Czeslaw Milosz was born June 30, 1911 Lithuania and made his high-school and university studies in Poland. In 1930, published in the 1930s two volumes of poetry and worked for the Polish Radio. Most of the war time he spent in Warsaw working there for the underground presses. In the diplomatic service of the People's Poland after WWII, he broke with the government in 1951 and settled in France where he wrote several books in prose. In 1960, invited by the University of California, he moved to Berkeley where he was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He received a honorary degree Doctor of Letters from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1977 and won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1978. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980 and died this past August. [adapted from the Nobel Prize web site biography]

On the occasion of his death a NY Times editorial described him as a poet of spiritual and ultimate things: Milosz's verses speak often of God and often to God. But there was nothing settled or doctrinal about his God. The annals of suffering insulated him against some of theism's complacencies. ''Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me,'' he wrote not long before he died. He was just ''a chaplain of shadows.'' Milosz was indebted to religion not least for the pleasure of doubt. He experienced a religious crisis in his youth that rattled his Catholicism and ''set me searching.'' He discovered a pragmatic value in holding steadfastly to a confidence in what he could not see, especially during a time in which faith is believing in the certainty of a journey towards a known destination and unbelief is thinking wandering aimlessly anywhere satisfies the human spirit. In What I Learned from Jeanne Hersch (New and Collected Poems, by Czeslaw Milosz, 711), Milosz wrote, That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a ‘philosophical faith,’ i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity. We will look at what God might mean through the eyes of his poetry and his experience.

On Sunday I go to church and pray with all the others.

Who am I to think I am different?

-Enough that I don’t listen to what the priests blabber in their sermons.

Otherwise, I would have to concede that I reject common sense.

I have tried to be a faithful daughter of my Roman Catholic Church.

I recite the Our Father, the Credo, and Hail Mary

Against my abominable unbelief.

It’s not up to me to know anything about Heaven or Hell.

But in this world there is too much ugliness and horror.

So there must be, somewhere, goodness and truth.

And that means somewhere God must be.

When everything was fine

And the notion of sin had vanished

And the earth was ready

In universal peace

To consume and rejoice

Without creeds and utopias,

I, for unknown reasons,

Surrounded by the books

Of prophets and theologians,

Of philosopher, poets,

Searched for an answer,

Scowling, grimacing,

Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.

What oppressed me so much

Was a bit shameful.

Talking of it aloud

Would show neither tact nor prudence.

It might even seem an outrage

Against the health of mankind.

Alas, my memory

Does not want to leave me

And in it, live beings

Each with its own pain,

Each with its own dying,

Its own trepidation.

Why then innocence

On paradisal beaches,

An impeccable sky

Over the church of hygiene?

Is it because that

Was long ago?

To a saintly man

• So goes an Arab tale –

God said somewhat maliciously:

"Had I revealed to people

How great a sinner you are,

They could not praise you."

"And I," answered the pious one,

"Had I unveiled to them

How merciful you are,

They would not care for you."

To whom should I turn

With that affair so dark

Of pain and also guilt

In the structure of the world,

If either here below

Or over there on high

No power can abolish

The casue and the effect?

Don’t think, don’t remember

The death on the cross,

Though eery day He dies,

The only one, all-loving,

Who without any need

Consented and allowed

To exist all that is,

Including nails of torture.

Totally enigmatic.

Impossibly intricate.

Better to stop here.

This language is not for people.

Bless be jubilation.

Vintages and harvests.

Even if not everyone

Is granted serenity.

"So lasting they are, the rivers!" Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B.C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.

Maidenly lake, fathomless lake,

Stay as you were once, overgrown with rushes,

Idling with a reflected cloud, for my sake,

Whom your shore no longer touches.

Your girl was always real to me.

Her bones lie in a city by the sea.

Everything occurs too normally.

A unique love simple wears away.

Girl, hey girl, we repose in an abyss.

The base of a skull, a rib, a pelvis,

Is it you? me? We are more than this.

No clock counts hours and years for us.

How could a creature, ephemeral, eternal,

Measure for me necessity and fate?

You are locked with me in a letter-crystal.

No matter that you’re not a living maid.

I was once told by one of my mentors in ministry to keep sermon titles short, and this one has sparked quite a few comments to me yesterday from people outside the church who read the title in the paper. Maybe its surprising to see "God" as the sermon title because it is so obviously a part of organized religion that to make it a sermon title raises it up as the natural puzzle it is. What is God? Is there a God? What use is there in believing? What kind of relationship could we really have, God and me, we’re so different, live in different parts of town, and come from two different backgrounds and families? That’s why we would use Milosz’s poetry as a preface to a sermon considering God, he, who confessed to ''Wandering on the outskirts of heresy," self-proclaimed as ''a chaplain of shadows'' and indebted to religion not least for the pleasure of doubt. There should be a question mark after the title of this sermon because, in our honest moments by our self, there are so many questions that religion really doesn’t address. Considering God we ask counsel from the chaplain of the shadows because we think we live in the light!

We live in a culture where politics has largely consumed religion, making religion into something simple and inflexible and bound to morality and partisan posturing; but, our times proclaim, certain with the clarity of the light of day! Take any social or political issue, tell me your stance on it, and today you will have told me your religion. Abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, homosexuality, gay marriage, these cultural and political issues mark out the territory we call religion. It makes it hard to follow honest religious questions, wander on the outskirts of heresy into the deeper waters of our lives, enjoy the pleasure of doubt.

Jesus analyzed this human tendency to make culture, government, politics, and God indistinguishable: Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.  How can you make a rendering, though, when you can't tell them apart?

Religion is so bound up with what people think and believe politically, that we can't conceive of rendering to Caesar or to God as two different, distinct renderings. And without discerning a difference we lose the capacity to see the spiritual in existence.  It is worldwide, zealous idolatry that we are caught up in and can't get out of.  There is no such thing as living a spiritual life that isn't rendered politically.  And it is killing us because it is killing off the spirit.

What could it mean to give oneself over to living the spiritual life of faith measured by God not Caesar; that is, like Milosz suggests, That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a ‘philosophical faith,’ i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity.

But, what do you mean when you use the word, "God"? I have been asked this countless times in my two decades long ministerial life. I do not mean theism’s complacencies, that is, the easy and cheap God who is invoked when tragedy strikes and in confusion try to discard the pain – as in, "It must be God’s will that the hurricane killed the innocent child." I don’t mean the God who is prayed to for selfish aims, exists in the end zone because an athlete points towards the sky, is footnoted for material success, or attributed to as the cause for what is beyond our knowledge today but won’t be tomorrow, the God of the Gaps. I also do not mean humanity’s hubris in thinking that speaking a word conjures up its existence or refraining from using it keeps its reality at bay! I also do not mean a being who is all-knowing, all-goodness, and all-American, or a superhuman who wrote the Bible down channeled through human fingers, or even a man disguised as God, as in creedal Christianity and pagan Greece and Rome. And I certainly don’t mean whatever it is that men and women invoke when sowing discord and deceit, wrecking havoc or even killing others in its name!

Maybe, then, the question of whether one believes in God or what one means when saying, "I believe in God," are both secondary to this: To contemplate or experience God is to learn something about human nature confronting the human condition in a universe we shape but did not create. We think religion tells us things about how existence, the universe, reality "out there" is ordered and structured. "It will be all right, God will provide," or "How can I believe in a God that would allow such suffering as this?" Or, we look to religion as a confirmation of the internal make up of the self. "God is the divine spark inside of every human being" or "God is created by man’s deepest needs and unfulfilled desires." Maybe contemplating and experiencing God is a way to know something about who we are as creatures who did not create ourselves, and are placed within an existence we help to shape. Maybe God is a tether, a link, between human nature and its universe.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, it is written in the Hebrew tradition, and maybe that doesn’t mean something about "out there" only; that is, that if you understand God can smite you, you suddenly get wise! In the Hindu classic Scripture, The Bhagavad Gita, the sight of God is such an awesome mixture of terror and beauty that man cannot gaze at one time at such a mixture of all that is, has been, and will be. Maybe God isn’t about the projections of the human unconscious. In the Qu’ran as in other Scriptures of the world’s faiths, God, Allah, talks to human beings, Mohammed, as though there existed a relationship between the self and the universe that forms the human condition. Maybe, God is an invitation to notice what you ignore about the human condition, what you deny about the human situation, and what you resist in response to the forces of our lives that relate to us but we do not control.

So I would offer this about "God," to ignite the passions of those who think religion is about devout belief and service to God, and to arouse the passions of those who think religion is only about a God that humanity has convinced himself exists but looks suspiciously like a bigger version of the self: only… the name persist[s], as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. Living towards God is a measurement of human nature and draws a distinctive portrait of existence and our condition in it. That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a ‘philosophical faith,’ i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity. When we use the word God, invoke the word God, experience a reality we call God, deny there is a God, we actually offer a commentary on the human condition and exhibit a measurement of human nature.

* * * * *

The kingdom of God is like a woman who lives upon an island inhabited by other men and women. She sets out one day to map the shoreline of the island and first observes that the contour of the shoreline changes with the ebb and flow of water and time, so that her map is inaccurate the moment after she tries to establish its shape. The crashing waves, the water extending to the horizon, and the blue deep evoke both unfathomable wonder and her most profound fears. Yet, still she maps, and in the course of all she must learn to complete this arduous task discovers her own body is three-quarters’ water. One day she completes her version of the map and then walks into the deepest part of the island taking the map with her to remember her experience of the ocean, the shoreline, the island and herself. She dwells in the deepest part of the island, surrounded by hundreds of miles of land. A man comes up to her on a rainy day and says that the ocean does not exist because he has not seen it, and cannot smell it, taste it, touch it, or hear it, and so it does not effect him. And then another man comes up to her that same day and because he claims to have lived on the beach, tells her the ocean’s exact dimensions, its length and its depth, that it is solid at its center, full of fantastic and real creatures she has never heard of in all her extensive studies, aroused to flood or soothe as is its disposition, and that if she does not believe him the ocean will surely devour her. But, from time to time she looks at the map of the shoreline to be reminded of the land she occupies, the dark and mysterious ocean connected to it, the shifting shoreline that she knows does not now even look like the map, and the way her body contains over 75% water. And she names the island earth. The kingdom of God is like a woman who lives upon an island inhabited by other men and women, and one day sets out to map the shoreline of the island.

Let’s see what the map of the island tells us about the ocean, and what mapping the shoreline of the ocean tells us about the island, using Milosz’s distinctive map.

* * * * *

We are afraid of wrath, destruction, and our own death, the demise of what we care about, covet, desire, love, and with our fear we project upon God the origin of that destruction, and then we fear Him. Out of fear God can become the object of our devotion or scorn. All the while it is a fear of the fragile nature of human life that drives our response. All the while it is really a love for an existence that in a moment can turn burdensome, ugly, and full of suffering that may not have an end. Living towards God measures the depth of human love for this life. Sometimes human beings love this life so much that there is a desire to continue in an afterlife, and sometimes a love for this life is so desired but nowhere near fulfilled that an afterlife is sought as soon as it can be. Sometimes human beings love this life so much that no greater existence than this could be imagined! The one that looks to heaven for a reward, the one that fears hell, the one who takes his own life, the one who cannot imagine a life more beautiful and glorious than this, all share a deep love for creation, though in certain instances life may not live up to the love! But, the distinctive portrait drawn of the human condition and the existence within which we are alive, is that we want life to love and favor us, and our children, in return and in the same measure. There is a deep human fear that it won’t, the flip side of love, and God helps to draw chart this region of our nature. It is the human condition.

When I was a minister to a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Milwaukee in the 1980’s, during the emerging horror of the AIDS crisis, a man from rural Wisconsin had told his parents of his condition. They responded by driving him for an hour of so to the Milwaukee County Social Services complex and dropping him off there as someone else’s burden and yoke. He was, they claimed, clearly condemned in Scripture by God for his homosexual behavior and would be punished for an unredeemable sin he did not repent of. A few years later I was a minister to a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wherein some members offered their companionship through a local agency to men dying of AIDS, becoming the first church in the area to offer such comfort. One man had practical, daily needs, although he had a mother and father within a day’s drive who could have provided this kind of comfort. They refused. They had disowned him twenty years before when he and they discovered who he was. They had not seen him since. Initially they continued to disown him in his condition. But after a few months, the members of my church told me that first his mother appeared at his home, for an hour one day; then for a day, then stretching cycles of days, taking up the task of providing comfort for her son. Then his father appeared, and by the end of the month, the last full month of his life, his parents had moved out of their small Oklahoma town where their son had been ostracized by gossip and religious prohibition, and into his home, at his invitation. He was their son, their only son, and for a few precious days the family was back together in the familiarity of loving companionship. And his mother and father nursed him, and held him, sang old Methodist hymns to him that he fondly remembered from his youth, and escorted him to whatever lies beyond what we can see, touch, taste, and smell. He was not a member of my church, and his parents belonged to the Methodist Church in their small town, but the mother and father asked me to officiate at the service in our church building. When I inquired as to why, she said there were members here filled with the love of God. I couldn’t disagree, knowing the individuals to whom she was referring, even though they wouldn’t have described it in quite the same way. But there was a loving Spirit present through all of those relationships, that is a Something More stronger than death.

Sometimes living towards God measures not the fears in us as much as the unfathomable capacity we possess to give back love and affection to a hurting and hurtful world. The distinctive portrait drawn of the human condition and the existence within which we are alive is sometimes so colored by human error, fear, pride, prejudice, and hate that we struggle to see capacities in humanity that are redemptive. So much of religion has been a response to the evil of which we are fully capable, that it has supported and upheld and compounded an opposite error. Love exists too, within and between us. The truth of human companionship never passes away. Hope is a good thing and no good thing ever dies. There is something stronger than death and larger than human forgetfulness, a something more which abides in human nature and is supported and multiplied like fishes and loaves in the world around us.

What is so difficult for us to fathom such that we would call it a mystery, because it is meaningless to our categories of what is right and wrong just, is that there exists a mercy and love for all contained within us and woven into the fabric of the existence that holds us. It is revealed in the "in-between," and is most obvious to those chaplains of the shadows. Yet, there is a deep, deep part of human being that fears God’s mercy most of all because we cannot and will never be able to understand or control it. We want this mercy and love to exist, I think, especially when the resources within us are depleted and in needed of a reenergizing hope. But, I think human beings also want this mercy and love to abide by our rules about who is deserving of it. We can’t fathom a love for all creation. The shoreline that leads towards the watery depths of God outlines what we human beings are. Our love is limited, conditional, momentary, ironic, temporal, and temporary. But, too, our love and mercy are capable of growing wider and deeper. God’s love is fathomless, and gives to us the measure of our current depth, and can take us deeper!

We stand at the shoreline of an ocean or a lake. And it looks like it stretches forever, and the sound of the beating waves are both soothing and foreboding. The water can support us when we are floating because we are tired and weary and need rest, and the water can whip itself up in a frenzy of wind and flood that excites our fear of not ever being again. But we who exist only on dry land, and can bear only occasional cruises out upon the sea, are three-quarters water. We, and the water, are different, yet inextricably related for we cannot and do not exist separate from one another. An island and the sea are what they are because they are connected, and we map the ever-shifting shoreline to remember this. In their relationship is the source of fear and hope, and the love for creation that transforms all things and makes them new.

"So lasting they are, the rivers!" Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter... Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.

I, too, am a worshipper of flowing.

AMEN.