Spiritual And Religious, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Jan. 24, 2010

• Listen to this Sermon: It's in the Playlist
• Back to the Sermons

Spiritual And Religious

        You hear it a lot in the string-of-lights room down the hall, where leaders of this church greet newcomers: “I’m looking for something,” the visitors say – “for community, for spirituality, for music. BUT,” they say – and I always know what is coming next – “But I don’t believe in organized religion.”

        That’s the setup, and I know what’s coming after that, too. Somebody in the room is sure to take the bait: “Don’t worry, you’ll be okay here,” they say. “We’re Unitarian Universalists, and we’re not very organized.”

        This is, of course, a lie. But it’s a cute lie. And may have a grain of truth to it; people mean all kinds of things when they say they don’t want “organized” religion. Are they sick to death of war and mayhem in the name of creed? Well, we are too. We reject enforced adherence to a system of belief, and if that’s what people mean by “organized,” then it’s true, we’re not. Or are they uneasy with hierarchy? We’re uneasy with it too, and sometimes that does make us disorganized. But if what they mean is they don’t like the idea of religion as an institution, well, in that sense we have to cop to being organized, because this church, and Unitarian Universalism generally, are, patently, institutional.

        It takes an institution to create church. It takes organization to create worship. And very often it takes preparation to get to joy.

        The Second Street Singers couldn’t create that lovely version of “Blackbird” without rehearsals, much less their “Look Before You Leap” opener. It takes practice, lots of it, to look that spontaneous.

         “Looking spontaneous” is highly valued, here in the age of flashmob.

        How many of you have seen the You-Tube video of the flashmob dance at the Antwerp train station? It’s on our uucava website, and we’re also playing it in Fellowship Hall after the service, so you can see it if you don’t have access to a computer at home. It takes place in a busy train station in Belgium, and it starts with one guy dancing with a little girl, maybe his daughter, as Julie Andrews’ voice comes through the PA system: “Doe, a deer, a female deer.” Then a few more people join the dance, and a few more. Other people stop to watch. What’s going on here? Is this spontaneous? Or is it planned? Pretty soon there are dozens -- old people, young people, large people and small, dancing like they’re in a Bollywood movie. People are amazed. They laugh, they wipe away tears. Clearly, what looked to be a spontaneous outbreak, was highly organized.

        What’s so moving about this? As people are going about their daily lives, running to catch whatever trains are on their schedule for that day, something unexpected breaks in. Stops them in their tracks. Throws them off balance, a bit. Reminds them that forces of which they know nothing are at work in the world.

        Back to our string-of-lights room. What brings them, these 21st Century seekers who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” – what brings them to a church? What brought you?

        Nathan was brought here out of a sense that there is more to the world than he can see and hear, and that in community, through music, story and word, he and his children might reach out and touch it.

        Others come, each with her own story. One has been on a spiritual path for a long time – meditation here, retreat there, yoga class on Tuesdays. One has seen it in flashes – the power of love, the beauty in a slant of sunlight, the way the heart drops into the belly when he’s listening to a Bach prelude. They all want to pay attention to these moments, but life is moving so very fast. They know they need community to help them make it stick.

        Or -- they have questions – bushels of them – about how it is we are to live our lives. How are we to be good? What does it mean, our finite time here on this Earth? How shall we live, knowing that we are all, one day, to die? Without community, their questions clang around inside their own heads.

        Or possily they look at the world as it is, and they feel a passion for justice burning in their hearts. They figure – as Rev. Linda told us last week – we can do so much more in community than any one of us can do alone, to bend the arc of history toward justice. They want to do this work in a faith community, one that is organized around shared values.

        I came looking for church in my late 20s. My mother had died at the age of 59 and barely more than a year later, my son was born. Life suddenly was too big for me to hold it all, all by myself. I needed community, and more than that, I needed religious community, a place where I could sit with the hugeness of it all, in company with others who were also paying attention, putting their minds and hearts to work making meaning.

        To pay attention in a regular way, in community, requires being organized. Requires institutional support. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was looking for a church, nobody was describing themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” But plenty of people were searching, like me, for a way to be in religious community without somebody telling them what to do or, more importantly, what to think.

        Unitarian Universalist congregations are institutions where that can happen.

        It started in the 1600s, when the Europeans who came to these shores were looking for something too – a place where they could be religious and organized in a whole new way, a way that was radical in its time. They decided they didn’t want a big ecclesiastical structure – no bishops and certainly no popes – telling their local congregations what to do. Bishops and popes and huge institutions, in their experience, led people into error.

        These institutional ancestors of ours saw evil in the structures they were fleeing, but we have to acknowledge that, locked in an exclusionary theology – my god is the true god, yours isn’t; I’m saved, you’re not -- they were blind to their own evildoing: stealing land from the people already living here, and, later, supporting of the slave trade.

        Like us today, though, they wanted to be good, and they tried to build institutions that would support them in being good. They decided that the local congregation, the gathered faithful, were the highest and best reflection of God’s love on earth. So they made a pact with one another, a covenant – to show up, to worship together, and to walk through life together, learning the ways of love.

        Four and a half centuries later, our congregations still are organized that way. We still gather freely in local communities. But our idea of what it means to be faithful, and what we are faithful to, is very different. Instead of being faithful to a Bible or a single culture’s view of what God is, we are faithful to one another, to our search together for truth and meaning, to Life itself. We support one another in saying “yes” to life, by listening each other into speech, helping one another remember the sources of our strength.

        And we are faithful to a few ideas. Though we don’t have a creed, I do believe – I believe! – that there are a few ideas that are generally shared among us. One of them has come down to us from the 16th Century, when one of our Unitarian saints, Francis David, said these words: “We need not think alike to love alike.” We are communities that are held together not by our thinking but by our loving, and isn’t that strange, since we are the people who are said to lead always with the intellect and not with the heart?

        Of course human institutions, like human beings, can be forces for good and for ill. When we gather together in institutions, sometimes program and ambition take over; we get attached to agendas and accomplishments, and we forget what we came here for. It takes walking consciously not only as individuals, but as a congregation together, to keep on the path toward the good.

        It also takes occasional disruption of the organization. We need to dis-organize sometimes, then re-organize, to stay vital and true to our highest values, and I thank David McTaggart for reminding us of that yesterday in a gathering of leaders of this congregation.

        That dis-organization may come a little easier to us than to most, and this can be a great strength. Because we do not all think alike, we challenge one another in our search for truth. We believe that none of us has all the answers, but that each of us possesses inherent worth and dignity, and each has a piece of the truth. And so we listen to one another. We are organized not by belief but by our intention – an intention to pay ATtention to the things of worth. This is the original meaning of the word “worship” – “worth-ship,” making liturgy and meaning out of that which is most worthy of our attention. That most vital part of our lives.

        We may struggle with that word, “worship,” as we may struggle with the word “religious.” Etymologically, the root word “religare” means to bind back, and in our case the binding is not to an idea of a supreme being but to the community, to the walking together, to the ultimate connectedness of our disparate souls. That’s another word some of us have trouble with – “soul.”

        But “spiritual” – that which so many of our 21st Century seekers are willing to claim – this word comes from “breath,” or “ruah” in Hebrew. In one early definition the root of “spirit” is the breath that’s blown into a flute to make music. It is, in other words, it’s airy. Not attached. Not bound.

        So when people tell me they are “spiritual but not religious,” I think, at last you’re here. You need a home, a flute to turn your breath into music. You need a community of flutes to make an ensemble, and you need to practice together. You need grounding, and this congregation may well be the place where you will find it.

        In the Jewish tradition, according to Rabbi Mark Glickman writing in the Seattle Times, there are two kinds of prayer – keva, which is set, scripted prayer, the kind that is said week after week in community, in synagogue; the kind that is said by rote. And kavvanah, which is intention, the prayer that soars, like breath, like spirit, toward union with the All. The way to get to that soaring kind of prayer, Glickman wrote, is through keva – through prayer that is practiced, prayer that is rote.

        Because we need both, even if we’re a Sunday morning flashmob. We are like a flashmob! We show up, we do something together in a public place, we disperse – and sometimes the unexpected enters.

        I have a friend who believes that Unitarian Universalism is the next great world religion, and you know what, I think she’s right. It is exactly the religion for these religionless times of the 21st century. Because people like us have known for nearly 500 years that we need not think alike to love alike. Because we have known for just as long, that other great idea of Francis David – that revelation is not sealed. This is the radical promise of these two great ideas: we can support one another in becoming what we are becoming, we can ground one another in Love even as we soar; we can lean on one another in a profound interdependence that is both spiritual and religious. Hallelujah!

Photos of the Service

Excerpts of the Sermon

Nathan Monell: I Believe

Read Nathan Monell's statement

Excerpts of 2nd St. Singers