by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, October 10, 2004
Some time ago the literary magazine The Sun carried an autobiographical tale by a woman named Emily Rogers. In it she tells of her pathway out of the traditional Christian church in which she was raised, a path familiar to many of us because of having wended our own way along a similar one before ending up here.
She writes, "Our Sunday school teachers told us tales, illustrated with felt cutouts stuck to an easel, of heathens in hot, faraway lands, and of the missionaries who labored heroically to save them. 'Millions belong to false religions,' said Mrs. Hubbard. 'Their children are brainwashed. They don't even KNOW the Good News about Jesus. If we don't tell them, who will?'
One day I raised my hand. 'Mrs. Hubbard? If they don't know about Jesus in the first place, then isn't it kind of mean for God to send them to hell? And what about the people who were born before Jesus even showed up? And what about the ones who died before the missionaries got there? How could it be their fault if they didn't even know?'
After a pause, Mrs. Hubbard responded, 'Well, some people who study the Bible believe that those who haven't heard the Good News get a second chance right after they die. But those who hear the truth and reject it are most certainly condemned.' 'In that case,' I said, 'wouldn't they be better off if we didn't send missionaries in the first place?' That was the first time a Sunday school teacher sent a note home to my parents. The notes multiplied along with my sins…."
Eventually Emily Rogers left behind the church in which she was raised, and she left it for the same reason so many of us also left the churches and synagogues of our birth. At some point, often when we were quite young, we began to ask questions. At some point we found that the answers we were given could not resolve the things that troubled us. We began to feel so large a disconnect between what we were taught and our own reason, our own logic, that we couldn't stretch ourselves across the gap any longer, and we left.
One of the reasons so many of us end up Unitarian Universalist, after having an experience like this one, is that we came looking for a place where we were not required to stretch ourselves across a gap between reason and doctrine. In fact, one of the advertising slogans our denomination used a couple of decades ago was, "Come to a church where you don't have to check your intellect at the door." Like a lot of the literature we produced back then, that claim was embarrassingly smug in its tone.
But setting aside its implications of superiority for the moment, there were some real historical reasons for the claim. Beginning several centuries ago, our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors devoted a whole lot of attention to that gap between faith and reason in their own religious lives. Their solution was to embrace logic and reason wholeheartedly, as gifts from a good God that were meant to be used. They didn't give up their faith, and try to use reason as a substitute. Instead, they believed that faith and reason ought to work together, that both of them were essential in leading a whole and Godly life.
Those ancestors of ours were willing to see their faith as something that had to shift and change. Instead of imagining it as something rigid that had to be preserved against difficult questions or new insight, they thought faith was something to be shaped as we moved along in our lives. That gave them a liberating edge, especially in the world of the 1800s and early 1900s, when the discoveries of science were coming fast and furious. They were men and women of creative insight who saw a world in which the rich answers given by science could complement the answers given by faith. They taught a balance between truths we could find through logic and proof, and those we came to intuitively, or through revelation.
So far, so good: that's a story we know fairly well. That's why so many of us who found ourselves in self-exile from our childhood faiths ended up here, in a place where heart and head, proof and faith, should be able to live in harmony.
But is that in fact where we are? Have we found a religious home where reason lives side by side with faith, where intuition is nourished along with science, where the revelations from prayer or meditation or scripture are balanced with those that come through proof and deduction? Or have we slipped, almost without noticing, into something that might more honestly be called the flip side, or the mirror image, of the intolerance and dogmatism so many of us were trying to leave behind us?
What if Emily Rogers were a child growing up within one of our congregations? In my most pessimistic moments, I wonder whether or not, years later, her story might be a revision that would sound something like this:
"Our UU Sunday school teachers told us tales, illustrated with felt cutouts stuck to an easel, of Christians, Jews and Muslims. We heard about the quaint beliefs in God that these people still held, despite the fact that they lived in the 21st century. 'Millions believe these religions,' said Mrs. Hubbard. 'Not everyone has the chance to learn about the world through science, so they still understand their world through myth and tradition.'
"One day I raised my hand. 'Mrs. Hubbard? What if some of those people know a lot about science, but they think that their ideas about God still make sense to them? Or what if they think that science only tells part of the story, and that another part has to come through religion or tradition or scripture? And what if God is really real, only we've stopped paying attention because stuff like God can't be proven? Aren't we sort of like those people in other religions then, only they're paying attention to one part and we're paying attention to another part?' That was the first time a Sunday school teacher sent a note home to my parents. The notes multiplied along with my sins…."
To our credit, a conversation like this one would not actually result in a note sent home, unless it was to praise the child for asking good questions. But it is possible to imagine a conversation within our fold, whether among children or adults, in which the not-so-subtle message that gets sent amounts to our own form of dogmatism. That message, whether delivered overtly or not, is that "truth" actually comes in just one shape and size: it's the truth that can be touched and tested, probed and proven.
I myself tend to be very fond of truth that comes in this form. Like most of you, I am at least reserved about the claims of religious revelation, and my "default setting" includes a large dose of skepticism. I think that's a good and healthy place to stand; it's what I want my kids to learn, as they move through the world and begin to hear truth claims in many different forms.
But it seems to me there's a big difference between greeting the world as a religious liberal, and greeting it as a cynic. In a faith like ours, where we celebrate difference and proclaim our tolerance and advertise ourselves as open to new religious truths, we have to demonstrate what it really feels like to be embraced by open minds and open hearts. There's a big difference between the kind of skepticism that says, "prove it!" and the eager voice open to new insight that might say something more like, "Oh! What's this?" What's this? What might it teach me? How might this enlarge my vision and enrich my life? Religious truth still has to be probed and tested. But it doesn't get tested in a laboratory or through math equations. It gets tested against our inner compass, weighed and measured internally, along with all that the world teaches us through our senses.
Is there truth that has nothing to do with science and logic and proof? Of course! You know that, if you've ever fallen in love. You know it if you've ever acted on intuition and watched the pieces of your puzzle fall perfectly in place. You know it if you've ever heard a poem read or listened to a strain of music and suddenly, for no reason you could point to, felt your heart open to forgiveness or your mind stretch into new insight.
The religious historian Karen Armstrong uses the terms mythos and logos to point to two primary ways of human knowing that, at least in her reckoning, used to work together more harmoniously than they do today. Mythos has to do with meaning; logos has to do with reason and practical action. Armstrong argues that in the modern age, mythos has almost entirely fallen away.
We have an almost exclusive dependence on logos, on the part of our consciousness that depends on the rational mind. It's perfectly adequate for getting us up in the morning and into the flow of our work, adequate for digesting the news of the day and figuring out what we think about it. But it isn't enough - at least for some of us - in constructing the sense of meaning and purpose we hunger for. It doesn't take the place of mythos. For that, we want a religious language that holds us open to intuition, to small whispers of revelation, to insight, to what we feel is true about the universe and our place in it.
This kind of truth doesn't have to be something we can prove to anyone else. It isn't something we need to persuade anyone else to believe along with us. But it's a wonderful thing when we can ground ourselves in a faith community that will hear our truth, without the raised eyebrow and folded arms of the cynic. We've found our way into a liberating and energizing religious home if within it, we can always find companions who will listen to us with the open mind and open heart that say, 'what's this?' instead of 'prove it!' Ideally, we are that kind of spiritual home. It's what we strive to be; it's what we promise one another.
Poet Denise Levertov wrote,
The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again but, knowing no better.
It's toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable -- but reason in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn't quite touch the ground, manages still
to squeeze in -- a filtered light, splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
The idea that reason has its limits, that reason can lock us into its limits, is kind of a scary one for Unitarian Universalists to contemplate. But it wasn't scary for our Unitarian ancestors, the ones who embraced reason as a complement to their faith. Maybe it was because in their day, there was a broader notion of the self - a trust that the thinking mind was accompanied by a discerning soul, open to the whole range of truth: mythos as well as logos.
When I was occupying the place in my own Catholic upbringing that Emily Rogers recounts from her childhood, I never had notes sent home to my parents, as far as I can remember. My religious education teachers were well-meaning nuns, and as I can plainly see looking back on it as an adult, they surely had their minds on bigger issues than my childhood crisis of faith. They were all caught up in the massive changes brought about by Vatican II, and I'm sure many of them were preoccupied by their own adult crises of faith.
So I don't remember having my questions shut down by disapproving notes sent home, but I do remember the final answer that would inevitably arise after the long string of queries. "It's a mystery, dear", they would say. How can God be three people but just one? How could Jesus have died for my sins when he didn't even know what those sins would be? How could Joseph be Jesus' father but not really his father? How could God know everything but still not stop bad things from happening, like war? "It's a mystery, dear", they would finally say, a bit wearily.
For a long time after I had stopped calling myself a Catholic, I heard those words echo in my mind as an excuse: the final refuge when there was no reasonable answer to give. And it works that way, of course, as the conversation-stopper when a pesky kid can't seem to let you get on with the lesson of the day. But now I also hear the truth in that statement. It is a mystery: not the dogma with its contradictions, but the whole complicated story of faith that lies beyond the creeds we're taught.
Mystery is the place beyond our formulas and constructs. It's out there past the edge of our logic and our proofs; it hovers beneath our birth and our death; it shines through in little snippets of scripture or poetry or music that bring our minds beyond words, and leave us momentarily in a silence that speaks on a whole other level. Writer Ken Kesey once said of religious truth, "The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer -- they think they have, so they stop thinking. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. Not all religious liberals would agree with that, I know. For some of us, the hunger for answers is pretty consuming, and there isn't all that much attraction to mystery except for the promise of more answers unfolding up ahead. But for others of us, Kesey is right. Not because we dismiss answers, but because we've come to believe that the Mystery - the really big, capital 'M' Mystery - speaks to us on other levels. It delivers to us something that feels more essential than the answers. We want our logos balanced with mythos. In the silence of meditation and prayer, in the insight of a spiritual teacher, in the movement of our own hearts responding to stars or wind or ocean, there's a resonance that seems to teach something we can't force into the box of words. But it feels true.
As Scott Russell Sanders put it in our reading, "You and I and the black-footed ferret, the earth, the sun, and the far-flung galaxies are dust motes whirling in the same great wind." We each feel that great wind differently. What sense we make of it, what we call it, and how we use the disciplines of the spirit to feel it more strongly, are all variable: they change all the time, for each of us. But this is a spiritual home meant for seeking, built on an ancestry of men and women who maintained a holy curiosity all of their lives. We're truest to that past, and to the potential of our future, when we nurture within ourselves and each other that same holy curiosity, holding ourselves open to the breath of the great common wind. AMEN.