Morning comes, she follows the path to the river shore

Lightly sung, her song is the latch on the morning's door

See the sun sparkle in the reeds; silver beads pass into the sea

She comes from a town where they call her the woodcutter's daughter

She's brown as the bank where she kneels down to gather her water

And she bears it away with a love that the river has taught her

Let it flow, greatly flow, wide and clear

Round and round, the cut of the plow in the furrowed field

Seasons round, the bushels of corn and the barley meal

Broken ground, open and beckoning to the spring; black dirt live again

The plowman is broad as the back of the land he is sowing

As he dances the circular track of the plow ever knowing

That the work of his day measures more than the planting and growing

Let it grow, let it grow, greatly yield

What shall we say, shall we call it by a name

As well to count the angels dancing on a pin

Water bright as the sky from which it came

And the name is on the earth that takes it in

[We’ll] not speak but stand inside the rain

And listen to the thunder shout

I am, I am, I am, I am

So it goes, we make what we made since the world began

Nothing more, the love of the women, work of men

Seasons round, creatures great and small, up and down, as we rise and fall

The Rev. Dr. Midge Skwire served the West Shore congregation in Cleveland,

and chaired the Board of Trustees of my alma mater, Meadville Lombard Theological School. This is adapted from the most recent of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s series of annual anthologies of meditations and poetry.

“What did you do on summer vacation?” Our children [will be] answering this question [soon] in classrooms all over the city, but I’m afraid no one will ask me. So I’ve decided to tell you anyway. I learned to hum to snails.

On a lazy Sunday afternoon in July, I sat with my ten-year-old cousin on the rocky shore of the Damariscotta River in Maine. I watched as he patiently held a snail that he had plucked from the rocks—and hummed to it!

I didn’t know whom to watch, the boy or the snail, but soon I saw two antennae appear from the shell and the snail began to dance! Of course, I had to try it. It wasn’t long before all the other adults had moved from the porch down to the rocks, each one holding a snail and humming to it. A dance troupe of snails!

Two things struck me about the experience. One was the quiet power of that youngster in teaching us something about our world. He didn’t tell us anything, but allowed us to discover it for ourselves. We forgot our adult anxieties about looking silly and abandoned ourselves to humming.

The other was in the form of a theological question. Is there something out there in the universe humming for us to come out of our shells, urging us to dance? Trying to understand what moves us is one of the reasons we come together in a religious community.”

 

How many of you have ever attended a concert or a sporting event where there were 20,000 or more people? How many find that kind of energy exciting and energizing? How many of you find crowds to be more anxiety-producing than enjoyable?

I generally find those kinds of large crowds exciting, especially if it is at a Grateful Dead concert.

I remember one concert, in particular, at the Palace of Auburn Hills, a couple hours east and a little south of here. My seats for that show were just about the best I ever had— not on the main floor, but in the first couple of rows. I was pretty close to the band, and everywhere I looked, around and above me, there were Deadheads dancing to the music.

The lights from the stage gave everything a red-yellow glow, and the atmosphere was pretty smoky, especially near the ceiling of the auditorium. It occurred to me, as I watched my fellow dancers, that the whole place looked a lot like a 12^{th-century vision of hell. The orange tint, the smoke, the heat, and the people writhing in circular tiers—it looked strikingly like I’ve seen hell described. If you couldn’t see the smiles on their faces, but only saw their limbs and torsos in motion, you might mistake their joy for torment. It really tickled me, that this scene that some people might find hellish was one in which I found deep pleasure.}

We don’t talk a lot about hell these days. Hell does not have the cultural significance it did back when Jonathan Edwards was preaching about “sinners in the hands of an angry god,” like spiders hanging from threads above the abyss. At one time, the majority of European peoples on this continent believed in—and feared mightily—a place called hell.

That is one of the things that allowed our Universalist ancestors to grow so steadily and successfully. When they preached that no loving god would create imperfect beings and then send them to hell for being imperfect, that made a lot of sense to some people. Universalists were never the majority, certainly—but they were one of the ten largest denominations in the middle of the 19th century. Their message of universal salvation struck a chord in a lot of folks.

In fact, it struck a chord in so many people that the other denominations followed along. By the beginning of the 20th century, most churches in the U.S. were downplaying the whole “hell” thing

and focusing more on heaven, and on the good we could do here in this world.

As the Universalists lost their distinctive message, and due to some demographic shifts like the rise of cities, their denomination shrunk. By the middle of the 20th century, they were happy to merge with the other branch of our heritage, the Unitarians. You could almost say that the Universalists were so influential with their message of universal salvation that they preached themselves out of work.

Nowadays, most people still believe in heaven, but not nearly as many believe in hell. At least among the liberal folks I hang out with, we don’t talk about hell or sin very often, and I don’t believe in the devil,

as a personification of evil, any more than I believe there is a single personification of good.

You know when the devil is used in an ad for a fast food restaurant that his or her power to influence our behavior has diminished. Some of us may even feel sorry—the Rolling Stones did sing a song called “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Whereas the Grateful Dead sang a song “Friend of the Devil”:

I lit out from Reno

I was trailed by twenty hounds

Didn't get to sleep that night

Till the morning came around

The chorus is:

I set out running but I take my time

A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine

If I get home before daylight

Just might get some sleep tonight

I ran into the Devil, babe

He loaned me twenty bills

I spent that night in Utah

In a cave up in the hills

I ran down to the levee

But the Devil caught me there

He took my twenty dollar bill

And he vanished in the air

Got two reasons why I cry

away each lonely night

First one's named sweet Anne Marie

and she's my heart's delight

Second one is prison, baby

the sheriff's on my trail

If he catches up with me

You know, I'll spend my life in jail

Got a wife in Chino, babe

And one in Cherokee

First one says she's got my child

But it don't look like me

I set out running but I take my time

A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine

If I get home before daylight

Just might get some sleep tonight

It turns out that the singer does not claim that the devil is his friend, only that a “friend of the devil” is a friend. And the devil is definitely not a friend, because he takes the $20 back before the singer gets to spend it.

The singer is on the run, a lonely bigamist who cannot sleep at night because of the things going wrong in his life. He’s not really much of a role model, is he? But, at least as Jerry Garcia sings it, we find compassion for the teller of the tale. We empathize with him. We, too, are sinners, at least in the original sense of the word, “missing the mark.” We do miss the mark; we make mistakes. We try to do the right thing, most of the time, but not every time. And even when we do, it doesn’t always work out the way we planned. So we are sympathetic when others express their troubles. We do not believe that we deserve to go to hell, and we are reluctant to send others there.

Now, there are exceptions. Some people may be willing to damn mass murderers, or child molesters, or maybe terrorists that blow up innocent people. Some folks might make an exception, and allow that if hell existed, it might be appropriate for such creatures to be sent there. I saw a lecture advertised at our annual UU General Assembly, “Is Hitler in Heaven?” about the limits of our belief about universal salvation.

Speaking for myself, I do not believe in an afterlife, but I can see how it would make sense, for such evil people to have to atone for their misdeeds, before they are allowed into heaven, or to be reincarnated and learn their lessons in another lifetime.

Mostly, I shake my head at the general injustice in our world, and imagine how tormented their lives must have been, how they never really enjoyed the greatest treats of this world, like real love and beauty and community. I try to take a Taoist outlook on these kinds of issues: if good exists, then evil must also exist.

There’s that word, “evil,” again. Evil is another concept that we UUs don’t talk a lot about. By and large, we are a rather optimistic bunch, and we tend to expect that things will work out in the long run. We may not be as optimistic as our ancestors, the Progressives of the early 20th century, who promised the progress of humankind, “onward and upward forever,” but we do tend to focus more on the possibilities and the potentials than on the perils of our situation. We recognize that we humans do indeed have a capacity for evil—each and every one of us—but we also know that we have a equally-large capacity for good. And we expect that our creativity will save us, in the long run.

We’ve also reduced the scope of “evil.” What used to be called “acts of god” or acts by some other, more malignant power, we now understand as natural events. Eight months ago, when the tsunami washed away whole villages, how many of you thought “how evil!”? It is tragic, certainly. The loss of life is heartbreaking. But many of us believe that there must be an intent to do harm, to call a thing evil. And we’re not certain that there was intent behind the tsunami.

In 1875, a cloud of locusts 110 *miles* wide, stretching all the way from Canada to Texas, ate virtually every bit of vegetation in its path. When they landed, the locusts were a foot deep. They ate the harnesses off of horses, and the bark off trees. They ate curtains and the clothing out drying on laundry l lines. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts, by running into the swarms—and they had their clothing eaten right off their bodies. Such plagues of insects were incredibly damaging to the people and the towns of the west. The locusts did intend to eat everything they ate, but did they intend to harm the farmers and the livestock? Were they “evil?”

What about human intentions? According to preachers like Jonathan Edwards, we humans are so stained by original sin that literally everything we do is tainted. Supposedly, we are in such a fallen state that all of our intentions are evil. Even when we think we intend to do good, say these theologians, we are really just fooling ourselves, and we end up doing more evil. According to the most hard-core of these folks, unless God personally reaches in and tweaks something inside of us, we cannot trust our feelings or conscience. Once we *have* been tweaked, we are still incapable of doing much good, but at least we are no longer fooling ourselves, and we can ask forgiveness for our evil state.

That’s a pretty desperate picture of human life. It’s the source of one of the heresies from the other side of our family tree, the Unitarians. They got their name from their belief in god as one—not three, as the Trinitarians state. In other words, they thought Jesus was an amazing teacher, but not divine. He was the son of god in exactly the same way that I am. But, beside that heresy, and in counterpoint to the Universalists’ heresy that all beings would be saved, and not sent to hell, many of our spiritual ancestors believed in the heresy called Arminianism. Arminius was reacting against the Dutch Reformed church;

he said that we humans did have the power to do good. He still believed in heaven and hell, but he thought that our actions and choices, rather than god’s predestination, would determine which place we ended up.

So, here is another former heresy that has become common understanding. Virtually everyone I know believes that we humans have the capacity to do good, and that our choices and behaviors matter.

Of course, we also have a capacity for wrongdoing, and that’s where we differ from the locusts, or the waves of a tsunami. The locusts did not understand that their feasting was endangering the lives of others. We humans do understand it, now, in the 21st century we do understand, and yet we go on polluting and warring and killing off whole species and endangering the health of our entire planet.

I may not believe in a personification of evil—I don’t think a red-skinned devil with horns and a tail whispers in peoples’ ears—but I do recognize that we still do evil.

Happily, I also think there is a solution. I think we can still save ourselves and our world. I offer you the words of Meadville Professor David Bumbaugh:

“The heart of a faith for the 21st century, I am convinced, is suggested by the 7th Principle…

Hidden in this apparently uncomplicated, uncontroversial, innocuous statement is a radical theological position. The 7th Principle calls us to reverence before the world, not some future world, but this miraculous world of our everyday experience. It challenges us to understand the world as reflexive and relational rather than hierarchical. It bespeaks a world in which neither god nor humanity is at the center; in which the center is the void, the ever fecund matrix out of which being emerges…It calls us to trust the process, the creative, evolving, renewing, redeeming process which brings us into being, which sustains us in being, and which transforms our being. It offers a vision of a world in which the holy, the sacred is incarnated in every moment, in every aspect of being, a world in which God is always fully present, and in which God is always fully at risk.”

Earlier, I said that I did not believe in a single personification of goodness—and old bearded man in the sky, for example—but I do believe in goodness. I like Bumbaugh’s conception of a process of goodness, a “creative, evolving, renewing, redeeming process.” I think if we all hold this vision of the world as a sacred process, then we’ll be more likely to treat it as sacred, and treat each other as sacred, and we will come to embody and inhabit goodness as never before.

I also understand that that vision might not be the one that really excites others. Some folks like crowds, and some do not. There are as many different concepts of god—of holiness, of goodness, of the spirit of life—as there are people. That’s okay.

We just have to make room for all of those names, and all of those concepts, and help people connect with whichever one they connect.

In the Islamic tradition, there are 99 names for god. Some of these are The Compassionate, The Merciful, The Great Forgiver, The Subtle, The Vast, All-Embracing, The Hidden and The Patient.

With all of those names, there is probably one that feels right for every person and every situation. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker used a wide variety of phrases in his worship services, including: Creative Cause of all; Conserving Providence; Perpetual Presence; Spirit who art everywhere; King of Love; Mother who art near us always; and Thou who are everywhere, whom no eye can see, but every heart can feel.

The Grateful Dead use a lot of Jewish and Christian imagery in their songs. They sing about Samson and

Delilah, and Ezekiel’s Wheel, and Brother Esau and prophets like Moses. It is not surprising that they refer to Jesus, and God and Jehovah. They also use an Islamic form of address when they sing Blues for Allah.

I do not mean to say that names are un-important. They are. The names Allah, Jehovah and God describe the same deity, but they emphasize different parts of that reality.

Often, words mean much more than just a single concept. They come loaded with whole theologies, entire histories and traditions of thought and deed. I have a colleague who used to sign his emails with “namaste.” “Namaste” is a Sanskrit word that means “the god in me bows to the god in you.” That’s a lovely sentiment, right? Then he heard that it is also tied up with class issues, that it is no longer a reminder to find all people holy, but just another way of reminding us of who is more important than whom. He stopped signing his emails that way, just to be sure.

And some of us may have been wounded by the theologies or practices of our childhood religions. It took me a long time to say the word ‘god’ without flinching, without being reminded of the oppressive and homophobic things that people in my youth said that god was.

So words definitely matter.

But, ultimately, they are all just metaphors, anyway. They all point at an underlying reality, they do not totally and exhaustively define it. Like the lyrics in our first reading, “Shall we call it by a name? As well to count the angels dancing on a pin.” People once argued about whether angels had bodies or not. If they did not, then lots of them could be in the same space—they could all dance on the head of a pin. Well, it doesn’t really matter, in my life, whether angels can dance on pins. And it doesn’t matter, that much, what name I use for the holy. Whatever we call it, the Spirit of Life is still pulsing in our veins.

It matters less what we call it, than that we call it. What matters is that we know it is there, that the sacred is everywhere in the world, calling to us.

In some ways, the Unitarian Universalist church in the 21st century is the opposite of the Universalist Church of the 19th century. They shrank, because others adopted their message. We are growing, because of our distinctive message.

Our message is that there does exist a…god, an energy or a being or a creative impulse—there does exist something that hums for us to come out of our shells and urges us to dance; and that something is bigger than any creed or any possible human conception.

By whatever name you call it—God, Goddess, The Vast All-Embracing, Thou which is everywhere, unseen by any eye but felt by every heart—The creative process of goodness is calling us, to come out of our selves and engage with others, to approach our spirituality with humility, and not assume that we know the one name or the one truth. The Spirit of Life is calling us to serve the goodness, the beauty, the joy that does definitely exist in the world.

So may we be.