Direct Experience of Transcending Mystery©

UU Fellowship of Midland, MI

November 3, 2002

Jane Thickstun

Sermon

            There’s a story about a meeting of great religious leaders from all over the world. They had gathered at a moment of crisis, to address some pressing issue that needed to be resolved. Each leader came to represent his or her tradition’s point of view. Going around the room, the Jewish Rabbi began by saying "The Torah says..." and proceeded to present the Jewish point of view. The Buddhist monk began with "The Buddha once said..." Likewise the Protestant minister said, "It says in the Gospel..." and the Muslim Imam said "The Quran tells us..." Finally they got around the table to the Unitarian Universalist minister, who began, "You know, it seems to me..." (Ken Jones, “Living the Living Tradition”, November 15, 1998)

            We Unitarian Universalists don’t have a creed, and we don’t have a common scripture, but we do have our statement of principles and purposes.  An important part of this statement is the listing of the sources our living tradition draws on.  Because we are so open and pluralistic, there are six of them, and all of them in some way inform the tradition as we practice it today.  The sources include “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men,” “Wisdom from the world’s religions,” “Jewish and Christian teachings,” “Humanist teachings,” and “Spiritual teachings of Earth‑centered traditions.”  But the very first one is:

“Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

            This source is clearly listed first because it is the most foundational.  It is foundational in two ways: because our experience of the world is where we begin, and all language, culture, science, and religion are ways we seek to talk about and interpret our experience.  All the other sources are what we as Unitarian Universalists use to interpret our religious experience in terms that make sense to us.  But experience is fundamental.

            The first source is also foundational because it refers to the experience of the individual, and the primary religious authority for Unitarian Universalists is the individual conscience.  Historically, within our western tradition, religious truth was known through the church, through tradition.  The Protestant Reformation, coming on the heels of the invention of printing and the wide availability of bibles, rejected the authority of tradition, declaring that scripture was enough.  The reformers felt that the individual had direct access to the divine through scripture and didn’t need the mediation of the priests.

            Then came the Enlightenment which lifted up Reason, and people like Emerson decided we didn’t even need the bible - that the divine could be read in the pages of Nature.  The focus of religious authority became even more closely associated with the individual, and now it is the experience of the individual that counts most. 

            But there have been many Christian mystics over the centuries, who interpreted their experience in Christian language.  Some examples are Hildegaard von Bingen and Jacob Boehme. The direct experience of a transcending mystery and wonder has been and still is affirmed in all cultures.   There is a mystical sect of Islam, the Sufi’s, that you may have heard of.  And some of the Asian religions are centered more on cultivating that direct experience than on any interpretation of it. 

·    The classic study of such experience is William James’ book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The book began as a series of lectures at Edinburgh in 1901-02.  To this day, James’s definition of a "mystical experience" remains the standard. Such an experience, he says, has four characteristics:

·      ineffability, meaning it can’t be described in words;

·    it has a noetic or “knowledge” component; there is a sense one knows something after the experience that one didn’t know before;

·    it is transient, fleeting, lasting only moments; and

·    we are passive “recipients” of these experiences; in other words, we do not actively bring them about. They just happen to us.

(p. 371-372)

            People most often have these experiences in Nature.  There is something about being surrounded by the non-human world that puts us in direct contact with that force of life, that mystery that is larger than our human concerns.  It is possible, however, to have a mystical experience in other circumstances, such as listening to music, or in meditation, or even in a crowd of people.  It is even possible to have one in a Unitarian Universalist church!  Rev. Linda Hoddy relates how that happened for her:

            “I can recall four such experiences in my life. The first occurred in church, which probably says a lot about why I am a minister today. I was eight years old. It was a special Christmas service. The junior choir was singing. I was to sing the second verse of "Away in a Manger as a solo. The choir would sing before and after me." As I began to sing, suddenly it seemed that everything fell away. I was transported to some special place, where beauty reigned. It didn’t seem as though I were singing. It seemed as though this small clear voice was coming from somewhere else. It couldn’t possibly be me. For just a few moments, the entire room was in the thrall of a magic spell. And then it ended, and we were back in the dark church, rustling and shuffling as we processed back to our seats. But something had happened to me. I had experienced something magical and mysterious and wonderful that I had never experienced before.”  (From "Transcending Mystery and Wonder", Mar 5, 2000, Rev. Linda Hoddy)

            Wendell Berry’s experience of the bluebells is typical of such an experience.  It happened in Nature, in particular when he got to the part of the woods that had no trace of human contact.  The experience made him “humble and joyful.”  It affirmed a transcending mystery and wonder, and it moved him to a personal renewal and “an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”  In spite of his attempt to describe it, Berry describes his experience as unimaginable and unspeakable.

            There is often a sense of time being suspended.  There is something eternal about it.  Have you heard of the concept of the eternal present?  It can feel like being outside the normal dimensions of time and space.  When I was studying the philosopher Immanuel Kant, I was interested to find that he saw space and time as constructs of our mind, a way that we structure reality and not a feature of reality itself.  A mystical experience feels like one has achieved an insight into a deeper reality than is normally experienced.  This is the “noetic” quality James talks about.  Often there is a feeling of understanding a deeper truth than we can get to with our normal ways of thinking and knowing.  Many express an insight into an underlying unity of all existence.  Usually the experience conveys a sense of the self as melded somehow into the whole, which is both extremely humbling and extremely uplifting at the same time.

            I can’t recount any of my own experiences, because the memory doesn’t stay with me.  But I know I have had them, and they have formed me in significant ways.  Because of this I have always been fascinated by mystical experiences.  I have tried to figure out how to make them happen.  But of course you can’t make them happen, no matter what you do; that is James’ fourth characteristic of them - passivity.  They come unbidden, they come by grace  What we can do is be open to them, and get to where they occur most readily more often. 

            Not everyone has mystical experiences.  William James himself says “my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand.” (p. 370) But we all experience something now and then that suggests to us there is something - if only a wonder - that transcends our view of the world.  What is it?  It’s a mystery.

            So how do we know we’re not just going off the deep end, so to speak?  We can distinguish between a psychotic experience and a mystical experience by the effect the experience has on us.  Whether we have lost contact with reality or gained a deeper insight into reality is made clear by the result.  An authentic, healthy religious or spiritual experience “moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”  Though the memory of the experience may fade, the personal spiritual renewal stays with us, and helps us in our future encounters with the world.  It is always helpful, always positive, always life-affirming.  It grounds us and connects us in an important way to the whole, to the universe.  It dispels loneliness and fear; it brings peace.

            Ralph Waldo Emerson addresses this in his essay called Nature.  In his 17^th century non-gender-inclusive language, he says, “. . . no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.  Like a new soul, they renew the body.  We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so.  No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change.  Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative.  We apprehend the absolute.  As it were, for the first time, we exist.  We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity.” (p. 29)

            Ultimately though, the value of the experience lies in what we do with our lives after it.  There is a tendency to want to just have more mystical experiences, sometimes called “mountaintop” experiences.  But this can be an escape.  It can even be an addiction.  We have to come down off the mountain.  We have to use our renewed spiritual insight and our enlarged sense of self in our daily lives.  We need to bring that sense of peace and contentment to the world around us.

            I’d like to leave you with a bit of Walt Whitman.  This is from his poem, Song of Myself:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase,

Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul . . . . and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland is recognized by the Unitarian Universalist Association as a Welcoming Congregation. We welcome, affirm, promote and celebrate the full participation of all persons in all of our activities without regard to age, gender, sexual orientation, race or any other such category of exclusion.

Please feel free to contact us with any feedback, corrections or questions at jaham@delta.edu