"How Can the World Be Saved? Taking Spirituality Seriously" (Part 1 of 3)

Readings

 

From the Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman…

 

I [remember] how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, and I [knew] that the hand of God [was] the promise of my own, and I [knew] that the spirit of God [was] the brother of my own, and that all the men ever born [were] also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers, and that a kelson of the creation [was] love.

 

From the writings of the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore…

 

I suddenly felt as if some ancient mist had in a moment lifted from my sight and the ultimate significance of all things was laid bare...Immediately I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side, and no person or thing in the world seemed to me trivial or unpleasing.

 

From Varieties of Religious Experience by William James…

 

One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them—as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect—a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing away.

 

From Drinking Rain: A Memoir by Alix Kates Shulmun…

 

I was sitting alone on the downtown IRT on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of the Twenty-third Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed. All around me people sat bundled up in mufflers, damp woolen coats, and slush-stained boots, reading newspapers or staring off blankly as the train jerked along the tracks. The air was cold and close, with the smell of stale tobacco clinging to winter coats. An elderly pair exchanged words in a Slavic tongue; a mother read an advertising sign to her three bedraggled, open-mouthed children.

Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun - - our entire living cohort - - formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surprisingly lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station and I got off.

 

From the novel Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo, from a scene in which Quinette, a missionary in Kenya who struggles with her faith because she has never felt “born again” in the same way that others say they feel, has an experience one evening…

 

Twilight was a brief intermission between day and night…it was light and then it was dark. The stars began to show themselves, sharp and clean in the moonless sky. She searched for the Southern Cross, which she’d read about in the guidebook she’d bought in Nairobi, and found it: no so much a cross as a diamond. The Dipper was there, but much closer to the horizon than it was at home. The birds had fallen silent, the cattle had settled down. Soon crickets filled the silence, so many chirping at once that they made a single high-pitched cry, like locusts in late summer. Frogs croaked in the green corridors along the stream forming the town’s northern border. They also made one unbroken chorus, the croak of each individual lost in the din of countless throbbing throats. Quinette felt the racket of insect and amphibian more than she heard it; it seemed to penetrate her skin and vibrate inside her, becoming one with the rush of blood through her veins; then in an instant her flesh became like the smoke from the herdsmen’s fire, all sense of herself as a separate being evaporating as her soul, set free, dissolved into an ecstatic union with frog song and cricket screech and the vast dark plain lying under the stars of an alien hemisphere. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, and she came back to herself just seconds later (though she felt as though she’d been gone for hours), she tried to make sense of it. There was no drug or drink on earth that could have produced such a sensation, such an intense joy. Starting back toward her tukul, her head as buoyant as a balloon, her limbs tingling, she remembered something Pastor Tom had read to her in one of the counseling sessions she attended when she joined his church. “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” That was the transcendent emotion she’d sought but hadn’t found in her spiritual rebirth.

 

Sermon

 

            All of our readings this morning were descriptions of various kinds of spiritual experiences, and I chose these readings because I think we understand spiritual experiences better when we hear about them in people’s own words.

            This morning I want to talk about more about spiritual experience. I want to talk about what spiritual experiences are like. I want to talk about how we can understand them. I want to talk about why they are important.

            This isn’t an easy topic to talk about or even to define.

             People sometimes think that spiritual experiences necessarily involves a lot of God talk or other traditional religious language, but as the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once said, God-talk doesn’t always refer to authentic spirituality, and authentic spirituality doesn’t always involve God talk.

            People sometimes also get mixed up between spiritual experiences and anomalous or even paranormal experiences. When some people talk about spiritual experiences, they may include prophetic dreams, visions, hearing voices, communion with the dead or other spirits, or even out of body experiences. As interesting as these experiences sound, they seem to be relatively rare, so this morning I’d like to focus on more common kinds of spiritual experiences.

            Let me tell you what I know about spiritual experience, both from my own experience and from the reading I’ve done on the topic over many years, most recently during my sabbatical. By the way, the classic book on this topic is Varieties of Religious Experience and was written by William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology in this country, about a century ago. This text is still the one that is most referenced by other thinkers on this topic, and I’ll refer to it frequently this morning.

            Spiritual experiences sometimes occur to people out of the blue, but the most intense spiritual experiences tend to occur to people when they are experiencing some inner conflict or in situations in which they have limited control. They often seem to happen when people are experiencing extreme anxiety, fear, guilt, anger, bitterness, grief, or despair. They often seem to happen when people are feeling terribly alone, indifferent, or overwhelmed by life. They also often tend to occur when people have reached the end of their rope, so to speak, and are at the point of giving up any hope that they individually might be able to do anything about whatever problem they’re facing. As James says, they often come about “not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.”

            And then - - sometimes at the moment of surrender, sometimes later  - - something happens, something clicks, some change occurs. Whatever was previously causing them conflict no longer does. As James says, “The central [result] is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well…the peace, the harmony, the WILLINGNESS TO BE, even though the outer conditions should remain the same.

            In addition to this loss of worry, people who have spiritual experiences seem to be filled with a new sense of vitality and an abundance of positive emotion. The Apostle Paul describes this in Christian scripture when he says, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

            Related to this, after having a spiritual experience, some people perceive the world in a new way, often saying that it feels as if their vision has changed. We heard several examples of this in our readings this morning, but probably the most well-known example of this is the line from the hymn Amazing Grace - - “I once was blind but now I see.”

            During spiritual experiences, some people speak of feeling something inside them and all around them, often using words like “infused,”  “permeated,” and “bathed.” Some people talk about experiencing heat, warmth, and light. Some people speak of feeling like power or energy are flowing through them. For example, when describing a spiritual experience of her own, the Unitarian laywoman Margaret Fuller spoke of touching “the secret of the universe” and “by that touch was invested with talismanic power.” Instead of feeling something, some people speak of feeling someone, a personal presence. Occasionally people will speak of the sensation of being held in loving arms. And some people who have very intense spiritual experiences say they don’t feel anything or anyone inside them or all around them at all.

            Who or what people say they experience seems to depend a lot on their personal histories and cultural context. Evangelical Christians don’t feel the presence of the Hindu god Ganesh, Buddhists don’t feel the presence of Christ, and Muslims don’t feel the presence of the Goddess.   

            Yet despite these differences, many spiritual experiences also seem to reliably create in people a deep feeling of connection to others - - even a deep love for others - - as well as a feeling of unity with all that is. The writer and researcher David Hay has suggested that spiritual experiences lead people to greater “relational consciousness,” even suggesting that spirituality and “relational consciousness” are synonymous, and by “relational consciousness” he means an awareness that we as human beings are all connected to one another, that we are all part of one human family, that we are connected to every living thing, that we are connected and a part of the natural world as well as the mystery and miracle of all creation.

            What can be said about such experiences?

            According to social scientists, about one out of three people report having spiritual experiences similar to the kind I’ve been talking about. It’s interesting to me that so-called religious skeptics seem to have them in almost equal numbers to so-called true believers.

            I’ve had such experiences myself of varying intensity - - experiences of being transformed in some way by something beyond my immediate will. Let me ask now, how many people here have had experiences similar in some way to the ones I’ve been describing? If you’re willing, raise your hands…How many people have never experienced anything like this? If you’re willing, raise your hands…

            There are some who think such experiences are proof of a supernatural reality, proof of God’s spirit moving within the world. On the other hand, there are those who tend toward more naturalistic explanations, believing spiritual experiences are reducible to mere psychological explanations.

             Evolutionary biologists have suggested that spiritual experiences provided an adaptive value for early humans. Alistair Hardy was a zoologist by training and a British Unitarian by faith, and later in his career he turned his professional attention toward the scientific study of spiritual experience. Hardy argued that “spiritual awareness” has been naturally selected through evolution because it helped early humans to survive, giving them the ability to better cope with the “dangers, toils, and snares” that are a part of almost every human life.

            More recent studies support this claim. From Freud onward, it has been suggested that spiritual experiences might be a form of neurosis or psychosis, but more recent studies show that people who say they’ve had spiritual experiences score more highly than average on tests of psychological well-being. In one study, those who have had more profound mystical experiences scored higher on a test of psychological well being than any group ever measured.

            Some neuroscientists even claim they are beginning to understand the neural mechanisms by which such experiences occur. Neural imaging studies of Buddhist monks meditating as well as Roman Catholic nuns praying show that certain parts of our brains “light up” and certain parts “shutdown” during spiritual experiences. Some other studies have shown that the part of our brain that helps us distinguish our bodies from the rest of the world becomes less active during spiritual experiences, possibly explaining the “oceanic feeling” or feeling of unity that some people feel during spiritual experiences.

            Twin studies show there’s strong evidence that there is a genetic disposition toward spiritual experience, suggesting that both those who have spiritual experiences and those who don’t might should be more tolerant of either other.

            From my perspective, such scientific explanations don’t invalidate the value of spiritual experiences either for the traditional believer or for the religious skeptic. If there is a personal, loving God, a traditional believer could easily argue, then certainly such a God would design the human body in such a way to make human beings able to have spiritual experiences. As William James famously said about the scientific study of spiritual experiences, explaining spiritual experiences on the “hither side” with science does not preclude explaining them on the “farther side” with religion.

            For those who tend toward a more skeptical, rational, worldview, I suspect a greater scientific understanding of spiritual experiences might be helpful in coming to see them as a natural, positive, even desirable part of human life. Too often, I suspect some of us think we have to choose between a more skeptical, rational worldview and believing in something “woo woo,” and choosing the former, we deny or dismiss spiritual experiences when they occur. This, though, is a false choice, and it robs us of an opportunity that might indeed help us to lead deeper, fuller, richer, more abundant lives.

            Up until now, I’ve been talking mostly about what might be called spontaneous spiritual experiences, experiences that often occur outside of any explicitly religious setting, but what is the relationship between spirituality and religion?

            Many thinkers speculate that spiritual experiences are the origin of religion. Just as the early humans learned to cultivate crops that they originally found growing wild, the earliest religious rituals and practices were meant to nurture and cultivate the kinds of spiritual experiences that people sometimes experienced quite naturally.

            Personally, I’m very attracted to this idea that experience rather than belief is at the heart of religion because it means that when a born-again Christian talks about having Jesus in his heart and I talk about, to use the words of the poet Tagore, feeling the “stream of life run[ning] through my veins night and day,” perhaps we are talking about similar human experiences but using different language to talk about them. It gives us more common ground.

           Of course, throughout human history, religious institutions have sometimes become oppressive and exploitive, manipulating people’s natural spiritual yearnings and experiences for less than ideal purposes just as the fast food industry today manipulates our natural cravings for sugar, fats, and salts for corporate profit. It’s certainly true too that religious institutions seem to damper and deaden spiritual experiences more than nurture and cultivate them.

            But this morning, I want to suggest that at its best, religion still helps us to nurture and cultivate spiritual experiences that lead us to a more satisfying experience of life, a deeper relationship with the source of life (however we understand it), and a deeper relationship with others and all of creation. I also want to suggest in today’s world, we need more of this, not less.

            What do I mean?

            Today, we live in a world in which hyper-individualism dominates our cultural, social, political, and economic lives, especially here in the United States. From my perspective, it is this hyper-individualism, with its glorification of greed and the pursuit of power, that is at the source not only of our current economic problems but of the greater ecological catastrophe toward which we may be heading.

            When I ask myself the question, “How can the world be saved?’ my answer is that the world will only be saved when more people achieve a greater degree of relational consciousness, the kind that often results from authentic forms of spirituality.

            There is a word in Greek - - metanoia  - - which is sometimes translated into English as “repent.” For example, this is how it is translated in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Some people say a better translation of metanoia is “a change of heart.” A more literal translation, however, come from examining its roots, meta - - which means “beyond,” and nous which means mind, yields a meaning of “going beyond the mind that one has.”

            If our world is to be saved, I think this is what has to happen. On a global scale, we as a people need not only a change of heart, but to “go beyond the mind we have,” to truly come to understand at the deepest levels of our being that our lives are all interconnected and interdependent.

            It is only when enough people come to believe that we all participate in a shared humanity, that what affects one of us affects all of us, that we all are part of the same human family, that none of us is self-derived or self made, that there is no individual salvation but only salvation for all of us or none of us, that we all sink or swim together…it is only when enough people come to feel these things in their hearts and then act on these understandings that the world will be saved.

            Are the kinds of spiritual experiences of which I have been speaking this morning the only way that a greater relational consciousness can be achieved? No, but they are certainly one way.

            I want to suggest this has two implications for us as Unitarian Universalists.

            The first implication is that we as Unitarian Universalists should welcome and applaud genuine spirituality wherever it may be found in our world. If other religious traditions use different language, images, understandings, so be it. Our criteria for judging any other religious tradition should only be whether it nurtures a spirituality which leads to greater relational consciousness, not necessarily whether it makes sense to us.

            Secondly, we should take more seriously the task of nurturing authentic spirituality among ourselves, and that, my friends, is my topic for next week….

 

The main sources for this sermon include Varieties of Religion Experience by William James, Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit by David Hay, and The Psychology of Religion, Fourth Edition: An Empirical Approach by Ralph W. Hood Jr., Peter C. Hill, and Bernard Spilka.