Dr. John Young 9/10/06
UUCJ
UUs on Reality and God
For many years this congregation has closed its Sunday services with the clause “to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine.” Our UUCJ Mission Statement begins by calling us a religious and spiritual community and pledges us to sustain a sacred space. In our shared Vision, we identify ourselves as “a spirit-filled community.” Our Unitarian Universalist Association’s shared traditions includes: “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
For more than 400 years, Unitarians have been identified as the ultimate monotheists because they identified reality with God and God with reality. As Francis David said: “God is one. God is indivisible. The individual human conscience, at its best, will not be satisfied by anything less than truth and justice. Using the best tools of reason and experience, the deepest emotions and broadest love, we seek to accept God’s truth in this lifetime, and to accomplish salvation here on earth.”
For more than three hundred years, Universalists have proclaimed a theology of hope instead of an ideology of fear. People, like Rev. John Murray who brought Universalism to America first in colonial New Jersey, affirmed a benevolent God and a loving Jesus. The ideas of hell and devil are only the nightmares of sick souls. All people will be saved. We believe that all people can find meaning and value in life and will find peace in death. This theology of hope became the sixth largest denomination in America just after the Civil War. Already by the 1850s, we had women ministers and African-American members and leaders. Today, our membership is an inclusive cross-section of progressive, responsible activists.
We are Unitarian Universalists. We do not divide reality from the divine, nor put people down in order to lift God up. We seek to find the true unity of real life. We believe that we and life have sacred worth. We know that people do need to concentrate on love, but we do not think that people need to think exactly alike in order to love alike. We look for truth in all the great religious and philosophical traditions. We refuse to accept the abominable lie that only a few are worthy of salvation or that most of humanity is or will be damned by a vengeful god or a condemning prophet. These lies drive people to despair and invent gods and goddesses that fly in the face of reason and human experience. They have given God, religion, and humanity hypocritically bad names. It is time for good news that is actually good news, good news for the truth and good news for humanity.
We base our ideas about reality upon our best tests of reason, the results of scientific inquiry, and our own deepest experiences. Some of us are trained logicians or philosophers, but most of us are simply educated people who use the tools of reason to test all things. A few of us may be expert scientists in one field or another, but we all embrace the current scientific knowledge available to everyone with the will and patience to understand. For hundreds of years our spiritual ancestors have used reason to test scripture along with every other book and used scientific methods to measure potential truth from all its sources. Every one of us not only uses reason and science but most especially our own life experiences. These have taught us all about the idolatries of others and ourselves, about the worth of every person, the need for democratic process, the worth of individual conscience.
Many spiritual people and some philosophers have wasted a lot of time considering whether there is a real world or not. Unitarian Universalists are functionally unanimous that there is a real, natural world, and that we can substantially understand it, and can, at our best, live in it reasonably successfully. For us, reality is real, and it is natural, and we have the capacity to understand it and, at our best, to live in harmony with it. The quest for truth and meaning is not a foolish exercise, but a practical quest. Truth for us is real and vital, but human truth remains inevitably partial, contextual, evolving and developing. Some questions are interesting, but in any absolute sense, they are probably finally unanswerable. Most questions can be answered, but we need to realize that our answers are rarely the whole answer. Our truths are usually only part of the answer, are almost always dependent upon the context, and these truths usually evolve and develop, sometimes reversing our former truths.
My favorite personal way of thinking about reality is that reality is real and natural, but our understanding of it, our truths, are almost always probabilities. The quest for absolute truths are usually not only wild goose chases but are often terribly misleading enterprises that tend to degenerate into outworn dogmas, convenient lies or cultural myths. I find it more practical to try to proceed in a probabilistic world, where I live by likely outcomes, rather than sure things.
God is a single word to try to sum up the creative and organizing powers of the universe, of the world, and of our selves. Natural reality is complicated, and we only partly understand it; so, God becomes a convenient symbol for talking about the only partly understood forces behind what we think we do understand, as well as the other parts of reality which we do not understand but depend upon, have hopes about, or faith in. Few of us believe in some of the traditional concepts of God; so, some of us hesitate to use the word ‘god.’ But, of course, most of us use a host of other concepts, such as peace, democracy, justice, or love, about which we also do not share a traditional view or the cultural superstitions of many other people. If we could only use the concepts where we share the majority view, many of us might be made into mutes.
Like most Unitarian Universalists today, I do not believe that God is a person or a human- like being. I do not think God has gender. I do not think that we can talk God into changing the laws of the universe. I am most comfortable calling God: Creation, because I perceive God to be the creative process, the process that created the universe, that governs nature, and that continues to evolve humanity. Reality, as we all realize, is incredibly complex, and some aspects of natural reality appear to be terrifying and even diabolical from a human perspective. These are aspects of reality, and they are probably, therefore, aspects of the divine, but, like most other human beings, I am usually not comfortable with those aspects, particularly when they are confronting me or my intimates. Cancers, plagues, genocides, wars, and child abuse happen, but I have trouble working them into my God concept. Human beings have a tenacious desire to have life make sense; they want the world to be a significantly benevolent place. Like most people, I am more comfortable with perceiving God to be basically benevolent toward me, the human species, and the natural world I revere. I cannot prove it. However, very few human beings proceed through their practical lives as if they did not believe this to be so. They live as if there was hope, that life did justice to good people, that life could make sense for reasonable people.
Considering God is a matter of both considering the God beyond, the transcendent God, and the God within, the immanence of God. Unitarian Universalism is central to our faiths significantly because it has concentrated, from the beginning, but particularly since the American Transcendentalists, upon the God within, and shown the myriad of connections between the immanence of God, the divine within people, and the creative forces in the world. So, our pre-eminent traditions become your own experiences of transcending mystery and wonder, the transforming power of love, and the celebration of the sacred circle of life. We spend our lives connecting and relating the wonders and evolving facts of the natural world with the depths of wisdom and love within ourselves. That is how we learn to live in harmony with the divine.
I know that some of you are more comfortable just not thinking about God. You want to play like you understand the world, or simply focus on the part of it you think you do understand, and I don’t mind what you do as long as you try to live with love, use your reason, be responsible, and try to do justice in your lives. However, it is my experience that people become better people when they think deeply about both reality and about the enduring mysteries, transcendence and wonder beyond the known and understood realities. That is central to why I became and have remained a Unitarian Universalist minister. I love life and human beings. I embrace reality, and I wish to stretch myself toward the edges of Creation as I understand it. I celebrate the Unitarian Universalists’ good news. We are practicing humanists, but we are also exuberantly spiritual. For us, god and reality are one, and we want not only to discover the truths of natural reality but to explore, celebrate, and revere the mysteries, transcendence, and wonder beyond those understood natural truths, but divinely and exuberantly connected with them. We did not invent our reason or conscience. They were given to us by Creation, and our purpose is to discover how to evolve our individuality so that we fulfill our unique parts in Creation itself, as our Spoken Affirmation says: “to grow into harmony with the divine.”