Metaphors of Spiritual Transformation

Metaphors of Spiritual Transformation

Sunday, January 8 2006–Unitarian Society of Hartford

Last July I had the scary honor of giving a series of six chapel talks at the annual conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS)–on Star Island, off the coast of Portsmouth, NH.

Star Island is a remarkable place–a conference center for UU’s and for members of the United Church of Christ. If you like the New England coast, you can’t help but love Star Island. You can get an idea of what I’m talking about by looking at, or taking one of the large postcards that announces next summer conference.

IRAS has been holding conferences on Star Island since 1954. I’ve been attending IRAS conferences since 1972, and I’ve held a number of leadership positions in IRAS, including that of President. But last summer was the first time I had been the Chapel speaker.

As I said, it was a scary honor–scary because I was on the 75 acre island for a week–with no easy way of getting off–with 230 scientists, theologians, ministers, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, doctors, engineers , environmentalists, children and other such ordinary folk. And at any time during the week, anyone could come up to me and challenge what I said.

What was even scarier was when two of my grandchildren showed up at the chapel services with their friends from the children’s program–to hear me.

What I want to share with you today is based on one of the talks I gave on Star Island. The theme of the conference was Spiritual Transformation: Scientific and Religious Perspectives. In my talks I drew on ideas from Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, and from evolutionary theory, to talk about some of the variety of spiritual transformations. As a part of this I reviewed and presented some metaphors of spiritual transformation. Some of these metaphors I want to lift up for us today.

One metaphor for spiritual transformation in the Christian metaphor from the New Testament–being born again, or being born anew. Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity suggests that being born again or being born anew is not so much a matter of what we believe. Rather it is a matter of changes in our selves, in our identity, in the way we live our lives. This suggests to me that it is possible to talk about being born anew as one moves through various phases of one’s life, one some call the human life cycle.

Moving from one phase of life to another is often described with another metaphor–that of passage. Birth, puberty, becoming a productive worker in society, getting married, having children, retiring, dying–all are passages that involve a significant transformation of the human.

These passages are often marked in many societies by religious rituals. Religious rituals recognize these as sacred times. They are times of being born anew, of dying to old ways of living and assuming new roles and responsibilities.

These are times filled with new possibilities. My friend Philip Hefner, a Christian theologian, says that times filled with new possibilities are sacred times.

These sacred times are also risky times. Although one can look at how other humans beings live in the stage of life one is entering, one does not know how one will handle it.

Because times of life’s passages are risky, they also are scary. One of the experiences I’ve had in risky-scary times of passage is what I call the “O my God, what have I done” experience.” I remember asking my first wife Carol to marry me 45 years ago. The time and place are still vivid in my mind. And so are my first thoughts when I woke up the morning after: “Oh my God, what have I done?”

I had a similar experience when I finally retired 4 years ago from full-time teaching at Rollins College. Looking forward to life in retirement but recognizing that I could not really envision it, I had a smaller “Oh my God, what have I done” experience.

In both cases, I was entering a passage to a new form of life. There was no turning back. And the future was–and is–only dimly ahead–full of possibilities but uncertain.

As we move through the human life cycle, through its passages, there is another new birth that, I think, is more fundamental to being human. It the new birth from being a separate individual, sometimes isolated and alienated from the rest of the world, from other human beings and the rest of society, to being a person who is open to the world and who exhibits compassion toward other humans and other creatures, who is contributing citizen to society. Also for some, such as the environmentalist Aldo Leopold, it is a new birth to become a citizen of the natural world–taking responsibility for acting in harmony with the rest of nature.

Marcus Borg writes about this new birth using another metaphor of spiritual transformation--“opening the heart.” Borg, a Bible scholar, says that the word “heart” occurs over a 1000 times in the Hebrew and Christian Bible. It most cases it is a metaphor for the “self.” Phrases like “Serve the Lord with all your heart,” “Your law is within my heart,” “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” “Out of the heart come evil intentions,” and “God searches the heart”–these all are ways of expressing what we often mean by the self that is the core of our being.

Borg goes on to talk of “closed hearts” and “open hearts”. Closed hearts are turned in on themselves and not open to others, to the wider world, or to God. A person with a closed heart has limited vision, is self deceptive, and lacks gratitude, A closed-hearted person is insensitive to wonder and awe, forgets Nature or God as the wider source of one’s being, lacks compassion, and is insensitive to injustice.

How do closed hearts develop? First, I think the capacity for developing a closed heart might lie in part in our evolved biological natures. Over time humans have evolved through natural selection to have self-protective emotions and behaviors. These have been selected to preserve and continue our genes through reproduction.

Of course we also have evolved with other emotions and behaviors that support close family relationships–especially bonding relationships between parents and children–and relationships of reciprocity–doing on to others as we would have them do to us. These other directed capacities open our hearts to others–even as we preserve and continue our genetic line.

Still under certain conditions our self-protective emotions and behaviors can isolate us from others and the wider world.

Second, part of the development of closed hearts may be normal human development. When as children we develop self awareness, we come to experience ourselves as separated from others.

And, third, sometimes, when we are excessively criticized, beaten up, and abused, we dissociate from others and even from other parts of ourselves.

Fourth, sometimes during a passage in our life cycle, something happens that adds to our separateness and isolation. In my own life, when I went through puberty, I experienced the dying of my first mother over a period of 2½ years. As I look back on that time of my life, I remember that my friends were beginning to engage in early teenage social life, and my best friend fell in love and spent most of his time with his girlfriend. But the crisis in our family kept me more at home, often by myself. I now can say that my heart became more closed as I became more withdrawn and wrapped up in myself. I continued to excel in my studies, but I did not reach out to have the kind of interactions that, on the one hand, I craved but, on the other hand, I felt I could not.

In contrast to the closed heart. Borg describes an open heart as seeing things more clearly, being alive to wonder, to the sheer marvel of “isness.” “An open heart and gratitude go together.” Borg suggests that “we can feel this in our bodies. In the moments in my life when I have been most grateful, I have felt a swelling, almost a bursting, in my chest” (162). Further, “an open heart, compassion, and a passion for justice go together. An open heart feels the suffering and pain of the world and responds to it. Compassion and a passion for justice are the ethical impulse and imperative that go with an open heart. ‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate,’ Jesus said.” Borg concludes this part of his book saying: “The Christian life is about a new heart, an open heart, a heart of flesh, a heart of compassion.” I think that the Buddha would agree. And so would most other religions, as well as Unitarian Universalism. The core to living the kind of life we should live is to have open hearts. To develop such a heart is to be born anew–to be spiritually transformed.

How does one go through a transformation process to become more open-hearted? Following Borg, I’d like to introduce another metaphor–the metaphor of “thin places.” There is more than one ways in which one moves from a closed to an open heart. One of them is in encounters with thin places.

“Thin places” is a Celtic Christian metaphor for coming in contact with the sacred, which is present all around and in and through us, but which is hidden from us. This idea about the sacred reminds me of what the French, Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin called the “divine milieu” in the title of one of his books–the divine environment, the holy environment. It’s always there, but in a few instances, in thin places, it begins to become manifest in our lives more clearly.

Borg says that a thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened, or opened up again, opened up more. Many different things can be thin places. Nature, especially wild nature can be a thin place. Or the panorama of the stars. Science can lead to thin places. In her book Sacred Depths of Nature cell biologist Ursula Goodenough writes about how her scientific research brings her to a sense of awe, gratitude, and sense of responsibility for other human beings and our planet. In our terms today, we might say her science brings her to thin places.

Rituals, yoga, and other kinds of meditation can become thin places. So can non-religious music, poetry, literature, the visual arts, and dance can become thin places. I remember one experience I had dancing. I’m not much of a dancer, but some years ago I took ballroom dancing lessons. After a few years I became reasonably average. And there were a few special moments. One was when I was reviewing some the steps to the waltz with my instructor. And as I began to put it all together, it didn’t matter that we were in a cleared section of a school cafeteria; it didn’t matter that we were listening to taped music.

I began the waltz with the usual box step, moved to a twinkle and then to double and triple twinkles, and still other more advance steps. And we began to move in perfect time to the music around the floor–again and again–flowing in the experience of the waltz. It became indeed what some call a flow experience. I felt like I was opening up to another dimension of life experience which left me emotionally breathless–and with deep gratitude for what my instructor had enabled me to do and experience.

People can become thin places. Religious founders–the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Handsome Lake of the Iroquois. People like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King (remember his I had a dream speech).

Small children can be thin places. Over almost eighteen months now, I watched our grandchild Amelia grow in wondrous process from an infant in arms, to crawling, to standing, to toddling, to beginning to talk. As her brain neurons and her body muscles organize themselves in the miracle of human development, I experience wonder and gratitude for the gift of life we all have. I experience a thin place.

Another human being who was a thin place for me was a man I met in Hong Kong, while I was on a graduate student seminar around 1970. One of the aims of our seminar was to meet with university students to discuss world affairs as it related to our lives.

On an afternoon at the University of Hong Kong, about fifteen students from the United States met with the same number of Hong Kong students. At that meeting was a slightly older man–not a student–but one who was working to unite the working people of the city to better their labor conditions. It became clear to me that he was a “charismatic leader” for these students. I too felt the power of his personality and his vision.

I learned that he had written a number of pamphlets related to his labor organizing activity. After the meeting, I talked with him, and told him that some day I would probably be reading his work in the United States. “Oh no,” he replied. “I’m not interested in writing for the world. I’m only interested in my work here in Hong Kong. That is enough.” At that point, I recognized the significance of what he had just said. It is better to focus on doing good work in a smaller sphere of influence that trying to become known to the wider world. When I realized that, he became for me a thin place.

Thin places can also be places of worship. One of my most memorable worship experiences took place on Star Island at an IRAS conference, in a small stone chapel on the highest point on the island.

Each night Star Island conferences close with a simple candlelight service. Conferees carry candle lanterns from the porch of the hotel up the path to the chapel. Once inside they hang the lanterns on sconces bathing the chapel in its only source of light. It’s a beautiful setting.

One time the Star Island chapel became for me a thin place. The IRAS conference had been a wonderful week of exciting ideas and meaningful conversations. I felt good as I walked up the path to the chapel in silence, carrying my lantern. Ahead of me I noticed that some were looking north at the sky. When I turned I saw the most magnificent display of northern lights I had ever seen.

In the chapel I sat in the back corner. As was customary in those days, the Friday night candlelight was a Jewish Shabbat service, conducted by Rabbi Jerome Molino and his wife Rhoda Molino from Danbury, CT. The service was all in Hebrew. I did not understand a word. But as I sat in this candle-lit stone chapel, listing to the sacred sounds of the service, something came over me. I can’t describe it. The whole week, the aurora borealis, the chapel all came together in an absolutely thrilling way. I sat there in silence, tingling, emotionally moved to tears at the beauty of what I felt. Today, I would say that I was experiencing a thin place.

I’ve had that same experience–often–right here in our meeting house sanctuary. When I enter our sanctuary on Sunday morning, its round design, the rising ceiling, and the lighting makes me aware that this is a special place–a sacred space. When I experience greetings from others, hear the music of organ and choir, sing the hymns, and close my eyes to flow with the words of a prayerful reflection, a reading, or a sermon, I often find myself moved to tears–my ego dissolving, as my heart opens up to memories of those gone but still dear to me, as I open up hearing the needs of other who are suffering, as I’m called and guided to connect with the wider reality that is the source of my being.

This is the only congregation I’ve ever belonged to that I come to Sunday services only for the sake of coming to the service itself–only for the sake of worship itself. This is because, for me, our Sunday services often become thin places.

So thin places can occur in worship, in nature, in art, music, and dance, in people, in our interactions with one another. When they happen, we are in touch with the sacred. Our hearts open up to new possibilities as we enter the passages of our lives. Our hearts open up more fully to one another in love.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 08/31/06)