New Morning, New Man: Poetry of the Male Spirit

Rev. Anthony David

June 21, 2009

Listen to this story from Paul Kivel, from his book Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart:

It’s Sunday night and my son, Ariel, is supposed to be finishing his week’s homework assignment, due tomorrow. He sits down at the table, looks at the last page and says, “I can’t do this.”

“Why not?” I ask in disbelief.

“I don’t have an encyclopedia.”

“But we went through this last week. You are supposed to check your homework ahead of time to see if you need an encyclopedia. I’ve told you before that’s not an acceptable excuse.” I can feel my anger rise.

“I looked at it. It’s a crossword puzzle on domestic cats. I didn’t think I needed an encyclopedia.”

[At this, Paul Kivel says] I know I’m stuck. There’s no way he can do the assignment. Once again he has managed to postpone some of his work so that when the final hour comes he can’t finish it.

“Can I watch television now?” he asks in all innocence.

“No, you can’t. I told you that you couldn’t watch television until your homework was done; I said that forgetting to bring home the right books isn’t an excuse.”

“But Dad…”

“That’s it. You can just sit there and figure out a way to do your assignment.”

I leave and he starts to cry. We both feel terrible.

That’s the story, from Paul Kivel. A snapshot of a difficult fathering moment, on this day that we honor fathering even as we brave difficult territory and go deeper into what it all means.

As I shared this story, how many of you felt yourself tensing up? You’ve been there, done that. You know what it is like to be that kid, on the receiving end of an authority figure saying angrily, “You can just sit there and figure out a way to do your assignment.” Resenting their power over you, in the face of your own seeming powerlessness. You’ve been there, done that. And perhaps you’ve been the authority figure as well. Your parents said such words to you, and now you say them. You say them, feeling responsible for the wellbeing of your children. You say them, feeling the heavy burden on your shoulders.

And fathers can feel this in a unique way. As a father myself, I can honestly testify to an underlying desperation, linked to a sense of ultimate and absolute responsibility. Behind it is an anxious thought process, running like a broken record, which sounds like this: If you don’t teach your kids now, immediately, they will grow up to be failures. Let them off the hook—cut them some slack—and you are neglecting your responsibility. Make them do what’s best, right now—it’s ridiculous to give them a say in the matter. What do they know? But you know the discipline they need, and they need it if they are going to succeed in this world. Drill it into them. When I say “jump,” they better respond with “how high.” That’s the anxious thought process. That’s the kind of desperation fathers can carry into their fathering. “You can just sit there and figure out a way to do your assignment.” Desperation separating fathers from children and disempowering children even as the fathers are trying to connect with them and care for them. Desperation that even causes some to absent themselves entirely from the process. Too intense. Too overwhelming.

Listen to this dream I had maybe 20 years ago. “I’m in a strange and dark classroom, stuffed into a desk that’s way too small and hurts. My Dad is teaching me how to analyze images. He assigns homework. But I don’t think I need any of this, because I love my Dad. I love him. I tell him how I feel, but he doesn’t believe me. I try my best to prove it, but nothing works. He just continues lecturing, relentlessly.”

Something like this is precisely what happened to Paul Kivel, at the death bed of his own father. “He had few words for anyone during his illness,” he says. “But one week, when the doctors told him his heart was working at only 25 percent capacity, he suddenly wanted to tell me a great deal about what he thought I should know. With sadness, self-pity, and anger … he not only explained to me what he thought was important financially, he also made a final attempt to get me to value the things he had—security, stability, family, and civic responsibility. On his deathbed he was trying to get me to shoulder that role while conveying his anger and despair that he would be unable to do it himself. In his eyes he had failed on two counts. [For myself,] I had romanticized his death and though, Aha, there will yet be a final scene when he confesses his love for me. Then we will cry in each other’s arms and forgive each other. Instead, after unloading all the family business onto my shoulders and criticizing me, he lay back on his bed. My mother said, ‘Why don’t you tell Paul you love him and appreciate what he’s doing?’ My father simply said, ‘No, he doesn’t need that ego-boosting stuff.’”

What tragic, painful irony. And I know that this does not do justice to all the varieties of fathering out there, or experiences of our Dads. I admit this up front. Yet there is enough frustration around fathering to suggest that we are on to something significant. In the hearts of too many of our Dads: strangeness and darkness. Love, felt as desperation, felt as a sense of overwhelming and ultimate responsibility, held anxiously, conveyed through harshness, leading to the tragic, painful irony. “On the days I am not my father,” writes poet Scott Owens,

I don’t yell. I don’t hold inside?the day’s supply of frustrations.?My hands stay open all day.?I don’t wake tired and sore,?dazed from senseless, panicking?dreams. […]

On the days I am not my father …? I listen well.?I let things go unfinished,?in an order I didn’t plan.?My mouth is relaxed. My teeth?don’t hurt. My face stays ?a healthy shade of pink all day.?On the days I am not my father?I don’t fill the silence with my own?irrational rants. I don’t resent ?the voices of others. I don’t make fun?of you to make myself feel better.??On the days I am not my father…. What’s going on here? The clenched fist, the fatigue, the tense mouth, the gritted teeth, the red face, the irrational rants, the cruelty?

I go back to my dream of the dark classroom. The desk that I am sitting in, that squeezes me with its smallness, that makes my body hurt. Dad drilling his lesson into me, relentlessly. I believe that there are times when dreams communicate a poetry of the soul, and perhaps my soul, 20 or so years ago, was telling me something about my training as a man. How it’s like a Procrustean bed—an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is enforced. If a part is too big, it gets cut off. Too small, and it is stretched. That’s where the clenched fist comes from, and the fatigue, the tense mouth, the gritted teeth, the red face, the irrational rants, the cruelty. All of it inescapably carried into one’s fathering, to some degree or another, for fathers are men first.

“Be a man,” the entire world says to a boy. The message coming not just from fathers, but mothers too, the media, teachers, and peers. Also from the only kinds of initiation rites that are generally available to men today, centering primarily around team sports, military life, gang life, and prison. All of them, sources of a surprisingly consistent message, which the following scenario tries to convey. (It comes from The Oakland Men’s Project, with which Paul Kivel is associated.) Here it is: imagine a ten-year-old-boy in a chair at home watching television. His Dad walks through the door holding a piece of paper:

DAD: Turn off that set.

SON: Aw Dad….

DAD: Turn it off. Now! This place is a mess; why isn’t it cleaned up?

SON: I was going to do it after this show.

DAD: Excuses. You always have excuses. Do you have an excuse for this? What is this?

SON: My report card.

DAD: Look at this right here: math, D.

SON: I did the best I could.

DAD: Sure you did. You’re just stupid. You know what D stands for? It stands for Dummy.

SON: (Starting to get up) That’s not fair.

DAD: Sit down. I didn’t say you could go anyplace.

SON: (looks down, near tears)

DAD: What’s the matter, you gonna cry about it? Poor little mamma’s boy. You’re just a wimp. (Pushes him off the chair onto floor) When are you gonna grow up and act like a man around here? (Storms off)

SON: (Picks himself off the floor. He’s angry, confused, hurt, says to himself:) “He’s always coming in here yelling, pushing me around, shouting at me to be a man. I hate it! It’s not fair!”

And that’s the scenario. A dark classroom. In other words: numb yourself to your feelings. Stay sitting down when you want to stand up. Be suspicious towards your tears. Ridicule yourself whenever an emotion emerges that registers vulnerability.

“Be a man.” Kill the instinct you have to take your confusion to other people, so you can get clarity about what you are feeling. Kill your need for real friendship and intimacy. Learn to be lonely.

“Be a man.” Of course you can have male friends, but these will only be people you will measure yourself against in competition. Never ever anything else. You can’t turn to them for support—that’s for sure. That’s what a wife is for. You can dump all your intimacy needs on her, and she’ll be your lifeline. You really only need one source of emotional sustenance in life, and that’s her.

“Be a man.” Take responsibility for your success. Control and conquer. There can be no excuses, ever.

That’s the overt training on how to be a man. That’s what it looks like on the outside, if not at home, then on the streets, in the playground, on the Internet and TV, at work, at war. “Be a man.” Success is the goal, but the problem is that what we have here is a perfect recipe for failure. One cannot possibly be strong unless one is whole in oneself and connected to others, but “be a man” means having your feelings cut off and being cut off from others—doubly so if you happen to be gay. “Be a man” is all about power and control, but this makes men (gay and straight) only feel worse about their lives and not better, makes them do desperate things to prove their manhood. Men all their lives wondering, Am I a man yet? Have I finally made the grade? Paul Kivel’s father on his deathbed, conveying his anger and despair at not having lived up to his responsibilities, and not even death can be an excuse. There can be no excuses, ever.

It’s a recipe for failure. It’s why, as Paul Kivel says, “the fabric of men’s lives is interwoven with violence.” When you’ve been bullied, you bully others, you pass the hurt around to counter the feelings of powerlessness. Some aspects of this are clearly visible, as in the case of physical violence. Rape. Gay bashing. Husbands beating up wives, even killing them—no doubt when the wife failed, for one reason or another, to live up to the impossible expectation that she should meet every one of the emotional and intimacy needs that the husband has dumped on her.

“Be a man” ends up being more about passing the hurt around than anything else. If not physical violence, then verbal violence, or violence against oneself: men going overboard drinking, or ignoring their health needs and refusing to take care of themselves. And then there are other kinds of violence, far more subtle: stone cold silence. Paul Kivel’s father, on his deathbed, refusing to bless his son, saying “No, he doesn’t need that ego-boosting stuff.” Subtle violence: the desperation that fathers can feel, when they bring to fathering their “be a man” training—desperation that presses down upon them, makes it impossible for them to let up, ease up, cease from trying to drill the discipline into their kids NOW.

But desperation is not the last word. Men can get up off the Procrustean bed of their “be a man” training and become whole again. Stop passing around the hurt. Grow back the parts that have been cut off. Allow the parts that have been stretched to resume their proper proportion. Father their children from out a more healthy place. Success like this—real success—can absolutely happen.

There can be a new morning. A significant part of this involves consciousness-raising, in which three different kinds of things happen simultaneously. One is a growing awareness of how one has been trained to “be a man”—going right back to all those moments when you were sitting in the chair, and someone said something or did something that did not feel fair, and you were about to stand up in protest, but then you heard the all-powerful voice of Dad saying, “Sit down. I didn’t say you could go anyplace.” So you sat back down. Becoming aware of these kinds of moments, what it felt like for your integrity to be violated. Crying tears that have been so deeply stuffed for so long. It is an awakening, and it hurts. It can make you long to go back to the numbness. Yet the only way out is through.

Which leads to the second aspect of consciousness-raising: male friendship. Safe places in which one can be heard into speech. Encouragement from others who have been there, or are there with you right now. This congregation’s men’s group, for example, meeting on a regular basis—aiming for a different kind of male bonding. Not competition, not hatred of some “other,” but honest sharing, mutuality, respect for others, and emotional risk taking. “The kind,” says Paul Kivel, “we often envy women for, the kind that we each long for ourselves.”

Growing awareness of our “be a man” training, growing friendship, and then this: growing capacity to let go of the desperate need to control. That’s the third aspect of male consciousness-raising, all to the end of learning how to father from a more healthy place.

For Paul Kivel, it happened like this. Go back to the fight he had with his son, over homework. In the days following this, he reflected on what had happened, drew on his awareness of his “be a man” training, talked about it with his men’s group, and came to the realization that things weren’t working precisely because he had all the power and all the responsibility. He says:

I resented my responsibility and Ariel resented my power. It finally occurred to me to sit down and talk about it with him.

I told him I didn’t like playing the enforcer when it came to his completing his homework assignments; I didn’t like yelling. But I was concerned and wanted to know what kind of support he needed from me.

“What I need from you is to back off some, stop yelling at me every day about my assignments.”

“What can I do? Stay out of it completely?”

“No, don’t stay out of it, just lighten up some.”

“What else would help?”

“Ask me when I’m going to do my homework instead of telling me to do it. Then I can plan out the right time.”

“What if you save it till you’re too late and you’re too tired?”

“I just won’t save it all for late.”

[At this point, Paul Kivel says that he bit his tongue. He found this hard to believe, but he didn’t say anything, just this:] “Okay, it sounds good to me.”

“Yeah [his son responded], I need you to answer questions about the assignments and things.”

“Sure.”

And that was the conversation Paul Kivel had with his son. “It was a tremendous relief,” he says, “to both of us. It didn’t completely end the arguments, but it confirmed that we were both on the same side. It also shifted the responsibility from me to him for planning his homework schedule. The next day after school he told me his schedule he had planned. And he followed it. He still forgets his books at times, or loses assignments. But he doesn’t feel like a billiard ball bouncing between the wrath of school and home. He feels in charge of his homework and I feel like his ally.”

Now that’s a father’s blessing. That’s what real success looks like.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav once said, “The world is a narrow ridge. The key to crossing is not to be afraid.”

We take this to heart this morning as we consider some of the most controversial, hot-button ethical issues of our time: abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research. The narrow ridge that each of these separately and together represent. The key to crossing.

But why these three issues, and why now?

Simply this: because of current events close to home and close to heart. Just two weeks ago, on May 31, we heard the news about Dr. George Tiller, shot to death as he stood in the foyer of his church in Wichita Kansas. His women’s health clinic had long been a flash point in the battle over abortion rights because it was one of the few that performed late-term abortions. Dr. Tiller’s murder is especially ironic because just several weeks before, President Obama had delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, talking about “how we must live together as one human family” in order to address the pressing problems of our times, including “violent extremism.” He says, “The question, then, is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without … demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?” “Nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion,” says President Obama, and then, two weeks later, as if to underscore his point, Dr. Tiller is murdered. A great tragedy. My heart goes out to his family as well as to all health care workers and professionals who put it on the line every day to protect women’s health and constitutional rights. Just right across the street—the Feminist Women’s Health Center….

It’s close to home and close to heart. And then there is euthanasia. Regarding this, the current event that comes to mind happened back in late February and early March. I remember opening up my Atlanta Journal-Constitution and reading the March 1 front-page headline: “Suicide group tests society’s limits.” Here’s the first several lines of the article: “Critics charge that the Georgia-based group Final Exit Network is undermining national efforts to make assisted suicide universally accepted and legal. But supporters and members of Final Exit Network said the group merely wants to extend the right to die beyond people who are terminally ill to include those who simply believe their quality of life isn’t worth living. They believe Georgia—where four members of the group are being charged with assisted suicide after a Georgia Bureau of Investigation sting operation last week—is now the new battleground in the fight to extend this right of ‘self-deliverance’ to those whom doctors have not diagnosed as terminally ill.” These are the opening lines of the article. There had been a sting operation, in this state. Four people charged, one of whom (I learned later) is a Unitarian Universalist. In a very public way, the euthanasia issue had come home to roost.

Reading through the article a little further, I saw a quote from the controversial assisted suicide advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian, indicating his disagreement with what the Final Exit Network group is doing, as well as his firm belief that physician-assisted suicide should be reserved only for people judged to have no more than six months to live. And I was struck by this. A diversity of opinion about what a good death means, within the euthanasia movement as in all other movements. Of course. Diversity of perspective on when the prolongation of life goes against human dignity and is truly worse than death. Publicly the debate goes on, and it goes on privately as well, even when an aging parent has made clear his or her do-not-resuscitate request, and yet in the heat of the moment, faced with the doctor’s urgency to save life at all costs, faced with our own grief at the loss of a loved one, do we withhold antibiotics or surgery—do we say no to life-support—and allow death to take its natural course? What do we do?

It’s close to home and close to heart. Abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research as well. Last week, a congregant shared a story with me about her grand-nephew who has hemophilia. Born with it. Discovered by his parents in a horrible moment when, after his circumcision, he would not stop bleeding. From that time till now, he’s had to take a special infusion twice weekly—delivered by needle—so that his blood will clot normally. Yet there is hope that this twice-a-week needle regimen might end someday, through stem cell research. When Peter’s sister, Selena, was born, the parents had her umbilical cord frozen and handed over to a private research facility. In five years, the private researchers say, they hope to have achieved enough progress in working with the stem cells in Selena’s umbilical cord that they can be used on Peter, enabling his body to produce the blood-clotting factor on his own.

A cure like this is just the tip of the iceberg. Diabetes, blindness, Parkinson’s disease, glaucoma, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, stroke, lymphoma, infertility, cancer: all of these and more are potentially resolvable through stem cell research. No wonder some people call the stem cell “the Aladdin’s Lamp of biology.” Rub it, and a genie pops out and grants wishes. But President Bush wasn’t buying, because for him, days-old embryos are destroyed in the process, and he sees this as the taking of life. Some liberals stood with him too, although for very different reasons. Pro-choice feminists concerned about how such research might turn women’s eggs and wombs into commodities. Environmentalists wary of biotechnology and cautious about genetic tinkering. An odd-couple of conservative and liberal standing together—the result being the banning of federal funding for research into stem lines created after 2001. Only research on the 22 stem cell lines already in existence would be federally funded, but the problem here is that these lines “lack genetic diversity and were generated with early methods that produced poorer quality stem cell lines than are now available.” This last point comes from Unitarian Universalist Molly Walsh, who adds that they “also include no disease-specific lines, so scientists can’t use [them] to study diseases. [To make matters even worse,] the original lines were all isolated using a mouse-based media, and these lines would run the risk of introducing mouse viruses to humans, so they will not be usable to treat humans.” It’s true: newer and better stem cell lines could still be developed and studied, but without any federal finding, and this is the big problem. As a 2001 Chicago Tribune article puts it, “federal finding is key because it can unleash a huge army of university researchers who could greatly speed up important discoveries. Without federal money, embryonic research would proceed at a snail’s pace in privately funded labs.” In 2001, the Aladdin’s Lamp of biology was within reach, but President Bush stepped back.

But that was then, and this is now. This past March, President Obama reversed the ban on federal funding, meaning that the pace of research would step up tremendously with a focus on newer stem cell lines. “Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident,” he said, and then he promised his administration would make up for the ground lost under his predecessor. “Rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. […] But I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.”

So much has happened in just the past three months. Abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research coming close to home and close to heart.

We are braving the narrow ridge. And now it is time to ask, What’s the key to crossing? How to move forward?

We know what Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav says about this: Be not afraid.

In particular, there are three sources of encouragement that I would have us consider today.

The first is this: that we should not feel like failures if these controversies are hard to resolve and evince a “push-down, pop-up effect”—as in, we push down conflict over here, but over there it pops up again…. We should not feel like failures because abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research are all new faces of an ancient storyline which is this: human ingenuity engaged to ease suffering and enhance life, with the ironic result that feathers are ruffled and arguments explode over limits, over the difference between playing doctor and playing God. The storyline is ancient, and we do well to remember this in the present, as hot-off-the-press news breaks over us like a tide.

The specific myth I’m thinking of is at least 3000 years old, from ancient Greece. Prometheus, who is said to have created human beings out of clay, in the image of the Gods. Prometheus, who gifted humans with the arts of civilization, such as writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science. Prometheus, who saw his children’s suffering and, out of compassion, wanted to improve their lot in life—so he gave them technologies to focus their minds and strengthen their hands, including the use of fire. He stole fire from the Gods and gave it to us. Why he had to steal it is an open question. But steal it he did, and for this, he was punished by Zeus. Chained to a rock for all eternity, where an eagle would come everyday to feed on his liver (which, because Prometheus is an immortal, would regenerate overnight, allowing the whole scene to repeat ad infinitum). It’s an ugly picture. Vicious harm coming to one who sought only to help humanity, because in doing so he transgressed limits established by the Gods. He stole.

It’s fascinating to take this myth and overlay it on the issues we’re talking about today. All sorts of resonances emerge. One in particular relates to the role of technological innovation in driving conflict. For Prometheus, it’s the arts of civilization, especially firemaking. Today, it’s the availability of modern abortion technologies that are safe and ensure women’s reproductive health; it’s aggressive end-of-life care protocols like ventilator support, resuscitation, and the feeding tube that can keep people alive long after their quality of life has diminished irreparably; it’s also powerful microscopes and lab techniques that enable work on a cellular level. What the ancient myth is trying to say is that technological innovation changes our world immeasurably—generates all sorts of new questions—and thus can’t help but spark conflict. It did for Prometheus, and it does for us, it will continue to do so in the future.

The task before us, as we walk the narrow ridge, is only to do all that can be done. Not to shoulder a burden of shame for being unable to clean up that which is inherently messy—and by that I mean the human condition. Technological innovation will shake things up. Established orders will be transgressed, in pursuit of what some people think is progress. Each side will see the other as some kind of thief, and feelings will run high. (Remember this last point in particular, when we get to a quote from Tom DeLay in a moment.)

It’s just the human condition, and we can do only all that can be done. This honesty about ourselves can be a source of encouragement for us, and now here is another source: this insight: that acknowledging the complexity of issues surrounding abortion and euthanasia and stem cell research is OK to do—that it doesn’t represent some kind of evasion or avoidance of duty, as when some politicians filibuster a bill to death, or some fundamentalists spout bumper-sticker theology, as in “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” The issues are just too complex for this. Each specific case has unique aspects that can’t be ignored as we evaluate them. There can be multiple moral principles that appear to apply equally and yet are in conflict with each other. There can even be a single moral rule we all agree on—people on all sides of the debate—and yet this single rule is interpreted and applied differently.

Take the Terri Schiavo case. For about 15 years, Terri had been in a persistent vegetative state. If you had looked at a CAT scan of her brain, you would have seen that large portions of it were gone, replaced by cerebrospinal fluid. Recovery was simply not possible. So in 2000, Florida state judge George Greer ruled that Terri would not have wanted to continue living under her circumstances because they were undignified, the quality of her life was negligible, so he ordered her feeding tube removed. That was in 2000, and after that, the controversy only increased. The tube was removed only to be replaced by virtue of a civil suit coming from Terri’s parents. They wanted her to remain alive as long as possible because they believed that all life, no matter what its quality happens to be, is sacred. On March 18, 2005, Terri’s feeding tube was once again removed. That’s when congressional leaders decided to intervene. House Majority Leader (at the time) Tom Delay called it “an act of medical terrorism” and also said, “one thing that God has brought us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America.” That’s what he said—and I wonder if this is how Zeus might have sounded, when he found out about Prometheus stealing fire—all self-righteous and pompous…. In the end, in an act that was widely hailed as unconstitutional, all but five House Republicans voted for emergency legislation throwing the Schiavo case into the federal courts, the Senate agreed, and President Bush signed it into law.

It was a mess. Feelings running high on all sides. Highly ironic, since all sides saw themselves as speaking on behalf of human dignity. The Golden Rule. Love One Another. Do No Harm. Revere Life. This is the spiritual core of morality, the center, the essence, and we are united in this. Every religion on this planet, from every age, says the same basic thing. Love One Another. How can we disagree on that?

Yet this core religious value, which unites us in the abstract: what happens when we use it to help us figure out social policy—or the politics of whether or not to remove Terri’s feeding tube? All of a sudden, we find ourselves deeply divided,
because what does Human Dignity mean, exactly? How do you interpret it in terms of legislation, or rules?

Human Dignity: these two simple words hide a world of complexity. Are we talking quality of life, so when the quality is poor, one’s human dignity is violated
and the right-to-die practice of euthanasia is justified? Or does human dignity mean the sanctity of life no matter what, no matter what the condition, so even if you have someone in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years you keep the feeding tube in, because life is an absolute value, life is a great mystery, like a star shining, and who are we to say exactly when the shine should end?

In other words, we’re not all reasoning from the same set of premises. We might possess a different set of facts, or a different set of errors. How about different social biases? Different takes on science, or scripture? Different emotional premises? Though we all start with the same Golden Rule, different premises will lead us to different conclusions.

Things can’t help but be complex, and communication difficult, when a reality like this is before us. That’s why President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame is so important and yet another source of encouragement—the third and last source for our purposes here and now. How do we work through the conflicts? Not by “reducing those with differing views to caricature.” Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, for example, referring to Dr. George Tiller as “Tiller the Baby Killer,” saying “He’s guilty of Nazi stuff.” And then some liberal activists, on the other hand, taking the worst side of the pro-life camp (exemplified by people like Bill O’Reilly) and making it sound like this is the best it has to offer, and thus easily and instantly dismissing it.

Not like this. But through “fair-minded words.” “Because when we do that,” says President Obama, “when we open up our hearts and minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe, that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground. That’s when we begin to say, ‘Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any women is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.’”

Life is perennially messy. The ancient myth of Prometheus tells us that. Yet we must again and again strive to find out how we can live together as one human family. Stop the increasing trend towards violence and hate speech. Hold the Bill O’Reilly’s of both the right and the left accountable. Begin again in love. Discover at least the possibility of common ground, and courageously move forward. That’s how we cross the narrow ridge. That’s how.

Something to Live For, Something to Die For
Rev. Anthony David
June 7, 2009

The famously dour writer J. D. Salinger once said, “I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse.  I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” If this is something you have suspected about UUCA, then you are right!

Meaning within life is our focus this morning: the practical endeavor of living in the world richly, with a sense of something to live for and something to die for. While Rev. Keller has focused on this more generally, my focus will be on exploring our story for today from Paolo Coehlo’s great book, The Alchemist—highlighting the specific wisdom it brings to the art of living.

One insight is this: balance the amazing with the mundane. In the story, the wise man invites the boy to wander around his castle and witness all its wonders. But then he says, “As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing any oil to spill.” At first, the boy overfocuses on the drops of oil and misses out on all the wonders of the castle. Then he overfocuses on the wonders and loses the drops. Neither will do for the wise man. The secret of happiness, he says, “is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.”

Perhaps one way of thinking about this balance is in terms of alternation. For me, the drops of oil represent the nitty-gritty of our days: the tasks and responsibilities that keep us busy at work and at home, the established relationships in which our lives are grounded, the habits and patterns which give us comfort and regularity. The drops of oil are all this, as well as the point-of-view that results from one’s attention being narrowly focused on such things. And this is as it should be, says the story. It’s one part of the good life. But don’t get stuck. Make room in your life for the wonders of the wise man’s castle also. At times, expand our perspective into one that’s more us-centered, more community-centered, more cosmic-centered. Do a random act of kindness, expecting nothing in return. Balance times of great busy-ness with times of reflection and retreat. Step back and see your life from the perspective of history. Read a book. Go to a museum. Come to Sunday services here at UUCA. At night when you arrive home, don’t just go straight into the house—pause and look at the stars and feel awe at your existence. Step out of the daily grind and go on vacation. Go on a date with your partner or spouse. Go dancing. Sing Kareoke. See a movie that takes you out of yourself and into the world of possibility. Try something new.

The art of living requires an alternation between these two: the drops of oil on the spoon, and the wonders of the castle. Otherwise, trouble. If we fixate on the daily and weekly tasks and responsibilities without allowing for times of retreat or play, we become unimaginative and dull. Same thing happens if established habit and pattern rule our lives and we never question the sacred cows, never try something new. The air in our balloons leaks out, and we’re sagging. Life’s no fun, because we take ourselves way too seriously. Whereas we may be building up a cathedral brick-by-brick, all we can see is each individual brick, and we are disheartened. Larger wisdom says about every crisis, “This too shall pass. You are not the only one to ever have experienced this. You are not alone. One step at a time.” But if our eyes are fixated just on the drops of oil, we can’t hear that wisdom. We feel alone in every crisis. We make a mountain out of every molehill.

Conversely, if we dwell only within wonder and possibility, then we are flaky. Commitment-phobic. A walking, talking Peter Pan syndrome. Everything has to be made new, which means that we keep wasting energy reinventing the wheel. We love to flit in the midst of other people’s ideas and achievements, but what about our own? Why can’t we be more like them, we say, but then when it is time for us to step up and lead, we say, Not me. “There is a time in every man’s education,” says Emerson, “when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.” This is what Emerson says, which means that if, indeed, we are stuck in wonder, then we remain abstract in our lives. Because we don’t want to get our hands dirty with details, we end up knowing more about history than making it ourselves, here-and-now. No kernel of nourishing corn comes to us, since the plot of ground which has been given to us to till requires too much discipline, too much hard work.

We’re in trouble, if it’s one or the other and not both. The drops of oil which we carefully carry, and the wonders of the wise man’s castle. Remember both, however—take care of both—and that is the secret of happiness.

It’s a question of balance. The art of living.

But now let’s turn to the other kind of balance that the story points out. It’s subtler than the one we’ve just looked at, but foundational, in fact, to everything else…..

It’s about balancing a desire to experience meaning in life with a capacity for patience. The poet John Keats calls this “negative capability,” which is when, as he puts it, “[a person] is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Without a burning desire to know, we would never risk putting ourselves in the midst of uncertainties and Mysteries and doubts; but to the degree that our reaching is irritable, meaning evades our grasp. It’s just one of the frustrating and yet delicious paradoxes of the spiritual path.

Desire to know, and yet a capacity for patience. We see this already developed in the boy in the story, even before he encounters the wise man. Clearly he has a great desire to know the secret of happiness, otherwise he would never have left home. And so for forty days he finds himself lost in the desert, wandering, but he doesn’t give up. For two hours, he has to wait his turn to speak to the wise man, but he doesn’t get impatient. When the wise man appears, he has the audacity to say that he doesn’t have time just then to explain the secret of happiness, and then he gives the boy a truly weird assignment: to explore the wonders of his palace while, at the same time, he carries a spoon with mysterious drops of oil in it. But the boy is game: he does it. And then he does it again. And we know that in the end, meaning emerges—but only because the boy has been able to unite his great desire to know with a capacity to trust the process.

It’s a hard balance to strike. The process of our lives can take us into unexpected, strange places. Things happen. And whereas we could be like the boy, just going with the flow, seeing where it takes us, often we demand far more control, and when our circumstances refuse to explain themselves to us—tell us their rhyme and reason—we pitch a fit. I pitch a fit. I just struggle with this at times, and maybe you struggle along with me.

Reminds me of a poem by Billy Collins, called “Introduction to Poetry.” The speaker is clearly a frustrated professor talking about his students, but the speaker could also be God, and the poems referred to our own lives……

I ask them to take a poem?and hold it up to the light?like a color slide??or press an ear against its hive.??I say drop a mouse into a poem?and watch him probe his way out,??or walk inside the poem’s room?and feel the walls for a light switch.??I want them to waterski?across the surface of a poem?waving at the author’s name on the shore.??But all they want to do?is tie the poem to a chair with rope?and torture a confession out of it.??They begin beating it with a hose?to find out what it really means.

How are you interpreting the poem of your life this morning? Are you like the boy in the story—in search of meaning, in a strange place, but able to wait, capable of allowing the meaning to emerge in its own good time? Or are you beating your life up with a hose, trying to torture a confession out of it?

The spiritual way is a paradoxical way. To desire meaning with all your heart, and yet not to reach for it irritably. Trusting that it is there. Loving the questions of life, so that someday, you live right into the answers….

There’s an old Italian joke that writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells about a poor man who goes to church everyday and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint—please, please, please … give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son—please, please, please … buy a ticket.”

Life stands before us like a big question mark, and at times we can harden our hearts, or our hearts can go faint, because we do not already have an answer in hand. We want the conclusion before we even begin; we want a guarantee up front; we want … a miracle. But what we must do instead is simply buy the ticket. Begin from wherever you are. Take the first step, and then take another. Place yourself in the field of uncertainty, Mystery, and doubt, and do not despair. Allow life to surprise you. Trust. This IS the secret. Right here.

There’s a story I go to in the Hebrew Bible when I’m in the midst of adversity, and I’m fighting for the meaning and way of my life. It’s in the book of Genesis, Chapter 32. It’s night, and Jacob is about to meet his brother, Esau, whom he hasn’t seen in many years. Last time he saw him, Esau said he’d kill him, for Jacob stole Esau’s birthright. “That same night,” says the Bible, “Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and an angel of God wrestled with him until daybreak. When the angel saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the angel said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’”

That’s the story. Life is full of initiatory experiences, and they are difficult like wrestling matches against adversaries as daunting as angels of God. But if we persist, we will prevail-even though in the process our hip might be put out of joint, and the rest of our days we bear a scar from the struggle that transformed us forever and blessed us and gave us a new name, a name that says who we really are. If we persist, we will prevail, and we will become more fully ourselves.

Today I want to talk about Unitarian Universalism’s wrestling match with the Bible: the struggle of our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors to engage the Bible rationally, for the sake of freedom-and how this has determined to a great extent who we have been, who we are today, and who we may yet become in the future.

Start with Michael Servetus in the 16^th century, facing a church doctrine like the Trinity (the idea that God is a unity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Servetus opposed it. Didn’t matter that it had been declared official doctrine way back in 325 CE during the Council of Nicaea. Didn’t matter that, by openly opposing it, even mocking it, he could be burned at the stake. Servetus stood his ground, because he believed that the soul of Christianity was at stake. People hungered for bread, but they were being given stones by a church that had lost its way. People hungered for spiritual liberty, but the church was binding them to falsehood and error. The way out-the way to freedom-was to cut through all the add-ons and accretions of institutional history and go back to the Bible. Use the Bible as the sole standard for everything, and use reason (not church tradition) to discern exactly what this standard was.

This was Servetus, wrestling with the angel. For him, the Bible, interpreted by the light of reason, was the way to liberty. The doctrine of the Trinity represented corruption; but reason would expose it for what it was. And though, for all this, Servetus was burned as a heretic, his larger vision and hope carried on. For hundreds of years, into the 18^th and 19^th centuries, religious freethinkers and liberals followed his pattern of being exclusively Bible-centered and relying on reason to discern spiritual truth. So, for example, in one of the great classics of Universalism, A Treatise on Atonement, published in 1805, Hosea Ballou went through the Bible with a fine-tooth comb to argue against a prevailing idea of his day (one that still prevails for many): that Jesus died on the Cross to atone for our sins-that God requires this for people’s salvation, otherwise, we are doomed to eternal hellfire. This, argued Ballou, was patently unscriptural and against reason. For how can finite creatures like ourselves offend the infinite God? Why might our finite sins, to be wiped away, require the infinite sacrifice of the Son of God? The real issue, said Ballou, is just not about God, or God’s accepting us. The real issue is that we don’t make ourselves available to God. We don’t believe that we could ever be loved as deeply and as truly as God loves us. The problem with the atonement doctrine is similar to that of the doctrine of the Trinity: both represented ways by which the church was binding people with falsehood.

But if we wrestle with the Bible and don’t let go, it will set our spirits free. That’s what Hosea Ballou, one of the fathers of Universalism in America, believed. And so did the father of Unitarianism in America, William Ellery Channing. “We regard the Scriptures,” he said in 1819, “as the records of God’s successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ.” Yet one of the things that distinguished Channing’s approach from Ballou’s and definitely from Servetus’ was his acknowledgement of the rootedness of the Bible in history, and the need for reason to take this into consideration. “We find,” says Channing, “that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application.” The Holy Spirit might have breathed inspiration into the writers of scripture, but Channing insists that “a knowledge of their feelings, and of the influences under which they were placed, is one of the preparations for understanding their writings.” Without this, you just can’t be faithful to the Bible. The result is disaster. We apply Bible insights to our day recklessly, ignoring the fact that what the Bible writers are talking about may be very different or even absolutely different from the present concern on our minds. Or we overlay present meanings onto the past. We read into the Bible our own agendas and interests and standards and make it kill when its proper function is to give life. Here’s a joke about this that Channing would have enjoyed:

A teacher asked her Sunday School class to draw pictures of their favorite Bible stories. She was puzzled by Kyle’s picture, which showed four people on an airplane, so she asked him which story it was meant to represent.

“Oh, that’s Pontius–the pilot.”

The joke is not so ridiculous, however, when you consider all the ways in which people (Unitarian Universalists included) ignore Channing’s advice and do something that’s equivalent to hearing about a “flight” to Egypt and then drawing a picture of an airplane. One of these mistakes is seeing the Bible as a single book. Do this, and it’s easy to assume that everything in it belongs to a single category of writings that can be interpreted using the same rules. A classic instance of this is viewing the Bible as a science text-everything in it to be interpreted as saying something factual about the world. Genesis says the world was created in seven days, so that’s literally what happened. Genesis says that Jacob wrestled with an angel, so angels must really exist. Fundamentalists define the Bible in just these terms and swallow it whole; reverse-fundamentalists define the Bible in these same terms, but they spit it out. Tastes gross. Yet neither stop to wonder about their basic assumption. Is the Bible just one book? Or is it more like a compendium of many books that has evolved in Wikipedia-like fashion over time, involving many authors and editors, incorporating as well many different kinds of literary genres to get its various points across? This last insight is especially important to absorb. We just can’t listen correctly to what the Bible is trying to say unless we realize the genre of the piece we are encountering. Take the recent Star Trek movie-we completely misunderstand what it is all about if we classify it as a documentary and expect it to communicate literal truths about what our future holds for us. Similarly, when we see the book of Genesis as science, rather than the mythology that it is, we completely miss the point. We’ve heard the word “flight” and we’ve drawn an airplane.

Channing once said, “We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible.” It’s true. Consider yet another way in which we can hear “flight” and draw an airplane. Has to do with how people today read into the Bible an ethic of reporting history that is actually quite foreign to the mindset of the ancient Bible writers. Today, when someone makes a speech, every word can be captured on tape and transcribed accurately, so when we read about it in the newspapers-when we read “President Obama said…..”-we are expecting word-for-word accuracy. Nothing less is acceptable. But this is not the standard that ancient Bible writers followed. When reading “Jesus said…” or “Paul said…”, we have to press pause on our assumption that the words ascribed to them are the ones that literally came out of their mouths. Historians back then just had different standards than ours. Listen to what one of the best of them-the Greek writer Thucydides-had to say about this: “I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself, and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” That’s what Thucydides says-and did you hear that? “To make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation” (!!!). But this was the standard in the ancient world. “The past is a foreign country,” says writer Leslie P. Hartley. “They do things differently there.” And we’ve got to honor this.

Back in 1819, when Channing made his key points about Bible interpretation, he was building a way that was new for America (and, almost 200 years later, is still new for too many people). The occasion was an ordination sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity,” and it’s a defining moment in our history. Before it, if you were a Unitarian in America, you belonged to a movement that was amorphous and in the closet. It had no clear leader. It had no clear definition. The name “Unitarian” was a badge of shame. But along came Channing. He outed the movement, gave it clarity, took up the name “Unitarian” with pride. He did all of this in his 1819 sermon. And a big part of it had to do with his wrestling with the angel of the Bible. The Bible, central to Channing’s sense of what Unitarianism was all about.

But Channing’s achievement would not prove final. Within his lifetime, in the very next generation, a different sort of struggle with the Bible ensued. Not so much about how best to interpret it, but whether it is the sole source of revelation available to spiritual seekers.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is most definitely not. “Live after the infinite Law that is in you,” he says, “and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms.” Revelation, in other words, can’t possibly be contained just within the Bible. The wellspring is fundamentally within each of our souls; revelation bubbles up out of the spark of the Divine in our depths. Add to this the revelation of nature, as well as the revelation embodied by the Bibles of many times and lands, such as Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita. Ultimately the spiritual vision here is one of abundance, not scarcity. God is just too big to be contained by any single book. And it’s not only Jews or Christians who have ever wrestled with the sacred and written about it….

Despite this abundance, however, scarcity abounds. In Nature, Emerson says, “A man is a god in ruin. [...] Man is the dwarf of himself. [...] At present, man applies to nature but half his force.” This is Emerson’s constant complaint and argument. God bursts every seam, and God is within each of us, full to bursting. Yet we feel empty; we feel dry. Why? Emerson blames historical Christianity. It has “fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.” It has done this by committing the sin of idolatry. Whereas Emerson believes that Jesus continually pointed people toward their own God-like potentials of compassion and wisdom, traditional Christianity says that only Jesus gets to be God. And then it gathers up the revelations of Jesus and of select teachers, seals them up in the one and only one Bible, and says that revelation is over, it is through. No wonder people are Gods in ruin. “That which shows God out of me,” Emerson says, “makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being.” “You shall not,” Emerson characterizes traditional Christianity as saying, “own the world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature; you must accept our interpretations….”

Emerson’s message here is bruising. It’s not that he finds nothing liberating in the Bible, for he absolutely does. But he will not stand for the bullying that people can do in its name. And he will no longer abide by the exclusive Bible-centeredness of his forebearers: Servetus, Ballou, Channing. There are so many other Bibles to draw from. And above all, people must rediscover the Bible that lies within them. This is the way to freedom.

And this brings us to today. Transcendentalism expanded our spiritual universe, making the Bible just one source of the vibrant spiritual life and not THE source. Through Transcendentalism, we also learned that the Bible is not so much a record of what God says as a record of what humans have said about their long struggle for purpose and meaning in life. And perhaps because Unitarians and Universalists had engaged with the Bible so intensely and for so long, they were ready for different horizons. They felt that they had gone as far as they could with the Bible, and it was time for something new. Alternative forms of spirituality. Not Christianity, but theism. Humanism. Hinduism. Buddhism. Paganism. Blends of all these and more. Anything and everything but the Bible. In any other church or congregation, you better believe you are always going to have Bible study courses. But not in Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Meaning that the current state of our wrestling match with the Bible is different than it has ever been before. A first, in our long history. The current state is disengagement. It is apathy. We no longer know the Bible. It’s become strange to us over the years. Strange, and therefore threatening, because during our sleep, the Religious Right stole it and transformed it into a set of conservative talking points. And because we didn’t know any better-because we no longer read the thing ourselves with any degree of sophistication-we took their interpretations to represent what the Bible actually says. No wonder we don’t want to read it. It’s a vicious cycle.

Which is so sad, since there is a sweet wisdom in Scripture that can make the wounded whole. There is a sweet song that can lift our hearts and make them glad. Unitarian Universalist spirituality is there within its pages. We are missing out on one of the most fascinating and rich books in existence.

We are missing out personally, and we are missing out politically. Where are our Hosea Ballous today? Where are our William Ellery Channings, who might go toe to toe with the ridiculous James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells? Bible-based arguments continue to be extremely powerful and persuasive in America for shaping the common good, but we are no longer conversant. There is still more freedom to be won, but we have a lot of work to do to step up to the challenge. Angry voices argue, for example, that the Bible condemns homosexuality. They cite proof texts, one after the other: rat-a-tat-tat. But it’s not good enough any more to just shrug them off, shrug the conversation off. They need to be troubled by a better wisdom. They need to know and we all need to know that there is no word in the original languages of the Bible that corresponds precisely to committed and mutually respectful love relationships between same-sex partners. What does the Bible truly say about homosexuality in the 21^st century? Nothing. And saying this is not evading the authority or demand of scripture. It’s being faithful to it.

Besides being spiritually vibrant, I know that this congregation is and wants to be even more a social justice congregation. I think it’s great. Of course. But I would add that, as essential preparation for this, we need to know the Bible. Whatever our individual theologies and passions happen to be, we need to know the Bible so as to enable effective social witness in our time, here and now. Our wrestling with the Bible is not over, not by a long shot. It’s showing no signs of easing up. We can’t let go. We’re not done. There’s a new name out there for us, a blessing to win, but we haven’t won it yet.

Listen to this poem by Pem Kremer, called “Epiphany”:

Lynn Schmidt says
she once saw you as prairie grass,
Nebraska prairie grass;

she climbed out of her car on a hot highway,
leaned her butt on the nose of her car,
looked out over one great flowing field,
stretching beyond her sight until the horizon came
vastness, she says,
responsive to the slightest shift of wind,
full of infinite change,
all One.

She says when she can’t pray
She calls up Prairie Grass.

That’s the poem, about a woman named Lynn Schmidt who describes her experience of the Sacred. A vastness of prairie grass, responsive to the slightest shift of wind, full of infinite change. This is the image she conjures up in her mind, when a need for prayer rises up in her but she can’t easily give voice to it. Not an image of some powerful, transcendent male monarch battling and triumphing against enemies; not an image of a majestic, distant, forbidding grandfather who exists outside and beyond the earth that He has manufactured. Not any of these, but rather: a memory of prairie grass, evoking wonder and awe in her heart. A memory, but also a seed for nothing less than a new mythology, a new way of imagining the Sacred.

Today our topic is the Goddess: what this symbol means and can mean for women and men today.

Definitely this: consciousness-raising. Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow (with whom I personally studied in seminary) tells a story about a gathering of mainly Christian women in 1972, in Loveland, Ohio, to explore theology together. “In one of the small working groups that was a daily part of the conference, the women realized that traditional names for God no longer adequately reflected their experience. They began to call out words that meant God to them, putting their designations on a large newsprint board. One of the fascinating aspects of the resulting list,” says Plaskow, “was its large number of ‘ing’ words-changing, creating, enabling, nurturing, pushing, calling into question, suffering, touching, breaking through. The God of their experience was not an immutable being ‘out there,’ but a process of which they were part.”

“Brushing out my daughter’s dark silken hair,” writes poet Sharon Olds,
before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her purse full of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story-the oldest we have on our planet-
the story of replacement.

That’s the poem. Mother and daughter-the changes of life-the story of replacement. And it is a sacred story, told with the “ing” words of the women from Loveland Ohio in 1972: changing, creating, enabling, nurturing, pushing, calling into question, suffering, touching, breaking through. This is what the Goddess is. The Goddess moves within the cycles of life and death and rebirth, in the natural world as well as in our relationships, in community. The Goddess is a symbol of that, a way of giving honor to that.

But does the Goddess actually exist? Is the Goddess a being in Her own right, or simply a poetic symbol of the inherent worth and dignity of nature and people, as well as of the flow of interdependencies in which we live and move and have our being?

Here’s how Starhawk answers this question. Starhawk is a feminist writer and activist, a major figure in today’s neopagan movement, as well as an influential voice in the 1995 decision by our Unitarian Universalist Association to formally include earth-centered traditions as one of the six sources of our faith. She says, “It all depends on how I feel. When I feel weak, [the Goddess] is someone who can help and protect me. When I feel strong, she is my symbol of my own power. At other times I feel her as the natural energy in my body and the world.” That’s what Starhawk says, and right here we have another opportunity for consciousness-raising, relating to our understanding of what good theology looks like. Must good theology insist on single answers, or can it be large and contain multitudes? “Is there,” asks Carol Christ, another leading voice in the Goddess spirituality movement, “a way of doing theology that would not lead immediately into dogmatic controversy, would not require theologians to say definitively that one understanding is true and the others are false? Could people’s relation to a common symbol be made primary and varying interpretations be acknowledged?” And then she says: “The diversity of explications of the meaning of the Goddess symbol suggest that symbols have a richer significance than any explications of their meaning can express….”

For me, one particular use of the Goddess symbol is especially profound, and like Starhawk, I go back and forth with it, sometimes seeing it as factually true, other times regarding it as sheer beautiful poetry, but all times moved and inspired to wonder. It’s this: the image of the earth as the body of the Goddess-the one source out of which everything emerged, guaranteeing the interrelatedness and kinship of all things. All beings as children of the same womb, cherished by Her.

“How the days went,” writes poet Audre Lorde (and imagine her voice as the Goddess, speaking to the world that is her body):

How the days went
while you were blooming within me
I remember each upon each-
the swelling changed planes of my body
and how you first fluttered, then jumped
and I thought it was my heart

How the days wound down
and the turning of winter
I recall, with you growing heavy
against the wind. I thought

now her hands
are formed, and her hair
has started to curl
now her teeth are done
now she sneezes.

Then the seed opened
I bore you one morning just before spring
My head rang like a fiery piston
my legs were towers between which
A new world was passing.
Since then
I can only distinguish
one thread within running hours
You, flowing through selves
toward You.

Just listen to that. How different our world would be if this had been the prevailing image of the Sacred in the West-not patriarchal male God, who manufactures the creation as something outside of him, as a watchmaker would skillfully make a watch, but the Goddess, for whom creation is birthed out of her very substance and essence, in pain and in joy? Then, a vision of earth that is common today would simply be unthinkable: that the earth is but a temporary, discardable stage upon which the drama of individual salvation is played out-valuable only insofar it functions as a stage, a holding place, a location. OK to pollute, OK to poison, OK to use as humans see fit. How could this even be thinkable, if the earth were seen instead as the body of the Goddess, in fact or simply in poetic imagination?

Poetry is powerful, whatever the facts may turn out to be. Symbols are powerful. Carol Christ emphasizes this when she says that “Even people who no longer ‘believe in God’ or participate in the institutional structure of patriarchal religion still may not be free of the power of the symbolism of God the [domineering, jealous] Father. A symbol’s effect does not depend on rational assent, for a symbol also functions on levels of the psyche other than the rational. [...] [The] mind abhors a vacuum. Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.”

I remember a college philosophy class from years ago, when I triggered a mini-crisis in my students. We had been talking about traditional Western God images and how they have a stubbornly masculine, angry-jealous-God-of-the-Old-Testament dimension. My class of course denied this. Not just men in the room but women too, saying, “Everyone knows that God is beyond gender.” Then I talked about a classic argument for why the Catholic Church rejects women as candidates for the priesthood: Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God was male, maleness is thus tied up with God, therefore only men can be priests. I talked about this-how it was only the tip of the iceberg of instances where women have experienced oppression because they are not made in the masculine image of God. Women locked in stereotypes of passivity, completely contrary to the strength seen in the Goddesses of old: Athena, Artemis, Isis, Brigid. Women absorbing the prejudice that there is something fundamentally wrong and shameful about female bodily functions, like menstruation. Childbirth treated like a disease requiring hospitalization. The fanatic pursuit of youthfulness-postmenopausal women knocked off the pedestal they were placed on when younger-their distinctive beauty not celebrated as it should be. All these instances of misogynism, and more.

Then I gave them the challenge. Thanksgiving was coming up, so I said, When you go home to see your family, ask to say the Thanksgiving blessing over the meal, and just see what happens when you pray like this: “Mother God, who gave birth to our universe and to the abundance that is before us, we thank you….. “ I could just see the wheels turning in their minds, eyes widening when they imagined the consequences. Symbols go deep. Rationally, of course God can’t be male. But the poetry of this persists. Poetry is powerful, deeper than reason, comes first-it is, in fact, the material which reason, second of all, sifts and sorts and makes sense of…. But the poetry, the imagination comes first.

It’s exactly as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

Consciousness needs to be raised. Reminds me of an incident that happened a couple weeks back. One morning, just as I was starting my car and about to leave my home in Decatur to come here, I resolved to take a slightly different path than was my usual habit. I wanted to avoid the noxious traffic on South Candler Street right beside Agnes Scott College, and to do that, early on in my trip I needed to turn right on Kirk Road rather then left. Just this-so simple. Turn right on Kirk, then left on Avery, Avery would take me all the way down to East College, which in turn would take me to Commerce, and on and on. Less traffic this way.

Great. I shifted the car into drive, started off, and my thoughts immediately turned away from my plan to take a different path to work and raced way ahead to the work itself: meetings and conversations and issues and things to do. Details details details. I was already on South Candler Street, slowing down to a stop behind a long line of cars, before I realized what the heck had happened. I had switched to auto-pilot, and auto-pilot doesn’t follow new orders that disagree with deep programming. How could I have lost focus so easily?

For me, the image of the Goddess is powerful because solidifies my intent and my decision to take a different route through my world than usual. It reminds me to expand my sense of the sacred beyond the patriarchal male images that are an inescapable part of our cultural programming, because I don’t want to get stuck in that kind of traffic. Gives a man a heart attack. Alienates a man from love. I mean this sincerely. It happens when men attempt to model their lives after the patriarchal God, which they do. I want to take a different route, turn right when my programming says turn left, and for this, I need to stay focused, I need to stop the chatter of the status quo from taking center stage, I need a God-image that helps me imagine the sacred to be BIGGER than that. BIG, because what I am worshipping I am becoming, and I want to be BIG in my heart. That’s what I want, and I suspect you want it too, men and women alike.

I’ll close as I began-with a poem about prayer. This one comes from Joy Harjo, entitled “Eagle Poem”:

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River.  Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Once upon a time, a young Pygmy boy heard the most beautiful song coming from the forest. The song was so beautiful, he had to go and see who was singing. Deep in the forest he found the bird, and he brought it all the way back to the camp to feed it. This deeply annoyed his father; he didn’t want to give any of their food to the bird. But the boy pleaded and pleaded with him, and the bird was fed. The next day the bird sang again; it sang the most beautiful song, and again the boy went deep into the forest to find it, and again he brought it all the way back to feed it. This time the father was even more angered, but once again he gave in and fed the bird. The third day the same thing happened. But this time the father took the bird from the son and told his son to go away. When his son had left, the father killed the bird, the bird with the most beautiful song, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song he killed himself and he dropped dead, completely dead, dead forever.

Joseph Campbell once said that the purpose of myth is to tell us-in metaphor and symbol-of “matters fundamental to ourselves, enduring principles about which it would be good to know if our conscious minds are to be kept in touch with our own most secret, motivating depths.” The myth of the boy and the bird and the father is clearly once upon a time, but also here and now. Now, there are songs to be heard which trigger experiences of awe and wonder. Now, there is a young Pygmy boy within us who is ready to be deeply stirred and moved. And there is an angry father as well, now, who wants no part of it.

But how so? What might this all look like, in real life?

Consider this story from a colleague of mine, the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons. She says, “As a young Unitarian Universalist in the 1960s, I was educated about human sexuality in a relatively open fashion; human religious experience, in contrast, was a closed book. I discovered my spirituality in much the same way that my peers raised in more conservative faiths discovered their sexuality-accidentally, furtively, without guidance, moved by overwhelming inner tides, and with some sense of shame. I longed for the white organdy First Communion dresses and the menorah candles of my neighbors. I secretly memorized Louisa May Alcott’s ‘My Kingdom’ prayer, written when she was thirteen, and sang myself to sleep with ‘For the Beauty of the Earth.’ I was fascinated by the hidden life of nuns. I yearned for someone, anyone, to take my childish capacity for devotion seriously. But seeds planted in paper cups on the Sunday school windowsill, the dead bird discovered in the backyard, the calligraphic hymns in We Sing of Life, and the annual flower communion were the scant resources my liberal religious education offered. To my parents and teachers-almost all of whom had grown up in other religious traditions-the absence of texts, rote prayers, sacraments, holy objects, and moralistic picture books represented freedom. But without any language for my emerging sense of mystery and wonder, I came to feel the contrary: deprived of the tools with which to understand or express those experiences. I floundered in a kind of guilty yearning until I became intellectually mature enough to claim the rich heritage of humanity’s religious cultures for myself. I did so greedily, with none of the literalism that afflicts fundamentalists, whether orthodox or humanist. As a student of religion in college, I read the Christian women mystics, Zen teachers, Taoist poets. I studied the art and architecture, music and mysteries of the world’s religions, and discovered how each constructed the landscape of spiritual experience. What I sought was some way to bring order to what had always been going on inside of me. And I encountered a whole universe of souls, across every culture and tradition, who knew all about it.”

That’s Kendyl Gibbons’ story, and in it, she is just like the boy ready to be deeply stirred and moved, who goes out far into the forest. As for the bird with the most beautiful song-how about the things to which Kendyl found herself drawn in reverence: initially the white organdy First Communion dresses, the menorah candles of her neighbors, a prayer from Louisa May Alcott, a song with which she would sing herself to sleep. Then, when she got older: the world’s religions, their literature and art and architecture, the whole universe of souls across every culture and nature who had heard the beautiful song. But then there is the religion she grew up in, in which spirituality was seen as regressive, cliché, lowbrow, not progressive enough. In her judgment, this reflects a kind of pridefulness. “There is nothing so petulant,” she says, as to throw away what our ancestors have tried to pass on to us, in stories and stones, in scriptures and songs, in rituals and prayers, because we think that we in our adolescent hubris know better now. Who can stand in the shadow of the great pyramids, or the radiant light and soaring stone of the cathedral at Chartres-who can listen to the deep cadences of the Book of Common Prayer fall sonorous on the ear-and not realize in the very fiber of being that our wonder and our hunger and our terror and even our most valiant ‘yes’ to life are not ours alone, but echo down the ages of the whole human race?” Whatever the reason, people in her congregation did not provide language and symbols of reverence that would have helped her give voice to her emerging sense of awe and wonder. Neglect threatened the bird with the most beautiful song with death-but somehow Kendyl had the resilience to outlast this, only to become one of the leading Religious Humanist ministers in our movement…

This is but one example of the myth unfolding in real life, and here is another, coming to us from Jonathan Haidt, author of our study book for this year, The Happiness Hypothesis. In it, he shares an experience he had while reading The Sacred and the Profane, by the great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade. Jonathan Haidt reads this book, and it tells him that the perception of sacredness is a human universal, and that regardless of their differences, all cultures have had sacred places and sacred times and sacred activities, all meant to allow contact with something that is larger than oneself, something which inspires reverence and awe. The book goes on to tell him that the modern West represents the first culture in all of history that has managed to strip space and time of sacredness and render it completely profane. But then he reads this passage: “Even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others-a person’s birthplace, or the scenes of a first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious person, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.” This is the passage that Jonathan Haidt reads, and as he does, he gasps. The realization is powerful, visceral. “Eliade,” he says, “had perfectly pegged my feeble spirituality, limited as it is to places, books, people, and events that have given me moments of uplift and enlightenment. Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.” In other words: the bird with the most beautiful song never stops singing, though its song can be drowned out or denied by the culture surrounding it. The bird with the most beautiful song never stops singing, though its song may be different from how common stereotypes portray it.

The myth unfolds in Jonathan Haidt’s life, in Kendyl Gibbons’ life, and perhaps by hearing their stories you are on the way of drawing your own connections with it. For myself, at this point, above all, what I’m trying to figure out is why the father would want to kill the bird. Why a church might make spirituality a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of thing. Why an entire culture might try to deny or drown it out the bird’s song.

We’ve already heard one possible theory about this, coming from Kendyl and her musings about the church she grew up in: the father is prideful, arrogant, imagines nothing significant can come from the bird. Or perhaps this: the father wants to kill the bird because he thinks it is a phony and the most beautiful song a fake. Perhaps he refuses to give time to the bird because he imagines himself just too busy. Or perhaps he has never himself found a bird like that-perhaps it reminds him of one he once found but lost-and so, in his shame, he turns into a bully. So many possible reasons for why the father does what he does.

Each reason would take significant time to trace out, so here (in the spirit of this science and spirituality sermon series) I will look at only the second one: the father kills the bird because he thinks it is a phony. A delusion caused by chemical misfiring of nerve cells in the brain, with no positive purpose. Why should I take my precious food and give it to a useless delusion? Ever heard this objection before?

It’s fascinating how neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili speak to this in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. One of their experiments involved injecting radioactive material into people practiced in meditation as well as in prayer, and using a high-tech imaging tool to scan blood flow patterns in their brains. The radioactive material would be injected only when subjects indicated that they were deep into the flow of their experience and close to a sense of interconnection with all life (or, alternatively, a mingling with God), so that the scientists could see what was happening in their brains at the climax of their meditation or prayer. And what they-Drs. Newberg and D’Aquili-saw was significantly decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, or the part of the brain responsible for orienting people in physical space-helping people know the difference between up and down, here and there, and above all, “me” and “not me.” Block activity in this part of the brain, through damage for example, and even a simple task like lying down becomes an impossible challenge. You can’t locate yourself. You miss the chair, hit the floor, don’t even know how to lie down. But this was not at all the case with the people meditating or praying. They maintained control of their bodies just fine; it’s just that they had these deep experiences of oneness with the Universe or oneness with God. In this, Drs. Newburg and D’Aquili did not see any nerve cells misfiring or anything manifestedly contrary to what our bodies are meant to do. They did not see anything that would smack of delusion.

Their ultimate conclusion? Our human capacity to hear the bird with the most beautiful song is a valid product of natural selection. It is primal. Evolution put the neurological mechanisms responsible for the experience of self-transcendence in our brains, because when we are able to escape the limited bonds of our narrow selves through love and trust and openness, we become stronger. We become able to accomplish things that otherwise we could never do. This is a “neurobiological need” we see in all living beings, expressed in various degrees of sophistication, from the ritualized behavior of animals to the most sophisticated of human ceremonies. In animals, think headbobbing, think vocalization, think grooming: all these and more enabling members of the same species to recognize eachother as such, enabling communication of various kinds, enabling most importantly mating and reproduction. And as for humans: think this morning: our singing together, our lighting of the chalice, our responsive reading, one event after another unfolding in our midst; and soon, the ringing of the bell, the time of meditation, the offering, the benediction. The rhythm to all of this, so that we can feel opened up, connected to each other and to the larger values we serve. Turn of those cell phones so that we’re not jarred out of our dance together… Underneath all of it is a naturally selected-for neurobiological need to reach out, connect beyond oneself, unite. Underneath is the reality of what poet Rabindranath Tagore spoke when he said, “The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.”

This is nothing less than divinity, with or without God. Rooted in our biology and in our bodies, it is no wonder that people experience sacredness in some form or fashion regardless of theological belief. “The holy is nothing but the ordinary,” says Kendyl Gibbons, “held up to the light and profoundly seen. It is the awareness of a creativity and a connection that we do not control, in a universe that is always larger, more intricate, and more astonishing than we imagine. It is the acknowledgment that we are formed by the earth from which we arise, and in which we live and move and have our being; and that we are, finally, not alone.” Whether or not God exists, we need this awareness, and we can have it.

And it can happen in surprising ways….. I’ll close with a story from Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili in their book I mentioned earlier, Why God Won’t Go Away.

“At midnight, in the shadowy choir loft of a candlelit gothic cathedral of the Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, a fifty-four year old businessman named Bill sits in a crowded pew enjoying a concert by the innovative jazz ensemble known as the Paul Winter Consort. It’s a hallmark of Winter’s group to set their stage in unusual and atmospheric venues-canyons, beaches, old stone barns-to reflect the moody, reverent spirit of their music, which often blends their own live performances with the recorded songs of nature. Tonight’s concert … has included a lyrical duet with a school of singing humpback whales and a haunting serenade build around the keening of eagles. Now, as the evening draws to a close, Winter and his group are providing the instrumental accompaniment to the tape-recorded singing of a pack of free-roaming wolves. The rhythmic, otherworldly wolf serenade echoes eerily in the monumental quiet of the cathedral’s soaring spaces. The wolves raise their voices in raw howls of sheer animal power, then let them soften to haunting, melancholy cries. [With Winter's moody soprano sax in call and response fashion, the effect is] to lift listeners out of their everyday lives, and into another world. And as the wolf serenade reaches its emotional crescendo, that’s exactly what is happening to Bill. [...] He feels deeply, serenely at peace. Then, suddenly, he is seized by a surge of excitement. It rushes up from the gut in a burst of joy and energy, and before he can think twice about it, Bill is on his feet, with his head thrown back, and he is howling from the bottom of his soul. Remarkably, at the same moment, other people have begun to howl. At first it’s half a dozen, scattered throughout the church. But in moments others follow their lead and soon the entire cathedral is alive with joyous noise, as hundreds of people joyfully join in the primal song of the wolves.”

Something like that is what I hope for each of you, too. To join in with some primal song. In fact, right now I want you to feel the young Pygmy boy within-feel how he is ready to be deeply stirred and deeply moved. Now, from that, howl!

It’s the neurobiological need for self-transcendence we feel, as we sing that primal song and feel the shivers run up and down our spines … as we feel wonder. That’s what evolution has done for us. Put a capacity for wonder in our hearts. Divinity-with or without God.