First Parish Unitarian UniversalistFrom Sunday to Monday
Rev. Cricket Potter
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton
October 18, 2009
Recently in one of my yoga classes, a guest teacher was bantering with the crowd before we began our routine, and he suddenly asked, "Hey what's the difference between a religious person and a spiritual person?" I was all ears:
"A religious person talks about hell
but a spiritual person has been there and back."
It got a good laugh out of the crowd of yoga groupies, and yes, I chuckled too. And, as a minister, I occasionally hear the remark from a parishioner,
"I'm not a religious person, but I am spiritual."
I think I understand what they're saying, and my usual response is,
"Well, I'm glad that your spiritual path has brought you here to this church."
Indeed, religion has gotten itself a bad name in history as people have gone and done horrific things in the name of religion and the God they believe in.
Any religion goes bad when it claims to have the only truth, not just part of the truth.
And, we as Unitarian Universalists often come to this faith tradition as a reaction to experiences in other religions where we felt boxed in by creeds, stifled by the rituals or liturgy, or alienated by the top-down nature of the church and its stand on "the truth."
So understandably, we Unitarian Universalists sometimes shy away from the word "religion."
My hope this morning is that we can revisit the value of religion and consider reclaiming some of its power for ourselves.
For, there is this essence, this capacity, that is at the core of all the world's religions that does sustain and nurture life and our very humanity.
People have been doing religion for millennia as they have grappled with the mysteries of life and found meaning through shared story, ritual, and worship.
In his classic book The World's Religions, Huston Smith describes this capacity of religion to awaken and challenge, and he calls this "religion alive."
He writes:
"Religion alive confronts the individual with the most momentous option life can present. It calls the soul to the highest adventure it can undertake, a proposed journey across the jungles, peaks, and deserts of the human spirit." (p. 9)
Smith then goes on to describe that journey as one that leads us to confront ourselves, reality, and all that the world needs of us.
The worthiest of journeys, I would say.
You may beg to differ with me — and I'm sure I will hear from you if you do, and I welcome your comments — but I wonder if spirituality alone can give us — or call us to — all that Huston Smith describes.
Just so you know, this question about spirituality and religion is not an academic or abstract for me. It is central first to my joining a faith community in my young adult years and later to my becoming Unitarian Universalist and feeling a deep calling to become a Unitarian Universalist minister.
I came to church in my early twenties because my own sense of spirituality wasn't enough for me.
And by spirituality, I refer to a deep sense of the "something more" in daily life than meets the eye.
It is a very personal, heartfelt longing for, or sense of, the sacred that imbues all of creation.
It is our effort through some sort of practice to makes sense of life and connect with all that gives life meaning.
The Jewish scholar David Ariel calls it "heart knowledge," while the Catholic writer Brother David Steindl-Rast describes the spiritual life as, "Wherever we come alive..(Whenever we are) vital, awake, aware." (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy, p. 28-29)
If that's spirituality, then what is religion?
"What else do we need beside being alive, vital, and awake?" you might ask.
Well, before pursuing my growing sense of call to Unitarian Universalist ministry, I took a course on the Psychology of Religion so that I could intentionally reflect upon what religion offered that one's own spiritual practice didn't.
We spent a whole semester defining and dissecting religion.
Frankly, the dry nature of the course and the droning voice of the professor was enough to make most anyone turn their back on religion forever.
But, here I am, and condensing a semester-long course down to a hundred words or so, I would say that:
- religion offers us a way of understanding the world, a kind of framework for our faith (in our case, our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes provide us a way of viewing the world - look in the first few pages of the gray hymnal if you need a refresher on the Principles and Purposes), and then this way of understanding is used to guide us in how we act in the world;
- this way of understanding provides meaning, comfort, and hope, particularly in the face of suffering and adversity;
- religion includes a community and an ongoing tradition in which one's own way of understanding, or one's faith, is shaped and informed through vocabulary, ritual, and story (worship is an example of this ritual and story);
- and finally, religion entails an ongoing process of experience and reflection with others as one continues to shape one's way of understanding, or faith, in light of life events.
Now you know why ministers go to seminary for 3-4 years — to learn all this stuff!
Seriously though, when I think back to the many forums and retreats I've led for churches, when I ask folks to share what brought them to their faith community, what longing made them seek out a place and people to be with on Sunday mornings, the responses always center on:
community, relationship,
having a place where their children can learn and grow and develop their values,
and having a place where they themselves can also learn and grow in the company of others who will both support them and challenge them.
I also think about many of you who commit to different activities and roles at First Parish whether it is as
a religious education teacher with the children,
serving in some capacity of leadership on a committee,
or helping to organize activities such as our clothing sale
our Saturdays working with Habitat for Humanity,
or our effort to support Women's Place.
In my book, we are doing more than being spiritual.
We are living out our religion and making religion alive.
We are sharing it with one another, and we are taking it out into the world to make a difference in bettering this world.
And believe me, I know the difference between that and pursuing one's own spiritual interests.
There was a time after seminary when I left the Presbyterian church and before I had discovered Unitarian Universalism that I had no religion per se.
I doubted that there was any faith community that would accept my increasingly broad sense of the divine and my desire to do more than evangelize to live out my faith.
So, I did my own thing for a while.
As an almost minister, I certainly had a strong sense of spirituality and strong spiritual practices involving reading, reflection, prayer, and opening myself up to the divine.
With no church to call home, nature was my chapel of choice, and I communed regularly with the spirit of creation I felt in its midst.
Yet, something was missing for me.
I didn't realize it until later, but what I was missing was:
community to reflect and dialogue with,
a tradition to grow in and with, and particularly,
a place that would nudge me beyond my own comfort zone so that I would stretch more into becoming my best self.
Then one Sunday upon the repeated recommendations of a friend, I found my way into a Unitarian Universalist church in Concord, Massachusetts, having no idea what this awkwardly titled religion even was.
I heard these words for the Lighting of the Chalice:
O flame of our faith, open our hearts
And fill our bodies and souls with persistent strength;
Enliven our spirits and engage us deeply in this life,
This sacred essential moment now.
And then for the Unison Benediction, we all shared in reciting the following words that are adapted from the apostle Paul's letter to the Thessalonians:
Go out into the world in peace.
Have courage.
Hold on to what is good.
Return to no person evil for evil.
Strengthen the fainthearted.
Support the weak.
Help the suffering.
Honor all beings.
We were being called to go out into the world and do something active to honor the light of the divine that resides in all beings.
What I heard and felt that Sunday and many others was a call to community, a call to engage deeply with life and the world.
We were all asked:
What is important to you?
Where and how do you experience the sacred and transcendent in life? What do you long for in the world?
What hope do you bring to the world?
And then we were all nudged to ask our own questions, shape our own faith, and then find ways to engage our faith in the larger world.
Drawing from the words of Huston Smith, I was definitely experiencing religion alive, a religion that didn't stop at the church doors or stop once Sunday turned into Monday.
For me, Unitarian Universalism is all about taking the faith and hope we nurture when we gather on Sundays and putting that into practice Monday through the rest of the week in our families, at work, in our communities, and hopefully at times even beyond our immediate communities.
It's about becoming as alive as we can be as we engage in community, learning, growing, reaching out, and in all the mystery and messiness of life.
I think back to our reading about a little girl stung by hornets.
I bet most any of us parents could recall a similar incident when all the pain and anger of a child is focused on those awful bees.
"Were they mean bees? Are they bad?" the little girl asks.
"No, they're not mean or bad," the mother responds.
It was an accident, the mother goes on to explain, that you and the bees were there at the play structure at the same time. The bees did what they instinctively do when someone gets too close to them. They sting.
Then the mother muses on:
There is no real way just yet to interest her as deeply in mystery and in the far more serious, echoing question, which is "So, what will you do now?".... She's trapped, as I so often am, in why it happened, and how. But so much more, so much worth wondering and pondering, lies in what will happen next..
And ever so poetically and prophetically, she concludes:
The world was made - gorgeous, tender, broken, dangerous - we know not why. How now shall we live in it, you and I and everyone?
What great theology!
The answer isn't to dwell on the why or why me of it.
The answer is to consider how we go forward and grow from the experience.
And so, I ask: How shall we live in the world, you and I?
Can we all bring our sense of spirit, our spirituality, and engage wholeheartedly in a religious endeavor here at First Parish?
Can we work together on the worthwhile question of what lies next for this community?
We have many tough questions to ask of one another in our time together.
We also have work to do with one another and in the larger world to truly bring our religion to life here at First Parish.
But from my own experience, I can't think of anything more worthwhile.
I close with these words I heard so many years ago as the chalice was lit at First Parish in Concord hoping that it will inspire us today:
O flame of our faith, open our hearts
And fill our bodies and souls with persistent strength;
Enliven our spirits and engage us deeply in this life,
This sacred essential moment now.
May it be so.
Amen.