edge10web

You know, this is it. This is the farthest point we’ve ever been. The great journey of Life has brought us to this very moment, which, in a profound way, contains everything that has been, and the potential for all that will be. It’s the farthest this great evolutionary journey has ever been. And here you are.

The Edge.

When you consider the whole span of this human journey, I’ve got to say, it’s a rare moment when an individual feels that they are at an Edge of a precipice, beyond which everything is uncharted. So we must be pioneers.

Think how the range of possibilities humans have faced has expanded from long ages when everything was charted and laid out and there was so little you could hope for beyond survival. Life was short and full of futility. You might be trapped in some predefined role, especially if you belonged to the wrong tribe or race, especially if you were a woman — or maybe a slave. You might even be singled out as a human sacrifice to some god. And you’d better not love someone of your own sex. Your world was defined by myth and superstition that could be quite deadly.
But what will the future be?

This sense of being at the Edge is something Unitarians and Universalists and our Transcendentalist forebears have been familiar with. They transformed religious imagination, and from that new consciousness, they created a new future for the world. But that work isn ’t done.

There’s a passion at the core of us that takes us to the Edge. A lot of the time, the culture around us acts to dull that sense of urgency, to draw our sight away from that Vision at the core of us, to think there’s something more exciting, more exhilarating, more important, more satisfying than what it is that calls us today.

And in these times of ours, times that are at once even more dangerous and even more promising: — when our nation seems poised to plunge down a desperately disastrous course; when the most primitive national or tribal pride seems still to lead us right into the stupidest of wars; when brilliant people can’t figure out how to make health care something everybody can count on, equally, whether rich or poor; when the world’s climate is changing dramatically but our nation still denies it and only pours more, and more, and more, pollutants into the earth and sky and sea — Yes, at a time even more dangerous and — at the same time — even more promising than theirs: —

I want to talk about this place where we are required to dwell, we who continue this far-seeing, prophetic religious tradition of Unitarian Universalism, this place I am calling the Edge.
We live in the magnificent light of the witness of our own spiritual forebears — far-seeing visionaries who saw through and beyond the mass delusion of their time and culture, through the barely-challenged assumptions about authority and truth, about the nature of the cosmos.

Unitarian Universalist spirituality is about edges, and, you know, at its best, it always has been.

We belong to a religious tradition of prophets.

We never really based our faith and spiritual vision on the received dogma of our time or of ancient times. We’ve been here to introduce something authentic and new. The evolutionary impulse that once drew hydrogen and oxygen together to create something new roars at the heart us us, too.

Going through my papers and possessions — a pretty unavoidable aspect of all the moving I’ve had to do — I’m flooded with memories. A traumatic break with my former religious affiliation, in a church defined by creeds, creeds tying it securely to the Conventional Vision of religion as it is practiced as far as possible from any edge or boundary of the human spirit. But I have other memories. Seasons of listening to voices from somewhere I had not yet been from across a boundary, from rooms never entered, possibilities not contemplated. Moments of decision where choices were made on behalf of that new reality. When life is no longer what it was. And is not yet what it is going to be.

Maybe you know the feeling of an edge. Maybe, like me, you get pretty tired of edges.
We get tired of being pioneers. As Ken Wilber likes to point out, you can tell the pioneers because they’re the ones with arrows in their backs!

Edges are demanding places and they can be lonely places. But you and I are edge-dwellers. By necessity but by choice too we are people who push our own frontiers and those of religion and society, too. The discontent we feel won’t let us have it any other way.

We have often heard inner peace and tranquillity described as the highest religious values, the chief object of our religious quest. But today I speak in praise of unrest, the discontent you feel at the edge, the evolutionary tension.

“Edges are important” — so says William Irwin Thompson —“important because they define a limitation in order to deliver us from it.”

When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before. We feel safe and secure when we can stand confidently at the center of things, but when we come to an edge, we get nervous, feel unsettled.

The edge is the time before dawn, the moments before creation begins.

So I’d like to suggest three characteristics of edge-dwelling.

And the first is awareness: — which requires a willingness to know. To let go of what we think we know so that we may know. To awaken from our stupor. To be conscious. The biologist T.H. Huxley wrote:

Sit down before fact (or truth) like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Gandhi put it more plainly. He said “the seeker after truth must be humble as the dust.”

It’s possible to possess a far greater awareness than we do. We live in the midst of a corporate culture that has drugged itself, and us, against this awareness. But when we allow ourselves a new awareness, we’re back on the uncomfortable edge having to do something about the consequences — which society as a whole does not often welcome.

Statistically most Unitarian Universalists are come-outers in terms of religion. We didn’t grow up UUs. Most of us came from somewhere else. We’d seen an edge. And the edge had defined the limitations of our lives and we were driven by a basic discontent about the narrow boundaries we found to human experience, awareness, and the quality of justice in the world. We have to push boundaries, and surely, you don’t think that that is always comfortable!

I personally expended a large measure of my life energy for many years blocking a reality, the truth about myself, a truth that puts me out of the mainstream. And in so doing I was souring my relationship with reality. I could have known the truth about myself sooner than I did. To do so meant finally making a choice about my relationship with truth. I had to cross a boundary of awareness. Every human being faces such moments. What it is that our coming out has to do with is different, but the point is the same: we have to establish a relationship with truth.

I had blocked the awareness of my own personal reality in the name of religion. In the name of religion I had maintained a safe boundary to my awareness, staying as far as possible from the edge. And when I allowed myself to approach the boundary and move it, it was the most powerfully liberating thing I had ever done. But every new day presents some new challenge. These days certainly do. A spiritual community, if it’s worth much, reminds us that it’s possible to live beyond the fears and desires and inertia of our ego and to return to the Edge. And I will not mislead you — that’s something I don’t always do. That’s the spiritual challenge of every day, isn’t it?

When you find an edge and touch it, something changes immediately. The hesitation is over and we wonder why we waited so long, how we ever tolerated living in that cramped little space.
I remember only vaguely a fear I once had of what would happen if I let go the idea that the Bible is more inspired or true than any other great literature that humans have produced. That awareness was obvious enough to me but I was a minister in a Christian church and that otherwise obvious awareness would have led to unemployment — so I just let that thought remain unthunk.

And that’s the second characteristic of life at the edge. Our awareness leads to commitment and a struggle.

And that’s because all of life is one and interdependent; it is an intricate web of interconnectedness. Therefore what we choose and do matters, has implications far beyond the scope of our ability to see. What we do today will shape not just a few future generations, but the future of life and consciousness in this universe, in a future so distant we can’t conceive of it. So we’ll have to re-assess our relationship with the world, with nature, with each other because nothing, no one, exists in isolation. A covenant we may define as Love binds us and that Love, which holds life together, requires of us commitment. And so the Jewish liturgy for Yom Kippur prays for forgiveness:

For the sin of silence
For the sin of indifference.
For the secret complicity of the neutral.
For the washing of hands,
For the crime of indifference,
For the sin of silence,
For all that was done,
For all that was not done.

We are the creators of the future that will be. When awareness don’t lead into some form of commitment and action, our senses become dulled — our clarity of perception evaporates. We fall back into a stupor.

And my third characteristic of life at the edge: a perception. It’s a perception that you are an expression and manifestation of the very Life sof the Universe — what some call the unmanifest Ground of Being — others call it God — the energy and the intelligence from which everything came and comes still. Not just an idea, but a consciousness in which you live.

Julian Huxley said that “man is evolution become conscious of itself.” Spirit’s own self-unfolding. Now — you might agree with that sentiment, but that’s not the same as living in that consciousness.

Unitarians before us understood that we are not fallen, depraved creatures capable of no good. Not that, — but you and I are expressions of the divine who don’t know who we are.

But it was the Transcendentalists who began to get the evolutionary bit. A spirituality of the Edge.

Sometimes it comes to us as a revelation and simultaneously, paradoxically, as something we have known and forgotten.

We stand at an Edge, gifted with the crowning achievement of this universe of life, crowning 13 and three-quarters billion years of creative work — of that creative, that evolutionary impulse at the heart of Being Itself.

Consciousness has come a long way in a short time. I think the point of this journey is to become conscious and from that heightened consciousness to create the world, and the congregations, and the lives, that are to be. Sometimes I envy my dog Scooby. He doesn’t know it’s up to us. He can relax. But he’s missing the ecstatic thrill of creating the future.

Our physical brains have remained pretty much the same for the last 10,000 years, but our consciousness has not. Its advance comes as close as anything we know to miraculous. And, unless we end this journey prematurely by melting down our fragile ecosystem, there’s way more future than past, more, far more to the journey ahead of us. And now, being conscious, we know this: The future is up to us.

It’s no longer about waiting for some Being-Out-There to take care of things. We ourselves are the conscious manifestations of Life Itself, of the creative, evolutionary urge at the core of things. Some people call that God.

Now maybe you’re kind of spooked and offended by the idea of being god but it’s only a crazy idea if what you mean by God is some kind of potentate superperson who sits in a cosmic controlroom with knobs and levers, always in control of everything, never losing battles or making mistakes, never having things go wrong, never being surprised. For me, there is too much senseless suffering, too many epidemics and famines and floods, cyclones and tsunamis and earthquakes and war, for me to believe in that kind of God. The divinity that is in us is a struggling divinity, a risk-taking divinity operating in the realm of uncertainty and experiment and evolutionary change and surprise.

That’s why edge-dwellers need spiritual community. It takes spiritual practice in a serious spiritual community to realize our own possibilities and to have the courage and vision to stay at the edge.

People who live on the Edge are people who are highly conscious and aware, people who are committed, and people who know the power of who and what they are.

This may seem audacious. There is an audacity about the great mystic Aurobindo’s words:

In anguish we labour that from us may rise
A larger-seeing [hu]man with nobler heart,
The executor of the divine attempt.

Sometimes, out there on the edge, you don’t see much evidence that what we’re trying to do can be done. We don’t see anything that looks like the kind of world or the kind of lives we’re trying to create. And it just isn’t there and we feel kinda foolish. Like we’re trying to create something out of nothing.
But particles and stars suddenly appear out of the darkness. Suddenly, constantly, elementary particles appear where there was nothing. They spring into existence in what we thought was a vacuum. And out of the emptiness of our lives or the desperation of our situation, the nothingness that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, we make something new.

So to conclude I’d like to tell you about Professor Tom Driver’s account of “chaos day.” In keeping with his style of a sort of “gestalt theology,” he liked to begin his classes at Union Theological Seminary in New York by reading some great piece of religious literature and then having his students act it out.
One day he used a story from the Bible that had, among its characters, God. Now he’s got to get somebody to play the part of God. This led to an intolerable tension, everybody on edge, no takers. I can’t do that — that’s what they’re thinking. Long pause. Finally somebody named Susan says she’ll do it, that is, if the group approves of her being God. She moves to the center of the circle, sort of. Not quite the center. Kind of tentatively sits somewhere near the center not sure if this is OK to do, then nervously slips back to the side, then nervously back to the center.

This goes on for awhile. Nobody knows what to say, can’t really offer her any support in being God, and the whole thing is going nowhere. It’s become intolerable. They’ve never been anywhere like this before, always letting someone else be God and stay up there in heaven. The tension’s awful. Then finally, whaddaya know, a student lets out a primal scream — this was in the 70s, after all — and then goes catatonic and falls forward on the floor, where he stays for the rest of the class. Several more primal screams from others, who start racing around the room in desperation. A fundamentalist is crying out to God-up-there to intervene and stop this havoc. A Pentecostal standing on a windowsill is giving off prophecies. They want help and direction and nobody knows what to do.

Susan had no idea how to be God. The student who did the primal scream didn’t know, either. He knew he had to do something but had no idea what, and having done something, that is, scream, he couldn’t take responsibility for having done and couldn’t think of any way of following through on it, so he went catatonic. The others sank into frenzy.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be the Creator of the Universe on the day before creation? — feeling a stirring of potential from within, the stinging discontent.

And something happens, and it happens more easily than we think. Maybe the ancient Hebrews got this — in the image of the divine breath in the Genesis myth of creation. Is it the wind, or the divine breath, or the spirit, that sweeps over the water? But — these three are all one word, in the Hebrew, and in the Greek. The Spirit is the Wind is your own Breath. When you know the evolutionary urge that gave birth to the Universe out of the nothingness is the same evolutionary urge at the heart and core of you, it’s a whole lot easier to live at the edge, to cope with the uncertain territory around the boundaries of where you’ve ever been. When you know that it’s the energies of the universe that pulsate through you, somehow it’s as natural as breathing.

Not waiting for a heavenly potentate to make it happen, no, not at all. The life within us is no less than a divine radiance that breathes through our strivings, our yearnings, our longings and loving and our hoping, through the tears and passion and struggle we feel here at the Edge, at the boundaries of life.

READINGS

From Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, “Fate”

The truth is in the air, and the most [sensitive] brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. . . . [The mind of the morally sensitive person] is righter than others, because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.1

The philosopher Johann Fichte, writing in 1800:

Whatever it is in me that compels me to think that I ought so to act compels me to believe that something will result from this act. It opens the prospect of another world to my mind’s eye, a world which really is a world, . . . but a different and better world than the one that exists for my sense of sight. It makes me desire this better world, to embrace and long for it with my whole being, to live only in it and be satisfied only with it. . . . As I live in obedience, I at the same time live in the intuition of its purpose, live in the better world which it promises me. Even a mere look at the world as it is . . . arouses the . . . absolute demand for a better world. Irresistibly it resounds in my inner being: it is impossible that things should remain as they are . . . I simply cannot think of the present situation of mankind as the final and permanent one, simply cannot think of it as mankind’s whole and final destiny. Only so far as I may see this condition as a means to something better, as a point of transition to something higher and more perfect, does it come to have value for me. . . . Never can this be the destiny of my being and of all being.

—The Vocation of Man. Book Three. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987, 80f.

The 20th century Indian revolutionary, mystic, and philosopher Sri Aurobindo

Man is himself a little more than an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him . . . This cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature. There is something beyond, something that [human]kind shall be; it is see now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of limitations that deny its possibility and existence.

— From The Hour of God, pp. 7-12.