My purpose is to select one view of the subject [of the purpose of religion], which seems to me of primary dignity and importance; and I select this, because it is greatly neglected, and because I attribute to this neglect much of the inefficacy, and many of the corruptions, of religion.

I affirm, and would maintain, that true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. Its noblest influence consists in making us more and more partakers of the Divinity. For this it is to be preached. Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn [human] aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul, which constitutes it a bright image of God….

I begin with observing, what all indeed will understand, that the likeness to God, of which I propose to speak, belongs to [humanity's] higher or spiritual nature. It has its foundation in the original and essential capacities of the mind. In proportion as these lie dormant, it is obscured. In proportion as they are perverted and overpowered by the appetites and passions, [human likeness to divinity] is blotted out. In truth, moral evil, if unresisted and habitual, may so blight and lay waste these capacities, that the image of God in man [and woman] may seem to be wholly destroyed… [But] proportion as [this Divine image and humanity’s higher spiritual nature] are unfolded by right and vigorous exertion, it is extended and brightened.

Oh God, thank you for this good life. And forgive us when we do not love it enough. Forgive us when we become lured, enticed, and infatuated by what diminishes this great gift of yours; the events that threaten to blot out its glory. Strengthen us to look through our trials, disappointments, failures; to see past what sufferings humanity brings upon itself and what hardships eventuate from humanity’s selfish will to power, to see the affection and compassion humanity is capable of bringing about. Stir us with courage to extend that affection into human existence. Fortify our will, so that when conscience speaks we act. Invigorate our moral sensibilities, so when we face good and evil we choose what ennobles life and ushers it towards a greater fulfillment of creation’s freedom and its mutuality. Soften our hearts to the cries of those around us, that we may love them as we ourselves would want to be loved. And steer us to where we are needed, especially to those needs we wouldn’t otherwise see. Thank you for this good life, forgive us when we do not love it enough, and as we are forgiven, invite us towards the freedom and goodness that can be. AMEN.

There is no such thing as a “universal space” because all places have distinctive characteristics about them. It’s “a condition of existence” as one theologian noted. When we lived in Milwaukee there was a yearly downtown festival called “Kidsfest” that included a beer booth for the parents, one of the strangest symbols of a wonderful town! In Oklahoma you will drive on the highway and puzzle at a sign reading, “Do not drive into smoke,” put there because wildfires are frequent on the prairie and blow dense smoke miles thick across the highway. And here, weather, the unpredictable and uncontrollable, is symbolic of the character of this area so weatherman and women are treated like gods, and if you want to know the future simply look to the sky and see what color has miraculously transformed a holy sphere! “The substance of culture is religious,” that same theologian noted..

Every distinctive place has symbols distinctive to it. Last Monday we were reminded of this during the memorials surrounding 9/11, which inevitably include looking at the space where the Twin Towers used to stand. It’s distinctive for what was there and what it now lacks. It’s a vacancy, a hole, a symbol of grief brought on by the evil acts of others. It is a symbol of part of the human story, containing both sorrow and sadness at what has been lost, and anger at what we are capable of doing to one another. That grief and anger are a part of the substance of our culture. Therefore, that grief and anger have a religious quality that needs be understood.

The uniqueness of a place is a condition of existence, although there are surely similarities and likenesses amongst places as well. If you are new with us this morning some of what this community does in worship and some of its character in spirituality and theology are similar to other communities. But it is the differences, the uniquenesses that distinguish spiritual communities from one another. Most in our culture proclaim that their way is the true way. That is not the proclamation here, or in our historic Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, that sees a variety in human religious experience and that there are different spiritual paths, though paths do not lead people across the same terrain. You have arrived at a place that conceives of the spiritual life as a journey with others; a “walk” with others as this community described itself five years ago when it was “gathered” into a church. These different words mean the spiritual life and the life of spiritual community are conceived of differently here than other places, unique amongst all other groups in West Michigan. The direction of this gathered community’s walk, its path as best I can understand it, is towards the idea that a unique aspect of human spirituality is uncovered and released when it is part of a relationship formed by freedom. Thus, they have made a free agreement, a “covenant of freedom,” a liberating connection between various and unique individuals, central to the spiritual journey; so theirs is not just any kind of covenant or connection, but one that liberates the mind to think freely and liberates the heart to extend freely and joyfully the broadest kind of affection for all souls. “There’s a wideness to God’s mercy,” one old hymn goes, and that divine breadth works through humanity best when it is “Free from the bonds that bind the mind to narrow thought and lifeless creed; free from a social code that fails to serve the cause of human need,” as another hymn goes.

Exceptional amongst all churches of all kinds that I know, All Souls has sunk its young roots deep into an identity that expresses itself in a communal character. Borne of this “covenant of freedom” is a communal spirit, a spiritual team as it were, that is strong and vibrant and evident. Like the distinctive characteristics of a place, the communal spirit that is All Souls is evident to those from afar, and oftentimes less evident to those who live inside of it daily!

Dr. John Weston, a Unitarian Universalist minister who has worked with this congregation and hundreds of churches for our national organization, the Unitarian Universalist Association, observed in an email to me that you are “Channingesque in theology.” That is, that your communal spirit, your spiritual team, evidences the theology of famous Unitarian William Ellery Channing. And the center of Channing’s theology is the idea that human being is created in a likeness to God.

It’s an ancient Jewish idea from the first creation story in Genesis, “So God created human being in God’s own image.” (Genesis 1:27a) Centuries after the idea emerged Jesus the Jew attempted to live its revolutionary ethic. It’s radical idea because religions and nations often conspire against it. It proposes that the individual human being is a holy creation and that as created, contains capacities that reflect what God is like, what the highest ideals and virtues are. It suggests that God’s activity is primarily through our own.

Religions deny this when they claim that a human being is circumscribed by sin and is inherently and completely sinful. Nations and governments ignore this when they murder their own populations. Men and women betray this when they divide humanity by race, ethnicity, sexual preference, faith, belief, abilities and disabilities, the haves and have nots, and the various ways we segregate ourselves from one another. Nations often base their activity and view of life on the unlikeness of human being to God. Religions largely base their activity on the complete and utter dissimilarity of human being to God.

But the issue is much deeper. Human beings perceive and invent their lives to deny, ignore, and betray their likeness to God. Being “Channingesque in theology,” is to say the religious way, the path of the spirit, is to learn with others how to shape our lives toward it; how to live inside of its revelation and the revolutionary world it creates.

* * *

The broken heart is as common a human experience as any. Our hearts are broken by tragic events, by traumatic events, by loss, especially by the loss of those whom we love dearly and deeply. Our hearts are broken by the loss of relationships, by covenants that are severed, by connections that disintegrate. Our hearts are broken by the intentional and malevolent and immoral acts of others. Our hearts are broken when we find we have been complicit in malicious and mean endeavors and events. The broken heart is as common a human experience as any because the Buddhists are right, “existence is suffering.”

“Don’t drive into smoke” the sign reads, but we do, sometimes by our choices and sometimes by the simple fact that the highway has taken us there. Sometimes we see the weatherball color and are certain we know what is destined or predestined to unfold.

The broken heart is the chief tempter away from the realization that you, that all individuals, that all souls are made in a likeness to God. And being tempted away from this understanding is the way the broken heart remains broken! It’s understandable. The broken heart not only hurts but occasions a deeper, spiritual pain. “How do you mend a broken heart?” becomes, “What can life like this be about?” The broken heart begets fear. And it is from fear that spiritual bitterness arises.

Like saying the broken heart is part of God’s greater plan. Like saying the broken heart is God’s will that we cannot comprehend. Like saying the broken heart is God’s punishment for our sins or the sins of our forbears.

I was with a wonderfully irascible, hard living woman who, when in her hospitable bed, surrounded by the broken hearts of her family, she was told by a priest that her impeding death was part of God’s plan. She firmly but not politely stepped away from the priest’s spiritual bitterness and the temptation it wrought, with a conviction that caused him to step back: “God doesn’t assign pain like its homework that needs to be completed correctly to graduate to the next level.” Existence does not contain a gallows at its center and God is no executioner! There is something more than this.

And I was told by a friend when describing the way he and his wife walked with their adult son as he was dying of AIDS, and as people would hound them with the declaration this was God’s punishment for sin, God’s will: “When our grown child got a terminal illness and died, and I was in such pain, I asked ‘Why him?’ and for my pain, “Why me?” I cried out to the heavens until I received the response, “Why not you?” What is special about human beings is not that we are spared pain. None are. What is special is not that some are saved and others not. What is special is what we have been created with. There is something more than pain – physical, emotional, and spiritual. There is something more than this.

To despise and be bitter is understandable, so deep is the pain of the broken heart and deeper still, the fear the broken heart engenders. But, while understandable, it is not spiritual. Out of pain religion can become sadistic; out of fear creed can become pathological; and God can be conceived of as random and volatile, not the Comforter wide in mercy, but the stern Warden of the prison of anxiety. But the ancient psalmist wrote of something different and more: “The broken heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

Indeed, we have been created in the image of this. Because we have been given not only hearts that can be broken, but hearts that even in their pain and the threat of their own demise, can reach out in comfort to others. By the acts of mercy we have been divinely created to offer, we can transcend the condition of the broken heart. We can transcend the conditions of any place or any time. We can walk towards the Divine with the spiritual legs we have been created with.

Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of 9/11 was the release of the tapes of emergency cell phone calls from people inside of the Towers. Some survived, but most did not. It breaks your heart to hear them. Fire dispatchers and 911 personnel can be heard telling people to get low near the floor and conserve breath in the dense smoke. It broke the hearts of the comforters to walk with the men and women in the Towers during their last moments. And though they walked with those in the Towers through the valley of the shadow of death, they did not fear but stayed with them. And by walking with them through that valley, they rebuked the evil human beings are capable of. But walking with them through that valley, they incarnated the God in whose image all souls are made.

Then there is the dispatcher who spoke with Melissa Doi, a 5-foot-2 fiscal systems manager who lived in Queens. The dispatcher, an unidentified woman, tried to comfort Doi over the course of a 20-minute phone call. A four-minute portion of Doi's end of the conversation was played for jurors in April at the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

"It's so hot, I'm burning up," Doi tells the dispatcher at about 9:18 a.m. "I don't see any air anymore."

"Okay, dear, I'm so sorry," the dispatcher replies. "Listen, the call is --"

"I'm going to die!"

"No, no, no," the dispatcher tells her. "Ma'am, you're not going to die. Say your prayers. You're doing great. We're going to get help."

Later, the dispatcher takes the name of Doi's mother and promises to call her. The dispatcher remains on the line even as Doi's answers become faint. As she appears to fall unconscious, the dispatcher repeats over and over: "Hold on, baby, hold on. You're going to be fine, baby, can you hear me? You're going to be fine, you're going to be fine."

Then there is a long silence.

"Melissa? Melissa? Melissa? Hold on, honey."

More silence.

"Oh, my God," the dispatcher says eventually. "The line is dead."

Doi died that day.

-More Voices From 9/11: 'I'm Going to Die, Aren't I?'

Michael Powell and Michelle García, Washington Post Staff Writers,

Thursday, August 17, 2006, © 2006 The Washington Post Company

The horror of the evil acts of those who drove the planes into the Towers is not wiped clean by the acts of mercy of those who walked with others through the valley of the shadow of death. Even when broken hearts mend it leaves a scar. Human beings possess the capacities both to do evil and good, and that is an ever-present capacity. But the evil acts are not given the last word when it comes to measuring the features of existence and the condition of human nature as they were created. Mercy transcends evil. Affection transcends destruction. Love overcomes and overtakes fear and hatred because love is stronger than death, whether death comes as a matter of life’s course or by the hand of another. Because love liberates the spirit, and excites the higher sentiments and nobler virtues that are created in human nature by God. Love redeems.

The ancients were right. Life is bittersweet. But the kind of courage towards another you do not know, remembered five years later, that kind of devotion to the human family, that kind of affection borne through trial and horrific tribulation, walking with another through the valley of the shadow of death, though deeply ironic and perhaps ultimately and definitively bittersweet, is strangely redemptive as well. There dwells a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

I affirm, and would maintain, that true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. Its noblest influence consists in making us more and more partakers of the Divinity.

AMEN.