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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Oneness
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
September 23, 2007
For a couple of years, I’ve been marking the place on the horizon where the sun rises on each of the solstices and equinoxes; I make a pencil mark an east facing window sill in our sitting room. There’s quite a range along the eastern rim of the world where the sun comes up, depending on the time of year.
I also have a small compass on the window sill, so right now I know that the sun is rising due east. This weekend the axis of the earth is parallel to the axis of the sun—as if the earth and sun are in some exquisite dance, moving around one another with the elegantly choreographed moves of professional dancers. And when you look at a compass on the Equinox, the four cardinal directions are square in relation to the earth’s axis, and so they might be understood to be at the center of each side of a perfect square drawn around the round earth. And of course the hours of daylight and darkness are equal as well. There’s a beautiful symmetry and order to this moment in space and time. However, starting tomorrow, if you measured with precise instruments you would see the northern hemisphere of the earth begin to tilt away from the sun ever so slightly, and the perfect square would be gone. It’s only a phenomenon of a brief moment in time.
I know that you know about the equinox; it’s a simple thing, third grade science really. Still, I mention it because it’s an awesome thing to contemplate, this fact of our lovely blue planet constantly turning on its axis as it makes its circuit around the sun. I know that this annual circuit is not what causes the changes of the aging process in living things. But we live within the seasonal changes caused by the passage and movement of the earth through space. Noticing and naming where we are against the backdrop of those huge seasonal changes is just one way that we mark and measure our own growing and aging process, and the growth and aging of the ones we love most.
But amid all this constant motion, at times there are moments of stillness, moments of balance. At times, transcendence is possible and we know ourselves as part of something greater than our individual selves. Last week there were several days when even amidst the rumble and roar of trucks and cars on Rt. 27, and the steaming and hissing of the street paving equipment working here in the square, even with the frantic activity of squirrels and bees and other living things storing food against the dying light and coming winter, even amid all this, at times there seemed to me to be a stillness.
Perhaps it was the light. As the sun moves across the sky at the time of the equinox, there’s very little change from the quality of mid-morning to late afternoon sunlight. And I find it possible to drop into the light and air of such a day as if dropping out of time and into the lap of something immense and timeless. “Each day is a god,” writes Annie Dillard, echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson. Perhaps my sense of dropping out of time into timelessness is something like the experience of the sacred that they both tried to convey. But whether or not that’s true, for me this is a highly valued experience of being one with all of creation.
###
It’s interesting to me that for thousands of years, poets and sacred texts have been describing this human experience of transcendent oneness in remarkably similar ways.
In their various ways, each of the world’s wisdom traditions tells us that a part of us is not of time and matter, but rather touches, yearns for and becomes part of something larger, something eternal. In all these traditions, the individual touches the Oneness, the great Web of Life. The Sh’ma is how Jews express their understanding of Oneness. The Hindus speak of Atman (the individual) and Brahman (God, in the sense of the great All of Creation). In the great Hindu spiritual classic, the Bhagavad-Gita, Brahman speaks about the greater wholeness, the Great “I Am…”.
Buddhists speak of the Great Om…the sound of all of creation that encompasses us as well. Through meditation practice, Buddhists seek to destroy the illusion of individual separation from all of creation.
There’s the bad joke about the Buddhist who asks the street vendor for a hot dog. “What do you want on it?” the vendor asks.
“Make me one with everything,” is the answer.
The joke is funny on a very simple level—“ha-ha, those Buddhists who are so different from us.”
And yet, a long time Buddhist practitioner might also find this funny because she would understand that really, the joke actually is that we are already “one with everything.” No one, not even a Venerable Master Hot Dog Vendor can make us one with everything. We already are. Buddhist practice is an effort to simply break through our illusion of separation from all existence so we can experience our essential oneness.
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Unitarian Universalists have tended to use their reason to describe this essential oneness in various times and places. Way back in the first centuries of the common era we can see people arguing at great personal cost for the reality of oneness.
In the first few centuries early Christians were sorting out their identity and there was very wide variety in their thinking and teaching. In the second century, Origen of Alexandria was one of the first great Christian scholars who brought together ideas in Greek philosophy and the Christian scriptures. He argued in church councils that the God who was spoken of in the texts was one God, that Jesus was a different person.
In the third century, Pelagius, a Christian monk who had come from the British Isles to Rome, taught his followers that there was no such thing as original sin or Divine salvation. Rather, he reasoned, every human being is responsible for their own moral life and conduct. A good life is one in which human beings choose to be good. Each of these men lost the larger argument and were convicted of heresy. They didn’t die for their beliefs, but they were banished from their academies and cities, sent off to start over elsewhere—no small thing when you have to leave carrying everything you own on your back. They weren’t Unitarian or Universalist, but you can see in their thinking the kind of ideas about one God and universal salvation that later came to be called Unitarian and Universalist.
Much later in the fifteenth century people such as Michael Servetus who lived in France, Francis David who lived in Transylvania and Jan Hus who lived in Hungary each died for the right to simply, freely say what they believed and practice their faith. Servetus argued against the trinity; Hus argued for the right of every person to equally share in the rituals of the Christian tradition; for their views both were burned at the stake. David championed the ideal of religious tolerance; for his views he died in a cold, wet prison. John Biddle, the first Unitarian preacher in England, also died in prison because he preached that God is one.
These people had great minds and hearts that showed them the truth at the center of their lives. Countless others followed them, having found the same things in their thinking and feeling. And so we have a religious tradition that doesn’t ask people to affirm creedal statements.
And yet, we don’t rest in 500 year old thinking. Our ideas have continued to evolve through both the early Unitarians and Universalists whose beliefs in this country called them to work in the world for the great reform movements of the 18th and 19th centuries: abolition; suffrage; immigration rights; child labor laws; public education.
By the end of the 19th c. the Universalists were securely established in their belief that God loved everyone, so much so that he would never condemn any being to eternity in hell. This was also the basis for their recognition of the worth and dignity of each person. And as Universalists began to learn about the world’s other great faith traditions from some of those tradition’s leaders, Universalists could see the worth and value of the beliefs of others which were so unlike their own.
And so in 1893 Universalists organized the first great World Parliament of Religions and invited Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Catholic and Protestant Christian leaders from around the world to come to Chicago to share their main ideals and principles. This was the first time this happened in modern history.
Also, by the mid. 20th c. the Universalists’ idea of universal salvation had grown beyond the idea of eternal life in a heaven outside this world, and had instead come down to earth. Salvation wasn’t to be found in some other world, but right here in this world. In its most basic, radical sense, salvation means health and wholeness. They reasoned that if God loves each and every soul, then each person deserves basic human rights in this world.
In their religious evolution, by mid-20th c. Unitarians had begun to embrace the scientific concept of an interdependent universe. This in turn has evolved in our thinking into the deeply cherished, deeply understood concept of the interdependent web of existence—the larger whole which holds our individual uniqueness, out of which rich, new possibilities emerge. We also understand the implications that come with the realization that we come out of the natural world the same way leaves come out of a tree: that there is no “out there;” there’s no place for our garbage that doesn’t affect those coming along behind us. We’re all part of one interdependent, living system.
And so our understanding of the interdependent web tells us that in reality, there’s no exit. We’re all in this together. Coexistence is not optional. The only real question then becomes “how shall we be together?” That’s a religious question; it’s a question about covenant. We aren’t bound into our faith by affirming a creed. Instead what holds us together are our intentional promises and agreements with one another. These agreements are deeply rooted in the larger reality in which we find ourselves.
Unitarian Universalists (the two groups merged in 1961) do have seven principles; these are simply statements which lift up and identify the underlying foundations for our work in the world for the last two hundred years.
Perhaps even more important than our principles are the sources of our faith, which in large part are the sources of our religious authority. The first source is “direct experience of that transcendent mystery and wonder affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” Throughout history, their direct experience has told people in various ways, in various times and places that they are part of a larger wholeness, a larger oneness.
Like others, Forrest Church says, “The acknowledgement of essential unity is a central pillar, the central pillar, of Unitarian Universalism.” And he says that if you’re trying to explain Unitarian Universalism to a confused neighbor, you could say that we are many, like the many different stained glass windows in a great cathedral, each one telling a different great story. And, at the same time we are one, because we also recognize that we stand together amid one Light that shines through each window, illumining each great story in a unique way.
Church goes on to say that at the same time that the vastness and awesomeness of the universe inspires and informs us about our essential unity with all existence, at the very same time it also makes us humble. “My favorite etymology speaks eloquently to this very point,” he says. “Human, humane, humanitarian, humor, humility, humus. Dust to dust, the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another. Truly we are one.”
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We find ourselves here on this day of the Autumnal Equinox, in the midst of a mystery of a round planet and spherical star that offer us through their relationship to one another the surprise of a perfect square. They are in a tremendous relationship with one another, and if we pay attention we might hear them reminding us of our own relationship to all that is. They remind us that we are not separate from the greatness and grandeur of the cosmos. We are an infinitesimally small part of it. But they remind us that by the means of our own unique and precious understanding, with our own distinctive awe and wonder and humility, we add to the cosmic symphony; in this way we, too, are participants in the great cosmic dance.
Forrest Church is quoted from a sermon he gave at General Assembly, June 2004 in Boston, MA, “Born Again Unitarian Universalism.”
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