The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

It is common to compare religions based on their answers to “The Big Questions.”  How do you, how do we, respond to these questions of meaning.

Religious Exploration: Spirit Play 'The Whale Song', Seekers 'Ask Questions'

Opening Words

from “Winter”               - Leonard Mason

We come to ask questions.  We come to accept what is.  We come to be inspired to live lives of courage and love. 

STORY FOR ALL AGES

The Three Questions    - Jon J. Muth

READING

The Web of Life          - Robert T. Weston

This reading, by Robert Weston, is found in a book of meditations called “One and Universal”. 

MESSAGE

The Big Questions.  What are they for you?  What is your burning question?  What questions do you walk with? What questions motivate your life?   Take a moment and see if you can put your own big questions into words.  

Anyone care to call out your question? 

All good questions.  And you know what?  I’m not even going to try to answer them.  Even if I could, those answers would be mine, and the beauty of the big questions in our lives is that they belong to each of us...they provide the fuel and nutrition for our search...they are pursued and answered and reconsidered in each heart and life.

I love this quote from Rilke:

“...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”  

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart.  Love the questions themselves. 

I expect many of you are here, and are part of this community, because you love the questions.  Or maybe, you just dislike the particular answers you’ve been given or been expected to swallow.  I have an image of being taught a catechism, an image of a small cowering child being instructed by an ominous adult who may even hold a ruler.  I didn’t grow up in a tradition with a catechism...how many of you did?  A catechism is a book or an instruction in religious principles that is laid out in question and answer form.  It is generally taught by rote, with an expectation that the student memorize the answers and thereby grow in faith and doctrinal understanding.   My negative image aside, I remember being somewhat jealous of those who got to leave school on Wednesday afternoons for regular catechism classes.  I thought they were part of a secret society.   Answers are very alluring things. 

Our tradition, historically, is not free of catechisms.  We are firmly rooted in a Christian tradition that tried to provide succinct and systematic answers, albeit answers that were unique to a unitarian and free-religious perspective.  Way back in 1605, our spiritual ancestors, Socinius and Stoinski, put together the Racovian Catechism, a little book that was in print for more than 200 years.  Earl Morse Wilbur wrote in his tome Our Unitarian Heritage that, “Beyond a doubt, it did more than any other book published (except the New Testament itself) to spread Unitarian ways of thinking about religion.”   And yet, it was a book of questions that had prescribed answers. 

This is what the religious traditions of the world do, isn’t it? ...provide their own unique and identifying answers to classic theological questions? 
If you ask, what is the meaning of suffering, a Buddhist might say that all of life is suffering.   A Jew might answer that suffering is God’s punishment of those who defy God’s laws.  For a Taoist, suffering is the result of disharmony. 
If you ask where salvation lies, some Christians would say that it lies in Jesus’ atonement for sin.  A Hindu finds salvation in being free from finite things and in being absorbed into an absolute reality. 

If we ask about human nature, a Muslim will tell us that we have divine origins and are fundamentally good.  In the Jewish tradition, humans are a blending of dust and divinity.   Unitarian Universalism claims all to have inherent worth and dignity.
The world’s religions are distinguished by their particular answers to questions.

Last winter, I shared with some of you a video presentation of a class I took at UU University in Salt Lake City the summer before.  The speaker was Rev. Galen Guengerich, the senior minister at All Souls Unitarian in New York City.  In it, he tried to address big religious questions from his Unitarian Universalist perspective.  I found his answers compelling, though it was clear from our discussions that not all who attended agreed with him. 

I’ll just share a bit of what he had to say, ever so briefly.  I got help for this summary from an article written by Dan Harper.[1]

The first question Guengerich addressed was, how do we know what we most truly know?  This question lays the groundwork for all other questions.  How can we trust any answers we find?  What makes us believe some things and not other things?  Simply, Guengerich said there are two possible responses.   We can know what is true based in doctrine...because God or a catechism or some other authority says it’s true.  Or, we can know what is true because we find some evidence that it is true.  The second option, which employs an ongoing process of inquiry and discovery, is typical of Unitarian Universalists. 

The second question in the series was, what is the nature of existence and how do we fit into the picture?   For Guengerich, "we live in a relational universe", one in which all human beings, and indeed everything, is connected.

Then he posed the question, what in the world is divine—if anything?  While it is difficult for me to summarize this succinctly, I would say that Guengerich considers ‘god’ to be divine, but then defined god as a necessary ‘idea’ in order to describe “the collection of all experiences in the universe."  And not only all the experiences, but also all the possibilities. 

How does this answer the question of what is divine?  Well, for Guengerich, the divine, or god, is a collective of all that has been and all that will be.  “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end”...all of that reality and potential, is divine.  Would you answer that question in the same way?  What for you is divine? 

Next came the question, “what is the uniquely human challenge?”  Well, since his theology begins with a relational universe where all is connected, Guengerich concludes that our fundamental failing is to live as though we are not dependent on others, and so our uniquely human challenge is to reach out to others, and to connect. 

Fifth question (out of seven.)  What is the purpose of faith and the role of religion?  Guengerich adopted the idea, from Whitehead, that transformation is the proper goal of religion.  We talked about that last week.   If we’re not doing the work of transformation here, then we’re missing the mark.  And faith?  Well faith, he said, “is a commitment to live as if certain things are true, and thereby help to make them so.  Faith is a leap of the moral imagination that connects the world as it is to the world as it might become."

Six.  What does it mean to be a religious community?  That’s more simply answered, I think.   A religious community comes together in common worship to invoke its fundamental religious experiences and to recall the commitments that make up its faith.  We join in community in order to remember and form who we are and who we want to be. 

Finally, Guengerich asked, how shall we live in order to transform ourselves and our world?  For him, gratitude should be "the defining element of our faith," comparable to submission in Islam or love in Christianity.  A UU discipline of gratitude would regularly recall attention to "our utter dependence" and lead us to be concerned for disadvantaged peoples, for the fair and ethical treatment of the plants and animals that sustain us, and to an abiding commitment to care for the environment.

Now, whether or not you completely agree with Guengerich, I think you can see that a particular worldview is formed by the questions we pose and how we choose to answer those questions.  Marilee Goldberg, who wrote a book called “The Art of the Question”, said that “Because questions are intrinsically related to action and spark direct attention, energy and effort, [they] are also are at the heart of the evolving forms that our lives assume.”  The questions we ask are really important to who we are and who we become.

In a way, we create our own personal catechisms, intentionally or unintentionally, and we live out our lives from those questions and answers.  We often speak of meaning-making and being on a spiritual path.  I’m fond of quoting D.H. Lawrence who said that “A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it, and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”  Now that’s my kind of catechism…one that is never complete, one that is always undergoing modification, one that is added to and shaped as we continue to evolve and grow.  It’s a challenge to print and bind such a catechism, but a joy to live it. 

Our openness to ongoing revelation is both the glory and the curse of Unitarian Universalism.  We glory in this call to continuous seeking and learning.  We love our faith’s encouragement of the unfolding of each individual’s beauty and uniqueness.  And yet, we are sometimes hampered by our inability to hold up a book that contains final answers to the questions that religious seekers are asking.  We are unable to define ourselves by the same paradigm that defines other religions of the world.   The same questions don’t seem to apply. 

I’m sure you’ve heard this before…that if you’re not getting helpful answers, perhaps you need to ask different questions.   Albert Einstein said that if he only had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask.  A simple example of this might be found in the discussion guides we create for our covenant groups.  We look for questions that cannot be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and questions that cannot be answered with only our heads.   We try to frame the questions in ways that bring out the stories of our lives, because those stories can help us to reflect on what has formed us and what values guide us.  We look for questions that have some power to evoke responses that will transcend boundaries and preconceptions and maybe even shift us into a different paradigm of living. 

There are a lot of questions out there.  We could find ourselves concerned with questions like, what makes No. 2 pencils so darn special?  Or, is it legal for a pregnant woman to drive in the carpool lane?   Do you ever wonder why most snooze buttons give you nine more minutes of sleep?[2]  We might wonder about these questions, but I daresay that these are not the questions that will help us craft a meaningful life. 

We could find ourselves concerned with questions like, who’s going to make the coffee this morning, or what colour shall we paint the walls, or how shall I best plan for my retirement.  It’s probably productive to find answers to these questions, but likely not too worthwhile for them to occupy a big presence in our psyches. 

Here at the Fellowship we have two big questions in front of us, posed by our annual theme.   Where do we come from?  Where are we going?   These are big questions...we could rewrite them as a meta-narrative, and ask, how did the universe come into being?  What is the future of the human race?  We could also re-write them to have a more spiritual focus, such as, what are the roots that sustain and define us?  How can we grow the wings we need to carry us forward?   The way we pose the questions gives us different answers. 

We are constantly in search of meaning, found through asking questions, seeking answers, testing what we find through experience and reason.   One aspect of being human is to function as homo poeticus, that is to say, as a human meaning-maker.   Yet religion appears to be built around those big questions for which there are no definitive answers.   Is there a God?  Why is there evil in the world?  What happens when we die?  It’s like some kind of frustrating cosmic quiz, but does the unanswerable make the questions irrelevant? 

Last weekend, in my typical Sunday afternoon crash, I watched a movie on TV called Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.[3]  In it, Dustin Hoffman plays the owner of a shop where children simply experience the unexpected, the unanswerable....a place where questions are set aside in favour of simply enjoying what cannot be explained.  Margorium has been alive since 1764 or something like that...and while he is healthy, he believes he is coming to the end of his life.  The young accountant he hires to put his affairs in order cannot understand why he thinks he is about to die.  Mr. Magorium, wiggling his toes in a pair of worn Italian shoes, explains that he found these shoes in a quaint little shop (in some obscure place centuries ago), and they were so perfect that he bought enough pairs to last his whole life.  Then he says, “This is my last pair.”  

Ridiculous?  Maybe.  Magical?  Certainly.  But perhaps his answer to the question of life and death...that is, death comes when one’s at the end of the shoe leather allotted...is as plausible as any. 

The big questions of life might be tackled in a written catechism, they may be reduced to doctrine, but I believe this does them a disservice.  The big questions are there to keep us guessing, to keep us living in the mystery, to give us the space to imagine the answers that can guide our lives in such a way that we continually find meaning and purpose and joy.   I mean, how much fun would life be if everything made sense? 

I’m with Mary Oliver on this, who wrote, “Let me keep my distance from those who think they have the answers.  Let me keep company, always, with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh with astonishment and bow their heads.”[4]

May we love the questions themselves, and may we continue to bow before the big, wonderful, unanswerable mysteries of life.

Amen. 

CLOSING WORDS

Cherish Your Doubts           - Michael A. Schuler