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Naming the Mystery
Delivered by
Bruce Arnold, July 17, 2005
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
I was inspired by the presentation Bepi Cordioli gave us a number of weeks ago. He talked a lot about “the fog”: that superstitious haze that is often evoked when people start using mythological language. He is right. Most often, when people start to talk like that, all they know is that the words mean something to them. What that meaning might be is vague.
For many people, and especially those of a fundamentalistic or evangelistic bent, if you try to find out what they mean, and ask questions, they may even become irate. If you ask questions, they soon come to feel that you are questioning their whole shtick. The truth is, the questions scare them, and the anger is a response to the fear. The fear is that there is really nothing there at all.
It’s difficult for me too, although I do use language like this. So often when I try to speak about God, I'm struck dumb. My sense of awe at God's greatness, and of my own incapability of putting anything intelligible into words, leaves me feeling speechless.
Reverence and awe for God are noble emotions, but they are hard to put into words. More than that, for many of us they have been tainted by experiences we have had. The very word God can be a stumbling block for some. Let’s explore this together and see where we might get.
Now, I was brought up in a Christian home, and was taught about God from my earliest days. I believed what they told me, so I thought I believed in God. But really I took it all more for granted than anything else. Grown-ups said God loved me, so it must be true. I had no evidence either way and who was I to doubt what the grown-ups said? They knew everything else, didn't say?
Well, when I got older and studied religion and philosophy in college, I found out the grown-ups didn't know everything. In fact, a lot of what they had fed me was pure-tee hogwash. It was the same pabulum they had been given as children, and most of them had never really thought about it as adults. Their faith, in other words, was the faith of immature children, and this is what they passed along to us.
Like most adolescents I was inclined to take things to extreme, so I threw out the baby with the bathwater on this one too. I decided I didn't need any of that Christian stuff, and became an atheist.
Many years later, after I became a social worker, the kinds of situations I was in as an investigator of child abuse and neglect were sometimes beyond belief. At times I was overwhelmed. I did not have – no one could have – the power to make sense of all this, or to put it right.
I found myself wanting to pray. I told myself that this was silly, some kind of childish need or whatever. There was nobody to pray too, was there?
But the impulses to pray continued. I needed something beyond myself, something greater than myself, and one night I could not resist. I found myself on my knees, saying out loud that I did not know how to pray and could not believe in a God to pray to, so what in the world was I doing?
And the answer came as I kneeled there. God said to me -- not in audible words, but unmistakably -- that I would never need to believe in him, because he would let me know him first-hand.
This may take some thought. Most of us were taught that belief in God was some kind of necessity. But did we ever think about what that means? Here is a definition of belief, taken from “A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names”: “affirmation of, or conviction regarding, the truth of a proposition, especially when one is not (yet) in possession of evidence adequate to justify a claim that the proposition is known with certainty.” I think that is why a lot of modern folks have a problem with the idea of belief, and certainly of belief in something as nebulous as God: why would you affirm something to be true if you did not have adequate evidence? This is just speculation.
So this – this knowing, this deep inner conviction – came as a great enlightenment. It is not required to believe in God! If there actually is a God, the same rules apply here as elsewhere. I did not have to accept something sight unseen. God made a promise: we would have a relationship founded, not on belief, but on knowledge.
After all, you don't believe in the existence of your spouse or friends or parents, do you? Think about this. You know them. You know them through direct experience. Belief never enters into it.
This is when I realized that it was my ideas about God that were the stumbling block. So long as I thought that God had to fit into the pitiful, inadequate little containers I had been taught to believe in, and later – correctly – rejected, then that God could not, would not, did not exist.
In a moment of great personal need, a very different God reached out to me and tore down the barrier that I had erected between us. In effect, he said “If I can accept you, doubts and all, can you accept me, doubts and all?” The answer was yes.
The next day, as I was re-reading Carl Jung’s autobiography “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”, I came across the following passage: “Being a part of the whole, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it , or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. `Love ceases not' -whether he speaks with the `tongues of angels' or with scientific exactitude traces the life of a cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown - ignotum per ignotius - that is by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependency; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error."
I want to repeat the last part of that: “If he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown - ignotum per ignotius - that is by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependency; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.”
There is a term that is in use in philosophical circles. It is not widely known, perhaps because it has so many syllables. There is no test, and you will not be required to remember this term. But remember the meaning of it, because this is important. There is no other word which means quite this, and it clears up a lot of the fog. The word is “soteriological.” It is used to describe certain kinds of language, specifically religious language. It means that something does not have to be factual to be true; it may be true because it is meaningful. I’d like to unfold that further.
In the Catholic tradition, it is believed that at the moment that the priest elevates the Host, it actually becomes the body of Christ. It’s called the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is not factually true; anyone can see that the wafer remains a wafer and not a piece of flesh. But it is soteriologically true. It is not enough for a good Catholic to pretend it is true. They must know it as true, with the same conviction that they accept that the sun rises in the east. It has a practical application to the practice of their religion. No one can get the full benefit of what the Roman church has to offer, without accepting this matter of transubstantiation.
Here’s another example, closer to home. Unitarians believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. A case can be made that there are people who have no worth. An even easier case can be made that there are those who have no dignity. But affirming this as true is essential if one is going to get the good that there is to be had out of Unitarian principles. It is not necessary to argue it as factually true; it is enough that it is soteriologically true, that it has deep and profound meaning for a Unitarian. It informs how they see other people, how they relate to other people.
So for me to accept that I could have a certain experience, one of awe, wonder, power, and mystery, and call it God, it is not necessary for me to claim that this is factually true. Just as my love is not really a red, red rose, but we all know what the poet meant by that, so too is my God poetically true, soteriologically true. That is perhaps a higher order of truth than what is merely factual.
It didn’t stop there. I kept my part of the bargain, and God kept his. Since that day, I have had many opportunities to encounter God. Not an idea of God, not a set of pre-programmed notions about God, but an unfolding relationship with a real being. I know that I am just one person on one small planet in one small solar system on the fringe of one small arm of one kind of average-sized galaxy in a very huge universe. I know that I am who I am, both charged and limited by my own experience. I know that, as Shakespeare said, there are many things in the world which are not dreamt of in my philosophy.
Someone else could call it something quite different. You could call it, as the Buddhists do, sunyata or emptiness. You could call it, as the Chinese do, Tao, the unknowable. I have no quarrel with that. Some days, I prefer to think in those terms.
But I know that I know … something. I am known by … something. I know that my choice, to use the name God and to think of this as an encounter with a living being, is provisional and not some kind of absolute truth. But it is … something. And that something has never once asked me to believe in anything superstitious, anything I could not experience, anything that would violate my integrity.
In the Sanskrit language, the word “guru” simply means someone who leads us from darkness to light. There is not any supernatural connotation, although some traditions place one on the term. The tape which is playing contains a beautiful mantra from the Sikh religion. It refers to two gurus of that tradition, historical figures who actually lived, and to their experience that prayers can be answered, as mine was. Please join me in a moment of silent meditation, and if you wish, in joy, anticipation and hope.
Ardas pahee, Aram Das guru
Aram Das guru, Ardas pahee.
Ram Das guru, Ram Das guru
Ram Das guru, sachi, sahee.
What I offer you, today, is not my experience. What I offer you, today, is not my solution. I offer you opportunity, to meet the cosmos on your terms, to embrace the unknown in your way, to name it how you wish to name it, to encounter this mystery with your integrity intact.
Notes
Belief: “affirmation of, or conviction regarding, the truth of a proposition, especially when one is not (yet) in possession of evidence adequate to justify a claim that the proposition is known with certainty.” -- “A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names”
“Being a part of the whole, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it , or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. `Love ceases not' -whether he speaks with the `tongues of angels' or with scientific exactitude traces the life of a cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown - ignotum per ignotius - that is by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependency; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error." -- Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”
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