January 22, 2012
Matt Alspaugh
On last Saturday the Patriots pummeled the Broncos 45 to 10, and I was secretly pleased, even though I’d lived in Denver for many years and generally root for the Broncos. I’m sure many of you were pleased too, using that logic ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ after Pittsburgh’s loss to the Bronc’s the week before. No, as a religious leader, I was glad to see the end, at least temporarily, of Tebow-mania, happy to see some order restored to the world.
Tim Tebow, as I’m sure nearly all of you knew long before I did, is a adequate but not superstar quarterback who gained celeb status by dropping to his knees for a quick prayer after each touchdown. Fine. But what I find difficult to swallow were the increasing claims that Tebow’s success was due to divine intervention. As one writer put it about the Steelers game, “Why wouldn’t God allow Tebow to throw for exactly 316 yards, for a 31.6 yard passing average, with a 31.6 television rating at the end of the game, a game where Tebow had John 3:16 written under his eyes?”[1] Indeed, according to a poll taken on January 8, some 31.6% — no, no, no — actually 43% of Americans did believe that Tebow’s success was due to divine intervention.
While I may snicker at this, it also saddens me. Such a small god so many people worship! When there is so much suffering in the world, so much need for divine intervention in very real, powerful ways, we are offered the very model of a minor deity, one whose powers seem limited to throwing football matches and mixing some numerology into the stats. Or else we are offered a god that promises to answer our needs and desires if we’d just pray or believe — a trustworthy god, whose motto is ‘in god we trust’, who comes in various denominations, and folds nicely to fit into our wallets. It is little wonder then, that many of us toss out the very idea of God entirely, choosing one of the non-theistic paths, such as atheism, Buddhism, humanism, Taoism, and so on.
Can God Be Saved?
Can God be saved? Is there a worthwhile place for the divine in our lives? For some, as I just mentioned the answer may be ‘no’, but that’s not the only answer for all of us. But a more majestic, expansive version of God would be nice.
In an old joke, a guy is praying to God.
“God, he says, I would like to ask you a question.”
God responds, “No problem, go ahead.”
“Lord, is it true that a million years to you is but a second?”
“Yes, that is true.”
“Well then, what is a million dollars to you?”
“A million dollars to me is but a penny.”
“Ah, then Lord,” says the man, “may I have a penny?”
“Sure,” says God, “Just a second.”
Can God be saved? Is there a sense of Ultimate Concern or Ground of Being, to borrow terms from Paul Tillich, some Absolute, or Source of Life?
For many of us, Barbara Pescan’s poem rings true:
“You are an absence, your name is all that is left behind.
Yet I look upon you.
I know I cannot turn
from the place where I last saw you.
I will search the face of the void,
I will continue to ask,
For this question is all I have,
this and my eyes
which seek to see you face to face.”[2]
Find X
We held our our first Healthy Congregations workshop here last Saturday. This is a district sponsored program with participants from our cluster of five nearby congregations. At this workshop, one person offered her understanding of God. She said “God is like the x in one of those algebra equations you encountered in high school. X is the unknown, find x”.
I thought this was a wonderful analogy! Most of us immediately remember how hard some of those problems were, working out whole pages rearranging equations, eraser at the ready, hoping we didn’t screw up a step, sweating away to find that elusive x.
I’m also well aware that many of those equations had more than one equally valid answer for x. Some of the possibilities for x were not even real, everyday numbers, but contained the imaginary numbers, not seen in the ordinary world. Other equations offered up an infinite number of possibilities for x. Other equations clearly offered no possible solution at all, there was no x. And then some equations were simply not solvable. We simply don’t have the intellect, the mathematical wisdom, or even all the time in the world, to solve them.
Find x. Hard enough. But here’s what’s even harder: when the question is about thenature of the universe, or the divine, we are not even given the equation. We have to find the equation too, or at least make a reasonable guess at it. We are given no textbook or quizsheet or scripture verse or creed that clearly, plainly gives us the equation or the x or any of it.
How We Construct Understanding
I think of times when I’ve watched skyscrapers being constructed. Early in construction, a tower crane is planted on the site, and it begins to lift steel and concrete as, floor by floor, the building is erected. Periodically, the crane itself is lifted up, so that it can continue to work on ever higher floors.
Such is an analogy for how we’ve come to understand much of our natural world. We imagine or intuit some new height of understanding, and then use observation of experiment to build floors of verification up to those new heights. This experimental or scientific method has worked remarkably well for some fields. Take physics, where we’re willing to spend nearly $10 billion dollars to build a machine — the Large Hadron Collider — to test for the existence of one subatomic particle, the Higgs boson.
But what about metaphysics? Now metaphysics doesn’t mean something spookily above and beyond physics, but simply was a word for the books of Aristotle that were put ‘after the physics’ books on the bookshelf. What about those books, the theology and religion? We face the awareness that these are fundamentally different from the fields in which scientific verification and proof can be obtained. Sure, we can have intuitions, create hypotheses, have great sense of faith, but proof eludes us. Against the railing of all the preachers and televangelists and youtube Holy Joe wannabes, there is no proof. No $10 billion machine will prove God’s existence, or for that matter, tell us how to live good lives.
This is left to our intuition, to our own internal understanding. We each have to find our own way. We each have to develop our own faith. We each have our own equation to solve, if we choose, to find x.
A Possible God
So let me, as promised, offer one version of God for your consideration. We might start with the thinking Ralph Waldo Emerson and other nineteenth century Unitarians, who moved far from orthodox Christianity and even Unitarian Christianity. These Transcendentalists accessed the divine through personal intuition and inspiration rather than through Scripture. Applying this new understanding, these modern mystics found that God, the Oversoul, Unity, the One, had moved down from a far-off heaven and into every person’s heart. Emerson wrote,
“God resides not in formal religion, but in nature; not in rites, but persons. I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of me. I can even with a mountainous aspiring say, I am God.”[3]
God becomes part of us, we are part of God, these mystical thinkers begin to say. In his essay called “The Oversoul”, Emerson tells us,
“We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.… We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”[4]
These Transcendentalist ideas of the world and the divine are very much embedded in their time, the mid-1800′s. But what happens when you take some of these ideas and combine them with the new scientific understandings that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? Ideas like quantum mechanics, general relativity, evolution by natural selection, and psychology of the mind?
Process Thought
In the 1920′s and 30′s, English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, along with Charles Hartshorne[5], a UU, and others, developed a metaphysics called process thought or process theology.
In process thought, the emphasis is on becoming, not being. Physical things — this building, these windows — may appear to have permanence, but in reality, they are merely a sequence of events, changing, evolving, becoming, as they interact with other things, other events.
In process, it’s all about relationships, how beings and things interact with one another. In relationships, everything is connected — our actions have the potential to reach out and touch anything in the universe. In fact, it is only by relationships that things exist.
God in Process Theology
In the realm of process theology, the divine is not up there but embedded within all things. God is in us, and recalling Emerson, we are god.
God did not create us from nothing, nor did we invent god, but both god and humans, other sentient beings, and in fact the universe, are in a process of co-creation. We create, we change, we evolve together with god, toward some more creative, perfect and beautiful future. As humans, we yearn, and god yearns with us, toward intensity of experience, toward satisfaction, fulfillment, toward creation of goodness and beauty.
You can begin to see how moral insights can emerge from this model of the world. We yearn for intensity of experience, life purpose, but we are interconnected beings in relationship with one another, so our own actions toward fulfillment shouldn’t impair others similar actions toward their fulfillment.
God urges us toward good ends, but god is not all-powerful, and lacks the ability to compel us to act in certain ways. There is no threat of a hellish afterlife either. The future in this process model is open, it is undetermined. It awaits our — and god’s — continued creative effort. The past is preserved and, through interconnectedness of things, it feeds all of the future. Thus, when we die, our essence, all we’ve done, is preserved and remains in the universe, rippling out to affect the future.
Whitehead, in particular, developed this model to a high level of detail, even down to schematic diagrams that would not seem out of place in a textbook on quantum mechanics.[6] He was, after all, a mathematician, and had trained in physics.
I think that goes too far. Write your theology in lines of poetry, not flowcharts. The real test is how a model like this fits with your own heart’s understanding of the world. If some of these ideas resonate intuitively with you, then I encourage you to explore process theology more deeply. If this does not fit, that’s fine too.
Going Forward
So what to do with these ideas? I think that to be a Unitarian Universalist is to be on a spiritual journey, to be ‘in process’, to borrow a phrase. When we are at our best we are constantly learning, exploring, and growing in matters of the heart. We find ways to turn inward, whether through meditation, writing, spiritual reading, time in nature, prayer, creating art. We depend on our intuitive sense to guide us as we craft our own theological understanding and way of being in the world.
Now it is important to realize that while this is interior work, we don’t have to do it alone. Indeed, it is better done surrounded by people we trust, spiritual companions who will accompany us in kindness and care as we explore these sometimes intimate parts of our being.
One way we might create a group for such exploration is with an Adult Education class. I’d like to offer the Building Your Own Theology class, starting in mid February. Some of you have already taken this wonderful class with me. We do what the title suggests, each, individually, build our own theologies from ideas offered by world religions, philosophy, our own ideas and intuitions. I propose to mix parts from both the first and second version of this program, so even if you participated in Building Your Own Theology before, there would be new topics for you to consider.
If I say write your theology in lines of poetry, then let me leave you with a wintertime poem. Rev. Rebecca Parker, president and theologian at Starr King School, introduced me to process theology. I think you can hear her passion in this poem.
… Let there be a season
when holiness is heard, and
the splendor of living is revealed.
Stunned to stillness by beauty
we remember who we are and why we are here.
There are inexplicable mysteries.
We are not alone.
In the universe there moves a Wild One
whose gestures alter earth’s axis
toward love.
In the immense darkness
everything spins with joy.
The cosmos enfolds us.
We are caught in a web of stars,
cradled in a swaying embrace,
rocked by the holy night,
babes of the universe.
Let this be the time
we wake to life,
like spring wakes, in the moment
of winter solstice.[7]
And so, may we, stunned to stillness by beauty, remember who we are and why we are here. May we feel in our most interior, intimate heart, the inexplicable mysteries, that we are not alone.
Notes:
1 http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/5565/missing_the_extra_point%3A_the_real_cause_of_tebow_fever/
2 Barbara Pescan, “Song of Job”, Morning Watch, p. 24.
3 Reverend Barry Andrews, “Self-culture: Transcendentalism and the Care of the Soul”, March 12, 1997
4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Over-soul”, from Essays: First Series
5 see Charles Hartshorne, “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”
6 see an example diagram in John Jungerman, “World in Process”, p. 178
7 Rebecca Parker, “Winter Solstice”