Thousands of years ago, as humans were hunting with crude weapons and gathering in groups, they also started to wonder. Early humans would lie on the ground at night and look at the stars…and wonder. They’d experience pouring rains, and seasons of drought...and wonder. They had children, and sometimes those children died, and they’d grieve… and wonder. Those humans, those early people who spent their days doing all they could to survive on a planet that seemed generous and hostile in turn, also asked themselves and each other if there were systems they couldn’t see. Was there a reason for it? Was any of it meaningful? Over time, they told stories, they created meaning, they designed rituals to put the chaos into context. They systematized those stories and rituals, designing the ancient religions starting in Africa, India and China and spreading to wherever humans were thriving. They celebrated and commemorated and worshipped and built spectacular temples, together.
As human culture developed, so did religion. Religion is how we face mystery, in community. Religion, by definition, is how communities ask the big questions, how we respond in awe and wonder, how we make meaning. Spirituality is an individual search. Once we gather in groups to share our ideas, once we ritualize and institutionalize it, we are religious. And humans have been religious for nearly as long as we’ve been human. We create tentative answers to ultimate questions and we do it in conversation and shared experience with each other.
Religion is a human response to mystery. Beyond what we know and have to do, there is the unknown, that which we don’t understand. The response to that unknown, to the reality of the ambiguity of human life is religion. For some, religion has become a set of answers, but for most of us in liberal traditions, it’s more an awareness of the lack of answers or a honing of the skill of living into the questions.
With that said, plenty of us in the 21st century feel like we do, in fact, have answers. Because we have science. Science has taken the place of religion in plenty of modern households, shrinking the role of religion as the place of wonder decreases. For instance, we now know why it rains. We can even predict it. We can tell you years in advance what seasons and in what geographic areas we can expect more or less rainfall and we can tell you a week in advance if you should plan a garden party. With the expanding breadth and depth of scientific discovery, we see the diminishing of religious practice. People aren’t gathering in groups to ask big questions and face mystery in the same way we used to. And, maybe that’s appropriate.
Except. I don’t think mystery is actually dwindling, just our ability to recognize it. I suspect it’s not that we know so much, but that we have lost access to the experience of wonder and astonishment at all the things we don’t know, or even at the things we do know which, themselves are magnificent. What changed, I suspect, isn’t that the world got smaller and more predictable, but that our ability to be present to what’s real has been greatly diminished.
Centuries ago, people believed that the Earth was flat. That’s a reasonable thing to believe. In the course of the average person’s daily life, it seems incontrovertible that we stand up straight, that our buildings are on level ground, that the sky is above us. The fact is, though, that Earth is round, and we are not, in fact, standing straight up. We are at an angle, the extent of which is determined by where on the planet we are situated. To make it more bizarre, we’re spinning at about a thousand miles an hour. Right now. At this moment, spinning. But, we don’t experience those things because of gravity, an invisible force that gives us the illusion of standing straight and still. And, by the way, the atoms making up the floor beneath us are both vibrating and largely empty.
Science doesn’t diminish mystery. Arrogance isn’t an appropriate response to our growing base of knowledge. Wonder seems a fitting reaction. Awe is still warranted. I might even suggest that faith is required to live with a science-based worldview.
A long time ago, I dated a Mormon. I wanted to know more about his faith so he told me the religion was based on a claim made by their founder, Joseph Smith. He is said to have discovered gold plates with passages printed in ancient Egyptian that God helped him translate into English. Smith wrote it all down into what is today The Book of Mormon, after which the plates disappeared. I wasn’t convinced. There was no evidence. My boyfriend admitted that you have to want to believe, which, at the time, he did. For him, lack of hands on experience wasn’t a deal-breaker. It’s interesting that it was for me when I already live so much of my life believing things with which I have no personal, experiential, evidence.
And, while I’m not sorry I didn’t join their church, it isn’t lost on me that much of what I believe challenges my own direct experience. This pulpit is made up of atoms, tiny particles. Far more than could ever be counted. I believe that even though my experience tells me this is a single, solid item. I believe it because scientists say it’s true. I don’t know any scientists who have ever seen atoms, but I know they exist. I’ve read about them and learned about them in school and I believe it, even though my direct experience contradicts it.
At the same time, most humans have direct experiences that many of us dismiss. Nearly everyone has had the experience of knowing something was about to happen before it did. A phone would ring. A car would get hit. We have these tiny premonitions, these windows into a future just moments ahead. People have oddly similar near-death experiences. Or, wild, divine encounters. Or entirely unnamed, and unexplainable occurrences. Of being watched even though no one is there. Or hearing your name whispered in an empty room. One night, I awoke unable to breath. I gasped, but there was nothing, no air. I tried forcing my lungs to open, as I reached for my husband-but then something shifted and the air came again. I looked at the clock. 2:30. I went back to sleep. A few hours later, my mother called to tell me my grandmother died. It was just about 2:30, she said. The number of people with these experiences is astounding, but we dismiss them handily. We think of them as illusion, or not yet explainable or maybe just absurd. Plenty of us are too embarrassed to even admit to them, worrying about appearing deluded or soft or just plain unintelligent.
So, religion is how we face into mystery, but the role of religion in modern society has been moderated, largely because science has explained so much of the world to us. And yet, what science has revealed is, itself deliciously mysterious. The world is still filled with reasons to marvel, just not in the same way. It turns out, it’s all even more complex! It’s even more wonder-full. And there are just as many reasons, if not more, to be awed.
Unitarian Universalists stripped religion of its supernatural elements and some of that is good. It was particularly important that we relieve clergy of their unquestioned power. No one is worthy of that. When governments and nation-states elevate people to untouchable positions, we are comforted by the reality that those people are few and far between. When religion does it, those people are in our neighborhoods, educating our children, seeing us in person every week. Bringing reason, science, and democratic sensibility to the project of religion was a good step.
But, we’ve flattened the world again. We have no room for the unexplained. We ignore things we don’t understand. We reject anything that has a whiff of the supernatural, even as we spend our free time diving into worlds of fantasy and science fiction.
What if we embraced a more complex picture? Are we able to expand the framework? Are we able to lean into the mystery that surrounds us. And are we able to approach it with the awe and the wonder it so rightly deserves?
To clarify, awe and wonder aren’t the same. In today’s reading, Celie is asking about God. What does God like, why does God do things. That’s wonder. Shug is explaining, but she’s also noticing and pointing out the beauty. The color purple. Wondering about how we became so lucky as to experience it is a religious act. Being in awe of it, standing before it with breath drawn, those are holy moments. One is in our heads, one is in our hearts, and both are required for the depth of living available to us. And when we stand beside another person, when we join in communities of people who are also wondering and appreciating and loving the world around us, we are being religious.
How do we reclaim the art of being religious? How do we stretch our minds beyond the visible world and experience the majesty of this life?
Have any of you ever been to the Grand Canyon? I found the Grand Canyon by accident. I mean, I knew it somewhere close by, but my friend and I were driving along a pretty average road, listening to the radio and wondering about lunch when a break in the trees caught my eye and I gasped. My breath was taken. I yelled for her to pull over which frightened her and she pulled off to the shoulder immediately. I jumped out of the car and pushed aside the brush to find that we were on the edge of the Grand Canyon. She slid in next to me and we stood, speechless. I don’t know how long we were there, but that canyon owned me. Owned us. Motionless, wordless, even thoughtless. We were overtaken. Eventually, the spell was broken and we went back to the car, but the experience of seeing that canyon for the first time has lived with me since.
I’m sure I’m not alone in being bowled over by something on this planet. If I’m not careful, I can be knocked over by the smell of a lilac or the joy of a pumpkin patch. I’ve had my breath taken away by hummingbirds in flight, and I bet you have too. Maybe not from those things, but from something. Because the art of being religious isn’t lost yet. We still have the ability to experience Mystery, even if our own egos force us to dismiss it.
As the world spins