What makes us different
from a smart phone?
What is it that we have
in common with a tree?
Or let’s just ask the
question at the heart of the matter- what is life?
We know it when we see
it, right? When you see a tree in spring bursting out in those luminous bright
green leaves, you know right away that something different is happening there
than in the wooden fence that runs right by it.
Now I know there are some ambiguities on the margins of life
that scientists and philosophers have been debating for millennia, but today I
want to talk about life that is unmistakable. A child bursting onto the
playground at recess. A turkey defending his territory. Us, here in this room
together right now.
Some have argued over
the centuries that we, and other animals, are not that different from a
machine- from a toaster or a smart phone. I think that is a semantic argument.
Even a child can tell that we, and a turkey and a tree are different from a smartphone.
Just because we have trouble explaining it doesn’t mean we don’t know it in our
guts.
One way I try to wrap
my head around this is using systems theory. This is the way of looking at the
world not as a collection of disparate parts, but as whole things. One
principle of systems theory is that parts come together to make a system. Cells
make up a body. Bacteria and beavers and fish and plants make up an eco-system.
People make up a church. One of the characteristics of a system is that it has
“emergent properties.” These are properties that the whole has that individual
parts together don’t have. So for example if you put a bunch of brain cells in
a petri dish, you don’t have a brain. If
you put a collection of organs together you don’t have a living being. A random
collection of 30 people at bus stop is not a church.
Lately when I hear the
phrase “Spirit of Life” this is what I think of- that special quality that
living things have that a toaster does not. Maybe the “spirit of life” is an emergent property
-- that which emerges from a system that
does not emerge from a collection of disparate pieces.
Each Sunday in this
church for the past several years we have sing “Spirit of Life” just as we did
today. I suspect that not all of you thought of the emergent properties of
systems when you sang that. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that each
person in this room imagined something different when they sang those words. But
in all the time I’ve been serving UU churches no one has ever complained that
when they sung that song that they felt like a hypocrite. There is a spaciousness about those words that
leaves room for a lot of different beliefs.
For the past year we
have been talking about a “Language of Reverence” for Unitarian Universalists
-- a language that we could use to express deeper truths. We have wondered
together whether the language we use shapes our ability to understand and
communicate such truths. We have talked about words like “Prayer” and
“conversion” – some of which are sticky words that bog us down with their
layers of meaning and history. We’ve talked bout reclaiming those words as our
own- they are part of our 400 year history, and they are ours as much as any
other.
But today I suggest
that there are also words that express important religious truths that feel a
lot less sticky. Phrases that feel like ours.
Yes, not only do we have the choice to reclaim those sticky words -- those
traditional theological words --but we can build our own language of reverence.
A colleague of mine, Scott Prinster, explained to me that the phrase “Spirit of
life” (which I had assumed was something
UUs came up with in the 60s) has actually been used by Unitarian writers as
early as the 1830s, and that the phrase
existed well back into the 1700s.
One of the things I
like about this phrase is that it is grounded in the world- in the life that we
know. The first source of our living tradition is “direct experience” and life
is something each one of us has experienced directly. Ours is a tradition that suggests
we have a right to expect our own experience to harmonize with our theology.
Ours is a faith that doesn’t require a leap between what we know and what we
believe.
“Spirit of life” draws
a wide circle, one that can include atheists, agnostics and theists. If someone from the church down the street
here asked if I believed in God, I would not know whether to answer yes, no or
maybe, because the word “God” means such a specific thing in each religious
tradition. People have been killing one another for centuries over the exact
meaning of that word.
But I know with some
certainty that I believe in the spirit of life. I’ve felt it every day. And I
have seen it go- like when I saw the life pass from my dog Sandy – it was like
a light had gone out in her eyes. It was unmistakable- it takes no theological
leap to believe in life.
But I do, in fact, make
a theological leap- I believe that the divine is not separate from life. This
is called Pantheism (a favorite heresy for both Jewish and Christian
traditions) -- God is all that exists,
and this universe is not different from God. I recognized myself as a pantheist
the first time I heard it from the pulpit at a UU church some 30 years ago.
Then a teacher in Seminary introduced me to “Panentheism” which means that the
universe is a sub-set of God—that is to say, God is the universe plus something
more. When I was introduced to Systems theory, I got excited by the idea that the
“something more” of panentheism is the emergent properties of the system of all that is. Does the universe
have consciousness? I don’t know. I am agnostic on that point. But as a Universalist I believe in the
one-ness of everything, and when I hear
that phrase “Spirit of Life” I don’t feel like an agnostic, because I have felt
that spirit of life in my own body and
in the world every day. It is a phrase that brings us back from heady
theological explorations -- back into the lived world we know and share.
When I was studying the history of
the Universe on my previous sabbatical we were introduced to the radical idea
that the actual scientific story of who we are and where we came from could be
as powerful as those myths and legends of our traditional cannon. I suppose I
should not have been surprised by this idea. Growing up UU I had always been
taught that the findings of science could be considered a source of wisdom-- the wisdom of the life we observe all around
us.
When Carolyn McDade wrote the song we
sing each week, late one night in the early 1980s, she was driving her close
friend Pat Simon home from a meeting for Central American solidarity... What she remembers most clearly was the
feeling she had. “When I got to Pat’s house, I told her, ‘I feel like a piece
of dried cardboard that has lain in the attic for years. Just open wide the
door, and I’ll be dust.’ I was tired, not with my community but with the world.
She just sat with me, and I loved her for sitting with me.” McDade then drove
to her own home in Newtonville. “I walked through my house in the dark, found my
piano, and that was my prayer: May I not drop out. It was not written, but
prayed. I knew more than anything that I wanted to continue in faith with the
movement.”[i]
Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.
In this song, in this
very personal prayer, here is the point where our conversation turns from an
abstract one about theology to a more practical concern- what do I call on,
what do I turn to when I am “like a piece of dried cardboard that has lain in
the attic for years?” What can we turn to not only for ourselves, but so that
we can continue to live with compassion and work for justice in our world? Can
we who are Atheist and Agnostic about a traditional understanding of God, can
there be some hope for us in life itself?
In considering the emergence of life forms that first photosynthesized or
breathed air and whether or not these life forms had any consciousness of this
amazing process, scientists Swimme and Berry write that “A primitive eukaryotic
cell would, for instance, be able to detect a temperature gradient, turning
itself toward warming regions. It would
possess a limited ability to sense nutrient densities and orient itself to
their thickest direction.”[1] So even our most basic ancestors must have been
guided by some life-sustaining
drive.
This drive brings to mind the words
of Lebanese poet, artist and writer Kahlil Gibran “Your children are not your
children. They are the sons and the daughters of Life's longing for itself" … Life’ s
longing for itself. I know that feeling. I have experienced it in my bones. I
don’t understand it, but I know it. For me that longing of life for life is
bound up in the phrase “Spirit of Life.”
One of the things we know for sure about life, is that it fights with
great tenacity and creativity to keep on living. Not only the individual
fighting for its own life, but our shared desire that even when each one of is
gone, that life itself should persist.
I find genuine hope in the indisputable fact
that when life on earth was running out of food and on the brink of collapse,
somehow photosynthesis was born. And when Photosynthesis inundated the earth
with this poisonous gas called oxygen,
life learned to breathe it. That’s the spirit of life. Seeing a tree (that for
all the world looked dead during the winter) begin to burst out with those
amazing spring green leaves- that requires no leap of faith. It is hope
embodied.
Here’s another fact-
you are alive. Right now. Right in this
moment. Whatever it is that brings a tree out of dormancy in the spring,
whatever it is that evolved photosynthesis, that “spirit of life” is indisputably within you. So how much of a
leap is it to believe that we can call on that “spirit of life” – not as some
transcendent spirit from above, but as that which is intrinsic to all living
beings –we can reach down deep into ourselves as a tree reaches down deep into
its roots at the end of winter, and we can call it up when want to come back
from our own winter, when we are dry as a piece of cardboard.
The Unitarian writers who
were using the phrase “Spirit of Life” in the 1830s did not yet have the benefit
of Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” They undoubtedly would not have explained it
the way I just did. But that’s part of why this is part of our vocabulary of
faith – because it is expansive enough to include the old traditional
theologies, and all that science has uncovered in the last century or so. Regardless
of your theology, this song reminds us that there is something larger than
ourselves we can call one when we are dry, when we need hope. It is laying in
your own beating heart right now.
[i] http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/35893.shtml Carolyn McDade's spirit of life By Kimberly
French
Fall 2007 8.18.07
Fall 2007 8.18.07
