Confessions of a Unitarian Universalist Mystic

A Sermon by the Rev. Kenneth W. Collier

Presented to the Unitarian

Society of Santa Barbara

January 7, 2007

©2007 by Kenneth W. Collier

Santa Barbara, California

 

We start these confessions with some history.  The two ancestors of Unitarian Universalism are a pair of Christian heresies, Universal Salvation and Arianism.  The first is the belief that since God is pure Love, none are condemned eternally.  Rather, in the fullness of time all, without exception, will be restored to God’s presence.  The religious task, then, is not be become saved, but rather it is the embrace the salvation that is already ours and to live our lives within its light.  The second, named for Arius of Alexandria, its most eloquent proponent at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, is the belief that God, being Perfect, is without parts or aspects, a pure being that cannot be separated, even conceptually.  That being the case, Jesus could not be divine.  He is less than divine, though more than human.  A later variation on Arianism is the belief that Jesus was human with a divine message. 

These doctrines were declared heretical as the core of Christian belief was enunciated in the 4th and 5th centuries.  However, they did not disappear completely.  During the millennium between the Council of Nicaea and the Reformation, they would pop up from time to time, usually being espoused in one form or another by Christian mystics.  The mystic, typically a cleric, would, in his or her mystical flights, experience either God’s Pure Love or God’s Pure Being or both and return to find great difficulty reconciling that experience with the Church’s teaching about the inherence of sin or the Holy Trinity. Not all mystics fell into this, of course, but I am thinking of people like Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century and Meister Eckhart in the 13th.  Meister Eckhart was actually called to Rome to account for his apparent embrace of Arianism, though he died before he arrived. 

My point in all this is simple. Mysticism and Unitarian Universalism are not incompatible.  Indeed, it was the mystics who kept alive the religious ideas that evolved into our religion.  The idea that Unitarian Universalism has no place for mysticism is a 20th century idea.  Even the argument between the rationalist followers of William Ellery Channing and the Transcendentalist followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson was not about whether Transcendentalist mysticism is an acceptable form of religion.  It was about whether or not the Bible in general and the miracles of Jesus in particular are the beginning of Christian faith.  Even Emerson admonished the graduates of Harvard Divinity School to give to their parishioners “your lives passed through the fire of thought.” 

It was not until the late 19th and early 20th century, when a radical form of empiricism began to take over European and American thinking, that mysticism began to fall into disrepute.  In Europe this empiricism was found in such movements as Logical Positivism, and in the United States, it sparked the rise of American Humanism.  According to this radical form of empiricism, all knowledge is scientific knowledge and all meaning is to be found in empirical verification.  If an assertion cannot be empirically verified through scientific investigation, then it is either meaningless nonsense or poetry, in any event, not worthy of being called knowledge at all.  Mysticism, it maintained, falls into the nonsense category. 

Well.  There are no more Logical Positivists.  Their program for reducing all meaningful statements to scientifically verifiable assertions simply won’t work.  And even American Humanism is softening some of its more radical positions.  So I think that it is high time to reappraise our understanding of the place of mysticism in Unitarian Universalism.  Let us begin by asking ourselves what mysticism actually is.  I know of no better description than that of William James in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he devotes an entire chapter to the subject of mysticism. 

James delineates four characteristics of a mystical experience.  The first is that the mystical experience is ineffable, that is, it cannot be imparted to another, either by words or even by artistic expression.  The most a mystic can do is to point another at his or her experience.  For example, imagine trying to explain the taste of a mango to someone who has never eaten one.  The mystical experience is like that.  It must be experienced directly to be understood, and therefore it is inherently not intersubjective. 

The second characteristic is that the mystical experience, though not subject to description, is what James calls noetic, that is, it is revelatory.  One emerges from the experience convinced that the experience is momentous and that one has learned something of deep and profound value and importance.  This profound revelation gives the experience a quality of lasting authority. 

James says that these two qualities “entitle any state to be called mystical.”  As far as he is concerned, having these two qualities is sufficient to make an experience a mystical one.  The other two, though, are also important, though not as clear or as commonly shared.  The first is that the experience is transitory.  It comes and then it goes, rarely lasting more than say thirty minutes to an hour, and often very much less. 

The second is that in the throes of a mystical experience one feels passive, as if the experience is flowing over one as a wave might flow over a boulder on the shore.  One cannot simply decide to have a mystical experience and have one.  One can do certain things that will raise the odds, to be sure, but there is no guarantee.  And sometimes the experience happens whether we will or not. 

To these four characteristics, the contemporary scholar of religion, Huston Smith, adds a fifth.  Though the mystical experience is transient, the memory of the experience lasts and has the power to change one’s life.  Smith came to this conclusion trying to find a difference between drug induced mystical experiences and more “normally” induced ones.  He found that the difference is not at the phenomenological level.  It does not seem to matter what the trigger is.  A genuine mystical experience stays with a person as a living memory and does not simply fade into a pleasant afterglow that can be forgotten.  As a living memory, it has the power to condition and direct one’s subsequent life. 

Armed with this understanding, I have to ask two questions.  First, do Unitarian Universalists have mystical experiences?  Second, are those experiences, if they occur, definitive for those people’s religious lives?  The answer to the first is pretty obvious.  Of course we do.  It would be silly to deny this.  I know that I have had experiences that fit James’ criteria.  I also know that I have had conversations with enough Unitarian Universalists who have also had such experiences to be certain that I am not at all unusual.  I might add that the theology a Unitarian Universalist may embrace seems completely independent of whether or not one has had a mystical experience.  I have had conversations with Unitarian Universalist Theists, Christians, Humanists, Buddhists, Neo-Pagans, and Eclectists, all of whom have had genuine mystical experiences as defined by these five characteristics. 

It is the second question that has raised controversy in our recent history, not the first.  Can these experiences be definitive for a Unitarian Universalist’s religious life?  Put another way, would we exclude someone from the family of Unitarian Universalism if that person’s mystical experience were deeply and indelibly enmeshed in his or her religious life?  A short answer to that second version of the question is that I certainly hope we wouldn’t, because my religious life cannot be separated from my mystical experiences.  And that’s the confessional part of this sermon.   

It is important to understand what I am actually saying when I say this.  I am talking about my own religious life and what its foundation is.  That is a far cry from asserting what anyone else’s religious life ought to be or what it ought to be founded upon.  Indeed, part of the genius of contemporary Unitarian Universalism is exactly that we carefully and steadfastly refuse to make this kind of prescriptive statement.  Instead of prescribing religious belief and practice, we offer the freedom of religious discovery.  Instead of giving a creed or a set of doctrines and demanding assent, we ask, “What is it that you really do believe?  Where is it that you place your heart?  What inspires you to reach beyond the limits that appear so powerful and yet restrict your growth into your deepest truth?  What is it that you trust with your own integrity?”   

Ours is a religion in which there is no limit placed upon inspiration.  For some of us—not for all of us—for some of us the mystical experience, deepened and nurtured though spiritual practice and contemplative living, is the core and the revelation that holds our heart and soul together.  And I know that this is true for the simple reason that I know that it is my truth.  And I also know that there are many more of us.  Isn’t it time for us simply to say so and stop arguing about it? 

THE HIDDEN BUDDHA 

My friends come and go, laughing and teasing. 

Only I am lonely, drifting like the image of the moon 

Floating on the dark surface of a lake. 

They make their money and buy and sell and drink 

Their wine at night.  I alone wander  

From morning to evening and have no place  

For buying or selling.  Who will buy the moon?   

Who will buy the star light or the wind  

Drifting among the leaves of bamboo?