Creating an Inner Religious Life

April 2, 2000

"All you have to do is stop. That's all. It's that simple." --Carl Scovel

I have always been an orderly sort, which is a cross not only for me to bear, but also for those who live with me and who are forced to put up with my unreasonable standards of orderliness and neatness. Yet, there is something in the resolution of chaos into order that appeals to something in me.

Without getting overly psycho-analytical, it has occurred to me that my outward compulsiveness and quest for order is actually a way of trying to control the inner chaos of my being. If only I can keep the external world in order, I reason, I will be able to keep the internal world in order, too.

This kind of rationalizing only works part of the time, unfortunately.

In truth, I realize that compulsive neatness is a poor way of keeping my inner world at peace and in harmony. But how, then, to keep our interior balance? How to control the seething, conflictive, threatening-to-explode mass of emotions and desires that lurk within all of us, below the surface calm, threatening at times to overwhelm us and knock us off our delicately maintained balance?

This is a question which, I think you will agree, is worthy of our best attempts to find an answer. This morning I would like to investigate the possibilities which creating an inner religious life have to offer as a way of keeping our interior chaos in check. It is a problem with which, as a publicly religious person, I constantly struggle.

What is the religious life? How do I live it? Do I even believe that there is such a thing as a religious life? How do I get beyond the stereotypes of what it ought to be?

All of us, even those who are commissioned to lead other people in worship, sometimes feel spiritually empty. Sometimes it feels as if there is nothing left to give, no gas in the tank, nothing to offer to people to help them put together a sustaining and nourishing religious life of their own. Such a feeling can easily lead one to despair.

God knows, there is more than enough evidence around us to convince us that the world is an utterly chaotic and meaningless place. And for that reason, we need to get beyond stereotypes of what is meant by the "religious life" to a recognition that whatever gives our lives meaning and a sense of order--and this may include some very unorthodox things for some of us--is of use for our inner religious well-being.

After all, the word "religion" has nothing to do with belief in religious dogmas or deities or systems or particular and peculiar religious denominations. The word religion means, simply, "to reconnect." Thus, in the slang of the 1960's, "getting it all together" is not a bad idea of what religion is really all about.

This idea of religion as "reconnecting" implies that something which was once together has come apart and needs to be put back together again. How many of us, I wonder, does that describe?

Religion ought to address the brokenness within and among us, and help us to put it back together. Thus, I would argue, whatever helps you to put it back together is, in the truest sense, "religious." Whatever in life helps you to maintain a sense of order and meaning and to keep chaos at bay, that is religious. And so, first and foremost, creating an inner religious life means getting in touch with those things in life which help you to do this.

I had a college professor who turned to Mozart in order to reassure himself that the world was, indeed, an orderly place. In Mozart he believed he heard God. Music is only one of the resources available to us for creating the interior life.

Despite its reputation, sport can be an important source of meaning and order. Beyond unbridled competitiveness, sport presents us with a closed world, one with rules and boundaries which must not be breached. Occasionally, in games as in life, chaos breaks loose; but it is quickly restrained and order soon prevails.

As we approach opening day, we might think of baseball. It is played in an enclosed ballpark, with definite rules and boundaries. We may not know who will win the game, but we know that it will take place within certain prescribed rules and decorum. Bump the umpire and you're thrown out of the game. And that's that. The beauty of games is the predictability which lies beneath the unpredictability of who will win and who will lose.

Many of us have hobbies and pastimes which help us to affirm that "all's well with the world." Whether it is a game that we enjoy as a participant or a spectator, sailing a boat, gardening, walking, reading, traveling, tinkering, or whatever--we need these things to help us maintain our balance and our trust in the universe. We need our interests in order to have a healthy religious life: that is, a life of connection. And our children need them, too.

Now, some of you may argue that these things are not "religious," but I am convinced that under the right circumstances, they are. I want my life to feel all of one piece. That is the most important thing my religious practice can do for me. Everything I do contributes to the whole cloth of my life. And to be whole is the whole point!

Perhaps this is where some of the more traditionally religious disciplines, such as prayer, contemplation, and worship come in. Because it is in gathering together for worship and meditation that we are able to step back from the chaos of our lives, to look at our lives and to try to weave that pattern of meaning that we so desperately seek. The very regularity and habit of Sunday worship services can serve as an anchor in our lives. It can be one of those things which by its very repetitiveness can help us to affirm a sense of order in our world. This is certainly one of the purposes of liturgy, and while we don't have a formal liturgy in our church service, we do have an "order" of service which is fairly predictable from week to week.

"Prayer" is an often-misunderstood religious practice which can be instrumental in helping us to create an inner religious life. That is why we Unitarian Universalists sometimes prefer the word "meditation" to "prayer." Meditation, my dictionary tells me, means simply "to muse over or reflect upon; to consider, study, ponder."

A survey of Unitarian Universalists some years ago indicated that only a small percentage of us often spend time in prayer. I suspect that that statistic is really a reflection of our mistrust of some of the traditional notions of prayer. I would argue that many of us do things which are meditative in nature, or, if you will, "prayer-like." We may not engage in petitions to a deity, and we may not have specifically "religious" objects in mind. Nonetheless, we meditate religiously: that is, we meditate on the ultimate issues and questions in our lives and on our places in the universe. Obviously, my broad conception of what constitutes religion allows me to make this claim. Because I believe that all of life is religious; and I believe that sometimes, even in our everyday, mundane activities, we become aware of the sacred in our lives. We become so specifically at those moments when our lives are bound up and feel of one piece.

As religious liberals, part of our problem with the idea of prayer is that we have tried to define it too closely, or we have allowed those more conservative than we are to define it for us. I am in favor of broadening the definition.

The late Paul Beattie, a Unitarian Universalist minister, once wrote a piece entitled "A Minimal Theory of Prayer." He argued that "prayer is a way of disciplining and transforming human behavior." This is, it seems to me, what we mean to do when we seek to create an inner religious life. In some instances, that discipline of prayer is intentionally undertaken. But in other instances our activities themselves become the discipline. There are some activities which put us into a meditative or prayer-like state of mind.

I have no doubt that some of us get that way while walking, or listening to music, or by splitting wood. Beattie argued that "to pray there is nothing that you have to believe or think, except that taking time for prayer and meditation is worth the effort. Stop and think," he tells us.

When do we really get down to basic attitudes and emotions in our lives? Not often enough. When do we seriously sort out our priorities? Too seldom. When do we see how our beliefs, ideas, and hopes are related to our everyday activities? Hardly ever.

One characteristic of a meditative or prayer-like attitude which most of the great religious teachers make reference to is solitude. In order to get in touch with the deepest currents of our beings, we need time to be alone. This doesn't mean that we can't be with others as we pray, but only that it must be a personal endeavor. To pray in a group is to be alone, together.

The attempt to create an inner religious life is the attempt to cut through the chaff in our lives to get to the wheat, to what is ultimately sustaining, and to find peace. Carl Scovel, recently retired minister of King's Chapel in Boston, writes that

Perhaps the hardest thing to believe in this world is that there is peace and that peace is possible for us. Most of us, if I observe correctly, are so busy that the reminder of the possibility of peace is almost an irritation, and yet there are moments when we desper- ately want to stop and relax. It is possible to do that. It is possible to stop whatever we are doing and breathe deeply and think and pause long enough to let our mind wander and our soul center itself, and to feel a stillness which the world cannot contrive and cannot seem to take away. You can do this in your own room. You can do it on a walk. You can do it at a retreat center. You can do it if you are old and you can do it if you are young. All you have to do is stop. That's all. It's that simple.

What we seek, then, is connectedness within our lives and with others. We do want to get it all together. And I would argue that ultimately there is nothing selfish in this religious search for wholeness. Rather, we will know we have it together when our own sense of inner well-being leads us back out toward engagement with the world and with other human beings. Getting it all together religiously means that our sense of connectedness to other people is also affirmed.

Creating an inner religious life requires stopping long enough to observe our lives and to see how the various pieces fit. For some of us, this will not be wholly satisfying as we realize that some of the pieces don't. But transformation cannot take place if we remain oblivious. It's always a risk to take the journey within, and we cannot be sure of what we will find there: order or chaos. But we'll never know unless we take the time to look, and we'll never change if we don't try. Some of us will have to confront the chaos at last, but I am confident that the risk is worth it when the goal is one of spiritual health and wholeness.

We all desperately need what my colleague Bruce Southworth has called "disciplines of the spirit that help [us] fall more deeply in love with life and its giftedness." We can begin with the simple willingness and desire to find inner sources of strength and calm, to fear life less and to love ourselves and it more.

The soul's yearning for order, meaning, and peace cannot be denied; we cannot hide from the mysteries of our existence, try as we might. Hopes and fears, joys and debilitating sadness will find us, often where we least expect to be found out. But we can prepare ourselves by heightening our awareness of the things which sustain us and give us hope. There is nothing out there which is not sacred if we have but eyes to see. To make all of life religious--to give meaning to all that we do--that is the task that we need to be about, and that will take some intentionality on our parts if it is to become a reality.

Whether or not we will it, life overwhelms us in all that we do. It takes no belief in religious systems, or books, or special prayers, to affirm that it is so. May we be about the work of creating an inner religious life to help us meet the challenges that greet us every single day, and may each of us find the wholeness and peace we seek.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock