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June 1999 Sermons
June 20, 1999 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanJune 20, 1999Spirituality and Make-Believe: Finding Religious TruthI need to begin my message this morning by telling you about Burdette Backus, born in1888 and died in 1955. He was a Unitarian minister who served his longest and most notable period of ministry, some fifteen years, at the All Souls Church in Indianapolis. His father had been a leading Universalist minister in Ohio, and his mother was also a Universalist minister, though she died before Burdette was a year old. So he had a good background for ministry. Backus, along with some other eminent ministers, was one of the foremost promoters of the Humanist movement, and was the second president of the American Humanist Association to which Isaac Asimov was so closely associated. Humanism actually is a very old movement, beginning around the time of the Reformation in the fifteenth century, and had to do with religion being in a person, rather than a cloth-like state-of-being given or laid upon us from God outside us. Remember I said last week that when it comes to human behavior and ideas, what goes around comes around. The idea of humanism really was what Jesus was talking about 1500 years before, and was pretty much displaced by the Church (with a capital C) over the next 1500 years of institutionalization of religion. The radical reformers of the 15th and 16th centuries were trying to recapture that early way of being religious that Jesus had done in his own radicalism. This seems to be a pretty well-established pattern of human behavior in religion and otherwise. By the 1930s in this country, a lot of upheaval, especially because of financial speculation, led to a real catastrophe for the working class. Religion that maintained the status quo, that resisted any rocking of the boat became less and less palatable to many ministers, especially in our Unitarian and Universalist circles. Across the land, the cry arose that we needed less God out there somewhere and more goodness right here and now. Watching so many good women, men, children suffering brought a lot of people around to the viewpoint that there could be no way to reconcile the idea of a Good God intervening from somewhere in a distant heaven here in the lives of real people. The focus had to be on humans in the here and now--humanism comes round again. This is the way of religious movements of all denominations. They start small, grow, become more regularized with a growing list of rules and regulations, get bigger, "higher", and eventually more distant from the very people they purport to be about. That even happened, on a smaller scale (but bigger impact), in our own Unitarian and Universalist congregations. (Remember that until 1961 these were two separate denominations.) Jesus had reacted to just this state of affairs within Judaism of his time. The Temple had grown too big, too focused on institution and less about the real people it continually asked to pay for its support. Burdette Backus, and many other Unitarian and Universalist ministers, simply could not abide the suffering of so many people in this country, especially during the Depression years, but that suffering had been felt long before as industrialization had made a few men very rich from the back-breaking labor of so very many. Backus grew up when the work week was six days long, with ten hour days the norm. Out of this unfairness grew the much-needed labor union movement. We today often have negative feelings about labor unions. Much of that ill-will stems from the fact that the labor unions institutionalized just like the Temple and the Church, so it is a problem of greed more than a problem of unions or churches per se. Unions were very much needed to break the unfair hold these megalithic companies had on the people. They will always be needed for there will always be this tension between management and labor, but the unions have to be scrutinized just as much as the businesses need to be. Backus promoted humanism that said people do not need to keep looking outside to some pie-in-the-sky-by-and-bye; the allusion to Marx is intended. For while today we may see that the Marx socialist ideas are rooted in great hopes for the common people, they are extremely difficult to put in place on a great scale. Once again, for the same reasons, even commune-ism, the great sharing of the people, institutionalizes and corrupts just like all other human organizations. Backus began to preach humanism in the ‘30s and in the 1940s did a weekly radio sermon that had a great influence in Indianapolis, with the formation of many Unitarian congregations, and across Indiana where today we still have a high number of UU congregations. His message and the humanist message of others spread rapidly. For the first time skeptics and atheists were heard as being good people--to the extent any people are--who cared more about people in the present than clerics or churches, synagogues, temples. H.L. Mencken who is of the same era as Backus, wrote well and famously and gained a reputation for his cynicism about institutions that people so blindly support. He called himself an agnostic, but probably was an atheist. He is quoted as saying to someone who asked him about the possibility of an afterlife, "If I die and find myself standing before a Pearly Gate and an old man in robes with a golden key, I’ll go right up to him and say, ‘My name is Henry C. Mencken, and I’ve made a terrible mistake.’" I suppose the Humanists were thinking like the judge who had a member of the American Muslim Mission in court for a crime of conscience. The man was alone, and the judge asked, "Where is your lawyer?’ "Allah is my counsel," the accused replied. "Yes, I understand, "said the judge, "but does he have a local representative?" Humanism, humanist thought, is not--contrary to fundamentalist preacher’s hype--about godlessness nearly so much as it is about truly honest spirituality. About real religion of the individual and the society. When religion moves from teaching and helping real human beings, then it is merely an institution. Backus was reminding us that the only religion that really is valuable is the religion that moves us to do real good for real people. Otherwise, it is religion in name only, it is make believe. All of which brings me to the idea of Peter Pan religion as Backus talked about it in one of his sermons. Quoting liberally from Backus’s sermon called "Peter Pan Religion," let me talk about this understanding of religion versus the truth of our heart’s spiritual being. Peter Pan, that marvelous creation of Sir James Barrie, is the story about a little boy. The complete title of the book is Peter Pan, or the Little boy Who Would Not Grow Up. Peter wants to stay a little boy. According to the story, Peter runs away to Never Land after hearing his mother and father talking about "what he was going to be when he grew up." He didn’t want to grow up after hearing those grand plans, so he ran away and became the leader of the lost boys. He has a jolly good time in Never Never Land, especially when he persuades Wendy and her brothers to join him, but when Wendy decides to go home and get on with growing up, but Peter "will have none of it." As Backus noted: This tale of Peter Pan is far more than a fairy story. With deep psychological insight Barrie has made it the means of setting before us one of the deep tragedies of human life,- namely that there are a great many persons, men and women alike, who never do grow up. They remain childish in their emotional life, though they attain their full growth physically and intellectually. They are unable to accept the responsibilities of adulthood: they take refuge in Never Land, a realm of fantasy and illusion, because they can not cope with reality. They may be charming and have many delightful qualities; nonetheless their lives are tragic and bring much heartache to those who love them because after all the world is real, and a large part of the business of growing up is to adjust ourselves to that fact and accept the responsibilities which it entails. No mother [or father] who truly loves [their] child would want him [her] to remain a Peter Pan. Foregoing Peter Pan Religion is not, as far as I am concerned, necessarily about giving up on the traditions of religion, which often seems to be what our more die-hard humanist teachers would have. Rather, it is about finding the stuff of genuine spirituality as I understand spirituality, which is discovering, finding religious truth for yourself. I believe that is what Backus meant as well. Peter Pan religion that seeks to escape responsibility for what one thinks, what one does, what one contributes to the betterment of the world is not only escapist, but potentially dangerous. Peter Pan religion puts the burden for human problems outside themselves, to such an extent in some cases (this was particularly noticeable in the Victorians) that such ideas arise that say slavery, imperialism, apartheid, exploitation of all kinds is justifiable, because it is really "God’s will." We just don’t understand the long-term ramifications of their suffering. After all, they will probably go to heaven, or "inherit the earth"--whatever that means. So relatively good people can sit back and watch the suffering of their fellow human beings with a clear conscience. If they are challenged, they say: "Well, that is what the Bible teaches." Or: "That is what the priest/ minister/ imam/ guru teaches." As if they did not have brains in their own heads. The greatest tragedy is that this kind of Peter Pan religion can be passed on, inculcated in the poorest of the poor, so that even they will come to think that their poverty and suffering is God’s will. After all, they see the rich and powerful going to religious services, and they are better educated, and successful--which since religion was developed has been a sign of being in God’s grace, at least that’s what they are told. So even the ones who should be least likely to see life as fantasy come to accept the hope in such fantasy. Therein lies the evil of Peter Pan religion. Backus points out that Peter Pan religion is ultimately selfish, self centered, and egotistical. Also, that it creates in people the a "let mother [or father] do it attitude." Such beliefs are about "perpetually dreaming fine dreams but shoving the responsibility for making those dreams off onto other shoulders. It asks God to do the things that we should be doing ourselves, with the consequence that they do not get done." Mature, honest spirituality requires each of us to examine our own minds, hearts and souls. Spirituality of humans ought to be about accepting one's responsibility as a full partner with God. I once heard that God was disabled, handicapped, and the only way God could act was to come into the hearts of people and to do the good that needed doing. In fact, this is the only way I can understand any notion of God that seeks to intervene in human lives. For a perfect God would de facto have a perfect world, and unless you see something very different from the world I see, it ain’t there yet. Spirituality is about wholeness of human experience. Looking at all that we think, see, touch, feel--the wholeness of what we know and understand of every single thing that touches our lives and that we touch. Spirituality is being and doing. It is the highest essence of knowing, feeling, such as the mystics teach us they feel and know. But spirituality is also and fundamentally about truth. Truth as each of us feel it, sense it, see it. When I was a little girl I was taught that only Christians would be able to go to Heaven and be in the glory of God. Seeing truth as a child usually will--until it is squeezed out--I asked, What about good people who grow up in some far away place where they never heard about Christ? Only to learn, that this was too bad, but it was God’s will. Our only responsibility was to make sure we taught about Jesus so more people would learn about God’s plan. I thought this was not only terribly unfair, but also a rather poor way for an all-powerful being to take care of his creation. There have been times in my life when I very much wanted to have Peter Pan religion, an escape from the truth that would rear its head in my heart. I have wished I could say my prayers and be forgiven my weaknesses, my lack of action, my unwillingness to reach out and help- how nice it would be. But I never could, because I was also taught that "honesty is the best policy." I think my family expected I would only apply that to the secular world, but I saw clearly--and have felt this more and more strongly as I have grown in my spiritual life--that any relationship I have with God, any religion I profess, has to be as truthful as my relationships in life. This is the difference between spirituality and make-believe; authentic spirituality has to be about truth for each of us. Anything that does not tell truth is about make-believe. If we can look at children working in slave-like conditions anywhere in the world, or any of the many wrong conditions that exist for so many people, and dismiss them as simply their lot in life, then we are enjoying make-believe, Peter Pan religion. We learn to discern the difference by questing for truth, by being unafraid to ask questions that test our honest spiritual understanding. Some of us in our honesty will become mystics, and some will become activists, but it is the honesty, the truth-telling for ourselves and to ourselves and to others that will result in mature religion, mature religious expression. J.M Barrie writes at the end of the story of Peter Pan, that when Peter refuses the offer to be adopted by Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, he says he wants to remain a little boy and have fun: "So he thinks, but it is only his greatest pretend; if only he could catch the hang of things he would learn that growing up is the biggest adventure of all." Paul said in 1Corinthians, from which I read last week: "When I was child I spoke like a child, I felt like a child, I thought like a child, but now that I have become a man I have put away childish things." Religion too, as Burdette Backus wrote, is about learning to "grow up . . .It means that we have to leave Never Land behind us, substituting in its stead the actualities of the . . . world. It is by no means easy, but it is richly rewarding for it is only there that the true treasures of life are to be found, and any one of them is worth far more than all the Castles . . . that vanish into thin air at the touch of reality." |
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