A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, January 22, 2006

Spirituality is a very private matter.  It is part of who I am and what I do.  When I write, there is a prayer that goes into it.  I hear people talking about how they wake up in the morning and set aside twenty minutes a day to meditate.  When I wake up in the morning, I usually say a prayer without a lot of fanfare.  I don’t go out on the balcony, arms outstretched.  In our way, it’s very private, very personal.  When I sit down for a meal, it’s the same thing.  It’s not something that I need to demonstrate,  I am very aware of the fact that there is a performative aspect of spirituality that many non-Indians expect.  They want to be able to see spirituality, to touch it.  They ask, “Where is your medicine bag?  Where are all the things that symbolize your spirituality?”  There is this kind of essential Indian list, everything from being an enrolled member to wearing ethnic ornamentation.  I feel just as comfortable in my sense of being Hopi, dressed in street clothing.  I don’t feel the need to wear it.

- Dr. Angela Gonzales

in Every Day Is a Good Day – Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women

one winter afternoon
(at the magical hour
when is becomes if)
a bespangled clown
standing on eighth street
handed me a flower.

Nobody, it's safe
to say, observed him but
myself; and why? because
without any doubt he was
whatever (first and last)
most people fear most:
a mystery for which i've
no word except alive

--that is, completely alert
and miraculously whole;
with not merely a mind and a heart
but unquestionably a soul--
by no means funereally hilarious

(or otherwise democratic)
but essentially poetic
or ethereally serious:
a fine not a coarse clown
(no mob, but a person)

and while never saying a word
who was anything but dumb;
since the silence of him
self sang like a bird.

Mostpeople have been heard
screaming for international
measures that render hell rational
--i thank heaven somebody's crazy
enough to give me a daisy

- e.e. cummings

Meditation:

In our quests for spiritual living

we follow many different paths.

Some seek God’s majesty,

and find it in the wonder of a moment,

or the beauty of a mountain.

Other’s seek the spirit of community

and find it in the simplicity of a handshake or a smile.

Some seek healing from pain and loss.

Some seek growth into new ways of being.

Nearly all of us seek many things at once.

Let this house of worship be a haven for every seeker

who would search with an open mind.

May it be a sanctuary of the spirit,

in which all may find comfort and courage,

challenge and blessing.

May it be a shrine of learning,

in which children and adults alike may grow in wisdom.

May it be a temple of justice,

adorned with the tapestries

of freedom, peace and compassion.

And may it never be confined by these walls,

instead opening to enfold and be enveloped by

the universe itself.

Let this be our prayer.

Amen.

And Blessed Be.

Sermon:  What Is Spirituality?

            When I was in seminary, I was privileged to live next door to the room in which Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his most famous address.  It was a simple and quiet wooden chapel with a small pipe organ and an antiquated pulpit, filled with plaques.  A century and a half after the event, it was hard to imagine the electricity that must have been in the room when Emerson, in his most eloquent and flowery style, encouraged an entire generation of Unitarian ministers to “Acquaint Thyself First Hand With Deity,” and enjoy the fruits of nature’s bounty.

            When you think about it, it’s a wonder they let him speak at all.  In those days Harvard Divinity School was all but exclusively in the business of training Unitarian ministers, and while Emerson may have been a great thinker, speaker and writer with deeply influential ideas about God and nature, he was hardly a shining example of good ministry.  This was a man who left his church in shocked disarray, on the flimsiest of excuses, after only three years as their minister.  This was a man who was once ridiculed as “the Unitarian Minister who left his pulpit to reform the world by growing onions.”

            But I have sympathy for Old Waldo.  I know, sympathy isn’t the word that usually springs to mind when one thinks of Emerson, but his was not a simple path.  He was one of the first of the Transcendentalists, and the movement, with its emphasis on first-hand religious experience, on going out and doing spiritual things, would not have met the approval of his rather stuffy upper-crust Boston congregation.  They expected to come to church every Sunday and hear something erudite, something Christian and above all something safe when what filled his mind were the mysteries of Indian sacred texts and his own love of nature.  They expected a weekly Lord’s Supper, but Emerson didn’t believe in the Lord’s Supper.  They expected a moving prayer, but as Emerson later said, “I found it difficult to get into a prayerful mood precisely every Sunday morning at 11 O’Clock.”  Can you imagine what it must have been like for the man, well suited to the lecture circuit but ill-suited to parish life – can you imagine, as his life seemed to him more and more cluttered with minutiae and devoid of meaning – can you imagine the clatter of a life so misdirected that even the communion with God that it was his calling to lead started to feel like so much annoyance?

            Perhaps you can imagine.  Perhaps you have found yourself in similar situations, if smaller in scale.  There come moments in every life when we can’t handle any more, and must choose between emotional collapse or some kind of substantive spiritual renewal.

            That renewal may not be as dramatic as Emerson’s resignation, and outwardly it may not seem especially spiritual.  I once read that when things got to be too much for Mozart, he used to fill his desk with rotten apples.  There certainly doesn’t appear to be anything spiritual about that – except that it was his way of demonstrating concretely that something was wrong.  It was a conscious step in a healing process – just as many today would say that acknowledging a problem is the first step in any healing.  If things get so overwhelming that we feel the need to jam furniture with expired fruit – maybe it’s time to think about spirituality.

            When it happens to me I generally try to play music or to get outside.  That can be a little difficult in the middle of winter, but there’s usually a cross-country ski trail not too far away, or a walk that is worth bundling up for.  In other seasons, it’s kayaks and canoes, or hikes through mountain trails.  I remember one late summer about a decade ago when I felt the need for spiritual renewal especially keenly – having within a single year driven halfway across the country five times, searched for and moved into a new apartment, and proceeded to commute four hours a day to and from a temp job I could barely stand while cramming for an interview with the UUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee.  Life was feeling a little heavy.

            So I took the first two weeks in September to spend in a cabin on Sebago Lake, Maine – a familiar and deeply comforting place for me.  Sitting in a canoe, a copy of Rabbi and Minister wrapped in plastic beside me, I started to reconnect with nature, with humanity, and with my own calling as a minister.  I took time to remember.  This, for me, was the beginning of a spiritual renewal.  This, in that moment, was what spirituality meant for me.

            In some ways, spirituality today seems easier to find than it has ever been.  Messages about spirituality surround us – in the words of politicians and preachers who wish to create a spiritual nation, in movies that promise a “spiritual experience,” at bookstores that sell spiritual self-help books by the millions (I’m still waiting for Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul to come out), in tabloids that tout the latest spiritual escapades of the pop stars – is it Kabbalah this week, or Hinduism? – in shops that have popped up all over the country specializing in “spiritual merchandise” – from crystals to wands, from Native Wisdom with a dash of Zen to the Tao of Almost Anything. 

            Some of these can be very helpful, but most seem hollow, somehow – it’s all a little too commercial, a little too piecemeal and a little too consumerist for many of us.  If it were that easy – if spirituality really were something we could purchase for a few dollars or that we could put on and take off like a piece of clothing – wouldn’t we all be fulfilled and content in our spiritual lives?  I find it hard to accept that what is holding so many of us back is a lack of more things.  Maybe the things can be aids to our spiritual seeking – but maybe they can become distractions.

            So it was that on a whim this week I typed in the word “spiritual” to Amazon.com’s search engine and came up with 18,124 spiritual books, 1,630 spiritual CDs, 570 spiritual pieces of jewelry, 343 spiritual articles of clothing, and, among assorted other items, an “Auto Expressions Spiritual Scent Car Air-Freshener” and some dietary supplements that promise “spiritual wellness.”  Now I’m a pretty open-minded guy, but some of these products make me want to go fill my desk with rotten apples!  This can’t be the answer to what we’re all looking for.  This can’t be all spirituality is.  There has to be something we’re missing.

            In Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships, the very word spirituality has been a subject of discussion for years.  It’s even been the center of some fairly heated debates; some claim we don’t get enough spirituality in UU churches, others believe we get all spirituality and no substance.  This is an old conversation – one that stretches all the way back to Emerson himself.  But to worry about how and where we get spirituality is to miss the point.  Spirituality is not and never has been something people get.  It’s something we do.

            Emerson did not get spirituality by, as he said, “observing the world as a great eyeball” – he did  it by “acquainting himself first-hand with deity.”  I did not get spirituality by sitting in a canoe on a lake – I did  it by renewing my connectedness with humanity, the larger universe, Unitarian Universalism, and my own deepest self.  The tranquil setting may have helped take me there, but in the end, it was only a setting for action.  Spirituality is action. 

            Of course, not just any action is spiritual.  While no one definition or kind of spirituality can ever speak for everyone, most practices that are spiritual seem to be those that foster a sense of connection – with oneself, with God, with nature, with the universe as a whole, with our ancestors, or with other people.  Spirituality might bring us understanding, knowledge, inner peace, or – yes – a warm feeling – but beyond that it brings greater connectedness.

            That’s what all of the products out there are designed to do.  That’s what practices like prayer and meditation help us achieve.  That’s the purpose that the crystals and music and all the books serve – they draw us out from our everyday mindset so that we may begin to connect with the world around us in new and marvelous ways.  Whether we need those particular products is its own question – whatever helps us open ourselves can, in its place, be a blessing.

            Certainly it is not enough just to have the trappings.  Spirituality may often be contemplative, but unless there is real contemplation involved, real change occurring, there is, literally, nothing doing.  Emerson was a flop as a minister until he realized he had to stop going through the motions of religion and start living it.  There needs to be more than something beautiful happening around us.  We must participate.  There is little spiritual uplift, for example, in being the object of unrequited love.  But to be in love is to be consumed with the spiritual.

            Spirituality is action.

             I love e.e. cummings’s image of a clown standing on Eighth Street handing out flowers.  Here is someone who practices spirituality by giving, freely and unashamedly, of himself – making connections between strangers that could never be forged by someone in ordinary clothing. 

            completely alert
            and miraculously whole;
         with not merely a mind and a heart
            but unquestionably a soul--

He changes the rules just enough to allow for the realization that anything is possible. 

            Alice Walker writes that when one is spiritual, “one begins to see the world from one’s own point of view; to interact with it out of one’s own conscience and one’s own heart....  We begin to flow, again, with and into the universe.”  This is more than spiritual practice; it is spiritual living.

            I can think of few who better embody this kind of spiritual living than my father, who seldom takes time to “get” spirituality ­– yet who in his work manages to do plenty.  He has always been like that – when he received his law degree fifteen years ago he turned away from corporations and law firms to work as a public legal advocate for abused children in poverty-stricken Washington, DC.  The kind of strength and depth of self it takes to do work like for very long was perhaps best demonstrated by a co-worker of his, a social worker who once said, “I got a heart full of compassion and I ain’t takin’ crap from no one!”  The material trappings of spirituality may seem completely absent, but these are some of the greatest acts of spirituality I have known.  These are people who interact with the world out of conscience and their own hearts.

            But even in the most important and holy work, it is too easy to lose track of what is central and sacred.  It is far too easy to become caught up in mindless detail.  No spiritual practice will do us much good if we worry so much about our technique that we leave ourselves no room for connection.  No amount of nature’s splendor will lift us from our ordinary selves if we leave ourselves no time to savor it.

            It was almost ten years ago that I came to know – and ultimately to bury – a long-time member of the UU Fellowship of Mankato Minnesota, where I was an Intern Minister.  Lowell had been an English teacher, and we often talked of the Transcendentalist writers – Emerson especially.  I think it was through Emerson that he came to accept his immanent death.

            The last time I visited Lowell in the hospital and was able to have a real conversation with him, he asked me what I, as a young man, saw ahead of me on my way to the grave.  “We are all,” he said, “on our way to the grave.”  Thinking of the sermon I had given a few days before, I responded with a hunk of theology ­­­­– something about continual growth, changes, the reality of suffering, and life’s surprises.  I went on for too long in this vain.

            After I finished, he took a moment before responding.  “Maybe I wasn’t listening,” he said, “but I didn’t hear a single peony.  I didn’t hear a star, or a shining trout, or a walk on a spring day.”

            He was right.  In my haste to think about the “work” of spirituality, I had forgotten what makes it worth practicing.  I had covered the detail, but lost the sense of connection.  Lowell remembered.  From there we jumped into a lovely conversation about simple pleasures – love, art, playing marbles on a Spring day, the joys of goofing off.

            It is never enough to be surrounded by beauty if we take no part in it, or to seek spirituality if we are driven only by detail.  True spiritual living demands more.

            And the teachers, the prophets, the sages are to be found everywhere – if we take spiritual action and open ourselves to them.  Some are social workers and legal advocates.  Some are ministers.  Some, writers and poets.  Some, construction workers.  Some, children.  Some are dying women and men.  And some of them are peonies.

We receive fragments of holiness,

glimpses of eternity,

brief moments of insight.

Let us gather them up

for the precious gifts that they are

and, renewed by their grace,

move boldly into the unknown