A sermon given June 27, 1999

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening Words

“What is a spiritual experience? A snowflake melting, a bee suckling honey, a fat man at a traffic light. Trivia.” --Frederick Franck, from Fingers Pointing Toward the Sacred

             There is a story about a woman named Sophie who lives in Brooklyn. She calls her travel agent to book passage to a remote village in Nepal. The travel agent, who knows Sophie well, is shocked. “Nepal? Why would you want to go there? You have to take two planes, a train, and then go by camel for a week. Why don’t I get you tickets to Florida?” Sophie is insistent and demands that her travel agent make the necessary arrangements.

            After ten days of strenuous travel, carrying a single suitcase and wearing a dark-blue traveling suit and very respectable low heels, Sophie arrives at last in the camp of a great mystic only to discover that there’s a three-week wait to see this holy person. Seekers have come from all over the world to meet with this man, to find the meaning of life and learn the secrets of profound mystical experiences. Furthermore, when her turn comes, she is told that she may say only seven words. So, while she waits, she deliberates about what she will say. At last, her time comes, and she is ushered into a cave redolent of incense and lit by hundreds of candles. Sophie can see a bearded man wearing saffron robes sitting on the floor in the back of the cave, his eyes half-closed in a state of transcendent bliss. Standing her ground and using the most authoritative voice she can muster from within herself, Sophie calls out to the great mystic, “Sheldon. It’s your mother. Please come home.”

            This story on many of the misconceptions that we have about mystics and mystical experiences. We associate mysticism more with Eastern religions that Western religions. We think mysticism depends on exotic rituals and esoteric knowledge available to only a few chosen ones. We think that mysticism involves stringent, self-denying spiritual practices. We think that mysticism involves a withdrawal from the world.

            As the Unitarian Universalist minister Bill Houff said, “To most of us a mystic is an aging, antisocial recluse. The word ‘mystic’ is often confused with the words ‘magic’ and ‘occult.’ In the common vernacular, a mystic is a person who shuns the major spiritual traditions and goes of in pursuit of esoteric perspectives that are both secret and a little bit crazy. I have heard liberal ministers suggest that mysticism has no place in a rational person’s religion.”

            Indeed, Houff is right. Mystical experience has been criticized by religious liberals because it often seems so other worldly, and in the liberal religious tradition there is an emphasis on the “here and now.” Alfred Stiernotte, a liberal religious scholar, once said,  “The more practical-minded among our liberals may claim that mysticism is the mark of the indolent, the indifferent, of those who, harassed or frightened by the complexity of the present scene, wish to escape to a spiritual oasis of their own and enjoy surreptitiously the fruits of its verdure in the midst of a desert of social tensions and human desolation from which they avert their gaze!.. Surely, it will be said, the presumption of the achievement of an inner ecstatic experience, divorced from concern with the trials and tribulations of men [and women]...is nothing less than the enjoyment of a pernicious type of spiritual egotism—nothing less than the betrayal of humanity.” Such very strong words!

            I think that there is something else at play as well. I think there is also a hesitancy, perhaps even a fear, among we who call ourselves religious liberals—I include myself here—to speak of deep religious experience. To be honest, “mystic” is a term I use sparingly about myself. We readily admit to being moved by a piece of music or an encounter with another person or some experience we have in nature, but even when speaking of these things, I sense among us a fear of saying too much. I think we are like those poets we heard in this morning’s readings. Like D.H. Lawrence, we fear being called a liar if we taste too much more than an apple within an apple, or like Rumi, we are afraid someone will say we are merely hallucinating if we speak of what we have not experienced with our five senses. On the other hand, when we give in to this hesitancy or fear, we are like the embryo in Rumi’s poem, robbing ourselves of the possibility of experiencing something “vast and intricate.”

            I would like to suggest, however, that despite our associations of mystical experience with other-worldliness and a withdrawal from life, that the deepest religious experiences we have occur when we are most fully engaged in life and with the help of the right language, mystical experience is something that even the most hard-minded of us can accept and welcome into our lives without sacrificing at some altar the rationality many of us cherish.

            What exactly is it that I mean, however, when I talk about mystical experience? Some have defined it as a direct communion between the self and God or Spirit or the Absolute or the Eternal. As the Hindu mystic said to the New York City hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything!” I prefer to define mystical experience simply as a deep feeling of connection to all that is resulting in an overwhelming sense of well-being.

            All of this is rather lofty language, though, and may even get in the way of realizing that some kinds of mystical experiences are just as likely to happen while standing in the check-out line at Fred Meyer or while driving along the torn-up stretches of Barbur Boulevard as in a cave or on a mountaintop. As the author Frederick Buechner tells us, “God speaks into or out of the thick of our days.”

            As Rachel Naomi Remen tells us, “It is said that the Christian mystic Theresa of Avila found difficulty at first in reconciling the vastness of the life of the spirit with the mundane tasks of her Carmelite convent: the washing of pots, the sweeping of floors, the folding of laundry. At some point of grace, the mundane became for her a sort of prayer, a way she could experience her ever-present connection to the divine pattern that is the source of life. She began to see the face of God in the folded sheets.”

            In a slightly more modern and less domestic example, Alix Kates Shulmun, in the book

Drinking Rain, tells about an experience of riding a train.

            “I was sitting alone on the downtown IRT on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of the Twenty-third Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed. All around me people sat bundled up in mufflers, damp woolen coats, and slush-stained boots, reading newspapers or staring off blankly as the train jerked along the tracks. The air was cold and close, with the smell of stale tobacco clinging to winter coats. An elderly pair exchanged words in a Slavic tongue; a mother read an advertising sign to her three bedraggled, open-mouthed children.

            “Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun—our entire living cohort—formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surprisingly lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station and I got off.”

            What is it that we can say about these experiences? What brings them about? How do we explain them? Do they have any lasting effect on us? To answer those questions, I want to describe two further experiences, one my own, and one belong to Henry Nelson Wieman, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago earlier this century and also a Unitarian Universalist later in life.

            My experience happened nearly 10 years ago. It was before I had even considered ministry as a vocation, and in fact, it was a time in my life when I was still rather anti-religious in any sense of the word. I was camping by myself in northwestern Illinois. It was the first of April and really much to early to be camping. The temperature hovered just above freezing. Except for me, the campground was deserted. There was no one else for miles and miles around. I was probably more physically alone then than I have been at any other time in my life.

            I had arrived at the campground in late afternoon, set up my tent, and fixed some dinner over a small fire. When darkness came, I went inside tent, snuggled into my sleeping bag and began to read a book I had brought with me. The batteries in my flashlight were not as strong as I had thought, and after an hour or so, the light became too dim to read. I put down my book and tried to go to sleep, even though it was only about nine o’clock. It was then that the storm began. The storm was unexpected and had blown in fast over Iowa.

            I usually love thunderstorms. I have passed many afternoons and evenings sitting on the porch of my family’s home watching storms roll across the sky. This storm was different. The thunder cracked just above my tent so loudly each peal reverberated in my chest. The awesome storm raged for hours demanding my attention every moment. I was terrified though I had no reason to be.  My tent was keeping out the rain. I did not fear a lightning strike. Yet I was alone, it was cold, it was dark, and it was thundering terrifically. These were not rational reasons to be afraid, and I told myself this, but my rationality could not soothe me. I thought about getting into my car and driving to a hotel 40 miles away, and it was only some sense of stubborn pride that kept me from doing that.

            It was then that I—alone, in the cold, in the dark, in the storm—surrendered.  I let go. I surrendered to my feelings of isolation, the cold, the dark, the storm, and above all to my irrational fear. I told myself that I would accept whatever happened, not knowing what that would be. In this moment of surrender, something happened. I felt something that I had never felt before and have not felt as intensely since. I felt embraced by a feeling of utter peace, overpowering love, and real joy. It was an oceanic feeling, a feeling of being connected and being one with the entire world. It was a feeling of being totally in a present that included the past and the future. Above all, there was no fear. I got out of my sleeping bag, unzipped the flap on my tent, stood outside my tent looking up to the still raging thunderstorm, felt the cold, beautiful rain pelting my face, and realized I was in love with the world. The feeling lasted until the dawn and gradually dissipated. It denied attempts to recapture it, much like a dream that refuses to let you renter in those semiconscious moments before waking.

            That was my experience. I still remember it rather vividly. Now let me now tell you about Henry Nelson Wieman’s experience. It takes place in 1916 while he was still a graduate student completing his doctoral studies.

            “I had been separated from my wife and children for over a year,” Wieman tells us. “I felt under compulsion to continue my studies but must also support my family, and if possible, have them with me instead of remaining where they were, halfway across a continent. I could do this only if I could get a certain kind of work that could be carried out along with my studies. I made several attempts to get such work but failed. Finally, I received a tentative offer, providing I could make good. The first time I came I was very nervous, being worn with much study and having lived in much isolation in the attempt to complete the work for my degree. I did not do myself justice. I came a second time and at the close of the day was told theat my employers were not satisfied with my services and that I could not have the position. It was nine o’clock at night at the time. I had to ride many hours on the inter-urban to reach my place of residence. I shall never forget that long ride of misery. It was after two o’clock a.m. when I got to bed, I could not sleep although I was worn with nervous strain, the day’s work, and disappointment.

            “The hours of the night were almost unendurable. Worse than the disappointment and failure to find a means of seeing my family was the sense of my own worthlessness and futility. I felt completely beaten. It was a total loss of self-confidence. It was not this last failure alone that overthrew me, but a series of experiences during the two previous years, which I had interpreted as failures. Because of these experiences I had been fighting the sense of failure and futility for some time. Now it rose up and crushed me quite completely.

            “During the forenoon of the next day I attended to certain duties and in the afternoon returned to my room to face the facts as squarely and completely as possible and somehow find myself I felt there was something that must be fought out and settled, although I could not tell exactly what it was. I suppose it was a vague sense that I must settle the problem of living my life and my relation to things in general. I felt there could be no rest for me until I settled things somehow.

            “I spent about four hours in my room alone. It was not exactly thinking, nor exactly praying, although at times it was one or another of these quite distinctly. Most of the time, I suppose, it was a sort of combination of these. Gradually, there emerged within me a spreading sense of peace and rest. That almost unendurable pain of mind that had possessed me for twenty-four hours assuaged and passed away completely. I imagine it passed somewhat as pain passes under anesthetic. Then I found myself...almost laughing and crying with joy. Joy about what? I could not tell. I only knew my pain was gone, and I was full of great gladness, courage, and peace. All the facts were exactly as they had been and I saw them more plainly than ever. My family was still as far away as ever and there was no visible means of getting them any closer. My failure to get the work I wanted stood as it had before. I cannot say that I had any anticipation of how my difficulties might be overcome. I did not even have the feeling that they would be overcome. I simply knew that I was glad, and ready and fit to go ahead and do whatever might find to do and take the consequences whatever they might be. There was no hysteria and no hallucination about it. The strong emotion of gladness gradually passed away in the course of days, but the courage, peace, readiness to meet any fortune with equanimity, and joy in living did not go away. The old anguish did not return.”

            In reflecting on my own experience and Wieman’s account of his—very similar in some ways, very different in others, as well as coming across accounts of several others—I have found that while some mystical experiences are truly like a butterfly landing on your shoulder, a pleasant but rather unpredictable even, the deepest and most profound of these experiences usually come to us during some kind of crisis. They come to us when we need them most.

            The particular kind of crisis which produces these experiences is what existentialist philosophers have called “ultimate situations”—those situations which affect us deeply but are completely beyond our ability to control. These often include experiences of suffering, struggle, failure, rejection, guilt, unpredictable happenings or encounters with death, isolation, or apparent meaninglessness. We try to deal with these problems in the ways that we are accustomed, using the traditional structures of knowledge that we use to interpret reality. We try to think our way through or reason our way out of a situation, but find this doesn’t work, leaving us despairing.

            If we face these situations squarely and do not try to distract ourselves from them or pretend they do not exist we can either confront them in despair or undergo a change in our consciousness of being, and if this change occurs, it is accompanied by feelings of strong elation.

            Many people have used similar language to describe this feeling. In describing his own experience, Wieman says, “I was full of great gladness, courage, and peace.” The Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki, has said,  “The feeling...is that of a complete release or a complete rest—the feeling that one has arrived finally at the destination.” The Unitarian Universalist minister Kenneth Patton has said that “the sheerest and simplest sensual experience wears a golden significance...We are stabbed by the isness, the thatness of things, and there comes a fresh and splendid sense of existence.”

            In more traditional religious language, this feeling of elation is called “grace,” and, in fact, it was only after my experience on that solitary camping trip, that I was able to truly able to understand for the very first time the words to that very well-known hymn: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost. I now am found. I was blind, but now I see.” Though nothing in the external world has changed, that change in one’s internal perspective is so radically different it feels as if one can see for the first time.

            It, is not however, necessary to resort to supernatural terms or traditional religious language to explain the event. Reflecting on his own experience, Wieman says there is a “reorganization of the unconscious structure of the mind” in which the situation which is causing dread and acute anxiety is integrated into a larger understanding of the whole, “neutraliz[ing] what was previously unendurable.” In similar but more poetic language, Ken Patton suggests that “[W]ithin us, in endless churning and interchange, this amazing confluence of living works upon itself. Below the threshold of consciousness the hidden armies, the underground movements, plot and wrestle. And then there arises a consensus of feeling and evaluation, a single light and heat from the conflagration of a thousand days.” These feeling of elation are necessarily temporary. “If it continues for too long,” Patton warns, “we feel that we are in danger of slipping into the chasm of insanity. But for a time we are able to burn and glow with a new radiance of being.”

            As for me, though I have never felt again in the same way what I experienced that one night—there have been many times in my life—during times of stress, worry, anxiety—that I too have been able to recapture just a sliver of that palpable grace—or whatever else you want to call it.

            In our most ordinary moments, we have the ability to experience the extraordinary, and in our times of deepest needs, there is something beyond ourselves that supports us. There are many different ways in which we can explain and understand these experiences, yet in our search for words and explanations, may we not forget that they are there. So may it be.

Prayer

And in more difficult, stormier times,

May we be patient and keep ourselves open to that grace

Which both allows us to accept the world as it is

And gives us the courage to change it.

Amen.

Benediction

            Leave this place of worship with your hearts open to the awe, the grandeur, and the grace that the world has to offer to you. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.


Copyright 1999, James Kubal-Komoto. All rights reserved.