After a personal introduction in which
the ways of devotion and intellect are compared,
various concepts of God are examined.
From Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, Deism,
Judaism and Christianity, panentheism,
pantheism, and finally Process Theology,
these concepts are not analyzed and reduced
so much as allowed to deepen our understanding.
The final word goes to Chief Joseph,
who explains why he was so afraid
of white men arguing about the Great Spirit.
OUTLINE:
1) PERSONAL INTRODUCTION:
DEVOTION AND LEARNING
2) GOD IS INEFFABLE
3) ATHEISM?
4) FROM UNMOVED MOVER
TO PROCESS THEOLOGY
5) THE HISTORY OF GOD IN THE WEST
IS WRITTEN IN BLOOD
6) WHY CHIEF JOSEPH WAS AFRAID
AUTHOR:
The Rev. Robert Bowler was a Unitarian minister in England
for three years, 1994-1997, before returning to the United States
and qualifying for Fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist minister.
He currently serves the Walpole Unitarian Church in Walpole, New Hampshire.
Previously he served churches in Glens Falls, New York
and Cheltenham, Gloucester and Evesham, England.
Currently, Robert also teaches Religious Studies courses
at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire.
He is a graduate of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley,
California.
His wife Cindy is an artist completing her Masters of Fine Arts degree
and they have a teenage daughter.
It has been said that if Unitarian Universalist churches were like
colleges,
most students would major in learning and minor in devotion.
Most of my life, however, I have majored in devotion.
From a very young age, God was outside of me regarding me with joy.
This perception was not something that I questioned.
It was part of an unspoken inner life.
Indeed, I don't think I had any words
for this sense of life until I was about 17 or 18.
It was a matter of intuition, a matter of the heart.
My God was a presence
that took simple joy that I existed, played, and loved.
I did not analyze it; God simply was present.
It began with my relationship with my grandmother.
I was her first grandchild
and she loved me to the extent that she spoiled me.
We would walk on the eighty-acre farm together
where she spent nearly her whole life.
We meandered through the pastures and the woods, exploring everything.
Finally we would reach the pond where I would look for turtles in the reeds.
The farm was started by her grandfather as a tree nursery,
and the great weeping willows and beeches, by then 100 years old or more,
swept the ground and reached the sky.
There was a beauty in those pastures and woods
and at the pond that filled me with love.
It was the center of the universe for me.
There was a grace in that place that my grandmother embodied.
Perhaps my grandmother was the model for the God that watched with joy,
or perhaps my grandmother knew that same presence
and it was made flesh in her.
Even now, it does not matter.
When I was eight we moved to California.
A year or two later, my mother decided she would take me to church.
It was just a regular Sunday,
and my parents went to church only on Christmas and Easter.
I don't know why she took me that day, but after the service she asked,
"Do you wish to come back again, because if you don't I won't?"
What a question--but I did not hesitate. "Yes," I said.
Somehow I knew it was important to me.
Perhaps it was because I felt the same presence
in that small wooden church by the sea
that I did on the old tree farm with my grandmother.
It enlivened that secret part of me, that life of the heart,
a life unspoken and separate from rational analysis.
I sang in the choir until my voice changed
and then they made me an acolyte.
It was pure devotion that motivated me.
I loved serving that presence that simply
regarded with me joy and I sang and I served with all my heart.
It did not look at a part of me, but loved me whole.
This experience had little or nothing to do with
what the priest said from the pulpit or even what he read from the Bible.
I imagined Jesus being close to that same sense of watching joy.
The Father was a mystery
even though he was pictured as a bearded old man on a throne.
However it was the Holy Ghost that really bothered me.
I imagined a ghost flying around that church
scaring the living daylights out of unsuspecting children.
No, my devotional experience in that church
had little to do with these three entities
that were described with such importance.
I simply loved being a part of the worship service.
It was in high school that this devotional life
started to become intellectually conscious.
I had a teacher named Dwight Johnson
who taught spirituality through the world's religions.
He called his courses the History of Ideas, but it was world religions.
We read and discussed the Tao The Ching,
The Dhammapada, Patanjali's Yoga aphorisms,
Shankara's Crest Jewel of Discrimination, the Bhagavad Gita,
Sufi stories, and the Sermon on the Mount.
He also taught Psychology;
we read Carl Rogers, Eric Fromm and Abraham Maslow.
Now I had an intellectual outlet for my devotional life.
Words like Tao, God, Soul, Atman, Self-Actualization, Love
began to point to a universal essence in the world's religions
and humanistic psychology.
I drank it in and school connected with me then
and all my grades improved.
I know all this is why I gravitated to religious studies in college.
I was consciously directing my studies, I said at the time,
to learn a language to speak of my devotional life to anyone.
I wrote a thesis on Meister Eckhart who I believed, and still do,
is a key in the Christian tradition to a more universal Christianity
that could enter dialogue with the world's religions.
Eckhart was a rational mystic, and with my immersion in his theology
I had come around from heart to head,
seeking a balanced life, integrating the two.
I am still on this journey of integrating head and heart.
At times I have majored in devotion to the exclusion of learning,
and at times my learning has lost sight
of the devotional life I so cherished as a child.
I still cherish, but it is no longer so simple.
No longer is it a personal journey, "the flight of the alone to the Alone"
as Plotinus the Neoplatonist called the spiritual journey.
It is lived in community, in relationship.
I suppose my relationship with my grandmother
and that in the choir and as an acolyte in the church by the sea
spoke of the community aspect of devotion.
But still for me it was the relationship with the presence,
"alone to the alone," that was so secret,
unshared, unspeakable and unquestioned.
GOD IS INEFFABLE
In fact, the common characteristic of all reported experiences
and conceptions of God is that it is ineffable.
It does not fit in any of the boxes the rational mind uses to understand
things.
"Reason is the help and reason is the hindrance."
I picture the endeavor of preaching a sermon on God
like going to the beach.
Standing on the sand we look out on a vast living thing,
surging with swells and waves, teeming with more life than we yet know,
vaster than our world we know so well on land.
For centuries sailors have journeyed out on the ocean
and returned with tales of wonder and adventure.
We have a photograph of my daughter and me when she was about three.
I am standing on the beach and she is on my shoulders.
Our backs are turned to the camera
and we are looking out at the vast sea,
letting it fill us or giving ourselves over to its vastness.
ATHEISM?
Some people have given up on the idea of God.
Personally I cannot imagine that for myself
and this does not help my ability to walk in their moccasins.
However, I would like to ask, if we were having a conversation,
"Tell me about the God you don't believe in."
I probably do not believe in that God either
and then we can stop stumbling over a mere word.
FROM UNMOVED MOVER
TO PROCESS THEOLOGY
In the west, there is the God of Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover.
This God, Aristotle thought, is necessary because for everything
there must be a cause, and the primal cause must be so perfect
that it is not affected by what it causes.
Therefore it is utterly other.
It puts the world into motion
and then remains aloof, blissfully contemplating itself.
Aristotle's Unmoved Mover is similar to
the deist notion of God as a Clockmaker.
The universe was designed like a clock.
The deity wound the clock and then stands back,
watching, to see how it works.
Here, with the deists,
at least God watches and cares in a distant sort of way.
Our Judeo-Christian heritage hands on to us
a God that is rich with complex meanings,
but the one characteristic that is important is that God enters history.
"It... intercedes, like a royal eagle swooping down from on high,
to save the day for those who, outnumbered and outflanked,
fight under God's banner," as Forrest Church describes Yahweh.
God is the greatest of allies
for those who follow the way of right relationship with Him
(and this is the proper pronoun here)
by following his laws passed down to us.
Otherwise, God is vengeful in His efforts to punish
and return His people back to living the covenant with Him.
Jesus, to most Christians, is the prime example
of the idea of God entering history
--even to the extent of demanding a blood sacrifice.
Jesus is God made flesh.
Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice of the Passover:
by this sacrifice God's children are saved while all others are destroyed.
Here Christianity goes two ways.
In the monolithic Catholic church,
Christianity becomes at least as exclusive as Judaism.
The epitome of this is the medieval Inquisition.
Or, Christians could stress the revolutionary Pentecost event,
when the Holy Spirit with tongues of fire spoke through the disciples
to people in their own languages
as the spirit gave the disciples the ability to speak.
This is model leads to radical pluralism,
but also leads to the excesses of speaking in tongues
and rolling in the aisles simply to show that the afflicted are saved.
Thus even the Protestant Pentecostal movements become exclusionary,
God saving the chosen.
A little more profound to me is the concept of God
expressed early on in Jewish history.
Moses is called by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
Moses asks God: "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them,
'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,'
and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"
God replies mysteriously, "I am who I am."
It is this God who says to Moses,
"Say this to the people. 'I am has sent me to you.'"
This is not a dogma, not an exclusionary proclamation.
God is Being itself.
This is as broad as Zen or even Tao.
This may be Panentheism, the belief that "All is in God."
God does not just intervene in history,
God is present in all of history and God is in the earth.
God remains transcendent but the world is contained by God's being.
It is a cosmos alive with divinity.
The "All in One" vision is expressed in Psalm 19:
"The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
Their is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world."
The earth itself is God's speech or Word, poured forth,
and yet, as an idea spoken in words still remains within the mind,
the earth remains within God.
Finally there is the belief that the earth is God, or, rather, Goddess.
Nature is one being and we are parts of that great organism.
Gaia is that being whom we are parts, the forests are her lungs,
the bedrock is her skeletal structure and her consciousness is in us.
Strip mining and other unsustainable practices are like harvesting organs
and transplanting them elsewhere for narrow, short-term gain
and the long-term undermining of the health of the Goddess.
Finally there is a modern concept of God in process with us and the earth,
a God of creativity, a God striving through us, to be more than it is.
This has been called Process or Naturalistic Theology.
God is that impulse in us to choose to learn and grow,
to act for the good of all,
to build together a world of peace and love.
God can be primarily characterized
as freedom, diversity and change
in order to maximize the possibility we can create for nature and
ourselves.
This God is the continuously ceasing and becoming
of the quanta events that comprise life itself,
as Dr. Rebecca Parker has asserted.
All these western conceptions of God,
from Unmoved Mover to God in process with us
have been the roots of conflict and violence, torture and war throughout
history.
The crusades and the Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and witches,
all illustrate how the history of God in the west is written in blood.
Our own Unitarian Universalist history
is not free of conflict over concepts of God.
In fact we have a long theist/humanist debate that has often been vicious.
I believe this dichotomy of theist/humanist is too stark, too narrow.
God is not a being, but being itself, and humanists, like Carl Sagan,
have not divorced themselves of wonder.
The universe is indeed a great mystery, as are life and consciousness.
We have not found the science to explain it all,
for the fact of life is altogether too mysterious and too subjective
for us to contain within any narrow rational boxes.
Some think someday we will, others think it impossible.
It matters not, for we are here and life is too precious
to waste on petty bickering over mere ideas.
What matters is that we learn and we grow,
we bring our hearts and our minds together for the journey,
we major in both devotion and learning,
we dare to stand on the beach that is life and reach out toward the
mystery.
And what matters is that we do this together,
learning and growing from each other as much from our own living,
so that we leave this earth better than we found it
for those who continue after us.
WHY CHIEF JOSEPH WAS AFRAID
All this is why Chief Joseph was afraid of the white men.
Because "They will teach us to quarrel about God,
as Catholics and Protestants do.
We do not want to do that.
We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on earth,
but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit.
We do not want to learn that."
As Chief Joseph desired for his people,
let us simply get on with living with one another,
learning and growing together,
in the Great Spirit, the Great Mystery.
In the end, for me, God simply regards us with joy
--as we strive to know who and where we are.
So May It Be.
HISTORY OF THIS SERMON:
"God -- What's in a Name?"
This sermon was first presented by the author, Robert Bowler,
to the Walpole Unitarian Church <http://www.walpoleunitarianchurch.org>
in Walpole, New Hampshire on December 10, 2000.