Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
"A Godless Mystery?" by Mark W. Harris - November 15, 2009
“A Godless Mystery?” - Mark W. Harris
November 15, 2009 - First Parish of Watertown
Call to Worship – adapted from Perry Como
I have seen a mother at a crib,
So I know what love is.
I have looked into the eyes of a child,
So I know what faith is
I have heard the wild bird's sing,
So I know what freedom is.
I have seen a rainbow,
So I know what beauty is.
I have planted a tree
So I know what hope is
I have touched a helping hand,
So I know what kindness is.
I have seen a flower burst into bloom,
So I know what a mystery is.
I have lost a friend,
So I know what sorrow is.
I have felt the pounding of the sea,
So I know what power is.
I have seen a star decked sky,
So I know what the infinite is.
I have seen and felt all these things,
So I know what God is!
Reading by Edward Frost
We have heard that God
Is all the goodness
All the sweetness and light
And joy in the morning.
But God is the cries we do not hear,
The depth of hell the other suffers,
The darkness and the confusion.
Of the permanent night.
God may be the chaos –
Missed in our neatness and order
Who shuns the glistening temple
To walk in the gray repositories
Of twisted and divided souls.
To see such a God
Is to seek discomfort,
To walk in another’s broken shoes
Through the eye of an inner storm,
And be bent and twisted with him.
We have heard that God is love.
But God is the demand to love,
A demand unheeded,
Thus a God undiscovered.
Press through the grown over path
To another’s aloneness,
And there, with her,
The pain and the bearer of pain,
Is God.
Sermon
Last week we heard two of our members address the theme of how their faith sustains them in difficult times. All of us have endured times when it seems like our lives are falling apart – our relationships, jobs, health all suffer. A traditional faith might inform you that God will sustain you at such times. Yet I think some people come to Unitarian Universalist churches because the God they learned about as children was suppose to prevent these bad things from happening, but then the inevitable vale of tears descended upon each of us, and God was absent. Yet it was not so much God’s absence that hurt us, but rather the interpretation of God that our childhood faith gave us. We end up with the impression that we are being punished by a guilt inducing, vengeful God. It is our fault we became sick or lost our job, and that we have committed some iniquity or are defective in God’s eyes. Christian Scientists for instance seem to teach that you become sick because you are not praying or living right, and then once you get right with God you will return to health. I had the experience many years ago when I was a student chaplain of sitting with a young mother whose baby had just died. Her own pastor, a conservative Baptist, came into the hospital room, raised his hand, and said, “It’s God will.” What person is going to go on believing in a God who kills off babies for his own pleasure as part of an inscrutable plan?. In an imperfect world, with imperfect people, mistakes are made, tragedies happen, and sometimes we long for answers to what it all means.
We not only have the issues we struggle with in our daily lives, but there is also a world beyond these walls that has been filled in recent years with economic chaos, unending wars, global warming, and the ever present threat of terrorists. I don’t need to tell you that we are living in tumultuous times. Just this week, a military doctor gunned down twelve people and wounded more than two dozen more on a military base in Texas, shouting the name of God as he did so. His Muslim faith fueled the already present fears that an entire religion is to blame for inducing terrorist activities. We see polarization between Jews and Palestinians, the Western world and the Muslim world, and between Republicans and Democrats at home. It seems like a world of extremists. Not too many years ago each of these larger political conflicts found representation in a rise of radical fundamentalism within its ranks. The scholar Karen Armstrong told us about a Battle for God, with each side claiming that its dogma was the true one with little room left for understanding the other side. Right wing Jews, Muslim terrorists, and evangelical Christians left us believing that the world would never know peace and justice.
The rise of worldwide fundamentalism has made more than one liberal a little nervous about the direction religion is going. In recent decades evangelical faiths have grown, while more moderate approaches have stagnated. One development in these times of political polarization is that fundamentalism has been countered by a resurgence of atheism. This atheist coming out brought us authors Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and especially Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion. I even found the Quotable Atheist stuffed in my stocking last Christmas. Jolly old Santa was pushing atheism, too. The other day I was riding the Red Line going to a meeting in Boston, and I noticed a placard inside the train with the words: “Good without God? Millions of Americans are.” An article in the Boston Globe said that these ads were sponsored by the Boston Area Coalition of Reason, who were trying to raise awareness that God is a myth. Last Sunday, Martha Scott read one of the letters that was written in response to the article, which stated that our UU churches welcome people of all theological stripes, including atheists. It is true that atheists, agnostics, theists, Christians and Buddhists can all find community in UU congregations that number among our principles the free search for truth.
Yet I have found many of these newly popular atheists to be fundamentalists in their own right. They are reacting against an image of God, that many of us rejected as children, that of an all powerful, supernatural monarch who approves of us when we are good, and punishes us when we are bad, and will broker deals with us in exchange for unending homage and allegiance. Since that kind of God does not exist, they say, there is no God. Yet many people who still believe in God, don’t believe in that kind of God either. Dawkins says that he is “against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” Another atheist group that sponsored some ads in the midwest said that religion “hardens hearts and enslaves the mind.” This point of view foolishly reasserts an intransigent science vs. religion argument where only one can be a winner. Understanding the world and trying to make it better have always been at the forefront of our Unitarian Universalists faith, but Dawkins seems to want to summarily dismiss all religions as stupid, anti-intellectual mythic structures that teach people things that just ain’t so. It replicates the polarization we see in politics into the religious world.
Into this mix of fundamentalists vs. atheists comes two new books. One of these, The Case for God by Karen Armstrong, was recently on the best seller list. One reviewer states that Armstrong says religion is properly a matter of practice, that is the prayers and rituals, or the experience of the faith, and the worst thing imaginable is the folly of intellectualizing the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. The problem with liberal religion is that we have frequently intellectualized the rejection of belief. We also have a hard time formulating exactly what our practices are because we don’t sprinkle holy water or eat wafers. What might be most helpful is if we remembered that the experience of Unitarian Universalism is the embodiment of it in our lives. Our whole faith is practice. When it comes to God, Armstrong says that nothing about God can be put into words. She recommends silence, and says words such as "God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word will always be inadequate, or metaphorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.
We can certainly appreciate this, when for many of us, the most reverent times in our lives are when we sit in silence. When that Baptist minister interrupted me as a young student minister, I was sitting holding the hand of the mother who had just suffered an unbearable loss. There are no words to comfort or to provide assurance at that time. It is merely time for a silent witness that the event has occurred, and that the other person is not alone. So, too when a parent stands by the side of a crib and watches their sleeping infant, or when we look out at a majestic mountain scene or feel the surf crashing against the rocks, there may be an ineffable feeling of oneness with another person or with the creation in that silent moment. To be reverent like this is to be more fully human.
Many years ago a family called me up and asked me to come to their house when their father died. I went upstairs and found myself alone with the deceased. Perhaps the family was acting out a ritual where they expected the clergyperson to perform some kind of last rites, but my training had certainly not prepared me for that. Instead all I could do was sit with the body, touch his leg, and try in my awkward way to send him him off to the great silent unknown. So in a sense I had prayed for him, giving him my own version of last rites by being present, not with prepared words, but with the witness of my life. That is really all that we can do. God is like the pain described in the reading by Edward Frost. It is the cry or the confusion in suffering, or the demand to respond to another in love, and say, yes I will be present with you even as you bear this pain. Former UUA president Paul Carnes once wrote, “we may not know what God is, but we can know what it means to be human. This we can each do. For as Carnes said, we are the earth speaking, . . . the Universe grown conscious of itself. . . We are the force that creates and destroys even the gods we worship.”
Is it us who has created God? The biologist Robert Wright writes in his book, The Evolution of God, that he is not sure there is a God, but he is sure that our idea of God has progressed in a humane fashion so that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. In the midst of all this polarization I have talked about, he gives us some degree of hope that the world and us can be saved. Echoing the words of that great Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker, Wright believes that while the moral arc of the universe is long, it does bend toward justice. Wright would be the first to admit that lots of violence has been done in God’s name, but the evidence is also clear that we have moved as a species in a positive moral direction over time. How people interpret the texts of their faiths, and the moral choices they make help determine the shape of the God they worship. Over time technological growth and the reality of greater global interconnections have moved us toward more mutually beneficial relationships. Simply speaking, the God we are envisioning now has evolved from one who people pray to to bring in a good catch by our fishermen, or who protects our little tribe from annihilation by the tribe over the hill. Larger and larger expanses of people have been protected, or at least tolerated by one God. Our new world has a God that embraces many faiths, and represents greater justice for all. Even as there are set backs, such as when a state like Maine votes down equal marriage, we also know that the world is marching toward a vision of oneness not so different from that first envisioned by our Universalist forebears.
Evidence of human progress can be found in familiar Biblical passages. Take the story of Jonah from the Hebrew scriptures. Jonah as most of you recall was the fellow who was swallowed by the whale. In the story God sends Jonah to reprove the people of Nineveh for their wicked ways. Jonah does not want to do this, and the big fish enters the story. After this dark night in the belly, Jonah decides he better obey, and he goes to warn the Ninevites. And what do they do? Surprisingly, they repent. What’s interesting here is that traditionally they had been an enemy of Israel. Remember in the old days God leads people around and massacres their enemies. Now people are discovering that there is a lot of waste and inefficiency in fighting all the time. So instead of killing everybody, we tax them instead and allow them to live peacefully within our nation. God becomes nicer, too. And we see that with Jonah’s story. As you heard in the reading, Jonah is revolted by the idea of forgiving them. But the book ends with God explaining that he should be concerned about them, because they don’t know right from wrong, and we must teach them to be better. Now God doesn’t just get rid of enemies, or condemn them for sinfulness, but instead God can be understanding and show compassion towards others, even the enemy.
Even if we agree that the moral circle of humanity has been enlarged, is that evidence that God exists? While Wright believes that this growth of moral imagination reflects that there is a higher purpose to life or a transcendent moral order, it is not the creation of a divinely perfect being. We have moved in fits and starts, imperfectly and painfully just as human progress always is, but nevertheless, on a sure and steady pace of moral growth. Are we growing toward becoming a more morally sensitive species? Do the Gods we create grow with us? What Wright would say is that it does not matter whether God implants something in us that makes our tolerance and understanding and compassion increase over time, or if we develop it ourselves. It is a universal principle that we are meant to embrace with our lives and our cultures. It is not the all powerful God who makes one nation better than another, nor is it the personal God who will answer individual prayers for healing, but it is a God in us that is moving us toward creating a better society, one that makes us be more just and equitable in our dealings with our neighbors.
In her work about God, Karen Armstrong finds meaning in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He said religion was an expression of the forms of life, not the expression of certain propositions. So religious expression is found in enacting certain practices such as gathering food for the hungry, or singing in the choir. We help others. We find friendship with others. He says what matters is what satisfies us. So perhaps lighting a candle may not have any actual affect on the person we are lighting a candle for, but it does make us feel better to remember them, and think about them, and it also alerts others to our concern. They then can care for us or affirm us. This is why the practice of some of our childhood faith might still bring meaning. We may not actual believe it, but it feels good to do it. Saying the word God may still hold meaning for some of us, but not for others. We cannot say for sure if God exists, but we can know an immense feeling of oneness in the silence. It may connect us to what we feel is a moral dimension to life that is growing in us and in the world. It may help us be more loving people. It may satisfy us.
An atheist group in England also ran a series of ads to celebrate the newly found resurgence of atheism. The British ad said: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” This reminds me of the series of attacks that were leveled upon Universalists more than 200 years ago when it was struggling to survive. Universalists were reacting against Calvinism which declared that God saved some to eternal bliss, but condemned most to hell. In their reading of the Bible, Universalists discovered a loving god who found all people deserving of salvation. Yet the opponents of Universalism said it would lead to all manner of licentiousness, because if all were saved, then there was no incentive to be good. The threat of hell was what made people good. So murderers, adulterers and thieves were often identified in the press as likely to be Universalists. Universalists argued that the moral principle of life is not a condemning God who threatens us, but rather a loving God who wants us to be happy. The word salvation comes from a Latin word meaning to stay intact, to remain whole, to be in good health. Universalists taught how salvation was to be achieved; how we can remain whole. Personally, we must do what makes us happy. Hosea Ballou, the great preacher of Universalism said, “The main object in all that we do is happiness.” I will always remember the words of my father as he laid on his death bed. He simply stated, “I’ve really enjoyed my life.” How can we appreciate our blessings? I recall the line in the novel the Color Purple, where one of the characters says God becomes angry when we humans don’t notice the color purple in a blooming field of flowers. The God in us truly emerges when when we do notice the beauty, live our lives to the fullest, engage with others, and care deeply enough to build a better world
Ballou also said that our happiness is tied up with the happiness of others. Salvation is not based on individual merit, or how good you are. Instead, salvation is a social salvation, or as Ballou said, our happiness is connected with the happiness of our fellows. We are bound up together, and this is clearly what our members said sustained them last week. Some would suggest that the divine appears through our willingness to be more engaged with others. Universalism teaches that the one human family is drawn up into God’s love, in one moral community. We will all be the better for it, and will be happy, when we comprehend the necessity of cooperation and compassion in building the moral community. Wright, in his new book, says we are moving toward an understanding of this great moral truth. For some it may be a nameless mystery, and for others it may be the source of the moral truth for all life, and whether or not we use the word God, or even find it meaningful, may we together create a community where we act on our longings to be in deeper relationship with others, and ultimately bring salvation to all.
Closing Words - from Mary E. Hunt
In the beginning God enjoyed herself.
She laughed out loud and laughed some more because it was good.
She sat back and smiled.
She clapped her hands in glee and imagined her sisters dancing.
She did nothing but enjoy and it was everything.
God knew that there was work to be done --
a world to create, people to form and a whole creation to plan.
She even glimpsed the fact that creation would include meetings and that there would be injustices to right, and still she laughed, knowing that in the end it was all about pleasure.
She explained to no one in particular that enjoyment is what she intended life to be about: pleasure is the first principle.
She knew that other would be divinities stressed work and obligation.
She reasoned quite astutely that if joy for all were the goal, then everyone could rest and relax, at least some of the time. Just thinking about this made her grin.
Light years later, when creation came into being and people began to toil and sweat their way, she noticed that her first principle had been replaced by work and pain.
So, she se t a reminder of her legacy.
She gave it several names: relaxation, fun, recreation, leisure, play. some thought it was a vestige of days gone by.
But God knew that it was the real thing.
She called it salvation.
November 15, 2009 - First Parish of Watertown
Call to Worship – adapted from Perry Como
I have seen a mother at a crib,
So I know what love is.
I have looked into the eyes of a child,
So I know what faith is
I have heard the wild bird's sing,
So I know what freedom is.
I have seen a rainbow,
So I know what beauty is.
I have planted a tree
So I know what hope is
I have touched a helping hand,
So I know what kindness is.
I have seen a flower burst into bloom,
So I know what a mystery is.
I have lost a friend,
So I know what sorrow is.
I have felt the pounding of the sea,
So I know what power is.
I have seen a star decked sky,
So I know what the infinite is.
I have seen and felt all these things,
So I know what God is!
Reading by Edward Frost
We have heard that God
Is all the goodness
All the sweetness and light
And joy in the morning.
But God is the cries we do not hear,
The depth of hell the other suffers,
The darkness and the confusion.
Of the permanent night.
God may be the chaos –
Missed in our neatness and order
Who shuns the glistening temple
To walk in the gray repositories
Of twisted and divided souls.
To see such a God
Is to seek discomfort,
To walk in another’s broken shoes
Through the eye of an inner storm,
And be bent and twisted with him.
We have heard that God is love.
But God is the demand to love,
A demand unheeded,
Thus a God undiscovered.
Press through the grown over path
To another’s aloneness,
And there, with her,
The pain and the bearer of pain,
Is God.
Sermon
Last week we heard two of our members address the theme of how their faith sustains them in difficult times. All of us have endured times when it seems like our lives are falling apart – our relationships, jobs, health all suffer. A traditional faith might inform you that God will sustain you at such times. Yet I think some people come to Unitarian Universalist churches because the God they learned about as children was suppose to prevent these bad things from happening, but then the inevitable vale of tears descended upon each of us, and God was absent. Yet it was not so much God’s absence that hurt us, but rather the interpretation of God that our childhood faith gave us. We end up with the impression that we are being punished by a guilt inducing, vengeful God. It is our fault we became sick or lost our job, and that we have committed some iniquity or are defective in God’s eyes. Christian Scientists for instance seem to teach that you become sick because you are not praying or living right, and then once you get right with God you will return to health. I had the experience many years ago when I was a student chaplain of sitting with a young mother whose baby had just died. Her own pastor, a conservative Baptist, came into the hospital room, raised his hand, and said, “It’s God will.” What person is going to go on believing in a God who kills off babies for his own pleasure as part of an inscrutable plan?. In an imperfect world, with imperfect people, mistakes are made, tragedies happen, and sometimes we long for answers to what it all means.
We not only have the issues we struggle with in our daily lives, but there is also a world beyond these walls that has been filled in recent years with economic chaos, unending wars, global warming, and the ever present threat of terrorists. I don’t need to tell you that we are living in tumultuous times. Just this week, a military doctor gunned down twelve people and wounded more than two dozen more on a military base in Texas, shouting the name of God as he did so. His Muslim faith fueled the already present fears that an entire religion is to blame for inducing terrorist activities. We see polarization between Jews and Palestinians, the Western world and the Muslim world, and between Republicans and Democrats at home. It seems like a world of extremists. Not too many years ago each of these larger political conflicts found representation in a rise of radical fundamentalism within its ranks. The scholar Karen Armstrong told us about a Battle for God, with each side claiming that its dogma was the true one with little room left for understanding the other side. Right wing Jews, Muslim terrorists, and evangelical Christians left us believing that the world would never know peace and justice.
The rise of worldwide fundamentalism has made more than one liberal a little nervous about the direction religion is going. In recent decades evangelical faiths have grown, while more moderate approaches have stagnated. One development in these times of political polarization is that fundamentalism has been countered by a resurgence of atheism. This atheist coming out brought us authors Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and especially Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion. I even found the Quotable Atheist stuffed in my stocking last Christmas. Jolly old Santa was pushing atheism, too. The other day I was riding the Red Line going to a meeting in Boston, and I noticed a placard inside the train with the words: “Good without God? Millions of Americans are.” An article in the Boston Globe said that these ads were sponsored by the Boston Area Coalition of Reason, who were trying to raise awareness that God is a myth. Last Sunday, Martha Scott read one of the letters that was written in response to the article, which stated that our UU churches welcome people of all theological stripes, including atheists. It is true that atheists, agnostics, theists, Christians and Buddhists can all find community in UU congregations that number among our principles the free search for truth.
Yet I have found many of these newly popular atheists to be fundamentalists in their own right. They are reacting against an image of God, that many of us rejected as children, that of an all powerful, supernatural monarch who approves of us when we are good, and punishes us when we are bad, and will broker deals with us in exchange for unending homage and allegiance. Since that kind of God does not exist, they say, there is no God. Yet many people who still believe in God, don’t believe in that kind of God either. Dawkins says that he is “against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” Another atheist group that sponsored some ads in the midwest said that religion “hardens hearts and enslaves the mind.” This point of view foolishly reasserts an intransigent science vs. religion argument where only one can be a winner. Understanding the world and trying to make it better have always been at the forefront of our Unitarian Universalists faith, but Dawkins seems to want to summarily dismiss all religions as stupid, anti-intellectual mythic structures that teach people things that just ain’t so. It replicates the polarization we see in politics into the religious world.
Into this mix of fundamentalists vs. atheists comes two new books. One of these, The Case for God by Karen Armstrong, was recently on the best seller list. One reviewer states that Armstrong says religion is properly a matter of practice, that is the prayers and rituals, or the experience of the faith, and the worst thing imaginable is the folly of intellectualizing the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. The problem with liberal religion is that we have frequently intellectualized the rejection of belief. We also have a hard time formulating exactly what our practices are because we don’t sprinkle holy water or eat wafers. What might be most helpful is if we remembered that the experience of Unitarian Universalism is the embodiment of it in our lives. Our whole faith is practice. When it comes to God, Armstrong says that nothing about God can be put into words. She recommends silence, and says words such as "God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word will always be inadequate, or metaphorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.
We can certainly appreciate this, when for many of us, the most reverent times in our lives are when we sit in silence. When that Baptist minister interrupted me as a young student minister, I was sitting holding the hand of the mother who had just suffered an unbearable loss. There are no words to comfort or to provide assurance at that time. It is merely time for a silent witness that the event has occurred, and that the other person is not alone. So, too when a parent stands by the side of a crib and watches their sleeping infant, or when we look out at a majestic mountain scene or feel the surf crashing against the rocks, there may be an ineffable feeling of oneness with another person or with the creation in that silent moment. To be reverent like this is to be more fully human.
Many years ago a family called me up and asked me to come to their house when their father died. I went upstairs and found myself alone with the deceased. Perhaps the family was acting out a ritual where they expected the clergyperson to perform some kind of last rites, but my training had certainly not prepared me for that. Instead all I could do was sit with the body, touch his leg, and try in my awkward way to send him him off to the great silent unknown. So in a sense I had prayed for him, giving him my own version of last rites by being present, not with prepared words, but with the witness of my life. That is really all that we can do. God is like the pain described in the reading by Edward Frost. It is the cry or the confusion in suffering, or the demand to respond to another in love, and say, yes I will be present with you even as you bear this pain. Former UUA president Paul Carnes once wrote, “we may not know what God is, but we can know what it means to be human. This we can each do. For as Carnes said, we are the earth speaking, . . . the Universe grown conscious of itself. . . We are the force that creates and destroys even the gods we worship.”
Is it us who has created God? The biologist Robert Wright writes in his book, The Evolution of God, that he is not sure there is a God, but he is sure that our idea of God has progressed in a humane fashion so that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. In the midst of all this polarization I have talked about, he gives us some degree of hope that the world and us can be saved. Echoing the words of that great Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker, Wright believes that while the moral arc of the universe is long, it does bend toward justice. Wright would be the first to admit that lots of violence has been done in God’s name, but the evidence is also clear that we have moved as a species in a positive moral direction over time. How people interpret the texts of their faiths, and the moral choices they make help determine the shape of the God they worship. Over time technological growth and the reality of greater global interconnections have moved us toward more mutually beneficial relationships. Simply speaking, the God we are envisioning now has evolved from one who people pray to to bring in a good catch by our fishermen, or who protects our little tribe from annihilation by the tribe over the hill. Larger and larger expanses of people have been protected, or at least tolerated by one God. Our new world has a God that embraces many faiths, and represents greater justice for all. Even as there are set backs, such as when a state like Maine votes down equal marriage, we also know that the world is marching toward a vision of oneness not so different from that first envisioned by our Universalist forebears.
Evidence of human progress can be found in familiar Biblical passages. Take the story of Jonah from the Hebrew scriptures. Jonah as most of you recall was the fellow who was swallowed by the whale. In the story God sends Jonah to reprove the people of Nineveh for their wicked ways. Jonah does not want to do this, and the big fish enters the story. After this dark night in the belly, Jonah decides he better obey, and he goes to warn the Ninevites. And what do they do? Surprisingly, they repent. What’s interesting here is that traditionally they had been an enemy of Israel. Remember in the old days God leads people around and massacres their enemies. Now people are discovering that there is a lot of waste and inefficiency in fighting all the time. So instead of killing everybody, we tax them instead and allow them to live peacefully within our nation. God becomes nicer, too. And we see that with Jonah’s story. As you heard in the reading, Jonah is revolted by the idea of forgiving them. But the book ends with God explaining that he should be concerned about them, because they don’t know right from wrong, and we must teach them to be better. Now God doesn’t just get rid of enemies, or condemn them for sinfulness, but instead God can be understanding and show compassion towards others, even the enemy.
Even if we agree that the moral circle of humanity has been enlarged, is that evidence that God exists? While Wright believes that this growth of moral imagination reflects that there is a higher purpose to life or a transcendent moral order, it is not the creation of a divinely perfect being. We have moved in fits and starts, imperfectly and painfully just as human progress always is, but nevertheless, on a sure and steady pace of moral growth. Are we growing toward becoming a more morally sensitive species? Do the Gods we create grow with us? What Wright would say is that it does not matter whether God implants something in us that makes our tolerance and understanding and compassion increase over time, or if we develop it ourselves. It is a universal principle that we are meant to embrace with our lives and our cultures. It is not the all powerful God who makes one nation better than another, nor is it the personal God who will answer individual prayers for healing, but it is a God in us that is moving us toward creating a better society, one that makes us be more just and equitable in our dealings with our neighbors.
In her work about God, Karen Armstrong finds meaning in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He said religion was an expression of the forms of life, not the expression of certain propositions. So religious expression is found in enacting certain practices such as gathering food for the hungry, or singing in the choir. We help others. We find friendship with others. He says what matters is what satisfies us. So perhaps lighting a candle may not have any actual affect on the person we are lighting a candle for, but it does make us feel better to remember them, and think about them, and it also alerts others to our concern. They then can care for us or affirm us. This is why the practice of some of our childhood faith might still bring meaning. We may not actual believe it, but it feels good to do it. Saying the word God may still hold meaning for some of us, but not for others. We cannot say for sure if God exists, but we can know an immense feeling of oneness in the silence. It may connect us to what we feel is a moral dimension to life that is growing in us and in the world. It may help us be more loving people. It may satisfy us.
An atheist group in England also ran a series of ads to celebrate the newly found resurgence of atheism. The British ad said: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” This reminds me of the series of attacks that were leveled upon Universalists more than 200 years ago when it was struggling to survive. Universalists were reacting against Calvinism which declared that God saved some to eternal bliss, but condemned most to hell. In their reading of the Bible, Universalists discovered a loving god who found all people deserving of salvation. Yet the opponents of Universalism said it would lead to all manner of licentiousness, because if all were saved, then there was no incentive to be good. The threat of hell was what made people good. So murderers, adulterers and thieves were often identified in the press as likely to be Universalists. Universalists argued that the moral principle of life is not a condemning God who threatens us, but rather a loving God who wants us to be happy. The word salvation comes from a Latin word meaning to stay intact, to remain whole, to be in good health. Universalists taught how salvation was to be achieved; how we can remain whole. Personally, we must do what makes us happy. Hosea Ballou, the great preacher of Universalism said, “The main object in all that we do is happiness.” I will always remember the words of my father as he laid on his death bed. He simply stated, “I’ve really enjoyed my life.” How can we appreciate our blessings? I recall the line in the novel the Color Purple, where one of the characters says God becomes angry when we humans don’t notice the color purple in a blooming field of flowers. The God in us truly emerges when when we do notice the beauty, live our lives to the fullest, engage with others, and care deeply enough to build a better world
Ballou also said that our happiness is tied up with the happiness of others. Salvation is not based on individual merit, or how good you are. Instead, salvation is a social salvation, or as Ballou said, our happiness is connected with the happiness of our fellows. We are bound up together, and this is clearly what our members said sustained them last week. Some would suggest that the divine appears through our willingness to be more engaged with others. Universalism teaches that the one human family is drawn up into God’s love, in one moral community. We will all be the better for it, and will be happy, when we comprehend the necessity of cooperation and compassion in building the moral community. Wright, in his new book, says we are moving toward an understanding of this great moral truth. For some it may be a nameless mystery, and for others it may be the source of the moral truth for all life, and whether or not we use the word God, or even find it meaningful, may we together create a community where we act on our longings to be in deeper relationship with others, and ultimately bring salvation to all.
Closing Words - from Mary E. Hunt
In the beginning God enjoyed herself.
She laughed out loud and laughed some more because it was good.
She sat back and smiled.
She clapped her hands in glee and imagined her sisters dancing.
She did nothing but enjoy and it was everything.
God knew that there was work to be done --
a world to create, people to form and a whole creation to plan.
She even glimpsed the fact that creation would include meetings and that there would be injustices to right, and still she laughed, knowing that in the end it was all about pleasure.
She explained to no one in particular that enjoyment is what she intended life to be about: pleasure is the first principle.
She knew that other would be divinities stressed work and obligation.
She reasoned quite astutely that if joy for all were the goal, then everyone could rest and relax, at least some of the time. Just thinking about this made her grin.
Light years later, when creation came into being and people began to toil and sweat their way, she noticed that her first principle had been replaced by work and pain.
So, she se t a reminder of her legacy.
She gave it several names: relaxation, fun, recreation, leisure, play. some thought it was a vestige of days gone by.
But God knew that it was the real thing.
She called it salvation.
“Yoga Dummy” by Mark W. Harris - November 1, 2009
Sermon - “Yoga Dummy” by Mark W. Harris
November 1, 2009 – First Parish of Watertown
Call to Worship – from the Buddha
The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
Sermon
This chart is something Andrea and I bought for one of our boys as a Christmas gift. It shows a variety of yoga positions. I don’t think I can get into any of them, and if I did, I would probably get stuck there, or would fall over and break some bone, or pull some muscle. Don’t expect a demonstration. It would not be pretty. I have never been a practitioner of yoga, and so have certain ideas about what it is without much actual knowledge or experience. For this auction sermon, Sue Demb has asked me to explicate the meaning of yoga. This is no easy task for a yoga dummy like me.
When I was growing up, yoga was not the popular discipline we see practised and taught at the local health club or YMCA. As I implied in the newsletter, I knew Yogi Berra, the famous Yankee catcher who got his "nickname" from a childhood friend who had seen a movie about an Indian snake charmer. The friend noted that Yogi bore a striking resemblance to the Hindu man, saying "That yogi walks like him." Yogi was kind of a small, squat guy, who later would assume the gyrations of a catcher, so the name was appropriate because that was how we thought of yogis – these serene Indians with a minimal white cloth wrapped around them, so skinny they looked like they hadn’t eaten in weeks, with the ability to assume physical positions that appeared, as if they were made out of rubber. Yogi, the baseball player, added to the mystique of esoteric knowledge with his famous yogi-isms that were illogically profound. Examples included: Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.” “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.”
Now we know yoga as something that has become extremely popularised and Americanised. Millions of Americans have become regular practitioners of the physical discipline, and it has made them more flexible, physically fit, relaxed, calm, disciplined and less anxious. It has been a good thing for a lot of people. But like anything in our culture it has often been labelled a commodity and a cure-all. From its first introduction into America, yoga has also been made into a method to serve capitalism, so businesses sometimes encouraged the techniques to improve concentration and production in workers. Yoga is not a religion, but rather a practice that in its most ancient form comes from Hinduism. Today, I hope to say a little about the coming of yoga to America, and also reflect on the deeper meanings I see that all of us could take to heart whether or not yoga is part of our lives.
Yoga would not have developed in America without Unitarians. The Transcendentalists, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, first introduced Scriptures from other world religions besides Christianity, to America. In the Bhagavad-Gita from Hinduism Emerson noted the essential unity of all things, so that similarities in humans experience were described as more important than any differences. Emerson’s “over-soul” affirmed the existence of one great common nature in which we all rest; the power that is available to the individual is ultimately the power of the one we all share. Unitarians and Universalists helped organise the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and there Swami Vivekananda wowed the crowds with a speaking performance. He subsequently went out on the lecture circuit, and introduced a kind of practical spirituality to America. He trained disciples in raja-yoga, a formal path of concentration and meditation giving detailed instructions on breathing techniques, and the right bodily postures. He said the greatest help to spiritual life is meditation. One of his successors Paramananda, focused on the affinities between Transcendentalism and Indian philosophy in his work, Emerson and Vedanta. This message became popular in Unitarian churches, as people saw it as a way to have an immediate and intuitive experience of realising universal knowledge. It also disturbed some culture watchers who witnessed these turbaned teachers from the East making yoga classes more popular than Shakespeare classes.
Within Hinduism there are six schools of philosophy, and one of these, derives from the Yoga sutras of Patanjali. This dates from about 150 BCE, but it codified practices that dated back many more centuries. As a way to understand yoga, Sue shared Patanjali’s work with me. Before I tell you what I gleaned from it, it is important I think to realise our affinity with Hinduism, and why yoga, Indian philosophy and UUism meld so well. A new work on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, calls it the Ellis Island of religions. Deeply engrained within it is the premise that ideas and practices of faith are permeable membranes. An eclectic pluralism has prevailed in India, whereby a person holds a toolbox of many different beliefs, and draws upon them as different occasions arise. It might be like the present day Unitarian Universalist who finds meaning in lighting the candles that he/she learned as a Catholic youth, or still celebrates Passover, because Jewish traditions were a important part of their upbringing. Like UUs Hindus tend to be more ortho-prax than orthodox. It is more important that they be a good person in their daily practice of life than that they have the proper beliefs, and beliefs become expedient to fit the situation or the relationship. Radhakrishnan, who was president of India from 1962-1967, defined Hinduism as the belief that truth was many-sided and different views contained different aspects of truth which no one could fully express,” which would, Doninger says, make all Unitarians Hindus.
The word yoga refers to yoke, as in harnessed, as we yoke the cows to the wagon. Central to this school of thought is how we are yoked to our senses. Our tendency is to be attached to things of this world, and so yoga does not mean harnessed to the world, but rather to use the discipline to liberate us from our attachments. In Hindu religious imagery, animals play a very important role. Yogic positions or postures, sexual positions, as well as the theological schools, are all named after animals. The animals of the terrain, and the animals of the mind are connected, and help us understand Hinduism. Gods come to life as animals. The human mind for instance, is imaged as a drunken monkey.
Patanjali gave this one line description of yoga: “Yoga is stopping the whirlpools of the mind.” How do we stop that monkey drunkenness, that continual need for attachment? Both Hindus and Buddhist suggest beginning with breath. Breath is how we start life. It is life. Our breathing is not conscious or voluntary. In and out. The earth breathes, the trees breathe and the animals breathe, there is a dance of breath. This is not breathing for mindlessness, but for mindfulness, to gain clear vision for the mind. Breath connects the inner and the outer; it is the go –between, the life connecter. Breath control is one of the first steps of the discipline of yoga. Let’s get in touch with our breath before we move on by singing hymn #1009.
Now I would like to share the four aspects of yoga that I learned, and then Jacqui will help us experience some chair yoga. The yoke of yoga also means union; or the joining of body, mind and soul. Patanjali says that the interior dimensions of yoga are impossible to attain unless one first pays attention to the body. This is expanded into all the body postures I told you I could not get into, known as hatha yoga. When I took a yoga class with Jacqui Sweeney it brought me back to the one time in my life when I had committed myself to a regular, routinized discipline of physically trying to get and keep my body in shape. This was through competitive sports, but especially football. Of all the sports I participated in, it was the one that required the most different kinds of contortions to the body. Football required leg lifts and stretches and neck turns like no other sport, but the goal always seemed to push yourself until it hurt, and most especially to be in shape to overpower an opponent.
After the session with Jacqui, I was sore for a couple of days. While I do walk a fair amount, I do not do much stretching. The other part of the stretching problem I encountered is that the only kind of stretching I know how to do is the kind that pushes the body to its limits, and so when Jacqui said raise the legs two inches from the floor as I laid on my belly, I raised them six inches. While putting our bodies in different positions may remind us, as in Hinduism of different animals – I am mostly the beached whale – I also learned of the different positions I need to take in order to face all the things I am confronted with in my life. When am I dominant or submissive, powerful or weak -the union of opposites.. Going into different positions may mean we see the different ways we respond to life, but it is also a challenge to go deeper into ourselves. Stretching will take care of some of that tension, but stretching the body also can stretch the mind as well - we become present in the moment. We let go of troubling thoughts, or accumulating anxiety, and are present with our bodies.
So we get physical first, and in fact, Patanjali would say we need to get physical before we can truly meditate and find peace with the restlessness in our minds, and the distractions that predominate in our thoughts. He says that the Upanishads tells us that all speech and thought are derived from one sound, AUM. I like making that primal sound because it makes my chest vibrate. This is the beginning of the falling away of the obstacles that distract us. I listen to the sound of creation and pay attention to it. While getting physical may seem like the opening of the door of enlightenment, it may easily be a tool to make us more productive. I am very tied to results. This is my second learning. It is easy for us in the West to misinterpret what is commonly thought of as the central teaching of the Bhagavad-Gita as selfless duty. This interpretation is a kind of playing out of being privileged, and helping others to relieve our guilt, but this is not the case. The more demanding Hindu practice is disinterested action or renunciation of the fruits of any deed. This is interesting in the context of our First Parish volunteer trip at the Boston Food Bank. They place a great emphasis upon counting how much food you have sorted, and then how many people it will feed. While it may seem gratifying to know we have done good, and they congratulate us on our achievement, this focuses the action on ourselves and the results more than on the action of simply helping. So the question this raises is can I do anything without worrying about a desired outcome? In schools we teach for the desired result, not the joy of learning or even for knowledge, but simply to get the grade or test score.
The athlete may say I am not going to work hard or play hard unless I am on a winning team. I cannot simply participate for the fun of the game in the moment. So, too I may not be able to enjoy anything because I am worried that it is not good for me, or will make me fat. We are focused on what this action is going to do or we worry about how it will come out, and then we can never just make the decision or enjoy the ride, or even let it go, if it does not turn out all that well. The deeper issue with the focus on results is we want to avoid pain. If we know we are going to win, then we don’t have to obsess about losing. If we know we are sick, we want to know it will end with getting better. This focus on results leads directly to the next learning, which has to do with attachments.
This is perhaps the most difficult learning of all. It seems at first like it is about not craving so many material objects, and philosophically the Upanishads that would tell us we are confused by a veil of illusion that makes it hard to discriminate between reality and appearance. One can see why Emerson with his idealism, was attracted to Hinduism because he spoke of a deeper truth behind the material. Practically this teaches us to accept the transience of life, and in fact in western traditions this weekend marks that time of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is believed to be the thinnest.
Both Buddha and Patanjali realised that suffering is fundamental to life, and that our sorrow is deepened by our desire for permanence. I suspect some of this desire for permanence plays out in the material objects we own, or in the items we collect like books or memorabilia, and a good practice for any of us is to periodically clean out those things that attach us to the world, as a signal that we accept our own impermanence. Fundamentally, this is why change is so difficult for us. We like things to stay the same because they reminds us that some things will not change, and so we will not feel so vulnerable to an existence which is fleeting. So we may resist doing something a new way at church, or changing the way a room is set up with the chairs we love because it is a deeper reminder of the way things have been and should be forever and ever.
Part of our concern about transience is the loss of personal memory. Long ago in my own life I participated in the most disciplined physical activity I have ever been involved in when I was a football player. It was not yoga. It was concerned with results and attachment to achievement in the world, and I suppose some degree of permanence with personal fame and status. Yet my college team set a record for losses, and I never achieved any fame, not even BMOC. Recently I have been reading more and more about the permanent brain injuries brought on by this most violent of sports, where young men literally hurtle their bodies through the air to injure one another. In a way yoga and football for me are like the balancing of opposites. The articles I have read have made me at least briefly worried about how many hits to the head I endured as a football player after participating for nine years long ago. Perhaps it is also a fear of losing memory, or losing my individual identity that in my attached mode of being wants to be permanent, and is saddened by all the attachments to the world I feel that I will one day have to relinquish. To a historian, nothing is more powerful than memory, and it is here that yoga gives me my final learning. Yes, part of that is learning to not be so attached to my things, and to the world. I know I will have to let go of my books, to my beautiful mind’s eye view of the Maine coastline, and all the churches and people I love. But there is a deeper learning, too. Memory for most of us is a personal recollection of those events and people we have known in our lifetimes. It is meaningful for all of us to bring those memories to life. And it helps with grief.
Patanjali teaches that memory is more than a recollection of past events in my or your particular life. He says that memory is also an intuitive insight to a past that transcends personal experience and connects us with a fundamental unity of being. I have evoked this experience in a prior sermon when I spoke about being at Gettysburg once, and standing on Cemetery Ridge where the Confederate army hurled their final assault on the Union line, and lost the battle suffering thousands of casualties. Standing there looking at the open field I began to inexplicably cry. I could feel the pain of thousands who had given their lives that day. Was this other life, the life of these soldiers buried in my very being? I suppose the Hindus might say that I was remembering a past life where I had participated in the battle. While I am not saying that is impossible, I would say that this is something other, a universal oneness of experience we are all part of. In a way the breath I take now was the breath that those soldiers took on that hot July day in 1863. It is still a part of me. While all of life is suffering, and those tears are an affirmation of that, I also learned that all of life is continually and eternally brought back into being through an eternal memory. I believe my mind knew suffering when it remembered it. I believe the mind also knows beauty, truth and right when it sees or experiences it.
Yoga teaches us to remember the body, as it will lead us to a deeper knowing when we use it. Yoga teaches us to not worry about results, but be present in the moment. Yoga teaches us to not be so attached to the things of this world, for all is transient. And yoga teaches us that there is a memory deeper than memory that we can be one with, and are one with even when all we know is gone.
Closing Words – from “Circles” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our [personal] memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “A man,” said Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.”
November 1, 2009 – First Parish of Watertown
Call to Worship – from the Buddha
The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
Sermon
This chart is something Andrea and I bought for one of our boys as a Christmas gift. It shows a variety of yoga positions. I don’t think I can get into any of them, and if I did, I would probably get stuck there, or would fall over and break some bone, or pull some muscle. Don’t expect a demonstration. It would not be pretty. I have never been a practitioner of yoga, and so have certain ideas about what it is without much actual knowledge or experience. For this auction sermon, Sue Demb has asked me to explicate the meaning of yoga. This is no easy task for a yoga dummy like me.
When I was growing up, yoga was not the popular discipline we see practised and taught at the local health club or YMCA. As I implied in the newsletter, I knew Yogi Berra, the famous Yankee catcher who got his "nickname" from a childhood friend who had seen a movie about an Indian snake charmer. The friend noted that Yogi bore a striking resemblance to the Hindu man, saying "That yogi walks like him." Yogi was kind of a small, squat guy, who later would assume the gyrations of a catcher, so the name was appropriate because that was how we thought of yogis – these serene Indians with a minimal white cloth wrapped around them, so skinny they looked like they hadn’t eaten in weeks, with the ability to assume physical positions that appeared, as if they were made out of rubber. Yogi, the baseball player, added to the mystique of esoteric knowledge with his famous yogi-isms that were illogically profound. Examples included: Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.” “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.”
Now we know yoga as something that has become extremely popularised and Americanised. Millions of Americans have become regular practitioners of the physical discipline, and it has made them more flexible, physically fit, relaxed, calm, disciplined and less anxious. It has been a good thing for a lot of people. But like anything in our culture it has often been labelled a commodity and a cure-all. From its first introduction into America, yoga has also been made into a method to serve capitalism, so businesses sometimes encouraged the techniques to improve concentration and production in workers. Yoga is not a religion, but rather a practice that in its most ancient form comes from Hinduism. Today, I hope to say a little about the coming of yoga to America, and also reflect on the deeper meanings I see that all of us could take to heart whether or not yoga is part of our lives.
Yoga would not have developed in America without Unitarians. The Transcendentalists, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, first introduced Scriptures from other world religions besides Christianity, to America. In the Bhagavad-Gita from Hinduism Emerson noted the essential unity of all things, so that similarities in humans experience were described as more important than any differences. Emerson’s “over-soul” affirmed the existence of one great common nature in which we all rest; the power that is available to the individual is ultimately the power of the one we all share. Unitarians and Universalists helped organise the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and there Swami Vivekananda wowed the crowds with a speaking performance. He subsequently went out on the lecture circuit, and introduced a kind of practical spirituality to America. He trained disciples in raja-yoga, a formal path of concentration and meditation giving detailed instructions on breathing techniques, and the right bodily postures. He said the greatest help to spiritual life is meditation. One of his successors Paramananda, focused on the affinities between Transcendentalism and Indian philosophy in his work, Emerson and Vedanta. This message became popular in Unitarian churches, as people saw it as a way to have an immediate and intuitive experience of realising universal knowledge. It also disturbed some culture watchers who witnessed these turbaned teachers from the East making yoga classes more popular than Shakespeare classes.
Within Hinduism there are six schools of philosophy, and one of these, derives from the Yoga sutras of Patanjali. This dates from about 150 BCE, but it codified practices that dated back many more centuries. As a way to understand yoga, Sue shared Patanjali’s work with me. Before I tell you what I gleaned from it, it is important I think to realise our affinity with Hinduism, and why yoga, Indian philosophy and UUism meld so well. A new work on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, calls it the Ellis Island of religions. Deeply engrained within it is the premise that ideas and practices of faith are permeable membranes. An eclectic pluralism has prevailed in India, whereby a person holds a toolbox of many different beliefs, and draws upon them as different occasions arise. It might be like the present day Unitarian Universalist who finds meaning in lighting the candles that he/she learned as a Catholic youth, or still celebrates Passover, because Jewish traditions were a important part of their upbringing. Like UUs Hindus tend to be more ortho-prax than orthodox. It is more important that they be a good person in their daily practice of life than that they have the proper beliefs, and beliefs become expedient to fit the situation or the relationship. Radhakrishnan, who was president of India from 1962-1967, defined Hinduism as the belief that truth was many-sided and different views contained different aspects of truth which no one could fully express,” which would, Doninger says, make all Unitarians Hindus.
The word yoga refers to yoke, as in harnessed, as we yoke the cows to the wagon. Central to this school of thought is how we are yoked to our senses. Our tendency is to be attached to things of this world, and so yoga does not mean harnessed to the world, but rather to use the discipline to liberate us from our attachments. In Hindu religious imagery, animals play a very important role. Yogic positions or postures, sexual positions, as well as the theological schools, are all named after animals. The animals of the terrain, and the animals of the mind are connected, and help us understand Hinduism. Gods come to life as animals. The human mind for instance, is imaged as a drunken monkey.
Patanjali gave this one line description of yoga: “Yoga is stopping the whirlpools of the mind.” How do we stop that monkey drunkenness, that continual need for attachment? Both Hindus and Buddhist suggest beginning with breath. Breath is how we start life. It is life. Our breathing is not conscious or voluntary. In and out. The earth breathes, the trees breathe and the animals breathe, there is a dance of breath. This is not breathing for mindlessness, but for mindfulness, to gain clear vision for the mind. Breath connects the inner and the outer; it is the go –between, the life connecter. Breath control is one of the first steps of the discipline of yoga. Let’s get in touch with our breath before we move on by singing hymn #1009.
Now I would like to share the four aspects of yoga that I learned, and then Jacqui will help us experience some chair yoga. The yoke of yoga also means union; or the joining of body, mind and soul. Patanjali says that the interior dimensions of yoga are impossible to attain unless one first pays attention to the body. This is expanded into all the body postures I told you I could not get into, known as hatha yoga. When I took a yoga class with Jacqui Sweeney it brought me back to the one time in my life when I had committed myself to a regular, routinized discipline of physically trying to get and keep my body in shape. This was through competitive sports, but especially football. Of all the sports I participated in, it was the one that required the most different kinds of contortions to the body. Football required leg lifts and stretches and neck turns like no other sport, but the goal always seemed to push yourself until it hurt, and most especially to be in shape to overpower an opponent.
After the session with Jacqui, I was sore for a couple of days. While I do walk a fair amount, I do not do much stretching. The other part of the stretching problem I encountered is that the only kind of stretching I know how to do is the kind that pushes the body to its limits, and so when Jacqui said raise the legs two inches from the floor as I laid on my belly, I raised them six inches. While putting our bodies in different positions may remind us, as in Hinduism of different animals – I am mostly the beached whale – I also learned of the different positions I need to take in order to face all the things I am confronted with in my life. When am I dominant or submissive, powerful or weak -the union of opposites.. Going into different positions may mean we see the different ways we respond to life, but it is also a challenge to go deeper into ourselves. Stretching will take care of some of that tension, but stretching the body also can stretch the mind as well - we become present in the moment. We let go of troubling thoughts, or accumulating anxiety, and are present with our bodies.
So we get physical first, and in fact, Patanjali would say we need to get physical before we can truly meditate and find peace with the restlessness in our minds, and the distractions that predominate in our thoughts. He says that the Upanishads tells us that all speech and thought are derived from one sound, AUM. I like making that primal sound because it makes my chest vibrate. This is the beginning of the falling away of the obstacles that distract us. I listen to the sound of creation and pay attention to it. While getting physical may seem like the opening of the door of enlightenment, it may easily be a tool to make us more productive. I am very tied to results. This is my second learning. It is easy for us in the West to misinterpret what is commonly thought of as the central teaching of the Bhagavad-Gita as selfless duty. This interpretation is a kind of playing out of being privileged, and helping others to relieve our guilt, but this is not the case. The more demanding Hindu practice is disinterested action or renunciation of the fruits of any deed. This is interesting in the context of our First Parish volunteer trip at the Boston Food Bank. They place a great emphasis upon counting how much food you have sorted, and then how many people it will feed. While it may seem gratifying to know we have done good, and they congratulate us on our achievement, this focuses the action on ourselves and the results more than on the action of simply helping. So the question this raises is can I do anything without worrying about a desired outcome? In schools we teach for the desired result, not the joy of learning or even for knowledge, but simply to get the grade or test score.
The athlete may say I am not going to work hard or play hard unless I am on a winning team. I cannot simply participate for the fun of the game in the moment. So, too I may not be able to enjoy anything because I am worried that it is not good for me, or will make me fat. We are focused on what this action is going to do or we worry about how it will come out, and then we can never just make the decision or enjoy the ride, or even let it go, if it does not turn out all that well. The deeper issue with the focus on results is we want to avoid pain. If we know we are going to win, then we don’t have to obsess about losing. If we know we are sick, we want to know it will end with getting better. This focus on results leads directly to the next learning, which has to do with attachments.
This is perhaps the most difficult learning of all. It seems at first like it is about not craving so many material objects, and philosophically the Upanishads that would tell us we are confused by a veil of illusion that makes it hard to discriminate between reality and appearance. One can see why Emerson with his idealism, was attracted to Hinduism because he spoke of a deeper truth behind the material. Practically this teaches us to accept the transience of life, and in fact in western traditions this weekend marks that time of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is believed to be the thinnest.
Both Buddha and Patanjali realised that suffering is fundamental to life, and that our sorrow is deepened by our desire for permanence. I suspect some of this desire for permanence plays out in the material objects we own, or in the items we collect like books or memorabilia, and a good practice for any of us is to periodically clean out those things that attach us to the world, as a signal that we accept our own impermanence. Fundamentally, this is why change is so difficult for us. We like things to stay the same because they reminds us that some things will not change, and so we will not feel so vulnerable to an existence which is fleeting. So we may resist doing something a new way at church, or changing the way a room is set up with the chairs we love because it is a deeper reminder of the way things have been and should be forever and ever.
Part of our concern about transience is the loss of personal memory. Long ago in my own life I participated in the most disciplined physical activity I have ever been involved in when I was a football player. It was not yoga. It was concerned with results and attachment to achievement in the world, and I suppose some degree of permanence with personal fame and status. Yet my college team set a record for losses, and I never achieved any fame, not even BMOC. Recently I have been reading more and more about the permanent brain injuries brought on by this most violent of sports, where young men literally hurtle their bodies through the air to injure one another. In a way yoga and football for me are like the balancing of opposites. The articles I have read have made me at least briefly worried about how many hits to the head I endured as a football player after participating for nine years long ago. Perhaps it is also a fear of losing memory, or losing my individual identity that in my attached mode of being wants to be permanent, and is saddened by all the attachments to the world I feel that I will one day have to relinquish. To a historian, nothing is more powerful than memory, and it is here that yoga gives me my final learning. Yes, part of that is learning to not be so attached to my things, and to the world. I know I will have to let go of my books, to my beautiful mind’s eye view of the Maine coastline, and all the churches and people I love. But there is a deeper learning, too. Memory for most of us is a personal recollection of those events and people we have known in our lifetimes. It is meaningful for all of us to bring those memories to life. And it helps with grief.
Patanjali teaches that memory is more than a recollection of past events in my or your particular life. He says that memory is also an intuitive insight to a past that transcends personal experience and connects us with a fundamental unity of being. I have evoked this experience in a prior sermon when I spoke about being at Gettysburg once, and standing on Cemetery Ridge where the Confederate army hurled their final assault on the Union line, and lost the battle suffering thousands of casualties. Standing there looking at the open field I began to inexplicably cry. I could feel the pain of thousands who had given their lives that day. Was this other life, the life of these soldiers buried in my very being? I suppose the Hindus might say that I was remembering a past life where I had participated in the battle. While I am not saying that is impossible, I would say that this is something other, a universal oneness of experience we are all part of. In a way the breath I take now was the breath that those soldiers took on that hot July day in 1863. It is still a part of me. While all of life is suffering, and those tears are an affirmation of that, I also learned that all of life is continually and eternally brought back into being through an eternal memory. I believe my mind knew suffering when it remembered it. I believe the mind also knows beauty, truth and right when it sees or experiences it.
Yoga teaches us to remember the body, as it will lead us to a deeper knowing when we use it. Yoga teaches us to not worry about results, but be present in the moment. Yoga teaches us to not be so attached to the things of this world, for all is transient. And yoga teaches us that there is a memory deeper than memory that we can be one with, and are one with even when all we know is gone.
Closing Words – from “Circles” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our [personal] memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “A man,” said Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.”