Listen:
OPENING READING: "Seeing Without the Observer"
It was a clear morning, though soon clouds would be gathering. As one looked out of the window, the...fields were very clear. A curious thing (was) happening; there (was) a heightening of sensitivity...not only to beauty but also to all other things. The blade of grass was (the) whole spectrum of color; it was intense, dazzling...(the) trees were all of life...(the) sweeping hills...were the expression of all time and space; and the mountains against the pale sky were beyond all the gods of man. It was incredible to see, (to) feel all this by just looking out of the window. One's eyes were cleansed.
-- J. Krishnamurti
MEDITATION READING: "It's Okay, You're Only Human"
It's okay to be ambiguous; to be uncertain.
It's okay not to know and to say so.
It's okay to know, then not to know.
It's okay, you are human...
You are human, like the wind is the wind,
The sea, the sea.
You are a part of the natural process,
Sometimes perfect, sometimes flawed...
-- Don Beaudreault
SERMON: "UU WAYS, PART THREE: WHY I AM A UU MYSTIC"
Consider the following as a metaphor for the mystery of human existence:
There simply has to be some mysterious force at work in the world when you lose a sock in the clothes dryer! Where in the world did it go? You've already sorted your clothes and put them away, except for one sock, whose mate is absent. So you go back to the dryer, look inside, expectant. It is dark in there. You tentatively reach into the cavern, hoping that something will not grab you, something like the Maytag Monster, the one they didn't tell you about when you bought the machine.
Your life is spared this time, but still: no sock. So you go to the place where a flashlight is supposed to exist, fearing that the mysterious force has gobbled that up, too. But the light is waiting! You return to the black hole and shine the beam. To get a better look, you almost crawl inside the machine, but still: no sock.
No sock inside the dryer; nor anywhere around the dryer, the laundry room, under the bed, the house, the street where you live, your entire neighborhood, city, state, country, planet, universe. The sock is gone!
Long live the sock! Let us devise a ritual of remembrance for it! A song perhaps: "You knock my socks off, babe!" or some such ditty addressed to the mysterious force. Cher could make it a hit! But the ceremony has to end - and you remember a healing thought: the sock not lost is still yours to cherish! But when you go to look for it, it too, has mysteriously disappeared!
What is the meaning of it all?
The meaning of it all is simply, that "it all" is a mystery; that we human beings sometimes exist in darkness and cannot know the way we must go; that no matter how earnestly we attempt to shed light on the mystery that surrounds us, we cannot completely see all there remains to be seen; that mystery is the essential nature of existence.
The Hindu concept of life: "maya" - meaning "illusion" - is indicative of this premise. The Spanish playwright, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, sums it up nicely with the title of his play: "La Vida Es Sueno" - "Life Is a Dream." And William Wordsworth agrees by expressing the thought: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."
"It all" - if existence is thought of as only what is obvious, everyday, mundane, verifiable, - is hardly "it all" - at all! Such a perspective on life is merely a partial glimpse of "it all." For "it all" - when it really is "it all" - depends on the mystery to inform that which - to our eyes - is most non-mysterious.
Consider the words of D. T. Suzuki, that Zen Buddhist scholar:
Our language is the product of a world of numbers and individuals, of yesterday and todays and tomorrows, and is most usefully applicable to this world. But our experiences have it that our world extends beyond that, there is another called by Buddhists a "transcendental world" and that when language is forced to be used for things of this (transcendental) world, it becomes warped and assumes all kinds of crookedness: oxymora, paradoxes, contradictions, contortions, absurdities, oddities, ambiguities, and irrationalities. Language itself is not to be blamed for it. It is we ourselves who, ignorant of its proper functions, try to apply it to that for which it was never intended. More than this, we make fools of ourselves by denying the reality of a transcendental world.
So, we speak of "mystery" today, a word that has the same origin as "mystic" - the root word being Greek, "mystos" - meaning "keeping silence."
And this is most instructive for our purposes this morning, if we even dare the attempt of defining "Mysticism." For to be a mystic, or to have a mystical experience is, by definition, to be unable to speak of it. One can attempt to define it, describe it, explain it, but ultimately, one has to fail.
Nevertheless, let us attempt to define that which can not really be defined - the word "mysticism." One dictionary tells us that the term refers to:
The doctrine of immediate spiritual intuition of truths, believed to transcend ordinary understanding...a direct, intimate union of the soul with God.
And how wonderful such a grasp of awareness of this Wordsworthian "sense of something far more deeply interfused" can be, as expressed in the grandeur and elegance of theistic language - Christian theism or other forms of theism.
Still, that definition probably causes some of us humanists a bit of a problem doesn't it? I mean to say that if by definition, a "humanist" is not a "theist" (meaning such a one does not believe there is a deity, although one can also believe that s/he does not know if there is a deity or not), then a "humanist" can't really be a "mystic." Or can a humanist?
Yes, a humanist can be a mystic, if we go beyond the words, and hold up the experience. I believe that the experience is more important than the words assigned to it.
In other words, we don't need to have the words to attempt to explain what our high moments of awareness are - those times when we do, in fact, feel a oneness with the mystery and magnificence of "it all"; when we feel not necessarily joy, but perhaps great sorrow, or great awareness; when we feel that we are not alone in the universe, but somehow connected to all that was, is, or shall be; when we feel that despite our miniscule existence in this starry, starry universe - and knowing, too, that ours is just one of an infinite number of universes - that despite our puniness, we still are and that those we have loved and now lost, once were and still are as long as we are alive to remember them; that we have purpose and meaning, although we have not always and perhaps only seldom understood this about ourselves; that each of us, no matter how seemingly insignificant we are, has dignity and worth; that we all succeed and fail, experience joy and loss, and are in need of comfort, understanding, and love. Truly, in our complexity lies our strength, and our magnificence.
I do believe that the signs of deeper meaning lie all around us, in those quiet, little mystical moments, as well as the grand, ennobling ones. To feel connected to a larger purpose in life, we need not have to always be astounded by dramatic occurrences, but also can be purely entranced by the seemingly ordinary and prosaic incidents.
When I was the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Charleston, West Virginia, I started an adult education class on "Spirituality." It was an eight-week discussion of the subject. Eight weeks later, however, we decided that none of us was done talking about such a thing, and so we decided to expand our discussions to monthly ones - that went on for two years and only ended when I took a different ministerial position.
During this time, we reflected upon the personal experiences we each had had that seemed to be of a mysterious - if you will, of a "mystic" - nature. I started logging mine on paper, and at the conclusion of this time, I had nearly 300 of them! What mine had in common was a thread that I really had not been aware of before - a thread linking each to the other - and I began to understand that what might have appeared to be merely coincidental at the time it occurred - had consequence for later events in my life. I saw then, that my life really had had a pattern to it; that most things had not just occurred randomly, without a reason. Quite the opposite, I saw that one thing had led to another, and that taken in their entirety, a deeper level to my existence had been there all along, although as H. G. Wells says:
It is impossible to dismiss mystery from life. Being is altogether mysterious. Mystery is all about us and in us, the Inconceivable permeates us...Ultimately the mystery may be the only thing that matters, but within the rules and limits of the game of life, when you are catching trains or paying bills or earning a living, the mystery does not matter at all. "Ultimate Truth" from The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (adapted)
I would prefer to change the great man's words a bit to capture what I think he meant by saying "the mystery seems not to matter at all." In the seeming lies our shortsightedness I believe - because for whatever reason: a god's design, the mysterious force in the universe, chance, luck, randomness, the goddess Fortuna, coincidence, an electro-magnetic force field - call it what you will - I have seen a pattern in my life, and can no longer believe that what one sees on the surface of human existence, is all there is. Along with D. T. Suzuki I believe that "we make fools of ourselves by denying the reality of a transcendental world."
Indeed, many people feel a more profound connection to this "transcendental world" when they feel their oneness with nature. Who among us has not had some such experience: standing atop a mountain and seeing the world before our eyes, looking at a rainbow or a shooting star, listening to music or to the sound of a bird, smelling the sweet fragrance of a rose - or somehow more intimately communicating with another human being (who, like we, are aspects of nature, too)?
Not that such mystical times need to be limited by feeling only this linkage to nature.
Still, being with nature often has a stirring message for us. Consider the experience of that great scientist and essayist, Loren Eisely:
...messages, like all the messages in the universe, are elusive.
Some months ago, walking along the shore of a desolate island off the Gulf coast, I caught a glimpse of a beautiful shell, imprinted with what appeared to be strange writing, rolling in the breakers. Impelled by curiosity, I leaped into the surf and salvaged it. Golden characters like Chinese hieroglyphs ran in symmetrical lines around the cone of the shell. I lifted it up with the utmost excitement, as though a message had come to me from the green depths of the sea.
Later I unwrapped the shell before a dealer in antiquities in the back streets of a seaport town.
"Conus spurius atlanticus," he diagnosed for me with brisk efficiency, "otherwise known as the alphabet shell."
But why spurious? I questioned inwardly as I left the grubby little shop, warily refusing an offer for my treasure. The shell, I was sure, contained a message.
We live by messages - all true scientists, all lovers of the arts...Some of the messages cannot be read, but (we) will always try. (We hunger) for messages, and when (we cease) to seek (to) interpret them (we) will be no longer (human).
The little cone lies now upon my desk, and I handle it as reverently as I would the tablets of a lost civilization. It transmits tidings as real as the increasingly far echoes heard by Thoreau in his last years...
Each of (us) deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that (our) own (depths) possess the power to endow the meaning...The golden alphabet, in whatever shape it chooses to reveal itself, is never spurious. From its inscrutable lettering is created (human beings) and all the towering cloudland of (our) dreams. (The Unexpected Universe, Loren Eisely)
So, however you might define "mysticism"- know that the term has been an attempt to define the inexplicable - but that in doing so, the process speaks of the mystery of human existence, in all its myriad forms, both great and dramatic, small and seemingly inconsequential. It is in the various meanings that we give to these experiences in our life, that speak of their depth and purpose, not necessarily the events themselves or the limited descriptions we have attempted to apply to them.
To be negatively critical of another human being's desire to apply such a meaning to his or her life, is really to think within the solipsistic box of one's own creation - that is, to view life in a partial way, denying even the possibility that the meaning of it all, is simply that "it all" is a mystery. And in denying another's quest after an understanding of this mystery is to deny that person's desire to be more fully human.
As that Unitarian Universalist sage Robert Weston phrases it:
...It is the way of a person to dream and to explore;
It is our way to see and follow...
Into the mists of the unknown.
Look not to authority for the voice of God;
Look to the flame of beauty in the heart, and the insistent question,
The creating that tries, fails, and tries again.
This it is to be human, and in some sense to be God:
To love, to imagine; to experiment; to try; to create;
To stumble; to get up and go on in anguish and faith
That it can be done.
-- from Seasons of the Soul
CLOSING WORDS: "We receive fragments of holiness..."
We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.
-- Sara Moores Campbell