by Linda Dove
May 1, 2022
Our Conscious Living Adults group has heard this before. A soldier before the battle of Waterloo is reported to have prayed, “Dear God, if there is a god, save my soul, if I have a soul.”
I’ve decided I’m no longer going to tiptoe around the “God” word. As UUs we’re often reluctant to refer to God with a capital “G” for fear of offending our Humanist or Atheist members and friends. And many of us migrated from religions discomforted by their rituals, absolutist creeds and dogmas, or literal acceptance of scriptures. Or we felt distanced by religion’s imperial, patriarchal set-ups and power-grasping—God distanced at the church altar with the priests, or Gods idolized in statues or icons in the temple, or God literally being born human in an implausible way.
UUs have never tolerated discomfort well and have been rebels and innovators. In the third century AD proto, as you know, the Unitarians broke away from the mainstream Catholic creed because they rejected the anthromorphic image of God as literally three in one, father, son and holy ghost: hence unitarianism. We heard last week how Thomas Jefferson rejected the Son as God but accepted him as a great moral teacher. The Universalists broke away from mainstream Protestantism discomforted by the portrayal of an angry, jealous father-figure with a dominating ego. They couldn’t reconcile a judgmental God consigning people to heaven or hell with a kindly, forgiving God, a God who cares personally for individuals. There’s a familiar story about the personal God. A rabbi was a poor man and kept praying God would win him the lottery. Eventually, he whined, “God, why won’t you grant my prayer?” God replied, “Rabbi, just meet me halfway. Go buy a ticket!” But, of course, the idea of such a God also makes UUs uncomfortable. We can’t get our heads round the contradiction of a God that intervenes with our free will and personal responsibility for democratic and social justice activism, all ideas dear to our UU principles. And, finally, there’s the big either/or question of God’s part in evil, as well as good.
More positively, many folk, of course, associate God with the beauty of religious worship—music, art, sculpture, architecture—that all religions inspire. For Christianity, one commentator said something like: “Without Bach’s music, God would be a completely 2nd.-rate figure.” And it’s a common experience for religious practices and artefacts to inspire ecstasy. Ordinary people as well as mystics are sure there’s a God after such transcendental experience. I’ve had three such experiences in nature but they confirmed for me, not faith in God, but an inner knowing that there’s a field beyond what my limited human faculties can grasp. Those ineffable moments enhanced my awe of nature, the cosmos, and the unnecessary fact of my tiny life; and this firm unknowing continues for me to this day—call it spiritual unknowing, if you will. Meanwhile, some atheists and agnostics say the idea of God is merely a place-holder until our minds and technology solve the mysteries of life and death and the cosmic creation.
Over the centuries we seem to recycle ideas about God. Some founding fathers turned away from medieval Christian orthodoxy with God in command towards an enlightenment confidence that mankind was in control, experimenting, inventing, and engineering all sorts of new-fangled gadgets to create perpetual societal progress. Late-19th. century industrialists also felt in control. But at the same time philosopher Friedrich Schelling regretted the cultural priority of the material over the spiritual. He wrote that we tend to degrade what we don’t understand by reducing it to the level of our own capacity for understanding. And now in the 21st. century Richard Dawkins and others conceive of the world in terms of a mechanical universe. Dawkins uses the metaphor of a big bang being “engineered.” Someone recently joked that when mankind took over from God, God became “a transcendent engineer on sabbatical leave.” And now we worry about humanity losing control—technological engineers revolutionizing our communications, manipulating our access to facts so that virtual reality and robots take over.
Paul Tillich offered a more balanced philosophy marrying the spiritual with the material. For him “God” is the cause of all being but is therefore beyond all being, beyond the material. He said that we humans don’t have the minds, the hearts or the senses to directly experience the beyond. And, now, with that in mind Dee will sing for us:
Hymn 321: Here in the Flesh
We all know how everyday language can’t fully express the spiritual. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the early 20th. century philosopher, said. “Words betwitch us in comprehending reality.” Since his day, as you know, neurological research tells us the left brain uses words, re-presenting reality as ideas, and the right brain doesn’t have words but experiences direct sensual reality and appreciates myth, metaphor, paradox and irony; Native American myths use symbolism to express indirectly their sense of the spiritual, the all-pervading Great Spirit. And to express their experience of the divine I turn to Sue Beachy to read:
Iroquois Prayer
Mankind has a tradition of expressing what God is not on the grounds that God-descriptions will always miss the mark. In the 3rd. century BC, Plato’s famous allegory taught that we humans see only the shadows of the earthly and divine truth. In the 3rd. century AD, St. Augustine wrote that if you understand God, it’s not God you understand. In the medieval 12th. century, Maimonides, the Jewish thinker, insisted that God exists but not through existence as we recognize it; and recently Paul Tillich echoed him. In the 14th. century, an anonymous author wrote the book, The Cloud of Unknowing. In the next century, Nicholas de Cusa wrote, the deeper we know and accept our unknowing, the nearer we are to truth. In our own time, David Bohm, the brilliant quantum physicist, philosopher and poet, suggests that the more we know, given the new scientific tools for microscopic and macroscopic research, the more clouds of unknowing we enter. Bohm was humble enough to say humans are on a path of endless unknowing. So, whatever name or un-name anyone uses, mystics and scientists agree God is not describable by humans in our limited time- and space-bounded world. However, that hasn’t stopped many learned people from describing God! Notice this in literal takes on the Old and New Testament stories.
In the 5th. century BC, Heraclitus described God as that which springs forth like water, the pure source everywhere. God as both the river itself and the flow. I think he was on to something. In the early 20th. century, this image arose afresh with Alfred North Whitehead’s writings. Our language forces us to use nouns like “thing,” and “matter.” But now quantum physics also suggest that matter and energy are not things but a constantly changing, inseparable process, a flow, both the river and the river’s flowing. The source of all is a process, not a thing, or a being. This take on God is now known as process philosophy and theology. It portrays God, not as omnipotent and omniscient, but flowing, ever-changing and ever-evolving with life as divine expression. In the 1950s, Teilhard de Chardin wrote about human beings having a relationship with the flow, and our becoming co-creators with God. He believed too that God is never complete but evolving in an eternal becoming. Thomas Berry, in his 2009 book, Earth, Spirituality and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, goes beyond the anthropocentric view. The “Sacred Universe,” he contends, is “Divine Manifestation,” a spiritual reality. He says scientific evidence now shows us the Universe is an emergent process with a fourfold sequence over four and a half billlion years: the Galactic story, the Earth story, the Life story, and the Human story. Our human consciousness has evolved enough, he says, to allow us to understand that we’re participants in the community of the universe, dependent on it, yet powerful enough to destroy “the myriad modes of divine presence on Earth and beyond.” Berry calls for all the world’s religions to provide the mystical inspiration for humans to enter into a spiritual communion with the creative force. He says our most urgent need is for a rediscovery of a spirituality, of intimacy with the natural world. He sees the material world as expressing God, God’s expression.
Some people still maintain that the big bang made our planet and life possible all at once, not as an evolutionary process. But many contemporary scientists, theologians and philosophers say recent discoveries in quantum physics take us beyond the idea that God created life with the big bang out of “nothing.” Instead, they say, the universe is driven by an eternal energy, an infinite consciousness. I like this. It reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita where God says, “I am the field and the knower.” In other words God-consciousness swirls endlessly in the “emptiness,” not the nothingness, of dark matter; it’s ever-evolving and infuses every microscopic particle of matter. This energy did not precede creation; it is outside our time and space. All of nature is infused by it and all physical reality births and dies in an eternal cycle of “creative consciousness.” Some call it “breath,” others “life force;” others “spirit.” Call it “God” if you wish. Teilhard’s plea to humanity makes sense in the light of quantum reality. He urges us to use our own participation in the eternal flow of consciousness or divine energy to co-evolve and, today, of course, help save our planet.
Significantly, many religious traditions are onto something in using un-words to name the not-describable that I’ve just tried to describe! “Logos “ first in Heraclitus, the un-word in the Tao, “YHVH” in Hebrew, Allah in Arabic, and similarly in Zen, Confucianism, and Vedic traditions. “In the beginning was the word.” Interestingly, semantic scholars say the word “Logos” in the Bible, translated as the “Word,” was a revision of earlier meanings, “breath,” or “spirit,” like “inspiration.” “Word” was substituted, some theologians suggest, by Church clerics who wanted to convince their flocks to obey the written scriptures as selected by the Church.
So, I began this talk referring to the God-word and its negative baggage. But I intend my main point to reach further. Most of us at HUU, our congregational surveys have suggested, value our community. But we’re not just any group of friends but a religious community. Isn’t that why we worship together at weekends? I bet most of us were drawn to HUU because we’re all on the one spiritual journey via our many paths and that means most of us yearn to relate to life’s meaning, the ineffable, the transcendent, that which is beyond time, space, and each of us.
So, I say we need to view HUU as above all a spiritual community. Personally, for the future, I don’t envision HUU continuing to shadow traditional churches, but rather evolving to shine a shared light, a luminous spiritual energy, both within our congregation and out into the wider world.
So, to conclude, I’m convinced HUU must start on a path of radical change if we’re to survive as a unique congregation offering a precious and special message. We need to participate consciously in co-creating a spirit-infused, evolving world. In order to do that it’s important, first, that we clearly understand our spiritual mission and, second, that we then clearly communicate our vision to others, especially in language that engages young people—language that’s loving, inclusive, democratic, peaceful, respectful of Mother Earth and the wonder of life, and offers an exciting challenge. And, yes, we do need a word or, better, an un-word, for the divine evolutionary flow, the cosmic energy, the breath that makes all life possible. So today I join our indigenous peoples in using the “unword” “Great Spirit” to express my awe and wonder at the endless, infinite mystery some of us call “God.”
Thank you and namaste.
[Hymn 331: Life is the Greatest Gift of All].