"THE ANATOMY OF THE
DIVINE"
A sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday, February 6, 2005
All
I
will begin with a poem from Walt Whitman that I believe draws a very vivid
picture worth considering in discussing my topic today of "the
divine," though it mentions no specific "divinity." It takes
place in a classroom where the student is focusing on a lecture about
astronomy:
When I heard the
learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs,
the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown
the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I, sitting,
heard the astronomer
where he lectured
with much applause
in the
lecture-room,
How soon
unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and
gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical
moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect
silence
at the stars.
[By the way, I chose this poem rather
than a similar story from Emerson. Emerson tells of sitting in church looking
out the window at the beautiful winter snowfall, while the preacher spoke in
esoteric language that had little to do with life. "The snow was
real," reflected Emerson, "the preacher merely spectral." I’ll
go with Whitman’s story for now . . .]
To
me, this story has a lot to say. There are many dimensions to the universe we
inhabit. One dimension is its material reality, like stars. The universe is
made up of things we can observe and measure and count, things that we can
understand enough to explain their existence or predict their outcome.
But
there’s another dimension to the universe that is, well, for lack of a better
word, astounding. Like stars. There is something there that can inspire us,
something than can leave us speechless, but also something that can help us
feel we are part of something very significant.
Things
like stars share both dimensions. On one hand, they are utterly natural
objects, they can be studied to discover what they are made of, and how they
got there. We can understand how they work.
At
the same time, who hasn’t been awed by the spectacle of a starry night? Who
hasn’t felt their own insignificance in standing in the light of these vast
symbols of eternity and beauty? And, at the same time, who hasn’t felt
specially blest just for being in their presence? And some people even feel a
sense of empowerment, considering that we are part of, we play a role in, this
greater drama of nature that includes such stars.
There
is another dimension to Whitman’s poem about stars. There is a considerable,
but overlapping, difference between understanding what something is, on
one hand, and experiencing it, on the other. For the student in the lecture
hall, stars were stars. When he left to look up in the night sky and stand in
silence before them, to experience them in his life, stars were part of him and
he part of them. Direct experience makes everything personal.
This
morning I continue a series of sermons. The first I called the "The
Anatomy of Religion." The second: "The Anatomy of the Soul."
Today I consider what I am calling "The Anatomy of the Divine." The
point in all of these is to attempt to disassemble the concept and look at its
components from different perspectives.
I
chose the word "divine" intentionally, and, as you may guess, in part
to avoid using the word God. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the
word "God" is used so very differently among different traditions
that it rarely seems to refer to the same thing. The Hindu gods are different
from the Roman Catholic God. The Mormon God is different from the Baptist God.
Jerry Falwell’s God is something quite different from Albert Schweitzer’s God.
Even within the same religious tradition, it could be argued that Mel Gibson’s
God is fundamentally different from Mother Teresa’s God.
What
is universal among these examples is not the nature of their God, but their
shared experience of something that leads them to imagine a God – the
experience of something understood as "divine." It is that experience
I wish to explore. I want to know why it is that, in the mystical moist night
air, from time to time we "look up in perfect silence at the stars,"
and feel the power of something greater than us.
So,
I do not intend to use my time this morning reviewing the various arguments for
and against the existence of God. Such issues would distract me away from what
I really want to understand. Whether a God exists, in some personal sense, is
not my particular concern. I confess that I enjoy such discussions – and if
you’re interested in what I think about that, I can point to a number of
sermons I’ve given over the years on the subject of the existence or
non-existence of God. But this morning I am more interested in how we
experience that sense of the divine, whether or not we name it "God."
I may use that term, but when I do, know that I am using it as a simple short
hand way of talking about the human experience of the divine.
When
I spoke on the "Anatomy of Religion," I mentioned some various
genetic and neurological studies that seem to say human beings are biologically
hard-wired with a predisposition toward a religious sense. That sense seems
often to be a feeling of oneness or unity with the universe, a sense of
self-transcendence, a sense of being connected to something that is greater
than ourselves. It is time today to explore that "something" to which
many people often feel connected, the sense of the divine.
There
are several things that can be said about this idea, and perhaps the first
observation is that it is inherently, and necessarily, mysterious. That is, to
experience the divine is to experience something that cannot be fully
understood. The Book of Tao says it rather directly.
"What is Tao?
The Tao that can be named (or understood)
is not the true
Tao."
It
may follow, then, that if the divine can ever be fully explained, it ceases to
be divine. The sense of mystery, of transcending complete explanation, is
essential to its character.
That
is an important observation around which to wrap all my comments today. I am
talking about something that cannot be fully explained. Take nothing I say as
gospel. I’m just guessing, but guesses are all we have in this area, and
therefore are important.
It is worthy of mention, also, that it is
mystery that provides in human beings some of the most important motivation for
achievement. It is the job of the artist to interpret human experience, and
make it meaningful. If the artist’s subject weren’t in some way mysterious, or
at least ambiguous, it wouldn’t need to be interpreted. When the classical
dancer Isadora Duncan was asked what was the meaning of a particular dance, she
said, "If I could tell you in words what it meant, I wouldn’t have needed
to dance it."
The scientist is also motivated by mystery,
to try and solve riddles of nature. If they are solved, it is time to move on
to the next one. Einstein said it very explicitly:
"The most
beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all
true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer
pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed."
Biologist Erwin Chargaff echoed this thought
when he said:
"It is the
sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist: the same blind
force, blindly seeing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into a
butterfly. If (the scientist) has not experienced, at least a few times in
life, the cold shudder down the spine, this confrontation with an immense
invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, then he is not a
scientist."
And
also, the great German writer and philosopher Göethe made the point succinctly
in this way:
"The highest
(human) happiness . . . is to have probed what is knowable and quietly revere
what is unknowable."
So
the first element of the divine, it seems to me, is that it is
mysterious, and unknowable in any complete way.
Another
question that arises for me is whether the divine is, in theological words,
"immanent" or "transcendent." These are concepts often
associated with God. A "transcendent" God is one who is separate from
the world, who perhaps creates and oversees the laws of nature, but is not
subject to them. A transcendent God is somehow "out there,"
and our task is to search for that God, by reaching out. An
"immanent" God is not separate from the world, but part of it, and
part of us. It cannot violate natural law, for God is not outside of nature.
The search for that God takes place in nature and, more importantly, in our own
selves. The immanent God is not found so much by reaching out, but rather by
looking inward. The immanent God is discovered in ourselves as what some
religions call "an inner light" or "a still, small voice."
The
same questions arise concerning the nature of the divine. This thing people
experience as divine, is it separate from us, or is it somehow part of us, and
we are part of it? Are we its creation, subject to its rules, or are our lives
a mortal expression of the divine? If we say we believe in inherent human
worth, is that because each person has some element of this sacred quality in
them? Is this what is meant when it is said that every person has within them a
"divine spark"?
In
my comments last week about the "soul," I invoked an ancient metaphor
created by Plato. I will do so again – not to use Plato’s ideas as some sort of
authority, but rather as a beginning point for grasping what it may mean to
experience the divine.
Plato
proposed that we think of this world we live in as an imperfect reflection of a
perfect or ideal world that actually exists somewhere else. There is somewhere,
for example, a perfect or ideal color blue, pure and true. Every hue of blue in
our world is simply an imperfect representation of perfect blue. There is
somewhere a perfect or ideal leaf, and all the trillions of leaves we can
observe in the world are imperfect examples of what a true leaf really is. And
so forth. This can also be said of human attributes. There is such a thing as
perfect or ideal love, but we humans can only imperfectly express it. There is
perfect courage. There is perfect beauty. But we can only experience and embody
a sort of reflection of perfect beauty and courage. And so forth.
If
you hold this metaphor in your mind for a while, I can leave Plato behind. It
isn’t difficult to entertain the idea that Plato’s concept of a world of
perfection, a world of the ideal, is in fact an expression of divinity. If this
scenario makes any sense at all, what would it mean to "experience"
the divine? It seems to me it might just mean that point at which our imperfect
world meets that world of perfection. It means the extent to which we
experience or encounter an ideal.
The
humanist philosopher John Dewey approached the subject in a similar way. In an
essay on religion, he defined his concept of God, or the divine, as "the
active relationship between the ideal and the actual." In other words,
whenever human beings have a glimpse of true beauty or true love or ideal
living, we are in touch with the divine. Whenever we aspire to the ideal, we
reach for the divine. This relationship between the ideal and the actual, between
what ought to be and what is, Dewey says he would call this relationship
"God." He adds, "I would not insist that the name must be
given."
What
Dewey was pointing to, I think, is this: all the great achievements of humanity
are efforts of striving after some ideal. What is it that urges you or me to
seek justice in the world? Isn’t it aspiring after an ideal? What guides the
human conscience, and what is it that shapes our aesthetic sense of beauty and
harmony? What motivated Martin Luther King, Jr., or Florence Nightingale? What
inspired Shakespeare, George Eliot, Picasso, or Beethoven? Why was Einstein
passionate in asking questions about the universe, or Margaret Mead passionate
in asking questions about human society? Aren’t the great achievements of the
human race attributable to our seeking after some grand ideal?
Whatever
ideals drove anyone to pursue knowledge or justice or compassion, says Dewey,
represent the human encounter with something divine. Furthermore whatever
ideals inspired anyone to pursue knowledge or justice or compassion, those
ideals are there to urge any of us as well. Our experience of the
divine, then, is our experience of uniting ideals with our lives. Here is a
little of what he said:
"In a
distracted age," he writes, "the need for such an idea is urgent. It
can direct action and generate the heat of emotion and the light of
intelligence. Whether one gives the name 'God' to this union (of the ideal with
the actual), it is a matter of individual decision. But the function of
such a working union of the ideal and actual seems to me to be identical with
the force that has in fact been attached to the conception of God in all the
religions that have a spiritual content.... Whatever the name... it selects
those factors in existence that generate and support our idea of good as an end
to be striven for.... The 'divine' is thus a term of human choice and
aspiration."
Dewey’s
point, I think, was expressed poetically by T.S. Eliot, the great secular poet
who spent so much of his life in search of God. Eliot spoke about the human
experience of the divine as the "point of intersection between the
timeless with time." Here is what he wrote, in part:
To apprehend the point of intersection
of
the timeless with time,
is an occupation for the saint . . .
I
think Dewey and Eliot were pointing to the same thing here. We cannot directly
experience something divine, but we can experience some points of contact
between the world of the divine and our world, the world of perfection and our
world, the union of the ideal and the actual, the intersection of timelessness
with time. For there are moments when we stand in that intersection, and that
is when we experience the divine.
In
the reading, Julian Huxley identifies what he calls a "Sacred Reality. I
chose Huxley in part because he identifies himself as an agnostic, and no one
could accuse him of being attached to any sectarian creed. Yet he still
embraces a sense of sacredness in life, what he calls "the sanctity of
existence."
Huxley
identifies three categories of this experience of the sacred:
The powers of nature,
The ideal goals of the human mind, and
The actual living beings who embody such
ideals.
In
these categories we can imagine the ideal beyond our day-to-day experiences. We
imagine the vast power and beauty of nature, though we can only experience a
piece of it, and when we do we are in contact with the divine. We acknowledge
the power of the human mind in conceiving ideals such as truth and justice and
compassion. Though we live imperfectly in the shadow of such ideals, when we
feel in contact with them, we are in contact with the divine.
There
is something sacred that seems to pervade all of reality. Some people seem to
make contact of it through nature, some through acts of compassion, some
through self-reflection and meditation. The Buddhist philosopher and mystic
Thich Nhat Hanh pointed to the interconnection of this sacredness in this way:
"Whenever I
touch a flower, I touch the sun and yet I do not get burned. When I touch a
flower, I touch a cloud without flying to the sky. When I touch a flower, I
touch my consciousness, and your consciousness, and the great planet Earth at
the same time . . . If you really touch one flower deeply, you touch the whole
cosmos."
I
once had an experience that was almost identical to the one narrated in
Whitman’s poem about the astronomer’s lecture. I was attending a Unitarian
conference where the lectures were on Eastern religions. The conference was at
a retreat center on the Puget Sound of Washington State. One evening, the topic
was Taoism, and the leader was showing a film made and narrated by the maverick
psychology writer Alan Watts.
I
was sitting near the door, and halfway through the film, I happened to glance
out to discover a brilliant scarlet sunset, silhouetted by the
It
seems to me that if "the divine" has any meaning for us, its meaning
is to be found nearby, not off in another world, but rather when this imperfect
world touches something perfect. It is to be experienced whenever we make
contact with something that displays for us the ideal, the infinite, the
universal. It is experienced whenever we understand that those timeless values
are also found within us.
Emerson
was perhaps one of the greatest writers on this subject, and I close with his
words about the human experience of the divine.
"Let us learn
the revelation of all nature and thought, that the Highest dwells within us,
that the sources of nature are in our own minds . . . There is a deep power in
which we live and whose beatitude is accessible to us. Every moment when the
individual feels invaded by it is memorable. It comes to the lowly and simple;
it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. The soul’s health
consists in the fullness of its reception.
"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. When it breaks through our intellect, it
is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue, when it flows
through our affections, it is love."
© Bruce Clear 2005