tomorrow's sermon

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite activities was climbing the guava tree in the corner of my grandparents’ front yard. I’d taunt my cousin by climbing higher than she dared, nestling myself among increasingly pliable branches. I could feel the entire tree swaying in its own private dance as the breeze brushed over my skin, could look through the web of branches and the sea of green leaves into a keyhole of vivid sky.

I also loved climbing onto the swing my grandfather had attached to the gnarled live oak in the backyard, a scrap of plywood with chain bored into a particularly sturdy branch stretching above my head. I’d pump my legs back and forth rhythmically, creating my own songs, and singing loudly while I pretended that I was flying.

Right now, at this point in my life, I’d consider that worship. I’d go even further and say it’s as much or more like worship as what we are doing here today. Today we have the additional component of community, of people sitting here together and singing songs together and saying the same words together. We have ritual. We have Religion with a capital R.

But what if we expand our definition of community just a bit? Many of us here are fond of using the phrase “namaste” or “the divine in me honors the divine in you.” Many of us find that phrase can be a hard one to say, even to our best friend or our spouse, much less to that church member who didn’t have time to talk to us at coffee hour or that idiot who cut us off in traffic.

What many of us traveling an “earth-centered” path have discovered is that the word “namaste” can be expanded or narrowed to incredible proportions. In other words, divinity is not up in the sky someplace, or even within the minds and hearts of humanity.

The divine spirit inside me can connect with the energy of an expansive sky, or of the sticky, forked weeds that spring up in the middle of my yard during summertime. My spirit feels akin to the smooth tanned branches of a guava tree or the full moon that shone into the windows of my house last night. Some of you may have glimpsed that same moon through your windows. Others in this congregation danced and drummed under her silver light last night, in celebration of Lammas.

Namaste is a word that infuses both the world around us and the world within us with meaning. It’s a word that connects us to both the seeming eternity of the universe and the infinity of the chlorophyll, cells, DNA, protons, quarks, and who-knows-what-else embedded within a blade of grass.

To me, worship is sitting on the beach and feeling crystalline grains of sand brushing against the backs of my thighs. That same type of worship can be experienced by the people sitting in the back on this side of the congregation, who have a great view of sky, trees, and the occasional crow flying by. I know this because I sit there myself. I too zone out if the sermon gets a little boring, meditating upon the changes in the sky from one week to the next. (But don’t tell M. That’ll just be our little secret.)

As a child, of course, I didn’t know this. As a child, I thought that worship was singing the hymns I learned in church, or reading the riveting stories of the Bible (and I’m not being sarcastic here…some of the weirdest raunchiest stuff you can imagine is in there, and it’s something I was SUPPOSED to read.) I thought worship was directed ‘out there’ at the Father God who lived in the sky and had definite ideas about my goodness or badness. I suppose I conceived of God as a sort of larger-than-life Santa Claus, compiling a record of when I was naughty and when I was nice and using that to decide some essential thing about me. God decided whether or not I was worthy of the good stuff of life.

It took a long time, I’d say until I was 29 or 30, before I was able to exorcise this image of God, and I’ll be honest with you and say that I don’t know if it’s gone completely. The roots are deep. But in my late twenties, I was surrounded by strong female friends here at church, women like SLC, AK, SP, and I was hearing them refer to the divine as “her” not “him.” Usually when you hear people doing this, it’s in the context of a joke, even now in the 21st century, even within the Unitarian church. But these women were serious in their devotion to Goddess as they conceived her to be.

I began thinking, “Why not?” What would a female deity be like? I conceived her as more nurturing and understanding than her male counterpart. I also imagined her as tough, gutsy, adventurous. This was no demure Mary looking up at Christ from behind a blue robe and headdress. This was a Goddess who was mystically vibrant.

I still believe in this Goddess, still turn to her on dark days. But I’ve come to understand her energy as more of a force imbuing all things with life. In other words, it doesn’t particularly matter to me if she’s called Artemis or Aphrodite, Adonai or Allah.

But it does bother me when we limit him/her/it to being one and one thing only. And that’s one reason why I tend to think of the various goddesses as helpful metaphors, archetypes to be tapped into, more than objects of worship, at least at this point in my spiritual journey.

Chip Dockery and I had an interesting conversation about deity and what we were taught as Protestant children growing up in the Southern United States. He likened the concept to the same “chain-of-command” that’s found in the Armed Forces. First there’s God, then Jesus, then the Holy Spirit, then the angels, then men, then women, then animals, then plants, the microscopic life forms. In this model, men are the stewards, the caretakers of all, the ones in charge of everything here on Earth. The lieutenants. In this system, (one many people in this country still operate under, I might add,) men give the orders. Men decide what needs to be done for the good of the world around us. However, even they are answerable to a higher authority.

This was the system of thought I subscribed to as a child, even as a young adult. The girl playing in the guava tree thought of climbing trees as play, separate from the worship I did in church, where the woolly pews scratched my legs and I doodled in bulletins to avoid messing up and speaking out loud when I was supposed to be silent. Worship was pleasing God by singing or listening to the minister and my parents.

However, once I began traveling down a different spiritual path in earnest, that changed. My concept of the world was completely turned on its side, from a vertical axis to a horizontal one.

As a friend of mine, gleefulfreak, wrote (though in messenger not here in LJ, lol), “Everything is God, and everything is of God, and there is nothing that we can possibly experience that does not resonate in some way with the divine. It's just the foolishness of dividing God. Why do we put him in this church but not that one? This book but not that one? If God is without limits, then he's in everything. And he's a she and an it and a they and an us.”

Within this horizontal model, I can look at a tree and say “Namaste” to the tree. I’m not trying to say that the tree is sentient, capable of cognition in the same way that we humans are. But I am saying that at a cellular or subcellular level, the tree is made up of the same divine stuff that we are. For me, at some level, science and religion converge. They become lovers embracing each other instead of two armies shouting rhetoric. At that level, there’s something flowing through the grass and the trees and the birds and the sky. I call that something divine energy. Other people might call it electrons moving about. Still others might call it something entirely different. But I believe in the existence of it, believe it’s cosmic and real.

So to those of you in the back on this side of the church, I’m more than happy to think that if you’re bored listening to this sermon, or a little tired after an interesting Saturday night, that you’re communing in your own way with the strands of clouds you can glimpse in the morning sky. I hope you’re able to see or sense the light streaming through the grains of sand that were molded into the glass of these beautiful windows. And as all of our feet rest on the rocks hewn into our sanctuary floor, as our hands grasp the order of service whose parts were once part of a tree stretching up into the sky, let us become aware of the interdependent web of life, those threads that truly bring each thing, each person, together as one. Within these threads is nothing more or nothing less than God.

Namaste.