Coleman McGregor is a pharmacist in his fifties who as a child attended the Methodist church regularly with his parents. When he was fourteen, he went with his father one Sunday afternoon to a ‘fire-and-brimstone’ service at a different church. ‘I came away thinking, I really want to be in touch with this God, whatever this God is. I remember trying to pray and thinking, Well, this isn’t working, and so much for that.’ He also had more questions than he had answers. As he matured, Coleman’s questions about God persisted.

    During his late twenties and thirties, Coleman and his wife settled into a suburban Methodist church where they took their sons to Sunday school and participated in small fellowship groups. But Coleman still had questions. ‘How does this all connect? What does the institution have to do with one’s personal experience of God?’ As he looks back, he believes the problem was that he was looking too much for security in the congregation and in his fellowship group. ‘We were not drawing on the love of God. We were drawing on our own little fellowship, our little group. We just wanted to keep our little group going.’

    Coleman began seeking actively for answers to his questions and decided to attend a seminar at a retreat center. Coleman arrived expecting the familiar bustle of singing, listening to lectures, and talking that he had experience at church conferences. What he found was a man ‘sitting cross-legged, staring at the door. So I came in and sat down. Pretty soon the room was full. I’m looking at my watch, it’s time to start and nothing’s going on. I’m waiting. About twenty after I began to think everybody in the room is deathly ill because it’s deathly quiet. I’m thinking, Does this seem strange or is it just me?, and I’m realizing it’s just me.”

    During the first break, another participant explained that the other people were involved in ‘spiritual direction’ and offered to put Coleman in touch with a spiritual director. [Since that experience] Coleman has continued to be regularly involved in his local Methodist church [like adherents of ‘dwelling’ spirituality], yet the core of his spirituality is not his congregation but the activities in which he engages to deepen his own relationship with God.

    Avery Fielding is a massage therapist who is about 20 years younger than Coleman McGregor. Unlike Coleman, she has long since abandoned the church in which she was raised. Whereas his spiritual seeking took the form of consulting with pastors and priest, hers has taken her far outside the Christian tradition. She could easily be an example of the privatized spirituality that many observers of U.S. religion have criticized [as ‘seeking,’ and which can be the distortion those ‘seeking’ are susceptible to]. Yet her story shows that she is not as isolated as these observers might suppose and that her spiritual life has developed because of the regular time and effort she devotes to a set of spiritual practices.

    When Avery was little, [her parents] sent her to a Lutheran church that was within walking distance of their home. She went to church services and Sunday school every week, and hated every minute of it. But she was also intrigued with what she was hearing about God and with the way she was experiencing the world. In retrospect, she had a budding understanding ‘that there was a oneness with everything, whether it was the tree or it was a bug on the ground.’

    When she tried to talk about [these experiences] at church, people looked at her as if she were from a different planet. So she quit talking about them and became increasing alienated from the church. ‘Everything was based on fear, and it was just uncomfortable for me,’ she says. The only outlet she could find was talking to her grandmother, who was not involved in church but was quite interested in spirituality, [and taught her] there was more to life than simply seeking pleasure.

    Avery has continued to cultivate her spirituality intentionally through prayer and meditation. She describes her spiritual journey as one of ‘really becoming aware of what is real for me and what is not real, looking at parts of my personality that needed refinement or harmonizing or balancing… There’s like a whole other level of understanding. I shifted from having a whole thought system based on fear to a thought system based on love. It’s learning how to look at life differently… [like] waking up from a long sleep and starting to see new possibilities.” She … has experienced what she can only describe as a personal transformation.

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.

Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.

The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

[NOTE: An ancient expression of dwelling-oriented spirituality begins…]

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.

[NOTE: An ancient expression of seeking-oriented spirituality begins…]

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?

    I spent the middle part of last week in Memphis with my colleague, The Rev. Burton Carley, and he showed me how to roast coffee beans. You take freshly picked, green coffee berries, insert them into a roaster, and the combination of the intensity and duration of heat causes them to shed their outer husks so that the intense flavor stored inside the bean can be harvested into the coffee mug. Outer layers shed reveal the inner reality of hidden flavor. It is incredible that sometime in the 9^{th century Ethiopians discovered this process and introduced it to the world. It could be a metaphor for the spiritual life. Ironically, of course, there is uncertainty as to whether coffee drinking is a health benefit or a health risk, so I’m not sure if what I learned is good for me or not. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.}

    For this year’s Lenten sermon series we are going to look at books that have been recommended to me by spiritual companions around the country. It is a distinctive practice of the spiritual life, to walk intentionally in this way. I sent out an email to a large group of friends asking each to recommend six books which, published since 2000, would give a “reading” of the early 21st century world. I chose six to preach on, but have listed the other recommendations on the announcement in the foyer. I purposively chose various genres from today’s sociological study, to poetry, a novel, a psychological analysis, an historical book, and a religio-political study. You can order them, read them, and it would be consistent and useful to read them as a congregation. I would recommend that immediately following the service, you grab six others, making sure four are new people, and invite them to lunch with you each Sunday from now through Easter, to discuss that Sunday’s book. I would recommend your elected leadership urge this in your email newsletter. It is my gift to you to give this form of intentional spiritual practice, a form of walking together.

    In “After Heaven,” Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s uses numerous interviews to develop a sociological analysis of our nation and offer a “biography” of the past one hundred years of American spiritual life. This is the “spiritual biography” that lies beneath the lives of Avery Fielding and Coleman McGregor, who don’t know one another, but are tethered to one another and to us here in Grand Rapids through this history. They represent a new form the spiritual life Wuthnow thinks is about to break forth. A culture has a biography that informs the subjective lives of every one of its members, and that biography includes political components, popular culture components, psychological components, and a whole myriad of other components of the culture’s biography, including spiritual. Wuthnow’s book tells the spiritual narrative of our common cultural life the past century.

    And because it is a spiritual biography of a culture it includes both transient and transcendent components. One could lift a reading from a different time and culture in humanity’s story and find similar spiritual dimensions. One can read something as old as the Song of Solomon, composed sometime between 950 and 200 BCE, and find in it the forms of spirituality Wuthnow finds in America of the 2000 ACE. Add in the prophet’s declaration, “what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8), and you have ancient expressions of the three forms of the spiritual life that Wuthnow has found in America in 2000: the dwelling-oriented, seeking-oriented, and practice-oriented forms of the spiritual life.

    Wuthnow is not a philosopher, so is not interested in writing a book defining spirituality or God, but as a sociologist seeks to understand societal patterns, society’s ongoing understanding of the sacred. He looks for how human beings act in societal community. He calls the kind of spirituality that predominated in America through the 1950’s, dwelling-oriented spirituality; the kind that predominated from the mid-1960’s through the end of the century, seeking-oriented spirituality. And declares we are on the cusp of a third shift in spirituality, what he calls, “a subtle reordering that has taken place in how Americans understand the sacred itself,” what he calls practice-oriented spirituality.

    Every downtown Grand Rapids church except First United Methodist and Westminster Presbyterian, exhibits dwelling-oriented spirituality, that people understand the sacred as having a secure location that is dependable and immovable. Seeking-oriented spirituality is less constraining and on exhibit in suburban megachurches. Dwelling-oriented spirituality was more prevalent in a residential culture, while seeking more prevalent in a commuter one. In dwelling-oriented spirituality the individual revels in an inherited faith, and this was predominant in the era of immigrant America. In seeking-oriented spirituality faith is something for which one is ever-striving, in redefining oneself over and over again, a never ending path of discovery; what was called in Unitarian Universalist quarters, the never-ending “individual search for truth and meaning.” Dwelling-oriented spirituality, prominent through the 1950’s, yielded large and ornate sanctuaries which were sacred ends in themselves, battlements of virtue with clergy as the guardians of the fortress and the archetypes for the spirituality within it. Seeking-oriented spirituality, prominent in the last third of the 20th century and multiplied by the explosion of spiritual diversity of the 1960’s, yielded functional buildings appearing like shopping malls or supermarkets or social halls, with clergy-shopkeepers hawking the wares of the faith industry. Dwelling-oriented spirituality takes denomination affiliation seriously, while seeking-oriented spirituality brandishes a disinterest, and even an ignorance and disdain of denominational difference. Both have left a deep mark on our culture as they are still in full evidence in some places today.

    One can see the obvious symbols of dwelling-oriented spirituality in Grand Rapids in the once ethnic neighborhoods of the west side and in the old downtown churches, although two have tried to break out of dwelling-oriented spirituality, First Methodist and Westminster Presbyterian. But the decline of downtown churches locally and nationwide betrays the passing of dwelling-oriented spirituality. And one can see the obvious symbols of seeking-oriented spirituality in the suburban churches that literally meet in shopping centers, with hundreds of ministries that thousands of men and women move in and out of.

    As Unitarian Universalists we do theology through human nature. We gain a perspective on the sacred, on what is Ultimate, we gather our ideas of what God might be through observing and understanding human nature. We do theology through understanding history. Human nature and human history reveal to us the irony that lies at the heart of human existence. We call the sacred Love, yet kill in the name of God. We call the sacred Justice, yet oppress in the name of God. We call the sacred Reason, and defend that unreasonably. History reveals this ironic tendency in us, though our theology reminds us, too, ever to know that this ironic, darker side of human nature is not all that we are. We are both the green coffee bean and the roasted, full bodied, full flavored one!

    So, in looking at human social behavior regarding the sacred, we can gain both an understanding of the covenant between God and humanity as human beings see it; and, how the irony of human existence weaves its way even into our ideas and understandings of God.

    Dwelling-oriented spirituality has its assets, the way it is a window onto the sacred. Prominent in the American landscape through the 1950’s it offers a religious identity that is secure, and what freedom there is, is contained within variables known and accepted by one’s group; freedom of conscience within a home, a neighborhood, a spiritual dwelling which is one’s anchor; which means in reality there is not much diversity, though roots are deep like family. But the ironic, dark side of dwelling-oriented spirituality is in its narrowness, then and now. Then, the neighborhood was largely the extent of its branches, and when awareness of ethnic, cultural, religious, and spiritual difference entered the American consciousness in the 1960’s, the dark side of dwelling-oriented spirituality rebelled and its narrow prejudices were and still are stifling and apparent. Religious folks supported segregation, and opposed women’s rights and gay rights, and dwelling oriented churches today have become impenetrable fortresses either against or for social progress, but fortresses nonetheless, which largely now are inspirational museums. Dwelling-oriented folks secured the battlements of their havens of security against all invasions from the culture outside. How ironic!

    Seeking-oriented spirituality, the latter 1/3 of the 20th century, has its assets, the way it, too, is a window onto the sacred. Freedom is the many spiritual choices that an individual now has to encounter God in a whole host of ways, and the breadth is invigorating. Eastern religious techniques, Native American sweat lodges, self-help and 12-step spiritualities, as well as new age religions proliferated. Spirituality becomes an endless journey of meaning. But a dark side looms here, too. Ironically, searching means being rootless, and can render one spiritually homelessness. In constantly searching, the identity of the individual is both begged and eluded! In looking for the spiritual self, the self escapes detection! And with all the choices before one the spiritual life begins to gather a consumerist, commodity-like value around it, and while its breadth can be invigorating, it could also be as momentary as an individual’s whim and passing fancy. Seeking-oriented spirituality can simply be a way of deifying one’s self-interest under the veil of searching for Truth. It can yield, writes Wuthnow, “a transient spiritual existence characterized more often by dabbling than by depth.”

    The dark side of dwelling-oriented and seeking-oriented spirituality can be measured by the relationship of historical knowledge to deepening spirituality. The dweller knows history but primarily so as to worship the past, when people were in their proper categories of belief and all was secure and known. You see it in orthodox churches who gather their faithful within their walls as a protection against the big bad world out there. You see it in liberal churches who worship the 1960’s without recognizing the dark side of its license and excess. And the seeker doesn’t know history at all, and creates interfaith institutes which recognize no distinctions, nor conflicts, between and amongst faith traditions and faith practices. I participated in one Interfaith Thanksgiving Service when, during the organizational meetings, one representative of an Interfaith Institute brought a reading from the Book of Hebrews as her interpretation of what a representative reading from the Jewish tradition would be. You have to know history to know why the Rabbi was justifiably offended, which escaped her. And you see another yield of this seeking-oriented irony when there are conservative and liberal churches that offer everything, but claim nothing as their distinctive history and identity.

    But there is a subtle change afoot which may prove to be lasting and significant. Wuthnow, the nation’s leading sociologist studying American religious phenomenon, thinks so. While dwelling-oriented spirituality continues, and seeking-oriented spirituality still holds a fascination, it is what he calls “practice-oriented spirituality” in which the sacred is increasingly being seen and understood in the lives of human beings today.

    It requires people to be in intentional community, though one can be connected to multiple communities; that is, communities formed by covenantal agreements, like this one is, though you can be a member here and elsewhere, too. These are communities in part because they see themselves as historical groups to which the individual can find a greater sense of self. The form of spirituality is aimed at an experience of the sacred through the senses, in activities that deepen one’s relationship to God through prayer and mediation, study of sacred texts and inspirational readings, and service, all intentional activities concerned with connecting the individual to what you have called in your founding documents, “the transcending mystery of the universe.”

    Practice-oriented spirituality requires a significant amount of time and effort towards mastering how to discern what is revealed in human existence as sacred. Many of you have commented to me how much time and effort go into “congregating” like All Souls has. To avoid the self-serving lean of seeking-oriented spirituality, this kind of spirituality must be social and must involve connecting with the perspectives of others on the deep level of difference, like interfaith worship and cross-racial endeavors, both of which you have engaged. To avoid the stagnation of dwelling-oriented spirituality it must become the practice of communities and individuals to seek connection through a whole plethora of various kinds of experiences, like labyrinth making and walking, study of ancient and modern texts, going on pilgrimages with others especially children, all of which and more you have done. Practice-oriented spirituality has to yield moral acts, being willing to take a stand as an individual, and most of all, being knowledgeable enough about history and theology to learn to do deep reflection. This is the cutting edge of your future practice. So, that when a church builds a building, like you must, it is to further its capacity to educate persons and equip them practice intentional spiritual living and interpreting their daily lives in deeper, more significant ways, “to work on themselves so that they can live in a way that is true to the ideals they believe to be associated with spirituality,” writes Wuthnow.

    We do theology through human nature, and thus understand the sacred through history. Through history means that for us to understand spirituality we must understand where various spiritual viewpoints came from; what were their origins in time and culture. I learned that before one learns the crucial steps in roasting coffee beans, the richness and robust flavor of the coffee is related to its country of origin, the soil in which it was grown, the location in the world in which it received the rays of the sun and the moisture from the clouds. If you do not know this, but only how to roast the berry, you will be neglecting a crucial component in harvesting the flavor. History tells of the identity of spiritual paths, and how the individual can assimilate them into his or her spiritual life in a manner authentic to the paths themselves. Thus, no claiming that the Book of Hebrews is an appropriate expression of Judaism.

    We do theology through human nature, and thus understand the sacred through irony. You drink the fruit of the picking of berries in a far off country and culture, and the roasting of it, careful as you can be, and there still remains deep uncertainty as to the health value. Some will say it will kill you, and others say it is the nectar of health. That’s the irony of sacred things, whether of coffee beans or God. We are finite, mistake-prone creatures. We will lift up what we are certain is God, even those who claim there isn’t one, and hold so tightly to our convictions that we can even choke the affection out of human existence. But, what our irony proves is what must be connected to intentionally with others, discerned with others whose difference from us is apparent and upheld, experienced with others through a variety of activities that engage the senses and yet yield a moral will to do things justly and mercifully and humbly. For the irony of our incompleteness, finally, is redeemed by Love, by falling in Love with what demands from us that we broaden our affection and temper our narrowness.

    That is what practice-oriented spirituality in our faith tradition will yield, which we are called to consider creatively in our own lives and in the life of this spiritual congregation, each Sunday when you guide yourself by a truth; the unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls. Because there is one other thing I learned this past week, what one might call the spiritual practice of roasting coffee beans: After the berry is picked in a land far away, from a soil I must become familiar with through its history to understand fully the taste, and put into the roaster, which is monitored for heat and duration because the flavor is affected by this; the green berry becomes a dark roasted bean as its outer skin is shed and its inner aroma and taste is liberated. It is both good for me and a threat to my health, and I’ll never know which. Though a good cup of coffee, with friends and spiritual companions, various and different and mysterious as we are to one another, is a practice that yields the transcendent, an experience of the sacred, a conversation where God is present.

AMEN.