“Waking in the Mystery”

A Sermon by Emily Melcher

November 27, 2005

First Parish in Bedford

 

 

 

Opening Words

from the 13^th century Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi

 

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

 

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

 

 

Readings

 

These readings are excerpts from “The Power of Myth,” a televised series of conversations between Joseph Campbell, who was the world’s foremost authority on mythology, and television journalist Bill Moyers, filmed just before Campbell’s death in 1987.

 

Referring to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, Joseph Campbell says: “Jung has a wonderful saying somewhere that religion is a defense against a religious experience…”  Campbell clarifies: “(Religion) has reduced the whole thing to concepts and ideas, and having the concept and idea short-circuits the transcendent experience, the experience of deep mystery that one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience…”  He goes on to say, “The ultimate mystery of being is the mystery of your being.”

 

Bill Moyers recalls one of Joseph Campbell’s favorite stories:  In Japan for an international conference on religion, (Joseph) Campbell overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, ‘We’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines.  But I don’t get your ideology.  I don’t get your theology.”  The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head.  “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said.  “We don’t have theology.  We dance.”

 

 

 

In the Mystery

(Words and Music by Emily Melcher)

 

I once knew your God

but your god was too small,

that’s why your god said:

“Make no images at all.”

 

A picture, a word or a concept

may help us to feel God close.

Close and closed in, God’s wearing thin

a window’s becoming a wall.

 

Maybe the force of the universe

coursing through us is too much to bear

So we give it all up to gods of projection

the source and the destiny somewhere out there

 

A king on his throne or a father,

even a goddess is just a way in.

The god that’s held up as a destination

should be a place to begin.

 

I once knew your god

but your god was too small

That’s why your god said:

Make no images at all.

 

But maybe the force of the universe

coursing through us is too much to bear

When the pulse of life throbbing

through laughter and sobbing

renders us weak-kneed in fear,

then we give it all up to gods of projection,

the source and the destiny somewhere out there

Projection, protection, till we’ve no recollection

the universe pulses right here

 

And suddenly there we stand

with gods of our own making

We’ll do anything we can

to keep ourselves from waking

in the mystery.

 

© 2005 Emily Melcher

 

Sermon – “Waking in the Mystery”

 

In the process of interviewing and being interviewed by theological schools in Boston, Berkeley, and Chicago, I was asked how I envisioned myself ministering to a largely humanist congregation.  The question was raised by John Tolley, a UU minister and Associate Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago.  Tolley has a background in theatre, and shares my interest in the relationship between the arts and spirituality.  He raised the question in response to my own undoubtedly too facile use of the word “God” to denote an ineffable experience I know in my most creative moments, in singing, dancing, writing, learning, weeping, and in intimate or creative relationships with other human beings.  I explained that “God” was the word I used to be able to talk about my central religious experience, and that I think there are many equally valid and equally limiting names.  For me, the word “God” was a window and not a wall, a place to begin, rather than a destination.  I told him I expected I would encourage people to listen beyond the word “God” to the experience it named, and to speak in whatever language they might of their own experience.  I hoped we might connect somewhere beyond the words.

 

After a disappointing rejection from Harvard Divinity School, which was my first choice, I decided to attend Andover Newton Theological School, and a month before school started, my husband Anders and I made a trip to Boston to look for housing.  On campus one day, another student struck up a conversation with us.  We talked for a few minutes about our search for an apartment, and on her way out, this future colleague said, “God will find you an apartment.”  I could barely contain my snort until she left the room.  For years, I’d been using the word “God” to speak of the most profound experience I know; she was referring to God as a rental broker.  I was astonished that she could imagine the God that she believed in would have the time and interest to help us find an apartment.  I couldn’t help wonder if God would want a finder’s fee.  In that moment, the “God” window slammed shut, and I became uncomfortably aware of the formidable wall inside my chest that I’d worked hard to dismantle. 

 

A part of me wanted to quit before classes even started!  Another part remembered that I’d chosen a Christian theological school over the UU seminaries in Berkeley and Chicago, not only because it would get me to Boston and allow me to take classes at Harvard Divinity School, but also because I knew I needed the challenge of facing that wall in my own chest.  My first encounter with another student proved promising in that regard, and I haven’t been disappointed since -- frustrated, yes, even angry, and, sometimes honestly moved by the faith and the openness of my Christian classmates, but I’ve never been disappointed by want of theological challenge.  I have, at least for now, stopped using the word “God” to describe my experience, aware that, for many around me, it connotes meanings I don’t intend.

 

During my second semester, I took a course in Youth and Young Adult Ministries.  The first 4 of the 8 or 9 textbooks we used stated the goal of youth and young adult ministries as connecting youth and young adults with God through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  Here, then, was God as destination, rather than God as a place to begin.  I kept butting my head against the theological wall, wondering how I could translate what those texts said into something that might be meaningful to my ministry. 

 

One day on my familiar drive to school, while waiting for a red light to change, I suddenly noticed a sign in a shop window across the street.  The sign said, “Custom logos.”  I was astonished, and burst out laughing.  The Biblical meaning of the word Logos is “Word of God.”  “Of course!” I thought, “I need custom logos, words not borrowed from another tradition, but custom-made for my experience.”  Rather than trying to fit my experience into the framework provided by our textbooks, I needed to create a different framework.  Custom logos. 

 

After indulging my laughter and a sigh of relief, I noticed that right next to this sign were others that read “Screen Printing” and “Custom Embroidery.” The business in question designs and manufactures promotional materials.  They create custom logos, not custom logos.  But never mind that:  I got exactly the message I needed: Custom Words.

 

By what word shall I name the experience of suddenly noticing a sign in a shop window across the street from a traffic light where I’d stopped many times before, of misreading it so correctly, just when my head was nearly bloody from beating it against a theological wall?  By what name shall I call that?  Coincidence?  Serendipity?  Grace?  God?  Have I overstated the case?

 

I like Lucille Clifton’s poem, entitled “the making of poems,” which is printed in your order of service.

 

the reason why i do it

though i fail and fail

in the giving of true names

is i am adam and his mother

and these failures are my job.

 

The job of a minister, like that of a poet, is to make meaning – or, rather, to point to the meaning she, or he, sees.  Actually, meaning-making isn’t really the job; meaning-making is a relentless compulsion in certain human beings, and the job of ministry, like the job of writing poetry, is an opportunity to pursue it.  But perhaps I understate the case:  Ministry isn’t just an opportunity for the minister to pursue meaning-making, it’s a gift, a blessing to the minister.  And in the moments of our failure, someone in the congregation recalls us to our interconnectedness by stepping forward to help; a parishioner dies and we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that life has meaning; the community gathers together in support of something larger than itself, and our failures are put into perspective.  And then, we try again. 

 

Whether we look to books, or, as Rumi suggests, take down a musical instrument, in our trying, sometimes we find the place where the beauty we love is what we do, and that experience is sublime.  For me, it often happens when I take down a musical instrument.

 

Sometimes when I’m writing a song or working on a sermon, I’m able to get out of my own way, to set aside what I think I know, what I think I want to say, and listen for what I need to hear.  In those moments, I connect with something beyond my self, or at least beyond the part of myself I typically live in and from.  There’s a perfect union of head and heart, of strength and vulnerability, of intellect and intuition, of reason and feeling.  The experience is sublime, indescribable, unnamable.  My only option is to surrender to the awe and mystery.  I’m still tempted to call that experience “God,” but if I do that, and you or I think I mean Father, Creator, King, Savior, Nature, or Apartment broker, the word diminishes my experience in a way I find unacceptable. 

 

An interesting thing about the songs that come out of that experience is that they teach me what I need to know again and again, over the span of years, neither exhausted by time nor limited to a particular period in my growth.  Sometimes years later, I discover a meaning in one of my songs that I didn’t know was there, that I certainly would not have been capable of consciously putting there.  When that happens, I don’t pat myself on the back, thinking “My God, I’m a genius!”  I feel like falling on my knees in awe and gratitude. 

 

In his essay “The Over-Soul,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes “We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation.  These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime.  For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind.  It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life.  Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight.  A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature.” 

 

A friend of mine who does basic research in neurophysiology retired 4 or 5 years ago, and immediately contracted to work 80% time at the university from which he’d just retired.  When I asked him what in the world he was doing that for, he was quiet for a moment, then a smile of pure delight slowly spread across his face, and he described the experience of sitting in the lab in the middle of the night, and suddenly realizing a truth that no one else had yet discovered.  “Isn’t that the experience of God?” I asked this Christian friend, and he replied simply, “I don’t know.”  We didn’t pin it down; we just basked together in his experience of awe and delight.

 

But you know, basking isn’t easy for most of us.  “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” says Rumi.  I think there are thousands of ways to avoid it, too, and most of us regularly engage in one or more of them.  It’s not just when we’re in the depths of despair that we grab a drink or another piece of pie – intense feeling of any kind is uncomfortable for most of us, and we will avoid it or pin it down or constrain it any way we can in order to feel it less strongly.

 

Recently, a UU friend who identifies herself as a theist said that she thinks people resort to God in the depths of despair.  “You don’t need God,” she proclaimed,” when you’re on the top of the mountain.”  The god she was talking about was God the savior, or God the loving father.  While she may be correct that a happy person has no need of such a god, I think most human beings are as likely to shut themselves off or distance themselves from the sublime experience of the mountaintop as they are to relieve their despair and hopelessness by self-medicating, or by turning it over to some god or another.

 

When I was in high school, in addition to my deep involvement in my Episcopal church, I sometimes attended Pentecostal worship with a classmate.  I loved the powerful experience of singing, clapping, weeping, and dancing in ecstasy.  So I was delighted when one of my colleagues in the youth and young adult ministries class invited us to a youth revival at his predominantly African-American church.  The young people were dancing, singing, and praying, and there was something alive in that room.  Those young people were making love to Jesus Christ.  Were they filled with the Holy Spirit, or just having a hormonal experience?  Maybe it doesn’t matter.  They were experiencing and expressing intense feelings, and the adults around them, including me, were caught up in their joy and pleasure.  When the adults were asked to lay our hands on a child nearby and bless that child, I turned to see a young girl looking into my eyes.  We held one another’s gaze for several minutes, my hands on her head, and there was something present there that can probably be explained psychologically or physiologically instead of theologically, but that’s not the point:  That child and I shared in a blessing, and it was sublime.

 

I actually want worship to have a sacramental function, that is: to connect us with something beyond ourselves.  For me, values and community are not big enough somethings.  I want, at least occasionally, to have the experience of the sublime in worship, and, fortunately, I frequently do.  

 

Some Sundays, the music here is exquisite.  At least some of us are carried deeper into ourselves, or transcend the prosaic lives we lead, and we come forth enriched, ennobled, inspired.  Nearly without missing a beat, we discharge that sublime experience in applause.  It’s as if we can’t stand it a second longer.  Like many of you, I feel the physical impulse to respond, to applaud, to whoop and holler even, and I think those are important and valid ways of expressing our joy and gratitude.  But I also think the impulse to clap is an impulse to lessen the intensity of the experience, and so I invite you, the next time you’re tempted to clap in a worship service, to simply try out how it feels to just allow the fullness of your experience in your own body, if only for a moment longer than you might have last time.  (Sorry, Steve)

 

Gabrielle Roth, a theatre director, dance and movement teacher and recording artist, says “Our ancestors danced till they disappeared in the dance, till they felt the full force of spirit unleashing their souls.  This was their religion, and it was ecstatic and personal and tribal and it moved through time like a snake.  Until it found itself in the wrong garden.” 

 

Roth continues: “At first the church fathers were condescending. They integrated the ecstatic tradition-hey, let them go out in the trees and do a few dances.  No problem.  Who cares if they raise the Holy Spirit?   The only problem was that when the Holy Spirit actually rose, people experienced a direct pipeline to the divine mystery.  The patriarchs weren’t too keen on that; it put them out of a job…The church fathers tried to tame and control this ecstatic force, but you can’t control the force of life,” she says.

 

One of the most powerful expressions of the force of life is erotic energy.  Remember those young people at the revival, whom I described as making love to Jesus Christ?  They experienced Jesus Christ as the source and the destination of their incredibly powerful erotic energy.  Their concept of God made it safe for them to experience and even sustain powerful feelings. 

 

This may seem strange to us, but I don’t think it’s any stranger than seeing another human being as the source and destination of our erotic energy.  When we feel that energy arise in us, in our creativity, in our relationships, do we know how to own it, to inhabit it, or let it inhabit us?  Do we bask in it, trusting it, or do we hide from it, dampen it with food or alcohol or other drugs, or discharge it by engaging in sex with the person we perceive to be its source and destination?  Please don’t misunderstand me: Lovemaking can be a sublime experience, but when it’s an automatic response to erotic energy, sex may be little more than a way to discharge an awesome creative force. 

 

Having seen a thousand reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” I was unprepared for the experience of seeing it in person.  I stood there transfixed, in the midst of a crowd, and wept.  After a few minutes, feeling somehow like I should move on, I turned to look for my husband, Anders.  He’d been watching me, and he knew I wasn’t finished.  He urged me to stay as long as the painting held me, which I did.  And I went back again a few weeks later to the same experience.  Van Gogh’s creative fire was fueled by many things; chief among them was his ongoing, spiraling obsession with Gauguin.  Van Gogh’s paintings pulse with erotic energy, with the awesome life force that also ultimately killed him.  No wonder we’re afraid.   

 

Still, I’d like to see us learning to live in the pulse of life a little more, learning to trust it even though it’s uncomfortable and sometimes frightening.  What a gift we would give our young people if we encouraged them to trust the pulse of life in themselves, to allow the incredibly strong feelings of adolescence to fuel their creativity, instead of numbing out or hopping into bed with the “hottie” they met last night.  What a gift we would give ourselves.

 

The force of life is awesome: when we let it flow through us, neither hindering its flow nor dampening its intensity nor discharging it prematurely, it has the power to bring us to our knees or to unleash untold creativity.   What would it be like for us to truly feel it, to truly allow ourselves that experience of the sublime?  What would it be like for us to awaken in the mystery?

 

 

Closing Reading

 

“Where Everything is Music”

by Rumi

 

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn’t matter.

 

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

 

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world’s harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

 

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

 

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

 

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

 

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can’t see.

 

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the center of your chest,

and let the spirits fly in and out.