Sermon: “It Takes Two Hands: Community and Spiritual Quest in an Ambivalent World”
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman, September 14, 2003
I begin with a poem I wrote over this past summer: “We Do Not Come for Ether”
We do not come for ether
to the sacred circle,
to the gathering of souls
in search of oneness,
in search of peace,
in search of hope.
Oh sure, some do.
Some do come to forget
for a while,
to forget about broken promises
and cultural lies about just deserts
and justice for all
and just plain distortions
that distance us from the pain.
Sure, some do come to forget
so that they can go on
undisturbed, unperturbed
and somehow assured
that they are held in the palm
of the hand of god
or to her bosom.
Yes, some do come to forget
but some, I pray for many, to remember,
coming into the sacred circle—
the sacred space—
made that way by the holy, shared declaration
of yearning, hunger and desire,
our desire, our determination, our vision
of the kingdom come
with enough to eat, with enough love,
with enough justice for all.
Called into the circle,
We are called to remember
to put together the pieces.
And so we come to find our place
among the many others gathered.
For our sacred circle is but a threshold
to that larger circle
that is Life,
and that holds us all
and wants for us all
and waits for us all
to hold one another.
And so we do not come for ether
to our circle
but to somehow and in some way to awaken
from the hypnotic distractions
that keep us from knowing
ourselves and each other.
We do not come for ether
to this sacred circle
to this gathering of souls
but to be enlivened
in the search for oneness,
in the search for peace,
in the search for hope.
Several years ago, back even before I entered seminary, I found myself somewhat enamored of the New Age movement. It was bright and crisp and spiritual. I found it to be very positive. It was about per-sonal integrity and human potential, about transcending personal boundaries and opening one’s self to greater possibilities of fulfillment.
I read books by Shakti Gawain and by a channeled personality named Lazarus, and others. I had a group of friends who got together regularly to explore with and encourage one another. I was really getting into it for a while, and then I became disenchanted. Disenchanted is the right word because it requires that one must first be enchanted. And that’s what I began to think the New Age movement was all about enchantment.
My disillusionment followed a conversation with one of my New Age buddies. Joe said, “I do whatever I can to avoid people who are sick or poor. If people are drawing that energy into their lives, or if they have bad karma, I don’t want to bring any of that into my experience.”
“What?” I asked. “You don’t think you have any responsibility to help or care for those who struggle just to get along and to make a life for themselves?”
“I’m not responsible for what someone else brings upon them self. Everything I’ve learned tells me that my potential is unlimited and that if I can only remove all the negativity and the barriers in my life, I can have anything I want.”
So then I began looking at the New Age movement through a new set of lenses. Nowhere could I find anything compelling me toward compassion. Nowhere could I find personal responsibility for institu-tions that held others back while providing me with privilege. Joe was right. The New Age movement was the spiritual expression of the me generation. The old age movement was more in keeping with my own spiritual sensibilities and with my conscience. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Do good works.” “Martin Luther King’s Social Gospel.” “The story of the good Samaritan.” “With liberty and justice for all.”
We might find such an imbalanced spiritual perspective as the New Age movement to be something laughable. I hope so. But the truth is, to a very great extent the American dream has adopted its tenets. The roots of the American dream go back to our Calvinistic origins of salvation through divine election – i.e. there are those who are on God’s A list, the ones who are saved and know they are on that list simply because they know they are on it. The American dream, now imbued with New Age spirituality, has become the stuff of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and any media dedicated to commerce through the sale of a divine election ideology that says you are saved if you look like you are saved.
To look like you are saved, of course, you have to look like a movie star and have really bright teeth, bouncy hair, and not bouncy other parts. You have to drink Heineken’s beer and drive the biggest most inefficient Mercedes-Benz SUV.
Now you might be getting the impression that I’m down on the American way, but I’m not. There is, as you well know, another side to the story. This is the E Pluribus Unum country – one of many. Democ-racy was born out of our American Revolution. When September 11th happened, when the lights went out in August, people pulled together to help one another. This is a nation that cares and we don’t even need to have a major crisis. People continually reach out to lend a hand to others who are in need.
But quite frankly, while the nice stuff might sell well, here and there, for a while, it’s not the big-ticket message. Conflict, violence, threats of violence – made either toward us or by us – those are the big ticket sellers. And of course part of the message in those particular parcels is that we really can’t do anything about the conflicts or the violence or the threats of violence ourselves. We shouldn’t even think about it. There are others whose job it is to respond them.
What are we told that we can do? Well, we can buy the stuff that helps us to believe that we are saved. That’s where the long-term profits are, at least in a shortsighted sort of way.
What does this all mean? What am I trying to say? We live in a very ambivalent world filled with a host of conflicting messages. The strongest messages come out of the religion of commercialism. They say, “If you are saved you’d better spend it so that you can prove to yourself and to everyone else that you are saved.” The religion of commercialism is closely related to the It’s All about Me brand of spiri-tuality that says, “All the billions of years of evolution have led up to the ultimate production of me. It is for the purpose of my unbridled joy for which the world was created and is at my disposal.”
There are also competing messages that come from the temples of government or politics – at least our contemporary politics – and those voices say, “It’s all bad out there; only we can save you; in us you must trust.” This particular institution follows after the model of priestly traditions where the priest is the only authentic mediator between humanity and the gods.
I will only briefly mention the fundamentalist religions. To a considerable extent they fit somewhere into the other categories. They are extreme examples of whatever category they illustrate and they have almost no sense of humor. Fundamentalists are rapidly growing in number and they are not natural al-lies of liberal religionists.
Many of the mainline religions also fit into one or another of the other categories. They are not so ex-treme in character and they often do have a good sense of humor. On the religious stage the mainline religions seem to be losing ground. Some of our stronger allies can be found in this group.
There is a voice from a more humanistic spirituality as well. Perhaps it’s a voice more in common with some of our own. It says, “We’re all in this together. Others are as deserving of the same respect and justice that I want for myself.” Some will say that such a message is ethical and not religious. Well it is ethical, and yet I don’t think that it could be more religious. If we are to consider the possibility that we’re all of the same inherent value, we have to ask – what is the source of that value? That’s a very religious question. 19th Century Unitarian minister William Channing Gannet said that, “Ethics thought out is religious thought. Ethics felt out is religious feeling. And ethics lived out is the religious life.”
So we have all of these various voices, that are part of our cultural dialogue, offering conflicting values, resulting in a largely ambivalent world where people sort of care but mostly don’t. We tend to care when our justice is impinged upon and are less concerned when injustice is incurred by others, perhaps by others whom we might deem as less important or less saved than ourselves.
An interesting e-mail was received by the church while I was away on sabbatical. No one seems to know quite how, but somehow this e-mail managed to be sent out over the congregation’s e-mail list-serve. It might be the case that several of you saw it at the same time that I did.
The note was from someone who had become a part of the congregation about 2 ½ years ago. She’d been very comfortable with activities and worship here up until September 11th two years ago. After that she described that for the rest of the year it was as though September 11th was the most important thing on our minds. We did not, she thought, focus enough on what it means to be a church or spiritual community. We were more concerned, she said, with gathering aid for the Afghan people.
I would that say that her description of what was going on here was perfectly accurate, but that her as-sessment of it was off the mark. My assessment would be that because September 11th had become a huge and ugly piece of reality in the middle of our lives, we had no alternative, if we were to maintain spiritual integrity, but to learn as a community how to incorporate that reality into our lives so that we could move forward in living out our principles and values in response to those events.
I often tell folks who ask about us that Unitarian Universalism isn’t for everyone. I hope that the woman who wrote the e-mail has been able to find a new spiritual community that is more in keeping with her sensibilities. At the same time I’ll hope that her new community will find a more acceptable way to challenge some of her assumptions. If someone wants to be shielded from the world in order to explore the Spirit, this church, this community is a place where we often fail to provide a very adequate shield. And I’m proud to say that we come by that deficiency honestly. We come from a long line and a strong tradition of connecting what it means to be religious with social justice—the promotion of the kingdom come.
The natural world around us tells us that we are all interdependently connected and so cooperatively re-sponsible – in thought and in action – for one another and for the planet. The ancient scriptures we draw from including Psalms and Proverbs and Isaiah direct us to the religious life where justice is more dear even than sacrifice. From the book of Matthew we are taught that to do justice for the least of us is to give honor to the highest of all.
• In 1805 one of the fathers of Universalism, Hosea Ballou, wrote in his, Treatise on Atonement, “… A man acting for his own happiness, seeks it…knowing that his own happiness is connected with the happiness of all his fellow man, which induces him to do justly and mercifully with all men…” • Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson instructed Unitarian minister’s in 1838 through his famous Har-vard Divinity school graduation address to hold up and observe the events of the day through the light of religious principle. • Speaking on the topic of salvation, our Unitarian forbear Theodore Parker declared in 1844, “We Americans can save ourselves only if we make such a division…of the earth and its fruits that none consume themselves in luxury [and] none waste away in poverty.”
From the earliest days of our tradition and even before, our Unitarian Universalist way in religion has compelled us to include in our sense of spiritual well-being a linkage with the world around us and with all of creation in it. It has insisted, whether we believe in some conception of a God or whether we do not believe in such a conception, that the religious life is one that keeps us engaged in the here and now of this world—every bit as much as it promotes individual thought and freedom of conscience. Spiritual growth in our tradition is as tied to social justice as it is to a sense of inner peace and oneness. It takes these two hands—one of them reaching to the sacred within, the other reaching toward the sacred with-out – to accommodate the whole, to promote a balance.
You may be wondering, why this message today? Why this topic for my first sermon after the long hia-tus of my sabbatical?
The answer is this – during the months of my absence the world around us has, I believe, taken enormous steps in the opposite direction of our religious values. Fear has replaced faith as the common cur-rency of international and even national affairs. Our once unquestionable value in all human life seems to have been replaced with a stronger emphasis on the value of some individuals, and a greater emphasis as well on the value of salable resources. There seems to have been a considerable trade-off, exchang-ing much of what was left of those less commercial but larger values of Americana, for the cheaper and more tawdry values of blind and unquestioning patriotism.
When religion concentrates solely on self-gain and individual, personal salvation, such things can hap-pen. When spirituality is about isolation instead of immersion, such things can happen. When the high priest claims to be the sole vehicle for mediation between the gods and humanity, such things can hap-pen. When we feel for any reason that God has blessed us with favor over others, regardless of their be-liefs, or color of skin or ancestry, such things can happen.
We do not come for ether. We come to find our place among the many others gathered. For our sacred circle is but a threshold to that larger circle that is Life, and that holds us all and wants for us all and waits for us all to hold one another.
What is the role of community in all of this? The world may be ambivalent about all that has come to pass, but we cannot be. The integrity of our very souls depends upon our ability to respond to the world around us—and those in it—in a way that promotes what is most divine: the possibilities of goodness and justice and Life. And the way things are looking, the world is depending upon us.
We need to be in community to walk together. We need one another for comfort and for solace. We need one another for strength and for encouragement. We need one another to achieve justice. We need one another so that we will not have need to turn to ether. We need to be with one another in commu-nity in order to help find our way toward holiness.
We do not come for ether to this sacred circle to this gathering of souls but to be enlivened in the search for oneness, in the search for peace, in the search for hope.
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