Readings:
In 1918, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the spiritual movement known as Anthroposophy, wrote what he called “A Calendar of the Soul,” relating our internal world to the outer. Here is his verse for early September:
There dims in damp autumnal air
The senses’ luring magic;
The light’s revealing radiance
Is dulled by hazy veils of mist.
In distances around me I can see
The autumn’s winter sleep;
The summer that is spent
Has given itself to me.
Gertrude Reif Hughes, writing in Orion magazine (Autumn 1999) about Steiner’s perceptions of autumn, writes:
Maybe it’s because I’m an academic, or maybe it’s the famous ability of mortality to concentrate the human mind -- or perhaps it’s just a personal idiosyncrasy -- but I know that I feel a clearer connection between my own inner life and that of the planet in the autumn than at any other time of year. The waning light poses a challenge. Will I be able to compensate for the growing cold and warm to my tasks? Am I ready? Fall asks something of me. Spring, whether because it’s so beautiful or, for a teacher, so impossibly burdensome, overwhelms me every year. But the fall, with all its warnings and wanings, stirs me to take initiative, make a contribution, find my own powers and use them. Fall and winter open a space for me to fill.
* * * * *
Is it not a privilege to be incarnating
at a time when the stakes are really high,
at a time when everything we have learned about
inter-connectedness, about trust, about courage,
can be put to the test?
-- Joanna Macy,quoted by Gillis Glendinning in
Off the Map
* * * * *
We look with uncertainty
Beyond the old choices for
Clear-cut answers
to a softer, more permeable aliveness
Which is every moment
At the brink of death:
For something new is being born in us
If we but let it.
We stand at a new doorway,
Awaiting that which comes …
Daring to be human creatures.
Vulnerable to the beauty of existence.
Learning to love.
-- Anne Hillman
* * * * *
Preface:
It has been four months since I completed my pastoral ministry with you, on June 30, and a couple of months since I have had the pleasure of being a guest speaker.
It feels good to be back.
I would be here more often were it not for the fact that I speak about twice a month at other UU congregations, one at our fellowship in Lakeland and the other at the Hollis Unitarian Congregation in Queens.
As many of you may know, I am a member of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, and have been for about 25 years. And so I try to attend there once in a while.
Yet something often draws me here. Originally it was to listen to David and Beverly, classmates of mine in theological school, and now to hear Kim, and to participate in your worship service.
Is it possible to have an original and an adoptive relationship with a UU congregation? If so, I have adopted you and here is where I feel adopted!
During my six months of pastoral ministry here, I got to know many of you. It is a great pleasure to be speaking to you once again, and to receive your comments and opinions.
I would like to apologize to any of you who have come this second Sunday to hear me.
I suppose it is a characteristic of being in the interconnected web that a good turn sometimes has deleterious side effects. As was announced in last month’s News and Views, I was scheduled to speak here last Sunday. About three weeks ago, Kim called to ask me if I might be able to postpone my talk for one week, so that he would be able to be away this week.
I was happy to accede to Kim’s request, but I met several people last Sunday who were surprised to find out that who they expected to be speaking was not. Though this change was announced in the order of service two weeks ago, anyone not at church that Sunday might not have known.
I am honored that some of you respond to my remarks, and I apologize to you for misplaced expectations.
* * * * *
Sermon:
Almost all animals have a sense of territory and know a place they call home. Homing pigeons are, of course, the dramatic example. When released far from their place of origin, they find their way -- sometimes over hundreds of miles -- back to their roost. Monarch butterflies return each year to winter in the same spot in Mexico. By the way, they pass through Sandy Hook, N.J., where I had hoped to visit them this fall. This January I hope to visit the spot of their journey’s end in Mexico.
When I was little, I had a cocker spaniel that I loved very much. However, my father did not favor him because he tended to roam. So in a punishment ironically fitting Red Sailor’s “crime,” my father crated him into the car, and carried him seven miles out into the country and delivered him to another family. But though my dog was wont to roam, he would always return. Three times he found his way back across the mountains to our home. Each time he arrived, he was once again deported. I don’t know what happened to him. Perhaps he finally gave up hope of being taken in.
Home, as has been said by Robert Frost, is the place where “when you go there they have to take you in.” “Home,” another has said, “is where the heart is.”
The ultimate object of religion is to help us find a home in the universe. The Latin roots of the word “religion” combine the prefix re, meaning “back,” plus ligare, meaning “to bind together.” And so we have “religion” as the act of returning to our togetherness. Religious success is a kind of homecoming.
You might say that religion arises from a kind of homesickness. It is the human predicament to experience separation and to long for reunion. We are all out of Eden.
I.
I grew up in a town that I felt was Eden. My mother considered it to be the “sacred” garden of Virginia, and Virginia she considered the “holy land” of America.
When we would return from a trip and crested the hill from which we got the first return view of Charlottesville, my mother would exclaim that there was never a place so beautiful, thus reinforcing the Garden of Eden myth in my being.
In this place, it was considered reasonable that a young Southern gentleman might travel the world for experience, even visit for a time in the North. But, having seen the rest of the world, he would then, of course, come to his senses, return to Charlottesville and settle in where he belonged.
Alas, I never returned.
In order to detach from the influence of my family, I matriculated at Davidson College, N.C.
Davidson, being a Presbyterian school, required its students to take Bible courses. The surprise for me was that they were taught in scholarly fashion. The professors’ lectures served up for me hitherto forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. I learned about conflicting versions of Bible stories, that Christian scripture was not necessarily historical, that it was highly imaginative, metaphorical, and that it was a product of diverse influences.
My hunger for knowledge carried me outside the Eden Garden of my innocence.
Soon I began attending services at a Unitarian church in nearby Charlotte, N.C.
About this time, in nearby Greensboro, N.C., the first sit-ins occurred at the Woolworth lunch counter. Their reverberations caused me to question the ethics of racism and other forms of cultural oppression, including economic.
Now I was eating as well from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Following college, I entered the Unitarian Universalist Meadville Theological School at the University of Chicago.
As my ties with traditional Christianity weakened, I found myself going back in time several thousand years before the Christian era, to Judaism, to the myth of the Exodus, and a vision of a Promised Land.
I began to build a faith in humankind’s ability to create a “promised land,” a better world in the future with social and economic equality. The ‘60s supported this myth.
In the midst of their fervor, I became minister of the Universalist Church in North Weymouth, Mass. Those of us who were part of “the movement,” as it was then called, made reforms in civil rights, education, economics, and worked for the equality of women and for peace. We believed that we were bringing in the Messianic Age, the New Age of Aquarius.
The assassinations, first of JFK and finally Malcolm X, silenced this optimism. The spirit of the early ‘70s regressed into the self-interest of the ‘80s, and the vision and optimism of the previous, oh-so-short-lived but vital era receded.
II.
When I have become discouraged with social transformation, I have always returned to the natural world for healing. Even at Davidson, whenever I was discouraged, I would walk in the woods around the college, and there amidst pine and oak and meadow flowers, I would find renewal.
Now I found myself looking for inspiration back further than the myths of Judaism to the period some 50,000 to 10,000 years before the development of Western civilization, to the natural interrelated world of indigenous peoples.
Nature’s vitality, variability, the eternal return of the seasons, the permanence of mountains and rocks serve to place human exigencies in a healing context. The expanse of the star-lit heavens, the enveloping wilderness, the vastness of the desert help us to place ourselves within a larger perspective.
The contemporary poet Mary Oliver describes this sense of transcendence in a passage quoted in our hymnbook. She says:
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine ... Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairie and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again...”
Alas, the wild geese are no longer all heading home. Many are remaining in the schoolyard across my street, where every morning the custodian goes out onto the lawn and fires off a siren rocket to scare the yuppie geese into someone else’s back yard. There they ensconce themselves in the artificial comfort we have made for them, in corporate parks and golf courses, and no longer return to their seasonal home.
Neither is the clean blue air as clean or blue. The seven sisters of the Pleiades, for thousands of years subject of myths and legends, are now no longer all visible in the night sky. The weather person now routinely lists days when it is hazardous to go out of doors. Much of the rain that falls carries acid; it has killed life in two-thirds of the Catskill lakes. Our aquifers are drying up. And the rays of the sun grow more fearsome.
III.
In times of duress, when aspects of the external world are not supportive, many of us turn to the inner world. Finally we must all turn to the world within to verify our experience. In the inner world, there is a universe every bit as large as in the outer and every bit as marvelous and mysterious. The practices of meditation, psychological exploration and deep reflection have become more significant to me in recent years.
There are times when this inner world is the only one over which we can have influence, or from which we can draw nurturance. I think of Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years, drawing on his inner strength to transform his captors. I think of Jesus and the Buddha and all those other heroes and heroines of the spiritual life. But I think not only of heroes and heroines, but of those of you here who have been beset by challenge -- by disability, by loss, by lack of acceptance -- and have discovered sources of faith and hope within.
Access to these inner places may be no more guaranteed than the hegemony of Christianity, the success of political and economic reform or the sanctuaries of nature. Our preoccupation with the accumulation of information threatens our connection to inner quiet. The soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may be nearer than we imagine. The reverences of our mind may end up forfeited to the utilitarian circuitry of artificial intelligence.
Just as the configurations of land and sea which guide the hawks home in winter are being obscured by development, so the flyways of our spirit have lost assurance and definition. The monarch butterflies are losing their way due to weakness from the absorption of genetically engineered corn.
Yet the memory of home may be more deeply embedded than we know. My colleague Al Boyce, minister at the Unitarian Church of Plainfield, is fond of quoting this quatrain:
“Something within me that holdeth the reins,
Something within me that banishes pain,
Something within me I cannot explain.
All that I know there is something within.”
This “something” may be enfolded in the quantum level of matter.
Gary E.R. Schwartz and Linda G.S. Rusek of the Department of Psychology at the
University of Arizona, writing in a recent edition of the journal of the Center for
Frontier Sciences, write of the hypothesis that
... once hydrogen and oxygen have interacted recurrently as H20, if hydrogen and oxygen are subsequently separated, some version of their history as H20 will be retained with the hydrogen and oxygen...” (p.28, Fall 1998, Vol. 7, No. 2).
Such a “memory” is being proposed by some chemists to explain the success of homeopathy. In quantum mechanics, Bell’s theorem demonstrates that if one of two particles that are split from one another at any distance, even as far as between Earth and moon, changes its charge, the other will change at exactly the same instant, with no lapse in time.
IV.
Since each us arose from a single zygote, and the energy of the zygote is ultimately the result of the expansion of that single hydrogen atom that spawned our universe, it does seem natural to me that we retain an intimation of immortality ... immortality in the sense of being indissolvable from the whole.
In religion, we often speak the word “atonement,” usually implying amends, expiation or reparation. But we have, I think, misplaced the accent. We might more accurately speak of “at-one-ment.” We are all of this oneness already. There is no need for expiation.
Within us there remains the spark of original creation. When we speak of life and of humankind, we must know we are part of that which was here before we were born and will continue to be after we are gone.
Whatever the nature of life beyond this, this one thing we know: Nothing is ever separated from the universe. To the universe there is no outside, inside, before, after, beginning, end, past or present. Forms continually change, appearances arrive and fly away, but the universe continues; and its orbital arms encircle all of us and contain each of us.
There remains in me a longing embedded somewhere in this universe to make it my home, and this longing will not let me go. Its very mystery motivates my pursuit. I cherish this longing. Unlike the geese in my yard, I do not want to be seduced by contemporary comfort to forget my spirit’s wildness.
I follow this longing, always leaving home and discovering somewhere different. Something moves me ever outwards. Perhaps I live with a memory, perhaps an anticipation. My longing gives me hope.
I trust in three maps: (1) There is a reality larger and more fundamental and more connected than the one in which I mostly live. (2) We are naturally drawn toward this reality, though we are at the same time fearful of it, because it exceeds our limits. (3) We come to know this reality as we open fully to the experience of each moment - overreliance upon holy lands, histories and futures may actually divert us from this immediate experience. In fact, the failure of our attachments to land, ideal or myth may enhance our ability to be immediately open.
I am optimistic that we may soon discover the explanation of how homing pigeons find their roost and monarch butterflies their nest. Discovering the means will further attest to our interconnectedness, and to the embeddedness of these longings.
I live much of my life in diaspora, but I am headed home.
I seem to be constantly discovering a larger dwelling place beyond my presupposed property line.
I seem to have progressed from holy place, holy history, holy future through holy longing, to holy moment. I believe I am coming closer to holy everything.
Now I know where my home is. My hope is where the openness is. It is where the boundary of my anger softens into sadness, and the sadness opens to compassion and compassion then to peace. It is where the edges of race and politics and gender relax into one another, and I embrace humanity. It is where time stretches back all the way, and all the way forward. It is where the turbulence within me eases into a kind of inner joy.
My home is where the openness is. When I am open, I feel taken in.
I invite each of us, in the ways accessible in our own lives, to awaken to a new sense of openness in the time now beginning.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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