Sermon Archives : 2006/2007

The Spirit of a Humanist

The Rev. Gail Seavey  ·  January 7, 2007

Jane Norris bought this sermon at the service auction. She, like many early members of this church, is a Religious Humanist. Jane asked me “What does all your talk about spirituality have to do with me?” I hope to answer this question by tracing a thread throughout our history as Unitarians considered their spiritual lives in the context of modernism and then post-modernism.

Let’s begin by defining spirituality. The word itself comes from the Greek word, “breath.” The word “Spirit” ‘s metaphorical roots refer to something like that interaction between air and the human body – something that happens even without our conscious decision, something that is invisible, vital and life-giving. I tend to use metaphor when I speak of spirit, but can understand how this drives the more logical among you a bit crazy.

According to contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber (Integral Spirituality, pp. 100-102), the word spirituality is confusing because people use it to mean four different definitions. The first definition of spiritual is used to refer to the highest stages of human development. For instance, Spiral Dynamics outlines research that showed that the people studied developed evolving stages of values. At level one the value is surviving, level two is safety and security, level three is egocentric, level four is purposeful and absolutistic, level five is achievement and autonomy orientated, level six is communitarian and relativistic – valuing harmony and equality--- level seven is integrative and systemic and level eight is holistic and values a global view. With this first definition, the word spiritual is used to describe the higher value stages above egocentric, such as communitarian, harmonic, integrative or holistic values.

The second definition of spiritual is used to describe spiritual intelligence, a whole line of human development with its own stages. From this definition every stage of human development has its spiritual aspect, in that all people try to find what makes life meaningful. Starting with the undifferentiated baby, all children grow through magical, mythic-literal, and conventional stages. Our teenagers are working on the individual rational stage. This “Life With Opus” cartoon (The Tennessean, September 17, 2006) shows a wonderful conversation between the literal-mythic and individual rational stages:

(Looking up at a star filled night sky)

“Auggie, Ol buddy…ever wonder how all this came to be?”

“You don’t believe in God, Opus?”

“I’m a penguin. We’re not sure what we believe in. Except purpose. We believe in having purpose. Also lots of squid.”

“That’s ridiculous. If you think this is all just a cosmic accident, you’re left purposeless!”

“I’m not purposeless!”

“Yeah, well, if we really are merely atoms bumping around by chance, there’s little hope for finding meaning in life. YAWN”

(Auggie falls asleep, Opus tucks him under a blanket, and as rain starts to fall, holds an umbrella over his friend.)

“Ah, Life’s meaning: Maybe it’s not so much found…as it is… Made.”

I don’t know about penguins, but human beings can keep developing our spiritual intelligence into the Conjunctive stage, which moves beyond either/or thinking into a both/and understanding of meaning, and the Universalizing stage can see the value in each and every earlier stage.

The third definition of spiritual refers to extraordinary peak experiences or states of consciousness. All human beings experience three normal states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleeping. All three states can be experienced in heightened forms. This can include anything from being profoundly moved by the beauty of your grandbaby, the woods covered in flowers or a Bach Invention to experiencing transformative, non-dual states of consciousness that people refer to as mystical experiences.

The fourth definition of spirituality refers to a particular attitude, such as compassion or wisdom. Wilber finds this definition to be uselessly vague. When people use it they are often talking about on of the other three definitions. Those are all useful as long as we say which one we are referring to.

Humanists use the word spiritual in all these ways: using the first definition to speak about ideal human values; using the second definition when planning religious education classes acknowledging that young children learn more from myth and story than from intellectual debate; using the third definition when planning worship to lift our experience with the beauty of the setting and music, or to give our consciousness a chance to expand within moments of silence and meditation. I will try to be clear about which of these definitions I am using as we look at the spirituality of humanism.

Unitarians have tried to understand what spirituality is about in an ever-changing world since the Protestant reformation. Men and women at that time who were moving from the conventional stages of spiritual intelligence into the individual, rational stage started to question the authority of the church and to study the world around them. They studied scripture for themselves, forming more rational interpretations. Those interpretations integrated new passions for historical context and scientific research. They became modernists, seeing less through the lens of God and more through the lenses of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Early Unitarians saw the spiritual (first definition) in the highest Good or character, the highest Truth through objective scientific and scholarly study and the highest Beauty through the most ennobling aesthetic subjective experiences.

As America became more industrial in the 1800s, some Unitarians became worried that they were being overcome by the objective world. They suspected that that people’s inner worlds, the world of beauty and passion, were dying. They feared that with a growing dependence on science that human spirituality would be stunted. They saw that many people, seeing that the old Gods were dead, were throwing spiritual babies out with the bathwater. Looking for a balanced way to understand spirit in the industrial world, they formed the transcendentalist viewpoint.

The Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, were 100 percent modern. Thoreau studied the natural world and evolution, and may have been one of the first people to write about it from an ecological point of view. Margaret Fuller studied society with an objective eye, fomenting revolution. Emerson rejected a theology of miracles and the supernatural profoundly upsetting his Unitarian teachers. They saw the value of spiritual in the third definition, however, the value of the peak experience or extraordinary state of consciousness. They did not understand these experiences as supernatural, defining God as purely natural. Indeed, they believed that every human being could perceive these higher states in the same way people perceive time and space, because of the biology of the human mind. They redefined the word “mysticism” to mean any human experience in which a person subjectively feels one with that which transcends them. Most of their mystical experiences were tied to the experience of feeling one with the rest of nature. Their definition of mysticism has become the one most commonly used today.

During the 18th century Unitarians were very restless. The arguments for this more natural view of religion moved them through a series of arguments that attempted to reconcile the scientific objective worldview with religion. The Free Religious Association in 1867 challenged Unitarian Christianity and the Western Unitarian Conference in the 1880s challenged Unitarian Theism. These arguments culminated in the Humanist Manifesto written in 1933.

The Humanist Manifesto clearly delineates a religious consciousness that is totally natural and rejects the traditional dualisms of mind and body. It centers on the human ability to grow ethically, and for human society to make progress towards the common good. But modernist dualism has been a difficult habit to break. Some humanists have fallen into the trap of living totally in the rational, objective world, assuming that the spiritual worlds of highest value or meaning making or peak experience are all supernatural. They get trapped in a conundrum that our dualistic culture has created. They know that they no longer believe in the mythic and conventional meanings of spirit such as supernatural gods and goddesses. But caught in dualism, denying that there is any spiritual growth without god, they stop their spiritual growth right there. They actually collude with many people who live in the mythic and conventional stages who can’t imagine that there is spiritual growth beyond their stage.

Ironically modernism is over. Those of us who have been able to finally understand mind and body as co-arising and non-dualistic, have only begun to understand spirituality. Post-modernism critiques spirituality and modernity from another point of view, showing us how our languages and cultures profoundly affect our subjective and objective experiences. Now we must see how our subjective spiritual growth and objective science are profoundly shaped by our cultures. We are not just individuals or I’s; we are we’s who can only interpret our experiences with the words and images we have been given to interpret them. Indeed, those words and images shape our experiences. Our mind and spirit and body and culture and society all co-arise together. Post-modernism calls us to reject not just the traditional dualism, but a complex fragmentation of experience.

Let me tell you about a humanist friend of mine who finds this post modernist worldview to be an exciting adventure. It all started when Ralph went river rafting on a church outing. The rubber raft must have been low on air, because when it hit a rock the part he was sitting on was pulled back and then released suddenly, acting much like a sling shot and catapulting Ralph hundreds of feet forward into the rapids. He was pulled down under the water and struggled unsuccessfully to get to the surface. He thought he would die. He did not have a mystical experience, mostly he felt sad that he had not kissed his wife goodbye that morning and told her he loved her. Then the current spit him up and he struggled to catch a breathe of air. The other people on the raft saw him and threw a rope out. He struggled to catch it. The breathe of air finally made it into his lungs, the rope made it into his hand and the others on the raft pulled him over and up. As he lay on the raft, safe at last, he still did not have a mystical experience. Then a friend leaned over him and asked, “Ralph, are you all right?” And Ralph decided in that moment that he was not going to lie and say “yes.” Instead he was going to be truthful, and say something he rarely said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know.” It was then that Ralph had a mystical experience. As soon as he said, “I don’t know,” he felt as if his whole chest opened up and that the sun and then the sky came down and poured into his chest and they pulled in everything they passed, the trees and the river and the raft and the people into him.

What to do with this? It was a third definition spiritual experience – a heightened waking dream. Ralph interpreted it as his culture and his experience as a Unitarian humanist taught him to. It had nothing to do with God; it had to do with being one with all of the natural world. As Ralph went about his daily life, he noticed that he had grown spiritually from the experience, using both the first and the second definitions. First, he had more discipline to live his highest values. Those values were his same Unitarian humanist values, but he was more motivated and committed to acting out those values. He kissed his wife every morning and told her he loved her. He spent the quiet time drinking his coffee in the morning, sitting in reflection and communion with the awesome beauty of the rest of nature, and from that communion came a will to serve justice in a more concrete way. He became passionate about building housing for those who do not have it. He started to lead his church in helping building affordable housing in his hometown.

Secondly, he moved to a new stage of spiritual intelligence, a more universalizing view. Every morning he sat with that coffee and entered into this new state for him, a state of “not knowing.” When he had the opportunity the visit a third world country, the passion to serve justice on a global scale arouse from that “not knowing” place. He now goes there once a year and builds a house or an orphanage or a school. This is what spirituality has to do with Ralph, as a Unitarian humanist.

One of the great joys of being a Unitarian Universalist has been discovering how many different people experience spirituality; learning about their highest values, evolving ever greater understandings of the meaning of their lives and listening to the profound experiences that have marked their journeys – exploring ever new viewpoints of what spirituality has to do with me and with you. Blessings on the journey.