Last year, in the heart of winter, God called me to the Caribbean to serve as speaker to a gaggle of Unitarians on a cruise ship. I am happy to report that God was kinder to me than he was to Jonah. The ship did not go down. I was not swallowed by a great fish. That is the good news. The bad news is I'm not sure that all the Unitarians were saved.
I've spoken before of my winter voyage to nowhere. You may recall that this is the trip I redeemed by taking my mother along. The plan was to abate my innate Calvinist sense of guilt for so shameless an act of self-indulgence by performing an act of filial piety. As it happened, my mother and I had such a good time together that my guilt was only partly assuaged. This sort of thing often happens when something we do out of a sense of duty ends up being fun. As for the Unitarians-a motley, theologically eclectic, group from all around the country-they too turned out to be boon companions. We had a splendid time together, and I'm glad I went.
In my lectures, after drawing a few themes from my little book, Lifelines, I unpacked the major parts of my then forthcoming book, Lifecraft. To the consternation of several of my auditors, Unitarians of a decidedly humanist temperament, I could not do this without an occasional allusion to my faith in God. Mind you, I tried very hard not to offend their anti-theological sensibilities. I told them that God is not God's name, merely our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each. If you aren't comfortable with God-talk, I said, just think of this power in terms of the life force, the Holy, the ground of our being, being itself. As carefully as I could, I explained that I too don't believe in the God that they may long ago have rejected and whom many of their more orthodox or fundamentalist neighbors credulously embrace. I don't believe in the great man in the sky. I don't believe in a God that orchestrates history or meddles in our daily lives. This God, the God I too disbelieve in, is far too small to capture my devotion, even to entertain my mind, and certainly too small to quell my doubts.
In any event, I said these things to my Unitarian friends. Fortunately, humility is the cornerstone of my theology, because several of them refused to swallow a word of this. What seemed self-evident to me, and actually quite harmless as far as religion goes, caused great offense, especially to one of my favorite fellow passengers, a Unitarian lay leader from a tiny fellowship in Northern California. As we were disembarking, he sent this parting shot across my theological bow.
"Forrest," he said to me. "After a week of listening to you I've decided that you are doing far more damage to the cause of liberal religion than Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and all the rest of them combined. When these people talk about God, no one with an ounce of critical intelligence pays them any mind. But you, you infect the thoughts of your readers. You spread your disease to innocent victims, unwary of how contagious you are. If you continue in this way, you could set liberal religion back at least a hundred years."
I have never been so flattered in my life. To think that I, who will never be guilty of committing a best-seller, could strike anyone as being sufficiently powerful to set back liberal religion even a decade. This rush of importance lasted all the way down the disembarkation ramp, where my mother was waiting with instructions. Nonetheless, it did get me thinking. Why does God-talk have so profound an affect on millions of people, including those who are deathly allergic to it?
Most of you know my definition of religion. "Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die." Because we know that we are going to die, we wonder what life means. We ponder the creation. We study nature and human nature. We try to make sense of all we see and think and feel. Knowing that we are going to die, we also reflect on the nature and meaning of time. In this context, we encounter concepts such as permanence and transience, the ephemeral and the eternal, mortality and immortality. Though we may conclude that all is transient, ephemeral, mortal, even meaningless, here too we are answering religious questions. In the spirit of Gaugin's Tahitian triptych, "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?" From time immemorial, our human ancestors have asked these same questions. To do so marks them and us as truly human.
Back in the late 70s, when I began preaching from this pulpit, I avoided using the word God. It embarrassed me somehow. First, I didn't want anyone to mistake what I might mean by God for the tiny, judgmental, anthropomorphic God of so many true-believers. I also felt far more secure when sharing my thoughts about things I actually knew something about. God was not then, and is perhaps not even now, one of those things. In each instance, my embarrassment stemmed from pride.
The problem was, whenever I wished to soar a little higher into the mystery of the heavens or dive a little deeper into the unfathomable sea of being, I lacked the vocabulary necessary to describe such a journey. Stripped of religious symbol, my attempts at poetry were at best prosaic. Of greater concern, without transcendental symbols to relate the sublime to the ordinary, my spiritual life was parched, my well of inspiration, dry. Only by sacrificing a bit of pride, and petty pride at that, could I even begin to commune with the muses or touch an angel's wing.
So it was, haltingly at first and then with slowly gathering confidence, I began to employ God-talk. Cultivating as best I could a higher sense of awe and deeper sense of humility, I grew comfortable with Rudolph Otto's depiction of "The Holy" as a "mysterium tremens et fascinans," a tremendous (both awe and fear inspiring) and fascinating mystery. With Paul Tillich, to avoid idolatry, I began to think in terms of God beyond God. With Carl Jaspers,' I sought to recognize, even to lose myself in what he called, "the encompassing. With Ralph Waldo Emerson, I explored transcendentalism and played with the idea of the oversoul. And with the great Romantic poets, within nature and human nature, I sought experience of the sublime.
But I also returned to the scriptures, listening with my Hebrew forbears for the still, small voice of God, and heeding Jesus's teaching that the Realm of God is not a future realm, but here, right now, within us, in our very midst. Through parable and paradox, seeking evidence of the divine in the ordinary, I began to uncover hints of eternity in time, of the divine within the ordinary.
Those of you who struggle with the idea of God might reflect on Paul Tillich's definition of religion as "Ultimate Concern." What concerns you ultimately? Different things at different times surely. But nonetheless, it remains true that when we disbelieve in God, we don't believe in nothing. On the contrary, we believe in almost anything. Material success. Power. Self-esteem. Physical fitness. Knowledge. Whatever concerns us ultimately we worship as if it were a kind of God. If the God of the Bible is too small to fit our 21st century understanding of the creation, how much smaller are these gods to whom we pay daily obeisance?
In his book, The Romantic Sublime, literary critic Thomas Weiskel writes that, "The essential claim of the sublime is that human beings can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human." In a sentiment chastening to many Unitarians, he goes on to write that "A humanistic sublime is an oxymoron." By the way, to transcend the human is not to betray the human, but to expand, even to complete it. It is fine to believe in ourselves in little ways, but surely we are not gods. This is self-evident whenever a trap-door swings before us, or the roof caves in over our lives. When a loved one dies, or we fall mortally ill, or - in some ways worse - debase ourselves or do grievous harm to others, neither petty ultimate concerns nor any amount of self-esteem can save us. Even when pride doesn't lead to our falling, when we do fall, our pretensions fall with us. When our own power fails us, our only hope lies in a power beyond ourselves, howsoever mysterious and unfathomable. To be embarrassed by God-talk at times such as these is only to indulge what little pride we may have left, itself the final act of self-defeating self-indulgence.
You may have read the story this week of Chris Antley's tragic death. At the prime of his career and newly married, Antley was perhaps the greatest jockey of his generation. Sportswriter Ed Fountaine called him "the Joe DiMaggio of thoroughbred racing, winning at least one race for 64 consecutive days." Last year, he won both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, a feat all the more impressive because, to do this, he had to overcome an eating disorder that had balooned his weight by 30 pounds. "The tale of his miraculous comeback from those dark days of despair made Antley an American hero . . . How he vowed to his father he would ride again. How, like Forrest Gump, he ran through the countryside 25 miles a day to get back in fighting trim. How, at the last minute, he was handed the mount on Charismatic, then rode him to upset victories in the Derby and Preakness. And how, when the coppery chestnut colt broke his leg near the finish of the Belmont Stakes, costing him the Triple Crown, Antley jumped off and cradled the injured limb in his arms, saving Charismatic's life."
To the untutored eye, not only these athletic and moral triumphs, but his meteoric rise from petty thief to stable boy to champion, represented the triumph of will over all manner of adversity.
To be sure, Antley was brilliant, cocky, kind and courageous. But he was something else as well. He was powerless over drugs and alcohol. Earlier this year, he disappeared for weeks immediately following his wedding, an event he called the happiest of his life. He returned to his wife, but in a deep depression. He couldn't shake drugs, and appears to have run foul with his dealers. Last Sunday, they found Chris Antley beaten to death in the entryway of his home. He was 34 years old.
After his first rehab two years ago, Antley told a friend about his new-found faith in God. "God is in every one of us," he said then. "You just have to find him. Something was growing inside of me without my realizing how powerful it was. Before I was blind to see that. I had a paranoia about sharing my feelings. I was hiding behind a wall. I don't have to live that way anymore. I wish you could jump inside my body right now to know how good I feel."
Some would take this as yet further proof that God does not exist. After all, the young man is dead. God didn't save him after all.
But those who have surrendered not their willingness to act but their willfulness to misact, those who have found the humility to give their lives over to a higher power, whether after suffering from addiction or any other self-destructive behavior, have no trouble with God-talk. Neither are most such people quick to judge another's weakness, having experienced in their own lives how debilitating the combination of weakness and pride can be. Whether born-again in Jesus, or enlightened by Buddha, or saved by following a 12 step program, neither could they be less embarrassed by God-talk, whatever vocabulary they may choose to employ. The Holy. Divine Compassion. Lord. Ground of our being. For me, God works just fine. By opening my heart and mind to God, by setting aside my willfulness and self-absorption, I enter a larger realm. I experience peace. I receive strength to meet life's trials. My cup of life fills to overflowing.
I still don't know who or what or why or how God exists. I also don't care, because the experience of grace, to use the old Christian word, is self-ratifying. Besides, especially when it comes to ultimate things, a confession of ignorance is far more appropriate to the human condition than a presumption of knowledge. Remember, we are far more alike in our ignorance, than we differ in our knowledge. As for humility, next only to love, it is surely the greatest virtue. Love saves us for others; humility saves us from ourselves.
For each, at the outset of this holiday season, I offer up my thanks to God. Amen. I love you. May God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls, 2000.