I know that this congregation, in recent years, has had the good fortune to hear another sermon about Rev. Davies and learn some specifics about the breadth of his astounding life and ministry. As you may remember, he was born in England, and became a Methodist minister, traveling here with his young wife to serve a Methodist congregation in Maine. In Maine he met a Unitarian minister whose friendship made him realize that he was a Unitarian too! (May all Unitarian Universalists be so glad to spread our good news -- who knows what new prophet we will discover?) With his family, Rev. Davies traveled to Summit to be the minister here for 11 years, and later was called to All Souls in Washington, D.C., where he became well known for his prophetic sermons and actions for civil rights, and for his intellectual and academic work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He died too young, at age 55, at the peak of his career. Though it was short, the breadth of his life is powerful. And the breadth of his preaching matter was impressive. Rev. Davies spoke to those gathered in this sanctuary and his later congregation in D.C. about the war, freedom, peace, hatred, evil, the presidency, and civil rights -- all issues that are stirring in our hearts powerfully today. His pastoral sermons delved into all the issues a human soul can face -- loneliness, desperation, materialism, sorrow, happiness, the appreciation of beauty, the longing for fulfillment.
However, when you read about 40 sermons back to back, you do begin to notice some major themes. Another professor of mine once said that just as there are only really about four plots in all of fiction, so too do ministers really only preach about four sermons. A rabbi friend of mine once noted to me how her congregation complained that she preached about God too much. "I don't know what I can do about that," she said, "even if I think I'm writing about something else, it all comes back to God for me -- and isn't that the point?" Among all of Davies' myriad topics, one theme jumped out at me again and again. So rather than revisiting the entire breadth of Davies' ministry, I wish to go into depth on this theme: the human being's search for the self, for community, and ultimately for God. And while I will share my own reflections, in many cases I will quote Davies at length, letting his words speak for themselves.
Lest I, like my rabbi friend, offend too many before me with my language of reverence, let me revisit the readings we heard today by Rev. Davies. Davies was and is understood to be a great mind, an amazing intellectual, but this did not mean that he believed the rational, scientific, skeptical brain was the peak of human understanding. In his sermon "What is Religious Experience?" he expressed his belief that all human understanding could be seen as a reaching toward the highest level of intellectual and emotional understanding -- a mystical, religious experience of the world. I quote Davies:
Our lives are full of precious qualities we do not altogether understand. Why then should anyone be afraid of the mystical level of human experience? ... Or hold their breath when a preacher is so rash and heedless as to speak the name of God? Is it really reckless to speak of a divine presence in life? Of a spirit that dwells equally in the uttermost and in the soul of [hu]man[s]? It does not seem reckless to me. It seems natural.2
Rev. Davies reveled in deep mystical experiences, a yearning of the soul to touch a larger spirit-force, which he was unafraid to name God. Unlike, I think I can safely say, his former Methodist compatriots, he was not speaking of a hellfire-and-damnation God, a spiteful God, a God made in human form, or an overly personal, small-minded God. God was a word that symbolized a thought that could not fully be explained.3 As we heard in the reading from his sermon "A Modern Catechism":
[... When we speak of God, we use] very approximate language but the best we can find. The thought of God is a thought the human mind cannot altogether think. It begins in experience but goes out to infinity.4
Davies was leading his congregation in a search for a religious experience that neither shunned the rational nor the mystical, a religious experience that embraced the intellectual and the emotional. He was leading a search party for a God whom we can never understand and yet whom we never stop seeking; a God who lives within everything that is strong and wise and beautiful, that which gives us courage in our daily battles. Davies used words like "the infinite," "the uttermost," "the Creative Spirit," but he used all of these words as synonyms for one simple syllable.
But this is mere definition, an attempt to ease our post-modern minds' discomfort with inadequate but necessary names for things that are essentially unnamable. But all right: God. I will be so rash and heedless as to speak that name. What is the meaning of human life -- what is it we are seeking in every desire of our heart? Again and again in the sermons of A. Powell Davies, every longing that our hearts and souls experience is the longing for communion with a universal spirit, a peace found in infinite love, an indescribable mystical experience we can, if we so wish, call God.
And yet, ever human, in our search for God we stumble again and again into human traps, material gratifications or social pretenses that only create a greater emptiness. One mental trap that Davies describes, which can keep us from facing life with integrity, is the anxious denial that we can somehow protect ourselves from harm through material securities. In these few weeks after the massive tsunami destroyed the homes and lives of thousands, we are reminded more clearly of the realities of our fragile lives on this planet. Davies preached in a sermon in 1942:
We are mistaken to ever imagine that we are secure. We live on a spinning ball, all but the outer crust of which is flame; we live on it subject to all its hazards and always will: these include earthquake and hurricane, tornado and eruption, storm and avalanche, fire and flood. We live our physical lives within our own precarious bodies subject to all the perils of disease, all the dangers of accident. There is nothing we can call our own which may not be taken away.5
I know many of us here gave to relief efforts, and were glad to do it. It felt good to help these strangers whose lives were suddenly full of sorrow. To interpret Davies, whenever our actions contribute in some way toward making a better world, whenever we live for something bigger than ourselves, we are helping to make "a world more full of the Divine Creative Spirit," and we are brought closer to God ourselves.
Why, then, does it often take a sudden tragedy like the tsunami for us to feel moved to live for something larger than ourselves? For example, as many people who died in the tsunami die of AIDS every month. We could always be giving of ourselves in large ways and small to help humankind, and in the process stretching our hearts enough to lose some of their littleness.
Our spiritual quest is often bogged down in our attempts to attain more worldly goals. In a sermon titled "How We Defeat Our Own Happiness," delivered in November 1938, Rev. Davies spoke to the congregation gathered here of how attaining a certain "standard of living" can cause us to lose a more important "standard of life." A standard of living speaks to an attempt to "keep up appearances," to use material possessions and other pretenses to present a pleasant but false face to the world. A standard of life is one where economic success is a far lower priority than staying true to a sense of integrity. But his warning about the need to keep up appearances did not stop at the material success of his parishioners.
He urged the people before him, gently but firmly (and, I might add, with some chutzpah!), to leave behind several social pretenses: the pretense of being a great intellect when you are in fact ignorant, the pretense of being of great importance to society when you would truly be missed by few, and the pretense of having a sparkling personality when in fact you are something of a bore. Ultimately, he says, these are all pretenses that can lead us to sacrificing our integrity of self and thus, our true chance at happiness. Give up pretense, he calls, and just be yourself. To quote the end of his sermon:
There is so much in modern life which tempts us to pretend; and the heavy burden of pretense is laid upon us. There is no happiness that way. Only misery after misery. ... Let our achievements be real, whatever they are. Let ourselves be real, whatever we are, and let us recognize that we are what we are and nothing else, just as good as we are and nothing better.
It is the beginning of salvation when a man or a woman says: "I make mistakes. I misunderstand. I am often stupid and prejudiced and even cruel. Sometimes I am selfish. Of many things, even of most, I am ignorant. The humblest peasant could teach me something. This is what I am. But I will not pretend otherwise. I will try to do better, but I will make no false claims. Whatever I am, I will be real."6
"Whatever I am, I will be real." In trying to keep up appearances, we frantically try to secure an impossible reality -- a bubble of a world where there is no sorrow or ignorance, security is guaranteed, and our happiness can truly be measured by the level of our bank account. But when we drop our pretenses and face reality -- when we turn off all the fluorescents and face the twilight -- the darkness that may drop around us will allow us to make out the light of God, a beacon of integrity and truth for us on our way.
How do we stay on this path seeking a higher level of life, a greater religious experience of ourselves, humanity and God? One sermon by Davies, preached in D.C. in 1945, also suggests we turn away from misleading externalities and look inward, to our "real" selves. He described a seeker on a mountaintop, asking of him or herself wondering questions:
"What am I? What am I for?" "Where am I going?" "How is it that I can see a whole world of life and feel it live and love it, and yet be so inconsequential, so full of little days and nights, so much a creature of this crawling earth, so distant from the sweep and wholeness of the sky? What am I? And what is it that I almost am and never quite become?" In these questions ... you are in quest of whatever is real in anything ... whatever is real in yourself.7
Davies continues to say that when we turn away from false happiness and try to find the wonder and beauty that springs from within, we are not simply seeking our self; we are seeking "the self of God's in-dwelling." I quote:
What is it that [people] find in [the life] Jesus of Nazareth but their own ultimate selves? They listen to him and hear the voice of their own conscience, they watch his life and know that if they had not missed their way it would have been their own. They stand in his presence and are face to face with their final selves, the selves they are looking for.
... So it is when [a person] goes seeking God in the world of meaning and of mystery. Is God in the beauty of the earth and sky? Yes, if you take God to it. Is the spirit of God in the world of humans? Yes, if you carry it there. But you will find God nowhere that you do not take God, and wherever you find God, you will find yourself. The search is one.
In the lives of Jesus, Buddha and other religious teachers, we see the possibilities for our own lives. We see how deep our connection with God could be, how deeply our love for humankind could be manifested. We see our real selves as sons and daughters of God, messengers of God, lovers of all that is sacred and good. And when we live with integrity and with open hearts, we find that God, the holy, the Creative Spirit, the uttermost of life, dwells within.
In one final attempt to honor the Rev. A. Powell Davies, I wish to end with a short prayer, in the same manner that he ended so many of his sermons.
Oh God, may we find you in all that we seek.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Footnotes
1 "The Ministry of A. Powell Davies," Rev. Oren A. Peterson,
April 8, 2001.
2 "What is Religious Experience?" Rev. A. Powell Davies, p.
6.
3 Like all ministers of his day, Davies was consistent in using
the pronoun "he" or "him" for God, but I claim my religious authority to excise that
particular product of its time from his writings so that I and the other 50 percent of
Davies' audience can better connect to his words.
4 "A Modern Catechism," Rev. A. Powell Davies,
p.5.
5 "Can Anxiety be Mastered?" Rev. A. Powell Davies,
p.4.
6 "How We Defeat our Own Happiness," Rev. A. Powell
Davies, p.6.
7 "Seeking, Perchance, Yourself?" Rev. A. Powell Davies,
p.3.
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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