Spiritual but Not Religious or The Separation of Church and Faith

Sermon

"I’m spiritual but not religious." How many times have we heard that phrase, or used that phrase? What it means is sometimes different according to who says it. It may mean that we don’t have a clear theology, but we feel awe sometimes in the world; or we meditate daily but not according to one tradition, or we came out of a creedal faith and are not interested in being part of another one, or we dislike or distrust organized religion but like unorganized, free-form religion a lot.

The longer I am a minister and the older and more curmudgeonly I get, the more I notice that many UU’s are among those who define themselves as spiritual but not religious. This all came together for me the other day when I was taking a rushed look at the Unitarian Universalist Association Bookstore Catalogue. I thought I saw, as I flipped pages, a title that went: How to Pray Without Being Religious. What?! Surely not. I flipped back, couldn’t find it, thought "See, it’s all in your head and what does it say about you that that’s the kind of thing in your head!" But then I found it. There it was: How to Pray Without Being Religious. Now I have to confess I haven’t got the book. I may yet get it and speak in a more informed way about it later on. But right now so I’m just using it to make my point, and moving on.

When did religion become the "R" word for us? Why are Unitarian Universalists concerned to pray without being religious? What kind of goal is that for our prayer? Not that it be authentic or fulfilling or transformative or otherwise effective, merely non-religious. Or perhaps its very unreligiosity implies its authenticity and fulfillment. "Liberal" has already been stigmatized effectively enough that plenty of people are renouncing it for "progressive" or, even better, "moderate." So has "feminist" Strong women everywhere run around making the point that they’re not feminists, since that no longer means believing that women can and should be strong, possessing equal rights to men, rather now it means man-hater. Are we going to give up on religion too?

What’s really the difference between spiritual and religious, anyway? Of course, different people will offer different answers to this question too. Mine is that spirituality has to do with individual experience, looser definitions and personal concerns; religion has to do with larger, identifiable, community experience and societal concerns. They’re not mutually exclusive, but they’re not mutually interchangeable either. They aren’t the same and they’re not meant to be. A religion can’t function authentically without spiritual experience as part of it, and spiritual experience isn’t enough without religious dimensions to call us to concerns beyond our own, and means of sharing our spiritual experience and the values they enjoin upon us, with others.

All this is not just semantics. It is of particular moment to Unitarian Universalists because of an ongoing issue in our movement, the question of the language of reverence.

Our opening words came from a sermon that initiated this theme of reverent language back in May, 2001 when a leading humanist UU minister, the Rev. David Bumbaugh preached it to the Chicago Area Unitarian Universalist Council. Our reading came from a sermon Rev. Bill Sinkford, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association delivered to the First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church in Fort Worth in January, 2003, wherein he picked up on David Bumbaugh’s theme and gave his version of it. Because a local paper misquoted him as saying that he wanted to insert the word God into the Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes, a tempest erupted, with hot-blooded debate via email, in sermons and speeches, in letters to the denomination, to Rev. Sinkford, and even in some major media coverage. Even since the mistake was clarified, the issue has continued to evolve and engage Unitarian Universalists, in such venues as the recent publication of this book, A Language of Reverence, which contains 6 sermons or essays on the topic from very different points of view.

At an Inquirer’s Lunch for visitors to the church a few years ago, someone asked a question about the room at UUCSS for theological diversity. They wondered what was the range of theological diversity here and how it balances out across the usual spectrum of beliefs that is Unitarian Universalism. In answer to their question Marcia Joiner declared that as an athiest, she’d never yet been offended by sermons I delivered using god language or offering an invitation to consider theistic questions or ideas. It was a light-hearted discussion at the time, but it gets at serious issues for us. Not only how do we balance our spectrum of beliefs in this congregation, but what is the relationship between different points within that spectrum? How do humanists and theists and those of Jewish or Christian or Buddhist or atheist or spiritual or religious descent or orientation share and speak a faith in which we all find meaning and belonging? Where does our individual spirituality end and our shared religion begin? Is there meaning and belonging for all of us in the language of reverence?

As I began to work on this sermon, I began to realize the topic can only be done two ways; fairly thinly in one sermon, or more deeply, as I think it deserves, in at least two or maybe more, sermons. There’s a lot that informs or is impacted by this issue of our faith language, and so in the end I’ve decided to do it right. My sermon today introduces the issue and posits a general answer to the question of whether we need a language of reverence at all. My answer, which is probably not a big surprise to most of you, is that yes, we need a language of reverence for at least three reasons.

First, Unitarian Universalist congregations, in this case, this UU Church in Silver Spring, need language of reverence because we need to be able to honor not only different religions and world views, but also, more personally, the spectrum of theology from one pole to the other, from atheism to theism, including humanism, agnosticism, mystical humanism, mysticism, deism, panenthiesm, paganism and more. In doing this, we need must always remain mindful of shaping our words and our themes in ways to keep our faith open to all, and respectful of our precious diversity, which of course includes honoring our many atheist and humanist members, who not only are numerous among us, but who have held and shaped Unitarian Universalism more than any other group in our movement in the last 2 generations. The fact that it was a humanist minister who first called for a renewal of reverent language, not a new introduction but a renewal, drawing on such great precedent as the Humanist Manifesto, reminds us that to offer words expressing spiritual experience is a gift available to all. Reverence is spiritual, as well as religious.

More fundamentally, we need to embrace a language of reverence because as a movement we are a religion and not a philosophy. Though we count many philosophers and many atheists in our number, we are a faith tradition. This means that we inherently value that which is ineffable and even incomprehensible but which we nonetheless seek to express and honor and deepen our understanding, or at least our relationship, with. We have Sunday Worship services, we ordain and call, we pray and meditate, we invoke and aspire, and though we may not mean the same thing when we say words like God or spirit or saving grace or blessing or redemption or sacrifice or power or miracle or human or evil or good, we use all those words here and must feel entitled to continue to do so.

Perhaps most fundamentally of all, we need to embrace a language of reverence because we experience reverence. There is profound intrinsic importance to human verbal expression. We are always rightly impressed by instances of languages having many words for what others sloppily lump together – like the many Eskimo words detailing snow in all its variety – because that linguistic range and precision reflects a range and depth of experience, a more nuanced understanding than our own. Eskimo language happens to be polysynthetic, which means rather than adding words to create phrases, they often combine root words to create one word that is the equivalent of a phrase in, say, English. This means we can get to what they’re saying, but their way takes less room. Of course scholars suggest that the linguistic tendencies of a language also speak to an environment that focuses attention on some elements or experiences, and necessarily doesn’t focus or perhaps even admit, others, some of which may be precious to our own UU worldview. Even with all these caveats and qualifications, particulars of language offer us different understandings and perspectives, mindfulness or awareness we recognize once it is articulated, or made effable, by that language. This is why we are so struck when we notice when a language or culture has a word or phrase another, perhaps our own, lacks entirely, though we too know the experience, for example l’esprit de l’escalier which though a whole phrase in French still requires a paragraph in English. Apparently coined by the French writer Diderot, it dates to the 18th century, and "refers to that infuriating situation in which you leave" an encounter – or in the original French terms, a salon,"and are halfway down the stairs before you suddenly think of that devastatingly witty reply you could have made. (Eighteenth-century grand houses had their principal public rooms on an upper floor.) More generally, it’s any sparkling remark you wish you had thought of at the time but were too slow-witted to produce." (www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-esp1.htm)

Or there’s schadenfreude which comes from the German words for "damage" schaden and "joy," freude, and refers to the pleasure one may take in another’s misfortune. It may be purely petty, or not, as in the pleasure one German Jew writes that he felt as a child when Germany lost some Olympic medal rounds in 1936. It may not be a laudable, spiritual or religious impulse, but until one learns of the word, one has no way to know there are others who have, right or wrong, felt this. It is a part of the human condition that we learn and may consider, when we have the word to point it out.

A unique, powerful, blessed, wonderful part of being human is that we experience reverence. Human experiences and abilities kindle in us a sense of what is, in Rev. Bumbaugh’s words, "deepest and dearest… the focus of our ultimate commitment,… the source of human good,… so precious to us that we cannot betray it without losing our own souls in the process." (ALOR, p. 21) We all experience reverence on levels that spark our souls and move us even if briefly, even if only momentarily, they lift us, unutterably and repeatedly throughout our lives. It seems unarguable that experiencing reverence, we should have language to express it. Anything less than that is a denial, even a silencing, of that experience, that precious dimension to what makes being human worthwhile.

How many times have I looked with envy at our brethren the animals, given extraordinary abilities, swift and free at least from petty cares and insecurities and the pressures of debt or taxes or guilt, and wished I were them and not me. How many of us have wished at one time or another for relief from our feeble, wracked experience of humanness? And what helps that wish and envy pass from us? It passes from me in part because of the facing side of my humanness: comprehension and depth of thought and feeling – even as I wish to be freed from what Wendell Berry calls forethought of grief, I also treasure that prescience, so futile and anguished as it sometimes is. That forethought helps me set right priorities and reminds me how fortunate I am to know love, how precious and fragile all life is, how much is constantly hanging in the balance, how much love and life deserve and demand our appreciation and attention, our reverence.

In the end, there is so much to gain from nurturing a language of reverence among us, that the denominational furor over the issue can seem puzzling. But in considering the case for the place of reverent language in Unitarian Universalism, we find ourselves in a perilous place, all of us, heterogenous and complicated as we are, together with our theologically-varied backs against the wall that is the inescapable relevance of reverence, we face a looming imperative: to define and own what our language of reverence should sound like, should look like, should be.

How we verbalize reverence is its own fascinating, complicated, hotly-contested conundrum. How do we speak about what Rev. Bumbaugh identifies as that which is "deepest and dearest, about what is the focus of our ultimate commitment, about what is the source of human good, about what is so precious to us that we cannot betray it without losing our own souls in the process?" He tells us that "The once powerful images and metaphors that enabled the religious community to stand in judgement on the powers and principalities of the day are now servants of the status quo, of conventional thinking and practice." Therefore, he says, "to call for us to use traditional language and symbols and concepts to speak about what is deepest and dearest… is to ask us to employ a tongue that has been so corrupted and exploited as to fail to convey the very depths of reverence the times call for." (GA sermon, ALOR, p. 20-21)

Is he right? I’m not sure the language of Judaism and Christianity was ever so pure – to be sure there were prophets standing in judgement over the powers of the day, but there were also false prophets, false messiahs and frequent accusations back of forth as to who was authentic and who was not. And winners write history; those judged authentic according to the books we have inherited in the bible are not necessarily the more valorous or sacred, but certainly those whose views prevailed in the end.

And we religious liberals know plenty of examples of biblical language and values, condemning what was then considered corrupt, which we view very differently today. Is Biblical language truly fallen, become its own Whore of Babylon, or is it merely, again, a Jerusalem that has been overtaken and inhabited by forces currently prevailing? To answer this requires looking at what the Jewish and Christian traditions actually offer or impose, also to consider whether traditional language can ever be ‘reformed’, invested with new meaning or interpretation or at least differently nuanced.

Apart from these Western traditions, what about using words from other world religions and traditions? How would the ethics of interfaith appropriation pertain to such adoption? Or would we need new language – new words or at least little-used words that we can employ with such power and care that they enter the dialogue with as much significance as other once-pure terms once had. Part two of this sermon, on December 11th, will consider these questions, with reference to particular words such as: rapture, sacrifice, revelation, mission, grok, dao, and the mysterious, lost Hebrew word, selah.

I close this sermon with the words of Unitarian Universalist minister Barbara Rhode:
The Poet God

God is writing a poem
I am one of the words.
He utters me.

(Do I mean what he means me to mean?)

When God’s voice stops
When the poem is finished,
The poem will be.
I will be.

(Do you think poems die? They are completed.
Do you think we die? We complete the poem.)

Without me, the poem would not be whole.
Without the poem, my word is a hollow sound.
Without God, nothing.

(The world goes mad with noise.
We cannot hear ourselves.
God, sing in our ears again.)

Amen.