UU Service

Richard Miller -- ( February 2007)

I would like to start off with a quote from

The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit by Margaret Somerville,
2006 Massey Lectures

"Today's mind altering, world altering scientific breakthroughs are challenging our ancient human philosophical-spiritual heritage in unprecedented ways. I use the term human philosophical spiritual heritage in the largest possible sense- as encompassing all our most important shared values, attitudes, principles and beliefs, whatever their source. And further I regard spirituality as a natural, inherent characteristic common to all humans, which some express through religious belief and practice, and others express in secular ways. We can all call our capacity to experience that spirituality the "human spirit".

It is the intangible immeasurable, numinous reality that all of us need to find meaning in life and to make life worth living- a deeply intuitive sense of relatedness or connectedness to all life, especially other people, to the world, and to the universe in which we live. One manifestation of the human spirit or human spirituality is the longing for transcendence- the strong desire to experience the feeling of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

In talking about the sacred,... I'm proposing it as a concept that encapsulates an experience that we might use to help people find their most authentic individual selves. ...I believe our most authentic selves are to be found in the complex interaction of knowing ourselves, relating to others, appreciating our place in the great web of all life and seeing ourselves as part of the earth, the stars, the universe and the cosmos.

Sermon: Using Nature and the Universe as a Spiritual Path

My thoughts on nature and spirituality have been inspired and stimulated by the work of Paul Harrison, President of the World Panthiest Movement and author of "Elements of Pantheism? and I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to him as I have drawn much of this talk from a service and sermon he gave at Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Thousand Oaks, California, January 2, 2005 .

I'm going to be talking about using nature and the universe as a spiritual path, but I'd like to start with the question: What does it take to be the focus of a spiritual path?

Back in 1917 a historian of religions called Rudolf Otto published a classic work called "The Idea of the Holy.? He compared religions east and west to try to sum up what it takes for something to be considered "holy? or "sacred? or numinous. Otto summed the qualities needed in one phrase:

An awesome yet fascinating mystery.

There are three aspects here, all of them related to the way humans respond:

• The first and the heart of it is Mystery - something that is greater than human comprehension.
  
• The second is a sense of awesome overwhelming Power - the power to create and to sustain, but also the power to destroy.
  
• Finally there is a sense of Beauty, so breathtaking that you have no choice but to love it.

The place where humans first felt those three feelings was in the midst of nature, and looking up at the galaxy we call home, the Milky Way. It seems to me that the idea of the deities came later: they were attempts at summing up those feelings. But the ideas took over the feelings, and removed them from their true origin in Nature, and changed them. In the West people got deeply detached from nature for more than a thousand years, focusing on heaven or the end of the world. Some people still do.

I find that fully restoring those feelings to the natural universe can create a completely satisfying and fulfilling alternative to belief in a deity or deities. This alternative approach to spirituality goes by many names. Probably the most common today is Pantheist, which refers to someone whose only "deity? is the natural universe - something you deeply revere. But there are many people with this same approach, maybe even some of you here, who call themselves religious humanists - or religious atheists - or religious naturalists - or naturalistic pagans - or eco-atheists. The name is just a label: what matters is the shared acceptance that Nature is all there is, we are part of Nature, and Nature is the ultimate focus of our feelings of reverence, awe and wonder.

Can the natural universe alone, without any deities or spirits, be a sufficient centre of one's spirituality? I believe it can. There's no doubt that the natural Universe, just as we see it in front of our eyes and telescopes, possesses all those numinous qualities that Otto required.

The Universe has unfathomable Mystery

Some of you may try keep up with modern science. Science is the best way we have to find out what is really going on out there and how it works. But science isn't the neat and fairly simple thing it was back in Newton's day. Our current understanding of the Universe at the largest and the smallest scales, is way beyond the comprehension of common sense.

Looking at the very large scale, relativity teaches us that as you accelerate towards the speed of light length shortens and mass increases and time slows down. That is far outside our everyday experience. We can, with some effort, grasp the mathematics of this: but we can't get any commonsense feeling for it. In some ways it defies common sense.

And we can't get our heads around the vast numbers involved. We evolved and mostly live at a scale of a few miles, maybe up to a hundred miles if we commute. We can have some grasp of a few thousand miles when we go on long flights. We can perhaps even understand the distance to the moon, about 240,000 miles, if we imagine 24 round trips from New York to Hawaii. But we start to get very lost at the distance from the earth to the sun ? 93 million miles. A light year is 5,866 billion miles. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. The edge of our telescopic abilities is about 12 to 14 billion light years away.

Moving down to the micro scale things get even stranger, down to the crazy chaotic dance of quantum particles. Quantum mechanics teaches us that reality at the tiniest level is unpredictable. Things can be both waves and particles, things seem to be smeared out in space until they are pinned down. Even the leading quantum physicists admit that they have no common-sense understanding of their own theories. Richard Feynman once said to his students: "I think it's safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Don't keep saying to yourself, 'But how can it BE like that?' Nobody knows how it can be like that."

At an even smaller scale, the most fashionable current theory suggests that all the tiniest particles may be made of infinitesimally small vibrating strings of energy. String theory suggests that we live in world of 10 spatial dimensions. Our brains evolved to move around in just three spatial dimension, we are not built to get our heads around more than three.

The biggest mystery of all is one that neither science nor religion will ever answer:-

Why does the Universe exist? Why does anything at all exist?

Our curiosity drives us to ask this question. A deity has been offered as an answer - but it is not really an answer at all. I'm sure most of us, being good UUs and questioning kind of people, asked our parents or priests at one time or other: but who created? And most of you probably got the answer: "You can't ask that question, that's a mystery.?

Well we - especially UUs, and other cosmologists - continue to ask these questions about origins. Maybe our local Universe came out of a black hole in another Universe, maybe it was one bubble in a vast foam of universes, the Multiverse or Omniverse.

"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

"At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:

"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on

the back of a giant tortoise. " The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But its turtles all the way down!"

Still we can't help asking: so where did the Universe come from? However far back we go down the line, there's always the new question. We know that ultimately the question can't be answered, and that's the mystery of existence. And maybe the ultimate answer is the one proposed by the "eternal inflation" theory of Andrei Linde. The Multiverse didn't come from anything, nor did it pop out of nowhere. It was always there. This great fountain of creation and experimentation was always there.

When children ask us that kind of question, and keep on pushing, we often end up answering: Well, it just IS. We must learn to live with the kind of answer we give to children, because ultimately there is no other answer. And if you live for long enough with that answer, it becomes actually very comfortable.

The Universe has overwhelming Power.

Along with the mystery goes power. The Universe has an awesome power of creation and of destruction. All of us, all planets and all stars emerged from the natural Universe.

It's in destruction that we see the power most dramatically. We see a tiny part of it in earthquakes and tsunamis. On a much wider scale, huge meteors cause mass extinctions. Suns explode. Galaxies go scything into each other peeling off stars and tearing planets out of their orbits.

But the destruction is the stepping stone to new creation. All the higher elements were baked in the stars. Exploding suns spread those elements out into new clouds which formed new solar systems. And here in a planet in one of those systems, life emerged. And probably on many billions of other planets, too. And eventually you and I were born.

As Carl Sagan said in his book "The Cosmos" "We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars." [ we are]... star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion, billion, billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth, and perhaps throughout the cosmos."

Just as much, we are the children of stellar explosions. Without the supernovae, life could not have emerged. Without the death of the dinosaurs mammals and humans could not have emerged to prominence. Without the destruction there could be no creation.

Size is part of the impression of power. We have already talked about the size of the known Universe, with a radius of 12-14 billion light years. We are coming to grasp the awesome diversity of the Universe, all those billions of galaxies, each one with billions of stars. Every galaxy is different, every nebula, every supernova, those exotic blossoms of lights.

Next to these it seems that all human conceptions of deities are almost trivial and dwarfish. If the deity made humans in his/her image, then the deity is also in our image, yet how limiting is this conception in comparison with the overwhelming awesome mysterious power of the Universe. Of course the most modern conceptions of the entity called "Deity? try to approximate the Universe ? but why try? The Universe is already there in front of us, the only deity-like thing we really need.

The Universe has fascinating Beauty

his is the part we know and love the best. We are very privileged to live right here in the Southern Ontario near the Niagara Escarpment, one of the most beautiful natural environments in the world.

We are also very lucky to live in the first generation that can finally see the full beauty of the Universe: the fantastic art display of the earth's surface from space. Jupiter's swirling coloured bands of clouds and Saturn's complex rings. Solar flares and the beautiful floral diversity of planetary nebulae, left over from stellar explosions. Even the spectacle of destruction is also beautiful. The Milky Way seen with the naked eye was enough to inspire previous generations: we have so much more that it should blow us clean away.

One of the most amazing thing about all this is how diverse it is. Not only are there tens of millions of species on earth ? but every individual of every species is different in some way, however slight. Every rock is different from every other rock, every planet and every moon has different textures and structures.

Humans In The Universe

Human beings are the most mysterious creatures I know. We seem to bridge in our existence the worlds of the macrocosm, of the microcosm and of the mesocosm. We--so far as we know, alone--are able to look back upon the history of the universe and see it as it may have been a fraction of a second after its birth. We--so far as we know, alone--are able to speculate upon its possible future course. We--so far as we know, alone--are able to draw the connections between what was and what will be and see how the lines converge upon this middle level of existence, this fleeting moment of time. We are the universe, contemplating itself and understanding itself, and in modest ways, directing itself. And yet, even as we recognize the unique position we occupy, most of our energy and attention are directed elsewhere, to mere survival. We struggle into birth, we grow and scrabble out a living, we reproduce, we fend off the indignities of illness and age and in the end we die and return to the source from whence we came. And through it all, we, who have the ability to understand the history of the universe, seldom understand our own history. I am forever amazed at what we define as important, and the mysteries of our own existence which we so blithely ignore.

Is the natural universe enough to be a spiritual focus?

s the natural universe mysterious enough? To me at least, a Deity with a mind anything like the human mind would be far less mysterious. The mind is a very familiar thing: we hang out with it for sixteen hours or so every day. Reality is much bigger and more diverse and - well, more mind-blowing. If I thought that some conscious being planned and designed the Universe, I would find it less captivating and mysterious. For me, the idea of a mental Deity takes the mystery right out of the Universe.

Is the universe powerful enough? Whenever people were told that Zeus or Thor hurled a thunderbolt, it was nature itself doing it. Yahweh at his most vengeful could not outdo the work that a meteor six-miles in diameter did at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.

Is nature beautiful enough, does it inspire love enough? Every intimation we have of beauty comes from the natural world. People sometimes say, even as they gaze at Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, that beauty is a manifestation of the Deity's greatness. But again I think that diminishes its impact on us. As I see it, Deity's greatness is an idea that derives from Nature's infinite creativity.

Celebrating our connectedness

You may be thinking: okay we may feel that way and think that way, but what difference can it make to our lives from day to day? Is it a spirituality that can enrich our lives?

I have been talking about Nature and the Universe as if it were something out there, separate from us. But it isn't. We are all part of it, each one of us in this room, all humans, all living things on the planet, all planets and all stars: we are all in it together. It is the sum total of all of us. It's a community. Everything is connected. We are not alone: we are all interwoven in a community of being.

We are not something separate. We are not spirits somehow trapped in bodies until death releases us. We are physical beings and our consciousness is the living activity of our brain. Recognizing and accepting that we are physical beings can help us to enter fully into our bodies and to recognize our full fellowship with the coyote and the lily and the rock.

This intimate connection with everything else is the key to using Nature and the Universe as a spiritual path. The key lies in feeling that connection more deeply, with humans, animals, plants, rocks, rivers and the sky at night, and deepening that connection in every way we can. It can lead to a life that's lived and felt and enjoyed more intensely.

Deepening our connection means being awake and aware at every moment. Opening ourselves up to the mystery power and beauty of the natural Universe is like a wake-up call. It is an invitation to true mindfulness of everything we do, both in human contexts and in nature, rather like Zen Buddhism but without any supernatural beliefs about reincarnation.

You can use it when drinking water, eating, exercising, hiking, going to sleep, even while breathing. It is at the heart of extreme sports where you ride the elements, like surfing, skiing, rockclimbing, skydiving, whitewater rafting.

And it's accessible to anyone. We can go into our beautiful parks and study all the different rocks and flowers. We can go out to the darkest vantage point we can find, and stargaze. We can watch the shooting stars, full moons and the Milky Way.

Using Nature as a spiritual support

The Natural Universe is not just a source of wonder. It can also be a source of support in times of trouble. One of the reasons people believe in deities is that life can sometimes be really tough and we need all the help we can get. A big daddy or a big mommy to look after us and guide us would be nice. But it's clear that the big parent, if there is one, does not look after us. It visits us with great gifts, and tough challenges, and troubles great and small. And leaves us humans to take care of ourselves. He or she behaves just like Nature.

Believing in a benevolent Deity, in a world full of disease and accidents and natural disasters small and large, is a difficult mental exercise.

If we take the natural universe as our focus, we do not have that problem. The Universe is not good or evil - those categories are human ones. The Universe is beyond good and evil.

The Universe just is. It is what it is. And it does what it does.

I find a deep kind of peace in accepting that. The natural universe made me and I'm grateful for that. The universe is playing the game of creation, and for a while it is letting me play along with it, and it is fulfilling fun and we should make the most of it.

Nature can help in more particular ways. Going out into nature in a time of trouble will always place personal problems into perspective. Our troubles are small in the scale of things, when seen against the night sky full of suns and galaxies. Nature always goes on, regardless.

And we can learn from Nature. The strength and flexibility of trees can teach us lessons in endurance. The mobility of rocky streams can teach us lessons in freedom and adaptability. The condensation and dissolving of clouds can teach us to let go of our pains.

Coping with death

This way of thinking also helps to cope with the thought of death. Ever since we humans became aware of death we have sought to escape it. We have invented all kinds of afterlives, both on this earth and under this earth and in the skies and beyond the skies.

Some of us can cope with the idea of total extinction, but many non-theists still need to feel that they and their loved ones will persist in some way after death. Well we do persist, in many realistic ways - in the memories of those who knew us, in the genes of our families, in the things we have created, in the actions we have done.

And our elements are recycled in nature. If we are cremated, they fly on the winds and encircle the earth. If we are buried in a natural way free of metals and chemicals, our elements break down for use by other life forms and part of us will live on in grass and trees and squirrels and rabbits and hawks. I find that a pleasant thought.

We are a part of nature. We will always be a part of nature.

Nature as a guide for ethics

We can use the focus on Nature and the Universe as a guide for ethics. I don't mean that we should watch what animals do and do the same. Chimps, for example, occasionally indulge in war, murder and even cannibalism. We know better - or we should know better.

The focus on nature requires and enables a deeper level of compassion. It means respect for human rights, for animal rights, and for the health of ecosystems and of the planet.

The awareness of our unity with nature and the universe means that the community is not just our family or place of worship: it's everyone on earth. All of us are equal centres of awareness. It's the people devastated by tsunamis and hurricanes. It's AIDS orphans in Africa, it's victims of war and oppression. We are all in the same boat together.

And not just people: all animals on earth with central nervous systems, they are all centres of awareness peering out on the world, playing in it, studying it, worrying about survival. And all the non-sentient beings that they depend on. In the final analysis we should be concerned about all life forms, because in complex ways they all depend on each other and we on them.

In summary then here are three aspects here, to the way humans respond to nature and spirituality:

• The first and the heart of it is Mystery - something that is greater than human comprehension.

• The second is a sense of awesome overwhelming Power - the power to create and to sustain, but also the power to destroy.

• Finally there is a sense of Beauty, so breathtaking that you have no choice but to love it.

The mathematician and cosmologist Brian Swimme captures the soul [of our topic today] in a direct, poetic and unusual way when he says: "Just think; four billion years ago the earth was molten rock, now it sings opera".