The collection of books we know as the Torah came about as a result of the covenant made with Yahweh, with the God of Israel. It took a thousand years to gather the canon. I am not going to claim that there is a set of books which all Unitarian Universalists could claim as scripture (not just because our movement is younger some five thousand years!)
I will claim there is a vast body of sacred literature, fiction, nonfiction, art, music and photography that does assist in sustaining us. That certain writing, music and art have the power to sustain us is the FIRST of four hallmarks which I will use to identify sacred sources.
Our Call to Celebration this morning was a story from the Hebrew Bible, an ancient story. It is a very brief story but it is one that holds a great deal in those few sentences, and here is the SECOND of the hallmarks of scripture--or what we can call sacred sources. Not only does sacred literature, or scripture, have the power to sustain us, it is densely layered with meaning.
Phyllis Trible's telling of Jacob's night at the Jabbok revealed depth I hadn't seen. Wrestling with the great questions, even to wrestle with God, as Jacob did at the Jabbok, is an essential part of the Jewish tradition, its understanding of itself and the people's relationship with God. Eli Wiesel's play, The Trial of God, is such a story in the Jewish tradition. It is based on Wiesel's experience as a teenager witnessing a trial of God led by pious men at Auschwitz. We all have stories which tell human beings who we are, where we are and why.
And so here is a THIRD hallmark of scripture. In addition to having the power to sustain us, of being dense with meaning, our sacred sources wrestle with the great questions of life.
Probably the greatest of all theologians is the three-year-old with the question we all have asked more than once: WHY? -- Why am I here? Why did this happen? Why is there suffering? Why is there injustice?
The story of Jacob at the Jabbok; Paul's letters to the confused and suffering folks in the communities where he has preached; Arjuna's questions to his charioteer -- the god Krishna -- of the terrible paradox inherent in living out one's dharma or duty in Hinduism's Bhagavad Gita. All scripture helps us wrestle with such questions.
I am, at the same time, certain that it is not just the scripture of the world's religions which sustain us, which layer meaning upon meaning and help us in our quest to understand all of our "whys," to live in love and peace and celebration, to fight for justice and to understand life and dying.
So, a question for us?
What scripture does Unitarian Universalism offer? We read the scripture of others to sustain us, illuminate meaning and answer life's questions. Do we have something like scripture to share in return? I believe we do, although, unlike other traditions, our canon is not codified; nor is it closed. It is our "loose-leaf bible," our moveable feast of many sources. What we have to share with others that is unique to our no-creedal tradition is our openness to new possibilities, a broader recognition of what is sacred in much of what we read, what we hear and what we see or touch. Warren Benson's service recognized the sacred in his service of jazz and poetry on the theme of love.
We are a religious people who seek and gather. We can see it is so if we spend even ten minutes with our hymnal. When we sing our morning hymns look for the chalices at the bottom of the pages. Not only do we seek and gather from many sources, we also write our own.
What has sustained you? What books, what poetry, what music and art, or film have been part of the force of understanding and transformation in your life? What do you find densely layered with meaning? What has helped you wrestle with life's great questions?
Was it Catcher in the Rye with its commentary on modern life and who has the power to name sanity: sanity meaning what scholar of mysticism Evelyn Underhill calls "the hallucinations we share with our neighbors."
Was it Shel Silverstein's poetry first read to you in the lap of your father or your mother and loved at least all the way through high school, a poetry which points to life's absurdities and playful joy? And then Adrienne Rich or Theodore Roethke? Rilke? Shakespeare? Mary Oliver?
Was it To Kill a Mockingbird which illuminated a tyranny in our midst and fired your call to action? Was it the cubist art of Picasso, its multi-faceted faces revealing the complexity of what is real? WAS IT SCIENCE?
I want to tell a story of my own, a time in my early thirties. I hope my story helps make a connection toward understanding what a sacred source is to each of us and in that way begin to point to what they might for Unitarian Universalism.
I begin in 1978, mid portion of the Diaper Years. We had just moved to Michigan with a three-and-a-half-year-old, a three-month-old adopted seven weeks after arrival, where I found myself alone most of the time. It was a time, theologically speaking, of alienation.
The veil of alienation began to lift when I met a woman at church who wanted to start a "Women's Group." Life was transformed. I began to feel lifted out of the ammonia atmosphere that seemed the sum total of my life. One of the women in the group introduced us to the Marriages book (as it is known among its devotees). As I read it--and reread it--as soon as I was done, because I couldn't bear to have it end, meaning began to feel really possible for me.
Doris Lessing is the author of the Marriages book and its whole title is The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five as told by the Chroniclers of Zone Three. Our morning's reading came from this book. The book's impact on me was transformative, though in what way was not immediately clear. It provided powerful metaphors for building a sense of life that honored myself as whole even in life's disarray. As sacred literature has the power to do, the Marriages book sustained me.
It provided an affirming foundation for my worldview (I had not known such a thing as a worldview; I thought I just had craziness and ramblings). The book helped me know who I am and why I am here, not only sustaining me, but offering me a frame for making sense of harsh questions and dilemmas confronting me big time as a young mom. And, as a sacred source is, the Marriages book is densely layered with meaning.
Even in the first reading of the book, when so much of the imagery remained foreign and uninterpretable to me, the book touched me deeply. As I said, I couldn't put it down after I had read the last page. I returned to the beginning and read again. I have read this book multiple times and it continues to move me deeply. My most recent reading, was an intentional and integral part of my preparation for parish ministry. That reading was richer than ever. I found metaphors and images that seemed not to have been written in the book when I'd last read it! The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is a book that has remained revelatory and relevant.
The FOURTH hallmark of scripture, the last for this morning, then, is the work's ability to keep us going back and back to find more to challenge and enlighten us.
Jewish mysticism says that the Torah we hold in our hands is incomplete. We are told the whole of the Torah is written in black fire on white fire and rests on God's knee. It is part of why the people keep going back.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, especially, are traditions wedded to a canon; but each have found many ways to say there is more than the words written on paper.
Unitarian Universalists seek outside any canon at all. Our sacred sources become in the process of space and time in the context of life's contingencies.
The Marriages book isn't the only source that has informed my religious life. Adrienne Rich's poetry has scriptural quality for me as have a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I have found sacred power in Loren Eisley, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Annie Dillard. And powerfully so in Georgia O'Keefe's early watercolor, "Starlight Night." For some Unitarian Universalists the Bible remains central. For others, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are relatively or wholly unimportant. What we Unitarian Universalists call sacred varies among us. A phenomenon that only makes sense for people in a religious tradition who call themselves Christian, Buddhist, Pagan, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, humanist, pantheist and more.
We have no Rabbis in Yavnah or priests in Rome to look at candidates for scripture and stamp approval or rejection. We don't operate in this way; we are a democratic, non-creedal faith.
We're not cultural folk JUST because we enjoy books, music, dance, the visual arts, NPR, and PBS....they feed us. We know there are alternative answers to life's problems, varying ways to understand life.
I don't want to discard traditional scripture when I can find meaning in such stories as Jacob's night at the Jabbok. I also KNOW that scripture powerfully informs the culture that I am part of. Rather than discarding, I look to illuminate the best all sacred sources embody: which sustain us, reveal meaning, offer understanding of life's profound questions, and that we keep returning to because of the richness we find in them. No one book, work of music or art completes a canon of scripture for me, nor will there likely be such a canon for our tradition. Revelation is not closed and it comes through remarkable voices. This is where our movement has something to add to the lives of liberal religious people.
The Marriages book confronted me and affirmed me at the same time. It is a book powerfully, densely metaphorical. Lessing sets us down into Zone 3 and Zone 4 and has us just live in the dilemmas and questions and confusions, the attempts to make sense of the crisis in which the people find themselves -- that MUST be worked out. She shifts our insistence on realizing the world and interpreting it only from a narrow view.
Lessing leaves us at the end knowing that things have changed for the better but without a quantifiable recipe for why, and leaves some in the zones without a clue as to what happened to improve things, even resenting to the end some of what has changed. Lessing creates a text which makes the reader wrestle, much as Jacob wrestled at the River Jabbok.
One of the most profound parts of this book is its exploration of what it means to look into the mountains; or what it means to NOT look into the mountains; whether forbidden in Zone Four or forgotten in Zone Three, as we heard in the morning's readings. Knowing and insight come and go in dizzying, sickening ways. It is so incredibly seductive to just let go and not change at all.
The works of art which sustain us, which are dense with meaning, which help confront the great questions of life, and which we return to through our lives, have the power of traditional forms of scripture.
May we become conscious and intentional in recognizing what are sacred literature, sacred art and sacred music to each of us. May we continue to deepen the meaning inherent and possible in our book groups and film groups, in the art we hang, and the music which fills us each Sunday morning. May we wrestle for the blessing and live with life's wounds. May we always look up and out and beyond what we now know.
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