Let It Be a Dance: Experiencing the Transcendent
Guest Sermon by Beth Lefever
Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie
April 19, 2009

I was gently taken to task, recently, by a good friend who was uncomfortable with my speaking about the transcendent in a sermon.

I no longer recall which sermon she was referring to, and in fact, probably forgot that piece of the story within a few minutes after the conversation.

It was totally incidental to the point she was making.

She was raising the issue because she believes it is a trend that is happening more and more in our churches, and she was disappointed that I had apparently joined the flow of this trend.

I sat back and sighed when she said this to me, for I had tried not to offend.

I had used all of the appropriate metaphors that Unitarian Universalists love so much – or at least those with which they are less twitchy: Great Mystery, Universal Good, Spirit, Universal Truth.

I know I had done this because I always do it.

I always try not to use those more typical words, in speaking about the transcendent, which make so many of us squirm when we hear them, words such as God, Holy, prayer, divine...

I even take care in selecting hymns from our very own Unitarian Universalist hymnal; I take care that I not select those that I think are going to be "too spiritual" for our more intellectual sensibilities.

But even with those efforts, I'd gotten too close to the edge for my friend.

I have been thinking a lot about her comments since we had the discussion.

Hers was a criticism with which I am not very comfortable.

And yet, I realized, it is a criticism I am fairly quick to make myself when confronted with religious language or concepts that set my teeth on edge.

That does not happen much, for me, when I am in a Unitarian Universalist setting because by and large, Unitarian Universalists are sensitive to the use of religious language.

We know that many who are among us have come from religious pasts that were distasteful or hurtful in one way or another, and that, when that is the case, those who have not yet fully recovered from those past experiences will quickly shy away from language that evokes a sense of what has gone before.

And so we tend to be careful.

But even in our sensitized churches, the language and ideas coming from the pulpit, the music and readings, and the responses and reflections after the service, can become problematic for some, as it did for my friend.

For me, it is in the broader culture that I am most put off by religious language and ritual.

For one thing, I'm not sure that I think it belongs in the broader culture, at least to the extent, and in the ways, that it exists there.

I certainly do not think it belongs in our political discourse, where it strikes me as largely inauthentic and shamelessly manipulative even when it is seemingly sincerely spouted therein.

Nor do I believe it belongs on our currency, or upon plaques in our courthouses or government buildings.

I don't believe it should publicly precede high school football games or athletic events, or follow in the rhetoric of those who believe god graced them with a win.

(Surely any god worthy of the title would shutter to think that in a world of ceaseless war, genocide, hunger, disease and environmental degradation, people would think she concerns herself with who won the bowl game!)

I don't believe the religious language of prayer should precede our governmental proceedings or community gatherings, certainly unless those offering the prayer can do so far more broadly and inclusively than ever they seem able to do.

I do believe that an announced moment of shared quiet to reflect upon whatever values and sources guide us, individually, and to deliberate upon the purpose and import of our coming together – I think that kind of ritual could almost always be useful for public gatherings.

But public prayer or pronouncements that favor one religious tradition over another -- no.

It's offensive and counterproductive.

Where it can hardly be fairly considered offensive, and yet where I struggled mightily with it recently was in my participation in a class at a non-Unitarian Universalist seminary.

It was a class I took in Christian ethics at the very progressive Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart.

I knew that I would need to make my religious orientation known in this class fairly early on, and was given that opportunity when a student parenthetically commented to the class that he assumed we were all Christians.

I was a little reticent to speak up just then, but one student who knew me, looked rather pointedly in my direction, anxious, I suspect, for the chaos to begin.

So I took a deep breath and blurted it out.

I said that I was a Unitarian, not a Trinitarian, and that while I did not consider myself a Christian, I did feel a certain possessiveness about Jesus and his teachings, both of which, I believe, are far bigger than the Christian faith, and which might even bypass Christianity entirely.

Well, I didn't actually say that last bit, thinking I would let them warm up to me more gradually, but I do believe it.

I do believe that Jesus would not be a Christian, were he here today -- but perhaps that is my particular prejudice.

After a shocked (I am over-stating for affect; it was merely surprised) silence, the class went on, and eventually came to both accept me, seemingly, and welcome my comments.

Perhaps I was their token non-Christian about whom they could feel proud of their treatment!

That's common among liberal religious folks, as we know, and as they were – in spite of their largely Mennonite persuasion.

At any rate, it turned out to be I who had the tougher time of it, and that had far more to do with the religious language of the texts they were using than of the conversation we were sharing.

The texts were good -- excellent really.

One was Kingdom Ethics by Stassen and Gushee, a book that excited me with its exploration of the teachings of Jesus and the way in which much of Christianity diminishes those teachings, or ignores them pretty much entirely.

I loved the book and the ethics it uplifted, but I viscerally flinched every time I came across terms such as "God's Kingdom" and "God's reign" and "surrender to God's will."

I viscerally recoiled, time after time, and had to painstakingly set myself back on my spiritual feet before I could proceed.

That, more than anything, tells me I still have healing to do from a wounded Christian past, as well as an offensively intrusive cultural Christian present.

But it is healing work I want to do.

It is work I need to do if I am going to proceed with ministry.

One cannot be a minister, even within the Unitarian Universalist denomination, and be afraid of religious language.

Furthermore, I do not like the fact that we have allowed traditionalists, conservatives and fundamentalists to co-opt language that we well might use, and richly so, were it not so negatively connotated.

Our denomination has a small-group curriculum that we used a number of times at my home church, UU Elkhart.

For those who participated, it was a profound and meaningful curriculum that stimulated deep, reflective sharing and fostered closer, more intimate relationships among group members.

But I know of at least one person who chose not to participate, at least in part, because she could not get beyond the title of the curriculum, which was "Evensong."

"Evensong" was connected to her religious past in a way that was unpleasant for her, and she simply did not want to go there.

She did not participate.

I understand that.

I relate to it.

And yet I had a very rich experience working with this curriculum, both as a group member and as a facilitator of several of the groups. As did my husband and, by report and observation, most of those who participated.

We lose something when we indiscriminately give away our language.

While it is true that words often have quite precise meanings, we humans are an ever creative bunch,

and are always inventing new words to suit our purposes, or finding new ways to use old terms, as I

believe I did a bit ago when I used the word "connotated."

Spellcheck could not reconcile itself to the word, (which always makes me feel either furiously frustrated or smugly superior, depending on my mood) and neither could I find it in the dictionary which lists "connoted" as the past tense of the word "connote."

I tried "connoted," just to be correct, but it sounds rather cut-off and inhibited, don't you think -- as though it just really didn't want to put itself out there; whereas "connotated" sounds bold and pushy and forthright.

I like that in a word!

So I used it.

And that's how language evolves.

So anyway, though the term Evensong may have had a particular meaning as it was used in the woman's past, its meaning in this particular Unitarian Universalist context was very different.

If we are unable to move beyond the past meaning of words, and examine what they might mean in a new and different context, we may be unfairly limiting ourselves, and/or others; we may be losing out.

Certainly, this is not always the case.

Some words have such a clearly ascribed meaning that even if it is used in a different context, we would know that whomever was using it had chosen it for a reason we could not embrace.

I wouldn't long consider participation in any kind of group that might call itself The Progressive Gestapo or Newer Nicer Nazis or War Mongers for Peace.

I might, however, take a look at a group called the Green Gestapo, to see if it was a new and radical environmental group with a punch that was still within the bounds of acceptable.

I might explore a group called Skinheads for Peace even though I know that Skinheads are affiliated with the young Nazi movement.

And if I did, I would find that Skinheads for Peace use the teachings of that famous skinhead, Gandhi, as their philosophical framework.

While I would probably not be interested in a group called Born Again Followers of Jesus, I might take a serious look at any group calling themselves Born Again Unitarians or Unitarian Universalist Followers of Jesus.

And the words prayer, divine, sacred, holy, spirit, devout, god, worship?

These are not, in and of themselves, evil, just as the terms kingdom, reign and surrender (wince as I might when I say them), are not necessarily foul or noxious.

Nor is speaking of the transcendent, wrong.

Is there not room in the Unitarian Universalist tradition for mystery?

Is there not room for the Infinite -- that which is exceedingly unknowable, and which appears will be infinitely unknowable?

If there weren't, most of us wouldn't be here.

Is there not room for the celebration of the Infinite and the Great Mystery?

Is there not room to praise the wonder of it all?

If there weren't, we wouldn't be here, most of us.

If there weren't, I wouldn't be here.

You wouldn't need me; you wouldn't need any minister.

All you would need is the coffee pot, the newspaper, and a nudge from among you to social justice endeavors.

But most of you are here, and I am here, because we want more than that.

We want more than a social club.

We want more than a social service club.

We want a church (and there is nothing intrinsically evil about that word, either) that will not ignore the spiritual, or deny it, but rather will lift up the notion of the spiritual in all of its rich potentiality.

We want a church that will nurture and nourish the experience of the spiritual, however that manifests for us as individuals.

We want a church that will affirm the exploration and celebration of the transcendent in all of its depth and variety and complexity, and will draw such things to our attention.

We want a church that will affirm our seeking of truth and meaning, and support our journey along the sacred path of life.

Dare I say sacred?

Yes! Yes, I do.

Because I believe that life is sacred, that it is to be regarded with awe, respect and reverence.

I believe that the life journey is sacred.

And if I may reclaim some other co-opted terminology, let me say that I believe that love is holy; compassion, transcendent; service to others, divine – not in the sense of coming from a god-figure, necessarily, but rather coming from that core within us, or perhaps even from beyond us, that is pure and good and sacrificial.

My use of the words may differ, some, from yours, and certainly differs a lot from that of the mainstream, but the words are still good.

They are powerful.

They speak to those moments of transcendence which often defy the limits of language, but which you and I know well: the feeling of overwhelmedness at the miracle of birth and life and growth; the feeling of awe at the sheer brilliance of ever-evolving creation; the feeling of an exquisite tenderness that so swamps our souls, on occasion, that we can neither contain nor explain it.

And if I cannot say these things, if I cannot speak of them, I cannot fully minister within our own religious tradition.

We, cannot minister to one another.

We cannot support one another in our amazement, our even our despair; we cannot nourish one another's search for truth and meaning.//

Transcendence is important to me because it seems so true to the Unitarian Universalist tradition.

We do acknowledge the transcendent; we do acknowledge that which transcends the bounds of the commonplace; transcends the bounds of that which we, for certain, know.

And we celebrate it!

We celebrate it in our attention to, and love of, art, literature, music, and dance.

We celebrate it in recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and when we affirm the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.

We celebrate it when we relish the gifts of nature, captured so well in this excerpt of a piece by novelist Dan Wakefield:

In the fields and woods not far from my house, in the burning leaves of autumn and the running streams of spring, I felt close to the source and mystery of things. The perfume of wet clover, the rough hide feel of the bark of oaks, rushes of wind lifting curled red maple leaves off the hard autumn ground in swirling eddies – these and all the million sights, sounds, and smells of nature, from the sweet taste of foxtail grass I chewed as I strolled, to the quick flash of a perch below the surface of a brook, all were revelations and messages of some great creating force...

He goes on to say,

Sometimes I felt a frustration that I couldn't decipher the message, that I couldn't learn the meaning of it all, of life and earth, simply by trying to communicate with nature: staring, for instance, as hard as I could at a rock with layers of colors, or feeling its smooth cool surface with my fingers and pressing it in my palm as if I could squeeze out an answer. I knew there were secrets in the woods and sometimes I felt I was very close to them, close to understanding, and there was a thrill in sensing such knowledge was there if only I could look close enough or be still enough or attuned enough.

Yes -- That is the transcendent experience.

That pull to oneness with the wonder of the mystery; that sense that we can know it, if only we can attend to it fully enough; a desire that ever more reverently draws us to bask in the vastness of it all.

Such transcendence can be experienced in nature, in relationship, in exquisite music or moving art, or simply by going deeply within and being quiet.

It can be known in something as simple as a scent carried on a summer breeze, or in the bliss of a bite into a sweet, juicy peach on a warm summer day.

We know it, we experience it, we long for it, we celebrate it.

And we speak of it, we share it, we affirm it.

In the book, The Mermaid Chair, from which I took our opening reading, the monk, Whit, or Brother Thomas, who was given that name because he had so many doubts, says:

Sometimes I experience God like this Beautiful Nothing. And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it.

And then other times it's just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we're meant to step into it, that's all.

It is my wish that we may all feel free to rest, that we may all feel free to dance, however we are called, from one moment to the next, by that quietly insistent impulse toward the sacred.

And that we may feel safe and free here within our Unitarian Universalist churches – especially here in our churches -- to share the joy of our dance, and the dreams of our rest, each of us, one with another.

May it ever be so!