Grown-up Religion

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

September 7 , 2008

READING

Adapted from William Ellery Channing

I call that mind free which masters the senses, and which recognizes its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting and seeking after righteousness.

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.

I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically copy the past or live on its old virtues but which listens for now and higher monitions of conscience and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.

I call that mind free which sets no bounds to its love, which, wherever they are seen, delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering, which recognizes in all human beings the image of the divine and offers itself to the cause of humankind.

I call that mind free which has cast off all fear but that of wrongdoing and which no menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults and possesses itself, though all else be lost.

SERMON

So, off they go, our children, marching bravely to their classes, accompanied by the flame of our chalice and our sung wishes for joy, peace and love, to begin a new year in the company of our church community. The developing of faith, that way of being in the world that centers us, to which we can give our hearts, is a life-long journey, we tell them, shaped by many things, including, we hope, what they will learn and experience here.

This image of religion as a journey resonates powerfully among us Unitarian Universalists. For one thing, it distinguishes us from many other faith traditions. While some see the goal of religion as cultivating and strengthening certain fixed beliefs, we here recognize that religious beliefs evolve over time as we change and grow. We offer a crucible to form, test, explore and act on our beliefs in the context of religious wisdom from many sources, including the wisdom that each of us has gained in the course of our lives.

Yet, we are not always clear on where is it that we hope our journey is carrying us, where walking the path of Unitarian Universalism will lead. Over the years this end-point has been described in many ways, but I’m intrigued with the idea that some leaders in our movement have suggested recently that we might describe the work of our churches as the cultivation of spiritual maturity.

This way of thinking offers a vivid metaphor for the religious life. We are not aimlessly wandering in our churches; we are cultivating a habit of being that fulfills a promise that is born with each us. We enter this world with, essentially, the seed of that promise that, if nurtured and fed, grows and in time ripens into fullness. And here’s a little of what that fullness looks like: We become stable and secure, measured and not reactive in how we respond to the world around us. A mature spirituality is one that is both grounded and open, both serious and playful. Spiritual maturity is a habit of living that while attuned to one’s own integrity is also deeply embedded in relationship.

This church year I hope to explore some of the dimensions of what spiritual maturity might be for us and how we might promote it, beginning today with some rough parameters of what I think it involves. I welcome your feedback along the way.

The notion that the purpose of our churches is the cultivation of habits of heart and mind to achieve spiritual growth goes back to the earliest days of our movement. William Ellery Channing, whose leadership helped give birth to American Unitarianism, argued that the aim of religion was what he called “self-culture.”

Contrary to the preaching of many of his contemporaries, Channing insisted that the self, that essence of our identity, is worthy, even precious. It didn’t need to be cleansed or changed. It needed merely to be nurtured to grow. And the chief means by which that growth might happen, he argued, is what he called “the self-searching and the self-forming power.”

In essence, he said, we are capable of learning from our experiences and adjusting our thoughts and behavior according to what we learn. We are mostly likely to find the right path, he felt, not when we are penned in or tied down, no matter how benevolent our oppressor, but when we are free to discover the truth on our own. You heard earlier what Channing considered some of the hallmarks of that freedom: the ability not to get consumed by our sensual appetites, to stand up for ourselves and not cower at the opinion of others or be their tool; to resist habit and convention, to set no bounds on our love, to cast off all fear and to calmly stay in possession of ourselves, even in the midst of tumult.

For my purposes today I want to suggest that there are two broad dimensions of spiritual maturity, having to do what we ourselves can cultivate and with how we relate to the larger world. I’ll call them: taking ownership of our own spiritual paths and engaging deeply in community.

The first step in taking ownership for our own spiritual path is taking ourselves seriously. By that I mean listening to what bubbles up from how we experience the world. I have always believed that across the ages religion endures because it touches a deep need within us, a need to make some sense of our lives, where we fit into the larger scheme of things, what the meaning of our existence is.

“I know, “wrote Howard Thurman, “that there is present in my life a quality that is only mine because the hunger is mine.”

The religious search begins when we feel that hunger beginning to gnaw. It feels at first like an emptiness that we can’t seem to fill. There are others who claim to be able to fill it, but their solutions often demand that we give ourselves up to them. We may, for a time: the attention feels good. But we realize that if anything we are more lost than when we began, and the hunger is still there.

What we most need at such a time is space where that hunger can be named, and where that elusive self, which has hidden away, afraid to speak, can give voice to how that hunger might be fed. Spiritual maturity begins by owning the search that is yours, not being shamed or brow-beaten into someone else’s program. An important reason why we exist as a religious community is to provide room for the questing heart and mind and to honor the hunger we all share.

Another part of taking ownership for our own path is learning to be open, inquisitive and flexible. “This being human,” wrote the Sufi poet Rumi, “is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival: a joy, a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all!”

Embedded deep in the DNA of our movement is the conviction that, as Samuel Longfellow put it, “revelation is not sealed.” There is always more to learn and wisdom has no singular provenance. And, what is more, if we remain curious, inquisitive, flexible, we leave ourselves open to the possibility of what the Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman called “creative interchange.” We admit the possibility of having our lives transformed by one another.

Similarly, part of taking ownership for our path is learning to live with ambiguity. Among those we admire we often find clay feet; there is little unalloyed good to be found. And yet, the grays in the world are a signal of its richness, of the mystery that lies beyond the borders of the known. Part of spiritual maturity is learning to admit, even embrace the paradoxes that life presents us without sinking into the funk of vague dissatisfaction, recognizing that our understanding is always partial and responding with wonder at each new discovery.

And, of course, of all the ambiguities that we must cope with in life there is none sharper than mortality itself. Death is the starkest fact of our lives. Each of us must come to terms with the fact that the time will come when all those we know, when we ourselves will be no more.

Forrest Church, minister of All Souls Church in New York City, goes so far as to say that this is the center of religion, our response to living while we know we must die. Now that Church himself is dying of esophageal cancer he says he has been confronted with how he himself will respond to this fact, and where it has taken him, he says, is the realm of the heart.

 “The realm of the heart is not only where we touch each other most sacredly,” he wrote, “it is also the place where we encounter the cosmic source for our sense of awe. What a luxury we enjoy, wondering what will happen after we die. Having spent billions of years in gestation, present in all that preceded us – fully admitting the pain and difficulty involved in actually being alive, able to feel and suffer, grieve and die – we can only  respond in one way: with gratitude. And how does this affect the way we treat others? I hope it means we will treat others as being as unpredictable, unexpectable and amazing as they are.”

In the end our mortality teaches us how precious life is, how precious each of us is and reminds us of the brief time we have to experience it all. And this leads me to my next point, which I first saw framed by Janne Eller-Isaacs of Unity Church in St. Paul. A key attribute of spiritual maturity, she argues, is “the ability to absorb and transform suffering.”

This may sound a little counterintuitive. Who wants to absorb suffering? Most of us do the opposite. Given the chance, we seek to wall ourselves off from suffering, to steer clear of it, or, if we can’t, to just gut ourselves through it. The truth is, though, that there is no avoiding suffering. We can choose to present a stoic face to the outside world, insist that we’re “fine.” But suffering will work on us anyway, and, if we’re not careful, it will do so in the worst ways, making us hollow and numb and unavailable to those we love.

What I hear Janne saying when she advises “absorbing” suffering is accepting it. Many of us flee from suffering because we fear it will overwhelm us. We will lose ourselves in it. Those who accept suffering when it comes, who absorb it and honor it in their lives, know differently. They find they are stronger than they knew, and that in time the pain they felt can be transformed into something else, into gentleness, sympathy and compassion.

Part of what opens us to being transformed in that way is learning deeper appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us. We are blessed in this place with natural beauty everywhere we look, but there is beauty in these people as well. The aesthetic sense opens us to an innocent source of wonder in the everyday that carries us beyond ourselves and sustains us. I am struck by this every year at spring as life unfolds out of seed and root, vivid and intricate. Beauty is woven through everything around us if we would but attend to it.

Taking ownership of our own spiritual path, though, is only the first step in spiritual maturity. None of us is alone; we are involved with, in fact we are completed by one another. And so some elements of spiritual maturity have to do with the ways in which we live with each other in relationship and in community.

I begin with the need to balance our inner and outer lives in order to act with integrity. The Quaker writer Parker Palmer laments that too many of us find ourselves struck in what he calls “divided lives,” where our knowledge and our values are held at great remove from how we operate in the world. We grow up learning to be wary of how much of our true selves we reveal to others, he says, and so we go about our lives “masked and armored,” projecting a persona that may be well received in the world but hides much of who we are.

This disconnect can leave us numb and confused: Out of touch with the emotional center of our lives, yet without a clue about what to do about that. Noodling on our own will do little to improve this. Instead, Palmer suggests, it takes relationships with people in a community of trust to lead us back to an understanding of our true inner leanings, relationships that invite us to discern the truth within us and that, with us, welcome what emerges.

And what emerges, if we are lucky, is an alignment of who we are and how we are in the world, a sense of integrity that grounds all that we do. But this doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t always easy. It requires a community that is open and accepting, that provides room for our struggles without judgment. It is my hope that this community can provide such room that we each may know the integrity of living divided no more.

Once we have such a sense of integrity it gives us the strength to offer and receive forgiveness for our lapses. If we live shamed and divided we lack the emotional resources to make ourselves vulnerable in that way. The sense of integrity that comes with spiritual maturity invites us to stay in relationship, to acknowledge the hurts we do and to name the hurts we receive, offering each with humility and love.

In the same vein, spiritual maturity invites us to live a generous life. Like Forrest Church, each of us has cause for gratitude for the gifts of our life, for those we are blessed to know and love, for our own existence. The natural response to such gratitude is generosity: generosity of heart, of spirit. Giving invests us more deeply in that which we love, which in turn only magnifies our gratitude. It is a self-feeding system that constantly enriches our lives.

In that sense each of these attributes of spiritual maturity feed each other, for they are all part of realizing who we are capable of being, of living lives of meaning and purpose. And this leads me to carry my metaphor one more step: having reached spiritual maturity, having ripened and realized the wonder that we are, each of us, the lives that we lived will be sustenance – fruit, seeds – to those who follow us, and there will be cause for us to be honored and to be blessed.

May it be so for us all.