"Humanistic Spirituality"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

06/19/05

The first essential [of spirituality] is an awakening, a sense of the absence of spirituality, the realized need of giving to our lives a new and higher quality; first there must be the hunger before there can be the satisfaction. . . . In the region of mental activity which is called the spiritual life vagueness is apt to prevail, the outlines of thought are apt to be blurred, the feelings aroused are apt to be indistinct and transitory. The word spiritual becomes a synonym of muddy thought and misty emotionalism. If there were another word in the language to take its place, it would be well to use it. But there is not. We must use the word spiritual despite its associations and its abuse. . . .

The spiritual life may be described by its characteristic marks of serenity, a certain inwardness, a measure of saintliness. By the latter we are not to understand merely this aspiration after virtue or after a lofty ideal, still pursued and still eluding, but to a certain extent the embodiment of this ideal in the life – virtue become a normal experience like the inhalation and exhalation of breath! Moreover, the spiritually-minded seem always to be possessed of a great secret. . . . The secret in this case consists in the insight vouchsafed to the spiritually minded of the true end of human existence.

I speak periodically about spirituality. That is reasonable, given that one of the principles of our religious association is declared to be “encouragement to spiritual growth.” The problem we come up against, time and again, is the one to which Felix Adler referred in our reading: “the reality that the word spiritual becomes a synonym of muddy thought and misty emotionalism.” We spoke earlier this year about the varieties of spiritual perspectives and the problem that people who look at spirituality from one perspective, commonly deny the spirituality of those with a differing perspective. (I hasten to add that this is not a problem with truly spiritual people – only with aspirants – those who would like to think of themselves as spiritual. One of the characteristics of the truly spiritual is that they do not judge others, but we will come to that in a moment.)

I have, in the past, referred people to the useful www.beliefnet.com which has a quiz that helps one see with which religious groups they have the most in common. Beliefnet.com also has a quiz to determine your “spiritual type.” Depending on your score, you are judged to be a:

The problem with that quiz is that it is really a measure of orthodox spirituality. To be a “candidate for clergy,” one must have a firm belief in traditional religion. I, it may or may not surprise you, came out an “Active Spiritual Seeker,” the comment about which is “spiritual, but turned off by organized religion.” Fortunately, I am not associated with any “organized” religion.

There is a lot of talk about spirituality today. When I googled “spirituality,” I found 17,800,000 references. That is more than four times as many as “patriotism,” which had only 4,340,000. Then, checking out the validity of that finding, I discovered that “sex” had 81 million, “Beauty” had 93 million, “Iraq” had 115 million, “success” had 224 million, and “good” had 442 million. This suggests that spirituality may not be quite as hot a topic as we believe, but up there nonetheless.

It is still true that there is a lot of talk about spirituality, and most often it is heard in the almost trite context of “I am spiritual, but not religious.”

I have nothing against spirituality in itself, but I am concerned with the way it is debasing language by (wittingly or not) turning religion into a bad word. My students during the last decade of my teaching are my population. Spirituality was invariably a good word for them; I never encountered a student who did not think that she had a spiritual side to her nature. Religion, by contrast, was not a good word for them; they equated it with dogmatism (we have the truth and everybody else is going to hell) and moralism (don’t do this, that, and the other thing). At first I attributed this to unfortunate brushes they had had with churches and synagogues, but toward the end I came to suspect that they were merely stereotypes they had picked up on campus, for as far as I could tell, most of them seemed never to have darkened a church door.

There is no question but that there is a spiritual hunger today. Ronald Rolheiser in his book The Holy Longing, asserts:

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.

The problem with our material success, our prosperity, in this country is that it makes clear our spiritual unrest. Abraham Maslow suggested years ago that people who are struggling to survive, to provide the basic needs for shelter, food, and safety, do not have the time or energy to deal with what we call the spiritual needs. But when you attain those basic needs, you then have the “luxury” or curse of encountering that deep unrest. Those who are old enough may remember the Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” Buying more “things” does not fill that hole. Alcohol, drugs and sex are means of distraction or numbing, but they do not really satisfy the hunger.

There is abundant evidence that no more than the same cuisine satisfies all of our hungers for food, no single approach to spirituality satisfies the spiritual unrest of everyone who experiences it. I believe it is Huston Smith who has used the analogy of looking at a source of light through a variety of stained glass windows. It is the same light, but it appears differently through the different windows.

As to this being a largely a contemporary issue, the truth is that I was impelled to this sermon by Felix Adler’s little book, The Essentials of Spirituality, which was written in 1905 - 100 years ago. Adler, who was one of the founders of our cousin, the Ethical Culture movement, sensed a hunger for spirituality in America a century ago. Like Unitarian Universalism, Ethical Culture is rooted in human experience rather than supernaturalism. Adler doesn’t use the word “humanistic,” but it is descriptive of his writing. He defines what I believe is a genuine and deep spirituality without resorting to the supernatural.

Constituted as we are, there exist for us lower and higher ends. This distinction is fundamental for ethics. Food is necessary; without it we cannot live. But the getting of food – however necessary – is a lower end. Knowledge is a necessary end, and a higher one. The practical moral ends, such as the reformation of prisons, the improvement of the dwellings of the poor, are yet higher ends. But above all these is the highest end, that of moral completeness, of perfection, not in one particular but in every particular. Spirituality consists in always keeping in view this supreme end. The spiritually minded person is one who regards whatever he [or she] undertakes from the point of view of its hindering or furthering attainment of the supreme end. If a river had a consciousness like the human consciousness, we might imagine that it hears the murmur of the distant sea from the very moment when it leaves its source, and that the murmur grows clearer and clearer as the river flows on its way, welcoming every tributary it receives as adding to the volume which it will contribute to the sea, rejoicing at every turn and bend in its long course that brings it nearer to its goal. Such is the consciousness of a spiritually-minded human being.

Adler went on to offer three conditions that are involved in this kind of living.

The first is being able to detach oneself from the daily grind so as to be able to focus on the larger perspective. I would suggest that the spiritually-minded person is one who is able to see the forest and the trees. We sometimes think of those persons as spiritual who are almost oblivious to the day-to-day world, whose focus on the ultimate is such that they refuse to be distracted by the everyday world. What Adler described as spiritual is the person who is able to switch back and forth between the mundane and the ultimate.

Attaining this requires that one take the time, regularly, to pull back, to use a very wide angle lens, to check out the direction in which he or she is going. If you use the internet mapping programs, you can zoom to see every intersection you will encounter, or you can pull back to see only the major ones, or the highways, or the interstates. Or you can also, on the internet, see your house from a satellite, or your neighborhood, or your city, or your state or region or hemisphere or the earth itself.

I occasionally have the experience of being able to look at what I am doing in a larger context. When I do, many of the things that seem like major problems become molehills. Genuine spiritual practice involves setting aside a time every day to look at our lives in that way – to be able to correct our course if we are slipping off it. One of the disciplines that seems to help some is journaling – taking the time each day to reflect on and to record what the day has brought – opportunities taken and missed to further our life journeys. Some get spiritual direction by setting aside a time each day for reading literature which helps them focus. Those who are genuinely spiritual almost radiate a conviction that they are on course. Those who emphatically tell you that they have seen the light, probably have not – they are trying to convince themselves.

Adler’s second condition is living “as if this hour were thy last.” Most of us fritter away our lives as if we have an inexhaustible supply. There was another Peggy Lee song out the past, “Manyana, Manyana, Manyana is good enough for me.” As I recall, it included a verse about a leaky roof that never had to be patched when it was sunny out, so it was put off until tomorrow (manyana.) Living with the reality of death is not inherently morbid, although some neuroses may lead people to such a place. It is a matter of acceptance of our finitude. When we pull back to the larger perspective, it reminds us that our time, our life, is only a part of the parade. Life does not begin nor end with us. We are a part of it, we have a role to play, but we are not what life is about.

The frank facing of death has the effect of sifting out the true values of life from the false, the things that are worthwhile from the things that are not worthwhile, the things that are related to the highest end from those related to the lower partial ends. The precept, “Live as if this hour were thy last,” is enjoined as a touchstone; not for the purpose of dampening the healthy relish of life, but as a means of enhancing the relish for real living, the kind of living that is devoted to things really worthwhile.

One of the truly great discussions I remember from my days in my church youth group was the one in which we were asked to imagine that we had only 24 hours to live. What would we do? The lesson was that we never know when our last 24 hours have begun, so it makes sense to always live as if we are in them. There are, of course, some people who would try to fill the last 24 hours with as much immediate pleasure as possible, but I don’t believe they are in the majority.

I know that personally, when I have encountered death, in those who are in their last hours, or in talking with a family about someone who has died, I find that it has helped me to focus on life’s deeper meanings.

Adler’s third condition of the spiritual life, which he attests “comes nearer to the heart of the matter than anything else” addresses our sense of oneness with humankind, our commitment to the worth and dignity of every person. “Realize the unity that subsists between you and your fellow[s], and then your life will be spiritual indeed,” he says.

Adler could not have imagined the human genome project which has provided the scientific facts that support his belief that human beings are all overwhelmingly alike. We vary in only the minutest details. How dare we suggest that some are of more value than others? That the lives of the wealthy mean more than the lives of the poor? That the lives of children of color deserve less attention than the lives of Caucasians? That any lives can be dismissed as “collateral damage?”

That same principle forbids the writing off of our own lives as insignificant. It is a familiar sermon, I am sure, but none the less valid, that reminds us that when Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourselves,” he did not say, “instead of yourselves.” We are a part of the human family, but that does not make us insignificant.

Truly spiritual people, the saints who have lived among us, tend to be the least judgmental of others. When they look at another, what they see is the potential that another life represents. The Hindu expresses it by bowing and saying, “Namaste,” which is addressing the holy manifested in the other. This is not based on economic value, or IQ testing, or any individual talents or usefulness – it is inherent worth. It even pertains, according to Adler, to those whom we experience as oppressors. That does not mean that they are not to be held responsible for their acts, but that in doing so, we may not demean their humanity. Such an attitude could not countenance the Guantanamos or Abu Graibs of the world – which to us were once unthinkable and are now justified by some.

A hundred years ago, Adler declared that an attitude of spirituality found the application of the death penalty “morally untenable.”

Finally, Adler addressed the complexity of the human spirit – what Carl Jung would later refer to as the presence of the shadow. Adler spoke of “The Two Souls in the Human Breast,” a phrase which he attributes to Goethe. He suggested that we may:

find [ourselves] allied on one side with what is best and purest, and at the same time aware of another side which in [our] saner moments fulls [us] with loathing and poisons for [us] life’s cup of satisfaction.

He suggests that there are hardly any of who have not had that experience, and the issue here is that knowing temptations to do less than good should make us more understanding of those who succumb to the temptation. The spiritual person is not one who has never been tempted, but one who has succeeded in triumphing over temptation – and to realize that it may be circumstances rather than moral superiority that have contributed. The spiritual person is able to realize, in the traditional phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

The spiritual person does not stand in judgement of others, but recognizes our relationship to them and looks for the potential in them to be more than they have yet become.

Something else the genome project has demonstrated is that we are also a part of the animal kingdom. In fact, our genetic makeup demonstrates our kinship with other animals – the difference between us and chimpanzees is minuscule. This raises the larger question of our relationship with the rest of life in a way which might not have made sense a hundred years ago. We have come to realize that we are a part of an interdependent web of existence. What we do, the way we treat our planet, our air, our water, our resources, has an impact not only on us, but perhaps even more on the generations to come. Native American spirituality tended to focus attention on seven generations. Contemporary American policies tend to focus on the corporations’ current or next quarterly profit or loss statements. “We cannot ‘afford’ to address global warming.” Can we afford NOT to address it?

Spirituality is morality carried out to the finish. It depends on always keeping the ultimate end of existence in view, and on not resting in the partial ends. Intervals set aside for self-recollection and the facing of the thought of death are useful aids. The ultimate end in itself is to elicit worth in others, and, by so doing, in one’s self. The indispensible condition of this attitude is to ascribe worth to every human being before we even observe it, to cast as it were a mantle of glory over him [or her], to take toward every fellow human being the expectant attitude, to seek the worth in [them] until we find it. Even toward oppressors we should take the same attitude. Furthermore, our true self resides neither in our poorer nor in our better natural endowments, but in the will that suppresses the one and alone gives moral significance to the other.

The point of this, as I hope has been clear, is that Adler has been able to describe what I believe is a genuine spirituality without reference to the supernatural. It is centered in this life, in human beings here and now, and how we conduct our lives.

In my searching on the internet I stumbled upon a fascinating research study which is now being conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. They developed a survey which was administered to 112,232 students entering 236 diverse colleges and universities last September. It contained 160 items which, as I mentioned earlier, apply to and differentiate between spirituality and religion. Their initial results (upon which they will follow up later with the same students) reveal a high degree of spiritual interest and involvement. 3/4's say they are “searching for meaning/purpose in life” or that they have discussions about the meaning of life with friends. “When asked about their spiritual/religious views. Four students in ten indicate they feel “secure,” one in four says they are “seeking,” one in four reports either being “conflicted” or “doubting,” and only one in seven is “not interested.”

There are roughly equal numbers of conservatives and liberals among students who earn high scores on either Charitable involvement or Compassionate Self-concept. However, liberals substantially outnumber conservatives among those with high scores on the Ethic of Caring (2-1) and Ecumenical Worldview (3-1).

There are at least two clear-cut clusters of religious preferences. The first – including Mormons, 7^th Day Adventists, Baptists, and [those who chose the category} “other Christians,” – is strongly spiritual, religious, and religiously/socially conservative and expresses little Religious Skepticism. The second – including Unitarians, Buddhists, Episcopalians, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish students – tends to score low on religiousness and high on Religious Skepticism, Ecumenical Worldview, Ethic of Caring, and Charitable involvement.

Unitarians produce the most distinctive pattern, earning high scores on Spirituality, Spiritual Quest, Ethic of Caring, and Ecumenical Worldview, and low scores on Religious Commitment and Engagement.

While, as an institutionalist, I would like to see our young people a little higher on religious commitment and engagement, we must be doing something right if they earn high scores on “Spirituality, Spiritual Quest, Ethic of Caring, and Ecumenical Worldview.”

We too often accept the judgement of others that we are somehow lacking in spirituality because of our failure to rely on traditional theological concepts and language. We fail to stand up for the reality that true spirituality is revealed in the living of lives, not in the creeds that are recited or the aura we project. In the most important sense, I believe that were the Research Institute’s instrument administered to people in Rockford, it would have results similar to the finding about Unitarian Universalist students: that we may well rank low on Religious Commitment and Engagement, but that among the people in our community, Unitarian Universalists high on Spirituality, Spiritual Quest, Ethic of Caring, and Ecumenical Worldview.

I know and have known few, if any, saints. The people I know have not arrived at a place called spiritual nirvana, but we are, as we say, on a quest, and the goal is living lives of which we and those we love, can be proud. That is spiritual enough for me.