[5-28-06] Our Spiritual Common Ground
Our Spiritual Common Ground.
Speaker: Scott Cardell
Here at the UUCP we have an incredible diversity of theological viewpoints. Sometimes there seems to be a division between rational humanist intellectuals seeking intellectual stimulation and spiritual mystics seeking inspiration. However, I see a large common ground. In this sermon, and it is my hope to deliver a sermon rather than a lecture, I will address that common ground, focusing more on the spiritual than the intellectual.
Let’s start with some rather broad definitions that work for me. The intellectual realm is the realm of ideas, the connections between ideas, and the logical frameworks that we create by developing and connecting ideas. The spiritual or inspirational is the realm of insight into the ineffable. Relying more on the connotation than the literal meaning, my primary definition of ineffable is "that which transcends the limits of concrete comprehension."
Here at the UUCP our survey shows that a majority of our congregation comes to the Sunday service seeking both intellectual stimulation and spiritual inspiration. To me this is completely natural, as we all depend on both intellectual frameworks and insight that transcends our concrete understanding. Inspired, creative artists also use intellectual approaches in their work and the most intellectual mathematicians and scientists use creative inspiration in their work. Psychologists have shown that when mathematicians think about hard math problems they use the same part of their brains that artists use in their creative work. This applies to all fields from the sublime to the mundane, from the art of dance to the science of accounting; true expertise is based on the ability to combine creative inspiration and concrete intellectual thought. Each of us shares in the common experience of seeking inspiration into those parts of our chosen fields of endeavor, or into passionate hobbies, that we never expect to fully comprehend. This shared experience is part of our spiritual common ground.
Interestingly, a completely materialistic approach to reality leads to the necessity of incomprehensible mysteries. In a materialistic world we are very competent thinking machines. The Gödel incompleteness theorem from pure mathematics proves that no competent thinking machine can understand its own capabilities. Other mathematical theorems prove that there are interesting questions that are forever undecidable. So in this purely rational cosmology, self knowledge, the human condition, "life the universe and everything" will always contain inexplicable mystery. Furthermore, this applies broadly to the world as a whole; for however humanity and nature cooperate, the same reasoning applies to the total. Thus, not only can we never fully understand ourselves, but humanity as whole can never fully understand itself or the natural world. Such theorems give me insight into the nature of the spiritual realm, the ineffable.
In this materialistic world view, inspired insights can supply clues to these mysteries and produce a dimension of understanding that we recognize as spiritual. However, how much inspiration is possible will always be part of the truly unknowable. On the other hand, believing in the possibility of a complete enlightenment that removes all mystery is a position that is untenable in a materialistic world view and instead requires a supernatural explanation.
Another part of our spiritual common ground is found when a well-chosen metaphor expands our understanding. Consider the metaphor of a cup of meaning from my father's ministry. In this metaphor we each have our own cup of meaning and what we fill it with becomes the meaning of our life. This metaphor is expressed in words, but it is an ineffable insight beyond our capacity to fully understand or express in words. Part of its insight is a very UU understanding that meaning is not given to us but chosen by us. However, such choices are not irrevocable. Sometimes we will choose to change the meaning of our life; and sometimes a crisis like a divorce, a death, or a failure in a career will crack our cup of meaning and cause some of our meanings to leak out. When that happens we must mend and refill our cup of meaning thereby changing the meaning of our life. I say must because that is the UU imperative - to continue the search for truth and meaning. UUism gives us the power to choose what will be the meaning of our life, and emphasizes our responsibility to choose wisely. So we do not come to the end of our lives discovering that we have lived neither as we wanted to nor as we ought to have. In the words of our closing hymn for today, "what we choose is what we are."
Another part of our spiritual common ground is explored in sermons that connect an idea with a personal inspirational experience, so that the idea imbues the story of the experience with the transcendence to escape from the specifics of the example and such that the inspirational story in turn imbues the idea with its power to connect to the human experience. Most often ministers use their own personal experiences but at other times they use experiences related to them by the stories of others or even a well-chosen experiential reading. On occasion the story alone has the power to inspire without regard to one’s theological perspective. The following true story is one that may inspire equally the theist, the atheist, the humanist and the mystic.
During World War II my father served in the 101st airborne. He was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, but managed to escape. He was then recaptured along with four other escaped prisoners. They were all lined up to be shot (the Geneva convention allows escaped prisoners to be executed). However, after the first three were shot the officer in charge stepped out of his tent and said to save the last two for questioning. After that he and the other survivor were combined with a column of prisoners being marched deeper into Germany in order to stay ahead of the advancing Allied lines. As they were marching along Allied bombers flew overhead and the prisoners cheered wildly. Shortly afterwards they approached a village and began to see the effects of the bombs those planes had carried. When they saw a little girl that had been killed by the bombs they became quiet. As they entered the village, the villagers approached them with rocks to stone them, but the German guards protected the prisoners. In frustration one elderly man with a large round face that had turned completely red shook his fist at the prisoners and yelled at them in German. My father came to think of that man as the little girl's grandfather. My father never doubted that from the Allied viewpoint World War II was a just war. However, with that experience my father decided that parish ministry was the only way to make future wars unnecessary, and that he would become a parish minister.
It is very Unitarian that my father's theology plays no role in this story. He had grown up in the Presbyterian church and assumed that he would become a Presbyterian minister. However, he had been an atheist from an early age. Later on he and my mother together discovered Unitarianism and he decided to become a Unitarian minister. When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged, dad was an enthusiastic supporter. In one of my last conversations with him he reminded me how offensive he found the saying that "there are no atheists in foxholes"; he took it as an assault to his intellectual integrity and to the intellectual integrity of all atheists.
When Steve Cooke spoke on scientific materialism some weeks ago, he placed in the realm of religion the realization of a wonder in you and the universe and experiencing the awe before that mystery. Sometimes such awe motivates us to seek scientific understanding, and sometimes we are motivated to simply be fully in the experience. I had a sense of awe when, at the age of six, I discovered that if I took road tar made soft by a hot day, shaped it into a ball, and threw it hard against the concrete, it to shattered like glass. Then I experimented to find out how this phenomenon was affected by how hot and soft the tar was and other factors. Perhaps this experience started me toward studying physics in college.
I and, based on our survey, many others in this congregation find spiritual experiences in the natural world. When I woke up camping out on a snowy morning and observed in the dawning light a deer walk through the snow and take a drink from the creek, that was a spiritual experience. When I told my mother what I would be speaking on today she related how spending an hour watching a flower open was a spiritual experience for her. All such ineffable experiences are part of our spiritual common ground.
Some years ago Audrey and I saw the stone circle at Callendish for the first time. It was a dreary, drizzly day and after a little while we were the only ones there. I felt a timeless spiritual connection to the ancient worshipers who once gathered there. As I looked out at the ocean I could imagine being among them and looking at this same ocean, perhaps hoping to see a relative returning from fishing in a tiny boat made of stretched hide, or fearing to see an enemy coming in such boats. On another trip to Scotland, Audrey and I and two close friends landed in the Orkneys at 10 at night. As it was near mid summer, the sun was still up. We quickly drove to another stone circle called the Ring of Brodgar and enjoyed the sunset there. Again it was an experience of awe and wonder. Each of these experiences was primarily about being fully in the moment and letting the awe wash over us. Oh, intellectually I wondered if ancient peoples sited there stone circles by finding places that naturally led to such spiritual experience and wondered whether in those ancient societies sensing such locations could have had a selective advantage which I might have inherited through my Scottish and Welsh ancestry. But the awe and wonder and the insight it gave me into an ineffable timeless connection to those ancient people was the message, not such speculations.
Another insight into ineffable timeless connection comes from Reading #537 in the back of our hymnal, by Maria Mitchell. It says: "the words that we utter reach through all space and the tremor is felt through all time." While chaos theory has proven that this statement is literally true, the statement provides an insight into ineffable truth that transcends that literal meaning.
Finally, we find spiritual common ground in our continuing search for truth and meaning. Consider some of the things that we have in common beyond our seven principles. Whatever we may believe individually we find resonance in Thomas Jefferson's idea that all humans have an inherent moral sense and in the statement of some UUs of faith that for them Unitarian Universalism is a reasoned faith. We believe in the power of human reason to guide our search for truth and meaning. We believe that the theist, the pagan and the atheist alike have the power to choose to live a good moral life. These ideas are in a sense intellectual, but our belief in them is spiritual. We cannot prove them through scientific experiment or logical argument but we believe them because our insight into the ineffable truth of human nature tells us that they are true.
In the seventeenth century Descartes proposed what he claimed were logical proofs of the existence of God. A few years later Pascal proposed that belief in God was a good wager, because if you believe and it is wrong nothing is lost, but if you do not believe and it is right then all is lost. These arguments caused much controversy among Christian theologians. Eventually, Pascal’s wager was rejected by most Christian theologians, not on the simple ground that such a faith was self serving, but on the broader ground that any faith reached through logical reasoning was inadequate. Interestingly, many Christian theologians went on to reject Descartes’ proofs for the same reason. As UUs we choose the opposite reason to reject Pascal's wager, rejecting it on the ground that truth cannot be determined by what we would like it to be.
It is not the truth that makes us free and whole - it is our search for truth that makes us free and whole.
Copyright © May 2006 by N. Scott Cardell
Speaker: Scott Cardell
Here at the UUCP we have an incredible diversity of theological viewpoints. Sometimes there seems to be a division between rational humanist intellectuals seeking intellectual stimulation and spiritual mystics seeking inspiration. However, I see a large common ground. In this sermon, and it is my hope to deliver a sermon rather than a lecture, I will address that common ground, focusing more on the spiritual than the intellectual.
Let’s start with some rather broad definitions that work for me. The intellectual realm is the realm of ideas, the connections between ideas, and the logical frameworks that we create by developing and connecting ideas. The spiritual or inspirational is the realm of insight into the ineffable. Relying more on the connotation than the literal meaning, my primary definition of ineffable is "that which transcends the limits of concrete comprehension."
Here at the UUCP our survey shows that a majority of our congregation comes to the Sunday service seeking both intellectual stimulation and spiritual inspiration. To me this is completely natural, as we all depend on both intellectual frameworks and insight that transcends our concrete understanding. Inspired, creative artists also use intellectual approaches in their work and the most intellectual mathematicians and scientists use creative inspiration in their work. Psychologists have shown that when mathematicians think about hard math problems they use the same part of their brains that artists use in their creative work. This applies to all fields from the sublime to the mundane, from the art of dance to the science of accounting; true expertise is based on the ability to combine creative inspiration and concrete intellectual thought. Each of us shares in the common experience of seeking inspiration into those parts of our chosen fields of endeavor, or into passionate hobbies, that we never expect to fully comprehend. This shared experience is part of our spiritual common ground.
Interestingly, a completely materialistic approach to reality leads to the necessity of incomprehensible mysteries. In a materialistic world we are very competent thinking machines. The Gödel incompleteness theorem from pure mathematics proves that no competent thinking machine can understand its own capabilities. Other mathematical theorems prove that there are interesting questions that are forever undecidable. So in this purely rational cosmology, self knowledge, the human condition, "life the universe and everything" will always contain inexplicable mystery. Furthermore, this applies broadly to the world as a whole; for however humanity and nature cooperate, the same reasoning applies to the total. Thus, not only can we never fully understand ourselves, but humanity as whole can never fully understand itself or the natural world. Such theorems give me insight into the nature of the spiritual realm, the ineffable.
In this materialistic world view, inspired insights can supply clues to these mysteries and produce a dimension of understanding that we recognize as spiritual. However, how much inspiration is possible will always be part of the truly unknowable. On the other hand, believing in the possibility of a complete enlightenment that removes all mystery is a position that is untenable in a materialistic world view and instead requires a supernatural explanation.
Another part of our spiritual common ground is found when a well-chosen metaphor expands our understanding. Consider the metaphor of a cup of meaning from my father's ministry. In this metaphor we each have our own cup of meaning and what we fill it with becomes the meaning of our life. This metaphor is expressed in words, but it is an ineffable insight beyond our capacity to fully understand or express in words. Part of its insight is a very UU understanding that meaning is not given to us but chosen by us. However, such choices are not irrevocable. Sometimes we will choose to change the meaning of our life; and sometimes a crisis like a divorce, a death, or a failure in a career will crack our cup of meaning and cause some of our meanings to leak out. When that happens we must mend and refill our cup of meaning thereby changing the meaning of our life. I say must because that is the UU imperative - to continue the search for truth and meaning. UUism gives us the power to choose what will be the meaning of our life, and emphasizes our responsibility to choose wisely. So we do not come to the end of our lives discovering that we have lived neither as we wanted to nor as we ought to have. In the words of our closing hymn for today, "what we choose is what we are."
Another part of our spiritual common ground is explored in sermons that connect an idea with a personal inspirational experience, so that the idea imbues the story of the experience with the transcendence to escape from the specifics of the example and such that the inspirational story in turn imbues the idea with its power to connect to the human experience. Most often ministers use their own personal experiences but at other times they use experiences related to them by the stories of others or even a well-chosen experiential reading. On occasion the story alone has the power to inspire without regard to one’s theological perspective. The following true story is one that may inspire equally the theist, the atheist, the humanist and the mystic.
During World War II my father served in the 101st airborne. He was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, but managed to escape. He was then recaptured along with four other escaped prisoners. They were all lined up to be shot (the Geneva convention allows escaped prisoners to be executed). However, after the first three were shot the officer in charge stepped out of his tent and said to save the last two for questioning. After that he and the other survivor were combined with a column of prisoners being marched deeper into Germany in order to stay ahead of the advancing Allied lines. As they were marching along Allied bombers flew overhead and the prisoners cheered wildly. Shortly afterwards they approached a village and began to see the effects of the bombs those planes had carried. When they saw a little girl that had been killed by the bombs they became quiet. As they entered the village, the villagers approached them with rocks to stone them, but the German guards protected the prisoners. In frustration one elderly man with a large round face that had turned completely red shook his fist at the prisoners and yelled at them in German. My father came to think of that man as the little girl's grandfather. My father never doubted that from the Allied viewpoint World War II was a just war. However, with that experience my father decided that parish ministry was the only way to make future wars unnecessary, and that he would become a parish minister.
It is very Unitarian that my father's theology plays no role in this story. He had grown up in the Presbyterian church and assumed that he would become a Presbyterian minister. However, he had been an atheist from an early age. Later on he and my mother together discovered Unitarianism and he decided to become a Unitarian minister. When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged, dad was an enthusiastic supporter. In one of my last conversations with him he reminded me how offensive he found the saying that "there are no atheists in foxholes"; he took it as an assault to his intellectual integrity and to the intellectual integrity of all atheists.
When Steve Cooke spoke on scientific materialism some weeks ago, he placed in the realm of religion the realization of a wonder in you and the universe and experiencing the awe before that mystery. Sometimes such awe motivates us to seek scientific understanding, and sometimes we are motivated to simply be fully in the experience. I had a sense of awe when, at the age of six, I discovered that if I took road tar made soft by a hot day, shaped it into a ball, and threw it hard against the concrete, it to shattered like glass. Then I experimented to find out how this phenomenon was affected by how hot and soft the tar was and other factors. Perhaps this experience started me toward studying physics in college.
I and, based on our survey, many others in this congregation find spiritual experiences in the natural world. When I woke up camping out on a snowy morning and observed in the dawning light a deer walk through the snow and take a drink from the creek, that was a spiritual experience. When I told my mother what I would be speaking on today she related how spending an hour watching a flower open was a spiritual experience for her. All such ineffable experiences are part of our spiritual common ground.
Some years ago Audrey and I saw the stone circle at Callendish for the first time. It was a dreary, drizzly day and after a little while we were the only ones there. I felt a timeless spiritual connection to the ancient worshipers who once gathered there. As I looked out at the ocean I could imagine being among them and looking at this same ocean, perhaps hoping to see a relative returning from fishing in a tiny boat made of stretched hide, or fearing to see an enemy coming in such boats. On another trip to Scotland, Audrey and I and two close friends landed in the Orkneys at 10 at night. As it was near mid summer, the sun was still up. We quickly drove to another stone circle called the Ring of Brodgar and enjoyed the sunset there. Again it was an experience of awe and wonder. Each of these experiences was primarily about being fully in the moment and letting the awe wash over us. Oh, intellectually I wondered if ancient peoples sited there stone circles by finding places that naturally led to such spiritual experience and wondered whether in those ancient societies sensing such locations could have had a selective advantage which I might have inherited through my Scottish and Welsh ancestry. But the awe and wonder and the insight it gave me into an ineffable timeless connection to those ancient people was the message, not such speculations.
Another insight into ineffable timeless connection comes from Reading #537 in the back of our hymnal, by Maria Mitchell. It says: "the words that we utter reach through all space and the tremor is felt through all time." While chaos theory has proven that this statement is literally true, the statement provides an insight into ineffable truth that transcends that literal meaning.
Finally, we find spiritual common ground in our continuing search for truth and meaning. Consider some of the things that we have in common beyond our seven principles. Whatever we may believe individually we find resonance in Thomas Jefferson's idea that all humans have an inherent moral sense and in the statement of some UUs of faith that for them Unitarian Universalism is a reasoned faith. We believe in the power of human reason to guide our search for truth and meaning. We believe that the theist, the pagan and the atheist alike have the power to choose to live a good moral life. These ideas are in a sense intellectual, but our belief in them is spiritual. We cannot prove them through scientific experiment or logical argument but we believe them because our insight into the ineffable truth of human nature tells us that they are true.
In the seventeenth century Descartes proposed what he claimed were logical proofs of the existence of God. A few years later Pascal proposed that belief in God was a good wager, because if you believe and it is wrong nothing is lost, but if you do not believe and it is right then all is lost. These arguments caused much controversy among Christian theologians. Eventually, Pascal’s wager was rejected by most Christian theologians, not on the simple ground that such a faith was self serving, but on the broader ground that any faith reached through logical reasoning was inadequate. Interestingly, many Christian theologians went on to reject Descartes’ proofs for the same reason. As UUs we choose the opposite reason to reject Pascal's wager, rejecting it on the ground that truth cannot be determined by what we would like it to be.
It is not the truth that makes us free and whole - it is our search for truth that makes us free and whole.
Copyright © May 2006 by N. Scott Cardell
posted by UUCP Sermons at 10:17 AM
