January 3, 2010

The Oneness of Everything

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

SERMON  

So, welcome to the 20-teens! Ever since the dawning of a new millennium ten years ago we struggled over how to name the decade we were passing through. The aughts? The naughts? The Ohs? I don’t think a consensus was ever reached. So, stepping in where, I’m sure, angels fear to tread, I offer this moniker for the decade we are entering – the 20-teens.

Actually, as diligent language mavens among us will be quick to remind me, just as the new millennium didn’t begin until 2001, so the teens, technically speaking, don’t start until next year. OK, OK. We can argue names, but it seems to me that when the second column in the odometer of our calendar clicks ahead one notch it is an appropriate moment for reflection, for taking stock of much in our lives, not least how we understand our place in the world, the meaning of our lives: in short, all that might be encompassed in the work of religion.

And so in this, our first service of the New Year, I’d like to invite us to step back and consider some of the premises that I believe underlie our work in this congregation and in the religious movement of which we are a part.

More than 160 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist and Unitarian minister, offered this thought of where the religious search begins. “When the act of reflection takes place in the mind,” he wrote in his essay “Spiritual Laws,” “when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.”

It was a minority opinion among clerics in Emerson’s time. The overwhelming consensus was that the natural world around us was the source of sin and depravity, a fallen world meant to be conquered, subdued and ultimately transcended at death when the faithful would be called to heaven.

Emerson urged his readers to have none of that. “The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if (we) will live the life of nature and not import into (our) minds difficulties which are none of (ours),” he wrote. “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any (one). . . . They are the soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs.”

Far more to the point, he said, is that we might learn, in his words, “to give account of our faith and expound (to one another) the theory of (our) self-union and freedom.”

Learning to see ourselves as living embosomed in beauty, coming to terms with our essential unity and freedom. Nearly two centuries later, I can hardly think of a more pithy and precise summary of the task with which religion presents us.

Emerson was among the pioneers for what arguably qualifies as the saving theological truth of our time: that at the deepest levels and in the most fundamental ways all is one. Indeed, belief in the essential unity of all things has been a thread that has run through both Unitarian and Universalist thought from its earliest days.

The Unitarian perspective argues that all that is participates in singular ground of being. The three-story house of faith – with heaven above, Earth in the middle, and hell below – is a figment that ultimately only leads to confusion and despair. It divides us from ourselves and each other as well as everything else that surrounds us. Rather than seek to escape the world of our experience, our religious task is to learn to celebrate it and our place within it.

Likewise, the Universalist perspective holds that all of us are joined in shared destiny. There is no select group guaranteed divine favor. And so our hope both individually and in community lies in learning to see each person as worthy and owing of our duty.

As the Universalist minister Thomas Starr King put it, “We are not intended to be separate, private persons, but rather fibers, fingers and limbs.” We cannot hope to live justly, he said, until we are, in his words, “rightly related to one another.”

The haughty fiction that we humans have some privileged place in the universe or some right, no less some clue how, to manage it has been demolished both by what we have learned and how we have behaved in the century and a half since Emerson and Starr King wrote.

Our learning encompasses many dimensions of what we have discovered about ourselves and the physical space we inhabit. As to ourselves, we have learned that there is a bit of wisdom in the story of Genesis, which declared that humankind was formed from the dust of the earth. The DNA that guides every cell in our bodies is no different in composition than that of every living thing. Each is made up of different combinations of the same four amino acids.

Likewise, many of the same genes that control what it means to be human also guide what it means to be a salamander, fern, or fruit fly. Genetically, the difference between us and the great apes is insignificant.

As to our physical space, we have learned that it is incomprehensibly vast and complex and yet also interconnected in ways that test our imagination. Not only do we find the sky filled with galaxies as deep as we peer into space, but some 90% of the universe takes a form we are unable to detect, whose existence we can only infer from even our most sophisticated instruments.

At the same time, the deeper and further that we look – out to the universe and into the core of the atom – the more interconnected the universe appears. In recent decades scientists have discovered that tiny particles of matter can affect each other instantaneously across large distances. This suggests a counterintuitive notion that Albert Einstein dismissed as ridiculous, that at some level we live in a “non-local” universe where objects that we experience as distinct, even separated by great distances are in fact connected: literally, in a way we don’t have the language or conceptual framework to define, part of one whole.

This is, of course, all very sketchy and difficult to integrate in any way that in a religious framework. It is reminiscent of a remark that George Bernard Shaw made to Einstein in the 1930s at a black tie dinner. “Religion,” Shaw said, “is always right, and science is always wrong. Religion solves every problem and thereby abolishes problems from the universe. Science is the opposite. It never solves a problem without raising 10 more problems.”

Religion, though, that leaves itself open to human discovery finds no cause to conflict with science. Indeed, these recent discoveries invite us to consider different ways of understanding and responding to the world around us. They remind us that the human struggle to divine our place in the universe is as old as our species and within it the theme of unity arises again and again, starting with some of the oldest writings we have, the great Hindu scripture of the Upanishads.

“Those who see all creatures within themselves and themselves in all creatures know no fear,” it states. “Those who see all creatures in themselves and themselves in all creatures know no grief. How can the multiplicity of life delude the one who sees its unity?”

This is the understanding that informs Tagore’s great poetry, the sense that we as humans are not separated from the world, that “the same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day,” that source of vitality that I know in my innermost being, “runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.”

That vitality, he says, that “shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.”

The ecstatic energy in those lines echoes Emerson’s imagery as well, to discover in the world a beauty that “embosoms” us, that embraces, that cherishes, that shelters us. It is a beauty that, as Tagore tells us, rocks us together with all life “in the ocean cradle of birth and death,” and invites us to “be glad with the gladness of this rhythm.”

That which separates us from this rhythm, these poets argue, disconnects us from the source of our vitality. So, it’s little wonder that so many of us today feel such distress in our lives. The practices of our culture and economy remain centered in a perspective that sees the natural world as a resource to be exploited, practices that are actively contributing to the deterioration of the earth, its climate and its capacity to sustain life.

 Our distress comes because, while we lament the damage we observe, we are paralyzed by the magnitude of the changes demanded of us. There is, I believe, a growing sense of the underlying unity of all things, an awareness that the separateness we feel, that western culture has taught for a millennium, is an illusion, that our destiny is linked with the larger well being of all life. And we yearn for some way of living into this new way of being.

This yearning appears as the premise of the blockbuster film, “Avatar,” which was just released. Though set at an imagined time 150 years in the future, the plot arises directly out of this present-day cultural clash – pitting a military-industrial juggernaut against a culture attuned to the rhythms of the earth. The film is a stunning display of what computer-assisted movie making is capable of, though it has to be said that, even amid the eye-popping 3-D visual effects, the morality tale at the movie’s center is not especially nuanced – ham-handed evil in the form of rapacious corporate greed is given its comeuppance.

Still, the film also interweaves throughout the story line some of our more sophisticated learning that has emerged from science in recent decades about the interdependence of life, the ways in which living things are linked in intricate networks across vast ecosystems. And the premise of the story itself, in which characters enter machines that make it possible for them to guide alien creatures, invites us to imagine how it might be to inhabit other ways of being.

In this way, we see that the unity we seek encompasses not simply attunement with the natural world and its diversity of creatures but also unity with others of our own kind: people whose skin we might imagine inhabiting, whose interests we recognize as equal to our own. It is here we negotiate the ever-present tension that Emerson pointed to between what unity calls from us and what freedom demands – how we might honor the oneness of all things and make a claim for our unique identity within it.

To say we are one is not to say we are subsumed in the one. Individual identity is necessary to the integrity of the whole. But individuals can also damage the whole by working against it.

There is both a fundamental tenacity and fragility to the Web of life. “The mosquito is so small,” writes Mary Oliver, “it takes almost nothing to ruin it.” So, it is for many of the tenuous connections that life makes. “Mushrooms, even,” the poet adds, “have but a brief hour before the slug creeps to the feast, before the pine needles hustle down under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.”

We cannot know the parameters of our brief hour on this Earth, as individuals, even as a species. For, the oneness of everything does not assure the continuation of any one thing. And we as a species have certainly proved we are capable of great ruination. Are we capable of great beneficence as well?

In the end, we are left with what Mary Oliver calls “that old idea: the singular and the eternal.”  In that great cup in which all being is dancing, swirling there emerges the particular – the mosquito, the ant, the leaf, and you know what else, right there – your own darling face, your own eyes.

Out of the mystery beyond all knowing you have made it here, a manifestation of the emergent energy of all things – what a wonder, what a privilege! Here, embosomed in such astonishing beauty wherever we look, life working within us like a song.

We need not be blue-skinned beings from the planet Pandora to see that as tiny as we are in the vast scheme of things we are connected to all things, stumbling and imperfect, yes, but ultimately redeemable and at home.