“Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; / Or surely you’ll grow double,” said the early-Nineteenth Century British poet William Wordsworth: “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife.” He continues,
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Ah, yes. Romanticism. They headed for the woods for their woo-woo.
And Romanticism hit US shores in Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, “why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” Experience. It was all about experience. Emerson began his great Transcendentalist manifesto, Nature, this way:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Whatever else this tradition accomplished, it convinced New England Unitarians that books were fine and necessary on Sunday morning, but mystical experience, the woo-woo of worship, would happen elsewhere. On that hike through the mountains perhaps. Or on the seashore. Only accidentally within the walls of a church.
Emerson’s children hold onto this tradition, remaining mistrustful of the technologies of woo-woo: rhythmic music; glossolalia; shouting and such. Yet, if we take up those leaves called the Norton Anthology of American Literature, we find that there have been a few literary and intellectual movements since Transcendentalism. Perhaps it’s time to move on and, as sage old Emerson said, “demand our own works and laws and worship.”
I just got back from a week at a dance and music camp in the California redwoods. The music was outstanding, the dancing ecstatic, the people open-hearted and the trees majestic. It was, in short, almost heaven. (My version of heaven does not include meatloaf prepared by the staff of a YMCA camp, but you can’t have everything.) Really, I think it’s as close to heaven as I’m likely to get.
My theology, and that of most Unitarian Universalists, doesn’t really run to a notion of a heaven that you arrive in after you die. The Universalist side of our heritage declares that a loving God would not consign anyone to eternal torment in hell. But when it comes to the question of what does happen to us after we die, most UUs tend to come down on the side of figuring that there’s no way to know until we get there, so there isn’t much point in worrying about it now.
Sure, every now and again I wonder if some consciousness might continue as my body fades to dirt, and what that might be like. But mostly I wonder why more people don’t dwell in heaven now. I wonder why so many people have to scrabble for the barest existence, when it would take so little to move them toward that heaven we call “enough.” But more than that, I wonder why so many people who dwell in the land of Enough seem so far from heaven.
Of course, maybe I’m missing it. Maybe it’s possible to find heaven in a shopping mall or in front of a TV screen, and it’s just never happened to me. But it looks to me like an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time working jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t care about, escaping at the end of the day into the world of people who don’t exist. And I know that heaven isn’t a place you can dwell all the time. For every moment of wordless delight when your baby looks in your eyes and grins there are an awful lot of diapers to be changed. But still, I have to wonder, how much effort have you put into the pursuit of heaven?
Not the pursuit of heaven that means following all the rules now so that you go Up when you die, but the pursuit of heaven right here and now—those moments of expansive joy, deep connection, a bubbling over of delight. The heaven that comes when you laugh with your best friends late at night, or let the music roll through you as you sing in a choir or when you plunge into a lake on a hot summer day. The heaven of burying your face between the neck and shoulder of your sleepy child, or in the deep fur of that same spot on your dog. The heaven of creating a bowl or a sentence or meal that will nourish someone you love.
I don’t pretend to know what heaven looks like, not in this life or the next. In either case, I suspect it won’t look the same for you as for me. But whatever your heaven looks like, feels like, tastes like, I hope that you go out of your way to find it – not by walking the straight and narrow path, but by dancing down the wide road of joy.
I’m a gardener in the upper Midwest, so in July I spend a lot of time pulling up weeds. Just yesterday, along with a lot of other stuff, I probably pulled up a couple of hundred tiny maple trees, growing from the ‘helicopter blades’ that spin to the ground from my neighbor’s maple each spring.
The first year that I saw these sprouting in my yard, I panicked. I think I envisioned our yard suddenly and abruptly turning into a dense maple forest. I paid my kid a nickel each to pull them up; in the course of the summer I shelled out $100!!! Duly sorted in tiny groups of 20 as she collected her bounty whenever she needed spending money.
Now I know that, unless I ignore them for five or six years, these little maples are the least of my worries. Sure, six or seven of them might implant themselves right next to the tomato plant, but a swift yank and they’re gone forever! Nope, the weeds that drive me crazy are much less dramatic, much more insidious, will never turn into trees but will simply plague me in their short green ubiquity. “We’re here, we’re green, get over it!” they seem to taunt me.
The tough weeds, the ones that I will spend my life pulling and re-pulling, never successfully, are the ones that spread underground, in their root system. Crabgrass. Bishop’s weed. Jerusalem Artichokes. (Bear in mind that a weed is just a plant in a place where you don’t want it! In some parts of the world, orchids are weeds!)
This year a friend took a turn at the horseradish plant I’ve hacked at every spring. “I think I got it all!” she declared enthusiastically. I just smiled and thanked her, confident because of past experience that she had not. Sure enough, though it’s gone from the area she dug—a huge four foot excavation—it’s now reappeared five feet away, in the middle of the strawberry patch. Root systems are invisible on the surface, and thus incredibly hard to eliminate.
Interestingly, pulling weeds yesterday led me to think about racism, and what’s going on in the US right now. Hundreds of hours of media attention have been given to the racist utterings of Paula Deen. Indeed, in our media, this story is the central narrative describing racism. From my view, Deen is a maple tree. Her racist practices, weedy as they may be, are isolated, have their own root system, can easily be plucked out. One second; yank; it’s over.
The racism that is harder to see, and harder to talk about, is spreading underground, evidence of its existence popping into view here and there without seeming connection, much harder to identify and eradicate. That’s the effects of the US Supreme Court eliminating the Voting Rights Act, which as far as I can tell is garnering no mainstream media coverage at all. Already in at least seven places, changes have been made to voting that will drastically affect people of color, and all of us, far more than the epitaphs of a random chef. And yet, I don’t even know the names of the people who are enacting these new ways of doing things. I’m not seeing interviews in mainstream media with them, or with the people affected by their decisions.
The problem with oppression is that so much of how it spreads and lives is invisible. It’s not about individual bigotry or what names individual people call each other. It’s about systems, connections of one thing to another that may not, on the surface of things, appear to come from the same roots.
That’s what I was thinking about while I was pulling up the weeds yesterday, anyway.
I subscribe to the notion that separating out religion from other meaning-making systems is valid only for the sake of convenience. I agree with anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith who says,
Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. (Imagining Religion)
Allowing for humor and rhetorical overstatement, Professor Smith’s point is that we human beings exist in a matrix of symbolic systems that we separate out only for the sake of contemplating (and one hopes clarifying) them. In our minds and in our lives, the meanings are all mushed up, a puree or whip of meaning and purpose. Sometimes we question the powers that be in our lives; often we don’t.
Since Emanuel Kant, it has been clear to many people that human beings are meaning-making creatures and that the meanings we create exist in systems of narrative and symbol. In these systems, it’s us or them: we control them, or they control us. Whenever we aren’t paying attention, it is the latter.
Religions are one way human beings create meaning. A religion is a subset of narrative and symbol within a system. A system separated only for convenience and clarity.
Given this mushy matrix, removing what is conventionally called “religious” (or “spiritual”) from a personal or collective meaning-making system does not leave a hole or gap, but is rather an opening that other symbolic systems will fill.
If the god concept does not guarantee or underwrite meaning and purpose for a human being, something else will . . . perhaps even the insistence that life has meaning and purpose without the god concept! (Hence the “angry atheist” syndrome.)
Think for a moment how many people you know who actually take meaning and purpose from the god concept. My suspicion is that the concept actually functions as shorthand for something else in most human lives.
Theologian Gordon D. Kaufman gives his view, writing:
The central question for theology is not . . . primarily a speculative question, a problem of knowledge at all. Most fundamentally it is a practical question: How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what cause give ourselves? Put in religious terms: How can we truly serve God? What is proper worship? (Face of Mystery: Constructive Theology)
Put succinctly: “What’s your cause?”
Your cause might be survival. Approval. Family. World peace.
Often the god concept becomes the straw man who underwrites preexisting wishes and prejudices. The symbolic systems we live in are difficult to see and even more difficult to separate into understandable strands. Most difficult of all is putting all the strands back into a conceivable whole. Yet, finally, there is no religion, no politics, no self. Only the forest of symbols we wander in.
As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
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Filled with the holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert. (Luke 4:1) He’s really not much different from us, the man who walked deep into that desert. The one we call Jesus of Nazareth. He, too, was filled with questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Does our life really matter? He, too, knew uncertainty, anxiety, fear. He, too, looked out and saw a world that was changing far too fast, a world where the old rules seemed to give way to something yet to be defined.
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We are on a dismounted patrol to the top of some ancient ruins. A short walk, but the ground is loose and steep. Rocks and dirt slide down as we walk up. The only way to make it up a steep hill while laden with gear is to look ahead but watch where you put your feet.
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In the dream, I am alone in a round stone tower. I do not want to be there, but I am trapped in its dark, damp, cold, airless space. And then, almost in a whisper, comes a soft voice, “Keep looking…there is a door.…” And suddenly the door is there. I can see light, I can walk out. I am not trapped anymore.
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East Shore UU Church
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First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
First Universalist Church of Denver
First Universalist Church, Minneapolis
Fox Valley UU Fellowship, Inc.
Main Line Unitarian Church
Maumee Valley UU Congregation
Rogue Valley UU Fellowship
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