Naming the Unnameable
February 3rd, 2008
The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
At the end of our seven Unitarian Universalist Principles, there is a section referred to as our Sources. These are the “roots” that inform and enrich our UU Faith. The very first of these roots is, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
But just what is this “transcending mystery” we are to experience? What name do we give it? How are we to recognize it?
Many – probably most – of us were raised with only one name for this elusive mystery – that which is larger than our mere selves; and that name was God. And if we were Jewish, we may have been taught that we could not even utter the word.
I suspect that most of us were raised with only one image of that God as well, and that was an old white man with a long white beard – at times loving, but also judgmental, angry, and even cruel at times. (I often remark that God has a passive – aggressive sense of humor!) For some, this God was unpredictable, never consistent with his love or his anger. It was a bit like living with an alcoholic parent, only there was no way to have a “family intervention” with this parent; he was too omnipotent.
These conflicting images of God came alive in the stories of the Bible, particularly in the Jewish Scriptures. There was Job’s God in the guise of a great whirlwind, with an angry and booming voice. “Where were you when I created the heavens and earth?” he responds to Job’s complaints of unfair misery. “Have you ever given orders to the morning? Or visited the storehouse for the snow?!” God goes on like this at some length, listening in detail all the wonders He has created, and reminding poor Job that he doesn’t stand a chance in the presence of such power.
Conversely there is the God of Elijah, who is not found in the “great and mighty wind,” or the earthquake, or fire; but rather, in the “still, small voice” within.
And of course the God of Moses, who appears as a burning bush that doesn’t really burn. It’s neither frightening nor comforting, but does get Moses’ attention!
Our gray hymnbook is strewn with a variety of names for this “transcending mystery;” I counted over eighty in just the hymns alone – names like “Immortal Love;” “Soul’s shelter;” “Power of my power;” “Weaver of our lives’ design;” “Maker of rainbows;” “spinner of chaos;” “midwife of changes;” straight-talking lover;” “the Great Musician;” “Calm soul of all things;” “Fount of every blessing;” “Author of Creation;” “Help of the helpless;” “Fount of Justice;” “Brooding sadness;” “Carpenter of new creation;” “Creative Love;” “Rolling cloud of night beyond all naming.” And yet, we still yearn to name it.
Perhaps every religion, has struggled to imagine the Eternal – the Mystery that cannot be fully comprehended, and cannot be adequately named.
Islam has its Allah. But in fact, the Koran includes 99 other names for Allah, the one used most often – 114 times – being “Ar-Rahim,” or “Most Merciful.” But Allah is also known as, “The Peace and Blessing;” “The Tremendous;” “The Ever-Forgiving;” “The Restrainer;” and “Fashioner of Forms.”
Jesus often referred to God as Abba – Father. But Abba wasn’t some distant, formal father; He was more like a familiar and intimate dad.
But one of my favorite images of the Divine comes from my colleague Carolyn Colbert, who points out that one manifestation of divinity in the ancient Celtic tradition was the “Great Fool.” Salvation was obtained not through reason, but by what Colbert called “a sort of divine madness, inspiration, folly even.”
Perhaps it is this image of the Divine that inspires comics. Woody Allen once suggested that God is “an underachiever.”
And just this week, Stephen Colbert asserted that “God is Love; love is blind; Stevie Wonder is blind; ergo Stevie Wonder is God.”
Someone needs to enroll Colbert in our Religious Education program, where our children have been exploring the various images of the Divine. Indeed, in today’s classes, I see that our K-2nd graders will be exploring God as a “compassionated deer;” and our 5th through Middle School grade kids will be learning about the goddess Demeter – “the power to make things grow.”
Some of the images or names for God that our youngsters have come up with themselves are: Universe, love, family, dog, cat, Alejandro (meaning, I think, the god within!), controlling mountain, and unbreakable border. I am amazed and humbled at these intimations of the Divine by our young children. They seem to understand better than some adults the concept that there are many names, many manifestations, of the Eternal Mystery.
I, like many of you, was raised with the images of God from the Bible – the punitive Creator of Adam and Eve, the all powerful and capricious Yahweh of Job, and the tender Father of Jesus.
But over the years I found those images too limiting, and began searching for others that would speak to me in a language I could hear.
During my first year of Seminary, I took a class in which we were asked to draw a picture of God. After pondering for a while, I finally drew a circle of people – stick figures, to be more honest; the circle of humanity would be my God.
A couple of years later, when again asked to draw a picture of God, I drew a tree – and that has remained the image I most closely relate to the Eternal. It feels strong to me, and at the same time sheltering; both male and female, grounded in the earth, and reaching upward to the stars. When I die, it is beneath a tree that I hope to be buried.
But even that image alone is too limiting. And so I turn to the poets:
Our namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, both a Unitarian and Transcendentalist – spoke of what he called the Oversoul:
Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.
As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause begins.
Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.
When it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.
From Denise Levertov:
Intricate and untraceable weaving and interweaving, dark strand with light:
Designed, - Beyond all spiderly contrivance,
To link, not to entrap:
Elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined;
Shaking, changing, forever forming, transforming:
All praise, all praise to the great web.
Nikos Kazantzakis wrote this: “I said to the almond tree: ‘Sister, speak to me of God.’ And the almond tree blossomed.”
My friend and colleague, Barbara Pescan, writes: “I say God and mean everything that is not me, that I do not control (and that is much). I say God’s voice and mean speech in its broadest and most inclusive sense – flowers, trees, weather of all kinds, loss, dust motes in thin winter sun, cat’s tongue on my eyelid, grief, a hand on my elbow, freesia, sudden joy, the radiating warmth and smell of a baby’s head – any voice that gets all the way in to me and says: ‘Stop. What you thought was all, is not all there is. Look here also (wiggling its fingers). And here. Here, too. Look! You are alive to this, now.’”
In a poem titled “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks,” Jane Kenyon writes:
I am the blossom pressed in a book
And found again after 200 years.
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper…
When the young girl who starves sits down to a table, she will sit beside me…
I am food on the prisoner’s plate…
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
Filling the pitcher until it spills…
I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden…
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge…
I am the heart contracted by joy…
The longest hair white before the rest…
I am the basket of fruit presented to the widow…
I am the one whose love overcomes you,
Already with you when you think to call my name.
There is a universal human need, it seems, to find some image, some name, for that which is eternal, is holy and whole, so profoundly large and yet so still and small. We need a name to cry out to in our deepest despair; a voice to listen for in our moments of doubt; a presence to thank when overcome with joy. What is that for you? What would you draw if asked to creat an image of God, of the Eternal? What poem would you write?
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what name we give to that “transcending mystery and wonder;” What matters is that it helps renew our spirit, and opens us “to the forces that create and uphold life.” What matters is that our experience of it moves us towards a profound compassion for all that dwell on this earth, and for the earth itself.
In closing, I share with you one of my favorite prayers by another friend from Seminary, Rev. Mark Belletini:
World that is my home, Spirit that matters,
Speak to me in the voices of Ralph Waldo Emerson, yes, and Florence Nightingale,
But sound as clear in the songs of meadowlark and crickets.
Show yourself in the rage of Susan B. Anthony or William Lloyd Garrison,
But reveal yourself as well in geysers and volcanic fissures.
Shine in the eyes of a Michaelangelo or a John Dewey,
But blaze as well in a hive of bees or the glint in a black bear’s pupil.
Let Bach proclaim you, and all the wolves arching on their ridges!
Let Lao Tse laud you with poetry sublime,
But let each falling leaf from the liquid ambers balance verse for verse.
Let the neck of a Balinese dancer sign your presence;
Let the richness of sapote fruit broken open in the sun speak of you.
Let the beaches enrobe you, the cumulus clouds crown you in splendor.
Dance in the splashes of rain in puddles,
Spin in the equations on the geometer’s desk.
Hum in the sleeping dreams of Einstein as well as in his writing.
Bring me down to earth, oh Spirit of Life, my home, my world that matters!
Let humans once again remember their origin from the cool dark humus.
Let mortals once again remember…we are fragments of a holy whole which we neither can see nor control by force of will.
Return us all to the humility of the seasons, of times that flow no matter our mood or prayer or wish,
And by such humility, grant us peace at last.
Amen.
© 2008 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
