I want to start out by telling two stories of two different people. One an atheist, one a theist.
When I was a kid, we drove from Wisconsin to Northwestern Montana to spend three weeks at Glacier National Park. Glacier is a palatial park, with a miniscule visitor rate compared to Yosemite or Yellowstone, primarily because it is truly to hell and gone. The closest airport is 70 miles away.
Now during those three weeks, we did many family hikes but the most memorable by far was led by Ranger Dan. He was a lanky slender man in his early 70's, with tufts of gray hair that stuck out from the brim of his Stetson. Evidently he had served the park for 30 some years, of which he had been hit by lightning seven times. The Stetson he sported had lost its top, burned out from the last strike, of which sprouted more of his unruly hair. When we first met him, someone asked about the hat to which he replied, "The hat keeps me humble." You can imagine my foreboding pre-hike. My opinion of him at first vacillated between prescribed divination and nut house resident. My father told me not to worry.
We started our walk with 30 or so people, traipsing through a thick evergreen forest on a spongy bed of needles and leaves. After 3 miles or so, most of the pack broke off from us, as I was 11 and not that fast. Soon, the trees were sparse and we were traversing a steep graded mountainside. At one point, Ranger Dan walked back to us without the group, " Just checking on you." he said. "Want to make sure you're ok. He put his hand on my shoulder, and crouched down half bent, looking in my eyes and said, " Way to go kid, you're doing great. You're ok right." Yup! I replied. And with a nod he strode off, covering ground twice as fast as we were managing.
Finally we reached the rest of the group now resting on a high prairie plateau, where the view was a magnificent 360(degree) panoramic wonder. The group had waited for us to eat, and my father and I sat together extracting our deviled ham sandwiches from the backpack. Ranger Dan, pulled out his granola bar, bent his head, closed his eyes, looked out to the splendor before him, broke into a wide grin and started eating. As people finished lunch, slurping from their water bottles, Ranger Dan checked in with each small group. He mended the injured ankle of a 50-year-old woman, bent before her on hands and knees expertly re-taping her ace bandage, giving words of encouragement and support. He stood with another group, sweeping his hand over the mountains before him, where slashes of bright sunlight broke through clouds, creating broad shafts of light to the heavens. He smiled and said, "You never get sick of this. Always amazed, always amazed. How can you not be struck dumb with that!?!" We all looked at the view and nodded.
Before we hiked down, he reminded us to leave a gentle footprint. Please no walking where trails aren't apparent, we are part and parcel of this land and it is of us as well. Bring your trash with you. We hiked back down to our camp, exhausted, revived.
The second person is my Great Aunt Selma. She was married to my Uncle Anfer, who committed suicide when I was two, so I never knew him really, just her. She was not a happy-go-lucky person. Perhaps it was from the sadness that permeates someone's epidermis when such tragedy of depression takes hold of not just a tortured individual but the family they leave behind as well. But this lingering un-answerable quietness to her spirit didn't hamper her loving. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday through her late 80's, she went to the nursing home to help out "my old people" as she called them, which often were incidentally folks ten years her junior. They relied on her visits because nothing was below her, she went ostensibly to read to those whose vision was obstructed or diminished, but ended up often helping the aides with dressing, bedpans, and dinner trays. She was generous in her love, though not affectionate. Nothing slipped by her, she remembered everyone's birthday, and you often received thank you notes for children's gifts of popsicle sticks and tempera paint, glued together with excess amounts of Elmer's glue, which resembled nothing. She would thank you for its construction and the thought behind the gift. Her house was simple, not ostentatious. She valued relationships, not things. She lived a humble life. She revered by a shade of African violet that surprised her, or the lyrical prose of a writer that hit the mark.
Now after hearing about these two people, one an Atheist, one not, could you tell me with complete conviction who was the Atheist and who wasn't? If I didn't know myself, I doubt I could be so exacting. I specifically kept language that might have given it away out of my description. Because both of these stories point to the kind of people they were; they both valued clearly four things: interconnection, awe, humility and compassion- they both clearly had a deep reverence for the mystery that pervades our lives.
For Selma, she did her acts in response to the great wonder and mystery of the universe of which she called God. Her living was as a good Christian. Awe, humility, interconnection and compassion, were all a part of living out your life in the spirit of Christ. For Ranger Dan, he was a scientist who lived in accord with a deep sense of connection and compassion to people and the natural world, while maintaining feet murky with awe. Yet he would tell you with relative confidence that he saw no reason or evidence to believe in a God.
Now I really want you to notice something. When I first started, I described these two by how they lived their lives, and then just a minute ago, I said who they were by using labels to describe them. When I described them the first time, they were of the same breed. When I use labels to describe them, they sound like different species of human beings.
My point. Labels, we all know but so easily forget, divide us. As we are in the month of doubt, part of what I want to ask us to do this morning is to doubt the usefulness of our theological labels for each other. More often than not, they don't clarify who we are but divide us from each other or make us seem further apart then we really are.
And if you question this, then let me clarify. When I first went to serve the Unitarian Universalist Church in Utica, NY, almost seven years ago now, I candidated and was elected based on the understanding that I was a humanist. Which I am. But then about five months into my first year, I said from the pulpit that I was an Atheist, which I also am. In other words, I do not believe in a God that has a will, a consciousness or intentionality to it. And boy, I tell you I heard about that. I had one 70-year-old who I had quickly come to love, who told her friends that her new minister had no morals and was valueless. She went into a state of panic that I was her spiritual leader. Everything she knew about me became false, once the label was applied.
Now, I had not changed. But because I had used the label to define myself, all of a sudden I was someone who held no moral authority, who lived a life void of compassion, integrity, awe, humility and interconnectedness. In labeling myself, I had managed to separate myself from my congregation rather than bring us together.
And lest you think that this is just on a personal basis, Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith, wrote: "Several polls indicate that the term 'atheism' has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the US that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not.)" According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president. Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.
My point here is to elucidate what labeling does. It makes the Atheist defensive of course. The new atheists are wondering out loud, "Why am I being called immoral, and judged based on what I label myself, rather than being judged by how I live and love?" Isn't the greater arbiter of being a good person, the one who abides by a collective moral conduct, rather than someone ascribes to a certain set of beliefs and claims moral high ground based on those beliefs? When the Atheists ask these questions, the Theists get defensive, and all the sides get in the mix, questioning whether or not the other can truly be spiritual, grounded and stand on a moral high ground based on belief- on labels.
In short, by labeling what we believe, we turn the attention to what we believe rather than how we live. And how we live is ultimately what matters. You can hold all the best beliefs in the world, whether you are an Atheist or a Theist, but unless you act on them, unless your living and loving expresses those beliefs, then it doesn't matter how you label yourself.
So here's what I want us to pay attention to: Some of the world's great religions emphasize it more than others, but they all have some strong strain in them. In almost all cases, it tends to be the dissenting voice that challenges its religious believers to be humble in the presence of the holy, and to just let the mystery be. Don't attach a label, just recognize what happens to you in the face of it, and let it be what it is.
In the Jewish tradition, there are strains that warn against pronouncing God's name out loud, as any attempt to label or express the divine is so inadequate, that it is potentially blasphemous. They believe that the ultimate reality is transcendent and ineffable. There are similar strains within the Muslim and Buddhist traditions as well.
Karen Armstrong, in her book the Great Transformation, points to the Axiom period where this was particularly true of all religions. The Axiom period was from about 900 to 200 years before the Common Era. She points out that in four distinct regions in the world, the great world traditions that have nourished humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, monotheism, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Listen to how she describes this period of time: "The Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not necessarily regard this as supernatural, and most of them refused to discuss it. If the Buddha or Confucius had been asked whether he believed in God, he would probably have winced slightly and explained (with great courtesy) that this was not an appropriate question. If anybody had asked Amos or Ezekiel if he was a "monotheist" who believed in only one God, he would have been equally perplexed."
She goes on to explain that for all of these sages, what mattered "was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level. The only way you could encounter what they called "God" was to live a compassionate life. Indeed, religion was compassion." Listen again to how she explains this: The Axial sages were not interested in providing their disciples with a little edifying uplift, after which they could return with renewed vigor to their ordinary self- centered lives. Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being." They did not want folks to believe that you could confine your benevolence to your own people; it had to extend to the entire world. They were talking about living a life of abiding by the golden rule: Acting toward others as you would have them act toward you. Which means what? It wakes you up to humility, compassion, interconnection, and bolsters awe.
Over the years, as traditions have adopted, merged, revised, appropriated, and changed, this Axiom voice can still be heard, though somewhat dimly. It's not the dominant strain, as most often the dominant manifestation of all religions is to name and require a certain definition of the mystery of life, of divinity: of where we came from, of where we are going, and what brought us into being. But today, I think it is important to remember within those great traditions, this much humbler voice that says, "stop trying to define it and let the mystery be", came first.
And I'd like to stress as well, that it's not just the humbler voice, but that the driving motivation behind this is a deep reverence for connection and compassion between people. In many cases the reason that scholars, monks, shamans, and priests have said "let the mystery be", is because they have seen more clearly than most that with the guessing game, and it is a guessing game of trying to define the mystery that at bar minimum divides people, we can easily turn to hurting each other, even killing each other.
Joseph Campbell, the great master of myth, claims that 1966 was the beginning of an entirely new stage of human development. That's the year that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took a picture of the earth from the moon. If ever there was a picture that mesmerized the entire world all at once it was this. For the first time, people saw the image not of divided races, countries, tribes, religions or nations, but the image of a floating blue green planet. Our planet. A symbol of one great united and connected human family. Joseph Campbell has a great line that I'll paraphrase. He said: "From that distance all our efforts to categorize who we are and why we are here seem foolish." I would just add, those efforts to categorize too much too quickly make us miss something beautiful, the image of the world as one in our mind. We miss the opportunity to come together around common purpose, rather than divided over different belief. We can, my friends, so easily convince ourselves that we are very different from each other, when we lead with our labels.
But here's the truth.
Each day in India, there are thousands of mothers raising their children with a gentle kiss on their forehead. They sing their children awake, or use humor to rouse the sleepy head. They leave the child muffled and drowsy, walk to their kitchen, and look to the rising sun, breaking forth over the neighbors reflective aluminum roof and smile, giving a silent, resplendent thanks to the universe. Awe starts their day.
Each day in Italy, there are businessmen, shopkeepers, students, and widows who pull open the large cathedral door, and light a candle of remembrance, love and hope. A kindling assertion for strength, compassion, and guidance for the day. A daily practice of humility starts their day.
Each day in China there are monks who sit in silence lighting incense and paying homage to ancestors who paved paths of integrity, courage, kindness. Of ancestors who remind them that we are all interconnected, human, tied from one generation to the next to each other, throughout the world. A deep sense of interconnection serves as their mantra, each day.
Each day in California, there are scientists doing research on fruit flies, and mutating genes. They peer through $100,000 telescopes, trying to find the right mutation to eventually eradicate Alzheimer's or Parkinson's Disease, and trying desperately to lead with the deep compassion they have for those who suffer in the world. They are doing their part to bring that compassion into being each day.
Each day, throughout the world, humanity brings forth humility, compassion, awe, and interconnection in action. Without the labels, we are so much closer than we seem. Each day, the world gathers to celebrate this life, this love that we share, and to engage in the possibilities of what we could be and do together, if we just let go of the definitions and labels. Each day, we usher it in together, when we let the mystery be.
return to main page