Ball and the Cross, The by CHESTERTON, G. K.: Recent Episodes
Quest Monthly Magazine
The Ball and the Cross is G. K. Chesterton's third novel. In the introduction Martin Gardner notes that it is a "mixture of fantasy, farce and theology." Gardner continues: "Evan MacIan is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed Scottish Highlander and a devout Roman Catholic.... James Turnbull is a short, red-haired, gray-eyed Scottish Lowlander and a devout but naive atheist.... The two meet when MacIan smashes the window of the street office where Turnbull publishes an atheist journal. This act of rage occurs when MacIan sees posted on the shop's window a sheet that blasphemes the Virgin Mary, presumably implying she was an adulteress who gave birth to an illegitimate Jesus. When MacIan challenges Turnbull to a duel to the death, Turnbull is overjoyed. For twenty years no one had paid the slightest attention to his Bible bashing. Now at last someone is taking him seriously! Most of the rest of the story is a series of comic events in which the two enemies wander about seeking a spot for their duel." MacIan and Turnbull become friends as they protect each other from interference from the modern world, which has trivialized their views over life's most important question (the existence of God) and outlawed their honorable duel. The irony is heightened when they both fall in love with ladies who happen to hold to their opponent's deepest convictions. Professor Lucifer and a Bulgarian monk also play important roles in this perennially relevant story. (Summary by Matthew Heckel)
When you are facing a juncture in your life, a period of transition, or an important decision, I wonder…
Do you search for an answer by weighing out all your choices in a reasoned, rational way? Or do you try to feel your way through it, seeking a gut sense of rightness?
Do you imagine that the universe or a divine presence has guidance to offer you about your path, and that you are being called toward one direction or another because of your particular spiritual work or destiny in a larger universal unfolding? Or do you feel that we are all quite on our own in an indifferent universe, and that all things in this life unfold by some combination of human action and random chance?
In the many traditions of discernment and spiritually grounded decision-making, there are perhaps two very broad categories:
One perspective is that we make meaning as we walk along. There is no “larger plan,” no “God’s will for our life,” no “where I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to be doing in the universal scheme of things.” There is only choice: the choices we make, their consequences for our lives and relationships, what they say about us, and to what extent they enable us to live to the fullest of our capacity. This might be called an existentialist view, but it can be understood in spiritual language as well. Our calling is to make meaning of our lives through the choices that only we can make.
A different language of discernment comes from a tradition of theistic belief in which the seeker lives and moves within a divine field or ground of being. The universe is expressing and unfolding a divine intention, what some call the divine will and others call the divine longing, and we are a part of its action, its expression and its fulfillment. In this view each person’s life has a purpose within that larger unfolding, and it is possible for the individual to experience the divine as communicative, responsive and leading. This is a mystical understanding of the universe and our place in it.
I am personally sympathetic to both these views and have experienced my path in both ways. I have enough personal experience of strange synchronicities and urgent intuitions to sense that reality is intelligent, responsive and very mysterious. At the same time, I think we build our lives by what we choose, moment to moment, day by day, and I believe that we are profoundly responsible for all that we create by our choices.
There have been passages in my own life when I longed for, prayed for, begged for guidance from God or from my own deeper wisdom, and was met by deafening silence and a deep sense of being alone with very difficult choices, a small boat with short oars in a big sea.
There have been other times when I have felt as if the wind caught my sails and moved me with great energy in a direction that felt right in every way, an undeniable leading or intuition that I was called to do a particular thing. Auspicious conditions seemed to conspire to assist me, and what followed that choice and flowed from it over time confirmed the rightness of the decision.
Perhaps there is also an in-between ground in which we seek through intuition and feeling and the guiding wisdom of a larger community to which we belong, a path that is both personally life affirming and good for the whole. I do not think we need to frame this as divine guidance, but it does call upon some larger sense of self, or larger sense of belonging than merely following one’s personal desires or reasoning.
It is possible to imagine that guidance comes as a kind of directive about a specific choice. What should I do? This particular thing or that particular thing? It is as if one were at a crossroads, facing four possible options, needing to choose: What is the right thing to do? What is the right step to take?
Many of us have GPS devices in our cars or on our phones now—global positioning systems that interface satellites with maps to locate where we are and how to get from one place to another. In a clear, pleasant, mechanical voice it talks to you, saying things like: “Left turn approaching, 200 feet.” Or if you take a wrong turn it says, “Recalculating route,” and sets you back on track. And when you get to your destination, it says, very satisfyingly, “You have arrived.”
What could be clearer? Perhaps spiritual guidance could work something akin to this. One would get directions about a particular choice or where one should go. There are right turns and wrong turns, a particular destination, and a particular route (plus recalculations, as needed).
While it’s true that one can get a very strong intuition to do something in particular—or not to do it—I’ve come to believe that the compass is a more apt metaphor for the way intuition and inner guidance work. The compass needle doesn’t point southwest to indicate that you should turn southwest, and then switch to due south when that’s the better way to go.
The compass simply shows you the direction of the Earth’s North Pole. The point of the needle is drawn toward the north because it feels a magnetic attraction to north. That’s all the compass does for you. North is the only thing it reveals. What you do in relation to that knowledge is up to you. You can move directly toward it, you can turn in the opposite direction and walk south; you can keep north in the corner of your eye as you move in an easterly direction. You can hike upstream along a winding creek bed that meanders first this way and then that, but always moves generally in a northerly direction.
If we were to understand “north” as a spiritual metaphor, what does it signify? And if the compass needle is also a spiritual metaphor, what is it in us that is drawn to the north?
Bring to mind a time when you felt spiritually grounded, when you felt that your actions flowed from a sense of being at home in yourself, being at one with your best self and your truest values. Can you play out in your imagination a scene in which you are spiritually centered? What happens to your breathing as you remember or imagine this? How do you feel in your body? What is the quality of your interaction with others? What’s the feeling in the room? What emerges from your choices or your interactions?
This might begin to give you a sense of your “true north.” The question may not be, “Should I choose A, or B, or C?” but rather, “What happens when I move and speak and consider the situation from a place of my deepest spiritual centeredness?” Another good question is: “What kinds of choices enable me to stay more spiritually centered, more attuned to my true north?”
A GPS enables us to not have to think. We are simply told what to do. We do not need to be aware of where we are, or how to get where we want to go. A compass places greater responsibility for awareness and choice in our hands.
We may think of discernment as all about making the important decisions in life—changing jobs, having a child, getting married or ending a relationship, etc. But the path of discernment is more about developing an awareness of our inner sense of truth, an inner feeling of rightness or wholeness, a capacity to sense our deeper yeses and our deeper nos. This is the compass needle within us.
As we develop an awareness of what greater or lesser well-being feels like, as we learn to distinguish when we are moving toward or away from that well-being, we develop a foundation for truer choices. We find north by attuning to a sense of sacredness or wholeness—within both ourselves and others. When we lose that attunement, or feel cut off from it, when we can’t sense in which direction our wholeness lies, the choices we make may not be informed by what is best for ourselves or others.
We have to ask not only the question, “Who am I?” but also, “Whose am I?” A friend once shared with me this truth: “Discernment is personal, but not private.” We are not entirely free agents, making our decisions in a vacuum. We belong to a community of others, and a community of life. At best, our capacity to attune to the sacred dimension and to an experience of spiritual groundedness places us in touch not only with our inner true north, but also in touch with a shared north toward which the larger community of life is longing and evolving.
Following that compass, the path may be winding, but we can trust that the direction is true.
Resolving the rift between science and religion is deeply personal for me. I was raised by a father who is a high priest of science—a retired professor of physical chemistry for the University of Delaware. I loved science as a child and looked up to my father as an exemplar of the scientific method for discovering truth. Repeatable experimentation was the enlightened path to knowledge for me. Those fossilized, sooth-saying charlatans in the irrational religious world were self-deluded crackpots. Christians, in particular, were caught in an archaic system of thought that became obsolete hundreds of years ago.
I continue today with the same appreciation and passion for the expansion of understanding through systematic and repeatable methods that are the crown of the scientific method. But along the way I had an unasked for, unexpected, and life-changing experience playing a game of chess.
There is no luck or chance in chess; it is a game of logic and rational pure intelligence. In a game against a stronger player, I had a revelatory experience of playing almost effortlessly, as if I were guided to see the right next move. Spiritually intuitive chess, if you will. I experienced a state of consciousness that felt completely new to me, one that expanded my perception of reality and began a religious journey that has led to this moment today.
I call this journey religious because previously whenever I read the Bible or other religious texts I found nothing inspirational in them. They were dead historical texts that chronicled a semi-barbaric past that scientific thinking had overcome and was in the process of putting behind us. I had no interest in gurus and swamis who deluded themselves with magical thinking, lost in their imaginations. I believed that science outlined exactly what was real and the rest could be discarded.
After my religious chess experience, however, when I picked up these texts anew I began to find meaning in them. Gradually, I began to see that hidden in the archaic language and ideas was a message that had some kind of synergy, resonance, familiarity, emotional connection, and attraction that had eluded me before. The rational, systematic, and experiential approach of Buddhist insight meditation further opened up an even greater experiential understanding of what these religious teachers were talking about.
I’ve since had a number of objectively ordinary but subjectively transformative moments at meditation retreats. Using my scientific mind frame, I’m constantly trying to figure out what is happening and steadily on-guard for superstitious and magical thinking. The language that best fits these episodes comes from mythopoetic and religious literature. And some don’t translate well into language at all.
I’ve written some pretty enthusiastic letters to my father after these retreats trying to share what I was experiencing that pointed me in a spiritual direction. My father would respond as empathetically as he could by talking about the chemistry of the brain and endorphins. For him, the world can be completely explained by chemical reactions. There is nothing more, nothing less.
Where science and religion collide is around the existence of God and an entity called Spirit. Religion begins with a revelation of God and Spirit which creates the universe. Science begins with observable matter and builds up from there. My father is right that the methods of science have proved far more reliable for understanding the external world than that of religion, much to the consternation of Popes and bishops.
But no scientist can deny the interior experience of reality for long. Consciousness is, of course, necessary in order for the scientist to observe and record the surface of things. But our interior reality is much greater than the physiological processes that support it. Sense data do not contain the message. Two people looking at the same painting and listening to the same music can have vastly different experiences even though the sensory input is exactly the same.
Most religious traditions demand that you begin with a faith in God or Spirit. But I suggest this is not necessary—one only need begin with interest and curiosity. Through the method of direct personal experience, guided by the confirmation of a community of practitioners, one can find out what the words God and Spirit are pointing at but cannot adequately convey. Spirit is an interior, subjective truth that cannot be objectified but can be encountered.
Where religion and science can meet once again and find common ground is the center of the scientific method—direct, repeatable experience. Just as the laws of the movement of objects can be directly witnessed and repeated by anyone sufficiently trained in the scientific method, so too are methods taught by spiritual leaders that also lead to direct, repeatable experiences that can be verified by a community of practitioners. Enlightenment can be approached with the same precision as a scientific experiment.
Science and religion can be mutually reinforcing because they both study the same thing—what is real. The science of the mind and heart can be joined together.
Philosopher Ken Wilber believes that this integration is possible because at the core of everything is Spirit.
There is nothing but Spirit taking the form of matter, body and mind.
We are already what we seek. Our challenge is to wake up to this truth.
The most profound truths about what it means to be human belong to both science and religion. The deepest questions, the most challenging mysteries, are shared by philosophers, theologians, physicists, and astronomers alike.
Curiosity, the search for truth, and the joy of discovery are crossover experiences. All three motivate our personal lives, our work lives, our thinking and reading lives, because we humans seek to understand that which we cannot see. We hold faith in things unseen; we write our faith in mathematical equation or chemical formula; we speak our faith in prayer and meditation.
Unseen things include love, gravity, black holes, evil, hope, and joy, to name a few. We can see the evidence of these things. We see expressions of love, acts of evil, effects of gravity, and the dancing and singing of joy. But we believe in their existence even when we can’t see them.
Professor of astrophysics and Hubble Fellow Adam Frank in his book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, writes:
Science and spiritual endeavor are both gateways. They are not the same. They are not equivalent. But both arise from the same ancient location in our history and our being.
The ancient location that Frank points to is the position of the human being as observer and storyteller. Both science and religion rely on observation of the world and all its wonders. Both science and religion rely on story, myth, and narrative to make sense of what has been observed.
Historian of religion Mircea Eliade explored the universality of myth, ritual, and the sacred across cultures. He created the category of hierophany for manifestations of the sacred. Sacred refers to things set apart and worthy of reverence. Eliade suggests three universally human questions that aid us in our search for the sacred:
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
Where are we intended to go?
Religion and science both explore these questions. Through observation and narrative, both disciplines search for truth and meaning.
We 21st century UUs continue to seek after Eliade’s great questions of the meaning of life and death. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we intended to go? The answers are still open; revelation is not sealed. Like the astrophysicists, like Einstein, we still search for origins and the meaning of it all.
Adam Frank speaks of the impulse to understand—this essential human urge to search for truth. He calls it “The Constant Fire.” It is, he says, the aspiration to know what is essential, what is real, what is true.
This was the Constant Fire of men and women working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory for 40 years. This is the Constant Fire that brings us back again and again to our faith. It is the desire to know. The passion to know what is real, what is true.
Ancient myth and classic literature are evidence of this Constant Fire in the human breast. We yearn to understand—ourselves and our world, the universe and the multi-verse. We wake each morning hoping for a sighting of the sacred, a heirophany. We wake ready to take on the world with our questions, with our quest for meaning.
Each morning I wake hoping to watch the sunrise. Each morning I wake searching for an experience of the sacred. Each morning I wake with deep questions on my heart.
We are observers, writing and telling the story of the universe, the story of humanity. What a gift, what a joy to dwell in the house of the sacred! To reach the furthest points in the galaxy and beyond. To hear the chirp of black holes colliding and detect gravitational waves from a billion light-years away.
To acknowledge nature as a source of the sacred in our lives requires each of us to live a new ethic, one of care and compassion for the earth, the universe, and all human and animal kind. An ethic of reverence for life.
Science and the sacred will together lead us on a path of love of life. And what we love we will protect. What we love we will honor. What we love we will pass on to our children’s children.
Rainer Maria Rilke writes, in Letters to a Young Poet:
Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, almost unsayable. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
May we find joy in living our way into the answers.
This year I became an Uncle, and in a few days time I will become a “goodparent.” My niece’s name is Ella, and we’ve met by video but not in person, so I know what she looks like and what she sounds like, but not yet what she smells like. I mailed her parents a little adaptor back in September so that they could plug their 8-inch tablet computer into their television set and show me to Ella life-size. However, when they tried it, she carried on looking at the much smaller computer screen. She saw through the trick straight away! You see, she knows that Uncle Phil is really a 4-inch talking head, not some blown-up new-fangled TV projection.
I wonder what Ella will think when she meets the real me? Perhaps we should spend some time playing with the tablet together, so that she can see me and my 4-inch talking head at the same time. Then, when we each go home, she’ll know that when she next sees my talking head, she’ll really be seeing me.
Imagine what the world must be like to a nine-month old person. If you get a chance you should get down on the floor with one of them and try it out, because it’s brilliant. Almost everything around you is new, and there is nothing on your to-do list except “explore!” For example, if you are nine months old, there is no better use of the next ten minutes of your life than to do everything you can think of with that wooden spoon that Granny just gave you to play with.
Does it feel like the plastic ladle I had yesterday? For best results, I’ll need to put it in my mouth. Does it taste the same? Not quite. I’ll try banging the spoon on the table. (A nice loud sound! I made that.) This spoon and yesterday’s ladle make different banging sounds.
And they also look different, and taste different, so that’s now three ways things can be different. So much variety! Almost everything in the world is different from everything else.
But what happens when I bang the table with the spoon again? The sound is the same as it was a minute ago. And now? Yep. And how about now? Yep. So this is interesting: the world is full of all sorts of different things, but lots of them stay the same in some way. Most of the time you can tell what’s going to happen next.
Books though: books are not like that. When you turn the page of a book, you don’t know what’s going to be on the next page (unless you’ve read it before). What fun! It’s like when you’re playing with a grown-up and they do something unexpected. People are different from most other things: sometimes you can tell what they’re going to do and sometimes you can’t. You just have to do the best you can. (Keep watching, though, as the grown-ups hide and re-appear, hide and re-appear: it’s worth it to see them smile again.)
The insights that toddlers have are profound, but they are about things that are so familiar to us that we don’t even notice them anymore. The world is incredibly diverse, requiring each of us to inhabit an immensely complicated mental model just to keep track of it all. However, it is also so predictable that we are able to update this model in real time, using a miniscule fraction of the sensory data streaming into our nervous system.
It turns out that wood is like plastic—mostly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, in different arrangements but leading to solid materials that are similarly lightweight and strong; but they are made by two very different organisms that have figured out how to harness energy and recycle atoms in very different ways.
These are amazing facts, but almost all of the time we pay them not a moment’s thought. We’ve got other things to do, apparently! Well, however many other things I have to do, as much as possible I plan to be down on the floor with Ella, wondering at the world through her eyes. It’s the moments of novelty, realization and unpredictability that remind us what a wonderful world we live in. Surprise! Informed, delighted, we are children again.
How do we know what we know? Well, as Unitarian Universalists we are committed to an ongoing “search for truth and meaning.” And the Church of the Larger Fellowship offers support and company to everyone on that search, all the time.
Please support our community of search, so that we can continue to offer support and challenge and resources to all who want to join us on the journey. Please make a contribution of $100, or whatever amount is right for you, by visiting www.clfuu.org or by calling 1-800-231-3027.
When I was 19 I fell in love with Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. These exciting explorations of truth and beauty, meaning and love, brought me into a deep curiosity. Having first encountered them on my own, I proposed doing an independent study about them at my college. I was assigned a crusty old philosophy professor as my teacher.
At our first session I shared exuberantly what made me particularly interested in the Dialogues: “Socrates often references a mystical source, or a myth, to explain what he’s trying to say. That’s what really interests me. At what point does he turn toward mythology, or the word of the Delphic Oracle, or other non-rational wisdom?” The professor, who was likely to smoke two or three cigarettes at once, sneered at me while he held his flaming lighter underneath an unlit one dangling from his mouth. “That’s not what’s important,” he said, definitively. “If that’s the kind of thing you want to explain, you should study fiction.”
I remember little of the content of the rest of the sessions; I mostly remember that each week I would go home and cry. And then I would put myself back together with the help of a male roommate—a philosophy major who would help me to translate what the professor had said and bridge it back to anything I cared about. After I limped through that project (my final paper was a sarcastic dialog between the professor and me) I quit reading Plato, became an English major and studied fiction.
I recalled that long-ago experience recently, listening to a podcast from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. A lifelong love of plants led her to the study of biology. She describes her first day of college, when she declared she was there to learn why the world was so beautiful—why purple asters and goldenrod grew together.
Her professor, with or without multiple cigarettes in his mouth, responded about like mine had. He encouraged her to go study art. But Kimmerer, not as easily intimidated as I was, stuck with science, and eventually learned a scientific explanation for the goldenrod and asters’ affinity: together they hold a wide color expanse which attracts more pollinators.
Kimmerer went on to write several books which connect her scientific mind and her indigenous understandings, and they are profoundly beautiful and wise. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants is the most spiritually nourishing book I have read in a long time. It is also great science.
If I could have learned from teachers who held realities together as Kimmerer does, I might have studied plants myself. Rote memorization of the names of the parts held no interest for me. Indeed, study of literature wasn’t that fun for me either. Never once did we pause over Shakespeare or Austin, Melville or Woolf to say, “Wow—isn’t this beautiful?” Instead we picked apart. We parsed. We analyzed.
This kind of analytical, deconstructive thinking is how certain brains work. Scientists learn about plants; indigenous people learn from them, Kimmerer says. The trouble is that too much education emphasizes learning about the world—the natural world, the human body, the ways we interact—at the expense of learning from the world.
When I was in seminary, besides getting academic grades, we students evaluated each other on the qualities which at that time, United Church of Christ members had said they valued most in their ministers. (I went to a UCC seminary, though I was UU.) Those qualities were empathy, compassion, and clear communications. I’ve always thought it would be great if every student in every subject was evaluated by peers for these qualities, along with whatever academic subject they were learning.
Empathy, compassion, and clear communications spring from a different kind of knowing than does parsing complex theological doctrine. Both are important. I want surgeons or airplane pilots to know the details of organs and engines, not just to be kind to me. But that type of knowledge can also be used as a measuring stick to judge some people inferior, and with that judgment comes trivialization at best and extermination at worst.
It’s certainly what white settlers did in the face of the different kinds of wisdom of indigenous people when they arrived on the land: judged them to know nothing of value. I weep to think who we might be if, instead, the white settlers had showed respect for different ways of knowing and chosen to learn from it. I am sure that our planet would be in much better shape, and our ways of interacting with one another would be profoundly different.
The poet Audre Lorde writes about these different ways of knowing and concludes, “The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
The world is a richer place when we respect the many different ways that people exhibit brilliance, and come to know what they know. May we create a world together where all ways of knowing are honored and respected.
Well, what do you know! No, really: what do you know—and how do you know it? And how do you know that you know it? Our fourth UU Principle says that we are committed to a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” But how do we go about searching for truth, and how do we know when we have found it?
Well, one obvious way to know things is through our senses. We know the things we can see and touch and smell and taste and hear. We can trust the evidence that comes to us from direct observation. At least, sort of. For instance, it turns out that we literally don’t all see things the same way. Maybe a while back you saw the picture of a striped dress that was going around social media. Some people saw the dress as gold and white. Some people saw the dress as blue and black. The exact same picture. You can do a computer search on “striped dress test” to read articles about the science of why that is the case.
But I can tell you this—although I read an article that explains that the dress is really blue and black, there is no way that I can look at that picture and see anything other than white and gold. If I can’t believe that what I see with my own eyes is definitely true, what can I believe?
Well, science. The fifth Source of our living tradition talks about “the guidance of reason and the results of science.” We are folks who know that science matters, that evidence matters, that very bad things can happen when you try to pretend that the science around things like climate change or vaccinations can be ignored or denied. We know that there are laws of how the universe works that enable us to predict what will happen (every single time you drop a pencil it will go down, not up) and to create technology that really works.
People may say that humans and dinosaurs were on the earth at the same time because that matches the stories of the Bible, but that simply isn’t true. We know this because the scientific investigations of thousands of people across time have proven things about the age of our planet and the development of life on earth that demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that dinosaurs were long gone by the time that people arrived. Believing otherwise because of your faith in the Bible is just not going to make it so.
Except, of course, that science is a process, not a conclusion. Everything that we know through science is always the best understanding that we have at the time, not necessarily the final answer. The picture can change as we get more information. For instance, scientists now think that birds are probably the direct descendants of the dinosaurs, and that at least some of the dinosaurs had feathers. So in one sense you could now say that humans and dinosaurs not only lived at the same time, we’re still living together. It’s just that dinosaurs these days look more like vultures and sparrows, not stegosauruses and velociraptors.
So if you can’t absolutely know something through observation or science, maybe we should go with the saying, “Trust your gut.” People have an amazing ability to have a sense about things that goes beyond what our minds have logically puzzled out. You might know instantly that a person you meet will become a good friend—or is someone that you can’t trust. But it turns out that even those gut-level first impressions are not that reliable.
Scientists did an experiment in which they set up situations in which people met each other, but in half of those first encounters they had the person who was meeting the subject hand them a cup of coffee. It turns out that if you hold something warm as you meet someone you are much more likely to have “warm” feelings toward that new person. Not really a great basis for deciding who you can trust!
So what do we know, and how do we know it? Do we really know anything? Maybe not. Or maybe it is better to think of truth as a process rather than an absolute fact. We are on a search for truth and meaning. Learning and growing is an ongoing part of what we do as seeking human beings. Through science, through relationships, through stories, through mystical experiences that we can’t explain, we gather up the pieces that we build into structures of understanding.
It might be a structure that expands or shifts or changes over time. Sometimes we might even need to pull down a wall or two, as well as to put in a new window or door. But throughout our lives as Unitarian Universalists we are committed to building ever sturdier and more beautiful houses of understanding to live in and explore from.
…that while there is only one issue of Quest Monthly over the summer you can find searchable archives for Quest here.
Knowing that you don’t know is health.
Presuming that you know is disease.
Only by recognizing that you are ill
can you seek a cure.
The Master is their own physician.
They see their illness and treat it.
Having healed themselves of knowing|
they are truly whole.
Tao Te Ching, 71
It seems to me we speak all the time and all at once of two kinds of spiritual integrity, two ways of being deeply, liberally, religious—one looking inward, one looking outward. And that presents a kind of paradox. Our work as 21st century Unitarian Universalists is to attend to both at once, never one without the other, because in fact they are not as separate as they seem; they’re entirely intertwined. And whenever we forget this, things start quickly to unravel.
There is the part of you that is most uniquely you, deeper than mind, more durable even than your will—and holy, if you like that word, or sacred. It is the essence of identity, radiant with dignity and worth. Even when you feel unworthy and undignified, it’s there, and has been since the moment of your birth, or your conception, or that instant that the old church once called “quickening.” We could argue all day long about when exactly it begins—but we won’t.
No one knows whence or when it comes into the world, nor when or whither it leaves. If you’ve ever been present to the birth of a person or the dying of a person, you’ve maybe glimpsed at the bedside the difference between “presence” and “no presence.” Without words, without anything that any of your five senses can latch onto, it’s palpable and ineffable. Some people call this the soul.
A member of the congregation I serve described it this way: “Soul is more eternal than personality. It is the indwelling of the spirit, the true self, the real self.”
John O’Donohue, who was a Catholic priest and a mystical poet, wrote:
There is a voice within you that no one, not even you, has ever heard—the music of your own spirit. It takes a long time to sift through the more superficial voices of your own gift in order to enter into the deep significance and tonality of your Otherness. When you speak from that deep, inner voice, you are really speaking from the unique tabernacle of your own presence.
So there is this practice, this awareness, of something deeply intimate and inviolate within each person, present from the start. If we have any doctrine to deliver to our children, then this is surely part of it: that they are originals, shining, powerful, lovely and beloved; that their worth and dignity and beauty need not be earned, and can’t be, because these things are inherent and can never be denied, destroyed or desecrated—though sometimes you can feel as if they are. How to return to the home of the soul when you feel lost or lonesome or “beside yourself” is part of what we hope they’re learning, what all of us are learning.
There is a sense of individual identity, personhood, sanctity, your own interiority. At the same time, there is this other understanding: a parallel idea, equally compelling, equally demanding, just as beautiful, and grounded not only in mysticism but in biology and physics—grounded in the ground, in the natural, physical world. This is the awareness that whatever we are as human, living beings is deeply interfused, interwoven, interconnected and interdependent with everything else.
That’s true at a molecular level. It’s true of the vapor of our breath, the material substance of the body, dust to dust. It’s true as well in other ways—in the sense that whatever it is that is holy in me, separate and unique, touches somehow what is holy in you. It is not separate; it is the selfsame holiness, the spirit of life that blows in the wind and flows in water and in sap and glacial ice, and among and within the animals, fishes, birds, the grasses and the trees—the spirit of life.
I think this is what people mean when they say, as they often do, “I believe that when we die our energy dissipates back into the energy of everything.” This is
pantheism, defined by one writer as the belief that the universe, with all its existing laws and properties, is an interconnected whole that we can rightly consider sacred…a holiness not confined to any one thing but immanent in everything. A pantheist walks literally in the mind and body of God.
A little different from pantheism is panentheism, the belief that God is both immanent and transcendent, that we all, and trees all, carry a piece of a larger, external, God within us. Either way— pantheist, panentheist—it’s a sense that the divinity in each touches the divinity in all.
Poet Carl Sandburg said it simply:
There is only one horse of the earth and his name is All Horses.
There is only one bird in the air and [her] name is All Wings. There is only one fish in the sea and [its] name is All Fins.
There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world and the child’s name is All Children.
We think of the soul in two ways at once: as the spark within us that is uniquely our own, and also as the part of us that makes us part of everything. The paradox is that the deeper inside yourself you go—in prayer, in meditation, in mature self-understand-ing—the closer you come to a sense of belonging in all, and belonging to all. When my congregation says that the mission of our church is “to grow our souls and serve the world,” we’re speaking of one continuous endeavor.
What does this look like in real life, in real time, in the practical, day-to-day, actual, grubby, busy, wonderful, terrible, tangible world where we live? How does all this fluffy stuff show up? Here is an example:
Not long ago a church member posted on Facebook a picture of a bathroom door, one of the restrooms in our church building, with the words, “Here is just one of the reasons why I love my church.” A picture of the bathroom door! Our restroom doors have been evolving here, thanks to our administrator, other staff, and many friends and members. The words and pictures on those doors speak an explicit theology, and we’ve been trying for some time to get it right. We are striving to express as plainly as we can the radical hospitality that is the very core of our religion, and like all theological treatises, the signage on our doors is a work in progress.
At the moment, there’s a picture of a baby on each door, to show that there are diaper stations. There’s a picture of a wheelchair on each door, to show each restroom is accessible. There’s a single-stall restroom labeled “all gender,” and on the other two (one with a small label “women” and one with a small label “men”), there’s a sign that reads, “Gender diversity is welcomed here. All are welcome to use the restroom that best fits their identity.” Gone at last are the iconic stick figures with the little skirt and little pants.
Our bathrooms are evolving. Our church email signatures are also shifting, so that staff can indicate the pronouns by which they wish to be addressed and in so doing, invite everyone to whom we write to do the same, to level the ground, the common ground, and name it as open, holy ground. He/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/their, xe/xim/xer—the English language presents challenges and creative invitations to self-determination. And the meticulous grammarian in me, the child of an English teacher, is creaking and groaning toward a new definition of “correct usage”: not politically correct, but attuned to the music of right relationship. We’re hoping that our church nametags, for everyone, will soon state pronoun preference right beneath our names, opening a necessary conversation and extending even wider welcome.
It is no symbolic gesture. Right now some states are passing laws to force transgender people and gender-queer people, some of them young children in their schools, to use bathrooms rigidly assigned by outdated misunderstandings of gender identity and fluidity, forcing people to conform to a binary idea, an ancient, flat-world duality, that can no longer can hold us all. In fact, it never could. We can laugh a little at how on earth and who could possibly enforce this (you need to present a birth certificate to pee?) but pretty soon it’s not really funny. People get hurt over this—physically hurt. It’s not safe. People get beaten up over this. They get killed.
Each of us has a name…and a spirit, and a soul, a dignified personhood, which may not conform to what others think they see or what they may expect, but which shines brightly. It burns truly, just the same. We can’t see it, but we believe in it. As Unitarian Universalists, we are about creating space, open, gracious space, wherein it is safe for the soul to show up, where each single one is honored and the soul of the whole is revered—the holiness within us and within which we all dwell.
We say, “I see you: stranger, friend, companion, living creature, fellow traveler on the same round earth. I cannot know—even if I know you well, even if I am your mother, your partner, your colleague in the next cubicle at work—I can’t know what it’s like to be you, and therefore presumptions and assumptions, whether born of convention or convenience or prejudice or ignorance or fear, need to all fall away.” We say, “The divinity within me greets the divinity in you.”
At least we try to say it. That’s where we begin. And there are about as many ways to put your foot in it and say the wrong thing as there are people on the planet. I speak from the most glaring, clumsy experience. But we try, and we learn, and take risks, and make mistakes and scatter forgiveness like wildflower seeds, everywhere we go.
“Each of us has a name,” says the poet, Zelda—many names, really, given by our parents, our relationships, our history and actions. Some names are bestowed on us by other people, names we might or might not claim as truly ours. Self-determination is a radical and sacred act, a human right. When a tiny child just on the edge of words speaks their own name for the first time it is revolutionary; they become a little freedom fighter.
When someone says, “I believe God knows my name,” I think they mean our truest, original self. I think of that exercise in consciousness-raising in which participants are asked to each name ten things that define them as a person. You make a list: I’m a father. A son. Life partner to this woman or this man. A widow. A musician. A Muslim, a Jew, a butcher, baker, candlestick maker—you’re listing the things that define you. Irish, Armenian, African, Dutch. Gay/straight. Tall/short. Blue-eyed/brown-eyed. Black/white. A survivor of abuse or cancer or war. A lover of orchids or baseball, online gaming or golf.
You list ten things, and then, in this exercise, you have to take two away, just cross them out. (The exercise is about what exclusion feels like, what invisibility or prejudice feels like.) So you cross out two parts of yourself, and then another two, then three—until at some point you can’t do it anymore, not only because there’s nothing left, but because it is a terrible betrayal. All these relationships defining you are connected, and the stories are connected, the legacies, losses, accomplishments, choices—these things are so finely intertwined with your original being that the weave can never be unwoven.
Your true name, the name God knows, is a singular composite, a gorgeous and unprecedented tapestry. “Who are you?” is a complicated question. Who are you? And whose? And why, and how, and who says so? Who gets to say? The soul is a spark deep within, inviolate, your own, and you stoke that fire with new vitality your whole life long, shining your bright flame, and warming your hands at the hearths of strangers and lovers and everyone else.
Not that transparent self tucked under my skin
one day to be set free by my death that it might fly.
Not the Oversoul of Emerson, his New England Atman,
unless you can oil it up first, so that it slips out of your hand
as soon as you try to cut and paste it to a dictionary page
in the same part of the library as theology,
but far from where they gather the poems.
When Bill T. Jones or Alvin Ailey leap on the dance stage,
you might catch a glimpse of it out of the corner
of the corner of your eye, but you will never be sure.
You’ll note that your breathing changed pace,
and that your eyes are wet, but those are clues, not soul.
It’s not a thing to be carried, but sometimes
you might feel that you are being carried
high above the snapping dragons at your feet.
You can’t say it occupies space, but without
the space between you and me, space to be crossed,
best not to talk about it.
Steady love, and tested friendship are the chalices
that appear to hold it like fine wine,
but if you drink it, it’s that rare
vintage
that is never drunk to the dregs.
What is between you and me might be called soul,
but when we are gone, and different faces anchor
the between-ness, it will still be there when are not.
When music bears it along into your bones,
you will feel that you can rush up and embrace it,
but soon you’ll smile remembering it is not an it.
More of a becoming, more like fire
that can both illumine and scorch, dance and consume.
The last line of a Szymborska poem usually
uncovers the soul which was right there all along.
Soul is the spirit of it all, not the all.
Life, not desire.
Passion, not frenzy or desperation.
Not juice in the limbic system,
but the relationship between that and, say, Alpha Centauri,
and between Alpha Centauri and thatness.
Or between your eye and a homeless woman
bobbing against a wall in the snow,
or between your skin and the skin of someone
shot dead because of the color of theirs.
You know, soul.
Here it is, right now.
Here it is, right now.
Have you ever had a spiritual experience, a sense of movement of the spirit? A flash in time when your appreciation for the world was so complete, so perfect, that you were transfixed and transformed? A moment in which you had found a place that you treasure in your heart? But then, when you described it to others, the words were never full enough, never sweet enough, never sharp enough, never enough to convey the wow of the moment, the senses heightened, the life in you fully awakened, the twinkling of connection, of perfection, of peace, of unity.
We can’t make those transcendent moments come to us. When they do come, we can’t make them stay. We can’t even be sure what they mean, at least not until we take time for reflection and discernment. We can only bask in them when they arrive, consider them when they have gone, and hope that we learn from them whatever we need to.
I recognize that spirit and “spiritual” are loaded terms for some of us. On the other hand, I can think of no better word for such experience, and I do think it’s relevant to how we live our lives.
First, what is spirit? We speak of it as if we know what it is, yet the abundance of definitions confuses as much as it clarifies. Spirit comes up in many contexts. School spirit has a lot more to do with football than with God, while community spirit produces strong volunteer effort. The French gave us espirit de corps to animate military units and work teams. We refer to ghosts as spirits, and speak of someone writing “in the spirit” of someone else when they have been deeply influenced by them. We refer to someone’s good mood as “in high spirits” and a sourpuss as “in poor spirits.” And speaking of spirits, there’s that other kind—Cheers!
In German the word geist is similar to spirit, but creates different shades of meaning depending on the context and what syllable is added to it—a system that seems to offer more precision. But we may have more confusion in English. And, even with the overlay of religion on spirit, we can’t contain it in a religious envelope, despite the heavily religious—or spiritual, if you will—connotations of the word. Is it surprising that the word spirit is as hard to pin down as spirit itself is?
In many Christian churches today, this month brings the celebration of Pentecost, a holiday we don’t often recognize as UUs. Do you know the Pentecost story? The Jews had gathered in Jerusalem some fifty days after Passover for the holiday they called Pentecost, a commemoration of the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai. The followers of Jesus—not yet called Christians—felt a mighty wind and tongues of flame descended on them and they spoke and somehow, all who were present, from all the corners of the Diaspora, heard the words in their own language.
“They must be drunk,” said the skeptics. Really, that’s in the text. I’ve often thought those were the proto-Unitarians, searching for a rational explanation. To which the Apostle Peter replied, “It’s only nine in the morning! They’re not drunk.”
One of the fascinating things about this story is that the spirit comes not to a single person bringing tranquility, but to a large group of people bringing energy. And that highlights for me some of the questions that cluster around spirit.
Is the spiritual a private, internal experience, or a shared, communal one? Those seem radically different to me. And is it about serenity and peace, or energy and action? Again, two very dissimilar impulses.
While the dictionary equates soul and spirit, some writers make a distinction between them. Bill Plotkin, a depth psychologist, eco-therapist and wilderness guide from Colorado writes in his book, Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, that the soul “holds our individuality together and gives us our identity,” while the spirit is “the single, great, and eternal mystery that permeates and animates everything in the universe and yet transcends all.” In other words, soul is particular and individual while spirit is what links us all together. Spirit is in us, but at the same time is out there. Soul is always internal.
Reading his descriptions reminded me of the distinctions the Hindus make between atman and Brahman. While atman (individual soul) and Brahman (universal spirit) are distinct and separate, they are also the same. Famously, Hindus say, “Atman is Brahman.”
Here’s where the distinctions between spirit and soul, or atman and Brahman, take me. When we realize our connection with that which is larger than ourselves, we touch spirit. When we go deep into better understanding of our unique selves, we engage soul. Sometimes during that deep engagement of soul, we realize a connection with our particular niche in the larger world, so we also slip up against spirit.
For instance, one of my great spirit moments was standing out on a cliff in a wilderness area, wind pushing against me, shaping the trees around me whose branches seemed to grow into the void created by the sudden drop-off of land. Before me, above me and even below me was the expanse of sky. My senses heightened, I felt exhilarated, but it was as if I felt not only my feelings, but also the feelings of the trees and the wind and the sky. I was profoundly connected with my space in the universe, aware not only of myself, but of my unity with all.
So, is spirit a private internal experience or a shared, communal one? My theory is that spirit is an experience of connection with what is greater, so if that private internal experience leads to connection with what is greater, then spirit is present.
In other situations, the experience is more overtly communal. The experience at the first Pentecost, whatever it was, was shared by thousands of souls. So, too, was the Azuza Street Revival in the spring of 1906, in Los Angeles, during which people were speaking in tongues and smitten by the spirit. The founding of the Pentecostal tradition emerges from that event.
We UUs might better relate to being caught up in the spirit as we perform or hear music or get carried away at a political rally or march. Swept up in something bigger than themselves, people feel a common humanity that cements them and inspires them. The spirit moves, and everyone feels unity and gets carried along as if by a great wind. Our language expresses it this way: we lose ourselves. UU minister Shay MacKay called it “the experience of overcoming physical and cultural differences in pursuit of connection at a more universal, divine level.”
It’s fun to be part of something like that. What’s more, that kind of spirit can accomplish great things. It gives people courage to march for human rights even when faced by tear gas and tanks. It rallies rescue responses in disasters. It inspires sacrifices of time and energy and money to build something bigger than oneself, so that the group lives on as family or tribe or nation or church. It also leads people into wars where they sacrifice themselves completely.
Something in this suggests to me an evolutionary characteristic that somehow contributed to our human survival. Self-sacrifice can be required for the survival of a species, and individuals do not surrender themselves readily. Something, though, encourages us—literally, gives us courage—and that is spirit.
The longest-lasting religious traditions, though, have found a place for both spirit and reason—a delicate balance to produce, but it can be done. Holding the movement of the spirit up to the light of reason can cause deeper truths to emerge.
Take an example. Malcolm X famously went on the hajj to Mecca. He participated in the ritual circling the Ka’ba and all the associated ceremonies. And he reported that he had a spiritual experience of the unity of all. He wrote about it this way:
There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white….
In the past I permitted myself to be used… to make sweeping indictments of all white people, the entire white race, and these generalizations have caused injuries to some whites who perhaps did not deserve to be hurt. Because of the spiritual enlightenment which I was blessed to receive as the result of my recent pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mecca, I no longer subscribe to sweeping indictments of any one race. I am now striving to live the life of a true Sunni Muslim.
Malcolm X had an experience of oneness, a spiritual experience, and then he held that experience up to the light of reason and found a deeper truth of practical unity. The process matters because he could have responded differently. He could have rejected his spiritual experience because it contradicted what he had believed over time, and said, “Oh, that was just the hajj. It’s like that. It’s not real life.” He could have been unreflective about the spiritual experience and set it aside.
Instead, he said, “There is something real, something of truth, something holy here that I need to acknowledge. And when I hold up the lessons of the spiritual experience, I find them consistent with reason and reality. These things are true, despite my previous experiences and beliefs that caused me not to accept them. We really are united.”
It’s important to recognize that he did not dismiss other realities he already knew, such as American racism and the experiences of suffering that he had endured as an African American. He continued to work against racism, but with a different inspiration, different philosophy, and different goals. His spiritual experience had shown him a new way, but one that had continuity with his past. The unexpected confronted him, and he responded with mind, heart and soul.
The gospel of John says, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Spirit brings the unexpected. Sometimes spirit sneaks up on us and we connect with it unbidden. Sometimes we seek and seek for it and maybe we find it and maybe we don’t. Spirit, like wind, is elusive and ever moving. Spirit empowers and equips, enlivens and inspires. It is our job to be open to its movement, and to respond with our minds, hearts and souls.
“I love seeing that you’re entertaining earth spirits in the yard,” the man said to me, bending his head so that his tall frame could fit through my front door. He was a friend of a friend, someone I hadn’t met before, and with his unusually tall presence and bright pink face, I felt as if he might be from another world—a magical world.
Feeling every bit a muggle (non-magical person), I responded, puzzled. “Entertaining earth spirits?”
“Well, what do you call what you’re doing out there?” he asked, waving his hand out the window at the flowers and herbs and vegetables that were flourishing where a lawn had once been.
“Um…gardening?” I responded, again feeling the chasm between our worlds. And our conversation went on from there to other things.
It took me, literally, years to understand what he had said to me, and why he had said it. It came clear gradually in other conversations. “You’re such an extrovert,” a friend said. “It amazes me that you are happy for hours at a time, alone in your garden.” I responded with shock. “Alone? Are you kidding? I’m surrounded by thousands of little green friends out there!”
Or, another day, I said to a friend, “The plants told me they are really upset by the violence of the machines doing the roadwork.” With a look bordering on fear, perhaps wondering how grounded I was in reality, my friend responded, “The plants don’t really talk to you, do they?” “Not with words,” I said. “But they make themselves very clear.”
And then I realized: maybe some people who are also gardeners don’t engage with plants in mutual relationship in the way that I do. Maybe not everyone experiences friendship and spiritual communion with plants. Maybe my kind of relatedness could indeed be called “entertaining earth spirits.”
I have always, from my youngest days, felt a deep kinship with the earth; I have known the earth and the natural world as living companions. I think most kids do, given proximity. When a big tree in our front yard had to be cut down because of heart rot, my three-year-old self sobbed and sobbed, sputtering out between spasms of wracking pain, “But she’s my sister!” And for most of the existence of humankind, entire cultures have known our interrelatedness, have honored the living earth.
Nowadays, in modern cultures, it is easy to feel as if we humans inhabit a mostly inanimate world. Even something as completely animate as the meat that some of us eat comes to us in neatly wrapped packages, in no way resembling the living animal it was cut from. In the U.S., farmers whose survival used to depend on knowing the earth intimately now sit atop giant machines with air conditioning and music, distanced from their crops. The oil that we put in our cars so that we can speed on cement highways is dredged up from under the earth in places far from us, and many of the foods that we eat come from places we’ll never see.
It delights me to know that many indigenous languages conceptualize the world not in relentlessly categorized boxes of male and female, but by whether any particular piece of it is animate or inanimate. Once I started trying to do that myself, I realized how much I label “things.” English is 70% nouns, I hear, while many indigenous languages are predominantly verbs. Verbs describe motion, action, life. Nouns so often put things in boxes.
I’ve been in many rooms where people are trying to put words like soul and spirit in a box, and the words simply won’t stay put. Once, in a seminary class on spirituality, we had a weekly assignment of finding three new definitions of spirituality. Twelve weeks, thirty-six definitions. None of the definitions were completely adequate, and the process freed me from trying to define words, per se, and opened me more in a commitment to experience them.
How do we stay connected to the essence of life that runs through the animate world? That’s the gist of spiritual practice, I think. For me, spiritual practice is any activity that opens me up to life’s vast web of animacy, done in a deliberate and steady way. (There are many other experiences that are spiritual, but come upon me without planning or warning.) For half the year, gardening is my primary spiritual practice, and I’m out there at dawn for a few hours daily.
For the other half, I patch in various practices with less consistency: improv classes, certain kinds of movement, spiritually grounded activism, singing with other people, sitting quietly in candlelight each morning reading a meditation. These activities, at least some of the time, open me up to
eternity, show me life’s vast horizon, connect me to all that is living.
Entertain earth spirits? You bet I do! And every other kind of spirit that comes to the door!
There are a whole lot of words from poets and preachers and wise folks of various types that have changed how I understand the world, but there’s one quote that has maybe shaped what I’ve done with my life more than any other. I was already a minister when I read these words from Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies: “Life is just a chance to grow a soul.”
Life is just a chance to grow a soul. I guess I’d always assumed that whatever a soul was, it was something that a person just came with. But this understanding of soul struck me as both right and helpful. Maybe a soul is not something we just have—maybe it is something we create. Maybe soul is the part of us that is mature and kind and connected to other beings. Maybe our soul grows when we are filled with wonder. Maybe the soul is the seat of our creativity, our ability to contribute something to the world that is uniquely our own. Maybe soul is the spark within that moves us to act, to try to build a better world.
What came to me as a kind of revelation is that this was the best understanding of church that I had ever heard—or at least the understanding of church that felt closest to my own sense of what I was called to do. The point of the church is to help us grow our souls. Whatever happens at church—preaching or teaching or singing or marching or praying or meeting or chatting together over coffee or the internet—the point of it is that we grow our souls. Which is to say that church life, all of church life, is religious education. Or, as people have come to call it more recently, religious growth and learning. Or faith formation. What church does, or at least what church should do, is to help us to expand that part of us that cares and wonders and creates and connects.
So I went back to school to get a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min) degree in religious education, not because I had any intention of leaving the parish ministry, but rather because I wanted to follow this flash of insight that all of what we do in church is supposed to be religious education—growing our souls. Now, it so happened that I did end up leaving the parish ministry to become a religious educator, and my title at the CLF is minister for lifespan learning. I think of myself as a religious educator and I think of myself as a minister and I can’t really see that there is particularly a difference between the two.
My work at the CLF includes writing materials for families to use for religious exploration, and my work at the CLF includes being part of the worship team that plans and leads our online worship services. And both, as I understand them, are simply part of our ongoing efforts to help people find ways to grow their souls—to understand more deeply and more specifically the ways in which we can live out our best selves and experience our essential connectedness to all beings.
So, how does one go about growing a soul? Plants need earth and air and water and sunlight in order to grow. What do souls need? How exactly does one go about tending a soul? Souls, it seems, are complicated and contradictory. I have watched them grow through times of deep sorrow but I’ve also seen them expand through experiences of joy. A friend of mine talked about how the death of her father led to her feeling connected with all others who had experienced such grief—and the recognition that each and every person she talked to had their own experience of grief. But with this very same friend I have experienced my soul expanding in the joy of shared singing and dancing.
Time alone in meditation or reflection or study or prayer can grow a soul, but so can times of intense connection with other people. We might feel our soul expand as we sit alone under a tree, but we are just as likely to experience that sensation of the soul stretching in deeply honest conversation or in marching together with thousands of other people in pursuit of justice.
The soul grows when we stay true to our own unique selves, refusing to simply go along with the crowd, but the soul also grows when we experience the ways in which we are inseparable from other people—and, indeed, from all the beings of this planet, whether or not they are human. There is no great art without personal freedom of expression, but it is also true that art is only great when it connects us to something larger than our own small selves.
I’m not sure that there’s a simple, straightforward answer to what grows a soul, any more than there is a simple, straightforward answer to what exactly a soul is. But maybe soul is the part of us that experiences yearning for something more, and the way to grow it is to follow wherever that yearning might lead us.
Help us be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers. —May Sarton
The CLF welcomes all who want to nourish their souls. We are here to provide a place of comfort, spiritual growth and belonging.
Please help us continue to be here to support those seeking spiritual growth by making a donation of $50, or whatever you can, today. You can give by going online or by calling 1-800-231-3027.
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We live in succession, in division, in parts, in 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. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay “The Over-Soul,” published in 1841
At age 10 or 11 I was just beginning to understand more about how the world works, about morals and ethics and my own agency. I was waking up to my ability to make choices about all kinds of things.
One particular memory of that time is from a summer day when my family had gone to see my grandmother. I loved visiting her, playing card games around her old wooden table, looking out at the street from under her bright orange awning. I loved the smell of her place, and no matter what the actual temperature it always felt warm in there.
We’d spent the afternoon with her that day and were getting ready to head home. I told my grandmother I needed to use the restroom before we left and she told all us kids she had something special that she would give to us when I came back. She would often give us a 10 or 20 guilder note (5 or 10 dollars) as a gift, which was a huge amount to me at the time.
I remember those minutes of anticipation as I was pondering what my grandmother wanted to give us. I felt sure, somewhere in me, not only that she would be giving us money but that it was going to be more than usual. Why I thought that, I don’t know, but I do remember then thinking that if she gave me 100 guilders—about $50—that that would be too much. To me, that was like an overwhelming treasure. I would be demure, I told myself, and not take it. No, no, that’s too much, I would say.
It was an early experience with setting good intentions that didn’t end up as intended.
When I stepped back out into the hallway with the rest of the family my grandmother pressed a 100 guilder note into my hand. There was no thought, no word from me beyond a thank you. I didn’t demure. I didn’t say No, no, that’s too much. Along with my brother and sister, I took the note, thanked her, and left with my family.
It wasn’t until recently that I even remembered that incident. I was in spiritual reflection class and we were talking about our relationship with money: where our thoughts and feelings about money come from, and how those feelings limit us or open us up. When I first remembered this long-ago event I was embarrassed—to have made that promise and then broken it so easily. Ugh, why did I do that and what did it say about me?
As I dug a little deeper, though, I had an image of myself as more hapless than intentional, on automatic pilot, with the momentum of the moment overriding my budding awareness that I have agency, that I am in charge of money, not the other way around. As I looked some more I realized I’d been absorbing thoughts and feelings and beliefs about money since before I could even begin to understand what it really was or what it meant. I was picking up all kinds of messages about this core reality that influences so many aspects of our lives before I really knew its significance.
Big things like: It’s really good to have it. You’re not supposed to talk about it. You’re not supposed to want too much of it.
And random things like: If someone takes you out to dinner, get something inexpensive on the menu. Don’t be miserly, but be sure to save plenty. Drive a hard bargain but be generous in all you do. Don’t go into debt if you can avoid it. Oh, but never ask for money—unless you’re asking your parents, but preferably not after the age of 25. And, did I mention, you’re not supposed to talk about money?
I’m still emerging from that foggy, tangled, unthinking, auto-pilot relationship with money.
Lewis Henry Lapham, in his book Money and Class in America, notes:
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air, and water. [We] can employ it as a tool, or…dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
But while money itself is value-neutral, it does not, in practice, feel neutral for most of us. I think about what it can mean. Money can represent power; it can represent security. Those who have a lot of it can nevertheless feel poor. Those who don’t have much can feel wealthy. It triggers fear in us sometimes, elation at other times. It can trigger jealousy, guilt, anger, superiority, inferiority.
Surveys say that money disagreements are one of the top causes of arguments between spouses, and as much as we hear again and again that it is not the be-all-end-all, most of us are sympathetic to the words of comedian Spike Milligan: “All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.”
I wonder how many of us feel calm and relaxed in our relationship with money? How many of us are navigating money in a way that feels clear and right and purposeful? We might feel like there is too much of it leaving our hands. We might find that when the topic of money comes up, we feel bad because we have too little or too much, or something feels unfair, or because we’re afraid about a future we can’t see.
And that discomfort, I think, leads many of us to corral our interactions with it into short periods of time—maybe on Sunday afternoon once a month paying bills. It becomes kind of like taking out the trash. We do it, but we don’t like it, and we try to think about it as little as possible.
Which can limit our discomfort, but can also leave those emotional cross currents, money anxieties, conflicting attitudes and auto-pilot responses firmly in place, making us vulnerable to spending our money in ways that don’t really reflect who we are and want to be. But how we do or do not spend has an impact on us. And, aggregated across a community or a country, it has a big impact on all of us.
I think back to that early money memory I shared. I wonder whether on some level I realized that if I’d said No thank you to my grandmother, she might have been surprised, maybe even insulted. My brother and sister might have been left feeling guilty. Maybe I knew, on some level, that I would be entering emotional territory. And perhaps most of all I knew that I would have been stepping away from a familiar way of relating to something and it would feel different inside of me. It might change me.
But I think in order to get clarity about what we really want to do with the resources that are so important in our homes and in our lives, we may just have to walk into emotional territory. We might indeed feel different. And yes, it might change us.
Money is like fire. It can be harmful or it can be put to good use. I believe that when we put it to good use, it not only changes the “out there,” it changes the “in here”—because it strengthens our own relationship with our own values. So that we can look in the mirror and say, Yes, that feels good. That is what I want to create. That feels right. One money decision at a time.
I grew up poor, although I didn’t think we were. We always had food. My dad drove a car. I was on free lunch, but I figured it was because my dad lied on some form or other so that I could get free lunch. We didn’t look like poor people in the movies and TV shows. We lived in a house, and our lights never got turned off. It wasn’t until I started applying for college that I saw my dad’s tax returns and realized that we were living under the poverty line.
It wasn’t always like that. I think for a while we were middle class; as a little kid I remember taking a vacation to the East Coast once, and eating at nice restaurants. But something happened and we hit hard times. I found out other things later: that sometimes we didn’t have health insurance; that my mother and father got divorced because my mother was taking money from their joint account and investing it in pyramid schemes; that my relatives in the States send ten percent of their gross income back to our family in Malaysia.
I didn’t grow up afraid of money. Actually, all my cousins are accountants! It’s great—I’ve never done my own taxes. (I’m so grateful.) And they and my parents taught me healthy financial habits from a young age. Things like: “Don’t spend money before you’ve earned it.” “Treat your credit card like a debit card.” and “Your rent or mortgage should not exceed 30% of your gross income.” Even though money was this thing that went up and down a lot, nobody in my family has ever been afraid of money, and they didn’t teach me to be afraid of money.
Money wasn’t this mysterious force in our lives that we had no power over. Money was something that we could control—not always, but a lot of the time. And you could also control yourself. Is this thing at the store something that you need, or that you want? Can you ask for a raise at work? Can you take on a little extra work, maybe in the evenings or on weekends? Can you take night classes, increase your skills, get a better job?
I’m not saying that if you’re broke it’s your fault, and that you should stop buying frivolous things like beer or new clothes and that you should take more community college classes and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I’m saying that I have this attitude that money doesn’t control me. I control the money. I might not have a lot of it. (I made less than thirty thousand dollars last year and flushed a third of it into school, so believe me, I don’t have a lot of it.) But I still make decisions about it. And what guides me in my decisions are my values as a Unitarian Universalist.
I’m actually going to borrow some Christian language for a minute, because I really like the way they put it. Some Christians refer to what they do with their money as stewardship of God’s wealth. This money is God’s, and they happen to be in possession of it right now. I like thinking about it that way. Stewardship of God’s wealth. Substitute whatever you want in place of God—Love. Justice. Peace. The Earth.
Money doesn’t control me. I don’t serve money. I serve higher causes. I use the money to serve higher causes.
Money isn’t for us to hoard and keep. You can’t take it with you, and you can’t swim around in a giant vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. So then, what’s money really for? Well, you can leave it to your children. You can give some to your neighbor. You can give it to a struggling seminarian. You can give it to Amnesty International. You can give it to your church. Just an idea.
It may seem like I’m only talking to people who have money to give. I know that’s not true of everyone. Some of us are living on very fixed incomes—social security or disability payments or student loans. Some of us are living in our cars. Some of us are going to work hard our entire lives and never climb out of poverty. I see you, and I hear your pain and frustration. I might talk about how money isn’t for us to hoard and keep, while some people are thinking, Well, that’s fine for you to say, you have an income!
But wealth isn’t just money, either. It’s also time. And health, wisdom, skills. Those are also your wealth and your responsibility, and you should put them toward a higher service too, because you won’t have them forever.
It’s an obligation of those of us in this community who are in a better position to give a hand up to the ones who aren’t. Because we are Unitarian Universalists and we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, not just the white and the able-bodied and the rich in money. We believe in justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. We believe in respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part. And that means that the wealth you possess isn’t yours.
That wealth belongs to love, to justice, to goodness, to God. You just happen to be in possession of some of it right now, and for whatever reason, some of us are currently in possession of more wealth than others. But you can’t take it with you when you die.
So remember: this wealth that you are in possession of right now is temporary. Everything you think you own is temporary. Your house, your health, your dog, your church. I have childhood memories of eating at seafood restaurants, but by the time I graduated from high school the only places we could afford to eat out were places like Carl’s Jr. You might be in a good position now, but someday in the future, you might be the one who needs a hand up.
And when that happens, you’ll look to your neighbor. You’ll look to your church. You’ll look to your grown children. And you’ll be glad, then, for those shared values of compassion and generosity and justice, and for the good examples you set earlier.
So what are your values? What is important to you? The church? Your children? Our schools? Our parks? Black Lives Matter? It’s a huge responsibility, isn’t it?—deciding where to put your wealth, especially when that wealth is money. In this capitalist, free market world of ours money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility. The power and responsibility of being a Unitarian Universalist is about discerning your values, and then living them. And like it or not, part of living your values is putting your money where your mouth is. That’s how we can make capitalism work for justice.
I’m not saying this to make anyone feel guilty. I’m not saying that unless you sell all your possessions and donate the proceeds to Doctors Without Borders you’re not living your values. I’m saying that every dollar you spend is a deliberate choice, and that every choice you make has an opportunity cost. Every time you say Yes to something, you say No to something else. And every time you say No to something, you say Yes to something else.
Because your wealth doesn’t belong to you. You just happen to be in possession of it right now. And you get to choose how to spend it. So spend it as a Unitarian Universalist.
I want to tell you a story about a little boy who got up from the table where his older brother and mom sat, to go back to his room. He had a sudden need to count his money. As he walked in to his bedroom, he looked up on the dresser, at the round glass piggy bank. Inside that glass pig was his net worth. It was mostly pennies, which felt a little disheartening. He wanted to feel like he was worth more than pennies.
And he was. He reached for a smaller, less conspicuous wooden treasure box, hidden underneath merit badges and old detention slips. In it lay the rest of his money. Quarters and dimes he stashed away. A silver dollar he’d gotten for Christmas. And two one-dollar bills. It added up to just about five dollars. Not much, but not bad, either, for a seven-year-old in 1969.
That little boy stood over that small box of money for what seemed like an eternity. He was caught up in a powerful deliberation. A painful, sweating brow kind of deliberation. And although it may sound as though it was a financial deliberation, it really wasn’t. It was a spiritual one.
I know this story well because that little boy was me. I especially remember getting up from the kitchen table where my older brother and my mom were still sitting. We had been talking and the conversation we were having wasn’t finished. The subject, as you might have guessed, was about money. It had to do with how much we had—or rather, didn’t have.
Times were a little tight for us as a family back in 1969. The particular crisis I can’t remember, but there was a whole laundry list of items on the chopping block. And the tone of the conversation was rather serious.
The other details sort of blur together. But this part I remember clearly: at one point in the conversation, when my mom’s attempt to convey the seriousness of our situation really came through, a deep silence fell between us. It seemed there was nothing left to say.
And just at that moment, my brother got up and left the room. But he returned, just as quickly, holding a small box. My mom and I recognized it right away. It was his wooden treasure box of money, identical to the one I had. Inside was money from birthdays and mowing the lawn, washing cars, recycling coke bottles, Christmas. His box had almost fourteen dollars. He was better at saving his money.
My mom and I both knew what was coming. We braced ourselves. I stared wide-eyed, and felt a lump form in my throat. I looked over at my mom and noticed her eyes had begun to well up. A few minutes earlier, she had a lot to say about the money we didn’t have. But, when he took that box and pushed it over in front of her, she suddenly couldn’t say anything. Tears rolled down her face. And she didn’t do anything. She just let him push that box in front of her.
It was me who did something. I got up and headed to my room. I walked straight to my dresser, and pulled out my own box of money. And I stood there. And I stood there. And I stood there. It was one of the greatest moments of deliberation I’d known. Calculating what was in my box. Five dollars. And what was in my heart.
Trying to summon the benevolence and generosity my brother had just demonstrated, but unable to do so, I was trapped in doubt. And fear. And finally I closed the box and mumbled to myself: Well, five dollars is five dollars. I retreated further into my bedroom, and further into my heart.
It was difficult for me, deciding to hold on to that money. But not because anyone berated me, or responded begrudgingly. I don’t think anyone even knew I struggled in that kind of deliberation. The part that was the hardest—that made me feel most lost and adrift—was that I couldn’t even summon the courage to return back to the kitchen table. I couldn’t get myself to follow my brother’s generous example. And I didn’t believe I could show up without it. So, I just stayed in my room. Alone.
On that day when my brother pushed all of his money in front of us, I could tell that our mother wanted very much to tell him to keep it; that she wanted to say we didn’t need it that badly. And the truth is that we didn’t. The truth is that fourteen dollars probably made absolutely no difference to our finances. But the larger truth is that it made a huge difference to my brother.
My brother wasn’t giving all his money because we needed it. He was giving it because he needed us. Because he wanted to feel part of something that he knew, deep down, was about love.
And my mom let him because she knew he wanted to know he was worth more than fourteen dollars. The money was just coins. What it bought was priceless.
The day my brother pushed all of his money towards us pushed me into a life-long spiritual deliberation. On that day when I couldn’t get myself to go back to the table, I entered a time of self-imposed spiritual exile. To this day, I can’t remember what I did with that five dollars. But I spent years wishing for the chance to go back and change that decision.
The price I paid – years searching for my own self worth, doubting my sense of belonging, questioning my contributions to love and justice – could have been covered by a small down payment early on. Though it would have cost me everything I had, it would have been the best five dollars I ever spent.