What Is Ultimate/God For You?

January 4, 2003

Rev. Gretchen Woods

READING

"Hymn to Matter" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence;

You who force us to work if we would eat.

Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion;

You who unless we fetter you will devour us.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born;

You, who by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

Blessed be you, universal matter, unmeasureable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations.

You who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.

SERMON

What Is Ultimate/God For You?

When I was about five years old, I learned that truth was ultimate in our family. My mother had discovered that each small dish of chocolate pudding in our refrigerator had a dollop lifted from it by a small hand. She railed at my little brother, then three, who was simply flummoxed by her anger and unable to defend himself. In distress, I confessed: I had done the analytical sampling of each dish, a sort of “quality control” experiment. Expecting a sound spanking and no dessert as a consequence, I was startled when she gave me accolades for telling the truth – and a full portion of dessert after dinner. I learned truth was important to her – in a very graphic way. That lesson stays with me. It certainly left me with a sense of wonder and real clarity about how I should live.

As I grow, many different values and experiences shape my sense of what is ultimate. And my sense of what is ultimate grounds my choices and my experience of life. This is a tautology, but one I can – and do – live with. Intentionally examining experiences that ground us and energize our lives shows us what is ultimate for us. In a real way, it articulates what is our “god.”

Now I know that “god” can be a bad word for some of us, but for many of us, it is simply a metaphor for what is ultimate. My mentor, the Rev. Dr. Lloyd Averill has defined religions as “. . . the search for that meaning which has power to give shape to our experiences, purpose to our existence, and motivation and moral energy to our human enterprises.” Sounds ultimate to me! It also takes “god” out of an anthropocentric image and into values and experiences, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Today, while considering a question that has myriad possibilities for answers, let us consider just three things that may help us in our search for that “power”: that it not only will, but must, be in our own image; that it must make sense to our own experience, and that it must call us to our better selves.

When I assert that what is ultimate is in our own image, I am not thinking physiologically. In his early poem, “The Indian Upon God,” William Butler Yeats captures that understanding graphically:

I passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees,

My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,

My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace

All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase

Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:

Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak

Is an undying waterfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.

The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.

I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:

Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,

For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide

Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.

A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes

Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,

He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He

Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?

I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:

Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,

He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night

His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

This calls up for me Proverbs: “Vanity, all is vanity.” But this is only a one limited perspective.

I have never been comfortable with an anthropocentric god. I think that idea comes of using only five senses to picture our selves. What of the values we claim; what of experiences which lift and gentle our hearts. Our search must open, deepen, and widen our perspective on our own image. We must begin to see how we can and want to be creative, loving, integrated beings of consciousness beyond our basest needs. Yes, Maslow was right, we do have basic needs that must be met. But are we willing to limit ourselves and what is ultimate to that first hierarchy of needs? That causes me to think our god is too small by far.

What about our capacity to think abstractly, to make choices which change our world for the better, or creativity, and our love? Have we forgotten all this in our search for “power?” Perhaps we should search for our “aliveness,” and consider how that informs our god. We might not have such an angry, power-driven god.

Of course, we, as meaning makers, want and need what is ultimate to make sense to our experience. We do not expect to leave our brains disconnected when we enter our house of worship. We do not need to believe in the “supernatural” to experience things beyond our five senses. The natural informs our values: our experiences of love, truth, beauty, goodness that deepen and maybe even move us beyond those five senses.

Such experiences may be supersensual, but not supernatural. What do you feel when you see the sun flash through drops of water and ice on a tree branch being blown by a gentle breeze (as I did one morning). I had a “wonder reflex”: that catch of breath and trembling moment of transcendence that was not sought, nor can be artificially created, but that may surprise in moments of unreflection – and be reflected upon later, as now.

Science is not the adversary of these moments, nor of the ultimate, but the ally. Knowing about light refraction and all the wonders of human perception does not alter the wonder one bit. We are caught and held for a moment beyond ourselves. Then, we use science to continue our search.

This is not about belief, but faith. It is not about forcing meaning to fit into already prescribed boxes of belief, but is recognizing that there are things upon which we can depend, given our own experience. There is beauty, truth, and goodness. We cannot assume or presume perfection or constancy of such moments. We cannot, as Lucy Van Pelt wishes, “. . . have only ups and ups.” We must live with the natural ups and downs of life and recognize that they can be grounds for faith in a larger process, if not belief in a fixed god.

Yes, our god will tell us who we are, will reflect our own image. If we cannot see beauty and wonder in a drop of water glistening on a leaf, if we only find meaning in power-over and a god of war, we definitely know what our own image is. I suspect that there are people who have only known war, pain, grief, and anger in their lives, but I wonder at what they are always looking. Have they never seen a shining leaf or a gorgeous sunset? Have they never heard a warbler or a symphony? Have they never tasted a ripe fruit or a lover’s kiss? If this has been their life: shame on the rest of us as human beings for we have failed them entirely and reap the whirlwind of loss of humanity in them. Their gods - and ours - are too small.

Which brings me to my last point, I believe that whatever is ultimate or god for us will and must call us to our better selves. Further, this experience will inspire us with energy and creativity for our lives. Think of those people you know who burn with love and creativity, with aliveness. In them I see what my god is. This does not mean that they – or we - must always be creative. Still, they exude an energy that asks the best of me, even when we just sit and chat, doing nothing. In like manner, a beautiful bird song invites me to whistle my own tune, a gorgeous sunset to create a new ensemble of texture and color, even with clothes I already own.

generated moves us out into the world, causes us to become agents for more such energy to be generated. The Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mentors wrote:

When the son of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

to find the lost,

to heal the broken,

to feed the hungry,

to release the prisoner,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among the brothers,

to make music in the heart.

Seeking what is ultimate does not make our lives easier nor give us less sorrow. If anything, increased consciousness will bring us greater awareness of pain and dis-ease in our world. What it will give us is experience that tells us there is more than anger, pain, and sorrow. There is beauty truth, goodness, and love, if we are willing to open to it and to co-create it in our world.

We, each one of us, will live by what is ultimate in our lives, whether we consciously determine what it is or not. As Unitarian Universalists, with shared values, we know that what we choose and how we live has meaning beyond our short lives, and we have the guidance of our Purposes and Principles to help us in our search.

I close with a poem by Mary Oliver which captures the search and the response:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean –

The one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

That is what is ultimate for you. May you choose wisely and well, with respect, responsibility and relish for the process.

Blessed Be!