Unitarian Society of New Haven
April 29, 2018
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Reading: Untitled by Jason Shinder
(http://claviclecollective-blog.tumblr.com/post/3366402801/untitled-by-jason-shinder)
Sermon:
Accounts vary, but some say that Joan of Arc was 13 years old when she first began hearing voices and seeing visions that she believed carried messages from God telling her, first, to attend church and live piously, and, later, that she was to deliver the people of France from the invading English and establish Charles the VII on the throne as the nation’s rightful king.[i]
A teenager on a mission, she cut her hair, took a vow of chastity and began wearing men’s clothes. She went to the king in 1428 and asked for an army that she would subsequently lead to Orleans, a city under siege by the English. The army’s victory – and hers – was renowned, and she would go on to lead other campaigns, but she was eventually taken captive. She was tried for heresy and for impersonating a man. She was forced to confess that her voices and visions were a fabrication, but she refused to stop wearing men’s clothing. She was burned at the stake at the age of 19.[ii]
Now, theories abound about Joan’s visions and voices. Scholars suggest that she was schizophrenic or epileptic or suffered from migraines or other forms of physical or mental illness.[iii] For others, she is a saint (literally, she was canonized in 1920 and is the patron saint of France). She is, for many, the epitome of virtue and religious devotion. Whatever the cause of her visions and “her voices,” as she called them, I imagine the fright that this young girl must have experienced the first time it happened.
“When I was thirteen,” she says in one account, “I had a voice from God to help me to govern myself. The first time, I was terrified. The voice came to me about noon: it was summer, and I was in my father’s garden. I saw it many times before I knew it was Saint Michael….
He was not alone, but duly attended by heavenly angels….”[iv]
For some of us, I imagine that this is what we imagine when we hear people talk about a “spiritual experience.” And for some it is: voices from God, visiting angels, a personalized message.
Some Unitarian Universalists may still agree with folks like early Unitarian Humanist, the Rev. John Dietrich, who looked disparagingly at people who claimed such a spiritual experience,
or spirituality in general. In 1929, Dietrich preached a sermon claiming “the feebler or the more dissipated the intelligence of a person or a generation, the greater the chance that mere words will pass as coin. Such a word preeminently is ‘spirituality.’”[v]
Nice. Very inclusive, Rev. Dietrich.
The truth is, we must get down off our tradition’s inherited high horse if we are to meet people where they are, if we are to engage with each other with respect and honesty, and if we are to understand the deep hunger that lies behind the desire for a relevant and resonant spiritual experience. What we find might surprise us.
Full disclosure: today’s sermon is the “auction sermon” meaning that the choice of topic went to the highest bidder. Said bidder and I had a fascinating conversation about what it means to seek out and find a Unitarian Universalist congregation when one wasn’t even looking and certainly did not expect to find what one wasn’t looking for in a spiritual community of any sort. What does it mean to all-of-the-sudden realize that one attends services on Sunday “religiously”
and not only that one attends, but one has a meaningful experience each week, that one finds one’s life beginning to be changed, transformed, even?
What does all that mean when, again, one wasn’t looking, didn’t feel anything was missing,
but now couldn’t do without it and before one knows it, one begins identifying with the group,
with the tradition, with a religion, even? No angels needed, this can still all be rather, well, shocking! For some, I’m sure it can even be terrifying.
The way I see it: we are all looking. Not for a congregation, per se, but for an experience that opens for us that “place of self,” that place that is “not alien to truth,” that place where we are washed with “peace and serenity” and the “fierce longing for light and heart” finds fruition,
where “living strength” flows in our veins, and we are called into “fearlessness and trust.”[vi]
Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever longed to feel that way?
I’ll tell you, I was shocked when I found myself one spring Sunday morning walking down a hill on the Wesleyan campus on my way to church. It was Easter, and I woke up that morning with what felt like a hunger, an ache, a homesickness for some place I had never been. You see, I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and Easter in our congregation was about flowers – each of the children received a potted pansy on that day, and I loved it – but I could never remember anyone mentioning Jesus or resurrection or even the empty tomb. Easter was about flowers.
And then I went to an all-girls Catholic high school and fought my way through, shocking innocent Catholic school girls with my atheism and general irreverence. I was mean and sometimes even cruel. And still, they were kind to me and loving and supportive. For some unknown reason, I signed up for our senior class spiritual retreat called Kairos, which means “the appointed time” in Greek. (Fitting for a senior retreat.)
I signed up for Kairos, and I attended, and I don’t remember much except that they gave me – gave everyone – a beautiful silver cross. Girls worn them proudly upon our return to school.
I did not. I placed mine in a special box, though, and I took it to college.
And that Easter Sunday morning my first year, I took it out and put it around my neck and under my shirt, and I marched myself off to church. It was standing room only, and I stood behind a father holding his daughter all dressed up in an Easter dress. The light from the stained-glass windows fell across the little girl’s face, and she was simply radiant. I don’t remember the songs or the sermon (a terrible thing for a preacher to admit), but I do remember that child and the love exuded from the pair, and my newfound sense that resurrection was real and true. Because, I felt a sense of peace and serenity I hadn’t known I was missing until that morning. And I felt strong again and not afraid.
I still had no idea what I was doing there or why that cross was around my neck or what I wanted, but I had a feeling that, at least for the moment, I had found what I needed,
and it had something to do with church and something to do with that child, and, yes, something to do with God and with Jesus, too.
Years later, it was James Cone[vii] who taught me that Easter was about justice, that Jesus’s victory on the cross held truth because it mirrored the Black experience in America, that hatred was never the final word, and racialized violence never the final act. He taught me that our work – all of our work – is to create together the “beloved community of humankind.”
He reintroduced the Christian story through the lens of the Civil Rights movement and the history of Black people in this nation and his classroom became for me, church, and something happened there that I can barely put into words.
~
Doug Muder, a Humanist writer for the UU World, our tradition’s magazine, defines spirituality as “an awareness of the gap between what you can experience and what you can describe.”[viii]
He then goes through a painstaking process of justifying his definition and proving how it meets humanist criteria for critical thought. Which is important for some, I know, and the footnotes will take you there, but that line of thinking is not as vital for me as it once was.
I like Muder’s definition because it focuses on the import of experience and allows space for our human capacity for language to reach its limits. Sometimes we simply cannot “describe things to be sure they happened”[ix] and yet, we know they happened; we know their import, and we know we were changed in some way because they happened.
~
In the Book of Acts, we find the story of the apostle Paul’s conversion. Before becoming Paul, he was known as Saul of Tarsus and was a persecutor of early Christians, mainly Jews who were following the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, known as “the Way.” Acts 9 reads as follows:
Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.[x]
For three days, he is without sight until one of Jesus’s disciples is sent to him to restore his sight, that he may be filled with the Holy Spirit. Paul is, without a doubt, a problematic figure in many respects, but I love this story of his conversion because he does not leave unscathed. He is temporarily blinded, but fundamentally changed, forced to see with spiritual rather than physical eyes and moreover, forced to trust the one he is persecuting that he might be restored to wholeness, filled with Spirit, and become more than he was before.
Have you ever felt felled to the ground by an experience – perhaps one you didn’t understand – and then restored? Perhaps this was, for you, the work of Spirit, or of your own mind,
or grace, or the love of a community. Perhaps for you, it pointed to some higher power or something larger than yourself. Perhaps this experience is the foundation for your belief in God,
or your disbelief.
For many of us, not fully understanding an experience can be disconcerting. Not having words to describe what is happening or feeling like it is illogical or beyond our reasoning is even more alarming. But we have to let go a little. Live a little. For example, we might let ourselves be moved by music in ways we didn’t expect. This might even prompt us to applaud during a worship service though we know it makes some others uncomfortable. We might not even know we are doing it or why, but there we are clapping and even calling out, “moved by the Spirit,” one might say.
This is why I will not, as your minister, issue a blanket ban on clapping in worship. I am not about regulating people’s spiritual experiences. We all engage this collective experience that we create together in different ways. And I am about finding ways for all of us to experience the longing and the peace and the serenity but also the living strength and the fearlessness and trust and joy that comes when we surrender to that we cannot put into words.
It is, often, the spiritual experiences that surprise us, terrify us, knock us to the ground, that hold the most meaning. This is not to say they cannot be mundane or every day: a meditative moment in the midst of a chaotic work day, a shared smile with a stranger, a walk in the woods, or a written or spoken word that jolts us into awareness.
But spirituality that surprises us takes us out of our comfort zone, moves us into a different realm, has us understanding that longing for a place we’ve never been and then realizing that we are home in the most profound way possible.
Your spiritual path does not, in any way, have to mirror mine for us to learn from each other.
My journey has taken me from Easter flowers to the truth of resurrection, from militant atheism to a profound belief in that abundant love that I call God. Yours has taken you … wherever it has taken you. If we engage it openly and honestly, the spiritual quest is a life-long journey. We grow and change along the way. When we make space for, not only our experience, but that of our peers here in this spiritual community and beyond our walls, what we find might not only surprise us, but delight us as well.
We may still be terrified, but we might also discover that now is the “appointed time”
for us to be transformed.
[i] “St. Joan of Arc, Portraits of a Saint” http://saint-joan-of-arc.com/voices.htm
[ii] “History Stories: 7 Surprising Facts about Joan of Arc” https://www.history.com/news/history-lists/7-surprising-facts-about-joan-of-arc
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] “In Her Own Words” pp.5-6.
[v] “Before Words” by Doug Muder. UU World. July 18, 2011. https://www.uuworld.org/articles/spirituality-humanism
[vi] Words of Rev. Ma Theresa Gustilo Gallardo:
Let us reach the place of self, the place that is not alien to truth.
Let us wash over with peace and serenity,
with fierce longing for light and heart;
with living strength flowing in our veins,
bringing ourselves into fearlessness and into trust.
[vii] James Cone died on April 28, 2018. He was a scholar, a theologian and a professor at Union Theological Seminary who is known as the founder of Black Liberation Theology.
[viii] “Before Words” by Doug Muder. UU World. July 18, 2011. https://www.uuworld.org/articles/spirituality-humanism
[ix] “Untitled” by Jason Shinder
[x] Acts 9:1-9