Inviting the Spirit

Revs. David and Beverly Bumbaugh
The Unitarian Church in Summit
Sept. 20, 1998

Something interesting has been happening of late in the cultural life of this nation. Everywhere there is a clear and increasing interest in religion. Bookstores, television programs, commentators, social scientists have all begun to recognize the fact that the religious impulse is exerting itself once more in the public arena. Nor is it only the religious right, with its determination to use the political process to further narrow, sectarian goals that is responsible for this resurgence of interest in religion. All across the spectrum -- from pop culture to high culture -- religion has re-emerged as a strong force in our corporate life.

In many ways, this is not surprising. Periodically, throughout the history of European experience in America, there have been religious awakenings which have marked critical moments in our social development. The first of these occurred in 1743, when Jonathan Edwards, preaching in Northampton, Mass., inaugurated what is called "the Great Awakening." That religious revival, which swept out of New England and engulfed the English colonies, is sometimes recognized as the beginning of our sense of ourselves as a people, as our first truly national experience. That revival also spun off vastly diverse religious consequences; for the Great Awakening not only reinvigorated conservative and orthodox Christianity, it also called into being a self- conscious liberal religious response which, in time, would produce Unitarianism and Universalism. From that 18th-century beginning to the present moment, there have been repeated occasions of religious renewal, followed by periods of quiescence and consolidation.

It is also true that we are confronting a mystical moment in Western history -- the turning of a millennium. Historically, Western culture has always had a fascination with years that end in two zeros, and it has exhibited truly bizarre behavior when the year ends with three zeros. Rationally, we know that this dividing up of the seamless robe of time is highly arbitrary, a fully human conceit. (In fact, we can't even agree about when the millennium begins -- January 2000 or January 2001.) But we cannot escape the sense that a momentous change is upon us. The motion picture industry is treating us to a rash of movies focused on cosmic catastrophe; the scientific community has discovered deadly dangers pervading the galaxy; computer experts and survivalists warn of catastrophic consequences when our computers fail us as the calendar turns the century. Inevitably, a year which marks a turn into a new millennium stirs up in us deep and challenging questions concerning the nature of the human venture through time and the meaning of our sojourn here on this small planet spinning through the vastness of space. Historically, the approach of a new millennium has stirred up our deepest hopes and our darkest fears and often has resulted in irrational and destructive behaviors.

And so, it is not out of keeping with our character as a people, or our location in time, that we are witnessing a strong resurgence of religious expression and concern throughout the culture. However, there are elements in this most recent awakening which seem remarkable even by our own historical standards. These elements range from the omnipresent advertisements for "The Psychic Hotline" on television, inviting viewers to engage the prodigious powers of psychics and mediums by means of the telephone, to a news report this summer in which we were advised that a number of major U.S. corporations, among them Lucent Technologies, had decided that in order to increase employee satisfaction and efficiency, management would bring into the workplace programs on spirituality, in an effort to develop among the employees a deepened sense of the meaningfulness of their work.

It seems to me that several things are obvious as we confront this strange situation. First of all, as the century draws to a close, there is an inchoate sense of dissatisfaction, especially among those who have profited most from our materialistic, consumer culture.

Having conquered the world of things, having filled our homes and our offices and our lives full to overflowing with the goods and services offered by the richest, most profligate culture in the history of the world, many of us find ourselves wondering whether this is all we can expect from life. With our closets jammed full of clothes we seldom wear; with our shelves overflowing with books we seldom read and recordings to which we no longer listen and videos we haven't time to watch; with our homes filled with furnishings and our attics and basements bulging with treasures we no longer love; as we give things away in order to have room to buy more, and find little joy or satisfaction in all that we have acquired, some of us are driven at last to question the wisdom of mortgaging our lives to support the things we own and the things we might yet own. And yet, in a culture which defines success in terms of consumption, how else do we encounter meaning in our lives?

Deep within many of us, there is an ill-formed yearning for a sense of purpose and direction and meaning which all our material success has failed to satisfy. Deep within many of us is a homesickness for a world in which all our busy-ness is rooted in an unshakable sense of vocation, of filling a meaningful role in the human venture through time and space.

The second thing that is true is that there is a vast cohort of people who see in this deep dissatisfaction an opportunity for power and profit and who stand ready to respond in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It is not surprising, I suppose, that given a culture which has a genius for turning every human yearning into a profitable commodity, we should find ourselves in the midst of a spirituality boom. Nonetheless, I remain disappointed at the pervasiveness of this tendency to transform the genuine human quest for meaning into a commodity to be sold and used.

Nor is this tendency limited to the proprietors and practitioners of the Psychic Hotline, or the televangelists, or corporations like Lucent Technologies. It is also present in the thinking of even main-line religious communities like our own, who, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, are busy plotting strategies for turning this spiritual hunger to their own advantage. The burning religious question of our time is no longer what is truth and how may we serve it, but rather, how can we package ourselves to benefit from the spirituality movement. When the spirit becomes a commodity before we are even able to define what it is, when Lucent Technologies decides that more spirituality in the workplace is just the thing that is needed to improve employee morale and efficiency -- and, incidentally, the bottom line -- it is clear that the time has come to rid the temple of the money changers and begin to think a little more clearly about the nature of this fundamental yearning so obvious throughout our society, what it is and what it is not.

* * * * *

The language we use is so important and rich that my tendency is always to check out where the words we employ have come from. Spirit, for instance, is based in Latin as well as in Greek and Hebrew on the words for "breath." Spirit, then, comes to mean "breath of life." Playing about with that notion some time ago, I came up with five spirit words which, I submit, encompass the career of human beings -- as well as outlining some of the lesser adventures within the human career. The words evoking the process of spiritual development are: (1) Respiration; (2) Aspiration; (3) Perspiration; (4) Inspiration; (5) Expiration.

We leave the womb of complete nourishment and muted sound only to enter the world suddenly needing to breathe. And that basic process of breath in, breath out continues for a lifetime. Body and mind and the spirit that we posit as that which integrates them are dependent on the ongoing process of respiration -- Respiration, which, with its prefix meaning "back or again," thus signifying the constant tide of breathing in and breathing out, is first and fundamental to our very existence. Many, if not most, meditative disciplines focus on breathing, on being so present to our breathing that it seems to breathe us!

Aspiration comes next. Meaning to exhale, or breathe toward, in the spiritual career it stands for the will to live, the reaching forward toward growth and development. As infants, fed, cared for, played with, stimulated, we are eager to grow and develop; the few infants who languish due to inattention, abuse, illness are said to have succumbed to "a failure to thrive." Aspiration, then, recognized or not, is that air-filled balloon of an attitude that keeps us going, living, thriving.

Perspiration may be the most difficult for a lot of us to encompass as part of the spiritual process, since it seems to have the least romance or inspiriting quality for enriching our lives. But this "breathing out or through," this sweating it out, this working through what tasks are at hand is an inevitable and necessary part of the journey toward integration or wholeness. The person who invented TANSTAFL (or There Ain't No Such Thing As Free Lunch!) -- I think it was Isaac Asimov -- not only had fund drives, but also the very basics of human existence in mind.

A story from the Sufi tradition tells of a man whose aspiration was to enlarge his spiritual understanding through study with a special teacher. So he went to live with that teaching Master, only to be left in charge of the house four days later when the Master set off on a three-year journey. The would-be student was, of course, confused and agitated, but he proceeded to take care of the house 'til the Master's return. Years later, he himself had become a teaching Master. Meditating in solitude or even learning at the feet of a teacher constitute but segments of the path to spiritual wholeness.

Inspiration, from the Latin for breathing in, has come to mean a breathing or infusion into the mind or soul. Now we are apparently in a different mode of being when what is happening seems less dependent on our will and activity and more in the nature of a gift. Sometimes the current notion of spirituality involves the expectation that this fourth segment of the process may be bought or coerced, earned through proper techniques and exercises. From all I have been able to glean about inspiration, there is more of "letting it be" or "sleeping on it" -- of trusting in the fruits of respiration, aspiration and perspiration working together to create within us new understanding, new insight, new direction and wider development than we had otherwise been able to envision or encompass.

Expiration, breathing out, signifies the death, the close, the coming to an end which is the natural lot of each of us. As individual human beings- in-process, we die leaving our gifts and stumbling blocks for others to encounter along the way. The finality of expiration is just that for the individual. And, as I mentioned earlier, there are adventures within each of our Great Adventures which also can be characterized by the five spirit words so that the integration of the various phases of our lives may also be seen to have both beginning and end, with no little aspiration, perspiration and inspiration involved along the way.

Having looked at human being from the point of view of the five spirit words, I would define spirituality as our given career on the way to realizing the interconnectedness of everything -- a realization that encompasses the totality of mind and body. This integration, this wholeness we may grasp and lose many times during our lifetimes, but from my Unitarian Universalist perspective, I believe with Henry Nelson Wieman that our responsibility is to aspire and perspire in setting up the conditions which allow the creative process, the inspiration, to infuse our beings. Moreover, I believe that this is a process in which we participate sometimes mindfully, sometimes not.

There is a story I read some years back which comes to my mind whenever the subject of spirituality comes up. It was related by Bob Samples in his book The Metaphoric Mind. He tells of the woman who, looking out the window one evening while washing the supper dishes, suddenly realized, immediately knew ALL IS ONE. Drying her hands, she went to the parlor to tell her family of her inspiration. Their response was to tell her she needed rest. Her insistence eventuated in her being put first under psychiatric observation, then in commitment to an institution for several months. Later, having moved from Kansas to California, she was listening to a call-in radio program requesting stories of experiences of higher levels of consciousness or cosmic awareness and, after a long dearth of phone activity, she called in first with her story, thus freeing many others to admit to similarly transcendent experiences.

The Sufis, those spiritual geniuses from the realm of Islam, often recognized with their stories that not all individuals are necessarily at the same place on the journey and so there is frequent danger of being misunderstood and negatively dealt with when one proclaims one's insight and inspiration. When there are those who are ready and receptive, however, there is a different response. The spiritual process is no sappy, happy-go-lucky, bliss-ninny trek toward earning the ability to levitate or to deal better with stress in the office and at home. Rather it entrains the necessities of life: solitude and interaction, danger and dancing, sadness and humor, ignorance and learning, beginnings and ends.

Inviting the Spirit requires an ascetic process including everything from special meditations and physical exercises to seeing to the affairs of the house -- hoeing the garden, planting the trees, washing the dishes, doing the laundry, attending to the work of the world. They constitute the perspiration parts of the process that allows -- or, better, invites -- the inspiration of the intuitive recognition of the unity of the universe and our integration and centeredness within that unity. What we do with our inspiration most likely constitutes the beginning of a new journey, a new process, until that day when we reach our own expiration date.

* * * * *

In many ways, I find the quest for spirituality and the quest for happiness to be similar in structure. I have never learned how to be happy; I have never been able to make myself happy; and certainly, I have never been able to purchase happiness. Happiness just comes to me, most often as a consequence of some other activity -- living well and richly in community with others, acquitting responsibilities with skill, meeting challenges with integrity and discipline, owning my failures and lapses, accepting and living with disappointments. Suddenly, I discover happiness -- a gift that comes, not at my bidding, but because intentionally or unintentionally, I have created the conditions which allow it to emerge.

I submit to you that spirituality, a sense of being contained within the wholeness of life, is a similar experience. That sense of cosmic belonging, of wholeness and completeness which whispers in our inner ear the reassuring word that our lives have meaning and purpose, that we are children of a great universal process moving through time and space, that our existence does matter even though we may not understand how or why, is not something we can create or demand or control. Jewish-Christian scriptures insist that the "spirit bloweth where it listeth." It comes upon us as a consequence of our living our lives with integrity, and with passion and with discipline and with openness to the world and to each other. It comes upon us as a gift for a life well lived. We can create the conditions which invite the spirit, but we cannot command the spirit. The task of religion, then, is not to cheapen the spiritual by making it a commodity, but rather to remind us that there is this other dimension to life and that it comes not at our bidding, but at our invitation.

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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