Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
Natural Religion in a Natural World
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
March 11, 2007
With your indulgence, I shall begin my remarks with some lines I wrote some years ago while I was camped in Hiawatha country at Indian Lake State Park just above the north shore of Lake Michigan.
In silence the moon moves through heaven;
It sets in silence.
The great sea bulges in silence and widens in silence.
Silence paces waves and winds;
Its pauses make their pulse.
There is silence on this narrow beach
Where quiet moccasins once moved.
More blessed now the silence than then the silence
Because now more hidden,
Because the pace of waves and wind
Now seems only small impediment to speeding boats.
Silence, this silence, though now hidden,
Once proclaimed to the naked canoeist
The urgency of his own heartbeat.
Silence, this silence, showed the space
That linked truth to life,
Life to squaw, squaw to brave.
Now the passing motorist,
Though listening hard,
Hears only the engine roar,
Or, when the engine stops,
The memory of it.
[D.V-F., 1983]
I begin with these words because they are stirrings within my own mind and heart. They speak to me about something essential to our humanity that can easily be drained out of our world. They grew out of an unsolicited awareness I had at that camp site of an essential silence that becomes lost in the noise of our human, technologized world. This awareness reminded me that the sense of being at home in this world often is overwhelmed by our frenzied and obsessive effort artificially to make this world into a home to be in. For me this reminder of a primordial silence pointed to that which truly leads toward a religion that is natural and not forced. With this reminder I realized that, for me, religion that is not rooted in silence becomes artificial and unnatural very quickly. Awareness of this silence, also, prompted me to remember a couple of religious traps that obscure this silence.
If you suspect that "natural religion" is something of a code word to me, you are not far off the mark. However, I use this term to mean what it says: a religion that flows naturally from us and not one invented outside of us and artificially superimposed on us as doctrine, dogma, and superstition are - and as such supposedly "natural" things as natural theology and nature religion often are, also.
No, I mean religion native to the human condition. I mean religion that brings the heart and the mind so directly in touch that our whole person is brought together within ourselves. And then we are brought to bear on the world in such a way that reason, faith, and action work together and not against one another. For me "natural" religion is religion that fits the whole person wholly into the world without sacrifice of any aspect of human essence. This is that at which I take Unitarian Universalism at its best to be aiming.
This understanding of religion was certainly at least in the back of the mind of some of our most influential religious ancestors. I believe Michael Servetus, the 16th century reformer who wrote the theological blockbuster, "On the Errors of the Trinity", was in search of a more natural religion. Surely, it was so with William Ellery Channing, early in the 19th century, when he preached that true Christianity encompassed not only faith in God but also faith in the powers of the human mind. And, later in that century, Ralph Waldo Emerson sought the same such wholeness and naturalness when he insisted that religion could deal with real human beings in a real world only if it also reverenced the personal intuitions of truth each individual may have. And John Dietrich, the Father of Religious Humanism, preaching early in the 20th century, sought wholeness in religion by emphasizing the primacy of human concerns in the here and now. "A whole person in a whole world" could have been the caption under his theology.
And the same kind of avowal shouts forth from the sermons and pamphlets of our movement. One much used pamphlet in particular, "Meet the Unitarian Universalists" by Jack Mendelsohn asserts that ours is a "Quest for a broad and encompassing religion: spiritual yet practical, personal yet universal." We are not willing to settle for less than the "whole".
Perhaps even more important these days than our own liberal religious history is the way science has shifted from a mechanistic to a systems paradigm. Nowadays, even the physicists - especially the physicists - are telling us that everything (as we construe "things") exists in relation to everything else. Ultimately there are no physical boundaries between atoms and galaxies, microbes and people but we all (everything) exist within an interrelated whole. Apparently what Black Elk saw in his vision is confirmed in mathematical equations. Not only are UUs not willing to settle for less than the whole, science itself is telling us we are part of the whole whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether it fits our preferred theology or philosophy or not.
And yet, we fall rather easily into one of two traps that lead away from the holistic natural religion we desire and into theological noise so deafening that we sometimes can hear neither one another nor ourselves. Those traps are what I call: (1) an unnatural anti-supernaturalism; and (2) an unnatural emphasis on our own subjectivity at the expense of our critical faculties.
This first trap springs when we focus on not being supernaturalists so single-mindedly that we become only anti-supernaturalists, not crediting enough the natural phenomena that lie at the root of the so-called supernatural. We may do this because we are reminded of our unpleasant experiences with a supernaturalism that was pressed on us in our youth in order to drive the natural out of our young intentions. Words such as God, prayer, salvation, etc. carry this message to some of us. Our negative experience with such words may automatically blind us to the possibility that they do have a natural content that requires attention if we are not to ignore truth in favor of our own negative dogmas. For even the words that supernaturalists use are rooted in the human psyche and speak of some natural human need.
The second trap, that of unnatural emphasis on our own subjectivity, arises when we so worship in the ecstatic style of Dionysius that we shove Apollo out of our lives. Dionysius was the Greek god not only of wine but also of unrestrained emotionalism; Apollo, the Greek god of harmony, order, and wisdom. Over-emphasis on expression of feelings or on ecstasy and other subjective experiences (which, oftentimes, results from undervaluing our critical faculties) destroys harmony and disrupts order. The result? Uncritical subjectivity can leave a wine-guzzling, ecstatic Dionysius standing with his foot on Apollo's neck.
Figuratively, this is becoming more and more the case, for as a reaction against what has been taken to be an arid rationalism has grown, so an emphasis on subjectivity and ecstasy for their own sakes, also, has grown. In recent years in our denomination, wisdom, order, and harmony seem to have been increasingly devalued and the wholeness of the person diminished by a lack of healthy balance between the head and the heart, the mind and the spirit. My own impression is that, as we have become more involved in subjective spiritual concerns, we have become less open and less wise. We are in danger of forgetting what a balanced religious diet is and, like the doughnut addict thinking that a balanced diet is two doughnuts of equal weight, we slip into thinking that it takes but two emotional experiences to balance each other -- and that critical reason eats away and tips the scales.
There are other traps into which Unitarian Universalists may fall, I am sure; but these are two primary ones: unnatural anti-supernaturalism and unnatural emphasis on our own subjectivity. To be caught in either of these sets mind and heart against each other. On the one hand, one can be so insistent on logic that the mysteries of the spirit are written off and the intuitions that the heart must live by are ignored. On the other hand, one can be so intent either on expressing oneself or on immersing oneself in a self-preoccupied spirituality that one can diminish that intellectual energy which must be present if wholeness is to be attained. Much to be preferred in both instances is for the head and the heart to live in active, creative tension with each other.
Progress in the higher levels of science set aside, our culture, in the main, has not been much help in these matters. It has tended to throw us into the traps I have mentioned. But it does give us some positive aid, especially through the thought of certain persons who have glimpsed the wholeness possible to men and women who have heart, head, and hands in gear with one another. Emerson stands high in this regard. Speaking of the intuition of the moral sentiment in his Divinity School Address, Emerson said:
". All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. While we seek good ends, we are strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as we rove from these ends, we bereave ourselves of power, . our being shrinks, . we become less and less.."
-- Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism, p. 3]
Emerson tried hard to awaken the rationalists of his day to an awareness of a natural world which speaks to the heart and mind and body. He had a great accomplice in Walt Whitman who, in a sense, picked up in personal, even more naturalistic terms, where Emerson left off theoretically. Whitman spoke of a human world that was an uninterrupted expression of the sea, rocks, air, and leaves as well as people. He spoke of human beings but the title of his book was Leaves of Grass. In it he wrote:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of
the stars,
And the pismsire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand,
and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is chef d'oeuvre (masterpiece) for the
highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of
heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all
machinery.
But in my own generation, the person who has done most to bring heart, head, and body together as a whole functioning wholly in the natural world is Kenneth L. Patton, a UU minister who, in my view, became our chief liturgist in the mid-20th century. As with Whitman, the human being (of which Patton speaks) is a being in the world, the natural world. In one of his services, he says:
We seek within the atom for the nature of our own being, for we are each a universe of atoms. We seek outward in the galaxy for the nature of our own being, one galaxy searching in another galaxy for self-definition.
-- (K.L.P.'s Songs and Services, p. 32)
No matter how spiritual or doctrinal or reassuring it may be, no religion is enough unless it fits the person and the community of persons into the whole, into Nature, the all, the everywhere, the everlasting. No religion suffices unless it opens our deeper vision to the deeper wonders, our inner ears to the silences which carry the intuitions which tell our spirits of this broad and deep and whole world which contains us and creates the field for our thought, our ethics, our civilization.
How do we avail ourselves of such religion? I know of no way except to desire it individually and collectively and then to seek silence - to go into the countryside or to some peaceful place that exists within our cities or to some special, hidden place within ourselves and be quiet there. Go wherever we can find true silence. For it is in quiet moments, moments of listening to our own life moving within our blood and within our being, that a connection is felt and known. The rhythm of our own pulse may seem an echo of a larger pulse rhythming the universe - or the universe may seem the echo. But, a kinship, a sameness with the rest of existence, breaks through. In those moments the life flowing through the world can be known to flow through ourselves. The same life, dancing in grass-leaves, can be felt dancing in the limbs and tendrils of our own spirit. The same life, ebbing and flowing in seas and rivers, quickens and quiets in our blood. The same life, breathing in animals and throbbing in the swirling dust of the earth, breathes and throbs in our own muscles and lungs.
It is in our quiet moments that we know we are of the earth and it is of us. Then, although this may not tell us much about the creator of nature or whether nature is its own creator, we can know nature is our creator and we are its creatures. This speaks to both our heart and mind. It gives us a clear and valid place in the universe. We take glory from this. We take gladness. We take meaning as we move in step with the larger motion holding us and throbbing through us. When we do not have such quiet moments, we easily forget how naturally we are in this natural world and we become swallowed up by the artificial constructs of theology or outworn scientific metaphors, by programmed experiences, by emotionalism, and the like that are life's usual invented fare. When we do have them, we are whole. When we have them, our religion fits us naturally into this natural world.
REFLECTIONS
Let us take a few moments to reflect on the way silence and our solitude can work together to open us to a world larger than we ordinarily see. I have a poem by a member of this congregation that shows this profoundly. It is by Logan Nicholson and it was written when he happened upon a cave in our southern mountains. It goes like this:
The Stone
I found in a cave
I turned it round in my hand
and wondered.how many deer
it had seen fall.
How many trees had grown tall
how many hunters had gone away
and left it for me to find
that day..and I who was no hunter,
I turned it until it fit
unto my hand, snug
Feeling the urge to use it.
inescapable urge of earth man.Suddenly I knew these men
who had walked here, and
had left me this crude reminder.
Tho' they would not have claimed me,
I had not changed so much.I, who had tried to abide
by the laws of change.
could not hide, but stood
stone in hand, and for an instant
that could not last
there was a link between
the present and the past.
[Jlogan Nicholson]
Unless we can be quiet within ourselves we not only miss our deep links to the natural world around us, we can not truly sense where we fit into the grand stream of humanity that generated us. When we are profoundly quiet, we can become more profoundly ourselves.