I usually blame it on college. That's what made me lose my faith. It's what I tell others and it's often what I even tell myself. I just got smarter, I say. And as a result the idea of a god that controls everything, knows everything and enforces the rules just slowly stopped making sense. God became a ghost; the inevitable force of my intellect simply made him disappear.
Now, while there's certainly truth in this storyline, it also leaves out a lot. For instance, all those moments when the woods lit up.
I grew up on an eighty acre farm in northern Ohio. Forty acres of it were fields of soybeans and grazing land for our cows, but the other forty were woods–my woods. As far as I'm concerned I had the best backyard of any kid in the world. Endless paths and cricks to explore. A junk yard way back, deep inside that contained all sorts of amazing treasures–including two old junked cars with radios that would work if you and your buddies could steal an old car battery from your fathers' garages. And space for forts and tree houses! By the time we moved off the farm during my teenage years, I'd built at least a dozen tree houses in the woods. It was fun. A great place to play. And also the first place I met God.
Now be forewarned, my divine meeting is difficult to explain, so my story will not be quite as dramatic as you may have hoped. It actually happened more than once, usually when I felt bad or was confused about something and didn't know what to do. I went to the woods to wander around, to be "alone with myself." And not always, but often enough to change me, this is when the woods would light up and speak.
Those words aren't precise, I know, but they are the best words I had and they remain the best words I have now. Sometimes it was the sun breaking through the clouds. One time it was entering a clearing and seeing the first single red tree of fall, standing there all alone in the midst of the others that blurred together in a sea of green. Another time it was a deer that decided not to run away, but instead just looked at me for a very long time. Ordinary moments that had happened before, but on these few occasions they became something different–something inhabited them in a way that caused everything around me to feel as though it was on fire, even though it clearly wasn't. And then the woods would speak. Not with words, but still absolutely clear. Usually something simple, like "It's ok." Or "Do it and don't be afraid."
And then the deer would calmly walk away or the tree would transform back into something that just looked interesting or the sun would just seem normal again. And I'd leave the woods knowing for sure that God had just talked to me.
So, I've never thought that old Moses was all that nuts, or frankly all that special. On that day that he stumbled upon the bush that lit up, he'd just been visited by the Holy Ghost as it was making its normal rounds!
And when you are visited by the Holy Ghost, it's not just that you are never quite the same; it's also that your idea of God is never quite the same.
The traditionalists don't like to talk about this. They prefer to talk about The Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a tight-knit, mutually-supportive, always-loyal team (kind of like the Bush administration!). But the Holy Trinity of Christianity has always had trouble holding itself together. And not just because the dogma of "three persons in one" requires a bunch of logical backbends, but because once you've met the Holy Ghost, it feels like that's all you need.
At least that's what happened to me.
So you see, it wasn't really about college, logic or me getting smarter. It was about me running into a real experience of the sacred that made my previous abstract and traditional understanding of God no longer needed. God didn't disappear because my brain revealed him to be an illusionary phantom; rather God disappeared because I met a different and more satisfying ghost.
Another story.
It was in the midst of my divorce. The fighting about "who gets what" was over, allowing the sadness of it all to sink in. It was that lonely and scary period, when what has been is clearly behind you but the path forward is by no means clear. That stage where everything seems unsure. Friends hadn't really taken sides about who was right and who was to blame, and yet as everyone whose been divorced knows, there was still the sense that people couldn't really be friends with both of us. So some friends just faded away. And the friends who stayed close understandably got tired and needed a break from the heaviness of it all. The church I served was doing its best to offer support, but the truth is taking care of your minister is not really something churches are set up to do. After all, they've hired you to take care of them. It just makes everything weird when it's reversed.
It all added up to me feeling a bit alone and let down by others. But also let down by myself. I just didn't have the energy to do as good a job as needed. "B-minus work" was the best I could muster. And one rarely feels good about oneself when "the best you can muster" is the best you can muster.
So life wasn't just feeling shaky, it was also feeling stingy and small, even empty and "against me."
And what did I do to help me out of this place of existential depression? What did I–as a trained therapist and spiritual leader–do to take care of myself? I took a trip to Boston, in the dead of winter, when the grayness and sooty slush of Beantown is at its most glorious peak! Brilliant!! In other words, I wasn't really doing a whole heck of a lot to get myself in a better place.
I was visiting my brother, who couldn't take off work–another genius idea, leaving me alone most of the day to sulk and curse the cold universe and undependable humanity. You might–and I'm not necessarily encouraging you to do so–but you just might say your minister was stuck in a little bit of self-pity.
And so lonely, poor old me, took a walk under the gray skies of Boston.
Five or six blocks into it–which was plenty of time to work myself into the mood of Eeyore–my downward-focused, hopeless eyes saw a $20 bill. The light switch of the world suddenly turned itself up by two notches.
I bent down to pick it up. Turned a bit to face the door of the building in front of which the $20 bill had sat, and I saw myself facing...a donut shop! And man, do I love donuts! The light of the world went up another couple notches.
And then I heard a voice–a real one. "Scott? Hey, Scott, is that you?" It was my cousin Johnny. A great guy. It'd been years since we'd seen each other. He was on his way to work, but said, "I'll just be late. They'll just have to deal with it. Are you living here in Boston? What's up? It's been a long time. Great to see you." There was a bench nearby with some trees around it, so we sat down. We talked about my divorce but also our childhood. It ended with us laughing a lot. We made plans to have dinner and said good-bye.
That donut shop was still there and the $20 bill was still in my pocket, so you can guess what I did next: I sat down and had a donut and a cup of coffee with the Holy Spirit.
Again, the entire world at that moment was just lit up. Radiant. Everything was absolutely bursting with meaning. James Joyce the great Irish author, called these moments "epiphanies," and he described them this way: "Moments when something's soul–its 'whatness'–leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance." That gets at it pretty darn good. The $20 bill, the body and voice of my cousin, that beautiful deep-fried, double-glazed donut–all of it had this incredibly meaningful "whatness" bursting from the vestments of their otherwise ordinary appearances. No wonder Moses said the bush was on fire! It felt as if all these ordinary things were bursting red-hot and urgent with the message of: "Scott! Life is not small and stingy; it's open, generous and full of new connections reaching out to you. Here, have a donut!"
In Celtic mythology, these moments are referred to as "thin places"–moments and spaces in time when the visible and invisible worlds touch and blur, the usual boundary becoming thin, thereby letting meaning and messages cross between. This too is a great way to wrap words around the experience.
But maybe my favorite of all is a more simple description by a not-so-well-known heretical Presbyterian minister and novelist, named Fredrick Buechner. He calls these moments, simply, "moments when our lives speak."
"Every once in a while," he writes, "life can be very eloquent. You go along from day to day not noticing very much, not seeing or hearing very much, and then all of a sudden, when you least expect it, something speaks to you with such a power that it catches you off guard, makes you listen whether you want to or not. Something speaks to you out of your own life with such directness that it is as if it calls you by name and forces you to look where you have not had the heart to look before, to hear something that maybe for years you have not had the wit or the courage to hear... It comes as a summons, a summons we have to answer somehow, or at a considerable cost, not answer. It comes [not just as a new truth, but as a new possibility] as something new that has just come to life, some new spirit within you, some new hope, as something born again into the world that is so strange and new and precious that not even a cynic can laugh although he might be tempted to weep."
This, friends, is why you don't hear me using the word "God" much. For the record, it's fine with me if you do. It makes me happy if you've found a way to use the word so that it helps guide and make sense of your life. But ultimately it's not the word that matters all that much. It's this experience of being able to listen to your life when it speaks.
What makes me a Unitarian Universalist minister, what makes this church and this religion my home is that it long ago stopped asking its members "Do you have the ability to believe in God?" and instead turned its passion and purpose to the question of "Do you have the ability to listen to your life and notice when it lights up?!"
God, divinity, meaning–whatever you want to call it–is spread out all over this earth, hidden in and haunting the most ordinary–as well as extraordinary–moments. This claim is what gives our religion its power! Forget all that stuff you've heard about UU's being unique because we don't believe in superstition. That's rubbish. It's not what we've rejected that makes us who we are; it's what we've embraced! And while Unitarian Universalism is no longer Christian, we most certainly have embraced and taken with us this radical thread woven throughout the Bible that says the sacred power of life is not sitting on a throne in some high heaven, but is instead found in and bursting through quite ordinary things like bushes that seem to be on fire or like babies–simple, poor, seemingly-powerless babies born in stables.
Again, it wasn't college that made me stop believing in the perfect, distant, judging father-god in the sky; it was these less-talked-about biblical passages and periodic, amazing real-life moments that said, "Pay attention to the ordinary stuff all around you, like boring old bushes, because they have the power to light up."
It may sound odd, but I've found myself thinking a lot this week about the Garden of Eden. For a long time, whenever I've read or talked about that story, I've left feeling as though it's got the devil's power and God's power all mixed up. The power of the devil–or the snake–we are told, is the power of temptation; whereas the power of goodness and God is the power of control, threat and punishment. But it's always seemed to me to be the reverse. And it is all of you–normal UU parishioners–who have taught me that this is the case.
I think of Jennifer. Jennifer's father and uncle betrayed her. They wounded her with sexual abuse, tangling her up in fear and self-loathing for much of her life. At fifty years old, she said she was finally beginning to feel like she deserved wholeness. "What's kept you going?" I asked. "How have you fought the temptation to give up?" "Some other temptation always stepped in to counter it," she said, "Something stronger always kept pulling me the other way, like a magnet. I mean, just the other day, it was the smell of bread baking. It can at times be an awfully powerful thing–the smell of baking bread. It lured me in to believing that there are lots of other things out there I'd like to taste. It tempted and tricked me into feeling that I don't want to leave this life without a few more bites of things I've never tried before."
There was Steven too. Steven came in talking about "a longing for more." Career-wise, he was accomplished and envied at only 49 years old. Plenty of money. A great marriage. Kids succeeding wildly in school. And yet. "Why don't I feel at home?" he asked. "It's not that my life isn't full; it just doesn't feel deep," he explained. "There's this nagging need to go deeper. I don't even know what that means. But I trust it more than anything or anyone else I've ever known. It's like my life itself is saying, 'There's more.'"
And I also think of Peter and Sydney–school teachers whose only major justice work had been helping their daughter sell Girl Scout cookies. After retiring, they decided to "have an adventure," so they went with a Quaker group to build houses for "those poor folk" in El Salvador. They got more than they bargained for and ended up hearing stories, terrible stories: about soldiers burning homes, shooting husbands, burying babies alive. One woman at the end of the visit called Sydney "sister." That's all she said: "sister." Sydney's world suddenly widened. "Her pain pulled at me," Sydney said. "And what's odd is that I didn't want it to stop. I don't ever want it to stop. That word "sister" created this rope between us that keeps tugging at me, tempting me to make her pain my own." Sydney and Peter have been leading activists ever since.
So three things about the Holy: Not just that it is spread out among the ordinary. And not just that it comes to us in the form of sacred temptations that save and unsettle us. But also that it depends on us.
Fredrick Buechner, that favorite Presbyterian minister of mine, puts it more dramatically. He says, "God is never safe from us." The holy comes in such a way that we can always turn it down. Jennifer could have ignored the smell of bread. Steven could have buried deep that feeling about there being more. Sydney and Peter could have treated the word "sister" as quaint and gone back to selling Girl Scout cookies. I could have hung on to my self-pity and given up the donut.
And the great tragedy of our lives is that this is what we often do. There is so much wonder and grace in the world that we simply run away from and pretend not to notice, because we are scared. It's important to remember that part of the burning bush story where Moses looks away and hides his face because "he was afraid to look at God." This wasn't a sign of reverence; this was simply because Moses knew that the next word to come out of God's mouth was going to be: "GO!"
Go do more than you've ever done. Go trust life more than you've ever had to before. Go put yourself in someone's hands and risk being hurt again. Go follow a new path for which you have no roadmap. Go give of yourself in ways that will leave you vulnerable. Go and let yourself care about and invest yourself in something that may fail or break your heart.
And while a piece of us will certainly be scared of all this stretching and newness, the good news is that, like all good ghosts, the holy–the meaning and deep callings of our lives–it just refuses to go away. Like all good ghosts, it continues to make noise in our attics and show up in mysterious ways, until we finally listen to and respond to what it has to say.
Thank goodness for this holiness that haunts our lives. Amen.
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