"Religiousness for Skeptics"
One of our ministers, the Reverend Carl Sandburg, has written a modern version of the Athananian Creed, however, perhaps it should be called the Skeptic's Creed, to wit:
We believe in Science, System Almighty,
Maker of Heavens and Earths,
And in Mathematics, its Method, our Reliance;
Which was conceived by the Babylonians and Egyptians,
Born of the classical Greeks,
Suffered under the Church Fathers;
Was crucified, dead, and buried,
And on the third day rose under Newton,
Ascended into heaven with Lobachevsky,
And sitteth on the right hand of Einstein;
And from thence shall come to judge the quick
and the deadheads.
We believe in the Holy Atom,
The Almighty Dollar,
The Communion of Sex,
The Forgiveness of Psychology,
The Resurrection of Medicine,
And in the Veatch Fund Everlasting.
The Veatch Fund, everlasting, we could hope, is a fund of millions of dollars created by one of our churches, an institutional owner of some oil wells in Germany, the money from which is used for good works around this nation, our movement, and the globe.
The Skeptic's Creed, just cited, is an example of Unitarian in joking. We are not afraid of holding things up to the light of inquiry – even of humor.
Ours is a church for the disenchanted—for those who have become disillusioned by the too easy religious blandishments of the past. We believe that religious doubt is a good thing and can lead to better things.
We have discovered that, “the simple gospel is not so simple as some simple people think.” Because we have given up oversimplification, “we” must seek the wonder and the mystery of religion at a deeper level: in and through experience, our own experience.
In the Unitarian church, then, we do not free ourselves from religion. The fundamental task and function of a church and of our church is religion.
Our congregation has a right to expect it: that what we celebrate and teach here is religions. From our teaching, learning, and growing we continue to build into our lives that which is right and good and helpful to others. But the power, the source, the energy for motivation comes from experienced religiousness inside ourselves.
Our way in religion is to free overtures for a religion that survives the death of traditional beliefs. We welcome skepticism. “Skeptikas,” as the Greeks called it, means “thoughtful and ‘inquiring.” Because we are skeptical, religion will not die here. Religion does not die because so many individual “religions,” appear to be nonsense, and skeptics question them; “counterfeit coins are accepted only because real gold exists.”
Religion means more when we experience it ourselves and do not simply inherit it; when we have to struggle for it, fight to win “the real gold,” to think and be skeptical, and then climb our way back into the religiousness, that satisfies the ongoing craving for meaning.
Let me speak today of some of the ways by which people come to religiousness through skepticism, taking skepticism as far as it will go, and then discovering their own more genuine faith.
One way some of us skeptics deliberately try to come to a deepened religiousness is through the study of reason, philosophy, theology, and philosophy of science.
I find I need, enjoy, and relish such study. I require it of myself. Even so, it never in the end, quite worked for me as the way back into religiousness. For religion is experiential, and reason and study alone, though valued, were never enough to convince. Something transcendent in experience has to touch us, I think, added to reason, to make religiousness for skeptics an imperative.
And this way, for some, is through intuition. Study breaks the mind free from its prison. Intuition opens the way to one’s own touch. By intuition, one reaches a kind of knowing or a waking up, a grasping and being grasped by ultimate reality.
A week ago one of our members sent me a fascinating article on “Zen and the Sport of Baseball.” It was by and about the Japanese baseball star, Sadaharu Oh, who broke Hank Aaron's all-time home run record by whacking 868 home runs. Here is what Sadaharu Oh said about his career, “It was a long, long initiation into a single secret that at the heart of all things is love. We are,” he said, “each of us, one with the universe that surrounds us, in harmony with it, not in conspiracy against it (let someone call you enemy and attack you and in that moment they lost the contest).” One with the universe is an intuitively grasped truth. Let me try to describe this intuitive “knowing,” this experience of an all-shall-be-well gestalt that some Zen Buddhists, Christians, Jewish mystics, Sufis, and intuitive scientists have experienced. This description has been suggested by an American psychotherapist named Arthur Deikman. I’ll speak of it in my words. It is hard to describe to others what you “know,” what you just know to be so for you religiously, in the same way that it is hard for you or me to tell someone what we observe about awareness.
Because we are awareness, we don’t do it, we are it. Therefore, we can’t observe it. We just are it and cannot separate ourselves from it. It is the central experience of being to be aware. Now an analogy: suppose each one of us is like a pond that is next to and continuous with the ocean. If the pond surface is smooth, that is like pure reflective undisturbed consciousness (pure awareness). The smooth pond—thoughts, feelings, and any other wanted activities are like ripples in the surface from the wind or as would be caused by pebbles thrown in or fish jumping.
If the surface is rough enough, awareness vanishes—what we have is a storm of disturbances. No serenity, lots of choppy thoughts.
When the surface become quite still and the water is still to some great depth, the pond then resonates with the longer phase pulsations of the entire ocean, that larger Being or “awareness” of which we are a part.
When a person, in great calm, with quiet and depth becomes aware of the All of the ocean, this is experienced as it was with baseball player, Sadaharu Oh, as love, harmony, wholeness, holiness, at the heart of reality.
Now it is hard to convey that experience (and that it is experienced as unconditional love) unless one has experienced it. It is not so much theistic or humanistic or some other kind of “istic,” it just is.
But since people through the centuries, including the first century mystic, Jesus the Galilean, are people and use words, they call it something. Jesus called it “Abba,” (daddy). Alan Watts called it the Great Ocean. It has been called the Self (with a capital “S”) or Tao or Truth or Brahaman. And many call it God.
The reason deeper than mere relaxation, that brings many people to meditation today (as has been true for centuries) is to get to the Awareness of Awareness Itself.
To the Truth, to the All, to God, to the quiet depth of the still pond at one with the sea, this has been a major way of skeptics to religiousness and to righteousness, by the way. One draws from the great well of the religious to pour one’s life out for the thirsty, yet the well never runs dry.
The skepticism is then to question or deny the official and traditional ways in religion as they sought religiousness substantiated by individual personal experience inside themselves.
It all may sound pretty theoretical. It is not theory. It is demonstrable, provable in experience; but it takes time and learning—it takes practice, it requires letting go. And some of us skeptics, thoughtful and inquiring, hope to learn more and more about it.
Another way skeptics arrive at their own religiousness is not through the “intuited insights of meditation,” but by being driven to personal religious practice. They start with skepticism.
That was so, for example, with the great psychologist William James, who was to become a professed religious investigator and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience.
As a young skeptical man, rejecting religion, he dabbled in the philosophies of Epicureanism and Stoicism as many wealthy educated Anglo Saxons of his time also did. Ultimately, he found epicurean aestheticism “comical and loose,” and stoicism moralistic, instrumental suffocating and tragic. With these discoveries he became very, very depressed.
Later in his work, he saw a patient in an asylum, a patient he could not get out of his mind. “The man sat there,” he said, “like a sort of Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human.”
James became afraid for his own sanity. His fear and the image of that man came together to bring him to feel. “That shape am I.” Not there but for the grace of God, go I but there go I, there I am, “I am that shape!” It frightened him.
Epicureans and stoics could not pray. William James, after that, could not help praying. Through skepticism, driven to religiousness, James found himself repeating over and over, “the Eternal God is my refuge” and “come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden.” It saved him.
How many have had such an experience, or will have it? Personal experience, not handed down, but your own! I have.
We experiment with the belief in “no belief.” Certainly, we do not throw out the findings of modern learning or science. We do not think of prayer as “magic.” But when it comes down to it—when it comes down, down far enough, down to it—we pray.
Skeptics we may remain, but we can be driven, or is it pulled, into (shocked into) religiousness.
“After spending my life as a rational man,” someone wrote to me once, someone recalling a time when I had delivered a memorial service for a member of his family. “After spending my life as a rational man,” he said, “barely touched by events around me, the grief I experienced was a shock. It was by far the strongest religious experience I’ve had. Grief must be the bedrock of religion. It hurts but life would be cheap without it.”
Yes, it would. Life would be cheap if it were not for grief; grief would not be if it were not for love, and both go to make up religiousness, that which holds us together with meaning through the facts of the transience of life.
A final way I would mention today that skeptics find their way into, or back into, religiousness is through the need to experience meaning with other people, to experience wonder together.
It can start as a small thing and spread it out to others. One Saturday evening driving home from somewhere I tuned in the public radio station sometime between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. in the automobile and was listening to a man named Garrison Keillor as he told some homespun stories about life in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where, as he said, “All the women are strong, all the men are good lookin’, and all the children are above average.”
It was this past fall sometime and I rushed into the house when I got home to turn on the station and hear the rest of it from Lake Wobegon.
After that, several of our members, one by one, started to tell me about Garrison Keillor: two families saying it had become a family ritual of theirs to listen to that philosopher (like a one-man Bob and Ray show) telling funny and sometimes touching things from way out in Minnesota.
Well, thinking, last week, about how skeptics can lose their childlike sense of wonder and something has to happen to bring them back into it, back to “religious wonder” too, and the sharings of people to that end, suddenly there arrived in the mail a gift full of wonder: four cassette tapes from Lake Wobegon.
So, I was listening last week to one of the tapes, one about winter at Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor reminiscing about when he was a 12-year old. It was back when most folks did not have a TV set and he didn’t either and he wanted one in the worst kind of way. He thought about the things that were going to be fabulous some day (when he could experience them and see them) just as what TV was like (before he got one it seemed that way).
He said all the fabulous things he thought about were out of his hands, beyond his power, and that’s what made them seem fabulous. But they all came to pass in time. “I got to drive my dad’s car,” he said. “I got out of school and didn’t have to go to class anymore. I moved to a city with a big library and I got a library card and could check out all the books I wanted. Those were all fabulous things when I was 12. Now they don’t seem fabulous anymore. But “what does seem fabulous to me now,” he said, “all has to do with people and love and affection and friendship which we have no power over either, and which we cannot make happen.”
Well, I say, religion for anyone maybe, but especially for free thinkers, it seems to me, is like that. It is about what goes on being fabulous after the things we thought would be fabulous have lost their power. But what never loses the power is all that has to do with people and love and affection and friendship, and we have no power over it because it’s bigger, always bigger, then we are. And we can’t make it happen either but it’s sometimes given to us like grace and we don’t forget it. We get a taste of it coming to church and remembering and being struck by the wonder of finding meaning in a place with other people at worship. And when the wonder sinks in, you can see it in the faces of people. Some of the best stuff happening in a church is what’s going on in the faces of people who have traveled the road of skepticism and found a way to religiousness!
