April 30, 2006

The Morning Reading, from the Book of Exodus, Chapter 33, verses 7-11:

“Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp; and he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people rose up, and every man stood at his tent door, and looked after Moses, until he had gone into the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the door of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. And when all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the door of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship, every one at their tent door. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.”

The Morning Sermon:

Last week for the Children’s Focus part of our worship service, I told the children one of my favorite true stories-- the story of Galileo. Galileo’s personal experience of religion and science change everything for Christianity-- Galileo changed the rules of what we are allowed to look to as a source of religious truth. Since Galileo’s revelations, we have not had to take the teachings of the Catholic Church as the one and only source of religious authority. We can look to our personal experience --what we see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, feel in our heart and soul, have learned with our intellect-- in defining and refining what “god” is to each of us. Because of Galileo, personal experience is a legitimate source of religious truth. You could say that Galileo was one of the first Protestants. The Protestant Reformation valued the people’s interpretation of what is divine and how to live a good religious life. Eventually, the Catholic Church had to acknowledge [if to varying degrees] that the people have had some ideas of great worth and beauty about God and religion.

Not long after Galileo’s death in 1642, George Fox founded the Quakers. Margaret Hope Bacon writes of the Quakers’ emphasis on each person’s direct experience of the divine in her book, The Quiet Rebels – The Story of the Quakers in America:

“Although firmly rooted in Christianity, Quakerism has never had a fixed set of theological beliefs. Friends have generally felt that it is the reality of a person’s religious experience that matters, not the symbols with which he tries to describe this experience. A direct experience of God is open to anyone who is willing to sit quietly and search diligently for it, Quakers believe. There are no prerequisites for this experience, neither the institution of the church, nor its sacraments, nor a trained clergy, nor even the message of the Bible, unless illuminated by the Inner Light. Every person has the capacity for religious experience, just as he has the capacity to fall in love, but he must be willing to approach worship with an open heart, experientially.” [pp. 5-6] and “They firmly believed that they represented the return of true, primitive Christianity and that the principle they had uncovered would be accepted everywhere and transform the world… They believed that God also dwelt in the pagan, the Moslem, and the Jew.” [pp. 14-15]

Next came the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the power of human reason and on empirical evidence. Next came theologian F.D.E. Schleiermacher who wrote [in 1799] that the basis of religious belief is human experience, primarily intuition, feeling, and imagination. Schleiermacher is often called the father of modern theology. Unitarian Universalism today is a direct result of those great earlier Protestant thinkers. I like to think of us as more highly-evolved Protestants. The sources of religious truth we now draw on include direct experience of the divine; the words and deeds of the great prophets, both women and men; Hebrew and Christian scripture and other world religions; humanist teachings, including the results of science; and earth-centered spirituality, including that of Native Americans. Galileo moved us toward looking at all these things as legitimate sources of religious authority. The main way he did that was by stating that the earth is not the center of the universe. This just blew everybody’s minds. It showed them all that everything is much more relative than they thought. It created, for many people, a sense of awe at how much we do not know and still have to learn, and an understanding that there are some things we will never be able to know for certain. Since there is much about the divine and divine living that no clergyperson or church can know for certain, you each are allowed to discern religious truth for yourselves. You can answer, for yourselves, the question: What is at the center of my universe? What do I hold as the most exalted thing there is? I want to know your answers. But there’s something else I care about even more-- What is the quality of what resonates between you and the center of your universe? What qualities make our relationship to what we revere base? What qualities make that relationship laudable? Paul spoke to this in his letter to the Galatians [5: 19-23]: “immorality, idolatry, jealousy, selfishness” –Not, said Paul. “But love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control-- these are the fruits of the Spirit.” What is the quality of your relationship with God?

I’ve reflected long and hard on that question this week. I know that not all of us here use the word “god” in describing our religious beliefs. But lots of people and institutions keep trying to define what God is and has to be --and loudly!-- even though the nature of the divine is ultimately unknowable. That being the case, it benefits all of us to clarify what our relationship with the divine feels like-- at least enough so that we can articulate that to other people-- especially to people who think –erroneously-- that they have the one answer that ought to be true for everybody.

Knowing that I would be preaching on various views of God this week, I knew right away that I did not want this sermon to be just a lecture on theologies or religious history-- That just would not be the best way to help you clarify your view of the divine so you can articulate it. The best way is to give you an image-- a real-life image on which you can repeatedly reflect and stretch your imagination. After lengthy reflection on God and my relationship to God, I arrived at the image of spiritual friendship. I realized friendship is what I hold in perhaps the highest regard of all. To me, real friendship is not an ordinary thing; it is a sacred thing. Real friendship, when we are so privileged to know it, is to be exalted, and cherished. La Rochefoucauld wrote, “A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.” I have always loved the quote by Emerson, “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.” Emerson also said, “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” Dag Hammarskjold wrote, “Every deed and every relationship is surrounded by an atmosphere of silence. Friendship needs no words- it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.” And Mark Twain, whose wit we can always count on, wrote, “The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.” The four films I mention in my May minister’s column are all at heart about the privilege of true friendship found. --that shared by John and Abigail Adams in their letters to each other; that of Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice; that of Jake and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain; that of Maggie and her sister in In Her Shoes; and that of Truman Capote and a prisoner on death row in Capote. Capote wrote, “It was as if he and I grew up as brothers in the same [abusive] house; and he escaped out the back door, and I escaped out the front door.”

But friendship has been exalted not just in the eyes of me and modern authors and directors-- Friendship has been exalted by wise religious teachers since the Celtic civilization before the fifth century AD. The Celts called it anamcara, which means soul-friend. John O’Donohue writes, in his book, Anamcara – Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World [pp. 35-37]: “In the early Celtic Church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. Anam cara was originally someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara, you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the ‘friend of your soul.’ The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul… In everyone’s life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of acquaintance fall away. You can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release your self into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul… This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul… The anam cara experience illuminates the mystery and kindness of the divine. The anam cara is God’s gift. Friendship is the nature of God… Consequently, love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other.” Also, “The Buddhist tradition has a lovely concept of friendship. This is the notion of the ‘Kalyana-mitra,’ the ‘noble friend.’ Your ‘Kalyana-mitra,’ your noble friend, will not accept pretension, but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. No one can see their life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind side where you are not able to see. Therefore, you must depend on the one you love to see for you, where you cannot see for yourself. Your Kalyana-mitra complements your vision in a kind and critical way. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.” [pp. 48-49]

In Kahlil Gibran’s, The Prophet: “A youth said, speak to us of Friendship. And the Prophet answered, saying: Your friend is your needs answered. He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. And he is your dining table and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace. When your friend speaks his mind, you fear not the ‘nay’ in your own mind, nor do you withhold the ‘ay.’ And when he is silent your heart does not cease to listen to his heart. For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed. When you part from your friend, you grieve not, for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain. And let the purpose in friendship be the deepening of the spirit. And let your best be for your friend. If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. For what is your friend that you should seek him only with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness. And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.” When I told one colleague that I was going to preach about spiritual friendship, she said, “You should mention dogs-- and cats-- not nature in general so much as the animal kingdom; you should mention St. Francis of Assisi, and pets.” The Quakers called each other “friend” and are also known as the Society of Friends. They have relied on each other for kind companionship, support, advice, accountability, and assistance with discernment. No matter how wise, strong, and good anyone is, they always need counsel and correction from advisors. A friend is someone you know, like, and trust, with whom you feel a sense of peacefulness. The opposite of a friendship is an enemy relationship of antagonism, hostility, and war. What are the qualities that resonate between you and the divine? If that relationship resonates with hostility or shame, can you re-imagine it so that your religious views make you feel, not worse, but better? To be friends is to be on the same side, to want the same things, to want what’s best for the other. I think of the O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi,” in which she sacrificed her hair to buy him a watch case, while he sacrificed his watch to buy a comb for her hair, each wanting more for the other than they wanted for themselves. In a true spiritual friendship, neither party is used or abused, and neither will the descendants or inheritors of that relationship be used or abused. A spiritual friendship is friendship at its highest and fullest possible form. It has integrity, honesty, and acknowledges the harsh realities of life as well as the blessings. It is open to the new, and ongoingly creative and evolving. Friends see in one another, vulnerability, but also possibility and potential. This is what it means to be a mature person and to be a partner in a mature relationship. A friend is not expected to take away my troubles in one fell swoop, nor to solve my problems for me, but to help me figure out creative ways to transform my own life. A clergyperson should cultivate spiritual friendships between members and friends of the church, and should cultivate spiritual friendships between people and the divine-- should cultivate them, not try to control or codify them. I feel the greatest compliment I have ever received was when a colleague said that I notice people who are somehow out of step [and isn’t every person somehow out of step in his or her own way?], and that I walk along side them, befriend them, and receive their wisdom.

In the Gospel according to John, Chapter 15, verses 12-17, Jesus says:

“This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that a man is willing to lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends [Jesus said], if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my father I have made known to you… This I command you, to love one another.”

I would not say “lay down his life” so much as “step aside--” so that shimmering between and around friends is the truth that we are known and loved— and that God is amazed at that.