to connect. We knew we weren’t just connecting to the stones themselves – although we imagined the many stories they could tell of the many events through the many millennia they’d born witness to. We were connecting to the people who first set the monoliths into these wide circles… and to both the earth that they rested on and the earthiness of each stone itself. At the end, I felt as one with the world as I have ever felt.

It was a remarkable day; it is a now part of my universal translator that helps me better understand those who would rather hike to the top of a mountain than read in an air conditioned coffee shop. And it helps when we are confronted with less-than-hospitable attitudes toward the earth. We need to add to our universal translators the note that some believe we are simply visitors on this planet, and stewardship of the earth isn’t part of our call. But as eco-theologian Sallie MacFague points out, we are earthlings; we belong to the earth. Because Unitarian Universalists understand the idea of an immanent God who inhabits the very earth itself, we see ourselves as part of – not separate from – the interconnected web. And we sing about it quite emphatically in hymn 317, We Are Not Our Own. Let’s sing the first verse.

We find this connection to the earth and this immanent God in some of our favorite hymns: “for the earth forever turning” and “the wide universe is the ocean I travel, and the earth is my blue boat home.” Even more, we find that the immanent God leads us to broader connections. In her new book Fluent in Faith, UU minister Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar suggests that the immanence of God in nature actually directs us to “move beyond material realities to the meaning of life and love, to the truth that there is more beauty and care in this world than we can comprehend or capture in our scientific explorations.”

Thoreau got it when he realized that ice cut from Walden Pond was sent to India and thus likely mingled into the Ganges, which is a holy river for Hindus. As he wrote in Walden,

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well … In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic]… I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

It is this connection that we see in Emerson’s words: “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.” Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” is beautifully interpreted in Jim Scott’s song “The Oneness of Everything” – number 1052 in the teal hymnal. If you can, sing along with me on the first verse.

But the call of the immanent God is not just one of appreciation. The call of the immanent God is one of action. Yes, we can commune with nature and we can connect with one another, but, as UU minister Kathy Huff notes, “being part of a conscious universe means that each moment profoundly matters; everything I do, say, think, or feel relates to everything else and may have consequence and meaning beyond my comprehension.” The immanent God calls us to protect our mountaintops from strip mining, to protect wildlife endangered by climate change, to stand for any person whose inherent worth and dignity is compromised. The immanent God expands on Frederick Buechner’s comment that “there can be no peace for me unless there is peace for you also;” this expands beyond humanity, to all who inhabit the earth and the very earth itself.

As I said last week, I find myself at times thinking many different things about God, sometimes all at the same time. And yes, the immanent God is one in whom I believe. I turn to the immanent God when I am too much in my head and need grounding. I turn to the immanent God when I lose faith in humanity’s goodness. It is the immanent God who compels me to a life of compassionate service. This is the God to whom I pray “we would be one, as now we join in singing” and to whom I pray “for the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies” and to whom I pray “listen more often to things than to beings…tis the ancestor’s breath, when the fire’s voice is heard…tis the ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters…. aaahh.”

The immanent God is present – here, now, among us and in us and with us. It is the divine in you, connecting to the divine in me, which we honor in this simple gesture: Namaste.