“WHAT HOMER SAYS TO ATHEISTS.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: Where have all the gods gone? Where are the gods from Mt. Olympus: Zeus, Aphrodite, Poseidon? Where are the gods of the mighty Romans: Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus; or any of the 330 million gods of India…Shiva…Ganesha?

I visited a Google site for the gods of India, and there were ads informing me of “Low prices on India gods,” and better yet, “2-day shipping.”

We laugh. The notion of gods and goddesses seems so foreign to our Western way of life. Our science, our government, our public education, our American Way of Life, shall we say, has bifurcated the sacred from the secular. In Europe, religious education is part of public education. But in America, religion is something we do on Saturday or Sunday. It’s not a pervasive part of our living. It doesn’t permeate our existence.

Unless of course you’re a professional religious, and it dominates everything you do. One of the realities of my spiritual journey is that I started way over on the hyper Christian religious side, and then very early on in my young adult life, I went the opposite way. It wasn’t until I began ministry at a Unitarian Universalist church some 20+ years ago that I began to search for a theological and religious center that was informed by all phases of my past.

I like to think of it as a mix of three stages of critical thinking.

n     The first stage was pre-critical. We believed. Whatever the church, mosque, synagogue, or our parents taught us, we believed. And then, something happened. It could have been simply growing up, or realizing that what we had been taught simply was not so. But we left that pre-critical stage where we mutely believed whatever we were told.

n     Then we entered the critical stage, where we were more identified by what we did not believe, than by what we believed. That may have been the time when we left the church of our heritage, synagogue or mosque for another; we may have changed churches, dropped religious observances, whatever. But the major motif was that we didn’t believe all the stuff we had been taught. Not surprisingly, a lot of people choose Unitarianism during that period.

n     And then comes a third stage, the post-critical...when we’ve gotten over our anger, or the need to attack other religions, and we’re searching for a way to expand our understanding and our spiritual identity.

Three stages: pre-critical, critical and post-critical. During our pre-critical phase, it’s very possible that prayer and meditation were very important….but during our critical phase, all of that went down the drain along with its outdated theology. Also, in the critical phase, we may have begun to realize that it’s not so much what we believe as what we practice. And we began to place a lot of emphasis upon social justice, and caring for the less fortunate….Then we moved into the post-critical phase, which I think most of us are in now. So let’s talk a little bit about it. It’s distinguished by many things, but two of them are these:

1.     We realize that we have an innate need to feel some sense of ultimate connectedness. Some form of prayer or meditation may come back as a part of our post-critical consciousness. Prayer takes many forms. The Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther said almost 500 years ago, “We pray my sisters and brothers, not to inform God, but to inform ourselves.” Prayer is the language of the soul…an expression of that inner longing to be attuned to the ultimate. And with the help of Eastern religions, we’ve learned that meditation is equally helpful, if not more so, when done regularly and with good practices. Prayer and meditation are sometimes distinctive of the post-critical stage: the desire to be connected.

2.     In addition to inner spiritual work, we also have a heightened awareness of the privileges that attend to our status as liberal religious in North America. And so we reach out to others in need. We give money, time, or moral support to the oppressed…to the increasing number of poor. Last year in 2010 in Lee County alone, almost 11,000 people had their mortgage holders file foreclosure suits against them. 11,000! Multiply that by the parents and the average number of children in those homes. It is probably between 30,000 and 40,000 people who have been unable to make their house payments. More than 55% of them are homesteaded, which means it’s not speculators losing out, but people who bought the constant promotion that owning your own home is what it means to be an American. I talked with the News-Press reporter last week who’s written their foreclosure stories. He said he found instances where loan promoters had people sign blank documents and the loan officer filled it out for them. He found others that signed documents in English, when they could only read Spanish! Too many of us were raised on the notion of applying for loans, paying 20% down, passing a credit check, and then holding our breath while waiting for approval. That didn’t happen. The institutions, Dick says, even filled in the amount of salary needed to get the loan and move in the house. Every week the 20^th circuit court meets with stacks of cases that need to move. Due process is a foreign phrase. These are all senior judges who serve at the invitation of the court. So they don’t want to gum up the process and listen to some poor soul who has a story to tell. It’s wham, bam, no thanks, Sam, and out the door they go. Those are your fellow Lee County neighbors.

We just inaugurated a new governor in Florida last week. I read that Governor Scott’s net worth is estimated at $283 million, and that’s after he spent $50 million in the recent gubernatorial race to buy the office. Doesn’t it just make your heart warm enough to pickle to think that we have a governor so rich that he is selling the state’s plane so that he can fly his own instead. As my professor at Oxford, who was also a bishop in the Church of England, said in a course on money and the church, “It is the task of the rich politician, to make the poor believe that his interests and theirs are one and the same.” I say all of that as an expression of the post-critical stage, a time when we try to find a center, both by inner work within and also outer work in our community.

And while we are in this post-critical stage, every now and then, we will have a genuinely exciting experience that will shake us out of the doldrums, get our fires burning, and energize our evangelistic zeal, because it pushes the possibility of a new way of searching for the center. That happened to me quite recently.

SCRIPTURE.

In fact, just last Friday week, I read a book review in the Wall Street Journal. It sounded so interesting that I went to Barnes & Noble and purchased it for $26. The title was “ALL THINGS SHINING: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.” It’s a grabber of a title, isn’t it? Then that afternoon I read another review in the New York Times on the same book. I thought, that’s unusual for any book to be reviewed that much. It must be good.

Then I began to read it, and I couldn’t put it down. The authors are two academics, one at Harvard and the other at Berkeley, and both philosophy professors. It may be a little heavy occasionally. But most times it is an incredible read.

And here is a sample of what they write…remember they are writing as philosophers:

1.     We are not fully in control of some of the most basic aspects of our existence. That’s anti-American, I know. We Americans stem more from the Roman gods than the Greeks. We idealize the self-made man…tough…independent…all on his own. Followers of the god Fortuna…who knows that her or his fortune may be good or bad, but they’ll take it stoically, face to the wind, and bite the bullet.

Unfortunately, by first hand experience, I know that we are not fully in control of some of the most basic aspects of our existence. Let me give you an example: On Tuesday, Dec. 21^st, I had an early lunch down the street of half a turkey breast sandwich, a side salad and a cup of soup. Six hours later, Joyce and I are driving in rush hour traffic in downtown Tampa, when I was hit hard with acute food poisoning…again… again…and again. Then it’s 911 to the Emergency Room, then two nights in Intensive Care at St. Joseph’s. Diagnosis: food poisoning followed by aspiration pneumonia, followed by bacterial pneumonia. The point is, we were just driving up for dinner with Joyce’s brother and family, planning then to turn around and drive home that night. We were fully in control of our existence: Right? Wrong! One of the many insights of the book is to flesh out dimensions of our lives which we normally don’t address. And one is to know and realize, that “We are not fully in control of some of the most basic aspects of our existence.” We can’t even control our response to the food we eat.

2.     Another sample of their writing is a question, and this is the point that all of us who think of ourselves as some brand of atheist need to hear.

Question: What if it isn’t the gods we’ve lost, but the meaning to life they offered? It isn’t so much that we’ve lost touch with Zeus, with Aphrodite, with Apollo and Poseidon. But what if there were meanings which that backdrop to Homeric life offered, a self-understanding painted on that canvas, which enriched life far beyond anything that our modern centering on self could ever imagine. It may well be that those kind of meanings – the meanings that came from a society infused with the gods of Mt. Olympus – have been lost for all time. But what if? What if we could recover some of the richness of life which Homer paints, minus the gods? For example:

Homer’s heroes were always profoundly grateful to the gods. Why so? They were grateful because they also believed that “wonderful things outside our control are constantly happening for us.” Think of that for a moment…that was Greece…now be here and think: “wonderful things outside our control are constantly happening for us…right now as we sit here in this building.”

But to them that was not a one-time thought that surfaced, or a sudden awareness that dawned; rather, it was the very presupposition of their living. It justified and reinforced the feeling of gratitude that was so central to their understanding of what is admirable in a life. So they are always profoundly grateful to the gods, because they knew that “wonderful things outside their control were constantly happening for them.”

Here’s one final statement: “To say that all humankind needs the gods…is to say that in part at least, we are the kind of beings who are at our best when we find ourselves acting in ways that we cannot and ought not entirely take credit for.” Here that is again: “To say that all humankind needs the gods…is to say that in part at least we are the kind of beings who are at our best when we find ourselves acting in ways that we cannot and ought not entirely take credit for.”

Enough. Next week: (check bulletin for title)

CONCLUSION.

I’m going to focus on this for two more Sundays, and in fact, I ordered 25 copies from the publisher at $13 each, which included free shipping. I would like to invite as many of you as are interested to join me on Thursday mornings about 10 o’clock here in the Community Room, starting not this week but the next, on the 20th. We will study it together and in groups for about seven or eight weeks with a break for soup about noon time. We’ve got a bunch of card tables and 50 chairs. Hopefully, we will not only learn a lot, but we can also use it as a basis for designing our summer services. By reading it together, we can work on the parts that may be a little dense. (Joyce Ramay and Ed Kleinow have already purchased their copies.). So sign up if you’re interested, and bring your money when you come, week after next, on Thursday at 10 a.m. If you can’t afford $13, there are scholarships; and the soup, bread and tea will only be $1.

Shalom, Salaam Aleikum. Amen. Blessed be.

Idealized portrayal of Homer dating to the Hellenistic period. British Museum.

(a public domain item made available by Wikimedia Commons)