I must open this morning with a confession. Last year in the very heart of winter I was invited to be the speaker on a Caribbean cruise. I've been in the ministry long enough to know, both in moral terms and in regard to enlightened professional self-interest, that to accept such an invitation, imagining myself basking in the sun while you slogged through ice and snow, would be wrong. Clearly it would be wrong. "What week?" I asked.
And then I was saved. The week they wanted me to speak was the first week of February, the week of our annual meeting. So I scrambled deftly back to the moral high ground and just said no. Two days later, they called me back. "How about the third week of January?" In self defense, I should note here that they called on a particularly frigid day, just the sort of day that you too, even if you were a minister, might have been tempted to sneak a look at your calendar. Mine, obviouslyy doctored by the devil, happened to be completely free. "What the hell," I said to myself. "Why not." The temptation was too great. Not only did I fall, I leapt from grace.
And then I started to feel guilty. To begin with, my wife had no interest whatsoever in wasting one of her vacation weeks on a cruise to almost nowhere, so I would have to go by myself. On reflection, I realized that this would not be particularly enjoyable. Since the only legitimate rationalization for doing something self-indulgent is actually to indulge oneself, my sense of guilt was now compounded by a feeling of stupidity.
And then it hit me. I could redeem myself. I could transfigure this dilemma into a moral triumph. I could take my mother.
Initially, she was not nearly as excited by this prospect as I was, but I didn't let this minor detail come between me and my new found rectitude. I degraded myself from the posh speaker's cabin to steerage, where my mother and I would share two cots and a head. I insisted she accompany me, and I reclaimed my piece of mind.
I should say a word here about my mother. You may have read a little about her in New York magazine last month. In an article on Mrs. Bradley, Bethine Church was called as the Godmother of Idaho politics. By the way, they didn't mean "fairy," describing her as a "grandmotherly figure with the soul of a cigar-chomping backroom pol." On this particular occasion, as the chair of the Gore campaign in Idaho, she had managed to crash a large dinner party where Ernestine Bradley was slated to speak by bringing Tipper Gore along and insisting, in the spirit of fairness, that Mrs. Bradley share the platform. My favorite depiction of my mother in the article reads as follows: "Bethine Church, a creaky grand-dam in a bright red blazer and a wild grin escorted Tipper through the crowd and commandeered the best table, right in front of the lectern."
You should have seen her in a toga.
In any event, with a clear conscience I devoted an entire week, as every son occasionally should, to caring for my poor creaky mother. Because she had the entire ship as an audience, I even managed to reread four Saul Bellow novels. In all, it was a noble expenditure of time and my soul is clearly the better for it.
There was also the sea. I grew up in the mountains of Idaho, but the sea has always captured my imagination more than even the mightiest peaks. Not only in contemplating the horizon which beckons one's mind to thoughts of eternity, but in pondering the hidden depths and mysteries beneath the surface, whenever I look out over the ocean, if I am paying attention, I experience humility and awe: humility in reflecting on how tiny we are in the whole scope of things; awe a wonder tinged at times with a hint of terror at the unfathomable depths and unsearchable breadth of creation. As it is written in the thirtieth chapter of the Book of Proverbs,
Three things are too wonderful for me;
Four I do not understand:
The way of an eagle in the sky,
The way of a snake on a rock,
The way of a ship on the high seas,
And the way of a man with a woman.
Physics, anatomy, biology, and psychology can begin to decode such mysteries, but knowledge has its limits. Quoting an academic study, my newly rediscovered old guide, Saul Bellow, recently observed "that on an average weekday the New York Times contains more information than any contemporary of Shakespeare would have acquired in a lifetime." That includes Shakespeare himself. The Times is a fine paper. I read it every day. But for all its information, it only hints, and then only occasionally, at what Shakespeare knew so very well: that the beauty of the bird, the symbol of the snake, the courage of the pilot, and the power of human love will always be touched by mystery.
We don't need something unnatural like a virgin birth or the stopping of the sun to prove our faith. Neither do we need a gigabyte of data to disprove it. Beyond all proof or disproof, we need only reverence for life itself. Contemplate our awe-inspiring connection, over millennia, to thousands of human ancestors, and ultimately to everything that lives.
One of my favorite twentieth-century theologians is Rudolph Otto. Much of what he had to say was only half intelligible. That's okay. Anyone who dares hang up a shingle as a theologian is lucky to be intelligible at all. But when identifying the core experience of religion, Otto was spot on. He described the Holy as a mysterium tremens et fascinans: a tremendous which means awe- and fear-inspiring and fascinating mystery.
When I returned to New York, I did a taping for a PBS special on the new Hayden Planetarium to be aired in April. What the ancient Egyptians described as the heavenly waters are even more charged with inspiration for humility and awe than are our earthly waters. Consider the cosmos. There are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and ours is one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies. And That is only our cosmos. There could be others. Think about it for a moment. Each of us living on the earth today is therefore the proud possessor of twenty-five personal stars in our galaxy alone. If you choose to name yours (actually a fun thing to do), you can't start too soon. Naming one's own stars is more than a lifelong project. With 100 billion galaxies, the cosmic star to person ratio of 2.5 trillion stars to one.
So what do we do? Do we name our stars and shake our heads in wonder? No. We sit on a single grain of sand on this vast cosmic beach and argue over which religious teacher has the best insider information of God and the afterlife. Is it Jesus? Is it the Buddha? Is it Mohammed? How about Nietzsche, Einstein, or Freud? All I know is this: Billions of accidents conspired to give each one of these compelling teachers the opportunity even to teach. Knowing this doesn't strip me of my faith. It inspires my faith. It makes me humble. It fills me with awe.
When Copernicus discovered that we are not the center of the universe, we were made not weaker but stronger. If we may happen to be less central to the scheme of things than we once imagined, we discovered this ourselves. We may be dwarfed by the immensities of space, but the mind that measures these immensities manifest its own greatness. Halfway in size between the cosmos and the smallest particle of creation, we exist in a kind of equipoise, our DNA as amazing as the number of our personal stars. As Nicholas Wade points out in an article on cells, "The nucleus of a human cell holds more than six feet of DNA, containing all a person's genes . . . If it were possible to align all the DNA strands of a baby in a single line, it would be long enough to make, on average, 15 round trips from the sun to Pluto, the farthest planet in the solar system." I don't begin to understand this, but it reminds me that we are neither less nor more incredible than the universe we ponder. Leonardo da Vinci described the creation better than I can, noting that human subtlety "will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous."
You've heard about the devil and the deep blue sea. What about the angel and the deep blue sea? Where does God fit in to all of this? Even when I first began preaching to you more than two decades ago I didn't believe in God, not really. Today, having pondered the mysteries contained in our oceanic deeps and been awestruck by the sea of the heavens, in one sense, I believe only in God. Everything else is too small. Don't worry about the word itself for a moment. God is not God's name; God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each: the life force, the Holy, the ground of our being, being itself.
So described, God doesn't exist because we need God. We exist because the universe is so amazing that only something like the idea of God can begin to come close to comprehending it. As Dag Hammarskjold wrote, "God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."
Describing the transcendent, philosopher Karl Jaspers spoke of "the encompassing." Look out over the horizon of your life. Peer into the vastness of the cosmos. And then take out your own little compass. For we are navigators, that's what we are, pilots sailing our own fragile yet wondrous vessels across the heavenly waters, mortal explorers launched, by no choice of our own, on a brief and precious voyage. You can't see the angel hovering over the face of the waters? Look again. Look farther. Look within. Look deeper and more closely. Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning, wrote that "They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea" We too are ill discoverers that return from our adventures in the seen world without a profound sense of humility and awe in face of the unseen, of the vastness encompassing our navigations.
Those who name and thereby claim God and the angels to be viewable only by a single set of dogmatically or scripturally focused lights mistake one of God's many veils for the mystery that lies behind it. No scripture can do anymore than hint at the vastness of the encompassing. But merely to recognize this and then blithely to discount other people's beliefs as mere superstition merely to lift a veil without looking beyond it, without pondering in awe the true munificence it disguises -- exacts a considerable price on one's own soul. In face of life's mystery and majesty, how much better is it really for us to believe too little than it is for others to believe too much?
God is a human invention you say, a mere myth? Fine. But think for a moment about what we do to ourselves when we disbelieve in God, simply because someone else's God is too small. When fundamentalists say that the scriptures are not myth but fact, and secular materialists respond by dismissing them as not fact but myth, I answer both with the same question: "What's wrong with myth?" Myth is not only the language of mystery but human experience projected onto a cosmic screen. Little experiences will be dimmed by the stars, even as great ones are reflected in them. The question we should ask ourselves is whether our myth is big enough. Can it begin to encompass the mystery, majesty and wonder of being? Does it even hint at the presence and power of the encompassing?
In this spirit, I invite you to take out your compass. Fix your bearings on the horizon. And then beyond the horizon into the sea of the heavens. Chart your course not only by the stars but by the angels. By the seen and by the unseen. And then look a little more closely at things nearer to hand, your loved ones, your dreams, your hopes for a better tomorrow. You may still only see the ocean not the landfall, but your tiny vessel will sail more surely, with ballast in your hold, the wind in your sails, and, in your heart, a joy for the journey. Who knows? You, the angel and the deep blue sea may, for a blessed and redemptive moment, even be as one. Copyright AllSouls 2000.
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