"What is spirituality?" It came as a question asked of me by the president of this congregation. Sometimes questions are expected. "How are you?", "Would you care for coffee?", those are questions that we expect. Even for a minister though, sometimes a question arises and it throws me for a moment, especially at the end of a business meeting.
Today I will endeavor to share with what is spiritual for me. It might not be the same for you. Unitarian Universalists embrace personal religious journeys that travel throughout a broad theological spectrum and spirituality might mean something different from different people in the church. We are each traveling unique journeys.
Perhaps though it would be useful to understand the roots of the word, "spirituality." Spirituality has the same roots as respiration, expiration and inspiration. To have spirit, from such roots means to breathe. Inspiration is to give breath to.
The peoples of the ancient Mediterranean believed that their gods took a lump of clay and breathed into it and behold, a human was made. In the myths of the ancient world breathing was first enacted by the God breathing into the first man. Therefore, the act of breathing itself, was a religious act. It was the defining element of life to the ancient peoples.
In a sense, this act of breathing as the root of the spirit is played out across religious boundaries. Buddhist meditation emphasizes the controlling of breathing to realize a higher consciousness. Tantric yoga combines breathing with exercise as a spiritual discipline. Chanting and singing are religious act the world round. There is something in us that gives voice in melody and even single notes to combine with the sound of the universe, a sound that we can not hear audibly but surrounds us all the same.
What is spirituality though? In our culture spirituality is an almost undefinable quality. This is sometimes a difficult thing for Unitarian Universalists to understand. In our movement spirituality can be almost anything. It is not defined, not given.
A couple of weeks ago the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church chose a new pope, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. Before he was pope Benedict was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Before the nineteen-sixties the Office of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith went by another name. It was the Office of the Inquisition. Under the Office of the Inquisition thousands of people were tortured and put to death in Western Europe over the centuries. The Roman Catholic Church two weeks ago chose the director of the office in the Vatican City, whose previous head had previously been known as the Grand Inquisitor, to be the leader of the entire faith.
One of the curiosities of this role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was that the Prefect was assigned the responsibility to maintain doctrine and to make sure that words were not redefined over time. Essentially the Prefect was to make sure that no innovation came into the Church.
For that role spirituality was neatly controlled within clear boundaries. Cardinal Ratzinger could tell everyone what spirituality was and was not.
For Unitarian Universalists such an answer though does not come quite so easily. Our denomination does not even have a statement about God to which all must subscribe.
Yet, we all long to deepen our faith. We seek to find something greater than ourselves, perhaps looking at the depth of our neighbor's faith and wishing that we could go further without ascribing to doctrine or lifeless creed.
Spirituality in our movement is also something that I have known to be used as a hammer at ministers. One of my colleagues was told recently in an evaluation that he was not spiritual enough. I told my colleague to go back to the people who told him that and ask them to define what they meant by the word, "spiritual."
So, knowing that spirituality might mean something different to each of us, here is my own vision of what spirituality means to me. Spirituality is the capacity to perceive connections that point toward a greater whole. It is the ability to look at a cup of tea and see connections that connect us to the larger world, and perhaps, to God, however we might know the Divine.
For me, spirituality is about making connections whether by means of a clear spiritual discipline or through the flash of sudden insight. It is about the capacity to see the universe as a totality and understand one's roles or roles in it.
This is an important part of every major world religion. In Theravada Buddhism, one of the challenges that any aspirant must face to attain nirvana is that he or she is a selfless person. A selfless person, what does that mean? Theravada Buddhists believe that one of the great delusions that humans suffer from is that we are separate entities apart from each other and from the universe. Theravada Buddhists believe that one can only reach nirvana when he or she recognizes his or her connections with the universe and understands that what befalls one, befalls all. It is the delusion of distinct personality, of self, that prohibits us from understanding the universe. Because we are bent upon satisfying the needs and desires of our individual personalities, we cannot recognize the greater reality that we are all connected.
This happens especially to you and me in our culture. We are taken with things that do not mean very much in the long run. We think about our jobs, status, accomplishments, abilities, love-lives and money. All of those things can distract us from the greater whole and our common humanity and links to this planet.
The nineteen-eighties band, Mr. Mister, had a song that exemplifies this condition, Kyrie Elaison. One of the lines in Kyrie Elaison is "somewhere between the soul and some machine is where I find myself again." We are all at danger becoming unspiritual people, living "between the soul and some machine" disconnected from that Spirit that gives us life and meaning, disconnected from the larger whole, whether the larger whole is envisioned as God or something else.
Sometime Unitarian Universalist spirituality is more difficult to recognize than other types of spirituality. Other traditions have prayer or meditation or chanting or dancing. Yes, we do those things in personal and collective religious practices but they are not the proscribed way that liberal religionists practice their faith. Therefore, it might seem to the casual observer that we are less spiritual than our religious traditions.
Some might imagine that we are involved in social action to the detriment of spirituality. Liberal religious congregations like this one are devoted to the work of justice. Sometimes it might be felt that we are not devoted to justice for religious reasons.
I believe that it is Unitarian Universalist spiritual practice to work for justice as much as prayer and meditation are spiritual practices are in other faiths. Unlike other religious traditions, Unitarian Universalists do not tend to place their highest aims upon reaching a connection with God or attaining unity with the universe. Yes, some of us do, but our faith is a faith of works for the most part.
I believe that Unitarian Universalists revere the earth and humanity so much that when we are working for justice that it is a spiritual practice for us. Yes, other faiths work for justice. Unitarian Universalists though, I believe, hold their own causes as the work of their spirits believing that in all the universe, if they were to revere the earth and her people, that they must work so that all might prosper.
I do not keep a spiritual discipline, for the most part. I usually say my prayers on Sunday mornings and only trouble the Almighty when I feel the absolute necessity to do so. I figure that the people in the other churches in town keep God busy enough with mundane details.
Yet, I have moments of religious insight and religious meaning even in the most mundane times. I suppose that the profundity of spirituality comes from the time and willingness that we give to exploring any given connection.
Years ago, when I lived in Boston I experienced a flash of incite from something ordinary. A group of friends and I went on whale watch in Massachusetts Bay. The day started good. It was bright, sunny and warm on land. Out at sea though it was a different story. The water was cold and choppy, the sky was overcast. The little whale watch boat bounced up and down. My friends became seasick. I was on the port side of the ship by myself when a great right whale breached right in front of me. If you have never seen a whale breach it is a moment when the whale turns over on the surface and falls back. As the whale breached within ten feet of our boat my eye met the whale's eye.
Now if you have never looked eye to eye with a right whale, let me tell you that it is awe-inspiring. For a couple of seconds I looked into the eyes of the right whale and he looked back at me. Looking into the eyes of a leviathan the size of my apartment shook me. In that moment I was changed. I could no longer think of whales the same. I was connected with a creature that inhabited a world totally unlike my own. I could sense intelligence. Sometimes when you encounter a wild creature and he or she looks back, you can sense that this is not a merely something driven by instinctive drives but an intelligence, calculating and curious.
That was what I felt from that moment; connected to another being, occupying the same planet but in different parts. There is a tendency to make animals into our own human image, to see them as just like us.
That day though, I felt that connection with that right whale and felt small in the grand scope of the universe. I recognized that I previously saw the world from a human-centered perspective, looking at land masses with squiggly lines defining the places that other humans claimed as their own, seeing the seas and oceans and spaces between the landmasses covered with imaginary squiggly lines.
In that moment I realized that I had never connected the ocean to the earth, despite being the son of a marine biology major. I had always viewed the water masses as wet waste, places that my kind only had to travel over or through. I had not viewed them as being a world unto themselves with somewhat intelligent creatures traveling through them.
Later that afternoon, after traveling through Boston on the trains smelling like ancient mariners in cold sopping clothes—and that must have been all the stranger to our fellow passengers because the day was sunny and clear—my friends and I arrived at my apartment. We changed clothes and drank mugs of hot tea, trying desperately to warm places inside chilled by the cold ocean spray.
The next day I arose and went to the Sunday service at King's Chapel in Boston. King's Chapel in Boston is unique among Unitarian Universalist churches. It started out as an Anglican church and became Unitarian shortly after the American revolution. King's Chapel uses its own unique version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. On that Sunday morning after the whale encounter the congregation began a chant called The Song of the Three Holy Children. The chant went on:
O ye mountain and hills, bless ye the Lord;
O ye wells, bless ye the Lord.
O ye seas and floods, bless ye the Lord;
Then I heard a line that caused me to stop and read and think:
O ye whales and all that move in the waters, bless ye the Lord.
Scientists do not know exactly why whales breach on the surface of the water. Theories are given but none has been proven or given more weight than any other. It struck me when I heard that line chanted that the whale I saw might just have been connecting with the world beyond the depths where he lived. His exploration of the world might have been equal to the exploration that I had with him.
That was a moment of connection and insight but the spiritual is also found in everyday connections as well. One expert on spirituality has said that when congregants come to him asking how they might become spiritual, he responds, "How about starting by loving your life partner or your kids? Even for the mystics moments of rapture and ecstacy are rare and unexpected." Spirituality is the connections that we make from the most normal relationships.
The English poet William Blake saw this need for connection of the large from the small when he wrote:
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour....
In our times our challenge to be spiritual is not to maintain distance from the world in mystic isolation nor deep in prayer on some mountain top but to connect our reverence for the earth to the flawed and sometimes great people who live here. It is not to think high thoughts but to hammer in nails for the Habitat. It is not to look up toward heaven in the skies but though me might be inspired to do so, but to find the heaven that is within all this real world and bring it forth so that all humanity might flourish.
Today I have tried to answer the question, "What is spirituality?" My answer is that it is ability to connect with the whales in the ocean, the children who scream at us in expectation, the plants and the earth at our feet. Spirituality is the ability to realize that we are not alone, whether connected to God, Goddess or the human race or the earth. It is the capacity to know in the words of Chief Seattle, that "what befalls one, befalls all."
In closing let me share with you a quotation from the novel Howard's End by the English author, E. M. Forster:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
May we live no longer in fragments but connect with this planet and the people who live here. May we connect the prose of our daily lives to the passion that is within our hearts. May we work so that our reverence for all this world makes life better for all this world. So be it. Blessed be.
Amen.
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