Sermon for Oct 17, 2004

 

God.  There’s a strange word.   What do we mean when we use it?  What images does it conjure up in our minds?

The word itself is generic.  In most times and places if someone said to you, “I think God wants me to do this or that,”  your first response would be to ask which god they were talking about.  The word God is actually more like an adjective than a proper noun.  It was used to describe any number of beings of various capabilities and descriptions.  Even the word “being” stretches the word “god” because it seems to imply personality, when in ancient times the gods were sometimes things like “revenge, justice, or fate”:  forces that seemed to dominate human life, but were hardly someone you’d invite in for tea. 

In our first reading today Annie Dillard uses the word God to describe the day as it rises out of the sea and spreads its light across the world.  Does she think of the dawn as a god?  The early Greeks did.  Does she find God in nature or identify the spiritual with the forces of nature?   I suspect, from my reading, that she is using the word ‘god’ metaphorically.  But she may do so because she experiences nature religiously, with the same sense of wonder and awe and reverence others direct toward the spiritual. 

But is she religious?  If her religious feelings are not directed toward some well-defined personal being, but are centered in natural phenomena, does she still count as religious?  Why not?  We know some religions are non-theistic and they’re still religions. Why can’t she be religious if she’s non-theistic, if she focuses her reverence on the material world?

But what then is religion?  Is it belief in a higher power or having a well defined set of theological propositions?     

Maybe religion has less to do with what we believe in and more to do with how belief changes us.  Maybe that’s why the spiritual reveals itself in so many different ways and doesn’t seem terribly bothered by the contradictions. 

Last summer I was helping a friend dig out under a back room at his house in order to  put in a new foundation.  We jacked up the old porch and for the next week, stooped beneath it, dug down 45 inches though solid clay to prepare for new footings.  One day as I was digging, I began to ponder the question raised by Socrates, “What is beauty”.  I don’t know why I think about things like that, but it may explain why I don’t get invited to a lot of parties. 

 

I realized that Socrates’ problem was that he was trying to find some quality in objects that makes them beautiful.  Is it order or symmetry or the use of color?  Suddenly I thought that maybe what makes something beautiful isn’t a quality it possesses, but the feeling it creates in us when we see it. 

Beauty draws me to itself.  When I see beauty, suddenly my focus shifts to something outside myself.  Beauty grabs me; I lose myself in it.  Philosophers call this a moment of self-transcendence, when something outside ourselves becomes the center of our world.   

That might explain why different things are beautiful to different people.  In graduate school I had a friend who told me about a beautiful woman he had just met.  From his description, I expected someone who should be gracing the cover of fashion magazines everywhere.  When I finally met her I was a little taken aback. She was pleasant enough looking, but hardly the overwhelming beauty he had described. 

But she was stunning to him.  She became the center of his world, the object of his attention and affection.  For the first time in his life, something beside himself occupied the center of his world.  Philosophically speaking, he transcended himself.  Maybe what makes something beautiful is what it does in us.

Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and author of murder mysteries, says that religion is about transcending yourself.  It’s about having a something beside yourself at the center of your life.  She also points out that for most people, like my friend, the first moment of self-transcendence, the first real religious act we make is when we fall in love for the first time.  Maybe the most important thing about love is not who we love, after all we may all love someone different, but what happens to us when we love; how we are elevated and changed by love. 

The notion that religion is not so much about what we believe in but what happens in us when we believe contradicts what we usually think of as religion.  We tend to think that religion is all about ideas.  Even the term “Orthodoxy” (as opposed to heresy) comes from a combination of two Greek words: ‘orthos’ which means ‘right’ and dokeo which means to have an opinion.  In western thinking, for some reason, religion is all about having the right opinion. 

But maybe religion is not so much about having certain ideas about the spiritual as having the right things happen in us when we contemplate those ideas.  And maybe its okay to have different ideas about the spiritual, about God, as long as the result of our belief is that we transcend ourselves and acknowledge something other than ourselves most important. 

Maybe religion is more about becoming right than thinking right.  Maybe it is about leaving ourselves behind. 

We all have a different idea of what we mean when we use the word God or the spiritual or the divine or the Intelligence, or whatever;  but does our idea of God call us away from ourselves and toward something better?  Does it have the power to transform us like our first love changed us from selfish adolescents into lovers?        

Our ideas of the spiritual come from many sources:  our upbringing or education, our own thought, our life experiences, and our spiritual experiences.  Social scientists tell us that almost everyone has spiritual experiences.  Some only have one in their life, some have many.  For some they are sudden unexpected events.  For some they constitute a gradual unveiling of purpose or meaning in life.  For some they are a growing sense of presence.   

My idea of God grows out of my spiritual experiences.  Several years ago I was sitting in a room, not doing anything in particular.  I wasn’t praying or trying to get mystical or even thinking about religion. Suddenly the room changed, like the lighting had changed or like when the eye doctor shifts the lenses on the machine you look through during an eye exam. 

And suddenly I was aware of a presence, a presence whose reality made everything around me seem unreal. Then I knew something.  I don’t know how I knew it, but I just knew it, deep down inside me.  I knew that this presence loved me perfectly and was the fulfillment of my every desire.  Just as suddenly it was gone; and everything returned to normal.

As I’ve thought about that experience over the years, three things stand out for me. 

First, was the sense that I had entered into the real.  I had always thought that if I ever came into contact with the spiritual, I’d have a lot of questions to ask about why different things had happened in my life.  But there, in that place, I suddenly didn’t have any questions. The nearest thing I can compare this to is waking up from a dream.  We don’t ask why something happened in our dream; we just realize, “Oh, it was only a dream.”  The overwhelming sense I was left with was that this life is only illusion, and that the spiritual is the real. 

The second thing I noticed was that this presence loved and accepted me perfectly.  Now I’ll tell you a secret.  I’m not perfect.  But there was no note of recrimination from this presence, no reminder of the things I should start doing or the things I should stop doing in order to deserve that love.  There was no Old Testament “Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips,” or New Testament, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinner.”  

There was no such obstacle between me and the presence.  No God stood there with a list of rules in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.  There was just unconditional love and absolute acceptance. 

 

That’s part of what I mean when I speak of God.  The rest will have to wait till I speak sometime about Buddhism and Taoism.  I know the word God troubles some people, which is why I want you to know what I mean by God.  For me, God is the reality behind this world of illusion, the reality that loves me completely and the fulfillment of all I ever desired.

I said there were three things that stood out for me in this experience.  The third is how difficult it is to hold onto this insight in a world that contradicts every part of  this experience.  Yet I know that as I cling to this vision of God, as I contemplate this love, it changes me for the better. 

 

We all have different ideas of the spiritual and we all mean something different when we say the word God (if we even say it).  The question is, do those ideas liberate us or do they enslave us?  Do they lift us out of ourselves or do they turn us inward with anxiety? 

If our idea of the divine doesn’t elevate us, doesn’t change us, maybe it time to get a new idea.  Can we be open to new ideas about the spiritual?  Can we take ancient words like “God” and fill them with new content?  

If there is a God, and  I think there is, I believe that God is like love that frees us from ourselves and beauty that draws us to itself.