Beyond Words (May 20, 2007 by Nancy Irish)
Opening Reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson. #531 in Singing the Living Tradition.
(Read responsively by Debra Russ and Nancy Irish.)
The Oversoul
Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought;
that the Highest dwells within us,
that the sources of nature are in our own minds.
As there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads and the infinite heavens,
so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we,
the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.
I am constrained every moment to acknowledge
a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
There is deep power in which we exist
and whose beatitude is accessible to us.
Every moment when the individual
feels invaded by it is memorable.
It comes to the lowly and simple;
it comes to whosoever will put off
what is foreign and proud;
it comes as insight;
it comes as serenity and grandeur.
The soul’s health consists
in the fullness of its reception.
For ever and ever the influx
of this better and more universal self
is new and unsearchable.
Within us is the soul of the whole;
the wise silence, the universal beauty,
to which every part and particle
is equally related; the eternal One.
When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius;
when it breathes through our will, it is virtue;
when it flows through our affections,
it is love.
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During the past year, Barb Michael and I have introduced songs from the new Unitarian Universalist songbook, “Singing the Journey,” that express the six sources from which this faith draws its living tradition. Along with the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism, the six sources help us define and understand what this faith is all about.
Each source will, naturally, be more meaningful to some than to others, but it is important that we are familiar with them all. Why is it important? So we can better understand and respect the spiritual paths of our fellow UU members and friends, and, so we can be aware of multiple avenues for our own intellectual and spiritual growth within this tradition called Unitarian Universalism.
The five sources we have covered so far are these:
--Wisdom from the World’s Religions;
--Words and Deeds of Prophetic Men and Women;
--Humanist Teachings;
--Jewish and Christian Teachings; and
--Earth-Centered Traditions.
Today we consider the final Unitarian Universalist source, Transcending Mystery and Wonder. This is the source that addresses that which is beyond words. Today I will address what is beyond words in typical Unitarian fashion: with verbiage. My preference would be to experience the transcending mystery and wonder as one body, by laying on our backs gazing at the stars together, in silence or singing together around a fire, or by sitting quietly by the great Lake Superior. (Sitting by the big lake together will have to wait until our August 5th service, when we will do just that.)
This morning I will rely heavily on the writing and thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Unitarian minister of the 19th century whose thinking has most influenced and inspired Unitarianism around this source. Perhaps you will conclude, as I have in the process of researching and pondering this source, that it is a first cousin to that of Earth-centered traditions.
The long version of this source, named first among the six sources, is as follows:
Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.
In my way of thinking, the holiest of trinities is that of body, mind, and spirit. What connects all life in the realm of the body, or physical plane, is the Earth. What connects us all in the mental realm is what Carl Jung called “the collective consciousness.” What connects and transcends our individual spirits is what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the oversoul.” There is, Emerson wrote, “a universal soul,” and believed, as I do, that this universal soul, or spirit, is most readily tapped through Nature. If Emerson were alive today, I think he would classify as a Unitarian pagan.
That most scholarly of academic references, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, states that the transcendentalists, of whom Emerson was the leading figure, believed that a fundamental continuity exists between humans, nature, and the divine (or the Spirit of Life, known by many names). What is beyond nature is revealed through nature. In Emerson’s philosophy, Nature is an indication of a deeper reality.
…in thee resides
The Spirit that lives in all;
And thou canst learn the laws of nature
Because its author is latent in thy breast.
Emerson’s career began, in fact, with a short book, Nature, published anonymously in 1836. Among the leading intellects of the 19th century, he argued against book knowledge and in favor of lived experience: "Only so much do I know, as I have lived," he said. He believed that Nature is the most important influence on the mind.
Immersion in nature, Emerson said, compensates us in our most difficult adversity, and provides a sanctification of experience that is profoundly religious —the direct religious experience that Emerson was to call for all his life. The fundamental knowledge of nature that circulates through us is the basis of all human knowledge, but cannot be distinguished, in Emerson's thought, from divine understanding. Emerson rested his abiding faith in the individual—"trust thyself,” he said—trusting a fundamental link between each person and the divine reality, or nature, that works through him.
In the following poem, Emerson speaks of two rivers….one of the natural world and the one of the spirit. The river he addresses, the Musketaquit, is the local Native American name for what the white settlers called the Concord River.
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through the Concord Plain.
Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.
Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.
So forth and brighter fares my stream,--
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness taints its equal gleam,
And ages drop in it like rain.
Emerson also believed that matter and spirit are not opposed but reflect a critical unity of experience. The concepts of “unity” and “flux” critical to his philosophy are also basic to Buddhism: indeed, Emerson wrote that “the Buddhist . . . is a Transcendentalist.”
In the following poem, entitled Blight, Emerson laments the loss of the sense of unity between matter and spirit that so characterizes the western mind since the dawn of the scientific paradigm.
(“Bowen” – a medieval men’s society; “unitarian” used in a generic sense; “pottage” -- pulp)
But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes.
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the Bowen,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And, wheretoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, 'Not in us;'
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant and mineral say, 'Not in us;'
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain;
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Deb Russ and I share a love of tapping into mystery and wonder, and agree that art and poetry come closest to capturing its essence. We will close with some poetry from other cultural traditions to help convey the meaning of “transcending mystery and wonder,” the first source of Unitarian wisdom and tradition.
(Deb)
O luminous being of shining lakewaters,
And luminous still
In clay sun-cracked and hardened,
When the waters have gone.
O luminous being in the riches of harvest
And luminous still in
The famine that follows
When harvests all fail.
O luminous being
Suddenly bright in night lightening,
You are luminous still in the darkness that settles
When lightening is spent.
Mansur Al Halaj (10th Century Persian Sufi)
(Nancy)
The great sea has set me in motion,
set me adrift,
moving me like a weed in a river.
The sky and the strong wind
have moved the spirit inside me
til I am carried away
trembling with joy.
Uvavnuk (Inuit Shaman)
(Deb)
I am through with everything but you.
I am dying into your mystery, and
Dying, I am now no other than that mystery.
I open to your majesty as an orchard
Welcomes rain, and twenty times that.
I am rejoicing. I am a beggar
Given gold with no giver in sight.
Not united, not separated, I try
Whispering perfection, but no
Sound comes. You are beyond
Description, beyond even
Reason to be.
We are fishes in your sea.
We are your gestures
And your pleasures.
But O, my love, you are not
Approached by thoughts
Like these.
Love
Is not approached
by thought at all.
Rumi
Closing Reading by Robert T. Weston. #530 in The Living Tradition.
(Read responsively by Congregation and Debra and Nancy)
Out of the Stars
Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity,
here have we come,
Stardust and sunlight,
mingling through time and through space.
Out of the stars have we come,
up from time.
Out of the stars have we come.
Time out of time before time
in the vastness of space,
earth spun to orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn,
the boiling of seas.
Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight;
This is our home;
Out of the stars have we come.
Mystery hidden in mystery,
back through all time;
Mystery rising from rocks
in the storm and the sea.
Out of the stars, rising from rocks
and the sea,
kindled by sunlight on earth,
arose life.
Ponder this thing in your heart,
life up from sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing,
mates to love.
Life from the sea, warmed by sun,
washed by rain,
life from within, giving birth,
rose to love.
This is the wonder of time;
this is the marvel of space;
out of the stars swung the earth;
life upon earth rose to love.
This is the marvel of life,
rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder:
sing that we live.