Mystery

December 3, 2000

A few years ago, I came across a little biblical parody in the newsletter of a church which shall remain unnamed:

In the beginning there was nothing;
And then God created light--
Still there was nothing,
But you could see it better.

It's funny, but it's a bit too cynical for my taste. I'm as skeptical as the next person, but skepticism is cold. It fails to warm or nurture me. Is there "nothing" as the parody suggests? It's a good question, one that needs to be asked. With people proclaiming certainties on every hand, it needs to be asked. But is there nothing?

Our scientific, empirical approach to religion has often ended in skepticism. Since nothing of a theological nature can be proved, nothing can be embraced. Unitarian Universalism, at this extreme, has too often been a light by which nothing becomes visible. It is a kind of fundamentalism to deny the validity of all religious feeling and belief; to deny the validity, in some instances, of placing one's faith in the unknown.

More recently there has been a different trend in Unitarian Universalism. This trend is reflected in the view of former Unitarian Universalist Association President Bill Schulz: ". . .Religion," he writes, "is only in part a matter of facts. Religion is in much larger measure a matter of mystery, a matter of values and faith, inference and uncertainty." Personally, I see this as a healthy trend. For as the great Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton wrote, in words that have intrigued me since I first read them over twenty years ago, "As long as you have mystery, you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity."

Liberal religion has had a tendency to want to explain all mystery away, rather than to embrace it. ". . .The demand for explanation," wrote Thomas Merton, "is due to the desire to be rid of mystery." It is this desire which Einstein warned against when he wrote that "He to whom [mystery] is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Is there nothing? One of my colleagues, Roy Phillips, writes,

What if we are at home in this universe, and, what if it sustains us and accepts us and nurtures us, and, what if we say it is good to be here, and, what if we are happy to be here, and, what if we are part of a power of life greater than ourselves, and, what if that power is good, and, what if we call that force or power God, and, what if this power or force becomes love when people care for one another, and, what if this is a good and decent place to live, and, what if we believe this, and, what if it is true, and, what if we live our lives as if it is true?

Perhaps in order to be healthy persons we need to embrace the mystery, the positive "what ifs" of life, as Chesterton and Einstein and Phillips suggest. And as Bill Schulz warns, "Our Unitarian Universalist addiction is to confuse rhetoric with reality, to relish argument more than appreciation, to care less about what one has experienced than how one describes it." There is more than a little truth to the old saw that, given a choice between heaven and a discussion about heaven, most Unitarian Universalists would choose the latter.

But we also have the tradition of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Emerson is our mystic, our embracer of the mystery. "Mysticism," wrote Chesterton, "keeps us sane." Perhaps that is why I love Emerson so much: he keeps me sane! In Emerson we find the worship of the inexplicable. In his essay "Nature" he wrote: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." He doesn't need to explain this feeling; it is enough to have experienced it. The experience is all the proof he needs.

Some of Emerson's elders were skeptical about his intuitions. They were worried about where these intuitions might lead, and about whether they could be trusted. The early Unitarians had spent so much time responding to the irrational excesses of their orthodox contemporaries that they feared the outcome of any transcendentalist musings.

But for Emerson, it was the experience that counted, and it was only the things that were personally experienced which could be trusted. That is why he told people to "acquaint [themselves] at first hand with Deity." Like William James after him, he recognized that "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all around it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."

For a while, Emerson's view triumphed and held sway. But doubt about the very existence of God--which Emerson had never questioned--began to intervene. Mystery again became suspect. Skepticism held sway, and Unitarians were subject to such generalizing characterizations as this, by Somerset Maugham: "A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn't quite know what."

I think the characterization is unfair, but like all generalizations it contains some truth. However, there have always been those Unitarian Universalists of whom it could also be said, as Chekov writes of one of his characters, "He was a rationalist, but he had to confess that he liked the ringing of the church bells." I suppose that I am one of those.

What we need, it seems to me, is not to throw out our reliance upon the use of reason in religion, of which we should be justly proud, but to strike a balance between the rational and the mysterious. As Chesterton writes, "It is exactly [the] balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy person. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that we can understand everything by the help of what we do not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid."

Now, this is paradox, and the rationalist does not like paradox. But somehow we need to embrace this paradox: after all, we rail against the fundamentalists precisely because they seem so utterly devoid of a sense of ambiguity or paradox. For them, everything is black and white, either/or, but never in-between. Will we be accused of the same?

Please don't get me wrong: doubt and skepticism do have their place. That reality has been an important contribution of our religious movement. But we must decide when the stakes demand them. A healthy sense of mystery and uncertainty about the universe and our place in it is not a total surrender to superstition or the irrational. Rather, an appreciation for the mysterious in life seems to me to be an act of greatest humility. It is the confession that I am not all in all.

As the contemporary Christian theologian Gordon Kaufman writes,

The only possible check against the monumental deceits which human religiosity works on our gullibility--and on our desire for certainty in a terrifying world--is the constant reminding of ourselves that it is indeed mystery with which we humans ultimately have to do; and therefore we dare not claim to know the right and the true, the good and the real, but must acknowledge that in these things we always proceed in faith, as we move forward through life into the uncertain future before us.

I suppose that what I am warning against is the sheer arrogance of that little biblical parody with which I began my remarks. For to proclaim the nothingness is sacrilegious. It is as bad and as insupportable as the fundamentalist claims to knowledge of the will of God. There is arrogance in both claims, an arrogance which does not in either case harmonize with my own, personal experience.

I certainly do not know the will of God. On the other hand, in the face of the claim that there is "nothing," I am prone to repeat Denise Levertov's poetic affirmation:

Don't say, don't say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and us drinking there.

Even St. Paul once wrote, "Prove all things, hold fast that which is true," and I don't think anyone would ever accuse him of being a rationalist. The problem, I would suggest, is that that which is "true"--true for me, true for you--is not always susceptible to proof. The great Christian mystic Julian of Norwich wrote, "Sin must needs be, but all shall be well. All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," but there is no empirical proof for her optimistic claim, and all the indicators we have certainly do not favor such a view. But personally, I'm glad she said it, and I hope that it's true.

"Faith," wrote John Shea, "is not believing in what you don't see; it is interpreting what you can't avoid." Faith is interpreting what you can't avoid. We are faced with uncertainty; our lives are veiled in mystery; and it is our job to interpret it. As the morning's reading suggests, there is more than one way to do that.

What really makes us different from other religious people is that we take individual responsibility for this interpretation. At our best, we Unitarian Universalists are not just deniers, we are interpreters, embracing the mysteries of existence and trying to make sense of them. Our actions in the face of these mysteries are what make us faithful, not our beliefs. It is when our rationalism, our skepticism, turn us into deniers and negators of other people's experiences that we become unfaithful and distrustful, and that is when we earn the approbation of those who see us simply as disbeliveers: people with no sustaining beliefs whatsoever.

To guard against this, we must sometimes leave old hurts and angers behind us, for often the things that have been done to us in the name of religious "belief" have stripped us of the ability to appreciate myth and symbol, or sacred rite. The power of symbols is not in how they conform to a dogmatic interpretation, but in how they serve as bearers of the mysteries of the existence we share.

Myths and symbols are attempts to explain things which are not rationally explicable. This does not mean that they are not true, though they may not be true in a factual sense. The story of Adam and Eve, for example, is in part a primitive attempt to explain the human propensity to act freely and knowledgeably for good or for ill, and as such it is a powerful and poignant description of the human condition. But to interpret it literally is a sacrilege. Some of us need to heal the wounds of our religious upbringing so that we can again appreciate the need for sacred symbols, for sacred story and religious language, and for mystery.

We need a healthy sense of the mysterious. The French philosopher and poet Amiel once wrote,

Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guest, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to take it. If you are conscious of something new--thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being--do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to any one!

I do not agree that we must "prove all things." But I do believe that we must hold fast to that which the heart teaches us is true. That will not always be easy; and our tendency will be to do the opposite of what Amiel suggests: to deny it a place in our hearts because we cannot explain it.

Often it is when we peer into the darkness, when we confront the mystery of our being, that an answer is found. In spite of everything, in spite of appearances to the contrary, we find that life is good, and in the face of the unknown we are forced to our knees to give thanks for the gift of being alive. I cannot explain this. Beyond all reason, we are filled with hope and a sense of purpose and meaning. We are overwhelmed by the love we have received and by the love we are capable of giving.

In this holiday season, may we continue our journeys into the mystery of life, expectant always, explaining what we can, resting in the questions we cannot answer. And may the mystery itself provide us with the comfort we are seeking. I wish it for us. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock