Sermons

'Moments of Clarity: Seeking Spiritual Fitness'

Our 19th Century transcendentalist and Unitarian pioneer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Harvard Divinity School address said:

I think it would be fair to define Emerson's idea of God as the cause of being. So, however you might call that which you consider to be the cause of being, what Emerson would encourage you to do is to love that cause, without anything coming between it and you. He would warn you not to let yourself be puffed up by that cause, but instead to allow your relationship with it to aid you in a harmonious relationship with the world a round you.

Our relationships with the cause of being and with all that is, provide about as good a definition of spirituality as I've found. Spirituality is the essence of our relationships within the intimate and the ultimate spheres of our lives. Conscious or appathetic denial of our relationships with the cause of being and with the world around us though, is as good a definition of evil as I have found.

A meaningful life of integrity is one that requires that we pay attention to our most basic relationships. Spiritual discipline is our effort to be in harmony, to work toward our spiritual fitness. Spiritual fitness can lead to moments of clarity. But how can we know if we are spiritually fit? How can we know if our moments of clarity are not moments of delusion? How can we know if our intensions of good are not evil? Sometimes the answers are obvious; sometimes they’re not.

Let me share an experience. Last week our president, Ruth Karr, lit a candle in appreciation for my willingness to forego my sabbatical during what may prove to be a difficult year in the aftermath of September 11th. While it is nice to be thanked, I would want you to know that I didn't make that choice based on what I thought might be a good idea. I made it based on what I knew to be right. It was really the only thing I could do.

Back on the evening of Wednesday, September 12th, I went to the Memorial Service that was held in the amphitheater over at the high school. Judy Tomlinson and several members of our congregation were there including a number of our youth. Following the ceremony, I had a chance to talk with some of you. We were all still pretty numb; it was just the day after the attacks. My last conversation was with some of our teens that were struggling to make some sense of it all.

My experience that night was that I felt grateful that I’d been able to be there. People allowed me make a difference. I had a sense of renewed appreciation for ministry that evening and for its power to provide comfort. You can't imagine the gratitude I felt, and that I often feel, for being allowed to play a part in providing comfort.

As I walked away from the group of teens that evening, and toward the growing darkness of the night, I experienced an even deeper, more profound moment of clarity. I hadn't been thinking about my sabbatical at all, but what occurred at that moment was the wholehearted sense that I belonged here with all of you, throughout this difficult time. I could see it; I could feel it clearly. The idea of sabbatical, or being anywhere else, was incongruous with my understanding of my current call to ministry here in Montclair.

You could say that I had a religious experience. Everything that I knew about the world, everything I was learning about the world, everything that I understood to be good and true, came together in that moment in what the Unitarian, Process Theologian, Henry Nelson Wieman, referred to as a revelation. Revelation, as defined by Wieman, is the experience of surety that occurs when the obstacles which often hinder our vision part, and we are able to see deeply into the actuality of things. Everything that we know lines up to provide us with a keen sense of awareness.

I think we've all experienced such moments of revelation or clarity, or whatever we might want to call them, when there has been no mediator or veil between the truth and ourselves. Or have we? Emerson also said,

We know that there can be errors. You have to appreciate Emerson’s confidence, though. But there are others who speak with great confidence, and also from religious conviction.

So, consider another scenario. Mr. Osama bin Laden, perhaps deep and prayer, experiences a call to jihad. In the name of Allah, he must destroy the great Western devils, the infidels that so imperialistically have undermined his vision of an Islamic nation. Whatever he is able to do to this end of destroying America, it is his duty to do.

Who is to say that my experience is a religious one and that Osama bin Laden’s is not? "If we are to distinguish the valid from the invalid…some standard more objective than that of an intense emotional feeling is required," says Duncan Howlett. One tendency we might have is to throw them both out and claim that religious experience is nonexistent, and that it can even be dangerous. I think such a claim is like the drug, Prozac. It is intended to protect us from both the highs and the lows of our existence. We don’t need to throw away the idea of faith simply because there are those who would abuse it.

I wasn't always, but now I am more and more convinced that there is both good and evil. It’s not all relative. They both exist within each of us. And they exist on a much larger scale worldwide. Goodness promotes the possibilities for the vitality of harmonious relationships in our lives and in the universe; evil denies them. When evil is conducted in the name of goodness, as it most often it is, it is most difficult to discern, especially by its promoters, intense emotional feeling not withstanding.

Emerson answers his question, "How do you know it is truth," with the answer, "We know the truth when we see it…as we know when we are awake that we are awake."

Easily said, but how do we know? In our "Building Your Own Theology" class, we spend an evening wrestling with the question, "How do we know what we know?" There is a way to answer this question – that is, as long as you are willing to accept that knowing and believing are a part of the same continuum. The classes invariably come up with that same conclusion–that knowing and believing are separated only by our degree of certainty.

How do we know? We know through any number of sources. We know through intuition and reason. We know through science and scientific investigation. We know from revelation, or through God. We know through our traditions of religious scripture and the traditions of our religious communities. We know from others, and from our own personal experience. We know through nature and from the world around us.

We grant authority to those sources of knowing that provide us with the greatest sense of continuity and with the greatest meaning for our lives. And then, through them, we know, or we believe, what we have learned. What we accept from our authorities is our truth.

As Unitarian Universalists, we tend to rely heavily on reason is a source of truth. William Ellery Channing wrote:

Why does Channing warn that reason is accompanied by danger? It is because, if we accept and adopt reason or any other single source of authority as the sole source for it, if we accept any rigidly limited number of sources as paramount over other, even greater numbers of valid competing sources, we are most likely turning a blind eye to truth and to the realities of our world.

We do have a rational nature. We also have an intuitive nature. Our task in the interest of goodness is to find a balance in which truth is validated harmoniously through many sources. Our task is to promote goodness, not for our own gain, not for the gain of our own tribe, our own clan, or even our own country, but our task is to promote the greatest common good for all.

Osama bin Laden and those like him hold religious truths that cannot stand up to any test of breadth or balance. They claim their truth on the basis of religious tradition, but the truth they claim is not a truth of Islam. It is a truth shared only by a zealous, self-serving few whose goodness or sense of God is narrowly limited, and that cannot withstand the multitude of other authorities that exist in our world — including reason, including intuition, including nature, including science. The terrorists have not found truth; they have turned their backs on it. That is no cause for us to do the same. We needn’t reject the possibility of truth because others have used it falsely.

As Unitarian Universalists, we say that we affirm and promote all religions of the world. We draw on them as sources for our inspiration. But there is a limit to that acceptance. We accept only the parts of those religions that are expansive, that promote the possibilities of goodness for everyone. We cannot affirm and promote that which itself fails to affirm and promote all people. There are no Chosen People.

It’s easy enough to recognize the failings of one’s enemies, and too easy to pass judgment on their spiritual flaws. In doing so, we would do well to remember our own many sources of authority so that we don't dismiss them, and with them what really matters to us. And if we are going to observe the failings of others, we will need to apply the same standards to ourselves.

So we need to ask ourselves, what about our own spiritual fitness? What about our own efforts at spiritual discipline, so that day by day, event by life event, we are doing our best to look at the larger picture, to draw from the wider sources, to discern the deeper truths?

Spiritual fitness is about recognizing and negotiating life’s realities as they present themselves to us. It is about pursuing and accepting knowledge, not about denying it. Spiritual fitness is about establishing and maintaining a balance of reason in our faith. Faith is based in what is, and it enables us to reach toward what yet can be. It is about serving the common good. It will always be something less than truth that encourages us to promote anything smaller than the greater good.

We are not, like Osama bin Laden, false prophets of destruction. We are everyday people, trying to make our way as best we can. Evil exists in our world, and even though we are not strangers to it, we must do our best not to be participants in it. To do that, we must be disciplined in our efforts toward spiritual fitness.

To that end, even in the midst of false prophets and terrorists, we need to dig deep and gather wide in order to discern our truth. And when we find our truth in harmony with love, we will know that we have found some degree of fitness. We will know that our intentions for good do not serve the purposes of evil.

We cannot, without guilt and disgrace, stop where we are. The past and the present call us to advance. Let what we have gained be an impulse to something higher. Our nature is too great to be crushed. If we will, we can rise. No power in society, no power in the world, no hardship in our condition, can depress us, can keep us down, in knowledge, in power, in virtue, in influence, except by our own consent.

Let us be ready to look both life and death in the face and answer with integrity, that we are ready to serve the possibilities of goodness; we are ready to do what is next. We are ready to do what we must.