Retreats » Spring 2011 Theme Talk

Synopsis of Rev. Walt Wieder's talk at the EUU 2011 Spring Retreat:

A Humanist View of Spirituality 

   by the Rev. Dr. Walt Wieder

 

Paths to Understanding

"Not to weep, not to wax indignant, but to understand" – Spinoza

 

EUU 2011 Spring Retreat Theme Talk

The search for spirituality seems to be everywhere. The topic just won’t go away; on the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Chat, on the internet, in conversations at my local bar, over coffee over lunch – the topic is, of course, spirituality. I have been reduced to prayer – “please”, I ask the heavens, “save me from folks who say, “I’m not religious, but I’m very spiritual.”

“Of course you are,” is my standard reply.

But I’m always unsure of what it means; to be spiritual without being religious, to be spiritual without the support of a community. Unsure and more than a little suspicious.

Since I am not a household name, even in the small pond that is Unitarian Universalism, I thought it proper to introduce myself. My name is Walt Wieder. Folks call me Walt, not Doctor or Pastor or Your Eminence. I invite you to do the same.

I would describe myself, theologically, as an existential humanist, a kind of double denial of the transcendent. I am a humanist in the sense that I believe that values and meaning are a human project where the existence of God or God's is irrelevant. I am an agnostic. There are two forms of the agnostic position, hard and soft. The soft form says, well, I'm not convinced, but who knows what will happen next. The hard form says, not only do I not know, you don't either. I am functionally an atheist. Not Zeus, not Krishna, not, not, not, not.  I am as spiritual as they come.

I have been a Unitarian Universalist minister for almost 40 years. I am the Senior Minister, for this past 15 years, of the UU Church in Surprise, Arizona, a 280 member congregation in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. I am a member of the UUA General Assembly Planning Committee.

I also host a radio show in Phoenix titled "A Different View". While the AM signal does not quite reach Europe, there is a podcast site, wwieder.podbean.com.

My undergraduate college career is not a bad metaphor for most of my life. I became financially emancipated when I entered college. It was my choice.  I was quite willing to work for the independence that supporting myself allowed. That theme, independence and self-determination, runs through my life. It is not unrelated to the fact that I am a Unitarian Universalist.

I followed my nose and interests (philosophy, psychology, English) with little concern for required courses. As a result I was able to cram 4 years into 7.

I dropped in and out of school as finances and circumstances dictated. I spent a year as a Vista Volunteer in West Virginia. After I completed my year as a Vista, I stayed in West Virginia, there being no pressing reason to be anywhere else. I owned and operated a small bookstore while taking classes at West Virginia State College, a historically African American College. It sounds grander than it was.  It was a one room building with a partition part way across the back. I lived in the back of the store with cold and cold running water for two semesters. I later worked as a newspaper reporter and social worker.

I had encountered Unitarian Universalism and the Kanawha Valley Unitarian Fellowship shortly after arriving in West Virginia as a Vista. I still didn't have a degree when I decided I wanted to become a Unitarian Universalist minister.

It was all very natural and totally lacking in any road to Damascus experience. I had taken on increasingly significant roles in the life of the Fellowship. It seemed a logical next step.

I did ask friends in the Fellowship if they could imagine me in the UU ministry. They said "yes", they could imagine it… perhaps more a testament to their imaginations than my abilities at the time.

My seminary experience was similar. The Baptist seminary I attended would suggest a Bible course or perhaps Biblical Greek. I would counter that since the Bible didn't loom very large in my religious life, why didn't I take another pastoral counseling course or perhaps work as a student chaplain on the burn unit at the local hospital.

It was the 60's -- they said “sure”.

I did the minimum core curriculum and again followed my nose and interests, mostly to suffering, not to talk about suffering. I demonstrated against racism and War and sat with people who were dying. I found theology boring.

My D.Min. from Southern Methodist University, you will not be surprised to hear, included significant credit for a year-long Clinical Pastoral Education residency as a chaplain at Children’s Hospital in Dallas, Texas. The typical CPE question was "describe the theological issues raised." I never got far beyond "they weren't alone."

My experience in the UU Ministry has likewise consisted of putting one foot in front of the other, doing what fell to my lot, without much concern about career. All very Zen, except for the boring meditation.

I have a colleague whom I quite admire who says that most of ministry can be summed up with the advice: “suit up and show up.” That, along with the mantra, “Please yourself and at least somebody’s pleased”, has served me, and I hope, the congregations I have served, well.

What follows are paths I have found congenial in my search for meaning and a deepened spiritual life. There is an important caveat... there is a crucial distinction to be made between "this is how I do it" and "this is how it is done".

Mark Twain was once asked to explain how he reached his advanced age. He gave some general examples of his course (never stand if you can sit, never sit if you can lie down; never smoke more than one cigar at a time, and so on). He then observed that such a regime suited him down to the ground, but added, "don't you dare try it, it would probably kill you."

Mark Twain's point (he almost always had a point) was that we each must find our own way.

The impulse which drives the search for spirituality is as pure as any concrete expression of that impulse is false. Crystals, covens, bibles, et al, are not the source of spirituality – at best they may be the occasion of bringing ourselves to ourselves. Any guru, anywhere, anytime, is of limited use.

The examples this morning are just that, examples to stir you to recognize what is or could be, for you, paths to deeper sense and experience of spirituality. Later this morning we will have a chance to share ways you have found helpful. I invite you to spend at least some time this weekend sharing with others your sources.

What is meant by spirituality, anyway? It of course means many things, ranging from the trite to the profound.  Spirituality, it seems to me now, in the midst of ceremony, worship, meditation and prayer, is the occasion of the connection and awareness, with and of, something greater than can be expressed any other way. It has the disability of being absolutely unintelligible except on its own terms. It clearly is connected to our search for meaning and connection.

You can imagine my relief to discover I am not the first religious professional to have to deal with the claim of spirituality without context. I assume it was exasperation with folks claiming that they were not religious but they certainly were spiritual, which led St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) to list the seven works of spiritual mercy. Aquinas obviously had the same discussions that I find so problematical. He came up with a list of what the effect of being spiritual ought to be. What were the hallmarks of genuine spirituality?

This is Aquinas’s list: To teach the ignorant, To counsel the doubtful, To console the sad, To reprove the sinner, To forgive the offender, To bear with the oppressive and troublesome, To pray for us all.

If someone means that they try and live up to Aquinas’s list when they say they are spiritual, all I have to say is, “good for you”; and that with a complete absence of irony.

I appreciate the impulse that led Aquinas to his list even if it doesn’t totally work for me.

To teach the ignorant -- fine

To counsel the doubtful – I want to encourage doubt

To console the sad -- OK

To reprove the sinner – if we could only agree on what is sinful

To forgive the offender – forgiveness is a good practice

To bear with the oppressive and troublesome – I have a list if you are having trouble finding someone to practice on.

To pray for us all – I’m not sure it does any good, but I don’t find it offensive

I have my own shorter list. There are some signs I have come to use in distinguishing between trite and profound claims of spirituality - fruits, as it were, of genuine spirituality.

Compassion, appropriate anger, and wisdom.

Compassion - self, family, tribe, nation, humanity. To be able to imagine oneself as the other.

Appropriate anger - at injustice suffered, not by oneself, but by others

Wisdom - limits and well as the courage to admit those limits

 

Philosophy, Hume and Kant in particular, led me to the “hard" agnosticism I claim. It protects me from believing that my ignorance means that the first fool claiming knowledge is right. It leaves the universe open.

Do you yearn for a more spiritual life? Gravitate to those experiences that deepen these three in your life.

Part II There are two modes of understanding which I have found helpful in inviting and appreciating the spiritual; two places I go, again and again, to refresh and deepen my religious life, lyric poetry and humor, especially irony and black humor. Poetry and humor, like spirituality at its best, allow us to apprehend and savor the conflicting truths which exists independently and simultaneously within all our experience (truth, pure and complicated).

((Flowering of intuition))

 ((Non-linear))

   ((That big hot fire which is truth))

Lyric poetry: complex, dense, able to do more than one thing at a time. It is able to capture a moment, some present, the now, in all it's complexity. It mimics the world I find, pure and complicated

I have two longish examples that represent what I have found in Yeats, Roethke, X.J. Kennedy, Frost, Sandburg, Stevie Smith, Houseman, Hardy, Elliot, Donne, and a host of others.

((Larkin quote: “depravation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”))

 

Church going - Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-

Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few

Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce

'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show,

Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;

Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort or other will go on

In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground

Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt

So long and equably what since is found

Only in separation - marriage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built

This special shell? For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

He gets at least part of what church means to me. It is hardly an uncomplicated relationship even as I near retirement after 40 years.

Life Cycle of the Common Man - Howard Nemerov

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,

This average consumer of the middle class,

Consumed in the course of his average life span

Just under half a million cigarettes,

Four thousand fifths of gin and about

A quarter as much vermouth; he drank

Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee,

And counting his parents’ share it cost

Something like half a million dollars

To put him through life. How many beasts

Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes

Cannot be certainly said.

                                   But anyhow,

It is in this way that a man travels through time,

Leaving behind him a lengthening trail

Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes,

Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown

Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers.

Given the energy and security thus achieved,

He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course,

The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting,

And he worked for the money which was to pay

For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary

If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera,

But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones

Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded

Steadily from the front of his face as he

Advanced into the silence and made it verbal.

Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime

Would barely suffice for their repetition;

If you merely printed all his commas the result

Would be a very large volume, and the number of times

He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,”

Would stagger the imagination. There were also

Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning

“It seems to me” or “As I always say.”

Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man

Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic

Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding

Steadily out of the front of his face, the words

Borne along on the breath which is his spirit

Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word

Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

It is a poem about courage and the human dilemma. The dilemma revolves around being “condemned to freedom". We are free in two senses - self determined and undetermined - it is the dilemma of freedom which drives the never-ending search for meaning.

Humor is a second source. The darker the better, irony, gallows humor (preferably without the actual gallows)

((Failure to fly – distance and engagement, all at the same time))

((surprise at unexpected connections; a door of ah ha as light breaks through))

I see the world slightly skewed – I wonder why everyone doesn’t see what I have come to call existential signs. The drive up teller machine at my bank that has instructions in Braille; the strip club on the road between my house and my Safeway with the sign, All Nude, No Cover – redundant, right?; walking down the street in Rochester, NY, in March, the streets full of slush and salt, and passing a diocesan store front with the legend on the door, Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Holy Childhood and, in an attempt to preserve the floor from winter slush, someone had taped a hand-lettered sign to the door, “please remove rubbers”; ah yes, the truth, pure and complicated.

The world shifts, we see that too often we don't see. Awake, humor calls, awake our spiritual longing cries.

Conclusion

Spirituality worthy of the name should help us with the human project - its goal to deepen and broaden our compassion - for ourselves and others. To increase our anger at injustice. And to seek wisdom – a matter, my philosophic training suggests, which includes an appreciation of limits.

The test of the claim of genuine spirituality is simple (though I fail often enough): how do you treat those closest to you; how do you treat those in that next circle, particularly those who are not in a position to advance your interests (your waitress, the bus driver, the clerk at the store, etc.); and finally, how large a circle can you draw.

To see creation as related... All people brothers and sisters in a non trivial way.

For me, it requires no God, but a willingness to be present to the world.