THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation

DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF TRANSCENDING MYSTERY
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, September 18, 2005

You may be familiar, to one degree or another, with the Unitarian Universalist principles. We normally have them right on the front of the Order of Service folder every Sunday morning. Less frequently you see the second half of the Unitarian Universalist principles: the sources from which we draw.

These are not pieces of information handed down by some teacher or some orthodoxy from way back in our heritage. These were created in the middle of the 1980's and they were created in an interesting way. In those days the Women in Religion Task Force had come to the General Assembly and to the Board of Trustees and said, "Your constitution and bylaws, beginning right up front with the purposes and principles, is sexist."
"Well," we males said, "couldn't be." Then we read it. It was.
When the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1960, they took the Universalist Church of America bylaws and constitution and the constitution and bylaws of the American Unitarian Association and merged them. They did the same thing with most of the organizational structures and officers. It was time for it to be re-examined in the early 1980's.

As part of that whole project of removing the sexism from our documents, a task force took over. It sent out various Affirmations of Faith and historical documents along the lines of "Gee, what's a Unitarian or a Universalist?" We were asked to use them in worship. To try them on like a shirt to see whether they still fit or not. Many congregations around the country did and sent back feedback. Sometimes the feedback was "lose it". Sometimes the feedback was "we could tweak this here and it might work nicely." Out of all that material, over time, came several suggested alterations and themes. As Unitarians and Universalists are wont to do, at General Assembly after General Assembly we whacked away at every comma and semicolon and came up with those first seven principles. What was at that time five sources were agonized over at least as thoroughly. No variation of them could even remotely satisfactorily summarize the sense of what the sources of our heritage had actually been.
The first one that you see there--we're going to come back to and talk about it at some length in a minute--is “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”
The second one celebrates that major contribution to our heritage of the prophetic voice speaking out on behalf of religious principle and trying to move both individuals and our nation in the direction of a more humane and human public policy. Third, something had to be in there are about world religions and we argued about that one endlessly because nobody wanted to say we accept all world religions. Let's face it, in all religions, ours included, there is error, misunderstanding and incomplete perception; right along with the wisdom and inspiring awareness.
We got down to the Jewish and Christian summary. Nobody was satisfied; neither those who wished we would stop calling the place a "church," nor those whose roots are firmly in the liberal Christian heritage. There's no way, in one sentence, to summarize a heritage as rich as any of those we were trying to point to, and yet we had to do it.
Of course, the Humanists came up with three and a half paragraphs that needed to be in there, and it got trimmed down to what you see. Neither the Humanists nor those who wished they'd all go away were are entirely satisfied with that statement as a summary of the Humanist part of our heritage.
Then, a few years later, the same women's groups that had told us we were sexist in the first place, came to us and said, ''You know, you left one piece out. You put in the seventh principle up there, that celebrates the interconnectedness of all life; but you put nothing in the sources about that heritage as it has been historically celebrated."
There were several attempts to find language to celebrate that heritage. Since the earth-centered traditions were relatively new in our midst as a language to be used as a part of worship. We kept putting off passing it. It was easy to do. All you had to do was change one word or one comma. Everything had to pass two years in a row in order for it to be added. It took about four years, as I recall, for us finally to come to this particular language.
Then, the whole piece ends with an affirmation of our religious pluralism which we had just spent about eight years, at that point, illustrating wonderfully.
Keep in mind: the document was created and shaped by people for whom one of those sources was their preferred source. Each of the pieces had to summarize, or point to, one of those sources without implying exclusion of any other source. We had liberal Christians versus Humanists. We had theists versus non-theists. Where do you put Buddhists, for example, who have no concept in their tradition remotely like the Supreme Being of so many other traditions? Social action people felt that was where we ought to have our emphasis. Those who recognized that individual and community spirituality form the foundation and basis out of which useful and intelligent social action has to grow wanted that emphasized. There were mystics of various sorts versus hard-headed pragmatists. Some of us had to say, in the process, "Well, I don't draw from that source, but I don't want to leave out someone who does."
What you see listed first in those sources had to be in the Number One position. This is something that virtually everybody who was involved in the debate agreed on: that the core foundational piece of our Unitarian Universalist history and heritage is the insistence that religion comes out of direct experience.
This isn't about mysticism as it is normally thought of; like Ezekiel's “wheel in a wheel," that incredible vision of the possibility of reconstituting the nation Israel in the face of its absolute decimation when he was a prophet. It isn't about Moses and his burning bush and going around looking for your own personal burning bush and waiting until your bush catches fire before your attention is opened to that deep mystery and wonder that lies back of our experience of the universe and our relationship with it. It isn't about Isaiah's piece of charcoal put on his tongue, hot and blazing until he comes out speaking on behalf of the Lord. It's not about waiting for an experience that is that kind of dramatic and overwhelming, and assuming that because one of those hasn't happened to you, you don't have any firsthand direct religious experience.
But it begins with direct experience.
It doesn't begin with an idea of God.
I've never been satisfied with that facile explanation of the origin of human religious experience from those who insist that religion's origin is in death and the experience of death and the terror and fear of death. The repeated stories down through the ages of experiences where people's lives have been grabbed hold of and transformed seldom have had to do with death. It doesn't begin with a teacher -- not even Jesus or Buddha whose opinions you may like or accept.
It doesn't begin with an ideology; it doesn't begin with a theology or even a thealogy or any form of orthodoxy, even one that snugly fits your pre-existing prejudice.
It begins with your experience. I have sometimes said that no one should believe in God or any other belief until they have experience that leaves them unable not to say "God". Direct experience out of your own life is the ultimate source of all authentic religion or spirituality. It applies to all teaching. Some would go so far as to say, as my Buddhist teacher did, that all teachings are irrelevant unless and until they arise from, speak to and shape your own experience and behavior.
I have been engaging occasionally in an e-mail exchange with a young man who, incidentally, is terribly impressed with the old "Dr. Who" TV shows and has an incredible collection of stuffs from it. Brian describes himself as "disphrasic". I haven't found out exactly what that is, but it results in some wonderfully creative spelling. At first, I thought he was teasing me with some of his misspelled and creatively-spelled words. One of his spelling changes really caught my imagination. He never writes "believe" "b-e-I-i-e-v-e". He always writes'''b-e-l-i-v-e". Belive. And that's so close to what my Buddhist teacher would have said. "Until you belive it, you don't believe it."
It is out of that experience of transcending mystery and wonder, whether little satori or big one, that the priorities of our lives are reordered. If we're paying attention.
Now, sometimes we get caught up in the large noble words. One of my very favorite poems, and one of my very favorite poets, was a member of this congregation that I met while I was here the very first time in 1967. Her name is lone Hill. I still have the book of her poetry that she gave me. Her poem says,
"Noble thoughts are good or bad
depending on whether they goose you
into or out of fully living.
Most of them are so damned noble
they wouldn't lift a finger either way."

It's not the noble ideas. It's not the ideals. It's what catches, holds, transforms your imagination. So often we are led to believe that, somehow, to be truly religious or truly spiritual we ought to be paying attention to the wisdom of other people. We ought to be going where somebody can manufacture a spiritual experience for us. And while there's nothing wrong with either of those,
authentic religion arises out of paying attention to our own lives,
to the places in our own lives where we are challenged,
where what is happening in our own lives commands attention.
It is that which kicks you, pushes you, pulls you, seduces you out of yourself; or, in another sense, returns you to who you are, returns you to what you are, returns you to where you are, but didn't know it.

There's a joke that's been making the rounds on the Internet. I originally saw it as a cartoon a few years ago. It shows the Buddhist monk going up to the hotdog vender and he says, "Make me one with everything."
The hitch is that my Buddhist teacher, at least, would have had a cow at that. He would have whacked somebody on the forehead with his ink stick, insisting that you are already "one with everything". This is not something you're supposed to sit in meditation to make yourself become, you already are, stupid. You're just asleep! Wake up!
I have the image that I'm already a hot dog with pickles and mustard and relish, delicious image. Anyway.
It's not just any old direct experience that's referred to, but that which moves us to a renewal of the spirit. Unless your life is very different from mine, those are seldom Ezekiel-type experiences.
They are when my kid comes home and presents me with a conundrum that I don't know how to deal with. It's when someone walks into my office and makes a call on my intelligence and empathy and compassion that forces me to look at my own life. It's when my existence for a moment takes center stage and I'm required to look at what, and who, I have become while I wasn't looking.
What is affirmed here is not any particular concept of God or mysticism or religious experience. What is affirmed here is that those human experiences are real, that they do happen. Whatever one may want to say or not say about them as to their metaphysical aspects--and many mystics of our traditions east and west, contrary to their followers, have absolutely refused to go beyond describing and sharing their own human experience--Those human experiences are real!
Those who attend their own experience, who pay attention to what's happening in their own lives and allow their own lives to be their teacher; they don't know everything. You, we, I don't become paragons of virtue, but we begin to know who we really are. We begin to be able to live from where we really are. We begin to know, finally, what we are.
Return again; return to the home of your soul.
(And the choir joined in:)
Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.
Return to who you are; return to what you are;
Return to where you are born again, born again.
Return to the home of your soul.