Taking Darsan in Minnesota

"The eye is the truth."

-The Brahmanas

I remember the northern lights. Night after night, as I would hike a mile and a half uptown to play pool or go to a movie, I would marvel at the northern lights. Constantly moving, they stretched 180 degrees across the northern half of the sky, from due east to the west. On the silent winter night they would make low rustling sounds, like a woman wearing taffeta petticoats. Even to a blase teenager, it was awesome.

How many of us carry such visual images of familiar places with us? I know that I do: images of snow falling heavily in quiet streets of home in downeast Maine; images of big seas crashing a rocky shore; gray-green spruce trees against a colorless sky; distant ghostly islands on the horizon; the way lobster boats swing into the tide; the way the sea-smoke rises off the bay on a cold winter morning, when the water is warmer than the air.

When I moved to Minnesota, I gathered a new set of visual images: the seemingly endless prairie horizon; the groves of trees around farm places reminiscent of islands, or, especially at night when only the yard lights are visible, of ships at sea; the huge, mid-western sky in every direction; the black, black earth of Minnesota; the gnarled oak trees; wind blown snow; prairie sunsets; the way the moon rises up out of the earth.

Images are important. The more familiar they are, the more charged with meaning they become. We associate them with particular episodes of our lives. We see more than is actually in the image: we see through and over and beyond it. We see into the image. It carries freight: precious cargo. No one else will see it quite the way we do, because of the memories and meanings that we bring to it. What we see is more than meets the eye: what we see is modified by us, by our own peculiar preoccupations, by our own particular baggage of past experience.

My message this morning concerns a special way of seeing which is called darsan, or "seeing the divine image." The morning’s reading, by Diana Eck, described it.

I am not going to claim that we can learn to "take darsan," as the Hindu’s say. Ours is a radically different culture, with a radically different understanding of religion. But I believe that we may be able to learn something from this way of seeing. I think that we may begin to understand what it means to look for the divine image. I hope that we will begin to look more carefully at the world around us, and to use our eyes more frequently as channels for the sacred. "The eye is the truth," says the Brahmanas. Let’s think about this claim for a moment.

Ours is peculiarly a religion of the word. The Protestant Reformation focused attention on the Word of God, the Bible: it was translated for the first time into the vernacular of the people, so that all who had ears to hear could hear the Word spoken. The placement of the pulpit in this meeting house illustrates our emphasis on the spoken word. In Protestantism, the pulpit replaced the altar and the sermon replaced the mass. The Calvinist Protestants, in their effort to realize Luther’s plea for sola scriptura, "only Scripture," broke up organs and threw out stained-glass windows in their churches. They did away with all images. Only the Bible, only the Word of God, was their cry.

Our ancestors, the Calvinist Congregationalists of New England, built large, airy meeting houses, with high, prominent pulpits, and windows of clear glass panes. Form and harmony were important, but subtle. The visual was downplayed.

Margaret Miles, my former professor of Historical Theology at Harvard Divinity School, has written critically of our Protestant emphasis on the word. She believes that we need images as well as words in order to live a complete religious life. As she puts it, "Religion without artistic images is qualitatively impoverished; art without religion is in danger of triviality, superficiality, and or subservience to commercial or political interests."

Vision was once known as "the queen of the senses." Yet, we have allowed our religion to become woefully devoid of the visual. As Miles suggests, "The religious affections, traditionally formed and trained by images, are not effectively engaged in the worship of Christian communities when images play no part in liturgy and devotional practice."

How different is the situation in India! There the visual sense is overwhelmed by images of gods and goddesses from the Hindu pantheon. A westerner can hardly begin to grasp the meaning of this rush of imagery. We make little sense of the dancing Shivas, of the fat, meditative Buddhas, of the elephant headed Ganeesas, of the phallic lingas of the Hindu temples. What does it all mean?

The Christian missionaries to India, coming as they did from a culture and religion of the word, could not understand this flood of religious imagery, so they dismissed it as idolatry. The Hindu celebration of many gods was considered blasphemy against the One True God. The Hindus, the missionaries believed, were pagans in need of conversion.

As Diana Eck suggests,

The bafflement of many who first behold the array of Hindu images springs from the deep-rooted Western antagonism to imaging the divine at all. The Hebraic hostility to "graven images" expressed in the Command- ments is echoed repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible: "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

But could we learn to see? As Margaret Miles suggests, "Language . . . develops one’s ability for analytical self-reflection. Visual images, however, are primarily addressed to formulating--for purposes of understanding and taking an attitude towards--physical existence, the great lonely, and yet universal experiences of birth, growth, maturity, physical vulnerability, pain, weakness, ecstasy, aging, illness, sex, death."

We are great analyzers, but we are not very good formulators. We are not very good, for one example, at finding positive images for aging or illness.

One reason, of course, is the visual images we are bombarded with: commercial images of slim, healthy, sexually appealing young bodies, for example. These are the images that advertising has chosen to represent for us. What does this tell us about the visual images we hold? Somehow we need to escape our enthrallment to the commercial images which are intended to make us desire something we really don’t need, something which is actually spiritually empty. These are incomplete images and false images. We need to create alternatives.

So how do we go about repairing our visual deficiency, our inherent distrust of the visual? How to create new images? How to be moved by images, and even to begin to see the divine in them?

The memory of Minnesota’s "awesome" northern lights provides a hint, I believe. And our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition, too, suggests a way.

Ever since the Transcendentalists at least, our tradition has counseled us to look for the divine in the world as it is. "Those motions everywhere in nature must surely be the circulations of God," wrote Thoreau. "The flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind--whence else their infinite health and freedom." This worship of the natural world is a significant strand of our Unitarian Universalist heritage. We are taught to look for God, to look for the divine, literally everywhere.

I am convinced that there is such a thing as a theology of landscape or geography. Our surroundings help us to form a vision of the divine, be it cruel or benevolent, abundant or austere.

We need to learn to look with the eyes of the soul. We don’t need to go far: there is plenty to see right here in Newburyport! There is plenty to see in Minnesota, I discovered, if you know how to look. We need only to cultivate the awareness of what we are seeing.

To do this, however, we need to overcome our distrust of the visual. Worship services in the Protestant tradition of which we are partakers are pretty much devoid of visual stimulation. But consider the visual richness of a Greek Orthodox worship service! Too seldom does our worship include visual experience, such as sacred dance or art. Too often our worship lacks drama. Perhaps what we need is to re-learn a child’s fascination with the visual world, and to relinquish some of our focus on words.

Undoubtedly, we could use more worship services and fewer sermons!

The good news is that we don’t have to go anywhere special to begin to see anew. We can start just where we find ourselves. As poet Wendell Berry writes in a poem entitled "The Wild Geese,"

. . . we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Like anything else, learning to see will take practice. My friend, the poet Philip Booth, provides a hint for how me might begin in his poem, "How to See Deer":

Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always:
find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.

You’ve come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to

new shapes in your eye.
You’ve learned by now
to wait without waiting;

as if it were dusk
look into light falling:
in deep relief

things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock