Jim Checkley
January 27, 2008

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            Imagine it is 2,500 years ago and you are a Greek with a question.  This question has been bothering you for quite some time and you just can’t figure it out.  So one day you decide to consult the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, one of the ancient world’s most intriguing and unusual establishments.  For there at the ancient temple located beneath the shining rocks of Mount Parnassus, the God Apollo spoke through a Pythia, or human priestess, and offered inspiration and guidance to all who came.

            Legends tell that Delphi and its environs had long been considered to have mystical powers.  A few years ago I went to Australia for my 50^th birthday and actually turned 50 while visiting Uluru, formerly know as Ayers Rock, the largest monolith in the world.  I was nervous about going out into the middle of the desert to a giant sandstone monolith for such an auspicious occasion—ironically, I had always thought I’d go to Greece and turn 50 at the Parthenon—but I’ve got to tell you, Uluru has a magic to it that has to be experienced and cannot be described.  If Delphi was like Uluru, then I understand exactly why the ancient Greeks put an oracle there and why they thought the very land held special power.

            When you arrive at Delphi, you approach the entrance to the temple and notice something carved into the wall, something that has come down to us as the best known of all the Delphic injunctions: in Greek it reads: GNOTHI SEAUTON, which we translate as ”know thyself.”  Some sources say that “know thyself” is the answer the Oracle gave to Chilon of Sparta who asked: “What is best for man?”  It is, interestingly enough, the same advice that the Oracle in the 1999 movie The Matrix gave to Neo, only in the movie the phrase was written in Latin over the entrance to the Oracle’s kitchen.  Times change, but the questions (and some of the answers), do not.

            Now it seems self-evident that knowing yourself would be a good thing.  But just what does it mean to “know thyself?”  It is a question as old at the Delphic Oracle itself.  Socrates said that it meant that “The unexamined life is not worth living,” that it was important on a daily basis to look inward to discover the true nature of our beings and to consciously make decisions about our lives and our dreams.  In The Matrix, know thyself meant to know the essence of your inherent nature, which for Neo meant to know, the way we know we are in love, with every fiber of our beings, that he was the One, the savior of mankind.  And when asked what he thought of the injunction “know thyself”, St. Augustine replied, “I suppose it is that the mind should reflect upon itself.”

            Nowadays we call such self-reflection “metacognition,” the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self reflection, to introspect.  This ability was for centuries thought the sole province of human beings, but animal research has challenged that old prejudice—some animals seem to have the ability to reflect upon their internal mental states, if only at a rudimentary level.  That aside, while I think that knowing yourself certainly includes self-reflection, I think it is more than that.  For modern science has shown us quite dramatically that we are more than just our conscious selves, and knowing oneself, truly knowing oneself, would include understanding all the layers of our beings, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.

            So let me suggest that simple—or even complex—self reflection will not get you where you want to go.  One thing that has become clear over the years is that we humans are not monolithic beings—we are not simply a conscious being that makes fully informed choices about life.  We want to think we are, and we certainly behave as if we are, but modern research on the sometimes surprising science of us has revealed that often, our control is an illusion, and that there is something very powerful and very deep going on that we don’t even know about at a conscious level.

            Research shows that our subconscious and unconscious selves play a big role in who we are, how we feel, and what we do.  More fundamentally, new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful, and independent than previously thought.  Generalized goals, like eating, mating, traveling, and the like, appear to be instigated by neural software programs that can be run by the subconscious whenever it, and not we, chooses.

            Let me give you a couple of examples:

            In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale were able to alter people’s judgments of a stranger by handing those people a cup of coffee.  It’s true.  What happened was this: the subject of the experiment was handed either a hot cup of coffee or an iced latte in a social setting.  Afterwards, the people who held the iced latte rated a hypothetical person they read about as being much colder, less social, and more selfish than did the students who held the hot coffee.  As improbable and strange as this seems, this result is consistent with others that have poured forth over the last few years.  For example, new studies show that people are more tidy if there is a tang of cleaning liquid in the air, and they are more prone to be highly competitive in their negotiations with one another if there is a leather briefcase at the end of a long table rather than an old, worn backpack, in which case they are more laid back.

            Psychologists say that what is going on is a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells, and sounds can selectively activate goals and motives that people already have in their brains.  What is going on is that the subconscious is running preexisting programs that strongly influence our choices and our behavior—all without us actually having any conscious awareness that we are being manipulated by our own brains.

            These findings help to explain how we can be happy one minute, then for no apparent reason, unhappy the next.  I’m sure everybody in here has experienced this phenomenon—you show up to a party feeling great, then, without apparent reason, you get depressed, turn sour, and want to get away.  No amount of self-reflection can explain the change, but it could be that one of the women is wearing the same dress that your ex-girlfriend was wearing the night she tossed all your possessions onto the street or perhaps the smell of the house triggered repressed resentments about your childhood.  You didn’t consciously realize any of it, but your subconscious did, and initiated a hard-wired program that actually changed your basic equilibrium.

            I’m going to go a little further and say that I don’t think that self-reflection is enough to know thyself for yet another reason.  No matter how hard we try, I don’t think it’s possible to get a true picture of who we are simply by looking inward.  While it’s true that only we can see our deepest thoughts, our deepest desires, and our deepest motivations, one thing we simply cannot see is how others see us. We need more data, data that reflects the who that we are in the eyes of others.  In short, to fully know ourselves, we need feedback on the self that others know and experience.

            And thanks to the Internet, all of us can do something that the visitors to the Oracle at Delphi could not:  While they could ask a god for advice, we can Google ourselves.  How many of you have Googled yourself?  According to a Pew Research Study, by the end of 2007, about half of all Americans have come a little closer to knowing themselves, at least as others see them, by Googling themselves.  But whether one Googles oneself or simply listens to what others who know and care about you have to say, I don’t think we can get close to truly knowing who we are without input from outside of ourselves.  That perspective allows us, at the very least, to check on whether who we think we are matches with how we are perceived by others, and, if there is a discrepancy, as there often is, figure out what happened, and correct it.

            Another thing about human beings is we are not static.  We change as we grow older, more experienced, and, as Billy Joel might say, earn a few scars on our faces.  I certainly don’t think I am the same person I was in my early twenties, before my experience with advanced Hodgkin’s disease and all that went with it.  I have a sense of continuity, certainly, but deep inside I know that I have changed at a very fundamental level, a conclusion that has been confirmed by many of those closest to me over the years.

            While these assertions may seem to run counter to the strong current in our culture that we each have an essence that is eternal and at some fundamental level, unchanging, recent findings in neuroscience and neuropsychology tend to support my experience.  I do not dispute that we are born with certain aspects of ourselves hardwired.  Nor do I dispute that this hard wiring is sometimes quite difficult to change.  Nonetheless, research is showing that while older brains may be less efficient than younger brains, and may in fact, show signs of memory loss and the like, older brains may actually be wiser brains.  It has to do with how information is accumulated and processed, but the point is that for this and other reasons, our brains—and with them, us—change over time.  So unlike some people who think it’s better to be consistent than right, I think it’s OK to change your mind because, in fact, your mind changes.  We change.  We become different people with different desires, different wants, different goals, different values.  And keeping up with ourselves, not living in the past, is a big part of knowing ourselves.

            Which brings me to the point that knowing thyself doesn’t just mean knowing and understanding one’s essence.  It also means knowing our dreams, our abilities, our real virtues and even our frailties.  It means knowing ourselves in all our aspects, including how we change over time, at least as well as we know the world, our jobs, and those around us.  But this often isn’t the case.  Just as we are generally good at helping somebody else figure things out, whether it be their love life, money situation, problems on the job, or whatever, we are often not so good at taking care of ourselves, and the same applies here.  As I’ve gotten older I have realized just how much I was unaware about my younger self and I think many people have had the same experience and that some, some go almost all the way though life as complete strangers to themselves.

            So does all this mean it’s not possible to fully know yourself?  I think that’s a fair question.  There are those who say that it’s not possible to understand oneself, that an accurate definition of self is impossible from an objective point of view.  Others think that the exploding field of neuroscience—the study of the brain at an anatomical, but in particular, at the cellular and even molecular level—is the most hopeful candidate for providing scientific answers to the questions that have perplexed human beings for thousands of years, including who we are and what is our true nature.

            Neuroscience is expanding at a fantastic pace.  My son, TJ, who is doing the lay leading today, has his masters degree in neuroscience and so I have some idea of how far we have come since the old days of stone knives and bearskins when I was studying biochemistry in graduate school.

            But you know, while I think neuroscience is going to be able to teach us a lot about what we are and how our brains work, I think it’s going to be less good at telling us who we are and how we should live.  So while it is clear that we are comprised of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious beings, and that our feeling of total conscious control is something of an illusion, no matter what science says, no matter what the limitations, it is vital that we get to know ourselves to the best of our ability, and be honest and accepting of what we learn.  If you insist on being ignorant or if you insist on being somebody else, then who will ever be you?

            All of which brings me to William Shakespeare.  Thought by many to be the world’s greatest playwright, Shakespeare’s greatest play may have been Hamlet.  In Hamlet, Polonius is preparing his son Laertes for his travel abroad.  Polonius directs his son to commit a “few precepts to memory”, the most famous of which is, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

            Much has been written about this quote, and I certainly am not going to do any literary exposition here.  But I do think it’s interesting that Polonius assumes that Laertes knows himself, for how can one be true to oneself without first knowing oneself?  Thus, before following Polonius’ advice, we first must follow the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, something that is at best a daily exploration, and at worst, impossible.  But leaving aside for the moment the very real issue of how do we know ourselves, what does it mean to be true to that self?  What does it mean to be true to the self we know and understand today, who needs to get about with the task of living, and hopefully living well?

            Well, the first thing we know is that Shakespeare was not trying to grant Laertes permission to behave however he wanted.  If you are an axe murderer, it will not avail you to say you were simply being true to yourself.  So that’s not what’s going on here.  Unless we live in solitude, being true to oneself will always mean being true in the context of culture, society, and law.  Thus, one of the most difficult aspects of being true to yourself is how to navigate in a complex society that presents us with scores of often complicated, difficult, and even ambiguous relationships.

            And we do live in a complex society that demands much of us, and that, for almost all of us, requires some level of compromise.  It is inevitable.  So we tend to wear masks, masks that have the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, that are safe, that don’t rock the boat.  Sometimes we wear them because we have to, one of those accommodations to reality that just has to be.  But sometimes we wear them out of fear, and sometimes we wear them out of a lack of self-confidence.  Those are the masks we need to work on, need to shed, if we are to live a truly authentic life of integrity.

            Still, we are left with the difficult question of how to choose our path, when to fight and when to yield.  There are many answers to this question, of course, but let me quote what Thomas Jefferson had to say: “In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”  Looking back on the 1970s, I’m not sure I agree with Jefferson on matters of style, but I do certainly agree with him on matters of principle.

            Which begs the question, of course, which principles?  Well, if we are being true to ourselves, then the principles we are being true to are the principles we found within ourselves, while we were following the Delphic command to know thyself.  You know, taken seriously, this position is a pretty radical one in our culture, one that sits at the core of what I understand it means to be a modern Unitarian Universalist and an adherent of liberal religion.

            I’ve been coming to this church for 31 years, and have always believed that one of the important missions of this church is to help people get to know themselves, their real selves, and then assist them in being true to themselves as they live their lives and participate in our world.  This is, I think, a very different mission from many other churches.  In many other churches the mission is to convince you to distrust your humanity, to almost disavow it, in favor of revealed truth that comes from God, truth that is unchanging, that is to be accepted and obeyed.  Our church, and all those like it, are very special places, are sanctuaries of humanity in the broadest sense of the word and I, for one, am grateful for them.

            But did you know that some of the people in this church are among the most disliked people in America?  It’s true.  And I’m not talking this time about being gay or lesbian.  According to a study conducted by sociologists at the University of Minnesota, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are among the most disliked persons in America.  They fell below Muslims, homosexuals, and recent immigrants in a poll that measured the respondents’ view of whether and how much a number of different groups shared  the respondents’ vision of America and what it means to be an American.  Unitarian Universalists, as free thinking adherents of liberal religion, and by that I mean us—you and me—we are not much liked or trusted by many in mainstream society, something it pays to know when you are out and about in the world.

            Having noted that, we all know that no matter who you are, sometimes being true to oneself and one’s principles takes enormous courage and may even put you at risk of harm.  It sometimes means having to stand against the majority, or your friends, or even your family.  It means engaging in a regular pattern of behavior, and of making choices that are consistent with your espoused values and with the person you claim to be inside.  It means  having the courage of your convictions, and of being willing to put them out on the table, even when they are not popular.  And I suggest to you that it all begins with knowing yourself, and then of accepting yourself, fully and completely, both the good and the bad, in order to be true to the good and change the bad.

            Now, I don’t mean to imply that we are always alone in our lives and in our quest to be true to ourselves.  Certainly, we have our friends, our family, we have this church, and we have a community of thought and feeling that goes back hundreds of years.  All of that is enormously important.

            And yet, we are a creedless religion that honors the individual conscious; which leads me to one of the scariest things about liberal religion and trying to know and be true to oneself.

            There isn’t anyone else to blame.

            When it’s up to you, when you are being true to yourself, then that’s all there is.  This is another reason why living authentically, living the life of personal integrity, takes so much courage.  Sometimes we’re all we’ve got. 

            And on this topic, it occurred to me that some Christians wear WWJD wristbands—What would Jesus do?  At first I thought we could wear WWED wristbands—you know, What would Emerson do?  Or even perhaps just get our own WWJD wristbands—only they would stand for What would Jefferson do?  But ultimately I realized that none of these would be authentic, that if there was going to be a UU wristband it would have to read: WWID—What would I do?

            Finally, there’s more to life than principles.  There’s dreams, there’s goals, there’s fun.  Yes, even tortured soul UUs get to have fun.  But strange as it sounds, being true to your dreams, your goals, and your potential can sometimes be just as scary and intimidating as standing up for unpopular principles.  Once we take off our blinders, once we see for real, we begin to understand just how much is possible in our lives and we wonder if we’re up to it.  We look out at the vista of possibility and it can be overwhelming.

            The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it this way:  “There is nothing with which every person is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”  We talk about becoming the true beings that we are and then of being authentic and living lives of integrity, and it certainly sounds good, even exciting, but when it comes down to it, sometimes those prospects can be intimidating and scary.  Sometimes it’s as if we are waiting for somebody to give us permission to be ourselves and pursue our dreams and our potential.

            My message to you is don’t wait for anyone or anything to work on yourself and your dreams.  You see, when we know ourselves, then we come into focus, our dreams become clearer, our path becomes straighter, and our sense of purpose and meaning grows until we feel such power and such of sense of belonging to and being right with the world, that as night follows day, we almost cannot help being true to ourselves.

            So let me close today by suggesting this:  I think there is a way to both know who you really are and at the same time, be true to who you are.  And it’s not through ruminating, or self-reflecting, or taking classes, or any other inward looking activity.  Ultimately, I think knowing yourself and being true to yourself is best accomplished simply by engaging fully in life and making choices and standing by them. 

            In the hit move Batman Begins, Rachel Dawes tells Bruce Wayne that it isn’t who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you.  You are the choices you make and the actions you take.  So if you want to know who you truly are, then put yourself out there, in situations that are challenging, that call for action, because then you’ll know.  There will be an inner voice that will tell you how you are doing.  You can sense it if you are honest with yourself and listen carefully.

            So let me ask you to do something today, something we should do every day of our lives.  Do something that is you.  Do something that is true.

                                                                        Presented July 27, 2008

                                                                        First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

                                                                        Revised for print.

Copyright 2008 by Jim Checkley

Aaron White    July 20, 2008

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Although I was laughing, I had to cringe a bit when I first heard it.  It was one of the most accurate portrayals of someone stumbling through a definition of Unitarian Universalism that I had ever heard, and I saw it on a 2006 episode of The Colbert Report.  After reciting the entire Nicene Creed, the host asks a staff member, Bobby, what religion he is a part of.  When Bobby responds, “I’m a Unitarian,” Colbert asks, “So you’re a Christian, too?”  Here’s Bobby’s response: “Well, I incorporate Christian values as well as aspects of many other religious traditions in my belief in God, and I don’t mean to imply that I necessarily think God exists or doesn’t exist, or that it even maters to Him, or It, or Whoever, what I do or do not believe.  What’s important is that it’s my choice, and that’s what holds the Unitarians together.”

Aaron White   July 13, 2008

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A few months ago I received an email forward.  You know, one of those forwards that has a new piece of information that will shock me, something I am supposed to send to all of my friends and family before it is too late.  No, this email was not the one informing me that one of our presidential candidates is a secret Muslim intent on turning our government over to Iran (although I have received that one), nor was it one of the string of emails warning me of evil men lurking in the parking lots of Wal-Mart, Target, or my local gas station waiting to attack at any moment. Has anyone else been getting these, or is it just me?

No, this particular email forward wanted to shock me by bringing some truth to light about a public figure who was not who he appeared to be - someone who represented our highest aspirations of innocence, education, and family.  This email was about Mr. Rogers.

I was told that Fred Rogers had a violent criminal past he hid from us, that he was forced to work on public television for children as part of his parole, that he had served in the past as a sniper in the Navy Seals with many confirmed kills - that the real reason he wore those sweaters was to cover up his many tattoos from his time in battle.

Of course, this email was far from honest, but I got sucked in for a moment.  The truth about Mr. Rogers is far less shocking.  He had never served in the military but instead was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and his trademark sweaters were all hand-sewn by his mother.

After spending some time online debunking this email, thinking to myself that my beloved internet had once again stolen another hour of my life, I found something that moved me.  In an interview on the television show, Hour Magazine, in the 1980’s, Fred Rogers discussed the philosophy behind his show and his interactions with children.  “I’m sure you know this,” he said, “but the best thing you can ever do is just be yourself.” The best thing we can do for children and others, he said, is simply to “give them one more honest adult in their lives.”

Throughout the last few years, this church has been placing ads in the newspaper, one of which reads, “Honest Religion.” After seeing this interview, I got to thinking: “What does honest religion look like on the ground?”  What would it look like for a place like this to call us each to give to the world “one more honest adult?”

Our Unitarian Universalist community has a long tradition of its members searching to build an honest religion and an honest spiritual life.  We have hundreds of years of experience attempting to build a faith whose members don’t have to take for granted what they hear in church.  A faith like ours challenges each and every one of us to ask whether what we hear and experience here honestly fits with what the real world looks like, with what our lives teach us.   

This is not a simple religion. In an honest faith like ours, none of us can have our worth determined by what some book, some society, some theologian, or any other person says.  Each of us is constantly, every day, called to ask these questions for ourselves: “Who am I, really? What moves me? Am I living the life that wants to live in me?”   

In my own experience, when I slow down and take this challenge of honest religion in my life, I experience two things that seem to contradict one another at first.  One the one hand, I discover that there are places in my life where I could be doing a lot better, that I could be in much better relationship with my family, friends, with what I call God.  On the other hand, though, I find that no person in the world deserves more love by birth, that the world is not divided into “saved” and “damned,” that what is sacred is infused within all people and creation.  It is funny – I find that we are not yet as good as we could be, and yet more precious than we can ever know.

I’m willing to bet that there is at least someone else here today whose has found it’s not simple to live as an authentic person.  It is not always easy to be honest, even with ourselves.  A struggle in much of our society today is people trying to appear as something different, something they think would give them more value.  The lower and middle classes are buying themselves into poverty trying to look like the upper class.  So many of us spend our time and money trying to appear thinner, smarter, more educated - or just anything but ourselves.  In the film version of the book, Fight Club, one character laments, “Advertizing has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so that we can buy [things] we don’t need…we’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars…”

Our culture often has its own suggestions as to what we should strive to be.  What is it that honest religion would ask to us to be?  Long before modern movies, of course, people were dealing with issues just like ours. In the book of Luke, the teacher Jesus cautioned his disciples not to be deceived, that a person’s life is not measured by the sum of their possessions. The Buddha, too, knew this when he proposed that in a world full of deception, full of distractions about who we are, a world in which we can constantly cling to attachment, one of the most radical things we can do is be aware in this moment, present for life as it really is - living instead of labeling.

I cannot speak for you, but in my life, this honest religion is easier said than done.  It is so tempting for me to have others believe that I’m strong enough to deal with any adversity.  It is tempting sometimes not to ask for help, to present this version of myself to the world that is smart enough and competent enough to handle anything that comes my way.  Anybody else?  It is almost too compelling to wear the label of most talented, best looking, most creative, the perfect friend, parent, or partner.  I wonder what it would look like to live such an honest life, to let go of those masks, to shake off the weight and the stress of trying to be perfect people that we cannot be - that no one can be.

For me, honest religion means finding out who I am in this world without the negative stories we tell about ourselves as well.  How often have I told myself that because I failed once, I could not succeed again?  How often can we replay that mistake, that dumb thing we said or did over and over again until we start to believe that’s who we are? 

Let this religion call us to give the world one more honest adult.  Many of us left traditions that told us human beings, just for being born, were so depraved and sinful that we would deserve hell without someone’s assistance - that real change in the world would not be possible if a supernatural force did not do it for us.  Let’s be honest, we can’t wait for that to happen if we want justice in this world. 

However, it seems that in liberal religious communities, we’ve also sometimes told a false story about what it means to be human.  Many of us, including myself, have sometimes let ourselves believe that human beings were born so inherently good that we will continue every day to progress onward and upward.  We get shocked when evil things happen.  An honest religion, I think, is going to have to live within the tension that the 20^th century brought us - that human beings can be beautiful and frightening, all at the same time.

And a religion such as this is not just a challenge for individuals, but for our communities as well. Honest churches must continually face with courage the core questions of our identity.  Who are we? What are we called to do? Whom/What do we serve?  We have to ask ourselves, “Are we called to be a sanctuary for the like-minded?  Are we called to be the religious wing of the DNC?  Is our purpose in this world to be the best kept secret in religion?”  I don’t think so. 

But in being honest with ourselves, again this means that we are confronted not only with our imperfections, but also with our best selves - our amazing selves.  This means also that we must live up to the honor of this religious tradition (and this is a good thing).  To be honest with ourselves, we do have something to offer this world.  We have something to offer people who come looking for community, who come looking for change.  As a community, we DO have history.  We didn’t just arise from the vapor somewhere in the 1960’s.  Thousands of years and countless individuals brought us to where we are. 

I think it is safe to say that, for many here, our past selves would be pretty surprised to see us sitting in this church on Sunday morning.  I know mine would be.  An honest religion knows that you aren’t a bad person for not going to church, but that those of us who do have come for a reason.  We seek to renew our minds, to learn more about life itself, to find community, to call our best selves into the world.  Each of us had a lot of choices of where we could have been this morning:   sleeping, seeing a movie, reading a good book, catching up with friends. But something brought us here, together.  If I am a UU Christian, something has me here this morning instead of the liberal Christian church down the road.  If I’m a UU Buddhist, something calls me to a place like this instead of the Zen center or local sangha, etc. 

For those that might be newer to our community, you’ll find that there is a tremendous amount of theological diversity in a Unitarian Universalist congregation.  However, this strength can sometimes lead us to believe that we’re more different than we are alike. But we can see the unity in this diversity; we can experience the shared values that bring us to a place like this.  When we are honest, we know that there is something to sink our teeth into here.  But it’s hard to admit that what we do matters, because if we do, we have to live up to it.

Last week, I talked about the well known UU theologian and ethicist James Luther Adams.  In the book, On Being Human Religiously, Adams points out what he believes to be the central, necessary assumptions of religious liberalism, and, using an image from the biblical David and Goliath story, he calls them the “Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism.” Here’s what Adams offers:

1) “Revelation is continuous.”  Here, an honest faith proclaims that there is always more truth to be found in our religious lives.  All the truth of the world cannot possibly be contained in one book, one teacher, one tradition, and so we keep searching.

2) All relations between people should be based on consent, and not coercion.  The honest religion cannot make you believe something or join its congregation.  It is an invitation into a shared life together. It invites you to bring your mind with you.

3) We have a moral obligation to direct our efforts toward justice in this world.  In other words, the honest church knows that we do not only serve ourselves; justice is shaped with human hands. 

4) We deny “the immaculate conception of virtue.” Here Adams means that there is no abstract good, we must bring goodness into the world.  “The good” is brought about in our history, in our relationships, in good partners, citizens, friends, and leaders.

5) The resources that are available for achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.  There is hope in the ultimate abundance of the Universe.  Adams was not naïve about the evil in the world. Indeed, he saw it firsthand when we worked with the Underground Church movement in Nazi Germany. However, he asserted, as can we, that the honest religion knows things do not have to be the way they are.  We can change the world.

Finally, Adams concludes this essay with an optimism about the core of liberal religion: “Thus, with all the realism and tough-mindedness that can be mustered, the genuine liberal finally can hear and join the Hallelujah Chorus – intellectual integrity, social relevance, amplitude of perspective, and the spirit of true liberation offer no less.”

I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of honest religion I would like to be a part of.  We know that religiously liberal does not have to mean religiously timid, but it must mean honest; it must mean humble.  When it comes to addressing questions of the sacred, of God, of value and meaning, a common statement coming out of an honest church is going to have to be “We don’t know yet.”

When asked to define the call of a religious life, the prominent Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Forest Church, offered this: “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”

What does an honest religious life call us to do? If anything at all, to give to the world one more honest adult.  We cannot make each other compassionate, we cannot remove human greed or all violence from the earth, but we can be present and real for this world as it is and each other as we are.  Honest religion is not always grand.  In fact, it seems that it is made up for the most part of the common moments of life. It might mean saying what we mean when we mean it, like “I love you,” or “I’m sorry.”  It might mean giving voice to that uncomfortable fact or emotion in the room that everyone feels but is afraid to admit.  It might mean living with our imperfections, our vulnerabilities knowing well that we are not the only ones, that we are not alone.

It asks of us each day, “Who is this self I’m presenting to the world? What masks am I wearing to protect me, and what are they keeping me from doing?”  It calls us to speak up, not to remain silent and complicit in the midst of bigotry, racism, or injustice when we know that there is more potential for our beloved community to become real.  It calls us to speak up when injustice is done in our name, especially when injustice is done in our name.  The prophets of the biblical tradition focused on Israel first.

My spiritual friends, let us give to the world one more honest adult.  If we “believe” as Rev. Adams said that revelation is not sealed, then let us search for more truth together.  If we can believe that honest religion invites and does not coerce, let us begin the conversation now, let us invite others here.  If we know that no supernatural force will bring justice in the world, let us prepare for much work.  If we can say unashamedly that there is more hope in this world, let us not be quiet about it, let us make it known in our words, our songs, and in our lives.

Let us offer the chance for some real “honest religion,” because this world needs it.  May this place and our communal lives together give the world for each of us, one more honest adult.  What better time than now?

Amen.          

Aaron White    

July 6, 2008

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:

 

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I’ll begin somewhat unusually for a Unitarian Universalist service today with a reading from 1 Kings:

“And He said: ‘Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD.’ And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”

On July 17^th of 2006, I found myself on the 11^th floor of Massachusetts General Hospital, sitting on the ground, in the dark, testing out my broken Spanish with a patient for the very first time.

J. was an elderly man, a Spanish speaker, and a victim of a very serious recent stroke.  J. could barely speak, and the little I could hear I strained to understand.  My religious and medical vocabulary is almost non-existent in Spanish, and I have trouble speaking in anything but the present tense.  J and I had communication problems, to say the least.  But there was one thing J said to me that I know I understood. 

Jesus was in the room. 

His head jerked back, yelling as he called out to God, I watched J slowly move his finger in the air as he pointed to the space above his bed.  This UU seminarian asked, “Is Jesus here in the room with us?”  He gripped my hand and pointed right above our heads.  “Yes….there.”

My visit with J was part of a ten week unit of training in ministry called “Clinical Pastoral Education” that I completed a few summers ago at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.  A frequent issue that arose there for me and my fellow students was one of spiritual authority.  I asked and heard this question many times, “What gives me the right to say anything here?”

Now, I shared my story about J with my other student colleagues as part of a “verbatim.” Basically, a verbatim as a weekly assignment, in which you record one of your more memorable patient visits as accurately as you can. You then take this into something like a small group setting, and you read them aloud and reflect on this in your CPE group.  In my CPE group, we had one woman from the United Church of Christ, one Reformed Jew, three Catholics, and one UU.  It sounds like one of those jokes where everyone walks into a bar together, but it was every day of my life for a summer.

After recounting this visit in my verbatim, one of my colleagues, a devout Catholic seminarian preparing to be a missionary, asked me if I really believed that the man I spoke to saw Jesus in the room.  Now, from what he knew of me as a Unitarian Universalist, I think he expected me to say “no.”

But there was something more to my experience here, and so I told my friend “yes.”  I could tell he was a little surprised.  He then asked me if I saw God in the room that day.  This is where my natural “Aaron defines Unitarian Universalism” self began to step in. I was about to explain how that word “God” means many things to UU’s and how what I say can’t represent everyone.  But before I could get my usual anxiety-filled routine going where I apologize for my faith, I simply said, “Well…yeah, I mean, we were already talking in translation.”

After our weeks together, I think that my colleagues expected me to do my normal shuffle around such questions.  And they were completely right for doing so.  For the longest time, I tried to provide informational facts about our church or make statements I thought would represent every UU.  In a setting where my job was to make sense out of my religious experiences with others, I had yet to be honest about any of them with my colleagues, or myself for that matter.  I had been so worried about my inability to say something entirely true about my experience of the Divine, that I said nothing at all.

Lately, this question of religious expression has been at the front of my mind, and its manifesting itself in one common word: prophesy.  When I say “prophesy,” like many UU’s, I don’t mean the ability to foretell what will happen in the future.  For me, prophesy means the courage give expression to my experiences of the world, of the Holy, no matter how imperfect my expressions may be.  People sometimes call it “speaking truth to power.”  At its most authentic, prophesy is a radical act.

The late Unitarian Universalist ethicist, James Luther Adams, spoke much about what he called the “prophethood of all believers.”  Adams wanted to extend Luther’s call for the priesthood of all to extend to our prophetic witness as well.  “The prophethood of all believers.” This is a phrase that has stuck with me since I first heard it, and it is crucial to my understanding of Universalism.  All human beings, simply by the fact of being alive, have some access to the ground of our being, from which we can speak.

Now, our age in society makes us well aware of the dangers that can arise in assuming a voice of prophesy.  Just turn on the television or read a newspaper and you can see that prophets don’t always do well for the world.  What we see of fundamentalism, the post-modern condition, our training in schools, and the liberal nature of our own churches often caution us against assumptions that lead to simple grand statements about the world, and rightly so.  Yet I cannot help but think that as people of the spirit, we have a place from which to speak.  In our prophetic voice, should our inability to say everything keep us from saying something?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the biblical prophet, Amos. Amos was a people’s prophet.  He came not from the stock of politicians, but from farmers, and raised his voice loudly against a government that would not care for the poorest of its people.  Not surprisingly, Unitarian Universalists have historically taken a liking to Amos.  We sing his words in our Hymn, “We’ll Build a Land,” when we talk about creating a society in which “justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like and ever-flowing stream.” In a decadent society crashing down around him, Amos, the text says, was visited by God in the form of visions which served as the start of his ministries. 

I don’t know about you, but I have to say that I am very different from Amos in this regard.  I’ve yet to have a vision, and more often than not, my religious inspiration resembles the “still small voice” of Elijah that I read about at the beginning of the sermon.  Elijah is portrayed on a mountainside amid storms, earthquakes, and fire, none of which contain the word of God.  When all is settled, he strains to hear the message in a “still, small voice” that passes by. (1 Kings 19:12).  I love this image, a still, small voice.

The 20^th century musician and Zen Buddhist, John Cage, had his own experience of hearing something amazing when he visited Harvard some years back and stepped into what’s called an anechoic chamber, a room without echoes. 

Here is what Cage says about the experience:

“I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low.  When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.  Until I die there will be sounds.  And they will continue following my death.  One need not fear about the future of music.”

I feel something similar with respect to religion. Again, this for me is Universalism.  It is the conviction that there is some reality within the world that all human beings have access to, not just a chosen group, a chosen time, not just those who have the grace of god and on and on.  Our Universalist ancestors put forth the catalyst for a theology which affirms that all human beings, simply by the fact of being alive, can have connection with that which sustains all the web of life, with a spirit of community and love.  Until we die, I believe there will be for every human being the sounds of the Divine, that still, small, astonishingly inescapable whisper of the sacred.

I can, of course, speak only for myself.  But it is in these experiences of awe of the world around me, of feeling a force greater than myself surge through my veins, that I find my inspiration to speak to my greatest values.  It is not always the source of my beliefs, but it is always the energy from which I speak about them.  What happens, though?  Why do I fall into the role of politician instead of prophet?  Why is it so easy for us to shy away from being honest with our friends, family, and strangers about some of the most important experiences of our existence?

We are worthy to speak.  Each and every one of us.  Despite what others might have said; despite the constant messages we hear in our culture that we must become something different than who we are before we can give ourselves and our voices to the world, despite the dominant religious voice we hear in the American religious landscape – in the face of all these things, you, me, and all those who will join us, our voices are worthy of being considered prophetic.

But why don’t we always use them?  Often for me, it is fear.  Fear of ridicule mostly, or not being understood.  But I don’t think I’m the only one.  Looking to the Hebrew Scriptures, even Moses was afraid to speak prophetically.  He was a stutterer and didn’t think people would listen. 

Sometimes I stutter spiritually.  Sometimes my best efforts at giving voice to my religious life, even in times where like-minded people surround me, they just fall short.  I find that often when I voice the earlier question I mentioned from the hospital - “what right do I have to speak?”  - what I mean most of the time is “I’m so afraid that you won’t believe me.”  But we remain called to speak.

There is a great story about the 18^th century minister John Murray preaching in Boston.  At the time, his notion of Universalism was even more radical than it is today, and it was not always well received.  During one of his sermons, a rock came flying through a window and landed by his pulpit.  Almost as if it were planned, Murray reached down and picked up the rock, saying: “This argument is solid and weighty, but it is neither

reasonable nor convincing … not all the stones in Boston, except they stop my breath, shall shut my mouth.”

In our speaking as prophets of liberal religion in this world, there will be stones, my friends, but which ones will shut our mouths?  Which ones are shutting our mouths right now?  Real prophesy is a radical act.  We hear the stories and see the images of those speaking truth to power facing death or violence, and many times meeting it.

The truth of the matter here, I think, is that most of us won’t face physical death for expressing our faith.  I’m worried that we as prophets die spiritual deaths, because we did not hear the voice within us, or did not feel worthy to speak it when we did. 

Our voice of liberal religion has something to offer this world.  At this point, we have not only the right to speak, it is our duty.  On this week of July 4^th, we take time to celebrate the greatest principles of our nation.  And yet the news speaks also this week of increased secret plans for war with Iran, of a despicable widening gap between the richest of our citizens and those who starve daily in this country.  In yet another election cycle, I find myself being told to hate my neighbor, to fear the foreigner and the immigrant, to feel God’s love for my country over all others in the world.

Our history, our vision for a world made fair has so much potential.  My friends, we have not been marginalized as a community, but we have been on the margins – we have been too silent.   It is time for a different religious voice to make itself heard in our society, for a different religious voice to be the one featured on the news.  It is time for us. 

Our messages of tolerance, of peace, our dedication to individual freedom of conscience and equal voice for all in religion.  Our religious commitment to the rights and dignity of every human being, of all the world around us - I cannot keep these messages to myself anymore.

There are things to be said.  Let us say them. What would it look like if just the people in our congregations – in just this room - really took their religious voice, their prophesy seriously?  I think that it would be life changing.  We will not always be right, and each one of us cannot know the truth alone.  This is why we join together in community.  This is why we have one another.

My friends, my prayer for us is that we may live fully the sometime terrifying task of the religious life, which challenges us to speak clearly and unashamedly our most intimate religious experiences, with the knowledge that we are not alone.  We are not alone.  May we, as if for the very first time, take seriously the voice within each of us, and the voice that this community of faith has to offer - not only in our places of worship, but with our family and friends, in our whole lives. 

Like Elijah atop the mountain, may we strain to hear that still, small voice – on hospital floors, in classrooms, in nature, in subway cars, and indeed within our very hearts; and may we have the courage to say with all of our breath, I hear you.  It is waiting to be heard.  What better time than now?

Amen