Every fall, the week before new member Sunday, I preach about our faith here at All Souls -- not what we don't believe, but what we, at least what I, do believe, a kind of credo as it were without dogma. So here it goes.
Let me begin with this. You didn't choose to be born. Choice may play a large role on many key occasions during the course of our lives, but it had nothing to do with our getting here in the first place. We didn't choose our parents. We didn't choose our country. We didn't choose the economic stratum into which we were born, or our gender, or our sexual preference, or even our century. As I said last week, whenever we are tempted to ask, "What did I do to deserve this?," if you take that question to its bottom line, the answer is "Nothing." We did nothing to be here, especially not to be here now. In the largest sense, we are the innocent victims and the innocent beneficiaries of life's incredible largess.
This is a theological point, by the way. Think back for a moment. Think back beyond your parents and grandparents, and then back further, ten, twenty, fifty, one thousand generations. In fact, if human beings and our closest ancestors have been on this planet for a million years, you have to go back 4 to 5 hundred thousand generations just to trace your human ancestory. Now, let me tell you what I am certain about what happened during this expanse of time. Not only your parents and grandparents, but 40 to 50 thousand couples down the very spine of your family tree survied infant mortality, plague, famine, and a myriad of other hardships simply to get the puberty and make love. And when they made love to conceive another slightly closer ancestor, each and every time the one sperm of a million that had you in its back pocket somehow made it to the egg.
Reckon the odds. The fact that anyone of us actually exists staggers the imagination. But then you have to take it back further, back to the beginning, back through a million missing links, even back to the ur-paramecium. We are genetically connected all the way back to the beginning, not of time, but of life. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.
I find this far more amazing, even more inspiring, than most theological reflection. Last week I spoke of my awe at the underwater world on the Great Barrier Reef. I said that it was impossible to be blase in the presence of a giant clam. And that is true. But it is even more true that it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to be blase when reflecting, deeply and humbly, on our own place in the creation. We're not talking about mere matter here; we're talking blow it away miracle. We don't need somthing unnatural, like a virgin birth, to prove or test our faith. We need only a deeper appreciation for the natural world, and for our own intimate and absolutely awe inspiring connection, over mellinia, first with our millions of ancestors, and then, ultimately, with all that lives.
In my opinion, perhaps the greatest theologian of the twentieth century was Rudolph Otto. Much of what he had to say was a little silly. That's OK. Anyone who dares identify him or herself as a theologian risks being silly. But when it came to identifying the core experience of religion, Otto was spot on. He described the Holy as a mysteriam tremens et fascinans. A tremendous -- which means awe and fear inspiring -- a tremendous and fascinating mystery. Consider the cosmos. There are one hundred billion stars in our galexy and ours is one of perhaps a hundred billion galexies. And that's just in this cosmos. Their might be others.
So what do we do? We sit on a single grain of sand on this vast cosmic beach and argue with one another about which religious teacher has the best insider information on God and the afterlife. Is it Jesus? Is it the Buddha? Is it Mohhamad? Or Einstein? Or Neitzche? Give me a break. All I know is that a billion billion accidents conspired to give each one of these admittedly powerful and compelling teachers the opportunity even to teach. This does't strip me of my faith; it universalizes my faith. It makes me both more humble and more filled with awe. The tremendous and fascinating mystery of being alive and having to die need not be trivialized into a faith with answers for every question. Nor, as I said last week, need we reject faith, a larger hope and honest to God awe, simply because the God we were raised to believe in is too small. Our disbelief in such a god may be just as petty, just as small. If, as Otto suggests, the mind-food of religion is awe, and if Jesus and many other great teachers are right when they say that the heart-beat of religion is humility and compassion, we should all seek for a larger faith, more open-minded and -hearted and -handed, a faith that connects us with one another in a way that at least approximates the sequential miracle that brought us here together in the first place.
Over the past two weeks, in my office and in a class I have been teaching, I have been sharing these thoughts with our prospective new members. To join a congregation like ours is not, at least not importantly, to reject what others believe. It is to embrace something larger, both more mysterious and more real. It is to shake one's head in wonder at the strangeness and majesty of creation, to receive life as a gift, not take it for granted as a given. It is to dare to rise to our human occasion. It is to live in such a way that our lives will be worth dying for.
The Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions, all with their original font in the Hebrew scriptures, trace our inheritance back to the Garden of Eden, to Eve and Adam, the ur-parents, some six thousand years ago. As myth, which by the way I have no problem with, this rings true for me. Just not true enough, not big enough, not nearly big enough, for the earth, not to mention the cosmos.
But still, it rings true. I think about the Mormons, who have added a fourth book to Western revelation, but trace themselves back to the same roots in Genesis as do the Jews, Christians and Muslims. Geneology is incredibly important to the Mormons. They believe that if we can trace our ancestries back far enough -- given that anyone who was born before the 19th century would not be privy to Josoph Smith's revelation -- that we can pray for our ancestors and liberate them from limbo. Of course, there are limits to this scheme of redemption. Even the finest Mormon geneologist, working with the best-connected families, can only get us back to the 12th century. According to this dispensation, those of our ancestors -- and all of us had them -- who were alive two thousand, or even twenty thousand years ago are toast.
About forty years ago, shortly after my father was elected to the U. S. Senate, the Mormon Church, in a somewhat self-seeking, but nonetheless interesting gesture, offered to do his geneology. My mother still has it, in two large vellum covered books some two thousand pages long. By dint of this exercise, I learned that I was related to Charlemagne, who evidently had a lot of illigitimate children. The only mistake the Mormons made, and this in gold print on the cover of both folios, was to spell my father's name wrong. This somewhat diminished the authority of their work.
Ancestral lines are important to all of us, though less so today, perhaps, than ever before. As we become less tribal, more global, our connection to the past becomes a little more tenuous. In this respect, the Mormon obsession with geneology has a certain nobility to it. Our blood lines do connect us in an intimate way to the source of our being. But there are more expansive, more encompassing way to look at our interdependencies. I encountered one in Australia while reading about the Aboriginal peoples. Aborigals are born not into one but into two families. The first is their blood family, the second their dream family, the family that places them in a larger mythos. Each dream family has not a bloodline but a songline, one connected to the natural world, each with its own story, a myth that is a song. When aborigines go on what they call a walkabout -- and this can last for weeks -- they enter the outback and follow their song. Each hill and rivulet along their songline is part of the story, a story passed down for thousands of years within each dreaming, or mythic family. These songlines are closely guarded, but they can be traded from family to family to ensure save passage through other parts of what might seem to the untutored eye a barran, undistinguished wilderness. There are the mosquito dreaming and the wallaby dreaming, the two babies dreaming and the butterfly dreaming. Each is not only a song but a path, somtimes a path that stretches across the vast expanse of Australia from sea to sea.
Along these songlines each dreaming not only participates in an age-old mythic drama, but the relationship between people extends to an intimate relationship with the natural world, with the creation itself. This is why the aborigines consider so much of their land to be sacred. If miners come and level the hills that make up part of your story, the songline is broken.
In a way, most western religious myths, the myths on which our great religions base themselves, are also dreamings, but the songlines are abstracted from the ground of our being. This can lead to a division between creature and creation, even higher creatures and lower ones. One result of this is to relegate this world into a charnel house from which we must be saved. Here, we can learn something from the ancient aboriginies.
This world is enchanted, riddled with meanings, itself sacred ground.
Though we are too far removed from the primitive mythic thought patterns of the Aborigines to recapture our own songlines, this doesn't mean that we cannot extend our theological imaginations beyond the dualistic western mythos we have inherited. Playing with this in our minds, we might even begin to think of our blood lines as a songlines, a long dreaming, an ancient and continuing journey leading from the beginning of time until now, a dreaming along paths from one corner of this earth to another, every chance encounter over hundred of mellenia spelling our fate, marking our destiny. Each blood-line, each songline a melody, passed on in our genes, to which each succeeding generation adds its harmonies, coupling songs, adding instruments and orchestration, building toward if not a cosmic then surely a world-wide earth centered symphony, cacaconus sometimes but susceptible in moments of grace and graciousness of harmonic resolution.
When fundamentalists say that the scriptures are not myth but fact, and the secular materialists say they are not fact but myth, I therefore answer both with the same question: "What is wrong with myth?" As with God, the real question we should be asking ourselves is only whether our myth is big enough to encompass the mystery, majesty and wonder of our being.
So the next time someone asks you what Unitarians believe, you needn't answer in the negative, by ticking off all the teachings of your childhood that you have rejected. The response you will get, by the way, is probably this: "That's fine. I agree with you. It's why I don't go to church."
No, when they ask you believe, dare to launch into poetry, speak not of miracles but of the one great miracle, talk of awe and humility and compassion. Speak of the redemptive work of community. Share your dreaming with them. Sing them a new song.
Copyright All Souls 1997
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