The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring
Sermon transcript
The Latest on God
by Rev. Elizabeth Lerner
Service at UUCSS on May 24, 2009
The Latest on God
In Jewish tradition, the name of God is unpronounceable. It is too awesome to be compassed by mere mortals, even in so far as we might dare to attempt it by saying the name of that which is the source of all and thereby transcends all. So Jews never pronounce the four consonants: YHWH that comprise the name of God. Instead, anywhere that word appears, YHWH, Jews say a different word in its place, usually either adonai, which means ‘the lord’ or hashem, which means, literally, ‘the name’ as in ‘the name (we are not now pronouncing).’
Though I do not observe all Jewish traditions, as a half-Jewish person, I do respect them and I follow those that are important to me or my family. And one of those I follow is I never pronounce the name of God. I’ll spell that YHWH – which is evocative enough that it makes me a little chilled – but I won’t say it. Not simply because it is a rule, but because I agree with the principle that underlies the rule. Naming implies understanding, at least on some level. We name what we think we can compass, recognize, understand – none of which is God. If God is anything at all, God is certainly unknowable and therefore rightly unnameable. I can’t understand God, I can’t compass God, otherwise known as ‘that which I sometimes experience or believe and at other times doubt or strongly disbelieve.’ Whatever the ultimate truth is about God’s existence or nature, I can’t definitively come close to being sure of it, so I have no right to name God, so I don’t. I feel too humbled by all that I experience and all that I don’t understand, even to want to name God.
Our reading this morning reminds us that Jews – and I – aren’t the only ones who think God is a lot to deal with. Dick Gilbert goes everywhere in his exploring what this word has meant, can mean, what it offers, what it carries, what it imposes…. the theology and wounds and baggage and history and prejudices and assumptions and revelations and catechisms all tangled up in ‘God.’ It is indeed a deep, dark, light, bright, up-tight, three letter word.
The last time I spoke to you about my own theology, it was a few years ago in a sermon called: Like Water for God, playing off the novel and film title: Like Water for Chocolate. In that sermon I said that sometimes in life, I experience a powerful sense of the divine operating in the world, operating in living creatures, operating in the nature of life itself. The patterns in planets or tides or cells or migrations, the transcendent beauty and balance of nature, the reality and power of love and honor and exultation, sometimes just a sense of immense power latent in everything – those offer me my sense of what I call God. Even just the quiet joy of a peaceful house, the blessing Anne Sexton evokes in her poem Welcome Morning, can be divine.
At other times I experience a complete lack of the divine in the world, in living creatures, in life itself. At such times living seems meaningless, random and bleak. Often at such times I feel undeservedly fortunate, because the devastation is someone else’s, perhaps someone far away, and hard on the heels of that can follow guilt at my undeserved fortune. Sometimes some kind of redemptive value can be wrested from these experiences, but that’s not always possible. Ultimately, these experiences are of great godlessness – and they happen often, just as the experiences of God do.
One of the most important messages in the teaching of the great American theologian and Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson was to pay attention to your own experience, to what happens to you and what you perceive and what your conscience tells you and to honor these. For Emerson, all human beings had a capacity to access the divine that was too often silenced and suffocated by society’s norms and hierarchies. He believed that Jesus was special not in himself, but because he was unusually able to fully access and empower the spiritual abilities all people possess for insight, compassion, and communion with the divine.
Honoring Emerson’s message meant that both my experiences of sacred presence and power, and sacred absence and desolation were real and relevant and should be honored in shaping my theology. And what came of adhering to that was my simile theology – that god was like water. When you’re in the desert and there’s no water around, that doesn’t mean that water doesn’t exist, it just means that water’s really not there, then. And like water, God could be many places and in many forms: mist, raindrops, fresh water or salt, streams or oceans or tears. Theologically this means that God isn’t everywhere all the time. I don’t whether god is self-limiting or not, I just know that sometimes I feel the sacred, the powerful, in some places and other times not, and I’ve decided that perception matters, at least to me, and that’s as much as I could come up with. I don’t know that I’m right, and I don’t know that I’m wrong, and certainly this sense of things doesn’t bring me closer to defining the unnameable any better: sentient or not, aware of me personally or not, granting us free will or forced to respond to our free will choices or not… it leaves a lot unsettled.
In some ways, since that sermon, not much has changed in my theology – certainly all that I’ve just reviewed still applies so it may be that like water for God is going to be it for me. But what has changed are the nuances.
Maybe you have the same kind of memories I do from when you were really little. I was drawn and fascinated by things that were also little, and also pretty ordinary, and therefore readily accessible in the limited sphere of a toddler. For instance, ants. Ants were fascinating. There were ant nests all around the environs of our apartment building, and ants frequently walking around our small outside porch. I remember lying on the ground and watching them up close, watching them walk, and encounter each other, and come up out of the nest hole, and go back down into the nest hole. I remember purposely brushing the sand that always accumulates in a mound at the entrance over the entryway itself to see what they would do –they would work their way up through the obstruction, clear up the mess, and go back to business as usual. And I remember once at school, one of the boys bringing in a magnifying glass to show how you could fry an ant by focusing the sun’s rays on it. I watched in fascination and horror as the black ant convulsed and fried into a small husk in seconds. And I watched in just plain horror as he did it again.
It’s been a long time, though, since I had the time and perspective to pay such close attention to such small things. Nowadays my time and perspective go to bigger things, in fact much bigger things. Lately what fascinates and calls to me are places, and just as my attraction and appreciation for small things grew over time when I was little, so my attraction and appreciation for places is growing now, to a degree that almost frightens me sometimes, the longing is so fierce and persistent. In particular, I feel this way about Cape Cod, ‘that hardy, bent arm of land’ that pushes out into the Atlantic. I was speaking about the Cape recently with a friend who has the same growing, powerful attachment to the place and we realized that what we were talking about was sacred geography. Places that are imbued with power and meaning beyond being, in this case, a pleasant vacation spot. The Cape is sacred to me. I am moved by it, by its scrappiness – mostly sand and scrub pines, estuaries and salt ponds – you don’t need to smell the sea to perceive the presence of the sea all around this land that is so improbably durable, unmajestic, and humbly beautiful, with its winding byways, grassy dunes and windblown terrain. It calls me, soothes me and compels me like nowhere else – the closer I get to it, the louder I hear it. It feels endangered, it feels eternal, it feels like the tiny-ness of mortality is heightened there amidst the sun and rain and sea and sand, the ancient horseshoe crabs and the bowl of the sky at night. And it feels like the beauty of human experience is more apparent there, with the sun on your skin, and the cold of the ocean, the warmth of the bay, the salt in the air, the mist on your skin. Being there is bliss, and leaving gets harder as the years pass. It seems silly to call prime American vacation territory sacred geography – but there it is and when I am there it’s not a vacation, it’s a pilgrimage and my soul is inspired and renewed. If I’m feeling silly, I can say that maybe God loves the Cape as much as I do and so God is always there which is why it feels so important and good to be there…certainly there’s a lot of water, and if water is like God… well anyone can do that math. If I’m feeling serious, I can only say that thought it feels silly to say it, this is how I feel about this place, this is what the place means to me and it is deeply spiritual.
The other big thing, and this is way bigger in human and social terms, is the sacredness of life. Life itself in all forms seems more sacred to me all the time. The life of a plant, of any animal. I feel bad when I am weeding sometimes and I pull out young, hardy plants that I have decided don’t belong where they are growing and cast them on the driveway to wither and die. On rainy mornings I always need to add 10 minutes to leaving the house so I can get all the stranded, exhausted worms off the driveway and into the lawn or the garden before I depart. I still kill mosquitoes but only because it feels like a ‘them or me’ face-off. I still eat meat, but that will change if I really face up to the implications of my non-vegetarianism, especially considering my position on worms and weeds. I save any animal we find on our property, from injured bats to baby squirrels to baby mice infesting our garage to baby snakes in the old leaves near the garden. The baby mice we accidentally displaced while cleaning out the garage were by far the most exhausting to nurse – smaller than one joint of my thumb they had to be fed formula every 3 hours with an eyedropper without fail for 24 hours until their mother finally found them in their box with an inviting hole in it and took them away. Perhaps I have not left the ants so far behind as I thought. But its not the appeal of any one thing that gives them place in this sermon, it is all of them together. It is what Annie Dillard writes of, coming as close as anyone has, to explaining what I mean, in her work Teaching a Stone to Talk: At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it; there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence…. The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters, it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence and even to address the prayer to “World.”
Her words are evocative and poetic, but this is not about poetry, in the end it is about very real life. I am not a pacifist, but you can imagine that this kind of attitude also holds significant complications for a non-pacifist. I believe there are some things worth fighting for and worth dying for, but I also believe that life is sacred, imbued with a divine spark – something, then, of God. War diminishes, denies and destroys all that. War is ugly, brutal, unholy, even wars I believe we had to fight, even wars I may ultimately owe my own life to. Can God possibly be in war? Though, as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes, and I’m sure I would pray as devoutly as anyone else under fire, given that I experience God or the divine as beauty, as power, as majesty, in patterns, in peace, in links between creatures and in links between lives, I don’t believe God is in war or in violence of any kind since those destroy peace, patterns, lives and links between lives. Andrew Young once said violence is the language of the unheard, and while that is often true, it is also the language of what is inherently unholy: despair, selfishness, hatred, inhumanity. We glamorize war and we impoverish ourselves to equip ourselves to prosecute it. Those who use peace or God as their shield are usually decimated by those who use violence as both shield and sword and the sight of bodies flung and mutilated by war always is a sight that makes me question not only the existence of God but the existence of souls. Dead is dead, and death is particularly graceless when it is the result of violence.
But then I look again if I can stand it, and the desolation of the maimed body reminds me of the literal gracefulness – grace-filled-ness, of a living body, of a body with a soul in it, even a sad soul, even a lost soul. A body in death seems empty in a way a sleeping body never is and while I know there are many scientific explanations for that look of fundamental difference and emptiness in a body that is no longer pulsing with life, still I feel also that there is a difference and emptiness that transcends the physical – and again, I am reminded of Emerson, who tells me to pay attention to what I perceive. Even when I can’t explain it or be sure of it, it still matters.
In the end it is frustrating to me that my musings on God, when I am always musing on God one way or another, should still be so scattered and inconsistent – from water to sacred geography to life in many forms to the sacredness of life, the soullessness of death and the godlessness of war. But mine is not a systematic theology – indeed I don’t believe systematic theology is possible. Sooner or later all theologies are either circular or inconsistent, which is part of why they are theology and not science. Mine is the experiential theology of one who believes, as a Unitarian Universalist, that I have to keep looking at life and at what I believe to make sure the two stay connected to each other. Mine is the experiential theology of one who says, okay Emerson, I hope you’re right because I’m really paying attention and trying to lean into what I perceive, even when it seems improbable and even when I don’t understand it. Mine is the experiential theology of one who sees a lot of shades of grey in the world, and so is willing to say maybe even the divine doesn’t need to be absolute – and in that case, it makes sense that the divine might not be everywhere all the time. Maybe sometimes we are apart from God or God is apart from us – maybe we’re meant to pay attention so that we feel the lack and work to change it, become better aligned with what seems to us sacred, divine, charged with God however we understand that uptight three letter word – charged with what matters most, what is best, if you prefer. Certainly if the world operated along lines that offered more chances for what seems sacred – well, sacred to me, the world would also be more peaceful, more sustainable, and a far better place for far more lives, human and not.
In case I am right, I will continue to pay attention, to try to understand what I perceive, to honor what conclusions I draw, as well as the questions or challenges I am left with. I do not need to name what I know I will never understand however hard I pay attention and ponder. What I do need to name are the understandings that are possible, the harvest of those reflections, in hopes that such sharing strikes sparks of recognition or response in any of us, in all of us. You may learn from me, I may learn from you. We may learn from another, and our attention may lead to a path that bring us closer to the unnameable, to the source of goodness, Hashem, God, peace, silence full of life, that which can never be named or defined or caught, and yet is perceived around the world and across all time.
Amen.
OW #421 from Psalm 98
Med There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry "hello there, Anne" each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning. All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds. So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken. The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.
Reading: God is a three letter word - WWS, p. 94
CW #701