REsources for Living
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As part of trying to define who we are and what we are called to do, Unitarian Universalists have come up with not only seven Principles that list the things that we “covenant to affirm and promote” but also a list of six Sources of our living tradition. And the very first item on this list of where we come from is “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”
That’s quite a mouthful for a person of any age, so let’s break it down a bit. This first building block of our UU tradition is not Christianity or Judaism or any of the world’s many sacred traditions or texts. The starting place for who we are comes from each and every one of us: our own direct experience. It’s not something that anyone else can give us or take away.
And this statement, the first source of our living faith, declares that everyone, in every culture, has experiences of mystery and wonder. Whoever you are, whether or not you would say that you believe in God or gods, you have had some kind of experience of touching Mystery.
Maybe it was looking up at a sky full of stars and remembering just how small each of us is in this unimaginably huge universe. Maybe it was witnessing the birth of a child, or the death of someone you loved. Maybe it was sitting in the crook of a giant tree or hearing music that engulfed and held you, or reading a poem that you couldn’t explain but totally understood in your heart. Maybe it was watching a flock of birds swoop and turn all together in the air, as if each bird were just one cell in the larger body of its flock. Maybe you experienced mystery and wonder looking at—or swimming in—ocean waves.
We tend to think of mystery as meaning things we can’t explain. And certainly there are mysteries to be solved, like in a whodunnit novel where you want to figure it out so that the mystery isn’t a mystery anymore.
But really, our direct experiences of mystery and wonder go far beyond the question of whether you can fully explain something, even scientifically.
Astronomers know a tremendous amount about stars and planets and supernovas and black holes and galaxies and many more amazing features of our expanding universe. But all that knowledge only adds to the great mystery that each of us is somehow living a complete and conscious life, that we are creating our own story and loving and learning, even though we are so tiny in the whole scheme of things that you would think we didn’t matter at all. Physics can explain the shape of a wave and how long it takes to curl over and crash on shore. But that doesn’t detract from the sense of mystery and wonder you feel when you stand face to face with something so powerful and beautiful.
Whatever our beliefs, whatever our knowledge, mystery and wonder belong not just to our human experience, but also to our human religious experience. That’s what makes it transcending mystery and wonder. When you transcend something you go beyond a limit or boundary, as in mercy transcends justice, or this chocolate decadence transcends all other desserts. Transcending mystery and wonder is something that moves beyond our ordinary categories of who we are and what life is like. That’s religion.
Religion starts with the experience of mystery and wonder that transcends all the everyday ways we categorize things by how they work and how they are useful to us. Transcending mystery and wonder starts with recognizing that we belong to something so much bigger than ourselves that we can only touch it in imagination and music and art. But it goes beyond that recognition to something more. The statement of our first source says that it “moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”
Experiencing mystery and wonder, remembering that we are connected to something bigger than we can completely explain or describe, does something to us—or something for us. When we touch that mystery we are somehow refreshed. We remember that whatever particular problems we are obsessing about at the moment are not the whole picture. We are just one drop in the wave, one bird in the swooping flock, one star or tiny planet in the great galaxy. We stop trying to make everything in life fit into the cramped box of our small ideas about how things should be and let go into the mystery and wonder of it all.
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