REsources for Living
Podcast: Download (5.2MB)
Subscribe: More
Get over yourself! Or at least get beyond yourself. That’s kind of the idea of “transcendence,” our theme for this month. When you transcend something you go beyond it. A prisoner transcends his circumstances when he focuses on living a life of peaceful compassion while stuck in a setting designed to degrade the human spirit. A student transcends social boundaries when she sits at a table full of people who speak a different language or belong to a different social clique. A job seeker transcends anxiety and depression to go out and contact people who might or might not have leads on a job.
But we also use “transcendence” to talk about a fuzzier sense of something that goes beyond our ordinary reality, a feeling of something larger that’s hard to describe. Our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes statement describes one of the sources of our living tradition as: “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 that create and uphold life.” Which is pretty much of a mouthful, but gets at the idea that there is a mysterious, larger something that holds us all together, that has to do with creativity and open-heartedness and growing.
That intuition—the notion that we all belong to a larger reality—is a part of our Unitarian heritage articulated, appropriately enough, by the Transcendentalists of the 19th century. Many of the most famous of our Unitarian ancestors were Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker and Margaret Fuller. They shaped American thought and literature with the idea—radical at the time—that people could directly experience this larger reality, this “Over-soul,” without reference to the Bible or a minister. They declared that the miracles of Jesus were not proof of its reality, and that the teachings of Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism were just as valid a way of describing this ultimate reality as Christianity. Shocking!
And yet, if you talk with most UUs, this Transcendentalist notion is pretty much where a lot of us land. We find the Divine in and around us, as accessible in a forest or a mountaintop as in church—or maybe a lot more so! Our intimate connection to what is holy transcends whatever might look like it separates us.
But here’s the funny part. Because transcendent means “beyond,” the belief in a transcendent God can also point to what is utterly beyond this world, an all-powerful, all-knowing God who is “up there,” wherever that “up” might be. Which is pretty much the opposite of the idea of the divine impulse inside all things, affirmed by the Transcendentalists and a whole lot of religious liberals who came after them. The term for that kind of understanding is “immanence.” Immanence means inside, basically the polar opposite of beyond.
Which might explain why the concept of transcendence is so confusing that it seemed like a good plan for me to write a column explaining just what it might be. Unfortunately, here we are, all turned inside out in a mess of immanent transcendence that has only gotten us tangled up, not straightened out.
Okay, here’s how I see it. An experience of transcendence is a reminder that you are not the biggest thing, that there is something beyond you. What you can see is not all that there is to be seen. What you believe or perceive does not cover everything that can be known. I have had tiny moments of transcendence as I sat grumpily behind a stupid driver who was stopped in the middle of the road for no reason, only to realize that they stopped to let a pedestrian that I couldn’t see cross the street. Oh. Funny thing. It turns out that I’m not the only person on the road, and my desire to quickly get where I need to be is no more important than the pedestrian’s need to do the same thing—and it’s a whole lot less important than the driver in front of me choosing not to run someone over!
I had a slightly larger version of this kind of perspective shift many years ago when I was called to serve a church in Chicago. The timing was perfect for me to leave the small town in Idaho where I had been minister, since my partner would only be able to pursue her career in a larger city. The universe, it seemed, was arranging things just for me!
Before I left, I met a UU minister who had moved to this rather remote area because of her husband’s job. She loved the area, but was rather depressed that there were so few possibilities for her to pursue a ministry of her own. After I left, she was called as the church’s next minister. And it struck me that the universe could just as easily have been shoving me around to make room for her to have what she wanted. There was, it turned out, no reason to suppose that the universe was any more interested in my personal desires than in anyone else’s.
I don’t know what the biggest thing is, or whether there is a God whose perspective is big enough to take in everything. That’s okay. I think really all I have to know is that whatever that biggest thing is, I’m not it. There is always something that goes beyond me, beyond what I see, what I want, what I expect. If I can live in the humility of that understanding then I have a pretty good start on keeping “an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
