The Spiritual Practice of Agnosticism
Wolf!
The Aesop fable about the boy who cried wolf has long been viewed as a cautionary tale about lying. The boy knowingly cried “wolf!” merely to disturb the villagers. The boy eventually pays the price in dead sheep when the villagers stop responding.
There is another and more dangerous way of crying wolf, however: continually calling “wolf!” because there might be one but there might not.
In this way of crying wolf, the boy is expressing his fears—his own psychodrama. He may even be utterly convinced that a wolf is threatening and nearby. He may even be imagining what a wolf attack might look like. Still, despite the boy’s true alarm, there is no wolf, and the villagers are wasting their time running to help the boy. Wasting time that would be better taken with other ventures.
It’s Not About Not Deciding
As an agnostic, I’m very aware that we agnostics are often seen as fence-sitters—the tepid ones choosing neither hot nor cold. Why can’t we just buck up and admit that we’re atheists? Or why can’t we admit that we have a soft spot for one god or another? Why can’t we just cry wolf or shut up?
Contrary to the cliche, agnosticism isn’t about not deciding. It’s about honestly facing what we know about knowing itself. It is, as the Victorian biologist, T.H. Huxley, who coined the term, said, “not a creed but a method.” (Athiesm is a creed because it is a belief, like theism.)
Agnosticism is a method that is, I believe, a spiritual practice like Christian Centering Prayer or Buddhist meditation.
When Huxley first used the word in print in 1889, he contrasted his confidence in human knowledge with that of the convinced believers. He said,
They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.
Knowing and Thinking We Know
Gnostic in Greek means “knowledge.” In the Western world we know the term best from the early Christian movement called Gnosticism, which claimed esoteric knowledge of the workings of the universe. Such knowledge, Huxley pointed out, can be neither proven nor disproven. The Gnostics claimed to have “solved the problem of existence.” Huxley, however, wasn’t so sure of their untestable opinions. (Neither, it might be mentioned, was the Church so sure of their solution.)
In other words, Gnosticism wasn’t about knowing, it was about belief. Agnosticism is about how and what we know.
Boiled down to its simplest formulation, the way of agnosticism according to Huxley is: “do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”
No matter how convinced you are that the wolf is near, don’t cry wolf until you see one.
This is not fence-sitting or vacillation. It is, rather, a commitment to the active search for what we can know. In this way it is much like the spiritual practice of via negativa, a method of removing those things that are not “god” in order to discover god.
Huxley, however, saw his method as a positive rather than negative path. He wrote:
. . . Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. That is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. (“Agnosticism and Christianity”)
It’s About the Questions
Huxley made it very clear that scientific materialists don’t have the answers either. No one does. All of us find ourselves improvising with as much information as we can scramble together—as have all people for all of human history. Agnostics are committed, however, to the common human project of learning more and more. Of knowing what is actually here, not what we only imagine. This commitment requires us to have active minds engaged in continual searching.
As psychologist Ellen J. Langer puts it in her book Mindfulness, “Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.”
The method of agnosticism is a way of being mindful. A way of being in the present moment and making that moment an open and creative matrix.
Agnosticism is a commitment to only crying “wolf!” when such a cry will do real good.
Because it is the Faithful Thing To Do
{Editor’s Note: Due to technical difficulties, this post, originally scheduled for August 19th, was delayed – posting now!}
I spent two weeks out of state, mostly away from the internet, TV, and newspapers – enjoying some much needed study leave. Returning to the news of the world on Thursday, August 14th was, I confess, quite an incredibly jarring experience.
The depth and the breadth of the systemic racism in Ferguson, Missouri revealed both in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager and the assault on the protesters demanding accountability for his murder at the hands of the law, the ongoing deaths in Gaza even in the midst of cease-fires, the President’s announcement that we are reentering Iraq, increasing violent deaths in the Ukraine, Syria, Honduras… and at home, the second weekend of August was an especially bloody one in New Orleans, as six shootings across the city left five people dead and wounded 11 human beings, including a 2 year old, a 4 year old and a 13 year old…
Dear Ones, today my heart is broken and I am trying to do the faithful work of making sure that it is broken open, to make room for more and more love.
…
In my time away, I finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s portrait of doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is an extraordinary human being who has spent much of his life both among the most profoundly poor people in the world and in the halls of ‘the Brigham’ and Harvard in Boston. Haiti is where the organization he founded, Partners in Health, did its first work and where it still maintains its flagship project, the hospital called Zanmi Lasante, (Haitian Creole for Partners in Health).
As the book concludes, author Tracy Kidder “notes Farmer’s fondness for a particular phrase: “the long defeat.” At one point he quotes Dr. Farmer:
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . You know, people from our background — like you, like most Partners In Health-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
Commenting on Kidder’s work, Professor Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College wrote:
“It seems to me that this philosophy of history, if we may call it that, is the ideal one for anyone who has exceptionally difficult, frustrating, even agonizing, but nevertheless vitally important work to do. For such people, the expectation of victory can be a terrible thing — it can raise hopes in (relatively) good times only to shatter them when the inevitable downturn comes. Conversely, the one who fights the long defeat can be all the more thankful for victories, even small ones, precisely because (as St. Augustine said about ecstatic religious experiences) he or she does not expect them and is prepared to live without them….”
Now I have been recently described as ruthlessly optimistic –and while I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that description — it did highlight for me the need to be explicit about our call to do the work of justice. Friends, we do not work for justice because we know that we are going to win. We work for justice because it is the ethical thing to do, the loving thing to do, the merciful, compassionate, and faithful thing to do.
If and when you feel overwhelmed by all the healing that must be done, by the sheer volume of injustice present in any one news cycle – I invite you to breathe in and breathe out. Remember that you are not alone. We who have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, let us not give up if we are comfortably devastated and can afford to despair. Let us be in solidarity with those whom the dominant culture treats as losers, let us join in the fighting the long defeat with love, compassion, courage and peace that passes understanding.
Together we bend the long arc of the universe toward justice that we may not live to see, but which we must struggle for because it is the faithful thing to do.
{PS – There is a gathering in New Orleans planned for September 26-28, 2014 for those wanting to live missional, justice-making lives and who are looking for a beloved community to connect with on the journey. Learn more here https://www.facebook.com/LifeOnFireTribe and here http://lifeonfirenola2014.wordpress.com/ }
Ferguson: Cynicism and a Smartphone
I have to admit that the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have triggered mostly cynicism for me. In the US we have periodic paroxysms of piety triggered by events that happen every day but occasionally “go viral” in the media. Then, the outrage subsides . . . and nothing changes.
Allow me to relate an example that went viral for a few weeks.
I was born across the river from St. Louis, on the Illinois side, the industrial side of the river where African Americans and EuroAmericans have lived since the late Nineteenth Century. The fortunes of that swath of river bank have gone up and down over the years, depending upon armament manufacture, but for the most part the region has been poor and race relations tense.
The people—black and white—who moved to the area have been mostly from rural Southern backgrounds, and the culture has long reflected that reality.
If anyone is looking for a great place to film a documentary about US poverty, I would suggest East St. Louis. But then I know that every city in the country has the scenes available there. It’s just that East St. Louis is a small town.
On July 2, 1917 an event occurred extreme even by the standards of the southern third of Illinois. As the style was at the time, the event was called the East St. Louis Riot. It was, in truth, the East St. Louis Massacre. It was a pattern replicated all over the United States—an incident occurred; whites saw the incident as a perfect excuse to teach blacks a lesson; violence ensued; outrage about the violence ensued; calls went out for change; things went back to normal; nothing changed.
But that’s my cynicism speaking, isn’t it?
This appears to be what happened: after a triggering incident, whites gathered at the edge of an area called Black Valley, the neighborhood where African Americans lived. Whites turned off the water leading into the area so that fires could not be extingushed. Then, they set fire to houses and stores.
As blacks escaped from the fire, whites shot, beat, or lynched as many people as they could.
The Illinois governor ordered the National Guard to occupy the area. When they arrived the troops aided the rioters, joining in the setting of fires and using their superior firepower to kill more blacks. (I know this bit because a member of my family was there and told the story when I was a child, in the early 1960s—I heard many such stories.)
The massacre eventually stopped because the rioters got tired and went home.
No one knows how many people died, since Black Valley was left to bury its own dead. The death toll was probably around 200.
As in the case of Ferguson, marches of solidarity with the victims spread across the US. One political cartoon from the time says it best, perhaps. A black woman is pictured imploring President Wilson—famous for his insistence upon making the world safe for democracy—”Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?”
Good question. And a question that echoes down the years. Why is it that we don’t make America safe for democracy?
The methods of oppression used in the East St. Louis Massacre—which continued into the 1950s—do not play well on TV, so in the television era lynchings and mass murders stopped.
Notice that when similar pictures appeared from Ferguson, Washington got busy talking about at least perhaps maybe talking about the wisdom of selling military-grade hardware to local police. (This might even change, if a sufficient number of Americans remember the images long enough to continue talking about the problem.) Remember: my forebear used his government-issued rifle to kill the people he was sent to protect.
In the television era, oppression has been for the most part more isolated—a shooting here, a Rodney-King-style beating there. Sudden, overt, isolated, and constant.
And usually not displayable on TV.
The smartphone, however, may change that. The new technology brought about the Arab Spring, and it might—it could—begin to dismantle the current US system of black oppression.
Violence against this systematic oppression is not the answer. Neither is a brief paroxysm of national outrage. The violence will stop only when we the people catch the acts and put them on television and across the web.
Racists don’t like to see themselves in action on TV. (Or, rather—they don’t like to be seen by liberals on TV.)
I can’t speak for the people across the river in Missouri, but this white guy, a descendent of Confederates and white supremacists, would like to see an end to the violence and oppression.
Marcus Garvey, commenting on the East St. Louis Massacre, perhaps said it best:
“This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”
Close to Home
It seems to me that the outpouring of emotion on the death of Robin Williams was not only for a beloved celebrity, although goodness knows he was that and more. His struggle with mental illness and addiction became an opportunity for the rest of us to talk about our struggles—with our own illness, or the illness of those we love, with our thoughts of suicide or our experiences of the aftermath when someone we love has taken their life. It all hits so close to home, and there are so few opportunities to talk about the pain that so often remains hidden.
Which makes me think about how we respond to the horrors going on in Ferguson, MO. Now, I certainly live nowhere near Missouri—I’m culturally and geographically thousands of miles away, in the liberal, integrated, diverse San Francisco Bay. A handful of BART stops away from where Oscar Grant was killed not so long ago. So close to home.
Now, you may think that “those people” are asking for police in riot gear—they’re rioting, aren’t they? But if the phrase “those people” has floated through your brain, then it is time to sit down and think. Because it is entirely possible that you have never personally experienced the police as a threat to your safety, rather than the essence of those who create safety. It’s possible that you have never been followed in a store or pulled over while driving because of the color of your skin. It’s possible that you have never considered your skin color to be a factor in getting a job or hailing a cab or renting a house. And if, like me, you have lived in the world of that privileged possibility, then the rage of “those people” in Ferguson, MO might seem very distant.
One of the common threads that I have noticed in the discussions of depression in the wake of Robin Williams’s suicide has been people who are or have been clinically depressed explaining that if you haven’t been there, you don’t know. You don’t know what it is like to have the disordered thoughts, the black hole sucking you down. And so you might be tempted to cheer the depressed person up, or blame them for giving in when they have so much to live for. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.
And if, like me, you live within the comfortable bounds of white privilege, you might be tempted to think that the folks in Ferguson, or the growing number of people who are supporting their protest, should move on, should behave better, should treat the police as the friends and community supporters that you know them to be. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.
But, as with mental illness, the fact that you might not suffer from it personally doesn’t mean that it dwells only in some distant land. Of course, it is possible that you have no family members of color, no friends, no co-workers—although I would find it hard to imagine. Certainly, in any case, you belong to this human family that we are all called to love and care for.
If it doesn’t feel close to home—the assumption that Black men are armed and dangerous, the notion that Black people need to be controlled and subdued, the premise that police in riot gear are here to “keep the peace”—if the reality of racism feels like someone else’s problem, or even a “race card” that people of color use to cover up their own inadequacies, well then it might be time to sit down for a moment. It might be time to remember that what you personally have experienced is not all that there is. It might be time to listen. It might be time to remember that in a world that we all build together, every struggle for justice is close to home.
The Rise of the Totally Awesome ‘Whatever’ God
“Moralistic therapeutic deism.” That’s the term sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton coined to describe the religious beliefs of the average North American. Rev. Robert Vinciguerra calls it “egonovism,” a neologism constructed of “ego” and “novo,” new. Rev. Rob claims that most Americans are Egonovists, even though most don’t know it.
http://revrob.com/society-topmenu-49/223-continued-observations-on-the-egonovism-of-american-society-and-dialogs-with-egonovists
Why are they saying such things? Here’s one reason: Something on the order of 80% of Americans claim to be Christian, but 25% of Americans believe in reincarnation and 20% believe in karma, decidedly UN-Christian concepts. Such statistics tell us that Americans have gone way beyond “cafeteria Christianity” in our “spiritual but not religious” zeitgeist.
A Wikipedia article summarizes the beliefs of moralistic therapeutic deism:
1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human
life on earth.
(NB: This point alone disqualifies the system as “deist.” Deists believe there
was a god who was the prime mover at the beginning of the universe,
but that god is now hands-off.)
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the
Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
(Rather a far cry from that old Christian hymn that intoned “such a worm as I.”)
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when
God is needed to resolve a problem.
(Apparently Jesus was confused about that numbering the hairs on the head thing.)
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Which is the first tip-off that something may be wrong here. How likely is it that the same god who smote the Egyptians is cool with whatever . . . and shoveling out favors?
Doesn’t this list sound like wish-fulfillment at its best—an ATM god who awaits our every whim and clearly loves the wealthy more than the poor, underwriting an unjust economic and social system that happens to be handing out bennies to lucky me.
And, while this god is reloading the ATM, I’m free to do as I like . . . as long as I’m nice.
As Rev. Bob’s “ego” in Egonovist points out, this theology has an “I” problem, doesn’t it? Whoever “I” am and whatever I’m doing is just fine with this god.
Past the Smiting
If you have read this far, it’s not likely you are a Moralistic Therapeutic Deist or even a Deistic Moral Relativist. After all, an Egonovist won’t be convinced by logic or reference to theology at all, because an important aspect of Egonovism is that it requires no pondering. No daily devotion. No sacrifice. The Egonovist god merely sits . . . or waits . . . somewhere, ready to dish out bennies to me.
None of that “straight is the gate and narrow is the way” stuff.
Sorry to sound like a Calvinist or something but am I the only one who’d like to see Jesus make himself a “whip made of cords” and do clearing of the temple here?
No, the moneychangers aren’t going to be getting their tables kicked by the Egonovists.
The admission price to Egonovism is self-satisfaction and good ol’ fashion hypocrisy.
How Likely Is That?
Don’t get me wrong: I think the moral theistic deist deity is as likely as any of the other gods human beings have thought up over time. Yet, I’m convinced that the point of religions is—and has always been—to stretch us, to call us to higher purposes than our basic lazy, selfish primate selves. Sure, religions also give teeth to social norms and underwrite whatever taboos a particular society has. Still, I can’t help thinking the various gods who have asked for a little effort have played some positive role in human affairs.
The Egonovist god, no so much.
Makes me glad I’m a humanist!
http://ferrelljenkins.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/balage_jesus_and_the_money_changers-t1.jpg
http://ferrelljenkins.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/balage_jesus_and_the_money_changers-t1.jpg
Spiritual but not Superstitious (Mystical Without the Mumbling)
“Spirituality” is emotion. Sometimes the spiritual emotion springs from a consciously adopted attitude toward the world we see around us. Sometimes it hits us unexpectedly. A “spiritual experience” can be anything from the warm-fuzzy feeling we get singing a song we love to the inexpressible “mystical” experience of feeling one with all that is.
Both great feelings. But not mysterious. Psychologist Daniel Khaneman in his groundbreaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow outlines how the head/heart and body/soul distinction actually functions. Fast thinking, which Khaneman calls System One, is our fight or flight selves. The visceral reaction. Slow thinking, System Two, is our reason and problem-solving abilities. We don’t think about System One. System Two takes discipline.
As we learn more about these systems, we see more clearly what techniques and technologies best trigger responses. For example, when the rhythm of the music reaches about 120 beats per minute—the average heart rate for mild exertion—we feel like dancin’.
For my money the most insightful writer on the subject of spirituality and mysticism is Jiddu Krishnamurti. Born into British-occupied India, a young Krishnamurti was taken under the wing of the Theosophists and trained in that mystical tradition. The Theosophists thought Krishnamurti would be the great “World Teacher” that they predicted would come to earth.
Krishnamurti eventually renounced Theosophy but did indeed become a great teacher, a synthesizer of spiritual and religious thinking from all over the world.
One of Krishnamurti’s gifts was a keen BS detector. Therefore, when Krishnamurti talks about spirituality and mysticism, I listen.
His key insight goes like this: “It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact.”
Listening without preconception; without judgment; without the interference of ego; listening in order to hear, to experience—right now, with as little of the usual interference as possible. Unmediated experience. This listening pushes System Two down into System One.
This sort of listening requires presence in the moment. It requires us to be in the place of the breath and that mental space that is at once maximum concentration and maximum surrender. This experience may be achieved by various techniques, from mediation to fasting to merely looking up at the stars.
From the Centering Prayer of Christianity to Buddhist zazen to the various yogas, human beings have developed techniques for getting to this space. Since these techniques are designed to dampen System Two and trigger System One, they feel visceral, spiritual.
Woo Without the Woo Woo
“Mysticism” is a technique aimed at achieving a “mystical experience.” Again, this experience is a feature of brain function and has little to do with specific religious or philosophical practices, except insofar as all religions aim for the experience and have techniques for achieving it.
Some traditions are overt about it—Sufism, for example. Shamanistic practice. Transcendentalism.
Take, for instance this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
The transcendental experience is being awake in the here and now.
It’s All About the Flow
Since spiritual and mystical experiences are a feature of brain chemistry, not specific religions, atheists and agnostics have no particular reason to poo-poo the idea. As a matter of fact, mystical experience doesn’t need a religious component at all, as demonstrated by the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who introduced the notion of “flow” experience. Csikszentmihalyi found “flow” in experiences as diverse as sports and video gaming. He lists the elements likely to bring on flow experiences:
1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time
is altered
6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as
autotelic experience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
A flow experience sounds like a “mystical” experience, doesn’t it? Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Sounds “spiritual.”
There’s nothing mysterious about mystical experience. You can put yourself in the way of the flow experience by following very simple (and secular!) procedures.
The Extraordinary Is All About the Ordinary
I’m a writer. I’ve been writing for years. I learned early-on that if I was going to get writing done, I had to do it every day. As part of my daily routine. So, I get up early every morning, make coffee, and sit down to write. And write. And write. Writing is my spiritual practice.
Sometimes, everything clicks and I go into the flow experience. The mystical experience. Sometimes not.
Since I was trained in writing by Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, I took up Buddhist meditation as a daily practice too. This was part of the “mindfulness” that the writers who became Buddhists in the 1950s thought contributed to honest and deep writing. They passed that on to me.
Over the years, I have discovered that meditation and writing have the same effect: They bring my mind into the present moment. Remember Thoreau’s words:
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment.
When we are not living in the present moment, we are living in memory or fantasy. We are out of touch with what is. We are kicked back and using System Two. And we are a long way from a spiritual experience!
There’s nothing mysterious about the mystical. Spirituality is a feeling. We don’t have to buy what particular religions are selling to access these feelings. It’s all in our heads.
The Journey is Essential
On the verge of two weeks of study leave, I offer this ancestor wisdom to the world:
Journey with peace, courage, mercy, compassion, and love beloveds. And may our dreams be realized…
House on Fire: Church Attendance in the US
There it is, yet another study indicating that the number of American Christians who attend churches regularly has dropped yet again. (see link below) Currently the number of those who attend church once a month or more has dropped to something on the order of eighteen percent, less than half of the number who claim to have attended church within the past month.
Pastors themselves report that roughly half of the members on their congregational rolls show up only on holidays, if then.
If current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Americans attending church at least once a month will be something on the order of ten percent.
The new studies, by separating the facts from the fiction of attendance, show that attendance numbers in the US track closely with the downward trend in church attendance in Europe.
The difference lies in the percentage of the population who claim to be Christian. In Europe, more of those who don’t attend church also drop the identification as Christian (Europeans also tell the truth about their church attendance). In the US, this is not as of yet the case.
Why don’t most Christians go to church? There are many and sundry reasons, but I suspect most of them boil down to one essential: most American Christians no longer find church compelling. Churches are not providing what people need.
Yes, the building is on fire.
Bread and Circuses and Beyond
What do the people want and need? The usual answer—bread and circuses—is partially true. The greatest loss in attendance has occurred in congregations of between 100-299 members. Since the median size of a US congregation is 125, this is bad news for those average or below.
Larger congregations provide more in the way of bread and circuses.
Younger people, however, are asking for more than a good show. Many say they hanker for a “deeper relationship with Jesus.” If I’m reading between the lines correctly, this is, at least in part, a dismissal of the liturgical styles that have been practiced—more or less unchanged—for years.
Indeed, nearly twenty-five percent of the people who attend church anywhere near regularly meet in some permutation of a small group. Let’s read that as “I need connection.”
Beyond this, many congregations are reaching out into the communities where they find themselves. Apparently many people today find that a “deeper relationship with Jesus” has to do with healing their local communities. This “walking the walk” is a sea change in American religious practice.
Christianity and Beyond
All this said, I am the minister of an overtly and predominantly humanist congregation. Some of the people who gather in my congregation seek a deeper relationship with Jesus, but most think that’s about as likely as a deeper relationship with Albert Einstein. The people who come to my congregation are largely post-Christian.
They are, however, part of this change in thinking in the larger society. Humanists are looking for exactly the same thing as those seeking out cutting edge Christian congregations: more connection and more service.
We humanists are able, however, to go a step further, jettisoning the tired language of liturgy altogether. “Benediction” is a very odd word, isn’t it? It’s barely English and it has meaning mostly from its churchy trappings. Many Unitarian Universalist congregations hold to these words, sometimes called the “language of reverence,” tenaciously. The numbers tell us that’s a bad idea.
Why do congregations that are purportedly open the ideas outside Christendom using old Christian language? I suspect it’s because the people who care enough about their congregations to become leaders have a warm and fuzzy connection to such language. They are, in other words, inherently conservative.
But the numbers don’t lie: most Americans, even the Christian ones, don’t find liturgical language compelling enough to put down the newspaper or the joystick long enough to attend church.
People today are looking for connection and service. They want to gather together and heal our broken world. The don’t want the same ‘ol same ‘ol.
The building is burning. Even those who remain Christian are fleeing. And those who wish to explore other paths?
Well, I can send you the address of my church . . .
Circle Round for Freedom
The opposite of liberal religion is not conservative religion. It is fundamentalism – the deep certainty that there is only one truth and only one way of knowing that truth. As a liberal religion, Unitarian Universalism acknowledges a plurality of possibilities; lifts up that the Dominant Culture may dominate – but that it is dominating other cultures, other truths, other experiences of the world. The work of our faith is deeply grounded in this vision of a multiplicity of stories being seen, heard, and respected.
I did not know when I drafted these words, an early Sunday morning handwritten addition to the printed text, that they would be radically embodied that day by events in a congregation I serve as a community minister. In the midst of our prayer and meditation, fundamentalist disruptors began spewing hate and vitriol into our holy, sacred space. http://uptownmessenger.com/2014/07/mayors-office-issues-certificate-recognizing-abortion-protest-group-for-service-to-city/
Beloveds, I have never been prouder of my faith community. The youth led the way in circling the congregation together, forming a ring around the sanctuary and singing sustaining songs. Soon it became clear who was choosing to be beloved community and who was trying to destroy it. Even in this distinction, all were notified that they were welcome to remain in worship if they could do so respectfully. If not, they were respectfully invited out the front door, to protest outside.
The congregation met the challenge of religious terrorism with courage and a commitment to the values of our faith, standing on the side of love without surrendering to hate.
Now is the time to stand together, beloveds. Now is the time to remember that we are not alone and that we are called forward to live lives of radical hospitality grounded in courage and compassion.
Whatever your faith tradition, I invite you to stand with Unitarian Universalists and other liberal religions besieged by hate-filled rhetoric that can trip so easily from violent words to violent deeds. Stand with us against those who would destroy the concept of religious freedom, those who invade and desecrate sacred worship space, who terrorize children and adults with their malice.
Stand with us on the side of love.
Martian Sleeper Cells and A-Model Tism
Since I’m both a minister and a humanist, I’m asked—often in rather shocked terms—if I am an atheist. Many humanists use that label as a way to use a description that is positive rather than negative. After all, being labeled an a-theist implies that theism is somehow normative and that being outside that norm is an important qualifier. I don’t identify as an atheist. I’m a post-theist.
Here’s an analogy to clarify what I’m thinking: I recently bought a new Ford truck. I bought a Ford because it’s good, solid, relatively efficient transportation. I also bought it because I have fond memories of Ford trucks—both my grandfathers had Ford trucks when I was a kid. Both had started buying Fords with the Model T.
I bought a new Ford truck, not a Model T. Why? Because a Model T, even though it revolutionized the automobile industry, is no longer an efficient mode of transportation in the contemporary world.
Does that mean that I don’t “believe” in the Model T? Am I an a-Model-T-ist? Not at all. I’m a post-Model T-ist. I have no doubt that my new Ford truck is built upon knowledge gained in the manufacture of Model Ts. The Ford I drive today could not exist as it does without the Model T.
This is how I view “god.” It’s not that I don’t believe in the god concept. It’s that I don’t think the concept is good transportation in our contemporary context.
Yet, my analogy also “proves” just the opposite of my point, doesn’t it? Because we could also say that my Ford truck is merely the latest version of the Model T, isn’t it?
I’m not an a-theist. Nor am I an a-Model-T-ist.
Then there are always Subarus . . .
Philosophers Know What They Need
The story goes that a rich man asked the Greek philosopher Diogenes why it was that rich men do not follow philosophers but philosophers follow rich men. Diogenes replied, “Because philosophers know what they need; the rich do not.”
What I know for sure is that we human beings need meaning and purpose in our lives. The question is where and how to find meaning and purpose. For me, a poet, meaning is generated in the creative act of noticing the moment and using the human creation of language in an attempt to communicate that.
There are other methods.
Let’s consider: what if I decide that life has meaning and purpose because I believe Martians invaded in 1865 and formed a sleeper cell that has now come awake in the guise of a popular reality television show. By watching this TV show, I believe, I receive messages from our Martian overlords, instructions as to what I should do.
Such a belief could without question give my life meaning and purpose. Each commercial break, for example, might indicate by the number of individual commercials how many bridges the Martians wish me to blow up. I have my marching orders; I have meaning and purpose.
That such a belief system gives me meaning and purpose is not debatable. Even that this belief system gives me MORE meaning and purpose than others I might have might be the case.
What IS debatable is whether or not this particular form of meaning and purpose has value to the larger human community. This is the interface between my subjectivity and the objective world of others. Where the rubber meets the road, if you will.
Sure, if every human being on the planet agreed with my belief in a Martian sleeper cell, all of humanity would have meaning and purpose. So. Is mass delusion a positive good? Is it preferable to finding meaning and purpose in a more thoughtful way?
Is delusion “better” than relying upon more reliable methods that perhaps will fail at delivering a common meaning and purpose to large groups of people?
Here’s another thing I think is true: meaning and purpose are human constructs and therefore can be constructed only by human beings. Why ever might we want a god or gods to construct meaning and purpose for us?
It’s also pretty clear from a cursory peek at human history that meaning and purpose take different forms at different times.
Henry Ford didn’t stick with his blockbuster Model T. He didn’t arrogantly insist that what he had already found was successful enough. Instead, Ford shut down his factory and retooled to manufacture the Model A.
It is true that religion and philosophy and art do not “progress” in the same way that automotive design does. Religion and philosophy and art are in in some way timeless, with a good anecdote from some thinker or other proving to be just the ticket for grappling with a contemporary issue. The human need for meaning and purpose remains. Nevertheless, it changes as we adjust to new realities.
The Model T demonstrated the need for paved roads. The multiplicity of human cultures in our shrinking world demands that we build religions and philosophies that will be positive, be roads and bridges, not muddy ditches.