5%. A Very Long Spiritual Journey

A Talk By James J. Geary
Delivered before the Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist Church
16 May 2010

Chalice Reading

The chalice is a symbol. We need symbols in our lives; we can’t do without them.
We utilize hundreds of symbols every day, including the words we use.

What does the chalice symbolize for you?

For me the chalice symbolizes itself — fire. Think about fire. Fire is energy. Fire is the essence of the universe. Fire is everything. Everything is from fire. Our sun, from which we come, from which we gain sustenance, is fire. The stars, from which we have come, are fire. We are fire, slow-burning, very complex fires. The stars are energy in action. Our sun is energy in action. And we, carrying within us the life force, are energy.

Like the Hindu god, Shiva, fire is the creator and destroyer of worlds. Fire is life, fire is death, fire is we, fire is the essence of the universe.

Talk 5%. A Very Long Spiritual Journey

Good morning.

Well, here we are — again. Oh, I know I said I was 95 per cent sure my last talk was really my last talk. That’s the meaning of the 5 % in the title of today’s talk.
I had a five percent chance of speaking again.

I have a piece of trivial news. Two days ago I turned 96. I don’t believe it!

I have a couple of readings:

The first is a short poem by the famous English novelist, Thomas hardy. The title
is: Waiting Both

A star looks down at me,
And says: “Here I and you
Stand each in our degree:
What do you mean to do, —
Mean to do?”I say: “For all I know,

Wait, and let Time go by,
Til my change come.” —
”Just so,” The star says: “So mean I: —
So mean I.”

The following reading is an excerpt from Pleasures, a poem by the California poet, Robinson Jeffers.

There is a higher pleasure;
To lie among cold stones my older bothers — God knows I am old enough,
But not like granite — to lie quietly embarnacled
Under the film of surf and look at the sky,
I strain the mind to imagine distances
That are not in man’s mind: the planets, the suns, the galaxies, the super galaxies, the incredible voids
And lofts of space: our mother the ape never suckled us
For such a forest: the vastness here, the horror, the mathematical unreason, the cold awful glory,
The inhuman face of our God: It is pleasant and beautiful.

=============

During the past 20 years, I have enjoyed some inspiring services from members of this fellowship, especially personal spiritual journeys. So I thought I’d try to interest you in mine..

In this talk I discuss the two principal intellectual loves of my life, philosophy and natural beauty.

I‘ll begin this talk with a mental picture, a picture of me crying when I was about 11 years old.. I had been promised I could visit with a family friend on his orchard estate for a few days. And then the promise had been withdrawn; and I was weeping. And my Uncle Leslie said something strange. He said the grief I was suffering was balanced by the joy I had felt when the promise was first made.

I couldn’t handle that. What he said certainly didn’t do anything to assuage my hurt feelings. But I remembered it. Little could I have imagined, however, that the philosophy or psychology that my uncle expressed would become one of the two sustaining pillars of my mature philosophy of life.

A normal 11 and 12-year-old boy, of course, doesn’t think about philosophy. I was interested in family, school, and taking solitary walks with my big reddish brown collie. Our house was the first in a new subdivision, which meant my not having many peers. But it did provide me with a variety of nearby fields, hills, and woods to roam in.

Then, when I was 13, something mystical occurred, something abstruse, amorphous, transcendent. On my walks I would find myself stopping and staring into the distance, at the mountains, at a sunset, for long minutes at a time. I was entranced, carried away with wonder and rapture. I think I was trying to understand, I knew not what.

Also at about that time in my life, and maybe as part of that mystical feeling, I was developing a deep love of the outdoors, of the distant mountains, of nature. I was beginning to have an appreciation and love for the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

I think it was about that age that I began to take an interest in the intellectual discussions at the dinner table. My parents had separated when I was four. My immediate family consisted of three siblings, my mother, my divorced Uncle Leslie, and my widowed Aunt Vedy. My mother and Uncle Leslie were the brainy ones, the eggheads.  From them I learned about evolution. And that knowledge greatly influenced my thinking. I learned about liberal politics. I learned much of the story of the Bible, although both had repudiated the Christian dogma enthusiastically embraced by their father.

My mother, raised in a small, mountainous Southern town, with probably an eighth grade education, rejected Christian dogma totally. Her apostasy was a product of her exceptional and penetrating mind. and her voluminous reading. Christian dogma was her bete noir. She said she was exposed to Methodism but it didn’t take.

As a consequence of her views, I never went to any church. So unlike many of you, I am not an apostate from the Christian religion or any other religion. My mother and Uncle Leslie were nature lovers. And that probably inspired me and reinforced my own mystical feelings for the beauty and mystery of the natural world. I think my love of nature became even deeper and encompassing than theirs.

My mother had a strong and tenacious influence on my spiritual life; my Uncle Leslie even more. I often call him my guru. I was particularly taken by his conviction that pleasure and pain are balanced, as he had expressed that night I was so disappointed. He introduced me to Emerson’s Essay on Compensation, and that became a sort of bible for me. It confirmed for me the view that the law of action and reaction applies to human emotion, that pleasure is paid for by pain, and pain is balanced by pleasure. I firmly believe that to this day.

During my teen years, I began to think more and more about the nature of the world, the universe. Gradually the idea solidified in my mind — again influenced by my uncle — that all action, all effects, are the result of cause and effect. High school physics and chemistry and the natural laws proposed by Isaac Newton supported me in this belief. I became a determinist. Lately I learned that Albert Einstein also was a determinist.

Well, those two concepts became the life-long pillars of my philosophy — one, that human emotions are balanced, that pleasure and pain are opposite sides of the same coin; and, two, that there is no break, no hiatus in the law of cause and effect, that every action, every thought, has a history of cause and effect going back ad infinitum.

At the University of Virginia, I took a course in beginning philosophy, but I declined to take any other philosophy courses. I was a bit arrogant. I didn’t want to dilute my personal philosophy. My major was the natural sciences.

Well, there is nothing like marriage, service in World W II, a growing family of girls, and a newsman’s job to keep one busy and dampen down philosophical contemplation.. Then there was a divorce and two important creative jobs, both very demanding.

The first of those jobs, as director of the five-year Virginia Centennial of the Civil War, made me a department head of the State government for seven years. The nature and dimension of the observance were on my shoulders. The second job, as the original director of the New Market Battlefield Park, brought me happily back to these western Virginia mountains in 1966. But, again, the character of the park and its museum/visitor center would be up to me. I was very busy.

Still I was confident that some day I was going to study traditional philosophy and the great minds of the past.

And I had not lost my love of nature, of the beauty of the starry night, of sunsets, of a child’s face, a sleek horse, and especially of mountains.

Ten years after I came to the Valley, I began to take night courses in philosophy at JMU. I took several in the next three years. Then in the spring of 1979, I took a course on Hinduism from a young man fresh out of the University of Chicago, Wade Wheelock. I enjoyed his course and took several other Oriental courses from him, on Chinese religions, a second course on Hinduism, two courses on Buddhism, and one on Islam. Wade and I became good friends.

I continued to take philosophy courses until I had enough credits for a second bachelors degree. They included: Introduction to Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, American Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Medieval Philosophy, Hume and Mill, Introduction to Ethics, Philosophy of Science, and Introduction to Logic.

I graduated in May of 1985 with Distinction in Philosophy and Religion. I had a grade average of 3.75. It would have been a 4.0 except that I was thinking of pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Virginia, so I studied for the Graduate Record Exam instead of for the final exam in my course in logic. I missed one whole question.

I was elected to Phi Sigma Tau, the national honor society in philosophy, and to Theta Alpha Kappa, the national honor society of religious studies and theology. I was 71 years old.

That panoply of courses in Western philosophy, together with my study of Oriental philosophy and religion, deepened and broadened my concepts of our world. But they did not alter my basic personal philosophy in which I embraced determinism and postulated equilibrium in human emotions. I believe the study of Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, did more than Western philosophy to advance my spiritual quest and provide me with a deeper appreciation of existence, the universe and my relation to it, and to my fellow human beings.

In August of 1989 Wade Wheelock told me a group was forming that he thought I might find interesting. So I went with him to the home of Dan and Jerry Spitzer, for the fourth meeting of what would become this fellowship. I remember Wade saying to a woman as we converged near the entrance, “It’s Beryl isn’t it?” She said it was. The movers and shakers for establishing a UU church were Deb and Randy Mitchell. The following Sunday I went with them and their three children to the Waynesboro UU church, which was in a house. The service began, and someone lit the
chalice.

“What’s this?” I thought. “Is this some kind of ancient cult, a savage worship of fire?” Well, in time I came to appreciate the meaning of the chalice for UUs. And I remained interested in the Harrisonburg group, which contracted to meet at the Jewish Temple on Sunday nights.

My first talk to this incipient fellowship was delivered at the Temple the following January. I said, among other things, that I had come to terms with death, that I had no fear of death. I said we were not individuals before we were born and we would not be individuals after we die, no afterlife. That talk was one of 16 I have made to this fellowship, not counting this one.

My association with HUU has been very good for me. I can’t say it has changed any of my basic beliefs, but, as I have said before, it has fine-tuned them. The searching, self delving required in preparing these 17 talks has required that I focus on my spiritual and aesthetic self. I have also benefitted from the talks that others have made. I reviewed and took a new look at my conceptions of beauty, of happiness, of morality, of my social values and prejudices. I gave a whole service on overcoming the prejudices of my youth..

So what do all those years of study and contemplation leave me with?

Well, I was confirmed in my belief there is no free lunch — we pay for everything.

I also realized how incredibly lucky I have been — good luck; and how luck, good and bad, is the controlling factor in people’s lives. Of course, I believe I have paid for my good luck.

`I realized we live in a world that is, paradoxically, both benign and very dangerous.

I’ve also learned that we humans are a social species — we need each other.

I’ve come to believe that we humans are largely egos. I have an equation: egg plus sperm equals ego.

As for purpose and meaning in life, I have not found any, except to live and produce and nurture the next generation.

The notion of the universe involves the concept of infinity, which I believe is impossible for the human mind to grasp. We cannot wrap our minds around there being an end to space or time, nor there not being and end to space or time. Nevertheless, I have come to believe that the universe is eternal — no creation, no beginning and no end. I don’t believe the Big Bang was the beginning. For me an everlasting universe is the easiest answer to the ancient question of creation.

On the practical level, I think and I hope I have learned how better to deal with my fellow human beings.

And, finally, my studies have confirmed for me the continuing two foundations of my philosophy of life: that everything is determined, that there is no suspension of the law of cause and effect; and that human emotions are balanced, that pleasure and pain complement each other.

But in the end, we really don’t know much, do we? Maybe there are no verities except change. I read that Socrates said it was the beginning of wisdom to realize we don’t know anything. And especially we don’t know why — so many whys. Why is the universe? Why am I? Why am I comfortable and in reasonably good health at age 96, instead of being some starving Haitian woman. Why am I human instead of being a mouse or a frog or a cow.

Well enough of what the Buddha said was useless speculation. The important thing for me is that I am at peace with myself and with my world. I enjoy my association with family and with friends. I observe the passing scene. I enjoy contemplating the great pageantry of human existence, unsavory as a lot of it is. I still love life and the beauty of our natural world.

I want you to know that HUU has been good for me in another way, perhaps the most important way. It may surprise you that members of this fellowship constitute most of Pat’s and my social life. We are home bodies. Aside from relatives, most of our friends, come to this building. Because of my impaired hearing, I have a hard time interacting with most of you in this noisy venue. But you are my friends.

In one way, this may be goodbye — goodbye from this pulpit. I am not making any promises; I’ve learned my lesson. But I want you to know, I’ve enjoyed expressing my thoughts over the past 20 years to this friendly and sympathetic assembly. For me these talks have been satisfying ego trips. Thank you for all those years of listening.