“The New Shape of Serendipity

that Awaits!”[1]

INTRODUCTION: In the Spring of 1995, I began a search for spiritual self-understanding. That’s much different than a search to find God. In fact, it was just the opposite.

To me, God was a bankrupt word. It had been used to justify war, murder, rape, robbery, and destruction, and still is. Most of us still remember the phrase that the 9/11 terrorists used when striking. After 9/11, the FBI found three separate copies of a checklist of final reminders for the 9/11 hijackers. An excerpt reads: "When the confrontation begins, strike like champions: Shout, 'Allahu Akbar.'” “God is great” or “God is the greatest.”

And I’m sure you’ve all read of the disclosure last month that an American rifle maker has for 30 years been putting King James Bible verses on the rifle equipment they’ve been selling the U.S. Army. That makes them “Jesus Rifles” and “God Guns,” I presume.

Back in 1995, to my mind the divine cemetery was full to overflowing with gods of all sizes, shapes, and sex. There were good gods, bad gods, old gods, young gods, male gods and female goddesses. And from my perspective, they had all outlived their usefulness.

I had no inclination to try and resurrect any one of them. They could stay in their tombs and neither I nor the world would be the worse for their demise.

But I did want to know this: Was it possible to keep one’s intellectual integrity and still explore dimensions of the spiritual life? I came up against one very serious impediment: language.

Now as I understand language, it developed as a way of communication. Sounds stood for something. They were symbols. It’s what we call symbolic communication.

We move our tongue, our teeth, our mouth, and then blow oxygen over our voice box and we get the millions of sounds, symbols, that we call language.

We’ve done that in religion as well. I put the middle of my tongue next to the roof of my mouth and make the “ga” sound and finish up with my tongue touching my teeth, and I have the “god” sound.

But the difficulty with that word, that vocable, is not how to say it. Rather, it’s whether, because of its loss of currency in many arenas, it should be totally tossed out?

As I studied about spirituality, I began to wonder: Is that like saying, that because Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo all had a faulty understanding of the universe, we won’t use the word, the vocable, universe, ever again.

What I’m asking is: Does the inadequacy of past uses of the language preclude their redefinition, their revitalization, their currency?

Now listen closely, for here is where it’s possible to have a great deal of misunderstanding: Is there something within the religious experience which is synonymous with the scientific one? Aren’t we at All Faiths about constantly exploring the parameters of religious experience, as opposed to discounting them and throwing them away?

Now I say that in the light of knowing this one thing: I think that many of us here one day made a significant discovery. We didn’t believe what we were being taught in the religious congregations of which we were a part. We made a change, and in so doing we rejected those previous teachings. We were one place, and we moved to another. That’s two moves.

My question is this: Can we now move to another place, where we explore new ways of understanding the same issues being addressed as before, but with new insight and new understanding?

Can we keep our intellectual principles in tact, while still being free to experiment with new ways of understanding, including new ways of using old language? Or is the religious vocabulary totally lost to us.

Here’s how that worked out for me. As I mentioned earlier, while in graduate school, I decided there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I had been taught to look at the world. I made a total paradigm shift in my understanding: 180° degrees. I ceased to use the God-word to explain my own religious understanding.

It did cause complications since I was a United Methodist minister. I led the religious emphasis week at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, which is a United Methodist affiliated, liberal arts college. I still remember a young man who had been at every service and workshop, who at the end came up to me and said that he really enjoyed my presentations, but upon closer reflection, he realized that I had never once used the word, “god.” I wasn’t sure whether that was something to be proud of, or be concerned about.

Years later, while rocking along on my journey and serving as minister of a Unitarian Universalist Church, I was asked, “Can you write a book about spirituality?” In attempting to do so, I discovered I had no vocabulary. I had no language, no great concepts and phrases.

Out of that experience, I came to the conclusion, and it’s only my conclusion, that we should feel free to reclaim the religious vocabulary and give new definition to its bankrupt terms. Use any of the words, but redefine them to fit our usage.

Let me put it more practically. I now have no trouble in saying, “I believe in God,” but not in any sense the god of my childhood, or of fundamentalism. Rather, I believe there is a reality in the universe which is wonderful and awesome. It’s not some person, nor is it some knockoff of anthropos.

But it is the presence…the process…that gives a new and glorious life to the union of semen and egg. It’s the process that causes grass to grow and wind to blow. That sends the sun to the soil, and rain to the earth, and vegetables and fruit to burst forth. It’s the power that takes life and gives life. That turns morning to sunshine and night to darkness.

And sometimes, when I stand on East Coast or West Coast beaches and listen to the roar of the oceans…sometimes when I sit in the silence of my room…sometimes when I spread the ashes of a departed…I confront that God. I feel a part of that cosmos. I feel a part of the wonder. I feel a part of tomorrow.

And I claim that as liberal religious of whatever religion – Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Sikh – you name it, we have the liberty to explore new depths and new ways of understanding this marvelous universe of ours, intellectually and religiously.

Here’s why we should (and it’s a quote from Jewish theologian Martin Buber):

I.

“EVERY JOURNEY HAS A SECRET DESTINATION OF WHICH THE TRAVELER IS UNAWARE.”

Along the pathway to self-understanding come life’s aha’s. Along the pathway of living come life’s bingo’s. Along the pathway of religious search and discovery come life’s unexpected rewards.

For life at its heart is all about serendipity – those unexpected good things that happen when we least expect them, such as:

“I was late and because I was late, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in 20 years.” Or:

“I was sick and stayed home, and in the process realized some things about myself that transformed my whole attitude towards life and living.”

Think for a moment of the turn you took, the event you went to that you really didn’t want to go to, and of the consequences which resulted…of the serendipity that occurred…of the unexpected good things you realized as a result.

            As  Robert Frost has written:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled. And that has made all the difference.”

All Faiths is about opening our eyes. It’s about seeing the wonder of the earth and the cosmos. But it’s also about seeing the wonder of us and our possibilities.

            Many years ago, I worked with Oral Roberts, a friend of my family long before I was born. One of the slogans he had was, “Expect a miracle.” There were bumper stickers, billboards, desk plaques, even a book using that phrase.

Personally, I didn’t think much of it. I really didn’t believe in miracles. Then one day, the vice-president of sales for Technicolor in Hollywood, asked me for 50 of the little desk plaques of Oral’s that said, “Expect a miracle.” This guy put them on every desk in his division. Whereas, I had my eyes closed so tight that I could not see the possibilities of living one’s life out of expectancy.

            For every journey – yours, mine, every one’s – there is an unexpected secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.

And remember one thing else:

II.

“WE HAVE THE REST OF OUR LIVES TO LIVE OVER.”

We as a species are inclined to the future. We as a species are at our best when we are able to focus our time and energy on tomorrow.

            Sometimes though we get into trouble emotionally, relationally, socially, familialy, and we have to call a “time out.” And instead of looking ahead to tomorrow, we have to look back to yesterday, to see, “What happened?”

We go to our friendly shrink, and one of the things they help us do is to look back and see where we got off track. Or we look for help in dealing with the unexpected heavy load that was dumped on us.

But seeking therapeutic help – and I’ve done it many times in my life – is for one purpose: by looking at the past and present, to find ways to help us restore our view towards tomorrow, towards the future, towards the possibilities of the life we have yet to live.

 That’s another way of saying we do not know what tomorrow holds. We have hopes and dreams and anticipations. But the reality is, something much different can show up.

The life that stretches before us is ours to live as if we were living our past life over again. We don’t have to make the same mistakes again. We don’t have to worry about what others think. We can sail our ship into uncharted waters. We can build our mansion in the shadow of Vesuvius. We’ve been given a wondrous gift: life. And we are free to explore the meaning of that gift.

CONCLUSION

I close with this wonderful event of serendipity that happened to me. I’ve told it before, but I want to share it again.

A few years ago, a young man in a fundamentalist church in Oklahoma City lost his partner due to AIDS. Their minister, when he found out the cause of death, had refused to conduct an affirming funeral. He made clear his belief that the departed was at that moment in hell because of the sin of homosexuality, and he would say so in the funeral service.

Further complicating the issue was that the illness had drained the couple of all their financial resources, so much so, that without the benefit of their home church, they were only going to have a graveside service, at the former “colored” cemetery – red clay dirt road, and no watering system, barely maintained by the county. And none of their families were willing to be present or to help financially.

In desperation, the decedent’s partner inquired from several as to who might help, but with no luck. Finally, the funeral director told him of this Unitarian Universalist congregation that might and whose minister had one time sent him a letter offering to conduct AIDS related funerals free of charge, after a story in the newspaper about churches that wouldn’t serve AIDS victims.

When the bereaved called, he told me the story and asked, would I be willing to do his partner’s funeral service without condemning him for being homosexual. He said his partner was a Christian, a gentle man, who loved the Lord. He knew that if anyone went to heaven his partner did.

I said, “Of course, I would be honored.” Then I called Gracie, my sister, and told her of the situation and that it would only be a graveyard service, with only a few people present, and no money. She agreed to pay for a substitute teacher to cover for her that afternoon and to come sing at the cemetery.

On the chosen day, a hot day with not even a hint of a breeze, I read the Christian scripture to the four gay men present. It said, “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, principalities nor powers, things present nor things to come, heights nor depths nor any such creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” In closing I said with every bit of intensity possible, “No where in any of the four gospels, or any part of Christian scripture, did Jesus ever say a word in condemnation of persons of same-sex orientation.” Further, that as I read Christian scripture, the promises of Jesus were available to all who believed on him. And then Gracie sang “Amazing Grace.”

Her gorgeous singing of that old gospel hymn seemed to redeem that barren sight of plastic green grass, a dirty little tent, and one little wreath of flowers on the cheapest of caskets. As she sang, the bereaved partner stood up a little taller, as did everyone else. We all cried a good cry, and they hugged Gracie and me and told us how great we were. As I drove away, I knew the Universe had just shared a bit of serendipity with me. I had taken the poetry of Christian faith and proclaimed its healing balm to four men who were hurting. I had gone to help, but been helped instead. Together we had all been lifted up in word and song.  

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.

Amen. Blessed Be.