Great Awakenings: Can You Feel It?

Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church Of Lafayette

April 27, 2003

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Reading

Words of Beverly Wildung Harrrison

We know and value the world, if we know and value it, through our ability to touch, to hear, to see. Perception is foundational to conception. Ideas are dependent on our sensuality. Feeling is the basic bodily ingredient that mediates our connectedness to the world. All power, including intellectual power, is rooted in feeling. If feeling is damaged or cut off, our power to image the world and act into it is destroyed and our rationality is impaired. But it is not merely the power to conceive the world that is lost. Our power to value the world gives way as well. If we are not perceptive in discerning our feelings, or if we do not know what we feel, we cannot be effective moral agents. Then the moral question is not "what do I feel?" but rather "what do I do with what I feel?"

We live in a time when massive and accumulated injustice, acted out over time, encounters answer in the rising anger of those whose dignity and life are being threatened by collective patterns of privilege that have to be undone.  In a world such as this, actively pursuing the works of love will often mean doing all we can to stop the crucifixions, resisting the evil as best we can, or mitigating the suffering of those who are the victims of our humanly disordered relations. In the midst of such a world, it is still within the power of love to keep us in the knowledge that none of us were born only to die, that we were meant to have the gift of life, to know the power of relation and to pass it on. We should not make light of our power to rage against the dying of the light. It is the root of the power of love.

Sermon

You know you make me want to shout! (Song by the Isely Brothers) Sung by minister.

Okay, nevermind, we don’t really do that here.  Our outbreaks are small ones. Sometimes we leak a little crankiness with one another...but never mind about that now.  And I’m not interested in rolling in the aisles—well, a few people, of course, have permission to roll in the aisles, but they’re very short--and I don’t want to create emotional chaos here – but I do want to talk about emotions.  And I don’t mean “feelings, whoa”.  I mean emotions – those things that move us.  For those of you under twenty eight I don’t mean some new internet discovery – tired of ebay, e-mail, been around the eworld in plane – no – I mean emotions.  I got em.  You got em.  We all got’em but we don’t much like to factor ‘em into the equation.  A while back, when the board was giving me their very gentle UUA e-valuation my first year here one of the many just why is this question here questions that appeared on the UUA form was “Emotional Content of sermons?”  No explanation – just that vague phrase.  Perhaps the UUA hadn’t read enough Plato to know that a decent answer requires a decent question – but we tried to answer – we really did.  Some felt that the sermons were fine emotionally – enough emotion – whatever that meant and we weren’t at all collectively sure – some felt that the sermons weren’t emotional enough.  Others I asked off the board later, out of curiosity, felt variously -- that the sermons were emotional enough, not emotional enough, and too emotional.  Nevertheless, you’re likely wondering – as we were all of us – what on earth did that question really mean?  What were they driving at?  Did the UUA really care about the answer or was it just a test to see if we liked one another enough to work at answering something together that seemed so open to various interpretation.  Anyway – the question stayed with me until finally I decided that it was probably just a good idea to talk about emotion – that’s what we do – you know the old joke – about – Heaven and the conversation about Heaven – that UU’s would rather follow the sign to the conversation about Heaven than actually go to Heaven.  I know I would – since I’m far more likely to find the conversation about Heaven in any reality than I am to find Heaven itself – in any reality.  But here I want to talk about Emotion – Because we’re guaranteed to find it everywhere.

We need to talk about emotion – because – in spite of all the pop psychology choking us to death with our feelings and the ways that our emotions are used to control our responses if you open the paper at all, you know exactly how that works– we have relatively little skill or comfort in the arena of human emotion.  Yet, it’s essential to our wholeness – as individuals, families, a community, and as an endangered planet – it’s essential to acknowledge our complexity, our mind/body/heart/spirit/motion/emotion/reasoning/faithful selves. Wholeness. 

Each Sunday is an invitation to wholeness – which, of course, – in many ways means something different to each one of us.  But – take just a moment and look around at this building lit with stained glass, the small candles that burn at the front -- the gathered people.  We sit together in this invitation -- the hard work of religion is the making of wholeness.  For life will wear on us too often – times even break us.  So we make this place for the making of wholeness: the binding of wounds, the opening of minds, the healing of hearts, the blazing of trails.  The human work that is never completed.

This church was begun 54 years ago by a small group of freethinking folk who needed – wholeness.  A place in the wilderness – where they could hear and speak free thoughts.  Where they could be honestly themselves and honor that exploring spirit that was too often heretical to their religions of origin.  They founded a place of peace within a community that was – even as it can be today – a hard place for a free thinker to feel at home.  Though the faces have changed, the histories are different, and the many styles – the many styles -- are different, the yearning today is the same – to find a home for the free spirit – a community in which free thought is honored, affirmed, and practiced.  To be at home in wholeness.

And yet, the patterns and expectations of the past dwell with us and within us.  They shape our world and ourselves.  The past shapes the present.

            When I was in college I studied philosophy.  Old School philosophy – but don’t worry – if you don’t know who Leibniz was, or Spinoza, or Kant – it’s okay – this sermon should be an all pieces included project.  It’s useful though to study philosophy because you can get an idea of what ideas have floated around this earth that may offer hope and ideas that may have gotten us into the mess in which we find ourselves.  But it isn’t really necessary – you just need to remember that our world wasn’t built in a day – not the material world nor the world of ideas – not that I’m saying that they are separate and distinct – that would be another sermon.  Anyway, there I was studying the old boys – and something just wasn’t working for me -- something was missing – something I wasn’t GETTING.  I mean – PHILO -- love– Sophia- wisdom – what could be more beautiful, more valuable, more alive – than the love of wisdom? Philosophy.  I think in my youth I may have been misled by the word itself.  I thought that anything that might put the love of wisdom – the love of the human exploration for meaning – right out front must be pretty cool.  And I did find the most amazing people – new people and ancient people long gone, who, in fact, loved wisdom enough to dedicate their lives to it – but somehow had -- tied their sneaker laces together on the path and tripped.  It had taken thousands of years for philosophy to get to the place where just a few people were beginning to ask: “But what’s the world really like – I mean the world outside the armchair?”

I’m rattling some marbles in my hand.  There was this philosopher named Leibniz who had this theory that we were all like little internalized worlds – at least that’s how I understood him at the time.  We were each this sort of personal movie theater of experiences rolling through a cosmos separate – but, you know, sort of running into one another – like these marbles – I mean if they roll around their trajectories may change some but really they’re very separate, distinct, and internally unaffected by one another.  It was too much for me.  How could it all boil down to this?  Talk about losing your marbles.  That’s not what being human feels like – feels…it feels…we feel… you, she, he, and they feel.  Where was real humanity in all this love of wisdom? 

            Emotion had a marginalized place in philosophy.  Wisdom was somehow the concern of the mind and not the heart.  The love of wisdom was seated by the Greeks very firmly in the mind – that place where we might come closest to ideas, which were the real things.  You know -- what is real is not this pulpit – but the way in which this pulpit participates in the idea of pulpitness.  This chair is not the real chair – it is the idea of a chair which is real and.  Still – you got to plant your behind somewhere with a modicum of faith.  But back to the heart -- the heart was instead the birthplace of mindless urgings and unreflective actions.  For the most part, emotion was seen as an inconvenience to the practice of a moral life.  Our emotions were seen as being in the way of our moral lives – I mean – look at the mess they could make of things – for one thing -- emotions could not be measured and, as Socrates said – “the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to measure that which is opposed to measure is one of the inferior principles of the soul” Let’s leave our rulers in our pockets and move on.

Emotions were a low trouble getting people to display sentiments that would be sloppy – sometimes, you know, even – womanly.  If you let emotions have a hand in things all kinds of chaos could break loose – people might become imaginative, soft, enient when there were laws to be upheld.  The only valuable feeling, emotion, was love of wisdom -- residing in the head and directed beyond the apparent world. From the time of Plato, philosophy would weave and bob sometimes closer and sometimes farther from emotion sometimes further from it – but essentially the outcome was always the same – it was a wretched inconvenience and raised questions that would undoubtedly lead to serious interruptions of the orderly governance of people and of goods.

The record of emotion in the hands of religion wasn’t much better – and, in some ways, far worse.  I need to explain, this is the groundwork of what I want to talk about, which will come later possibly not this Sunday, but certainly not next Sunday, but the next one after. But we’re starting with some small steps to understand how we got to the mess in which we sit at present.  So there’s more than this history, but we need to know where we’re located.  The Jewish and Christian traditions were of one voice in encouraging only two major strands of permissible and honorable emotion.  One was Righteous Anger, the other was Sacrificial Love.  The rest of the family of emotion was relegated to the status of poor relation whose place it was to heed The Law and stay out of sight.

Jeremiah warned: “Behold, he comes up like clouds, his chariots like the whirlwind; woe to us!  O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved.”  So spoke the prophet.  In Revelation it was written: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.”  And in Luke Acts it was written: Peter and the apostles answered, "We must obey God rather than men. When the council had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. And the apostles left the presence of the council, rejoicing.”

So between Righteous Anger and Sacrificial Love we lived for a very long time.  This, including the fear of God has been a volatile combination – resulting in crucifixions, religious empire, crusades, witch burnings, pogroms, Inquisitions. Not pretty. Where feeling is marginalized it’s certain that free thought will follow – or leads. Ideas are as dangerous as feelings and profoundly connected to them.  All the not now nearly so new philosophers I studied arose in response to all this chaos – all this at times heartless religion, at times mindless religion – all the brutality of nation states, the superstitions and the power hoarding on all sides.  The philosophers hungered for peace, ethics, and reason -- and they reasoned, and they reasoned, and they reasoned.  And they were willing to argue and wrestle and even die to labor toward Enlightenment. 

Neither reason nor emotion vanish – they rumble in the hearts and minds of the people – fomenting revolution, evolution, creativity, and desolation.  

But what’s most pertinent to us – now that we have a little bit of history – is what happened when all this religion and philosophy arrived on the shores of this great brand spanking new world, which, after a couple of hundred years produced the perfect conditions for our emergence.  Here was a land – rid of its spiritually uninformed natives – where a decent well- behaved religion could flourish – cleansing its sanctuaries of ornament and its Sunday mornings of passion.  They were simple and pure folk.

Then -- It was in the 17^th and 18^th centuries that the forces of reason and democracy began to prey upon our bucolic shores.  On the one hand there were dedicated rationalist church men – the staid church fathers, who all of a sudden wanted to apply the bright light of reason to the scriptures and were working to see in the Bible the messages that Jesus had left that had become somehow distorted.  They were ready for a democratic faith based upon reason – cool, quiet, and systematic.  On the other there were these wild religious elements that wanted to institute a democracy so radical that any person might have a one on one relationship –  living, talking, crying, shouting, and intimate relationship with God. And this group – largely the country folk – anyway this group came awake as they saw it – into a democratic faith based on feeling, experience, and passion.  And, of course – righteous anger, sacrificial love and the fear of God.  In one Great Awakening they met and butted heads and hearts.  And in that awakening – that began on the heels of our Revolution – Unitarianism found its first fullest voice.  These early Unitarians sought to defend their newfound liberty of reason from the revivalists.  In the process they began to discover just how new they really were – they wanted a purer, more reasonable God to go with their newly ordered and freed universe.  They wanted to allow freedom of conscience – untainted by freedom of sentiment – and ethical action freed from the wild excesses of emotion.  They wanted their God to be a single God, a logical possibility, who could adhere to and shape the laws of science.  Many were scientists and doctors themselves.  In 1825 they formed the Unitarian Association.  The home of freedom of conscience and reason unbounded and they were fine – for a moment – in short order they were assailed by one of their own… Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom we’ll talk about in another few weeks.  He wasn’t a wild revivalist – though some of his relations were, but others of his relations were staunch severe Unitarians.  He posed a challenge because he wanted to awaken Unitarianism and find a balance between reason and emotion, between the ideas that our experience of divinity was simply through deductive reasoning or through felt experience.  “Do you reason what is holy or experience what is holy?” He felt you could do both.  He unleashed a conflict we haven’t been able to settle since. 

So we sit together today – in our seeking for wholeness ,caught on the horns of the old dilemmas – not really dilemmas – but fears.  We still need reason – we need emotion – it may be terribly unskillful – but we have it – in heartloads.  And yet – no serious moral philosophy nor western religion has moved further than the use of moral law or the threat of damnation to control action – and none have really attempted to do more than shunt emotion to the side.

When we talk here about the numbers of hymns, the use of candles, the place of decoration, the creation of a sacred space, the use of responsive readings, the desire for silence or choir, the sharing of joys and sorrows, talk back, the place of clerical garb, the shape of seating, the role of the minister, and on and on -- we are yet carrying on the ancient dilemma.  Can you feel it? Can you think it? Can you feel it and think it at one and the same time?  It is no wonder that even out of Boston a paper could come to us with such a vague question such as “Emotional Content of Services?”  We are in fact vague as a movement upon this matter.  But this vagueness could cost us our lives -- we must take it seriously.  For our times have changed and our understanding has changed and we now know that we cannot silence our feelings, our emotions.  They are source of our strength, source of our insight, home of our values. 

When we get together again we’ll talk further about exactly how that works, but I just want to remind you of what Beverly Harrison said, “Knowledge is rooted in sensuality. We know and value the world, if we know it and value it, through our ability to touch, hear, see.  All power, including intellectual power, is rooted in feeling.” We come in sensing, learning to discriminate between ourselves and the world around us.  Having things reflected back, integrating them into our minds.  There is not a barrier between our thought and our feeling.  It’s essential to our wholeness – as individuals, families, and community, as an endangered planet – to acknowledge this complexity, that lives within us, because in it our power is hidden. 

When Nina Simone sings, when Beverly Harrison speaks they are saying your feelings are a signpost inside you to a deeper truth.  Don’t just respond to the feeling, study it, learn it, understand its sources, gain insight, and through that insight be moved, find motion in the world, motion which can transform.  The task we face here as a congregation is to create together-- ongoing in ways that change over time-- a place that encourages our wholeness and motion forward together and into the world.  As a loving force for transformation. 

Beverly Harrison said we must never lose touch with the fact that all serious human moral activity, especially action for social change, takes its bearing from the rising power of human anger.  Anger can be frightening, but let us not be frightened.  Such anger is a signal that change is called for, that transformation in relation is required.  Therefore -- The other question is not simply what do we feel but what do we do with it?  Into what bowl do we offer our feelings, our angers, our hopes, our fears so that they are transformed themselves into action which can transform the world. This is a sacred hour in which we gather, so many things are possible as we deepen our understanding and our understanding is deep in our bodies and our emotions.  Let us be insightful and awakened and connected -- let us be mindful of all we feel as we sit together in this room ready to go forth into the world.

Closing reading

We are not called to practice the virtue of sacrifice. We are called to express, embody, share, celebrate the gift of life, and to pass it on! We are called to reach out, to deepen relationship, or to right wrong relations-those that deny, distort, or prevent human dignity from arising-as we recall each other into the power of personhood. We are called to journey this way, to stay in and with this radical power of love.