JOURNEY OF LOST SOULS
A Halloween Reflection On Unitarian Universalism And Freedom as a Spiritual Practice
30 October 2005
James Ishmael Ford

It is occasionally suggested I’m oblique; particularly when I start waxing eloquent about matters spiritual. The problem, I fear, is that we rarely can encounter the really important things head on. Truth, as elusive as it is, like love, is usually discerned, at least I find, from the corner of the eye. We are, in C. S. Lewis’s felicitous phrase, more often than not, surprised by joy. In that oblique spirit, looking out the corner of the eye, I hope to take us on a small meander. Broadly, we’re going to go from Halloween to a consideration of multiple worlds, to a little digging into what we might mean by freedom, and finally to an invitation to our own freedom, yours and mine: the wild heart of what we really are.

Last night Rita and Chris and I were off to the UU Urban ministry celebration of the 25th continuous year of its Renewal House project. It was quite an affair. Our own Jan Shapiro was part of the headliner entertainment. I found it fun to see so many of the great and good of the Unitarian Universalist world there; and considering how many other worthy events were going on, how many of us from FUSN were able to be present at the First Unitarian Church in Boston.

When we left, as we walked back to the car I first noticed a large mini-skirted bunny rabbit flag down a cab. Then, we walked past a vampire, a clown and a pirate standing together engaged in what appeared to be a serious conversation. In the three blocks we walked to the car we passed a surprising number of strange and mysterious creatures each on their own private trajectory. I was confused for a moment, well, at least for the bunny rabbit, before recalling that, yes, indeed, this is the Halloween season.

Brian Kiely, minister of our UU congregation in Edmonton, Alberta observes “I have always loved Hallowe’en for more than just the costumes and the sugar rush. It is the gateway to the season, the celebration of hidden things and shadowy wisdom. All Souls followed by All Saints. I usually take the dog for a walk on Hallowe’en night after the three foot goblins have gone home with their loot. I feel the leaves blowing and somehow the possibility of spirits reaching out through the veil and across the breeze seems very real.”

It is the tradition of western myths that Halloween, this season, is a time in the cycles of our lives when the divisions between the worlds of the living and the dead are stretched to the thinnest possible membrane, and, occasionally, torn asunder. I’m caught up with that idea of pushing through and discovering other worlds.

Today, I want to make a dangerous invitation. I want to suggest we could profit from opening ourselves up to wonder and possibility and mystery. In that spirit, today I’d like to push the question about those worlds. The Halloween tradition of division is between living and dead. But the divisions that mark our lives, that create multiples of worlds, are obviously more than just living and dead. As important to most of us as that concern, life and death might be; I suggest as people committed to a quest for authenticity, for wisdom, we are also being offered a chance to peak behind several veils.

How do we divide the world? Let me count the ways. Apples and oranges. You and me. High and low. Good and evil. Necessity and freedom. In the blowing leaves of this season what spirits are reaching out across the veil? Well, I’ve thought a lot of late about freedom. It is presented as a cardinal good for us in our liberal religion. And not just for us. Freedom is one of the standard metaphors for success on the spiritual quest, as well as a given good in the political realm.

I want to invite what I believe is a deeper view of freedom, the experience of which may become the foundation of lives worth living. Our very lives are the product of constraint; we exist because of genes and historic conditions. We only exist within various forms of constraint. We’re defined by our species, our bodies, our families, our nations. It’s easy to think that’s it; the old Calvinists were right, we’re preordained, bio-robots programmed from the creation of the world.

And yet in some bubbling bottom line sort of way we all, I hope, have discovered we have the power to say yes or no. A small glitch in the software. But so important. In that small thing, our ability to say yes or no - smaller than a mustard seed as one great spiritual line has it - we see the beginning of something of great possibility. As I’ve already suggested freedom has several shapes. It can be freedom from, such as freedom from want, or ignorance, or dogma. And, it can be freedom to – freedom to reach for something, to become something we were not before.

The veil I would suggest we consider piercing is the veil of constraint. Yes, here we are, each of us, present within the conditions of our lives. Our work or lack of it, our families or lack of them, our health or lack of it, everything that has conspired to bring us to this moment – we need to know what those things are.

And then, in the spirit of the season, I suggest we look to how we can cross from that world of constraint in a healthy way to a world of freedom. In the Zen tradition there are a couple of koan that address this, two come immediately to mind. Koans, as you may know, are weird questions. Weird questions seem right to me for a Halloween sermon. Both of the koan that come to my mind posit situations and ask for responses – a little like riddles.

One suggests a woman one day puts a goose egg into a bottle. When the egg hatches she cares for it and feeds it and eventually it grows to be much too big to get out through the small opening. The question is, without breaking the bottle, how do you free the goose? How do you or I, the products of so many conditions, find our freedom?

If that question isn’t enough, there’s another one. Imagine yourself in a stone crypt. A good Halloween koan. The door is locked from the outside. There are no windows. How do you get free? How do you or I, the products of so many conditions, find our freedom? Given the situation we really are in, each of us, how do we pierce the veil and walk from a world where everything is dictated by one condition or another, defined by one constraint or another, to a world where our actions are joyful and at peace and of use?

Yesterday before the evening event in downtown Boston, I was at another UU activity. This was a Mass Bay District sponsored event held at Andover Newton School of Theology over in Newton Centre. There were a number of us from the congregation there, too. It was an exploration of the themes of engaging our UU theological diversity. The keynote speaker was Earl Holt, minister of King’s Chapel, and the chair of the commission on appraisal which had done the formal study upon which we based our conference.

Earl pointed out that at least his original goal in this project was to find some theological nugget that we all share. He said they didn’t succeed in that fond hope. What he said they did find was something about spiritual community. There was, is, an implicit deal we all have with each other. Whatever else, what we think, theologically or politically, or whatever: we agree to be together. It has to do with presence. We agree to show up. We agree to be honest. We agree not to walk when it becomes difficult.

I suggest two things. One, he was describing a spiritual practice. I love that word practice: in English it means both preparing and doing. Kind of rich, I find. And there’s our UU practice, being present to each other. When we’re doing it right there’s a certain humility involved, and a willingness to listen at least as much as to hold forth. Probably the best conscious expression of this discipline is found in our Small Group ministry. But the invitation is always in front of us. The invitation is to be present, to notice, and to discover.

And there, I think, we may find the common theological principle at the heart of Unitarian Universalism. It has to do with our possible freedom which is found within the very conditions of our lives as they are. Like that goose in the bottle, or you finding yourself in a stone crypt; when we start by really seeing who we are and our situation as it is – then, as if by magic, the delusion of our lives is cut through by the power of presence; the veil is ripped asunder, and a new earth and a new heaven are revealed.

At least that’s what I’ve found. And it’s what I’ve seen over and over again in our community. When women and men are willing to show up, things happen. I believe the trick is that as we open ourselves we discover the conditions that shape us are not just genes and history. Instead it turns out we are intimately wrapped up with each other. We are, in some mysterious way, all one. Separate - and one. Turns out we’re larger than the sky. And that discovery is a discovery of freedom.

At such moments we really need the poets. Pablo Neruda explains what I’m trying to get at. So I’ll let this draw it all together. “Some time, man or woman, traveler,/afterwards, when I am not alive,/look here, look for me here/between the stones and the ocean,/in the light storming/in the foam./Look here, look for me here,/for here is where I shall come, saying nothing,/no voice, no mouth, pure,/here I shall be again the movement/of the water, of/its wild heart,/here I shall be both lost and found —/here I shall be perhaps both stone and silence.”

Amen.