ENLIGHTENMENT RELIGION AND THE USES OF ENDARKENMENT
Rev. Sarah York, Guest Minister
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville
January 8, 2012
Readings
Reading from Choruses from the Rock by T.S. Eliot:
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Reading from Albert Einstein: The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. [The Person] to whom emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms –this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.
The Sermon:
Several years ago I made a phone call to the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston. I have memorized the number, of course. It is 617-742-2100. But on this occasion, I got the wrong number. Instead of dialing 617-742-2100, I dialed 619-742-2100. And guess what I got? Palomar Observatory!
The next week I preached a sermon about how Unitarian Universalists are only two digits away from Heaven. But I was convinced that there had to be more to this little cosmic slip of the finger than met the eye, so I called Palomar again, and learned that this observatory, which has been the most significant in the world, was losing its seeing capabilities as a result of “light pollution” from surrounding cities. Were it not for the Native American reservations at the bottom of the mountain inhibiting land development, the observatory’s vision would be more impaired.
Light pollution. Isn’t that an interesting concept? Think about it in relation to our tradition of enlightenment. Light pollution. Too much light. Too much information. Too much progress. The endless cycle of idea and action.
Enlightenment religion is our heritage—mostly on the Unitarian side. And we are proud of it. Particularly in American Unitarianism, which grew out of a liberal Christian rebellion against Calvinist theology. It was the latter part of the eighteenth century, and scholars were beginning to use their brains when they read the Bible and formulated their ideas about religion. They observed, for example, that Moses was said to have written the first five books of the Bible, but they noticed that he died in the second book. They found no biblical basis for doctrines like original sin and the divinity of Jesus and the Trinitarian nature of God. They believed, as we do today, that you cannot just accept on faith what the church officials tell you. You have to rely on the knowledge that you receive objectively through your senses. They affirmed that there is one God; that Jesus was a great teacher, and that human nature is essentially good. Now we adjust that to say that there is one God at most. We continue to be character-centered, not God-centered. And we continue to maintain a sense of hope in humanity, in the values of reason, tolerance, and moral service. We probably have a little less faith in the essential goodness of human nature, having witnessed the Nazi holocaust as well as some holocausts on a smaller scale.
But there is another part of our early heritage, the Transcendentalists. They were a group of Unitarian ministers, mostly, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. They came along in the 1830’s when Unitarianism was firmly established in New England, and asserted that the Unitarian faith was “corpse-cold” religion. You see, the Unitarians relied on empirical evidence for their faith, and they had ascertained that the miracles of Jesus were the physical signs of his authority. This sounds like less than scientific method to us, but in their time, miracles were considered to be hard sensory data. The transcendentalists, however, claimed that they did not need the authority of Jesus and his miracles. They did not need proof of anything in scriptures; they did not need the authority of the church. Their own intuition was sufficient. They had a direct line to God. They relied upon conscience to determine moral action and were open to the power of mystery and mysticism. Truth could be reached subjectively as well as objectively. “Within us,” wrote Emerson, “is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.”
The tensions that existed in the 19th century are still with us. Sometimes the mystics among us still complain that we are God’s frozen people. Others fear we are becoming the Church of What’s Happening Now. Our history is a series of controversies on similar themes. In the latter part of the 19th century, there were Intuitionist and Scientific Schools of thought. Then in the early 20th century, a strengthening movement of U.U. Humanists challenged traditional Theism. By the 50’s Humanism was dominant in many congregations. Then in the 80’s and 90’s many U.U.s expressed a longing for a deeper sense of spirituality in their religion. It was a reaction not unlike the challenge from the Transcendentalists in the previous century. Through all these conversations and controversies, we have grown into an inclusive faith, affirming reason and intuition, scientific method and mysticism. Theists and Humanists and Christians and Buddhists are, I suspect, sitting amicably side by side in this very room today.
In 2006 I was Interim Lead Minister at the Eno River U.U. Fellowship in Durham. Their survey of the congregation for their ministerial search indicated that almost half of them are Humanist; also that most are drawn to Christian or Buddhist tradition. Go figure. I recall when I was in a Church History class with Unitarian scholar, Conrad Wright. Conrad said that at some point every minister preaches a sermon titled, “Are Unitarians Christians?” Then, in his dry Maine accent he said. “That’s easy. Some are; some aren’t.”
Yes, we include a variety of theological positions, but we struggle sometimes to create a community where different needs are met. The tensions are not just between people; they exist within many of us. For we find ourselves needing a faith that is based on both rational inquiry and spiritual inspiration. Some of the most scientific minds among us are also the ones most open to the power of mystery.
But our roots are still in the Enlightenment. We have seen the damage done by emotional, dogmatic religion and we take refuge in our heads. We do not easily allow ourselves to feel inspired or be moved emotionally or to connect with the holy in a mystical moment.
I recall a statement that was made by a teenage member of the First Unitarian Society of Ithaca, New York, after their youth group visited the Benedictine Monastery of Mount Savior for vespers: “In the chapel there were only a few people watching the service, and I sat in front of them. I wanted the sensation of being alone there. I wanted to be open to the beauty of the chapel and the circle of monks and to the chanting. And I see now that I wanted more than that. I wanted thru some sort of magic to enter into the service, not simply because its forms were beautiful, but because they seemed at once mysterious and full of meaning…. The monks knelt and rose and bowed; bowing, their bodies bent forward from the waist, torsos almost horizontal. But I could not move…. I was brought up in this church, where no one kneels and no one bows. Physically I’m very inhibited, so that I don’t move easily. And when has it ever been suggested that I might kneel, even figuratively kneel, before or to something? I wanted to kneel, that's the important thing. But I could not.… To kneel and to mean it would be frightening because there is a darkness in the kneeling and a darkness in us which we cannot reason about. [Unitarian Universalists] teach the fear of form without meaning, and that is right; but having avoided forms, [we] have sometimes avoided the darkness, and it is from the darkness that the real questions arise.”
I had a similar experience while I was at a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony in Katmandu while I was on a trekking pilgrimage in Nepal. Several of our group went into a temple where the monks were chanting their scriptures. In a vestibule with hundreds of little butter lamps flickering, we removed our shoes. I sat on a mat and one by one my companions left. There I was, the only woman and the only visitor in the room. I stayed for about an hour, and never felt uncomfortable. What I felt, in fact, was a powerful connection with these men with whom I had so little in common.
I encountered something of the darkness that is pure mystery. I was sitting, but my soul was kneeling. I do not know why I was lulled by the deep music of male voices chanting or why I felt connected to the ancient temple or why I felt more a part of the human family in those moments.
Endarkenment invites us into a mystical moment when we feel connected to the holy, or part of a larger meaning. That is when we feel also our deepest human connections.
A dark place within us wants to bow or kneel. But we are sometimes the heirs of Emersonian self-reliance gone amuck. To admit that we might want to connect with some source of cosmic meaning outside ourselves is not easy. It feels like a weakness of some sort. Religion as a crutch. As the teenager from Ithaca wrote, “To kneel and to mean it would be frightening because there is a darkness in the kneeling and a darkness in us which we cannot reason about.”
I remember going to an interfaith peace service at an Episcopal church once. At one point we all knelt for a unison prayer in which we named all the people on a list we had compiled from our congregations and we offered prayers for them. We also called ourselves to witness for peace. I was there with several rational enlightened members of my U.U. congregation, and we were all deeply moved by the experience. We joked afterward about how the congregation would respond if we suggested putting kneeling benches on the backs of the plastic chairs in our worship space.
To kneel or to bow is to take the posture of one who feels humble or reverent, and to kneel with others is to call upon the transforming power of the holy to touch the community. Indeed, it is a function of religion to offer a safe place to kneel—if not literally, then figuratively, so that we may find a way to evoke power among us and use that power to transform our world. In the words of the poet Rumi, “Let the beauty we love be what we do; there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
I became a Unitarian Universalist years ago because I was disenchanted with traditional Christian religion and attracted to a religion of enlightenment. I found a home for my doubts. I continue to grow in my faith now because it is also a religion of endarkenment. So I live in paradox. My enlightened mind wants a scholarly approach to seeking truth and is skeptical of emotionalism. I am right there with John Bates when it comes to Creationism. But my endarkened soul thrives on music and silence, is sometimes moved to tears … and occasionally even kneels in a gesture of humility before the grandeur and the mystery of creation.