Feeding the Hungry Soul
One of my favorite past-times is to browse through bookstores, not in
search of anything
particular--just grazing among the newly published titles, looking to
see what has
intrigued an author enough that a book resulted, and what manuscripts
had been considered commercial enough that a publisher invested in their
promise. I am always amazed
and astounded at the number of new titles which are on the shelves
whenever I find
time for one of my periodic bibliographic explorations.
Now, I must confess that this particular form of exercise is more
dangerous than it
may appear at first glance. No matter how strong my resolve or how
buttressed my
sales resistance, almost always I leave the book store with one or two
volumes tucked
under my arm, my mind rehearsing the speech which will justify these
purchases and explain
why these particular books deserve a place on bookshelves which are
already over-full
and groaning under the weight they carry. And almost always Beverly
offers her ritual frown of mock disapproval, and then finds a way to
make room for the new acquisitions
on the over-loaded shelves.
There is an unexpected side-effect to this habitual prowling through
book stores.
After a while, one can begin to recognize the trends of thought and
concern which
move across our cultural horizons. There is always that flurry of books
geared to
some event or happening--election years are full of books praising and
denouncing candidates
and explaining and refuting the platforms and programs of various
parties and groups.
A catastrophe like the Oklahoma bombing, or the unexplained loss of an
airliner
will produce a minor flurry of books on terrorist groups or the unsafe
way in which Airlines
run their business. But every now and then it is possible to see among
the titles
of new books a genuine trend appear, establish itself, and grow over
time. And after a while it is possible to begin to extrapolate from
this evidence some tentative
conclusions about what is of concern, perhaps even troubling to the
American people.
One such trend has been building for the past few years and probably has
not yet reached
its peak. Several years ago, I began to notice that titles which would
normally
be segregated to the "religion" ghetto of the book store were beginning
to elbow
their way in among newly published works. There was a spate of books on
Jesus and on
new insights from studies of the gospels and of the Dead Sea
Scrolls--books which
purported to sift the actual words of Jesus from the accretions of the
New Testament,
books which defined him in terms of the Judaism of the first century of
the common era,
books which explored the so-called missing years and traced Jesus to
India, books
which tried to prove that his crucifixion had not been fatal and that he
had escaped
to Marseilles. There was a spate of books on angels--their nature,
their derivation, their
function in the world; books in which people described their own
encounters with
angels. Someone published a biography of God. Bill Moyers published
one of several
new books on Genesis. There were books on the care of the soul, on
discovering the sacred
in the common and the ordinary. There were collections of writings by
obscure religious
figures like Hildegard of Bingen. There were books of prayers and
meditations.
Clearly something was happening in that public which buys and reads
books. Religion
had suddenly moved from its corner, back at the rear of the store, there
beside the
New Age materials and had been welcomed into the bibliographic
main-stream.
In time a secondary group of books began to appear. Their function was
to explain
the appearance of the first kinds of books. Sociologists and
anthropologists began
to explore this modern version of the great awakening. With titles like
"A Generation
of Seekers" and "One Nation Under God" and "With God on Our Side" books
began to appear
explaining and exploring the spiritual hunger which was driving
contemporary Americans.
Here, at the end of the twentieth century, on the verge of a new
millennium, Americans had discovered a spiritual emptiness which these
books were attempting explain,
perhaps even to fill.
As is true of almost everything in the last half of this century, this
resurgence
of interest in spiritual or religious matters is tied to the
demographics of the
so-called "baby boomers." That huge cohort of people born between 1946
and roughly
1961 has begun to enter the middle years of life. They have lived
through decades of enormous
and unprecedented change and upheaval. They have seen the fulfillment
of many of
their dreams and expectations, the frustration of other hopes and
ambitions and many
find themselves asking, "Is this it; is this all that there is to
life?" In this, they
may be no different from any other group of people making their way
through the world,
but there are so many of them that the concerns which come to focus in
their lives
tend to define issues for the entire culture.
Needless to say, I am too chronologically challenged to be counted among
the Boomers,
but their struggle to discover a deeper dimension in life fascinates
and intrigues
me. They have discovered over time, what many of us have
discovered--that the promise of the consumer society is essentially
false, that no matter what we acquire, what
possessions we amass, what positions we attain, there remains a yearning
at the core
of our beings which nothing in the material world seems able to
satisfy. After we
have acquired our ideal home--or something close to it--and filled it
with all the bright,
glittering things that a consumer culture has to offer; after we have
struggled for
security and recognition; after we have been able to guarantee our
families the riches the society defines as necessary to the good life;
after we have realized all the
promises and accepted all the disappointments, there comes that moment
when many
of us discover that we have indentured ourselves to the things we own,
the promises
we have given, the compromises we have made. Our freedom and sometimes
even our integrity
have been sacrificed, and we discover an emptiness at the core of our
beings. We
find ourselves wondering if this is all there is to life. Is there
meaning beyond
acquiring and serving what we have acquired. And then begins the effort
to feed the empty
soul--the effort which is witnessed to by that literary trend so evident
in the book
stores these days.
What I find most interesting about the current rediscovery of the
sacred, the contemporary
search for a spiritual quality to life, is the frequent assumption that
meaning is
a commodity which can be purchased if only the right source of supply
can be found. All the evidence suggests that people who have had little
connection with organized
religion in their lives are beginning to seek out churches of all kinds
in response
to the emptiness which they feel. But they bring to the church the
attitudes of
consumers. They want to know what product the church offers, what the
quality of that
product is and how much it will cost. Spirituality is often treated not
as something
that grows organically out of life but as a prepackaged item--rather
like a breakfast
cereal. All the various brands are composed of the same essential
ingredients and
which one you buy is largely a matter of taste--some are sweeter than
others; some
have more sodium; some are fat-free--but in essence the only difference
between them
is a matter of individual taste and, perhaps, cost.
As I suggested earlier, the attitudes of the "Boomer" generation tend to
become normative
for our culture simply because there are so many in that cohort. It is
not surprising,
therefore, that churches have begun to respond to this consumer approach
to the quest for spirituality. Increasingly, experts are urging
churches to think of themselves
in marketing terms. The question is not "What is the truth, the
insight, the conviction
we are called to proclaim or the tradition we are committed to serve?"
Rather, we are told, the focus for religious institutions which want to
be successful
in capitalizing on the spiritual hunger of this generation must center
around "What
is it that people want, and how can we give it to them." Oz Mandingo, in
a book called
THE AMERICAN HOUR,
characterized the difference in these two questions when he suggested
that what has
happened is that churches used to look for an audience which would be
recpetive to
their message; now they look for a message that will grab and hold the
audience.
And there is a universe of difference between those two approaches.
In Unitarian Universalist circles, this shift from proclamation of a
central message
to responding to consumer demand is often dressed up under the rubric of
"embracing
diversity." The underlying, unexamined assumption is that basically
religion is
more like a cultural artifact, than it is a defining truth. Therefore
the critical task
of religion is to discover what people want and find a way to fill that
want. If
people think that their spiritual needs are best met with gospel music,
give them
gospel music; if they think that religion is best expressed through the
King James Version
of the Bible, then given them the Bible readings; if they think that
their spiritual
needs are best served by eastern meditation practices, then do eastern
meditation;
if what they want is Jewish rituals, then schedule a Seder and observe
Yom Kippur. After
all, it is all religion, isn't it? And after all, the validation of any
religious
practice is largely a matter of personal satisfaction. Religions are in
the business
of satisfying wants, not of proclaiming truth. The content does not
matter nearly as
much as how people feel. Satisfied customers, not transformed lives and
a transformed
society are the gauge of success in religion as in the other sectors of
the consumer
culture.
The irony, of course, is that in the end a consumer approach to
spiritual matters
proves to be destructive of religious institutions and unable to satisfy
the longing
to which it responds. The empty spirit is the psychic equivalent of a
black hole.
The black hole, astronomers tell us, is a point in space where gravity
has become so dense
that everything in the vicinity is drawn inexorably into it and nothing,
not even
light, can escape. It is impossible to fill a black whole. The entire
universe
would not be sufficient to satisfy its appetite. By the same token,
there is nothing in
the outside world, nothing that can be bought or packaged or sold which
can satisfy
the hungry soul. And religious institutions which seek to make religion
a commodity
end up as part of the entertainment industry.
Ultimately, the yearning which we experience when we come to the
dead-end of our efforts
to acquire and consume and possess results from a recognition that in
all the business
of our lives, somewhere along the way we lost ourselves. What we need
to recover is neither God, nor ritual nor form. What we need to find,
if we would be whole,
is our lost selves. What we need to discover is who we truly are. We
need to find
ourselves and the job of religion is to help us confront our own
brokenness and our
own emptiness and our own sense of deep alienation and begin to build
integrity in our
lives. And it does that, not by trying to find some satisfying
experience it can
sell us, but by asking hard questions. The job of religion is to ask us
what it
is in this world that matters so much to us that we cannot live without
it, cannot be whole
without it. The job of religion is to call us to integrity in a world
full of deception
and illusion. And it does that by modeling a fierce and unshakeable
integrity of
its own--one which is not afraid to embrace a defining truth. In short,
religion, if
it is to be effective in feeding the hungry soul, is not something one
is "in to,"
from time to time. Rather, it offers a constant standard against which
life and
integrity may be measured.
It is undoubtedly true that there are many different kinds of religion
which seek
in a variety of ways to call people to integrity, to wholeness, to
holiness. It
is also true that different people respond to different messages. But
effective
religion is focused on the message, not on the customer. It seeks to
offer a standard, a defining
truth in terms of which a life may be lived with rich meaning and deep
purpose.
It does not spend its energies prepackaging religious experience for
sale on the
open market. Effective religion is not a commodity; it is a way of life
and it demands
of us an open-ended commitment.
What I am trying to say with all of this is that nourishment for the
empty soul is
not for sale and it will end up costing you everything. The great
mystics and seers
of the ages have known that spiritual fulfillment comes as a result of
discovering
that which is so important, so vital, so compelling that it cannot be
denied and giving
oneself without reservation. It is in this kind of surrender to
defining truth which
restores a sense of self and integrity, which fills the emptiness at the
core of
our being.
However, I would not be true to my own faith or the tradition I
represent if I were
to leave you with the sense that all faiths are equal, that surrender to
a defining
faith requires that we leave all critical judgments aside. That is the
truly frightening aspect of the current religious quest. If consumerism
threatens to trivialize religion
in our time, the desperate inchoate need to identify with a strong core
of faith
threatens to turn the religious impulse into demonic paths.
I would argue that some religions are better than others, that some
faiths are too
dangerous to be be embraced, that being concerned about the long-term,
broad consequences
of the assumptions of faith is part of our responsibility as human
beings, and an
essential element in building a life of integrity. Sophia Fahs spoke of
the differences
that matter in religion when she wrote:
Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and
the feeling
of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead
the way into
wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved,
friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a universal community where sincere
differences beautify
the pattern. Some beliefs are like blinders...Other beliefs are like
gateways...Some beliefs weaken a person's self hood. They blight the
growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self confidence and enrich the feeling of
personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing
world. Other
beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the
upward thrust of life.
My informal, unscientific survey of the book stores confirms what other
people are
saying--there is a deep and profound spiritual hunger abroad in the
land. My observations
suggest that the drive to feed the empty soul will be with us for some
time, as we weigh the significance of the failure of consumerism to
satisfy. My guess is that
the search for spiritual sustenance will take many forms--some of them
trivial, some
of them frighteningly demonic, some of them powerfully creative and
transforming.
I am convinced that the key to a true spiritual renewal is to be found
in those expressions
of faith which root us once more in this natural world, which help us to
see ourselves
as unique and precious expressions of that same eternal force and drive
which shaped the stars and gathered the galaxies, that eternal same
force and drive which
set the earth spinning around the sun, that same eternal force and drive
which called
forth and sustains life on this planet. I am convinced that the key to
a creative
spiritual renewal will be found in those expressions of faith which call
us to community--to
peace with ourselves and with all living things, which call us to the
broadest understanding
of responsibility and relationship, which embrace novelty and invite us
to constant renewal. And I am convinced that the key to spiritual
renewal is a religious
community which is driven not by the market but by a strong sense of
commitment to
a core of central values open to the future and affirming the other
while retaining
a strong sense of self.
My life has been spent in search of that kind of spiritual renewal. I
know, at
a level deeper than fact, that our lives--yours and mine--do in truth
have significance
beyond the ability of any language to express. I know that the yearning
deep within
each of us is nothing less than the universe itself struggling to self
conscious awareness,
the universe itself reaching for purpose and direction. I know that we
are called
to larger community and greater purpose, and despite all the
distractions of our
daily lives, that call will not be silenced. It is deep calling to deep
and I am convinced
that the only appropriate response to that persistent call is a
religious commitment
to a faith which remains strong, and, in the words of Sophia Fahs,
"pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of
life." That is the faith
which this place is called to embody, the kind of faith, which truly
feeds the hungry
soul.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors'
comments on David Bumbaugh's "Feeding the Hungry Soul"
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