First Parish of Watertown

"Walk This Way" by Andrea Greenwood - September 23, 2007

Story: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by Don Johnson

One summer day, Henry and his friend decided to go to Fitchburg to see the country. “Ill walk” said Henry. It is the fastest way to travel.
I’ll work, said Henry’s friend, until I have the money to buy a ticket to ride the train to Fitchburg. We’ll see who gets there first!

His friend waved. Enjoy your walk!
Henry walked down the road to Fitchburg. Enjoy your work, he called back.
Henry’s friend filled the woodbox in Mrs. Alcott’s kitchen. 10 cents
Henry hopped from rock to rock on the Sudbury river.
His friend swept out the post office. 5 cents
Henry carved a walking stick. 25 miles to Fitchburg
Henry’d friend pulled all the weeds in Mr Hawthorne’s garden. 15 cents
Henry put ferns and flowers in a book and pressed them
His friend painted the fence in front of the court house. 10 cents
Henry walked on stne walls
Henry’s friend moved the bookcases in Mr Emerson’s study. 15 cents
Henry climbed a tree. 18 miles to Fitchb urg
His friend carried water to cows grazing in the grass in town. 5 cents
Henry made a raft and paddled up the Nashua River
Henry’s friend cleaned out Mrs Thoreau’s chicken house. 10 cents
Henry crossed a swamp and found a birds nest in the grass. 12 miles to Fitchburg
His friend carried flour from the mill to the village baker. 20 cents
Henry found a honey tree
Henry’s friend ran to the train station to buy his ticket to Fitchburg. 90 cents
Henry jumped into a pond. 7 miles to Fitchburg
His friend sat on the train in a tangle of people
Henry ate his way through a blackberry patch
Henry’s friend got off the train at Fitchburg station just as the sun was setting
Henry took a shortcut. 1 mile to Fitchburg
His friend was sitting in the moonlight when Henry arrived. The train was faster, he said.
Henry took a small pail from his pack. I know, he smiled. I stopped for blackberries.


Reading from Into the Silent Land, Paul Broks

... I’m on the train. I have a beer in one hand, and in the other, the paperback I have just bought, It’s about cosmology and I am trying to get some imaginative purchase on the immensity of it all. It’s the kind of thing I sometimes read as way of winding down. The grandiloquent prose (the velvet mantle of the night... cosmic symphony of the night...) and the big, round numbers (four hundred billion galaxies) have a soothing effect.

Cosmology and neuropsychology have absurdity in common. The raw facts are strange beyond imagination.

It sets me thinking about how the physical forces that twist the galaxies and roll the train along the track connect with the social and psychological forces that animate the passengers. The recalcitrant child and his weary mother, the old couple sitting in silence, the woman opposite who catches my eye, displays a micromomentory flicker of an eyebrow and smiles as the young man with an obscene message printed on his t-shirt takes the seat beside her. Fleetingly, she and I were complicit. I entered her mind and she entered mine. We can plot the motions of the planets, but how do you measure the force of a glance, or the weight of a smile?

Thinking these thoughts and looking at the people around me I entertain my self by seeing them for what, at one level of description, they certainy are: complex biological machines. Physical objects. I take a little thought journey behind their eyes, and all I see is darkness; then, looking to the window, against the dark, I see myself looking back at me, lost in a confusion of first and third person. The image in the window resembles a machine like the others on the train, but with an involuntary flip from third person to first, I’m back on this side of the reflection.


Reading

     —From The Spirited Walker , Carolyn Scott Kortge
  Early in my enthusiasm for walking, I strode to workouts with the eagerness of an infatuated suitor. I couldn't wait to explore every aspect of this new relationship that made me feel so alive. I bought a black plastic sports watch to time my walks. Next came a portable tape player and a recording of up-tempo jazz to lift my mood on foot-dragging days. Before long, I'd found a group of walkers who worked out weekly with a coach. With a newcomer's passion for adventure, I entered track meets for senior athletes and discovered a physical outlet for my love of challenge. Along the way I discovered that physical pursuits succeed or fail on the fitness of mental skills.

On a hot August weekend, (..I) paced nervously at the starting line of a 10K race and fretted about the heat. .... But I had a strategy in mind.

Among the walkers gathered for the event, I'd spotted a woman I recognized. Two days before, this woman had passed me in a shorter walk, moving easily ahead when I began to tire in the final minutes. ... My goal was to let her guide me toward a better racing style. .. She was ten years my senior, a national champion in her age division. My footsteps fell into rhythm with hers. Our arms swung like pendulums in synch, creating a momentum that carried me. ...Then slowly, the rhythm shifted. My feet lost the beat. My arms fumbled with the pattern. She began to pull ahead. In a flash, despair filled my head: I can't keep up. It's too hot. What am I doing here? A mental battle erupted.

For the next mile, I dodged the attacks of an internal ambush. I felt defeated — unable to meet my own goal. What's the use? my mind chided. Disappointment blinded me and I stopped in the middle of the street. .. Why continue? For me, the race was over. My ego raged at humiliation... Stubbornly, I leaned into a head wind of self-criticism and regained my footing on the route.

Later, I approached the woman who’d walked away from me. “How did you do that?” I asked? I wanted to know how she stayed so steady. I wanted to know how she avoided the complaints and resistance that buffet me when I begin to tire. What does she do at that two-thirds point where I always want to stop? What magic keeps her moving?

“Oh," she laughed. “There's no magic. I just start singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ to myself.” I stared in stunned amazement. I couldn't believe it. While I fought a frantic battle with resistance, she stuck a feather in her hat and rode away on the rhythms of a song. Abracadabra. Something flipped in my head. No magic. No mystery. No athletic wizardry. Her secret was nothing more than distraction--



Sermon


I expected to grow up to be a mail carrier. For someone who liked to walk, but can’t really imagine doing anything just because I like it, it seemed the perfect job. Accomplishment, exercise, pleasure, steady pay.... and something I seemed to have a knack for. I still remember, with childish pride, my grandmother complimenting me on my speed and endurance as a four year old-- she had left her car to be repaired, and I walked the several mile trip with her to go retrieve it, and did not slow her down. I enjoy being able to get someplace without relying on anything but my feet. It’s part challenge, and maybe part scale: I can see how big my universe can get, what the boundaries are, without opening myself up to overwhelming choice. Walking gives a perimeter for a life that I can actually be in; be present in.

There is something about walking, too, that is about connection. The summer I was twelve, I got up each day and set off to see how far I could walk on the beach. I wanted to get to the mouth of a river one town over without using any roads; but I also wanted to see how far I could get in a day. Of course, the changing tide made each attempt a different challenge, but what really happened that summer was that I got to know that shore intimately. I knew the shape of the rocks and where it was slick; I knew the hidden beaches and tide pools; where there were thorn bushes and abandoned logging roads. It was not just observation; a detached inventory of my surroundings. It was about inhabiting that space, and also being inhabited by it. I noticed every minute change -- what was lost to erosion, what the tide brought in, what was brought to life in different weather. Inhabiting a landscape like that helps us develop a sense of home. Children are often like this in church buildings, I have found. They know every oddity and detail; every hidden corner and unused relic. Physical knowledge can give us the area within the circumference, too -- a center to live out of that is truly whole.

There was, for me, in walking both a boundedness and a sense of freedom that derived from the very concrete knowledge of my world. There were no abstractions; just sensory information to be absorbed by the “complex biological machine” that was me. This did not happen in isolation. My rule was to set out using only the shore, but to return on the road, so I continually met the same people who were either driving or out working. They would inquire about my progress, or share their stories. This is the root of the inner life; the interior corresponding to an external world that may be evocative, but is not abstract. Rory Stewart’s travelogue about walking across Afghanistan, The Places Between, alludes to this indirectly. Stewart is something of a prodigy who moved rapidly through the British school system and then through the foreign services, and then quit in order to walk around the world. He writes: “I felt quite detached from the landscape. I wondered how I might connect my Afghan walk to my walks in Iran and Pakistan....

“I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it means to be human. Our two legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us on the long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at a walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus, and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.” Stewart is looking for peace; trying to end the restlessness in his soul; says that he hopes he will become more rooted in one place if he just keeps moving; starts counting his breaths to help him push away thought, and just be. He manages to achieve at most an hour of internal calm a day -- not what he was looking for, but, he says, it was a serenity he had not felt before.

Perhaps you are familiar with the African story about some explorer making a long trek, and using coolies to carry the loads. The explorer was quite pleased because on the first day the laborers were compliant, and marched very quickly, and had gone a great distance. Naturally, the explorer recalculated his expectations, and wanted them to go at least that fast and that far on day two. But the second morning these jungle tribesmen refused to move. No matter the threat or the enticement, they just sat and rested. Finally the explorer asked why they would not move, and was informed that they had gone too fast the first day, and that they were now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.

I like this image because it implies a natural unity while describing a dualism that we actually take for granted: That the mind and the body are separate. This story is far more complicated than it may first appear -- we may take it as instructive; a zen lesson of connecting to our own bodies, something those simple, primitive people do instinctively, but that we cannot do without years of disciplined meditation classes; or without trekking across the middle east. But this story reveals our own inability to start from the point of inhabiting the physical machine that does, in fact, define us. Rory Stewart’s story -- although not a typical one -- is something we probably identify with. It is a version of living that is not quite direct. Everything is filtered for meaning even before it is experienced. The body is not fully inhabited as it walks or stretches or strives to live. Instead we think about walking, we think about exercise, about breathing, about meaning. We wonder when our souls will appear in our bodies, and how we will know; and if our bodies fail us we wonder why, and what we did. I wonder how many of us do this to ourselves, and why. When do we switch from marking physical milestones to mental ones? With children, we obsess over first teeth; over height and weight and even head circumference. If someone measured the bumps on your head as an adult, you would think him terribly anachronistic, racist, and a few other things. But we happily let pediatricians take out the tape measures, and faithfully record the numbers in our baby books. We really believe in the physical nature of life; in the bundle of cells that sleeps and eats and eliminates and grows. For me, I know that it is in part a belief that the exterior act reflects some inner meaning -- for example, I was enormously excited that one of my children took his first steps right into Martin Luther King’s house in Atlanta; and it felt hugely significant to me that another first walked on the porch in my great grandmother’s cottage the day after my father’s funeral. Somehow these steps make -- in my mind, at least -- justice and family connection a more real inheritance. They make visible that which is not.

Maybe that gets at the real issue. We use the physical world as a hunting ground; a place to look for proof that we are good people; to collect evidence that we are not defined by the mistakes we have made or the failed attempts that nag at us. We scan the world to find that we fit in somewhere; to see that it all coheres, and adds up to something. To see how wrong this is, all we need to do is think about those who use wheelchairs, or canes. The reading from the Spirited Walker makes race walking into a moral judgment, and advises us to distract ourselves in order to achieve. But shouldn’t the goal be the opposite? To NOT be distracted; to not make our lives into a series of tasks to do each day in order to be a good person? The author seems to believe that in order to win, she has to trick her mind into mastering her body. I think she has it backwards. Changing a behavior; changing a habit, can actually change your brain -- can make you encounter different things, which lead you in new directions, but can also change how you feel. I was talking to a family about the whole issue of sports with kids who don’t do their school work. There are a lot of angles on this one -- involving words like “allow” “force” “achieve” etc. Underneath it all, naturally, is a desire that the child become competent, find pleasure, contribute to the world. But we don’t always agree on how best to help that happen, and we do tend to return to the list of failures as a set of worry beads, certain that past problems will grow; that each new effort will add another bead to the chain, until we can hardly lift our heads from the weight of it all. As we were talking, suddenly the dad in this family burst out, “Oh my God, my brother! He was a horrible student, all the way through. Then in ninth grade, he started playing sports, and it was so weird! He was on the honor roll every term after that.” Since the child in this family is entering ninth grade, this was a very helpful memory; but so is the information that the body may be a source of brain growth; that the visual spatial skills acquired in fielding a ball can carry over to writing and geometry; or that the endorphins released while running work better than antidepressants. The brain responds to the body’s discipline just as much as the body is effected by mental effort.

I started this sermon because of a conversation Mary Schilvek and I had last spring. Some of you know Mary; she is a member here. Mary was raised Christian Scientist and we were talking about the problem she has had motivating herself to use her body as a legacy of that faith. She said she was raised to believe in the mind’s ability to control the body, but that now that she is in her 90s, she no longer truly trusts her mind. It keeps telling her to relax and to rest, but if she does that, her body will fail. She needs to not give in. The problem is, she has no muscle memory of pleasure or excitement, and her cognitive memory is no longer reliable. What is there left to go on? Like the story from the Spirited Walker, it seems that she needs to distract herself into continuing -- but it is a more interesting problem, too, because her mind is not beating her up and calling her a failure! Her body and her mind are both telling her to relax -- yet she does not feel unified. There is still the disquiet we associate with inner conflict, which raises the question of its source. She wants to live; to be physically alive -- but having always used her mind to keep active, is not sure what to do. What do you trust? When everything we are taught has us relying on our own self, controlling ourselves, how do we suddenly learn to trust the universe; to identify with something outside?

I think we respond to the story about the African workers resting; taking time, because it captures some of the tension that pervades discussion about nature and nurture. There is no self consciousness in the story; just a simple refusal to let the body be overworked; an insistence on bringing their souls along; and all done in the face of an authority figure. Each of us is born with certain dispositions and tendencies; we exist in conditions that shape us in one way or another; that encourage sets of skills or behaviors, and perhaps what we really need is to learn how to embrace ambiguity; or to accept the idea that wholeness comes from all truth, not the truth. Even though we spend a lot of time looking for affirmation, what we really want goes deeper than that. It isn’t just that we’re good; it is that life is good; that it is interesting and meaningful and moving. Recently I was reading a book by the psychology professor Jerome Kagan called An Argument For Mind, in which he writes about himself as a twelve year old, finding a dead squirrel, wrapping it up and sneaking it up to his bedroom, where, with a kitchen knife, he slices open its belly and probes its life giving organs. When I read the sentence, “the glistening intestines evoked a feeling that may have resembled the state of a future cosmologist staring at the Milky Way at two in the morning”, I thought of two things: Paul Broks, whose book on neuropsychology I read from earlier; and my own Sunday school experience, which was in the 60s and was based in science. We hatched baby chicks and had the ascent of man marching around the walls of our classroom. It seems odd that science can be the home of these debates over truth residing in mind or body; or of character being contingent upon nature or nurture. Science seems to be where we can find unity; where we can be filled with wonder, and reverence, and we can be literally surrounded with examples of why. Life is miraculous. Kagan -- the psychologist; the believer in the mind -- cannot describe his feeling, but he invokes cosmology -- the sense of finding meaning in the universe. Broks, the neurologist; the believer in chemistry, too, soothes himself by thinking about the physical forces that twist the galaxies into shape.

We are raised to believe that meaning is personal; invisible, created from memories and dreams and aspiration; is not so much of the physical world as above it. But the connection between mind and body cannot really exist on a purely individualistic level. Once we give status to the physical world as equal to the metaphysical, we have to talk communally; we have to include the body of the world. Genuine awe and reverence move us beyond the completely personal -- they are both deeply interior, and wonderfully exterior. Being at home is cosmological -- both desperately specific and unspeakably evanescent. But they are connected, as Mary demonstrated for me in our conversation. Mary and I like to talk about words, and these are ones she brought to the table. The Greek noun for “house” and the verb “to dwell” have as their root another word, which means clan. It is the social unit above the house, and it points to a definition of home as something a little more than just the place where you take to your bed, or where you eat your breakfast. The place where we dwell is about the people with whom we spend our days; and the land upon which we live. It is all related -- even when we might wish it were not so. The word parish also has this root; it literally means “beside the house” (as opposed to in it) -- but is translated to mean neighbor, sojourner, stranger. All three. Doesn’t that complexity capture the truth of our relationships;? the wariness and the closeness; the edge to our welcoming; our clannishness; or desire to reach out and to include; and our simultaneous need to hold something precious for ourselves? Don’t these common roots tell us to travel the distance between self and home; between my home and yours; to travel the roads of the village and bind all into one; to see the universe as belonging to all life? Take a walk through woods and across streams to reach the town, and stop for berries; make eye contact with the stranger across from you; notice the mystery before your feet. And also, fight for accessibility so that everyone else, regardless of circumstance, can be in those woods; can cross that stream; can be in and of the town as equal neighbors. When I say “taking walks” what I really mean is, be in the world with your senses, which are not really in your head or in your body, but are what keep you tethered to the world.
  
Thoreau once wrote that he had met only one or two persons who understood the art of taking walks, “who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a saunterer ‘— a holy-lander. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without home, which, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.” Either meaning works; walking to connect; to find a path to what has been sacred; or walking because we have no home but the bone house that is our shelter. We walk to know our world, and bring it home.




Closing Words from Walking, HD Thoreau
The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours — as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day....
you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.
When we walk we naturally go to the fields and woods....I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. ... it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses.

Sermon - “Almost an Atheist” Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - September 16, 2007

Call to Worship - from William James

We gather as a community of religious seekers bound together by the guiding principle of a free and responsible search for truth. In this spirit we invoke these words of William James: “ The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

Readings - from Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor

from What is God? by Etan Boritzer

So when we pray to God,
When people of all religions pray to God,
We are really praying for that feeling,
The feeling which connects all of us.

When we pray to God,
We are praying for that feeling of love
To come to us and to everybody we know,
Maybe even to all those people we don’t know,
So that we can all be happy together, or apart.

And if you really want to pray to God,
You can just close your eyes anywhere,
And think about that feeling of God,
That makes you part of everything and everybody.

If you can feel that feeling of God,
And everybody else can feel that feeling of God,
Then we can all become friends together,
And we can really understand,
“what is God?”


Sermon - “Almost an Atheist” Mark W. Harris

My sermon title this week is changed from the one you saw in the newsletter. The reason for this is that I received a call from an administrator at Mt. Auburn Cemetery this past week. He was looking for someone to conduct a funeral service at the cemetery. He said that the daughter of the deceased had requested a Unitarian. Then he chuckled and said she was quite clear that the person she wanted be someone who is almost an atheist. I suppose almost an atheist fits with the old Unitarian Universalist joke that we pray to one God at the most. Yet the question of God is usually no joke to those people who wish to construct or live by a meaningful religious faith. Is there a God who is the creator and sustainer of the universe, or a God who is the source of love in our hearts - one of many names and faces, or no face at all? Do the 99 names for God in Islam really add up to no name at all, a human creation in the vast universe where we humans construct all meaning. I have probably spent my entire life struggling with this question. Like many of you I rejected the God of my childhood who controlled the universe and answered my personal prayers, only to find a vast emptiness in the heavens. Periodically, I became interested in invoking a God who was present in human relationship at times, and in the beauty and majesty of nature at other times, but more recently have concluded that meaning is found in human history, and not in some contrived theological matrix. Yet the question nags at our hearts, and my wife, an avowed humanist says to me, “you still believe in God.”

Can that be so? Am I in denial? It is certainly possible to find loving friends, build community, and even battle evil in the world without God. Look at the Harry Potter stories. One of the highlights for our family this summer was the publication of the seventh and final installment of J. K. Rowling’s blockbuster stories, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The local toy store in Rockland, Maine had one of these midnight book release parties, and so all of our boys had the excitement of going to an event that had the longest waiting line I have ever witnessed in the state of Maine, began at 11:00 p.m. and ended at 1:00 a.m., when they all fell into bed still wide eyed from the evening of magical creatures which included a real dragon and a possum masquerading as Scabbers the rat, a magical potions class and wand making. In the review of the last Potter story in the New York Times, Christopher Hitchens, points out that like other stories based in private British boarding schools, “religion is also taboo.” The students know nothing of Christianity, and both Harry and Hermione are completely ignorant of two well-known Biblical verses they see in a church yard. The series of course has been attacked by many conservative religious institutions and leaders, including the Pope, for promoting such things as magic and wizardry and witchcraft. What is apparent though is that even though Potter and his friends have no religious background they have developed a “strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment.” Furthermore, how can such a powerful, evil character such as Voldemort be thwarted by school children without the help of a benevolent deity who assures us all that good will win out in the end?

This lack of religious background may not present a problem for this particular book reviewer, as it happens to be Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens has published the latest installment in another series of books written by three people, the others being Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Hitchens’ current best seller is God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Dawkins’ last contribution was The God Delusion. I preached on Harris’ first book, The End of Faith, three years ago. In his Potter review Hitchens notes how Hermione struggles with the question of whether something called the Resurrection Stone exists or not. She says, “I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.” In other words, religious fools can say just about anything is true. I call these books a series because together, these authors and others are part of a major intellectual movement, “aimed at relegating religion to the proverbial scrap heap of history.” (Daniel Lazare) These atheists base their claims on scientific evidence, and say, “there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world,” and “if there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural.” (quote in NY Times from Stanley Fish 6/17/07)

In an earlier book called The Devil’s Chaplain Richard Dawkins wrote a letter to his ten year old daughter on “Good and Bad Reasons for Believing.” He says the good things we know like knowledge of the suns and stars is based upon evidence. Evidence means actually seeing something is true. Then he goes on to warn her about three bad reasons for believing anything. These are tradition, authority and revelation. He says traditions can be made up of ancient stories that are untrue. Authority has to do with being told to believe something by somebody important. Finally, there is revelation which is that feeling inside of us that we know something to be true, even though there is no evidence. But wait a minute! Scientific evidence in any era can turn out to be untrue as well. Don’t we all listen to a wide variety of respected authorities? And what if conscience and compassion were ignored because there was no evidence that acting on those feelings would produce a positive result. In his letter Dawkins goes on to say that no religious belief - a god or no gods, heaven, or a belief that prayers get answered - is ever backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions believe. This is because they believe what they are told and are convinced that they are right.

In a way this letter to his daughter sums up a good deal of the argument these atheists make, and what to a point, we Unitarian Universalists, whose religious beliefs have usually been fully informed by scientific evidence, would agree. Frankly though, it seems a little tedious and a little childish. Most of us rejected the personal god who answers prayers when he didn’t follow through on the little league victory, or the high school sweetheart, or at the least when the cat died or your wonderful grandmother got sick before her time. No all powerful deity was watching over you and me to make sure everything turned out all right. They are right. There is no evidence. God didn’t save the Holocaust victims, and he wasn’t in the sky when the Russian cosmonaut floated by, state induced atheist that he was. What frustrates these writers is the fact that so many people still believe what tradition, authority and revelation tell them. As far back as the 18th century atheists began to predict that religious traditions would be replaced by secularism, but they have been proven wrong. When the World Trade Center towers fell in 2001 some evangelicals said it was divine punishment on an evil America. It is outrageous that many religions still promulgate what are essentially medieval ideas as true. While some said we were to blame, subsequent terrorists attacks led some, like Sam Harris, to blame the religion. The cause was not politics or economics, but the incendiary language of the Koran. So the conclusion for most of these writers is that the beliefs are irrational, even crazy, and as in Islam, following these beliefs can lead to fatal dangers.

These books underscore a liberal dilemma. It is true that none of us wants to sacrifice evidence or reason in discerning religious truth. But in a way these authors are affirming the childish view of religion they seem to be attacking in these literalists and fundamentalists who swallow irrational beliefs as true. The longing we all have for some kind of divine connection to one another or unified meaning for life seems to be discounted as irrelevant in the unswerving obsession with only believing observed truths. It sounds like living in a laboratory. Hitchens only seems to know about a childlike God who is all powerful and all controlling, and therefore God cannot exist in his narrow scheme. If Dawkins thinks of religion as fear-inducing or dumb or stifling of human curiosity, he might reflect upon historical developments. He forgets that “the idea of an all-powerful creator might cause worshippers to see the world as a single integrated whole, and then launch them on a long intellectual journey to figure out how the various parts fit together.” Dawkins also wants to relate how much evil religion has caused, and so while we may recall how the Pope was a tool for Hitler’s atrocities in World War II, we can neglect the large number of martyrs, like our own Unitarian minister in Prague, Norbert Capek, and the famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose religious beliefs would not allow them to compromise their integrity, and so they chose death over hypocrisy or cowardice or betrayal of others. They remembered a man who said something about laying down his life for others. How many have been empowered by their religious beliefs to save the lives of others?

So while the overall impact of many religious beliefs seems irrational and dangerous, the response by these atheists seems overly childish and negative when it comes time to construct a powerful, positive faith that might help us live in a world that is caught up in so much violence, selfishness, cheating and greed. In his letter to his daughter Dawkins has hope that the day will come when evidence will help support more truth. Curiously this is not so far from what the Christian scriptures provide in their definition of faith. In the Letter to the Hebrews, faith, was defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. We know that then or now there is no evidence of these spiritual truths. In I Corinthians Paul spoke of seeing in a mirror dimly now, but “then face to face; Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully.” Here the atheists and the religious come together, in the words they share about a future where with faith and hope we believe the time will come when truth is more apparent to us.

One of the problems with Dawkins is that when he says “my way” is reliant on scientific evidence providing truth about the world and provides a substitute for religion, he is acknowledging that he believes that meaning is arrived at individually. This has been true for Unitarian Universalists, too. For 99 UUs have 99 different names for God, or no name at all making this naming and proving game meaningless. The fallacy of individual claims on truth is seen most clearly in the call I received the other day about conducting a service for a man who died. Whether he was a great scientist, or composer or athlete really cannot be judged by the man himself. Those who observed will be able to tell me and others what they saw. His family and his friends will give me some sense of what meaning was created and found in his life. Thus, the meaning of his life is only gleaned through his impact on others. Who did he teach or parent? Who did he love? What did he do for others? What did he create that others could affirm as good or beautiful? We are not self-created, but rather our meaning is found within the creation of a self in the context of community.

The claim that science will one day reveal all truth may reflect a lack of hubris on the part of any person who holds that perspective. It can easily lead to the idea that we are the Gods here. The problems with this is that there is no evidence of immortality, or that we have all the answers, or even that we can sustain life without destroying the ecosystem. When the atheists say there can only be a god whose existence can be proved by evidence, it is akin to saying there is no God because if we could prove God then he/she would not exceed what we could measure or see. It would be the local mountain or sun or river all over again. Over the centuries those who have had trouble conceiving God in a traditional anthropomorphic way, usually came up with a more distant, less personal God. Emerson, as we saw in today’s responsive reading, intuited an oversoul, an essence in nature and in us that we could directly feel part and parcel of, but he was accused of forsaking the kind of personal deity that had informed people’s prayer lives for hundreds of years. God became more distant and less personal, because it became apparent that the evidence our 21st scientist speaks of, is not present, and never will be.

So if religion is created by humans. If Gods are created out of fear, and there is no evidence for God anyway . . . Are these reasons to deny God, and reject religion because so much evil has been perpetrated in its name? Perhaps we place too much energy on the semantics of the question, and neglect nurturing the power within our selves to create a unifying sense of wholeness about life and our relationships. We forget what we have done as a people to create peace and justice and equality in the name of all that is good in religion. And at the same time we do not have to be Gods. The questions that Dawkins and others attack religion with, are the very questions religion has always struggled with. So we may have someone like Dawkins who looks at the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, and we say what a bloodthirsty evil God is depicted here. How can you believe this ? But we forget that throughout history people have been trying to discern meaning, trying to find the evidence. These are the stories of humanity struggling with the search for meaning. This story shows that society has learned to reject such killing. People have learned a more compassionate ethical code, and thus their God says no. So, too we are confused about what we should do with our lives. To those who claim they think they know what God wants them to do, we have the very savior of Christianity crying out to God, “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me? What does this story tell us about knowing that there is a plan for each of our lives that we must follow? If there is meaning it will continue to unfold, as we live and learn. Whether there is a God which binds us together matters less than if we all seek to find and create those experiences which will bind us closer together, and will lead us to offer love and compassion to those who are hurt and suffer from life’s myriad difficulties. In the children’s book, What is God?, Etan Boritzer writes, When people of all religions pray to God, We are really praying for that feeling; the feeling which connects all of us.

Once when the poet Robert Bly was sitting depressed in a cabin by a lake, he said, “It may be that these trees I see, have consciousness, and this desire to weep comes from them. The weeping of the trees, the weeping of others reminds us how we are connected to the earth and each other. I remember feeling the earth crying out at Gettysburg once, as I stood on Cemetery Ridge, and it brought me to tears. The human pain, and the carnage we create was juxtaposed with the yearning for life and its continuance that lives within us all. Is this God? This compassion for others, this connection to the earth? Who knows? Perhaps I do still believe. I believe in the connection with the life of earth. I believe in nurturing the compassion. What word I use does not really matter. We will never have the ability to give Dawkins his evidence. All we can amass is the feelings we have to connect, and act on them. Those are no proof - except in the heart and in the tears. So if it is proof Dawkins wants, let him look into the love we feel, the care we show, and the community we build. This is how the bumbling, disorganized Harry Potter fought evil, with love, friendship, community and integrity, and it seems to me that those powerful feelings unite the forces of good. In our reading Barbara Brown Taylor says the black earth speaks a language her bones can understand. There is a Presence she says, lighting up everything that moves. As I get older, I see and feel that presence more in the color of flowers, in the shells of the sea. Vincent van Gogh once said “The best way to know God is to love many things.” So if we seek that feeling, those possibilities for love in every part of our lives, who knows what God you might discover. Even though I can’t see it or define it, or have any evidence for it, I guess this yearning for the love that unites makes me only almost an atheist.

Closing Words - from Robert M. Doss

When giving thanks comes hard for you,
And things are grim,
And hope runs thin,
Recall:
Despair’s a door to pass on through,
And not a home for living in.
When thanksgiving fills your cup,
And those you love are all about,
Look at your blessings, count them up,
and give back something to the world
without.
Go in peace.
Go for peace.
For all who see God,
May God go with you.
For all who embrace life,
May life return your affection.
For all who seek a right path,
May a way be found . . .
And the courage to take it
Step by step.
Amen.