Can We Talk about God in Church?
Meg Barnhouse, musician, writer and, as many of you know,
senior minister over at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin,
summarizes Unitarian Universalism like this, “No hell. At most one
God.” It’s that “at-most-one-God” issue I’d like to talk about today. At
one Unitarian Universalist church I attended, just using the word “God”
in the sanctuary would have been akin to yelling “fire” in a crowded
theater. Some folks would have screamed and rushed for the exits.
It was a bit of an anti-church sort of a church group.
Now, I would guess that among us in the sanctuary today, there are
a number of varying beliefs and conceptualizations of the term, from
non-theistic, humanist worldviews, to folks who hold some degree of
agnosticism on the matter, to a variety of spiritualities that include some
perception of divinity, some perhaps more metaphorically and some in
actuality. So, it’s likely that within Wildflower Church, we have people
with a variety of different spiritual and religious perspectives.
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And I think that having all those differing religious ways of
making meaning of the world and seeking that which is greater than us is
terrific – it has the potential for helping us all to experience growth and
transformation – if we talk about it – if we allow our varying
perspectives to bump up against each other. Sometimes though, I worry
that we may be afraid to engage in the conversation. We may be afraid
that conflict could erupt or that our views might get dismissed if we let
difference out into the open, especially around something as big and as
sometimes controversial as words like “God” or “divine”.
So, I let me start by saying that I have struggled with the concept
of God.
I have moved from the Southern Baptist conception of God I
learned in my childhood, through rejecting those creeds and adopting a
form of agnosticism in my adolescence and early adulthood. In my late
twenties and thirties, I took on a sort of secular and scientific worldview
that rejected any possibility of a God. After becoming a Unitarian
Universalist and especially after entering seminary, I have been
exploring alternative ways of understanding and reclaiming what I prefer
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to call “the divine.” Recently, I have been learning about a perspective
known as “process theory”, or “process theology” when applied to
religion.
Process theology grew out of the philosophical work of a British
mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead in the early to midtwentieth century. In part, he was responding to new discoveries in
physics, where at the most basic level, reality no longer seemed to
function in the concrete, dualistic, machine-like way that much of
Western thought had until then embraced. Later, Charles Hartshorne, a
professor at the University of Texas here in Austin and a longtime
member of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, developed this
theology further.
A full explanation of process theology, much less quantum
physics, is well beyond what we can cover this morning. However, there
are a few core ideas that will be enough to help us get at how process
theology conceives of God (or the divine), as well as where it may fit
well with some of our Unitarian Universalist ideas and principles.
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The first key concept is that process theology rejects the dualism of
being or not being. Instead, it views humans, and indeed everything in
the world and universe, not as discrete, unchanging, static things, but as
processes that are always becoming, experiences that are always
unfolding and evolving, so to speak. Now, bear with me for a bit as we
dive right into some areas where process theory gets a bit heady and
abstract.
According to this concept, in this moment, I am not a being or an
object, but a series of events unfolding – my experiences of the past, the
possibilities available to me in the moment and the choices I make of
those possibilities.
But even as you have been listening to this, I made choices and
became something new, and the Chris that spoke that prior sentence
perished within the continual process of becoming, and so did the “you”
who heard it! The physical world is like this also for process theory. The
cells in our bodies, the molecules and atoms in all things are themselves
ever changing processes of mixing, dividing, perishing and being
replaced.
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And now, let us pause for a moment to process all this process
theology stuff so far. <<Pause>> Maybe we should all take a deep,
cleansing breath before we plunge in even further. This really can be a
difficult concept to hold onto because thinking of ourselves and really
everything as processes rather than distinct objects is contrary to
hundreds of years of Western thinking.
I had something happen the other day though that helped me to
grasp a little more easily this idea of always being in state of becoming,
a process rather than an unchanging being. I have a beautiful young
niece that I had spent a lot of time with when she was a child but who I
had not seen in the last several years. Recently, she sent us an invitation
to her graduation ceremony. On the front of the invitation was a
photograph of this lovely young woman – the lovely young woman
whom that little girl I once knew has become.
The little girl I knew exists now only within the past experiences of
the young woman in that photograph – my niece who is still even now a
human process unfolding into her magnificent potential. <<PAUSE>>
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This idea, that everything and everyone is a process of becoming,
results in another central tenet of this theology – that the future does not
exist. The future does not exist until we create it. As you and I and all of
the creatures of the present moment make choices from among many
available possibilities, we collectively create the next moment, the next
event.
As process philosopher C. Robert Mesle puts it, “…the future does
not exist…you and I, the grass, the birds, the stars, even space itself –
the entire universe – must be bursting into existence in each moment.”
Revelation is not sealed, as our Unitarian Universalist theologian James
Luther Adams famously said. How could it be when everything is
continually coming into existence anew?
Another core concept in process theology is that the events and
processes that make up all of reality are by their very nature connected
and interrelated. Theologian Monica C. Coleman describes this as
follows, “…we do not have relationships. We are not discrete selves that
can choose whether or not we want to relate to one another. Rather, we
are relationships” because processes can only exist in relationships.
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The web of all existence in our Unitarian Universalist seventh
principle becomes absolutely essential and immensely complex from
this perspective.
Last March, I was standing on an outdoor platform in Chicago,
waiting for the train that would take me to my class that morning. The
platform was located under a street that ran across a bridge overhead,
partially blocking the morning sun. Still, one, wide ray of sun was
shining though, and it started snowing very, very lightly. Tiny, fragile
snowflakes were being held aloft by a brisk wind, swirling in circles in
the air. They danced through the bright ray of sunlight, reflecting it in
dazzling patterns, as if thousands of miniature mirrors were whirling and
casting their own small rays of light in almost infinite directions – tiny
spirits dancing and floating and spreading light into their world.
Needless to say, I was captivated, standing transfixed and
enchanted until the sound of my train approaching drew my attention. I
turned toward the sound of the train. As I did, I made eye contact with
an elderly African American gentleman who was leaning on a carved
wooden cane for support.
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He smiled. There was a joyful glint in his eyes. I smiled back.
Without exchanging a word, we both knew that we had both been
mesmerized by the beautiful ballet of sunlight and snowfall. We both
knew that we had somehow been profoundly moved by and connected
through the experience.
Riding in the train a few moments later, I could not help thinking
that the potential for transformation exists within any moment. In that
small, fragmentary sliver of time on a cold train platform in Chicago, I
had understood that this person I had never meet and would likely never
see again, was, like me, enmeshed in all the beauty and fragility and
wonder and suffering and joy that life has to offer. I was reminded that
this understanding is the place from which empathy and love flow.
As that gentleman and I suddenly grasped, we are all
interconnected in ways that we only rarely glimpse. We are
relationships, bursting into existence in each new moment, with the
potential for transformation offered to us within each of those moments.
And this is where process theology posits a concept of divinity –
divinity at work in this world and in this reality, not in some
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supernatural realm. For Alfred North Whitehead, a key philosophical
concept was that you cannot create something out of nothing. Thus,
Whitehead thought that because there is ongoing novelty in the world –
we continue to have new creative possibilities from which to choose –
that there must be a God that holds all of these possibilities. He called
this idea of divinity as that which holds all potentialities that are and
ever were God’s “primordial nature”.
This, however, is a very different God than that of my Southern
Baptist childhood. First, for process theology, God is not an omnipotent,
supernatural being but is instead an emergent, everlasting process, both a
part of all that is and also containing everything past and present within
all of reality. This is divinity that, like us, is always becoming, and is
rooted squarely within the natural world, making everything that is
sacred. As our Unitarian transcendentalist forbearers might have put it,
there is a spark of divinity within each of us and that upholds all of us.
Further, the God envisioned in process theology does not control
the future. Instead, there is a divine essence that offers up new
possibilities, beckoning us toward better, more creative and life-
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fulfilling choices, in very real ways, making us co-partners in creating
the future.
When I was a kid, one of the questions that caused me to doubt my
original religion was the one about how could God be all loving and allpowerful, yet still allow so much oppression and suffering to exist in the
world? In process theology, God is not all-powerful, but does try to offer
us possibilities leading toward a vision of the good.
Such a conception of the divine also means that this is a presence
that experiences, feels and remembers all that we do. Whitehead called
this God’s “consequent nature”. In the book, A House for Hope: The
Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century, Unitarian
Universalist scholar Rebecca Ann Parker describes it as follows: “This is
not a despotic monarch, ruling the universe through coercion and threat,
sanctifying violence. This is not an unchanging, eternal reality from
which the imperfect can be condemned. This is not merely a metaphor,
but an actual presence, alive and afoot in the cosmos, an upholding and
sheltering presence that that receives and feels everything that happens
with compassion and justice, offering the world back to itself in every
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moment, with a fresh impulse to manifest the values of beauty, peace,
vitality and liberation.”
Now that is definitely not the God I learned about in Vacation
Bible School I attended in Port Arthur, Texas!
To be sure, some process philosophers would view these qualities
she attributes to a God or a divine presence as really just allegory for the
creative potentiality that exists within our universe, seeing no need for a
divinity to make the philosophy work. Dr. Parker even leaves room for
this possibility when she writes, “Does this God exist? My intuition says
yes. Yours may say no. However the question is answered, it is
provisional.”
For me, when we get a glimpse of the true depth and
expansiveness, the wondrous beauty, of our shared existence, ever
changing with our experience of that complex, fragile, sacred web of
existence of which we are part, as the gentleman and I did on that train
platform in Chicago – when we embrace the possibilities for
transformation bursting forth in each moment – the only words I have
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with enough symbolic power to describe such experiences are words like
“holy” or “divine”.
And I’m OK with leaving it there. For me, leaving some mystery is
a part of it. <<PAUSE>> So, I guess that makes me a process mystic.
Whether for you words like these are metaphor or they point
toward something that is beyond words, whether allegory or an actual
presence as Dr. Parker describes, I think the real beauty of what process
theology offers is an imagination of divinity that, based in our
interconnectedness, calls us toward a vision of creating a better world.
And it seems to me that a call, founded in a strong sense of
interconnectedness, which then moves us toward creating that better
world, is at the core of what Wildflower Church is all about.
So, I look forward to a process of becoming together over the next
year here at Wildflower. There is work to be done, challenges to face,
momentous decisions to be made. So too though, are there almost
endless creative potentialities.
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After all, from a process perspective, our future together does not
yet exist – it is still ours to create! Together, may we reach for the
transformative possibilities bursting forth in each new moment.
So may it be. Amen.