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"Gather the Spirit" a sermon by Rev. Brian J. Kiely Unitarian Church of Edmonton January 13, 2008
I have had a miserable cold since just before New Year’s, a bit of suffering I expect many of you are sharing. As you know, our newsletter deadline requires me to choose sermon titles sometimes as much as six weeks in advance of giving them. When I picked ‘Gather the Spirit’, the cold had not yet developed. This week I was struck by the irony of the title as I was wheezing and reluctant to take a deep breath for fear of triggering another horrendous coughing spasm.
Irony? Gather the Spirit is another way of saying ‘take a deep breath’ if one goes back to the root word ‘spiritus’. As many will know, our word ‘inspire’ means ‘breathe in’ in Latin, for in those days the spirit was indeed something carried on the wind. It was not there to be seen or touched or tasted, and yet it could be felt and known and understood. And so it still is today.
And as I lay about feeling sorry for myself (as only a man can do) and trying to figure out how to approach this topic while feeling decidedly uninspired in every sense possible, I began to wonder how often we ignore or hide from inspiration or perhaps feel as that inspiration is as blocked as that sinus?
Let’s be clear: that possibility for inspiration is always around us just like the breeze. It is part of the environment, just not always a part that we notice. Its presence may be faint at times, but it is there. The challenge is for us to see it for what it is, and to find ways to decipher it, welcome it and stop blocking it.
But there are times when gathering that spirit is terribly difficult. When we are tired, or feeling oppressed or beaten down, when work seems so boring or unemployment so frightening, when physical or mental illness saps our ability to love and embrace life, when failure seems to hover around us like a cloud, then noticing the potential for inspiration around us seems almost impossible. But that does not mean that potential is not there. It just means we aren’t able to receive it or build on it.
Sometimes gathering the spirit is easy, for every now and then a spiritual moment drops on us with such force that we simply can’t ignore it. To be at a birth, or a death, to realize that you have fallen in love, or perhaps fallen in love all over again with the same person, these are moments of spiritual awakening. To stand on a mountaintop or by the seashore and witness sunrise, to pause and drink in the silent and brooding forest, these are also ‘a-ha’s. Those ‘a-ha’s’ can be heady stuff. In our reading, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote,” There is a deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us. Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable.”[i]
Since he wrote that passage 170 years ago, we have a clue that this spiritual experience is nothing new. Spirituality is an innate part of our being. The only differences over centuries of time and space are the manner in which we interpret these experiences. Every culture, every age and every religion has a way of interpreting this moving inner experience. It has just been described differently in order to be meaningful to the people of their time. And of course, in our venal human history, there have been repeated attempts to define or limit access to personal spirituality in order to solidify the power and authority of the institutions or individuals who somehow convinced others that they had the only key.
It is hardly novel to note that regimes of church and state have tried to narrowly define what is or is not a valid spiritual experience in order to reinforce their own claims to power.
In early 19th century North America, Calvinism exerted such a restrictive influence. One’s eternal fate had been foreordained long before birth. Your place in heaven or hell was already picked out and no amount of devotion or prayer could change that. Inspiration therefore became a little suspicious for it was outside the ordered existence Calvinism preached and the obedience it required. Ecstasy was a bad thing. Too often inspiration from Nature (along with most other sensual pleasures) was condemned as the work of the devil.
Into that climate came the early Unitarians who first, rejected the gloom and doom teachings of predestination. As a second step, many became convinced that they indeed did have direct access to God and that joy and ecstasy were natural blessings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of this new breed of Unitarian minister, even before he became the famous American philosopher he is known as today. Emerson was one of the first, and the most articulate thinkers in a whole school of early American Unitarians called the Transcendentalists. In his training as a Unitarian minister at Harvard, Emerson was given a firm grounding in Christian traditions. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he also studied and was impressed by Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. They opened him to an entirely new way of seeing the world, a spiritual path that had been lacking in the overly pious and lifeless Calvinist religious expression.
He was also possessed of a liberal philosopher’s mind that questioned the teaching he received. Because of that he became one of the first generation of Unitarian ministers intent on throwing off the gloomy and repressive “Thou shalt nots” of contemporary Calvinism. And as he walked away from some of the doctrinal teachings, so, too, did he walk away from the idea that access to God had to be mediated through the church. In fact he walked away from a vengeful God and even the idea that God was a being such as you and I are beings.
Instead, Emerson and the Transcendentalists began to see the divine as a force or a presence in the universe, something amorphous and spread out and pervasive. It was a force that lived everywhere, in everything and it quickened all life. His divinity was inspiring – that is, there to be ‘breathed in’ and held close. And their radical thought was that everyone of us already had access to that transcendent divinity.
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. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.”
God and Nature were synonomous, because both were enduring and all around us. Like many of us today, the early Transcendentalists found their joy and spiritual expression in Nature. It is where they felt the presence of the divine, the ecstatic connection with the universe Emerson described in our reading. They expressed this in art, literature and music. Emerson, in addition to his philosophy, also wrote a substantial body of poetry. Most often they were his songs of praise for the transcendent and enduring qualities of Nature.
“No number tallies nature up, no tribe its house can fill, it is the shining fount of life and pours the deluge still... Blend war and trade and creeds and song, let ripen race on race, the sun-burnt world that we shall breed of all the countless days. No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, the oldest force is new, and fresh the rose on yonder thorn gives back the heavens dew.”[ii]
Although the language may be a little florid for us today, many of the sentiments are not. I know many here enjoy the pleasures of Nature whether it’s through gardening, hiking, outdoor sports or camping. Like most human beings we still feel that connection the Transcendentalists describe. It is in Nature that we are most likely to ‘gather the spirit’.
But, you know that breeze of the spirit exists in other places in our lives as well, places that are still natural, but not necessarily out in nature. I am sure, for example, that many members of our choir Chorealis find their spiritual well-being nourished by the act of making music together, the art of turning beautiful breath into beautiful sound.
For some that deep recognition of the spiritual comes from being in meaningful relationship with another person or with a community
The sticking point to this spirituality thing is the ‘recognition’ part. We have to notice the possibility, make room for it in our lives – unblock the sinuses that keeps us closed and dare to breathe the spirit in. We must develop the awareness that the everyday experiences we have in life have a transcendent component if we only stop to notice it.
On Christmas Eve, my wife Teilya delivered a homily based on a meditation reinterpreting the Nativity story. If we think of that tale as allegory rather than as a collection of hotly disputed facts, then it becomes a story not about some long ago man, but about our own spiritual rebirth
“Jesus Christ could mean our own Christ consciousness. Christ consciousness is our awakened, highest self. The part of us that sees the best in others, loves ourselves, knows instinctively what the best choice is, feels connected to the rest of the earth and all the beings on it. Our Christ consciousness would refer to the Goddess in all of us. Our own personal Krishna, Inana, Buddha, Allah, and Higher Power.
The metaphysical Christ resides in us and is us. There is no external God. We are divine. “Jesus Christ is born today” means simply that you are born today in the best way possible. It’s not really about December 25th, but rather about the day we each come to accept that Christ consciousness. Every day is an opportunity to be born anew.”
Now before you get overwhelmed with feeling of “I’ve GOT to learn to be more spiritual. Oh no, here is something else I HAVE to do, today!” Please relax. You don’t have to get born again today or tomorrow. There is no quiz or test grade facing you here. As Adrienne Rich said in our Opening Words, no one told us we had to make a study of our lives...it just gets thrown at us all at once.[iii] We need not worry about it or fear it`s missing for that fear will just block us from finding it. We jut have to trust that it is there like the air we breathe. Doing it the RIGHT way is not the point. Far more important is accepting that the possibility of gathering the spirit is always there for us. That’s not a duty or a task to be accomplished. None of us can sustain the energy required by a ‘spiritual experience for more than a short time.
Rather the possibility of the spirit is meant to be a reassurance, a life saver when the fears are closing in on us. I close with one final quote from Emerson:
“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.”
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[i] All references to Emerson’s words, unless otherwise specified come from the reading #531 “The Oversoul” in Singing the Living Tradition (UU Hymnbook) (Beacon, 1993)
[ii] Singing the Living Tradition (op cit) #79
[iii] Ibid. “Transcendental Etude #665
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