Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
April 25, 2004
The Natural Sacred
The Mother's Day cards are on the shelves - it's that time of year. There are rows and rows of them - it is amazing how many ways there are to say Thank you, and I love you, to your mother. Or your grandmother, or your children's mother; the variety of cards, the subtleties of illustration, the gradations of sentiment, are all remarkable. Something else intrigues me, too: a significant percentage of these cards announce themselves as intended for The Best Mother in the World, or the World's Best Mom. I'll bet there are dozens of different cards with a message to that effect just in my own local Target. But how can this be? Either the world's demonstrably best mother earned that title in part by virtue of being so incredibly prolific that it takes all these cards to satisfy the clamor of her enormous family to recognize her status, or else there must be some deluded people out there. I have an idea for a new reality TV show - let's make all the people who buy those cards register their Moms, and we'll get them together and have a run-off for the world's really best mom. We'll give them challenges, like packing the best lunch box, or band-aid application - points off for no kisses. Maybe we could get Donald Trump to appear and announce "You are NOT the world's best Mom" to the losing contestants. Next year, we'll know for sure; only one card, for the mom who really IS "the best mom in the world."
Or, am I missing something? Perhaps the point is that the claim 'my mother is the world's best Mom,' - together with its analogues, 'my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world', 'my husband is the sweetest guy in the world', and 'my child is the most talented kid in the world' (maybe even 'my minister is the world's most brilliant preacher'?) - is something other than a statistical or demographic claim. Maybe what is being asserted in such a statement is not a rational, scientifically verifiable proposition, but something else. Maybe it is possible to describe a kind of human experience in which it could be true that more than one person has the most beautiful wife in the world, or the sweetest husband, or the best mom. After all, when we say these kinds of things, it isn't really with the intention of flinging down the gauntlet and challenging anyone else who would say the same to prove that they are right and you are wrong. In fact, there is a dimension of human experience that is not subject to, and does not abide by, quite the same rules of logic and proof as the realm of rational knowledge.
My late father in law used to irritate me this way, though I hope I never let him see it. We would take him out to dinner, or Mark would cook, and he would end the meal by saying, earnestly and gratefully, "That's the best steak I've ever had!" At first, I took him to be engaging in a sort of careless hyperbole, and I found it grating, but after a time I realized that it wasn't really intended to be a comparison to actual previous meals, but rather an expression of complete satisfaction, and praise. It clearly wasn't a rational argument.
Jerome Stone suggests that it is in somewhat the same was that we need to understand the usage of words like sacred, divine, and holy. Properly understood, these terms point to a type of human experience that is not other-worldly or supernatural, but also does not belong to the realm of logical argument or strictly rational claims. The natural sacred, he proposes, is a quality of experience that is characterized by depth, significance, and intensity, and that is not subject to our manipulation or control. Such a concept is, it seems to me, entirely compatible with a humanist perspective. If we are capable of understanding how there can be more than one best mother in the world, then we ought also to be able to make sense of a concept like the natural sacred. Stone goes on to describe some aspects of his conception:
Sacred events are not to be understood as manifestations of something deeper. Rather the overriding importance is the "depth" or "height". All of the world religions, as I understand them, speak of going beyond the surface understanding of life. My naturalistic outlook suggests to me that the deeper vision we seek to attain is not of another realm or of invisible spirits, bur rather a revised insight into the importance of things. There is a "depth", not apart from, but right in the midst of things.
There are no clear boundaries around the sacred. Some events are clearly sacred. Others are perhaps boundary-line cases. It is not always possible to know whether some events or places are sacred. Perhaps this means that all things are sacred, although I am not sure that we are capable of sustaining such a sense.
The sacred is not a separate sphere of life. It is not to be found separate from the pursuits of truth, justice, beauty and selfhood. It is more like the caffeine in the coffee than like a cherry on the top of a sundae.
Religion could be thought of as a self-conscious acknowledgment of the sacred. In that cease there is no clear separation of the sacred and the secular, yet there is still a role for the deliberate recognition of the presence of sacred things. Religious communities and their traditions, what we sometimes disparagingly call "organized religions", are attempts to nurture and pass on the sense of the sacred.
Spirituality can be thought of as the attempt to cultivate an awareness of the sacredness of things, and an attempt to live out the revised sense of the importance of things which sacredness brings.
It seems that almost always, sacred things have a dual aspect. They both challenge and support the people that acknowledge their sacredness. My own view is that the sacred is probably plural in nature.
It does not require the supposition of any realm of existence distinct from the natural world, or any conscious purpose or intent directing that natural world, in order to recognize the difference between seeing the depths of things, and seeing only their surfaces. Indeed, if we assume as I do that our lives are not assigned their meaning, but rather that we create the meaning of our lives as we live them, then it is in the depth dimension that we must seek the raw materials for that act of creation. Those who are satisfied with the surfaces of events can never be scientists or scholars, poets or artists, lovers or parents, or makers of justice or peace. For all of these endeavors require the ability and the curiosity to see beneath the mere sequence of the tangible to grasp the intangibles of pattern, beauty, principle, and love.
Where any of these non-material but entirely natural realities is present in some crucially important way, we are entitled to speak of a holy moment, an awareness of the divine. In fact, I believe it is just exactly this that people who do believe in other realms and purposeful creators are actually experiencing and trying to talk about in a kind of anthropomorphic metaphor. It is easy and tempting to suppose that when you know you didn't cause some event, that there must be someone or something else that did cause it - but of course, that is a faulty conclusion. It is true that the experience of the sacred is not ours to manipulate - we can't make it come and go at our own will. Part of what characterizes a holy moment is that it deals with something profoundly important, intensely valuable, that we do not entirely control. Not that we are without influence; their choices have a lot to do with whether parents are going to have a baby to bring to a dedication service, but every parent also knows the sacred astonishment at the separate life that they cannot, in the end, claim entire credit for. As the Prophet says, "Your children are not your children; they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself." That longing, of infinite importance to us, but well beyond our power to command, is a wholly natural thing, and it is entirely sacred. So is our grieving love for those who were dear to us and have died. So is the slow-motion wonder of spring stealing once more across the prairies; so is the whole ultimate, intricate dance of living systems on this planet, which the human race is learning, painfully and none too quickly, that we do not control. The ecological integrity of the earth is sacred - it is of an ultimate importance that is not just a function of our own human well-being. Granted, we are in fact dependent upon this biological process for our own survival as a species, but there's more to it than that. Beneath the surface of our practical needs is an awareness of something precious and beautiful; an awe, a reverence, a holy wonder, that challenges all our calculated exploitations.
I suspect it is possible, as Jerome Stone suggests, that we would find all things, and every moment of life, shot through with a sense of the sacred, if our limited consciousness were capable of paying that kind of sustained attention. But it takes a concentration, and a willingness to be vulnerable and aware of our own finitude, that most of us just can't summon up as a constant state of being. We relax onto the surfaces of things, limit our perspective to our own narrow interests and needs. For when we are aware of the sacred, it not only expands and inspires us, it also makes demands upon us. Just ask these parents; the more deeply they rejoice in gratitude for the gift of their child's life, the more it sinks into their souls that they have taken on an enormous responsibility, and the more they realize that the promises they have just made are ones that they have no idea how they will be able to keep. I actually think that perhaps it is a mercy of the universe, or an evolutionary survival mechanism of human consciousness, that we cannot sustain our intense awareness of sacred significance over long periods of time. Such an awareness, even as it enriches and ennobles our living, giving dignity and loveliness and moral compass to our days, makes our every action and experience so fraught with meaning that at some point it becomes unendurable.
Thornton Wilder knew this, when he wrote the last act of Our Town, in which the heroine Emily, having died, chooses to re-live one day of her life. Her knowledge of the future makes every small, ordinary detail of an ordinary morning in an ordinary family so poignant that she cannot bear the weight of her awareness. There is nothing miraculous or supernatural about what Emily experiences; the only extraordinary thing is the quality of her attention, but everything she touches or sees is luminous with divinity; intense, deeply significant, and utterly beyond her control. "Just look at me for one moment as though you really saw me," she pleads, "let's look at one another!" I think that Stone is on to something when he muses that spirituality is about the double-sided effort, both to cultivate our capacity for that kind of awareness, and to make changes in our lives in response to what we may learn from such experiences. The people who are good at this, who can enter into a recognition of the holy depths of things -- if not with comfort, at least with the familiarity of practice -- and who then intentionally structure their lives according to the values glimpsed in those moments of intense insight, are the ones I consider spiritually wise. They are the ones I want to be like. Scientist and poet, parents and peace-makers, they are the ones, I expect, who will save us if anyone can.
The language of reverence is finally the language of humanity; it always has been, and there is nothing else for it to be. The human experience of finding ourselves in the presence of that intense, fleeting, beautiful and demanding moment when the dull surfaces of things become transparent to a meaning and significance almost greater than we can bear - that experience belongs to all of us, no matter what kind of vocabulary we use when we try to talk about it. Only by not paying attention can we avoid it; it doesn't need gods or angels or magical other worlds - looked at properly, the world we have is magical enough, holy enough, sacred enough. We are the ones who bring the eyes to see, the minds and souls to marvel, the voices to lift up in praise. We are the ones who must build the meanings of our fleeting days out of what we find to be deeply and powerfully important, right here, out of the utterly natural stuff of life. The holy is nothing but the ordinary, held up to the light and profoundly seen. It is the awareness of a creativity and a connection that we do not control, in a universe that is always larger, more intricate, and more astonishing than we imagine. It is the acknowledgment that we are formed by the earth from which we arise, and in which we live and move and have our being, and that we are, finally, not alone, for our very humanity is shown to us by families, friends and strangers, each and all of whom are the very presence of the divine.
On this day of re-covenant with our future - Earth day, day of dedication - let us be gratefully aware that we live in the midst of all that is holy, that we are surrounded on every side by the natural sacred, in a world overflowing with wonder. There were no need for heaven, could we but know this truth with the fullness of our being, and abide in its wisdom all the days of our lives.