by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, March 14, 2004
For years now I've had my hair cut by a woman in Middletown named Ellie, and like hairdressers everywhere Ellie likes to chat as she goes about her work. She is an active member of the Middletown Congregational Church, so at roughly six week intervals when I go to have my hair trimmed, Ellie and I usually have conversations that have something to do with our religious lives.
Last week as I was sitting in the chair under the attention of her snipping blades, we talked a little about the Mel Gibson movie, "The Passion of Christ". Like me, Ellie hadn't seen it yet, but unlike me, she intended to. She thought she might wait until it came out on video, so she could take the violence and gore in smaller doses and turn it off if it got to be too much. But she had decided to see it, she said, because so many of her customers who share her Christian faith had found it compelling. Some of them had told her that although they found the violence hard to take, the movie had been important to them because it helped them understand on a gut level what Jesus had done for them, for all of humanity. It helped them see how much he was willing to suffer in order to save our souls.
This notion that Jesus suffered and died for our salvation is at the heart of orthodox Christianity. Growing up as a Catholic child, it was the most uncomfortable part of the theology that I was taught. In Catholic churches the crosses that hang up in the front are usually crucifixes -- that is, Jesus is shown still hanging there on the cross, in perpetual suffering.
The teaching that his awful death happened on my behalf -- that he took on that enormity of suffering in order to spare me from it -- filled me with an outsized guilt and remorse long before I was old enough to commit any sin more dastardly than stealing quarters from my father's dresser top. It was one of the first elements of orthodox Christian teaching that I began to question as I grew older, and my doubts about it became the first wedge that eventually led me to realize in my teenage years that I was no longer a Christian in the traditional sense.
Instead, I came to believe that Jesus lived and died as a human being, although a most exceptional human being; and from that first heresy all the others flowed. I stopped believing that Jesus died to save my soul, and I came to believe instead that he died for a tragic -- but very human -- reason: he died because his teachings were considered inconvenient by the powers and principalities of his day. I came to believe that the salvation I could find in Jesus lay in the power of those same teachings, and in the courage he showed when he kept on offering his wisdom even while the rumblings began to build and his own life was at stake.
So even if I had a strong enough stomach to go see Mel Gibson's movie, I wouldn't emerge from it with the kind of boost to my faith that some of the more orthodox Christians might find there. But the little bit of fuss that the movie has kicked up and the snippet of conversation it provoked between Ellie and me did turn my attention to some theological questions. They are just as relevant for Unitarian Universalists as they are for Mel Gibson, though our answers are radically different, but the questions are hard ones. It's easy for us to say what we don't believe: that we don't believe Jesus died for our sins, or that we don't believe his suffering leads to our own salvation. But what do we believe about salvation? What is it that saves the Unitarian Universalist soul?
In a poem called "Salvation", UU minister Lynn Ungar wrote,
By what are you saved? And how?
Saved like a bit of string, tucked away in a drawer?
Saved like a child rushed from a burning building,
already singed and coughing smoke?
Or are you salvaged like a car part -- the one good door
when the rest is wrecked?
Do you believe me when I say
you are neither salvaged nor saved,
but salved, anointed by gentle hands
where you are most tender?
Haven't you seen the way snow curls down
like a fresh sheet, how it covers everything,
makes everything beautiful, without exception?
The poem moves us to larger questions -- not whether or not there is salvation for our souls, but what kind of salvation -- and what kind of souls? When Unitarian Universalists talk about the soul, we do it with a certain inevitable self-consciousness. We like to be solid and concrete in our thinking and in our speech, and we know that there is an acute limitation on all of the language that has to do with religion.
The concepts we're pointing to with words like soul, spirit, God, holiness -- all of these things lie outside of the realm of what we can touch and see and locate in space. They don't live under the microscope or in the periodic table or a math formula. They inhabit the space where poetry and imagination live, where our ways of knowing have to do with intuition and feeling, where a gesture or a symbol has to suffice because the thing toward which we're trying to point is too big for us to catch hold of completely. The word "soul" comes out of that same realm of symbol and metaphor. It's meant to point to something interior and essential, a sense of self that lies deeper inside of us than all the most common things we might point to for identity, like name and gender and age and occupation.
"Who are you?," asks the caterpillar of Alice and Wonderland fame, who we heard from in the children's message. It is the quintessential religious question. Who am I? When we talk of the soul we're reaching for an answer that goes below the transient or superficial parts of our identity. But what kind of answer do we find?
Again, I go to the voices of the poets. The great Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote,
Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that labor at night stopped?
And the water wheel of thought,
is it dry, the cups empty,
wheeling, carrying only shadows?
No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open [to] far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
I like that image of the soul as that part of us that 'listens at the shores of the great silence'. The soul thus is understood as a sort of inner ear tuned in to some of the long, slow rhythms of life that roll along beneath the distractions of our days. That soul of ours is bigger than what we usually think of as "me", as my "self". It's bigger -- or maybe it's deeper, or quieter, or more mysterious. It's the place within us where the boundaries begin to blur a little, where we begin to feel the truth that our lives are intertwined with all life, that there is a flow to the universe from which we cannot be separated.
This is something that can be sensed by the most mystically inclined among us and by the most skeptical humanist -- it is only the language that shifts. To know intellectually about the river of life that flows in us, the inseparable nature of all things, is as different from feeling the truth of it as reading about parental love is different from holding your own newborn baby in your hands. When we feel it down in the bones and the pulse of it, that's when I think we're talking about the soul.
That kind of soul is everlasting, at least to the degree that the universe of which it is composed is everlasting. It isn't a version of immortality that lends itself to images of languidly strolling through some sort of heaven after we die, but it does give a sort of comfort, at least to me, because when I feel deeply in touch with the notion that my essence is an expression of the universe, my own death takes on a slightly different meaning. Of course this body, this personality, this set of memories and loyalties and perceptions will come to an end. But the vast and mysterious circumstances out of which I arose will go on, and to the degree that I am part of that vastness, I go on with it.
As poet Roger Housden has written, "The [whole] Milky Way is continually wanting to pour through our heart and into our days. Your soul, after all, is not yours; it is not a property to be owned but a stream that comes through you, that flows and is never less…The …waters are carried there by some secret aqueduct from a source beyond all your knowing."
What kind of salvation could be needed by a soul like that? The salvation that's taught most often by orthodox Christianity is the child- plucked-from-a-burning-building sort that Lynn Ungar references in her poem. At least among the most orthodox, our whole reality is in some sense a burning building, and the burning becomes permanent if we end up on the wrong side of things and land in hell. From what I've read about Mel Gibson's own theology, this is where he locates himself, and there is only one narrow exit from the furnace, the very conservative form of Christianity he espouses.
But that vision of salvation rests on ideas that both our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors rejected -- ideas about the corruption of the world and the sinful nature of human beings. Those ancestors of ours looked around them at the same world seen by the orthodox of their day, and they drew different conclusions from it. They saw a world filled with human evil, but also filled with human compassion and creativity and wisdom. They saw a world that included death and suffering but also included birth and growth and healing.
And they concluded that this was not a world from which we needed to be saved, but a world we needed to apprehend. They thought it was a world we needed to see and understand at a far deeper, more astute and more awakened level than we had yet managed. Most of them considered themselves Christians all the days of their lives, but they were branded as heretics by the orthodox of their day because of the shape their Christianity took. The salvation they turned toward wasn't about creedal statements and correct beliefs. It was the faith that if we were able to follow and live what Jesus tried to teach, we would awaken more completely to our own nature and to the nature of the world around us.
One of our best-known Unitarian ancestors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, "Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff…The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb…Thus is the universe alive."
Thus is the universe alive. Like our ancestors in this liberal faith of ours, my own doctrine of salvation has to do with waking up to this aliveness, to the bright and shadowed mystery in which we live every day. We do need saving, but not from a corrupt world or from our own wicked natures. We need to be saved from complacence, from ignorance, from all our shallow habits. We need saving from anything that keeps us from being astounded at our lives and grateful for every one of the short days we have on this golden little planet.
What I think this amounts to is a theology that has less to do with saving a soul than it does with shaping a soul. What does it mean, after all, to believe -- as we do say we believe -- that we are inseparably part of everything around us? What does it mean? It doesn't only mean that our bodies are made up of the same intricate combinations of cell flow and minerals that we find in our garden dirt, in the ocean, and in the stars, as wonderful as that is.
It also means that there is a tiny fragment of our universe that has come to consciousness in each of us. There is something vast that looks out at the world through our eyes. How we live our lives gives shape to that fragment, to that vastness. It is what process theology means when it talks about human beings as co-creators with God. It really doesn't matter what we call God or even if we believe in God. It is enough to believe in the vastness, and in the glimmer of it caught in every living eye you will ever gaze into, in every green thing, in every stone.
Our souls need shaping, not saving. I am deeply grateful to have found my way into a theology, and into a faith community, that puts the joy as well as the burden of that shaping into our own hands. And one final poem: in his Book of Hours, the most mystic of his poems, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world….
My looking ripens things,
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
AMEN.