Long, dark night of the soul

I have been feeling a deep sadness lately, a hopelessness bordering on despair. 

I have completed my first semester of seminary, unbelievably arduous even for an accomplished academic, only to be faced with five more just like it and five intensive winter or summer terms in between, beyond which lies an uncertain future to say the least. A detailed conversation with a school official has confirmed my worst fear: that they can and will do nothing to make it any easier for me to fill my denominational requirements here, nor will they waive or allow me to replace any redundant or UU-inappropriate coursework. My church has become a place of work, now--a place of responsibility rather than a place of respite--and for various reasons it seems that my ministers are not able to devote any time to mentoring me right now. My seminary friends have mostly scattered to the winds and taken with them my sole support network. And lest I take this time "off," the professor I have been working for at UT is wanting me to use my "less burdened" time "to play catch-up." And to top it all off, I have been late for practically everything all week, including my kindergartner's first public-school holiday performance. 

It is as though I had traversed a mountain that had proved more difficult to climb than I could possibly imagine, only to see from the peak that there were a dozen more to go, many looking more difficult and remote, and then to land on the other side in a swamp. And to go through all of this only to find that there is no longer anyone designated to hold out a hand to pull me up, certainly nobody to give me directions or to offer any comfort about what lies ahead, and only myself to blame for all of the problems in which I find myself "stuck."

My spiritual director calls it "the dark night of the soul" in reference to a work of the same name by St. John of the Cross. Apparently it is common for seminarians (and others setting out on journeys of spiritual seeking) to go there after the first semester. I forget exactly what he said about it, but it has something to do with the ego needing to get out of the way of the spiritual journey. The old personal spiritual practices that once sustained the student go out the window pretty quickly in the face of an incredible onslaught of new ideas to absorb and process, books to read and papers to write, and weekly (if not daily) challenges to tightly-held facets of their spiritual-theological world view. When the stress finally dissipates at the end of the semester, a deep emptiness remains. The student is left in a place where the easy answers that used to comfort no longer do, where the people who used to serve as guides no longer can, where no sense of controlling or even understanding one's own life path remains intact. 

It is an emptiness that demands to be filled but cannot be if we are to continue the journey. In order to become the people who can give answers and comfort and guidance and perhaps even understanding of where the road is going, we must first let go of our dependence on others to provide these things for us. Even harder, we must admit how many of these things we cannot provide for ourselves, either. Some questions have no comforting answers, some wild places admit no guidance through them, and most of all some paths cannot be known or even understood except in the traveling.

What is to be done about the long, dark nights of the soul? Nothing. They must simply be acknowledged for what they are: periods of waiting for the ego to get out of the way, to admit that it is no longer in control but is now living in service to something greater and more mysterious, for the cloud of self-concern and self-doubt to resolve into a clarity of purpose that may be nothing more than "I have begun this journey, I will follow where it leads." (after all, as the quip goes, when you are going through Hell, for God's sake don't stop going!) And, as the new day dawns, that which is holding the traveler back may suddenly become apparent, and the final leap of faith needed to truly undertake the journey can be made.

Somehow, for me, simply acknowledging that this is going on and that I am not alone has been enough to lift a large part of the weight from my shoulders.  It has also enabled me to see that it is now time to divorce myself from my old career completely, to resign my research post at UT Austin. It has been rightly said that a man cannot serve two masters, and my old master is holding me back in a place of doubt in and incomplete commitment to the new. As for the rest, it is enough to know that I am not alone, that I have traveling companions on an intimidating but well-worn path, that that there are folks looking out for me here and there, and that eventually, on the other side, day will dawn again and I will once again see what i need to do.

Until then, Good Night!

a particular scandal: God is With Us

In brushing up for my theology final tomorrow, I read a series of slams on Unitarian theology in an article titled "The Scandal of Peculiarity" by none other than Cynthia Rigby, the APTS professor who usually teaches this class. The argument seems to go that only a triune God is actively and fully present in our world and is therefore capable of understanding and loving us as we are, of being "God with us" in solidarity (as one who was once human), and of "indwelling" us as challenger, shaper, and transformer of our lives. A unitarian God, she states in negatives, is distant, authoritarian, unloving, and incapable of understanding what it is to be human. 

She is seriously misunderstanding the unitarian God. Rigby's logic, and that of the people she cites for backup, only works if one sees a unitarian God through a trinitarian lens: in particular, Rigby seems to think that Unitarian Christians choose to keep the "Father/Creator" person of her trinity and lose the other two, maintaining the transcendent aspect of God at the expense of the immanent aspect. No! 

Neither Judaism nor Islam, which both insist on a unitarian Diety, has such an understanding. The Jewish scriptures speak time and again about a Diety who is present and involved in the world we live in, and the Sufi tradition of Islam says we have no further to look for Allah than in the living of our daily lives. 

While we Unitarian Universalists have many names for and conceptions of the Divine, I think it safe to say that we would largely agree on one thing: whatever the Sacred is, it is here among us in the midst of things, dwelling in and among all, present in our very Spirit and in every act of Love, stirring things up for the comfortable yet comforting those in pain. God doesn't have to be triune to be with us or to love us. God simply has to be and the with us is taken care of.

It seems no scandal at all to me, then, that such a God could become incarnate, dwelling fully in a particular human for the good of all. The scandal, for me, is the implication by Christians that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow the only time this ever happened; indeed, I believe that God does this all the time. What if God was one of us, right now? What if God was all of us?

What UU's believe

From time to time, I get asked something along the lines of "So, what do Unitarian Universalists believe?" I always have a hard time answering this question, since as a movement held together by covenants rather than creeds we have no readily accessible statements of "what we all believe." 

It's a bit easier, generally, to explain what we don't believe in: we don't believe in setting apart any one particular set of holy scriptures or in limiting ourselves to any one particular definition of "God," for example, and we heartily disapprove of all five points of Calvinism. But these do not get me any closer to answering the question.

Our district executive, Susan Smith, likes holding up James Luther Adams' "Five Smooth Stones" of liberal religion, but they are somewhat hard to make sense of unless you already have some background in theology to compare them with, so that generally doesn't help me in those conversations, either.

But after writing a couple of term papers and listening to a few podcast sermons, I think I have an answer that might do. I'm sure I will keep revising it, of course, but here's a start:

"We believe in the incredible potential of fully realized human persons, the ability of unbridled spirits to go forth and change the world. We believe that a world full of people who are true to their best selves and actively working to do what they know to be right cannot help but be a better world to live in, because those people will accept nothing less than a world where every person--and every other partner in the web of life--is honored and accepted and cared for and given a voice. We believe that we can talk to each other, work with each other, learn from each other, and love one another without having to share a common statement of faith. We believe that the biggest lie that has ever been told is that one person cannot make a difference. We believe that people who bring their great passions to bear on the world's great needs can heal a broken planet. We believe that if enough of us give of the sparks of the divine that glow within each of us, we can kindle a flame that will set the world on fire."

How's that for some Good News?

A modern UU in King Arthur's Chapel

After almost a full semester here at Austin Seminary, I still find myself going to chapel, and I still find myself trying to figure out what people get out of it. There's an awful lot of scripture reading, an awful lot of praying, a sermon that is more often than not a bible study lesson rather than a lesson in living, and hymns that more often than not lack much energy or ability to motivate - me, at least. So what keeps the Presbyterians doing it this way? Tradition, perhaps. Or maybe it really does move their Spirits in some way that it just doesn't move mine.

I find two things most remarkable about chapel worship here. First, there is a certain choreographed pageantry about it: worship leaders sit in certain places, stand in certain places for certain actions, and never ever interact with the congregation. People who never wear anything more dressy than a t-shirt to class will dress up tremendously for their days as chapel leader (it is my wicked fantasy, should I last that long at Austin Seminary, to give my Senior Sermon in bermuda shorts and a hawaiian shirt). And everything, everything, is done in an emotionally neutral manner, with only an occasional exception of humor or emotion during a sermon. 

Second, there is a fixed attachment to worship as centered around Sacraments. The Sacrament of "Proclaiming the Word" (reading and explaining texts from the Bible) takes up most of the service, with the tedious Sacrament of "The Lord's Supper" (or "Eucharist") taking up an equal space of time when it is celebrated. And they are so serious about this latter ritual that it can only be conducted by an authorized clergyperson at a time and place authorized by a governing body of some sort. Even so, there is an empty plate and empty chalice present on the "Lord's Table" for all worship services, just to show how central this ritual would be if it were being performed.

Which brings me to my second and perhaps even more sacrosanct fantasy: sticking a medium size candle in that chalice and lighting it at the beginning of a worship service sometime. Somehow I don't think I'd last very long after that, though...

"The Lord's Prayer" - my version

If I ever get to lead morning prayer in the Austin Seminary Chapel again, these are the words I think I might use:

Our Heavenly Parent,

blessed be your many names.

We forge your community,

we follow your will,

a Kingdom of Heaven right here

in our daily lives.

Heal today our broken-ness,

that we may help to heal  

the broken-ness that is around us

And fulfill our basic needs,

that we may better serve those

whose needs are not being met

Help us resist our selfishness,

and protect us from harm,

For you are the source of all blessing and power,

now and forever,

Amen

Prayer of Confession

My spiritual direction group this morning worked through an article on the (originally monastic) practice of solitude as a way to achieve spiritual integrity. The article built on the 4th-century Christian "desert fathers" and their conviction that mainstream society was "a shipwreck from which each [person] had to swim for his life." Our at-large society, and perhaps even the sub-communities we join within it, is a "dangerous network of domination and manipulation" that seems to inextricably require that we abandon our religious principles in order to participate. We "children of the light" are coopted to becom "conspirators with darkness." One solution, then, is not to participate: to swim for your life to a place where you can be, with other escapees, continually in touch with the spiritual center of your life. Monks call this practice "solitude."

The clincher for me, though, was the post-monastic idea that solitude of this sort is an attitude, a state of mind, not a physical location. It does not require being removed from the culture, just being apart from it. Imagine that! Imagine if we were to truly cultivate a life where in each moment we tried to act from a deeper place than the culturally-expected focus on the self: imagine acting in each moment from a deeply centered connection to the Spirit of Life and Love, the Ground of Being, the Word of Ultimate Truth...however you concieve of the spiritual reality known in western cultural shorthand as "God".

Imagine with me what that would look like. If our daily life were not dominated by what the article I read calls "main enemies of the spiritual life" (self-exaggerations such as Fear, Anger, and Greed that put our own concern so squarely in our focus-of-vision that we cannot see past it), but instead were punctuated by a continual series of attempts to connect to and act out of the deeper spiritual ground of our being...we would become the spiritual beings we were made to be. We would be like Christ, or the Buddha, or Gandhi, or ML King Jr. Insert your religious radical here.

We would react to each encounter with another not in terms of their expediency to us (I said I wanted chips, not fries!), or their obstacle-ness in our rush to make every meeting and deadline, or their potential to harm us...but rather we would see them each as an imago Dei, an image of God, a person containing the same Divine Spark we contain. Each person would be our teacher, and each person our pupil: the God in Me would seek to connect with the God in the Other. There would be no need to trot out that well-worn First Principle of "Inherent worth and dignity," for that worth would be manifest and obvious to us. If we could truly practice solitude-from-society in every moment of our lives, we would begin to create an alternate society, to form the Beloved Community right here in the midst of the world of selfish darkness.

As I was reading this, I realized that I have failed to live up to my religious principles here in the very beginning of my seminary journey. I have been letting fear and anger and greed dominate when I should be acting out of a true desire to know the pieces of Truth that my fellow Images of God have brought to me here, to offer me for my own deepening in faith. And so, I found myself composing in my head a very classic Christian piece: the following prayer of confession. And now that I've got that out, I feel so much more at peace. For now.

Great Spirit of Love and Life, from which every Blessing flows,
I confess that I have not loved your children with my whole being:
Out of fear of losing my own perspective,
I have shut out the perspectives of others;
Out of hurt that others had not considered my feelings,
I have allowed anger to fester in my heart;
Out of an experience of being singled out,
I have seen oppression and exclusion when they were not there;
Out of a desire to be fed the fruits of my own tradition,
I have been un-thankful for the food freely given me by others.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
that I may truly be in communion with your many and varied children here,
that I may truly learn the lessons of the perspective I have been given,
that I may be a vessel for your healing love and grace,
and that I may be of greater service to you and your creations.
Amen

Trinity redux

I saw a flower blooming (on Halloween, folks! the weather here is weird) on the way out this morning. It was a tiny flower, a perfect little triangle, composed of three petals that almost perfectly overlapped. I decided to call it a "trinity flower."

For the first time I understood this whole Trinity idea, in the form of a metaphor presented by Nature herself: one Flower, three Petals. Each petal distinct, but each emanating from the same flower, none of them could be said to be a flower in its own right, and all of them dependent on some central flower-part that is unseen but every bit as real and important. 

Too bad the midterm happened last week...