DEMOLITION DERBY A Few Words About Finding God
James Ishmael Ford
28 August 2005


Text
I used to be shy.
You made me sing.

I used to refuse things at table.
Now I shout for more wine.

In somber dignity, I used to sit
On my mat and pray.

Now children run through
And make faces at me.
Jelaluddin Rumi

At the beginning of July Jan, Auntie and I joined with Arlene and Sue for a summer driving tour of the Pacific Northwest – mainly circling the Olympic peninsula. The fourth of July rolled around while we were in the most northwestern most part of the peninsula. We spent the morning walking through North America’s only temperate rain forest and the evening around a very large beach bonfire. The middle of the day we spent in the town of Forks, joining what looked like, I’m pretty sure, most of the town as well as a goodly number of those who lived in the general area – watching a demolition derby.

If you’ve never been to a demolition derby, and I must admit, I never had before, it is something to behold. The basic principle is roll out a bunch of cars, start crashing them into one another, and the last one running is declared the winner. What struck me at the time, besides hormones and pheromones mixing with gasoline and stressed metal clouding up together into the air, was how after the great rush of crashing and banging, after trucks chained and pulled away auto carcasses, after the firemen hosed down the area, washing away spent oil and gas; there was a moment of silence, of profound emptiness.

In that moment of emptiness, it seemed to me, there was an expectation hanging in the air, a sense of possibility. Which somehow, perhaps inexplicable, led me to begin to think about God. Of course that’s a subject much in our Unitarian Universalist air these days, as thick as the gasoline in the air at that Forks demolition derby. Thick. I believe we’re at the tail end of a fundamental theological shift; the fourth one since modern Unitarianism emerged from New England Congregationalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So, of course such things would be in my mind, somewhere, waiting to be called to consciousness perhaps by just about anything.

For those unclear about the course of our UU history, the first shift was classical Unitarianism, rationalist and optimistic. The second was Transcendentalism, a claiming of a naturalistic mysticism. The third was the great humanist wave, another turning of reason and optimism, this time marked heavily by scientific method and more than a little Freudian analysis. And now we’re ten or probably twenty years into that fourth shift, what for lack of a better term, I’m calling the “new spirituality,” with a new turn into a naturalist mysticism, this time marked by a Jungian wash and a world religions perspective.

I believe all our major pulpits are occupied by, as well as the current and previous presidents of our denomination are ministers who fall under that general rubric of “new spiritual,” or maybe “new Transcendentalist.” I’m sure the term will emerge before long. While some of us are unhappy about this turn of events; the deed seems done. The questions now are really not whether we should make this turn, but what it means. And truthfully what it means is not yet completely clear. Still, we are beginning to see some contours of this new dominant perspective.

And one particularly significant contour turns on our reclaiming God. Or, perhaps it’s better to suggest how God is reclaiming us. I think of this God that is revealing itself and for me it really is something like that moment of silence following the great crashes and the removal of twisted metal. Perhaps that trigger wasn’t so random or arbitrary as it might at first have seemed. We really do live in a moment pregnant with possibility.

I want to talk a little today about God, and what God means, or may mean for us as religious liberals at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Today I want to move out of that moment of silence, out of that place where everything has been swept away. From that place of potential and waiting, I want to explore what God might and might not be for us. And something more. Out of that I want to discuss how we, you and I, might find ourselves face to face with God. A big task, but I propose nothing less.

UU minister Morris Hudgins outlines the engagement with God within contemporary western liberal religion over the course of the twentieth century starting with “a pronouncement of the death of God in 1965, to a God who sets people free in 1966, to a God as the source of my being or the Ground of all being in 1968, to God as found in the human search for goodness in 1973, to God as found in the divinity of all people in 1980, and finally to God as the transcendent in the midst of nature in the 1990s.” A pretty good summary, I think, of the liberal Christian perspective over the course of the twentieth century. And perhaps you can see some of the similarities in thought and engagement of many spiritual Unitarian Universalists.

But mainly we’ve gone in other directions. Our interests, mostly, have been social and psychological. To use a broad brush, Jung and world religions, as I’ve already observed. We are awash in reflection and engagement. Our movement has also been deeply marked by many currents, most significantly feminist theology, earth-based theologies, and Buddhism. Out of this rich stew, I suggest, we can engage God, or reengage God in meaningful ways. We’ve crashed and crushed and hauled away our old ideas of the divine. And now in a pregnant moment we can birth a new vision, one that I find healthful and helpful.

I’ll start with some negatives, a briefest list of things I don’t think we need to believe to meaningfully engage God. And then on to the positive, to what I find that compels a use of the word God. And within that divine engagement, I’ll explore something of the path of compassionate wisdom that I find to be our contemporary Unitarian Universalist way.

First a question from that swept away moment: must God be a creator? This is one of the traditional bundle of questions people have asked just about for ever and ever. Is the world created and if so by whom or what? Is there life after death? If so to where do we go: heaven and hell or a cycle of reincarnations? I’ll make a bold statement. These questions, I think, are all red herrings on a quest for the divine.

Just to briefly explain why I think this; let’s look at God as creator. I know many people, many people I respect, some in this room, are convinced by the so-called “argument by design,” which is that the very intricacy and astonishing beauty of the world implies a creator divinity. I don’t see that at all. This argument seems like an anthropocentric projection to me. As Xenophanes famously observed in the fifth century before our common era, if horses had gods they’d all be horses. Frankly that’s what I see in this argument.

Likewise, I see no sign of or need for a God that intervenes in history by punishing one person or people and assisting or rewarding others. Again as I see the world I see no compelling reason to think such a thing ever happens. As Jesus observes in the Gospel of Matthew, the rain falls on the good and the wicked, alike. I’ve never seen evidence of divine special treatment. And, frankly, assertions that one child was miraculously cured of cancer while another died are offensive to any idea of a God that could be called good.

But, really, I’m not trying to engage an argument against something. I want to call your attention to something, something astonishing and amazing. The real miracle is life itself, glorious, frightening, mysterious. God need not be something beyond the world. In fact, I’m suggesting, God must be found within the world, must be found within the experience of joy and love, within the warm embrace of our intimate human experience. Here’s what I’m saying. Everything is part of God, without exception.

A big statement. Let’s unpack this by briefly referencing the 7th UU principle that we are all part of a web of interdependence. What does that assertion of interdependence mean? Really? Beyond a poetic rhapsody. Beyond an opportunity to sell some jewelry. Let me give an analogy, a pointer, to that beyond. Think of the world as a single body, a cosmic body. It has hair. It has eyes. It has skin. Each of us is one of those things. And we are one body. To draw upon an extension of this analogy used in one school of Buddhism, think of that cosmic body as a golden lion. All the different parts, each is different. But also all the parts are gold. Pure gold! Completely gold. And, let me suggest that gold is God.

An important question for many on the path is this God simply the sum of its parts? Spinoza’s pantheistic God? Or is this God of the whole something more than the sum of its constituent parts? The panenthiestic God of process theology? Some days I prefer a simple systems approach with nothing extra. Some days I’m overwhelmed with the extras that do erupt into our lives. There is some strange emergence in our lives – it’s not those miracles of special pleading, sparing my family, or cursing yours; but it is miraculous, nonetheless. Let’s look at what it is that erupts, seemingly from nowhere, out of the empty space after every thing, every idea, every dream, every fear of loss and gain has been swept away.

Josh Bartok, one of my senior Zen students, is an editor at Wisdom Publications, probably the foremost English language Buddhist publishing house right now. Of the people I work with as a spiritual director, he probably has the best handle on traditional Buddhist thought. When I asked him to comment on his own experience of awakening, of what Buddhists usually like to call emptiness, that swept away place which you might have noticed I’m suggesting as our starting place for genuine spiritual engagement, he said something rather interesting.

“The awakened reality of… emptiness—is in fact filled with bliss and joy. How marvelous! (E)mptiness could feel like nothing, blankness. But it doesn't. The ground of reality, when everything is completely penetrated, completely embodied, is joy.” We paused in our conversation to ponder that. Then Josh added, "And God is as good a name for this truth as any." What a curious non-Buddhist thing for a Buddhist scholar, or at least editor to say.

Joy as a mark of God. I suggest this is true. Joy is a mark of God. Talk about the miraculous erupting into the world. Let’s think about this. What other human characteristics fit the divine bill? What else in our human experience, when we open our hearts and minds wide, what else do we find that astonishes, confounds, and births hope? What is the gold that permeates us and gives us meaning and purpose?

I often claim that when we walk through the gate of spiritual inquiry, when we experience reality cleanly for ourselves, we find we have a compass for our lives. To what does the needle point? Well, Joy for one. And how about compassion? How about that sense of harmony we all have experienced one time or another? How about friendliness? What are these things? Compassion, joy, that pervading sense of harmony, simple friendliness; these are the needle of the compass of the spirit as well as that to which the needle points. Let me spell this out. These things are the traces of the divine we find in our own living lives.

And there’s something here about how we can live our lives so that words like joyful and holy might become our most intimate truth. I think of it as the way of vow. To vow is to dedicate. And as we become UUs we do dedicate ourselves to some things. I suggest a primary Unitarian Universalist vow is honesty. To be honest, to not turn away from what is, is to make a vow of presence. As we allow ourselves to be present, really present; we discover the swept away place. And from that swept away place, from that pregnant silence, we find these things emerge, erupt into our lives: joy and compassion and harmony and friendliness.

What is kind of wonderful, however, is that each of these things which are manifestations of our deepest truth are also gates into that truth: the needle pointing, and the thing to which the needle points. As we open ourselves to joy we are also opening ourselves to God. As we open our hearts and discover compassion, we are opening our hearts to God. As we walk paths of righteousness, of harmony, of balance upon this earth, we open ourselves to God. As we are simply friendly, kind with one another, we open ourselves to God.

So, what would a life be like that was deeply marked by joy and compassion and harmony and friendliness? What would this community be like if each of us cultivated these things as cardinal goods? How would that affect our city? What would it mean for the Commonwealth? How might it shift the nation? The world? To something divine, I suggest.

I suggest these things, joy, compassion, harmony and friendliness, are the true revelations of God in the world. I suggest these things are the real gates to God in the world. I suggest all we need do is turn our hearts, just for a moment, away from the self-centered, from anger and grasping and certainties, allow the dust to settle, and to notice. There, in the swept away place, we will discover that from before the creation of the heavens and the earth, this joy and compassion and harmony and friendliness are our divine heritage. That’s what I believe.

Amen.