Every sermon's title has a life of its own. In the sermon title's birth process, something is going on in the minister's mind -- at least at that moment. The most important task for the minister is to write a few descriptive sentences about what the sermon title meant at that moment, as it may not make the same, or any, sense later on! I am learning this sermonizing business! Beyond that, even with a title and descriptive sentences in place, and filed where they won't be lost -- and that too is an issue! - the sermon may end up having many lives. This was such a sermon.
Was this sermon to be about the tension in our tradition between humanism and spirituality? A tension that reflects the stretching of energies and understandings that both humanism and a more God-centered approach, each bring possibility to our individual and congregations' lives. OR Was this sermon to be a lesson in our UU history? About the early nineteenth century more orthodox Unitarian values in tension with Transcendentalism? I do mean conflict. Flurries of pamphlets were written, sermons pounded on the pulpit and organizations formed, failed and reframed and formed again....
There were other potential sermons in this title as I began to collect material and look at the books on my shelf - and think about the books still in Michigan! What sermon are you going to get? The sermon title posted on the sign outside a church, or printed the newsletter, does not necessarily reflect the sermon any congregation across the country is going to hear on a given Sunday morning.
This sermon title, "Mysterectomy in the Rational Church" appealed, first of all, to my feminist heart because mysterectomy is so close to hysterectomy. The relationship between cutting out the mystery and cutting out a woman's reproductive organs is a very strong metaphor for religious feminism's stand that religious traditions in the West have long cut out the female from the church. Rationality and reason in the church is what is called for, and women are not owners of that, has been the line women have long heard. Not that I believe it. The great mystics in Christianity, Judaism and Islam have been both female AND male. One can easily come up with a long list of names. The list of great names in religion's rationality and reason department are decidedly more male than female but I see that as more a matter of academic cultivation being refused to women than their innate inability to think in this way. Nineteenth century genius and Unitarian Margaret Fuller couldn't be a better example, that women have intellect, and that teaching cultivates. And while there are few like her, there have always been women who thought and wrote intellectually on this or that subject in the church.
So here is Shug in Alice Walker's wonderful book The Color Purple, --the book mentioned and promised in the description for this sermon - Shug. A profoundly spiritual woman who offers Celie a stunning insight. Shug reports to Celie that she realized one day that if she cut her arm a tree would bleed. Mystical and spiritual. But not just mystical and spiritual. Recognizing the interdependence of the health of her arm and the health of a tree is a remarkable theological insight.
Our Unitarian Universalist seventh principle reads "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." These sound a lot like Shug's words. We have generally connected that principle fairly exclusively to a commitment to the environment, but it is more than that. This principle, which recognizes the "interdependent web of all existence" reflects a much more complex theological understanding, as Shug understands in The Color Purple. It is a principle that radically undoes the mysterectomy of the too rational church. It's not that rationality is bad, Unitarianism was built upon the recognition that rationality MUST be in the church. Rationality is just not enough ---or the only quality essential for a whole religious tradition. Our seventh principle of interdependence actually expresses better than the rest of our principles and purposes the importance of both rationality and the play and insight of, the spirit.
The broader theological insight that if I cut my arm a tree would bleed - the interdependent web -- is a principle that you can find in Buddhist theologian Thich Nhat Hanh's writing, what our tradition calls interdependence - and he calls "interbeing". Thich Nhat Hanh says;
"...[E]verything is everything else...everyone is responsible for everything that happens in life. When you produce peace and happiness in yourself, you begin to realize peace for the whole world. With the smile that you produce in yourself, with the conscious breathing you establish within yourself, you being to work for peace in the world.... Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the society deprived of everything [share interbeing] The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. 'This is like this, because that is like that.'....The truth is that everything is everything else. We can only inter-be, we cannot just be. And we are responsible for everything that happens around us."
Indeed. Not only if I cut my arm a tree will bleed, if I practice greed, what kind of bleeding does that cause? This principle of interdependence or interbeing -- resides also in the theology of Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka, my professor at Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago. Thandeka finds the spark of that interdependence in the work of her favorite theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. She finds it in Jewish theologian Martin Buber. Thandeka finds it in the writing of psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow. He writes, using "intersubjectivity" for what we have been calling interdependence and interbeing, "...[E]xperience is continually and mutually shaped. Our vocabulary is one of interacting subjectivities, reciprocal mutual influence, colliding organizing principles, conjunctions and disjunctions...Intersubjectivity theory...seeks to comprehend psychological phenomena not as products of isolated ....mechanisms but as forming at the interface ....of worlds of experience."
When I read this piece in Stolorow, I thought of psychologist Abraham Maslow's work on what he called the "Hierarchy of Needs." At the base of the hierarchy are the essentials of life: being able to exchange oxygen, to eat, to sleep, and so on. What is possible beyond this basic level is only possible when the base level is met. At the top of Maslow placed the human capacity to self actualize. -- the pinnacle of human achievement. The power of individuality, the isolated self. Maslow later moved beyond thinking self-actualization was the pinnacle of human possibility. He moved to a much broader sense of the interdependent, intersubjective organism of the whole community. He found this thinking in anthropologist Ruth Benedict's concept of "synergy". Over-individualism in a society represents the low end of synergy, for Benedict, much like Maslow's self-actualizing individual - neither very interdependent! High synergy reflects interdependent, mutuality-based activity -- a higher human function than the self-actualizing, self-contained individual that Maslow originally placed at the peak of his hierarchy of needs chart. This is indeed a remarkable example of interdependence.
It is an insight that brings me right back to Shug and Celie in The Color Purple. Shug recognized high synergy, interdependence, interbeing or mutuality when she said that if she cut her arm a tree would bleed. Celie's husband Mr. , in the same book, recognized only low synergy, as his needs and his point of view were all that counted, as an isolated individual. And so he kept Celie's letters from her sister hidden from her for decades. He could only see his own needs, not the needs of others, nor the impact of his acting only on those needs on others and what would come back to him.
All of these people-Shug, Maslow, Benedict...-- are speaking the same language of interdependence, interconnectedness, interbeing and mutuality that theologians, Buber, Schleiermacher, Thich Nhat Hanh and Thandeka are speaking. The same language of interdependence in our Seventh Principle.
So what do all these ideas of interdependence and the related terms: interbeing, intersubjective, high synergy -- have to do with a mysterectomy in the rational church? Well, just about everything in the multiple ideas and themes that came up for just this one sermon. They help us make sense of the humanist theist tension in our UU tradition. Help us understand why the Transcendentalists had such trouble in the early part of Unitarianism in America.
Transcendentalist and Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A person will worship something--have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts [individualism]--but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming."
The various terms I've been using for the "interdependent web of all existence" represent an astounding and remarkable theological perspective. It is a perspective that has the power to shift all our Western thought systems were we to let them in. Were we to deeply see that Interdependence, intersubjectivity, interbeing, high synergy, are necessary for life to thrive. Individuals AND communities.
What we are worshipping, we are becoming. Worship individuality exclusively and we become isolated. Worship community exclusively and diversity recedes.
As a young housewife I learned that it is not a good thing to put bleach and ammonia in the same bucket. You can end up in the hospital. That these two compounds do not amicably co-mingle does not mean they are not related to one another, are not interdependent, and both necessary in the world.
That much of one religion contradicts another does not mean that one of them ought not to exist. That Unitarian Universalists might be non-theist or pagan, Christian or Humanist does not mean somebody should have to leave.
That we Unitarian Universalists are committed to diversity in a world that doesn't yet understand the necessity of diversity in community, does not mean our tradition should dissolve.
Perhaps the mysterectomy in the rational church that this sermon is trying to get at is a challenge that the so-called "rational" thought Tthat we must be only one way or another to thrive, will, actually, eventually, inescapably destroy us. Perhaps the mysterectomy that sometimes operates in our tradition is the impulse to reduce ourselves, to one aspect of our own tradition. Humanists over here, Christians over here, Pagans, theists, panentheists, Buddhist or Jewish UUs, here, here and here. Political liberals here and political conservatives here.
The interdependent web of all existence, the intersubjectivity, interdependence of life, Thich Nhat Hanh's interbeing, means we all are among one another. What we worship, we become.
I need to listen and attend and regard the disparate yet connected voices of all of us. It's -- if I cut my arm, a tree will bleed. If I cut out the mystery, our tradition, life itself, will bleed; if I reject the use of reason, our tradition and life itself will bleed.
It is, as Bruce Southworth said in our morning's reading: to be "fully human, fully alive. That simple and that difficult.
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