Lost in the Shuffle:
Unitarian Universalism’s Less Popular Principle
Sermon given at The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
March 17, 2019
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I had just barely finished introducing myself as the chaplain when he blurted out, “Oh, um, no offense, but I don’t have anything to say about God.” I smiled and replied, “That’s okay. Neither do I.” We both laughed a bit and then his express shifted to what appeared to suggest bewilderment. “So, what are you here for?”, he asked. I told him I was there to listen and help him explore any spiritual concerns he might have. “Well”, he said, “I’m afraid you might be wasting your time with me. I don’t go to church, I don’t belong to a religion. Saints, spirit, that soul thing, that’s not for me. I really don’t know how to talk about spiritual concerns.” “Fair enough”, I said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” “Sure”, he said. “What brought you into the hospital?” He replied with the name of a type of cancer. “What’s it like being here”?, I asked.
For the next fifteen minutes or so he talked virtually nonstop. Never once did he mention God, saints or religion. He talked about his life, work, and family. He didn’t use the words like spirit or soul but instead talked of fear, loss, and hope.
He even managed to throw the names of a few sports teams into the mix. For my part, I mostly listened, occasionally affirming something he said or asking him to say more. I never once mentioned God, saints, religion or used words like spirit or soul either. He ended by saying, “Anyway, that’s where things are; that’s all I have. Like I said I don’t know how to have a spiritual conversation.” To which I replied, “What kind of conversation do you think we just had?”
My encounter with this gentleman reminded me how we sometimes allow certain words or language and the concepts associated with them to limit us.
Relatedly, it seems one of the least talked about principles among Unitarian Universalism’s seven principles is the third, “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” What’s especially interesting to me about that is that it is the only one of the seven principles that uses the word, “spiritual.” Now, I will say we do put some effort into working to address the first part concerning acceptance. But the second part about encouraging spiritual growth seems to get lost in the shuffle making it one our less popular principles.
Maybe it was always the case, but it seems to me our use and understanding of religion and spirituality, including the language associated with it, is especially limited in our own time.
Some of this, no doubt, is due to a habit human beings have of making religious concepts so concrete, which paradoxically makes them more vulnerable, that they become “truths” that must then be defended, sometimes vehemently. Many of us are familiar with people who insist the word “saved” means one thing and one thing only in the religious context. But I’m also thinking of a man I knew who, if he even overheard someone say the word “God”, would march right over and with an air of defiance say, “You mean with a small “g”, right?” Yes, it is possible for non-theists to be fundamentalist too.
Further in from the extremes at both ends of the theological spectrum, the limits of religious and spiritual language may be attributable less to stubborn clinging to rigid concepts and more to a simple lack of imagination. As John O’Donahue, whose words were our call to worship this morning, said, “We have made our world so familiar we do not see it anymore.”
Which brings to mind another encounter from my time as a chaplain. My colleagues and I had gathered to consult on the spiritual needs of a patient. The question of the patient’s theology was raised and the colleague who requested the consultation explained the patient, a woman, didn’t have a discernible theology. When asked about the content of their conversation, my colleague said the woman mostly talked about wishing she was back home, sitting by her large kitchen window where she enjoyed observing the tranquility of nature.
She liked to watch the birds in her yard. On some days, a deer would come into the yard, an event especially meaningful to her that, although random, she looked forward to, and that she missed greatly as she lay in the sterile confines of a hospital room unsure of when or if she’d go home. Our colleague was asked if she invited the woman to say more about her experience of nature, her joy and anticipation of the deer’s appearance, and her sense of loss. To which my colleague replied, “What does that have to do with theology?”
Although religion is today often equated with rigidity in thinking and blind obedience to outside rules, imagination born of reflection rests at the heart of most of the world’s traditions. Jesus, working within the context of his own Jewish faith, imagined a new life, gained by dying to the ways of our old lives and invited his followers to do the same. The Buddha imagined a different way of conceptualizing and relating to reality in response to human suffering. The Sufi poet Rumi imagined life as courtship with the divine. In English translations of his poetry he often refers to the divine as “Beloved.” And in the Celtic tradition, a blend of Irish pre-Christian pagan and early Christian spirituality, to which we nod annually at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church (BUUC ) with our Celtic music Sunday, emphasizes the immanence or immediacy of the sacred in the world, especially in nature, as opposed to looking somewhere “out there.”
In each of these traditions we see an imaginative and expansive use and understanding of religion and spirituality and the language and concepts associated with it. And which is very much connected, inseparable, really, from the here and now, the everyday experience of our life and living. Reminding us religion and spirituality need not and ought not be limited in conception or conversation to ideas about deities, saints, angels, souls, heaven or hell, denominations or doctrines.
Consider our readings today, “Acknowledgement of Limitations” and “Becoming a Marine”. Not a deity, saint, or doctrine in sight…or print…in these readings, but both address profoundly spiritual concerns. In the first, each line begins with the same words, “I wonder…” “Wonder”, said Socrates, is the beginning of wisdom. Which, incidentally, is different than knowledge. As one saying goes, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”
Indeed in “Acknowledgement of Limitations”, the author’s invitation is not to simply to accept and inventory the fact of our limitations as human beings, but to ponder what it means that we exist as part of nature, that is, limited, but also apart from it in that we’re the only life form, so far as we know, aware of our limits in a way that permits us to deny and even rebel against them.
Indeed, we are confronted by limits constantly as human beings, some surmountable, but many others not and which is which is not often easily distinguished at first, second, even third glance. Then comes dealing with what we determine.
And that takes practice and for most of us, some nudging, if not a little cheerleading. And often a different kind of cheerleading. Like that offered the young recruit by the chaplain in “Becoming a Marine”.
Quieter, more patient, the one that “won’t yell”, but is nonetheless firmly, lovingly present amidst the sometimes seemingly relentless, exhausting, even hostile challenges we face trying to become, or remain, who we’re called to be. This kind of cheerleading imposes nothing of the cheerleader’s own beliefs on another. Rather, it quietly listens, creating a silence in which might be heard that still, small voice speak what has always been been true, “You can do this.”
But what about the popular notion that religion and spirituality is a private matter? I hear or read this all the time. Often someone will say something like the Dalai Lama said, “My religion is kindness. That’s enough for me.” What someone who says that doesn’t realize or perhaps doesn’t want to admit, is “Kindness is my religion” is not a formula; it is an expression of spiritual wisdom. Wisdom that has grown over of a lifetime of learning, meditating, reflecting, and imagining in the company of a tradition and community that accepts and encourages spiritual growth.
Even when all is going well, life is complex. It’s hard to go it alone. People today report feeling more isolated, stressed, anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed than ever before. These agonies of our age are, at their root, spiritual in nature. An angst we keep looking to, but that our best technological, medicinal and political efforts cannot sustainably address. Yet we continue to look to these, in part, because our use and understanding of religion and spirituality, including its language, has become so limited, so narrowly applied, that we’ve come to confuse our own lack of religious and spiritual imagination as a defining characteristic of religion and spirituality itself.
That’s why our third principle, calling us as a community to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth is necessary and deserves our attention if we hope to be whole in a fractured world.
I mean, I like my smartphone. With it I have access to a quantity of information unprecedented in human history. Information, but not wisdom. Medicine can extend life and delay death, but it doesn’t deeply address the reality that we are alive and will one day have to die. And our political system- God help us- our political system can change laws in an attempt to make life better or society more fair, but it can’t change hearts.
Wisdom, the meaning of life and death, hearts opened, hearts changed. These and the like are the purview of religion and spirituality. That is, religion and spirituality with language expansively applied and practice imaginatively lived. Religion and spirituality that requires of us fidelity to our covenant to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth in our congregations.
So, how can and do we live this call here at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church?
We talk to one another. We share our theologies or life philosophies and what informs them with one another. We talk about life and death and things that bring us joy and make us weep. We take part in adult religious education. We talk with our children after church about what they did in RE. We get involved in a committee, ministry or activity of the church. We come to worship to hear and reflect on what people have to say. We come to listen to prayers or offer our own. We come to be in silence. We sing hymns, and if not for the words, then to partake in the creation of something rare, something beautiful with others.
In other words, we put down our phones and gadgets, set aside our to-do lists and distractions and make the time and space to be present, to show up in body and spirit, thought and deed to this not so little thing… called life. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Unitarian Universalism’s Less Popular Principle
Sermon given at The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
March 17, 2019
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I had just barely finished introducing myself as the chaplain when he blurted out, “Oh, um, no offense, but I don’t have anything to say about God.” I smiled and replied, “That’s okay. Neither do I.” We both laughed a bit and then his express shifted to what appeared to suggest bewilderment. “So, what are you here for?”, he asked. I told him I was there to listen and help him explore any spiritual concerns he might have. “Well”, he said, “I’m afraid you might be wasting your time with me. I don’t go to church, I don’t belong to a religion. Saints, spirit, that soul thing, that’s not for me. I really don’t know how to talk about spiritual concerns.” “Fair enough”, I said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” “Sure”, he said. “What brought you into the hospital?” He replied with the name of a type of cancer. “What’s it like being here”?, I asked.
For the next fifteen minutes or so he talked virtually nonstop. Never once did he mention God, saints or religion. He talked about his life, work, and family. He didn’t use the words like spirit or soul but instead talked of fear, loss, and hope.
He even managed to throw the names of a few sports teams into the mix. For my part, I mostly listened, occasionally affirming something he said or asking him to say more. I never once mentioned God, saints, religion or used words like spirit or soul either. He ended by saying, “Anyway, that’s where things are; that’s all I have. Like I said I don’t know how to have a spiritual conversation.” To which I replied, “What kind of conversation do you think we just had?”
My encounter with this gentleman reminded me how we sometimes allow certain words or language and the concepts associated with them to limit us.
Relatedly, it seems one of the least talked about principles among Unitarian Universalism’s seven principles is the third, “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” What’s especially interesting to me about that is that it is the only one of the seven principles that uses the word, “spiritual.” Now, I will say we do put some effort into working to address the first part concerning acceptance. But the second part about encouraging spiritual growth seems to get lost in the shuffle making it one our less popular principles.
Maybe it was always the case, but it seems to me our use and understanding of religion and spirituality, including the language associated with it, is especially limited in our own time.
Some of this, no doubt, is due to a habit human beings have of making religious concepts so concrete, which paradoxically makes them more vulnerable, that they become “truths” that must then be defended, sometimes vehemently. Many of us are familiar with people who insist the word “saved” means one thing and one thing only in the religious context. But I’m also thinking of a man I knew who, if he even overheard someone say the word “God”, would march right over and with an air of defiance say, “You mean with a small “g”, right?” Yes, it is possible for non-theists to be fundamentalist too.
Further in from the extremes at both ends of the theological spectrum, the limits of religious and spiritual language may be attributable less to stubborn clinging to rigid concepts and more to a simple lack of imagination. As John O’Donahue, whose words were our call to worship this morning, said, “We have made our world so familiar we do not see it anymore.”
Which brings to mind another encounter from my time as a chaplain. My colleagues and I had gathered to consult on the spiritual needs of a patient. The question of the patient’s theology was raised and the colleague who requested the consultation explained the patient, a woman, didn’t have a discernible theology. When asked about the content of their conversation, my colleague said the woman mostly talked about wishing she was back home, sitting by her large kitchen window where she enjoyed observing the tranquility of nature.
She liked to watch the birds in her yard. On some days, a deer would come into the yard, an event especially meaningful to her that, although random, she looked forward to, and that she missed greatly as she lay in the sterile confines of a hospital room unsure of when or if she’d go home. Our colleague was asked if she invited the woman to say more about her experience of nature, her joy and anticipation of the deer’s appearance, and her sense of loss. To which my colleague replied, “What does that have to do with theology?”
Although religion is today often equated with rigidity in thinking and blind obedience to outside rules, imagination born of reflection rests at the heart of most of the world’s traditions. Jesus, working within the context of his own Jewish faith, imagined a new life, gained by dying to the ways of our old lives and invited his followers to do the same. The Buddha imagined a different way of conceptualizing and relating to reality in response to human suffering. The Sufi poet Rumi imagined life as courtship with the divine. In English translations of his poetry he often refers to the divine as “Beloved.” And in the Celtic tradition, a blend of Irish pre-Christian pagan and early Christian spirituality, to which we nod annually at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church (BUUC ) with our Celtic music Sunday, emphasizes the immanence or immediacy of the sacred in the world, especially in nature, as opposed to looking somewhere “out there.”
In each of these traditions we see an imaginative and expansive use and understanding of religion and spirituality and the language and concepts associated with it. And which is very much connected, inseparable, really, from the here and now, the everyday experience of our life and living. Reminding us religion and spirituality need not and ought not be limited in conception or conversation to ideas about deities, saints, angels, souls, heaven or hell, denominations or doctrines.
Consider our readings today, “Acknowledgement of Limitations” and “Becoming a Marine”. Not a deity, saint, or doctrine in sight…or print…in these readings, but both address profoundly spiritual concerns. In the first, each line begins with the same words, “I wonder…” “Wonder”, said Socrates, is the beginning of wisdom. Which, incidentally, is different than knowledge. As one saying goes, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”
Indeed in “Acknowledgement of Limitations”, the author’s invitation is not to simply to accept and inventory the fact of our limitations as human beings, but to ponder what it means that we exist as part of nature, that is, limited, but also apart from it in that we’re the only life form, so far as we know, aware of our limits in a way that permits us to deny and even rebel against them.
Indeed, we are confronted by limits constantly as human beings, some surmountable, but many others not and which is which is not often easily distinguished at first, second, even third glance. Then comes dealing with what we determine.
And that takes practice and for most of us, some nudging, if not a little cheerleading. And often a different kind of cheerleading. Like that offered the young recruit by the chaplain in “Becoming a Marine”.
Quieter, more patient, the one that “won’t yell”, but is nonetheless firmly, lovingly present amidst the sometimes seemingly relentless, exhausting, even hostile challenges we face trying to become, or remain, who we’re called to be. This kind of cheerleading imposes nothing of the cheerleader’s own beliefs on another. Rather, it quietly listens, creating a silence in which might be heard that still, small voice speak what has always been been true, “You can do this.”
But what about the popular notion that religion and spirituality is a private matter? I hear or read this all the time. Often someone will say something like the Dalai Lama said, “My religion is kindness. That’s enough for me.” What someone who says that doesn’t realize or perhaps doesn’t want to admit, is “Kindness is my religion” is not a formula; it is an expression of spiritual wisdom. Wisdom that has grown over of a lifetime of learning, meditating, reflecting, and imagining in the company of a tradition and community that accepts and encourages spiritual growth.
Even when all is going well, life is complex. It’s hard to go it alone. People today report feeling more isolated, stressed, anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed than ever before. These agonies of our age are, at their root, spiritual in nature. An angst we keep looking to, but that our best technological, medicinal and political efforts cannot sustainably address. Yet we continue to look to these, in part, because our use and understanding of religion and spirituality, including its language, has become so limited, so narrowly applied, that we’ve come to confuse our own lack of religious and spiritual imagination as a defining characteristic of religion and spirituality itself.
That’s why our third principle, calling us as a community to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth is necessary and deserves our attention if we hope to be whole in a fractured world.
I mean, I like my smartphone. With it I have access to a quantity of information unprecedented in human history. Information, but not wisdom. Medicine can extend life and delay death, but it doesn’t deeply address the reality that we are alive and will one day have to die. And our political system- God help us- our political system can change laws in an attempt to make life better or society more fair, but it can’t change hearts.
Wisdom, the meaning of life and death, hearts opened, hearts changed. These and the like are the purview of religion and spirituality. That is, religion and spirituality with language expansively applied and practice imaginatively lived. Religion and spirituality that requires of us fidelity to our covenant to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth in our congregations.
So, how can and do we live this call here at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church?
We talk to one another. We share our theologies or life philosophies and what informs them with one another. We talk about life and death and things that bring us joy and make us weep. We take part in adult religious education. We talk with our children after church about what they did in RE. We get involved in a committee, ministry or activity of the church. We come to worship to hear and reflect on what people have to say. We come to listen to prayers or offer our own. We come to be in silence. We sing hymns, and if not for the words, then to partake in the creation of something rare, something beautiful with others.
In other words, we put down our phones and gadgets, set aside our to-do lists and distractions and make the time and space to be present, to show up in body and spirit, thought and deed to this not so little thing… called life. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be