Playing With Fire
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
It seemed like a great link to click on. Someone I follow on Twitter wrote: ‘#Unitarians provide welcome break from some of the unseemly undertones of Christian worship’. Always happy to read about someone who has had a good experience with us, and – if I’m going to be honest – glad to be able to pat myself on the back even if it’s not my church specifically. So I clicked on the link and began to read.
The author – Theo Hobson – starts by talking about going to visit the Unitarians in Brooklyn. Ah, I thought to myself, it’s not about England, but nevermind. I read on. The first few paragraphs were a little romp through who Unitarians are. His history was pretty awful, but the writing style was pretty bouncy so all seemed well enough. Lots of people get the history wrong, I said to myself, even ministers and folks who should know better. Nevermind. Really. This has got to be good. The title, after all, said that he got a respite from the dark undertones of Christianity, and so there is bound to be something interesting. (I admit this is not my most attractive side, but it is something I try to work on.) He then begins to describe his experience at the service. It’s about women’s spirituality and has a collection of women speaking about their experiences. He describes what each woman is saying, and I think, Awesome. It was a great service! What a lucky guy!
But it begins to get strange by the end, as his description skids into some more judgmental statements about what he didn’t understand about what the women were saying. And then it got worse. He’s coming to the end, and it gets really ugly:
I have no idea whether this spiritualised feminism is a regular component of this community; maybe most weeks it's burly men doing the talking, about the sense of rational peace they have while out fishing. But at least three quarters of the congregation was female. And it felt as if the language of therapeutic self-affirmation, whether feminist or not, was very well rooted here. It is now seemingly the Unitarian fashion to deny any single path to truth, but there is still an element of oneness to justify the denomination's name: its very deep respect for Number One.
I don’t like the turn this has taken. With good reason. He continues:
I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that's the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there's a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There's a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom for it too. There's a disturbing absoluteness. Unitarianism carries about as much sense of dangerous otherness as a tots' singalong at the local library.
We’re very harmless. Not at all dangerous, unless you consider the mind numbing potential of a tots’ singalong to be dangerous, which I, for one, have been known to declare when staggering out of such events.
I was sent searching for the reference to being harmless in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. The fifth book in that series is called ‘Mostly Harmless’ and that title comes from the Hitchhiker’s guide itself. If you don’t remember quite how this works, the Guide itself is a compendium of information about the whole of the Galaxy, it’s like an electronic encyclopaedia that travellers carry with them. In the first book of the series we meet Ford Prefect, an alien who writes for the Guide who has spent some years on Earth so as to write a new review of the planet.
The original review of the planet had been the single word ‘harmless’. Ford’s revised article was extensive and relayed all of what humanity had done through the ages, but was eventually edited down to the book’s title, ‘mostly harmless’.
Harmless. Mostly harmless. About as dangerous as a tots' singalong at the local library. Unworried Mormons. It’s enough to get you riled up on a Wednesday afternoon, not to mention a Sunday morning.
What is most irksome is the dismissive quality to the comment, as if we were all about fairy cakes and candy floss, as if the courage of those women in Brooklyn who stood up in front of the congregation and shared their spiritual journeys was incidental to the religious quest, not an integral part of it; as if taking the time and energy to work on discerning what it is that is most true and to seek to live by that understanding is a matter of mere preference and the easy path in life. Let me be clear here: it’s not. It’s playing with fire, as it is any time people genuinely enter into spiritual seeking no matter the content or context of that seeking. It is playing with fire.
While Annie Dillard's suggestion is that when we kindly church people call upon God on a Sunday morning, we risk arousing a power that is beyond our ability to contain, I would say that anytime any of us begin that journey of discovery, we are at the same risk. When we seek to understand the deepest truths of life, we open ourselves to transformations that we wouldn’t have ever asked for, we wouldn’t have ever wanted. When we open ourselves in love, in whatever way, we open ourselves to the pain of the world, we open ourselves to heartbreak beyond imagining, the certainty of loss that can leave us breathless and lost. You all know this. You know what the risks are every time.
That journey is not harmless, ever. It is always playing with fire. And knowing that it is always playing with fire, still here we are. And what we want to know – at least something of what we want to know – is that the journey is worth it, that getting scorched and scarred from what happens to us is worth it. We come to places like this to be reminded of what we gain from such a journey, too. Because the gift that comes along with it all is a life that is truly lived, and when we’re able to get it right, a life lived authentically and deeply.
It’s what Henry David Thoreau suggested in Walden nearly 200 years ago:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
We want to know the truth of life, to live it fully and know it as fully as we can. It’s an arduous journey of discovery and we are well served being in a community in which that journey is honoured and where we can gain sustenance from our companions on the way.
While this may play out as an intense concern for ‘number one’ as Mr. Hobson suggests, my trust is that the more people there are who are awake and aware in the world, the more hope we have for a world of peace and plenty, of mercy and justice. You know my ongoing mantra about this: a religion not lived is not a religion, values not lived are not values. It has to show in your life.
And perhaps this is the one place where Mr. Hobson is right on the mark: we are in our way harmless and that’s not a bad thing. We’ve not taken on holy war against anyone, including our enemies. We seek to be compassionate and caring, not celebrate the spilling of blood, we seek – at our best – to live lives that are not only harmless, but helpful, lives that often (I hope) go against the cultural norms of getting and greed and personal gain at the expense of others, that work against the need to denigrate another to uplift ourselves. When we are at our best, we seek to understand another’s perspective even if it is vastly different from our own.
Given the chance, I’d have a cup of coffee with Mr Hobson, and try to find out what it was that gave him life, that helped him to come alive to the wonder and beauty that surrounds him, what it is that helps him through the days that are bleak and when love seems a distant dream. At its most harmless such a conversation is still playing with fire: fire that can illumine, fire that can warm on a cold night, fire that give us passion and energy.
It is this fire that we seek. May we all come into such a light.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
light of our hearts and minds,
Touch us this day with
the brightness of flame
that we may see our lives
in their wholeness, in their fullness,
holding the beauty along with the terror,
the sadness along with the glory,
the peace along with the turmoil.
All of it is a gift to us.
In the quiet of this moment,
may we offer our intentions
whatever they may be
for the days ahead,
that we may be guided
by what we love most,
by our deepest dreams
that we may live truly and authentically,
offering the best of ourselves to
each other and the world.
(Speak a word of your intention)
Flame of truth and light of love,
be with us in the days to come.
Amen.