This page was updated 11/07/2007

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics. Once one has experienced this and continues to experience it--and whoever experiences it once always continues to experience it!--he is ethical. He bears his morality in him and can never lose it, and it continues to develop in him….

Therefore do good in gratitude for the good from which you have benefited. Make your own tally and see if you are repaying the full amount you owe to unknown people and to fate itself. Have you been helped in time of illness? Then know that you must help someone else who is sick. Did someone make you a loan in your time of need? If you know someone else is in a similar situation, assist him in gratitude for what you have received. ... This is what you must do all your life, in matters both great and small. Say little about it. It's a bookkeeping matter into which you alone can or ought to see. It is nobody else's business. Only be sure the balance is correct. (A Place for Revelation)

Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.
Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untamable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of what the world means by "God."

Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.

Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists….

I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured — a mass of brute forces and base appetites — but as you reveal yourself to mc today, in your totality and your true nature.

You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality for existence and transformation wherein the predestined substance germinates and grows.

I acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all converge on the way of the spirit, as the divine milieu, charged with creative power.

Raise me up then, matter, to those heights, through struggle and separation and death; raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me in perfect chastity to embrace the universe.

The global crisis now facing us is, at its root, a crisis of consciousness. The essence of any crisis, whether it be a personal crisis, a political crisis, or, as in this case, a global crisis, is that the old way of functioning is no longer working. Something new is being called for. In this case the old way that is no longer working is our mode of consciousness. The old mode is destroying the world around us, and threatening the survival of our species. The time has come to evolve into a new mode. With the advent of human beings, evolution has ceased to be a blind affair governed by random genetic mutations. A new degree of freedom has appeared; we can think ahead and determine our own future. Our further evolution is now in our own hands – or rather, in our own minds.

Liberated from unnecessary self-centeredness, we will be free to care for each other. And we will be in a much better position to build a new world, one that is not so driven by this halfway stage in the unfolding of self-consciousness. Our task is to manifest this change on earth, now – both for our own sakes and for the sake of every other creature.

A Reading from Dr. Beatrice Bruteau:

All of evolution has progressed by a series of creative unions. More complex and more conscious beings are formed by the union of less complex and less conscious elements with one another. So in order for us as human beings to unite with one another to form the next creative union, according to the same pattern that the atoms and molecules and cells followed before us, we must share with one another our characteristic energies. It is the energy sharing that forms the bond. It is not just physical energy or chemical energy or biological energy. It is the energy of thinking, or knowing, and the energy of loving, or willing. It is this most intimate energy of ours that we are asked to commit to the new union. In other words, we are being asked to give ourselves as persons in order to create a higher-level New Being.…

Since each of us is free, we can each choose whether we will enter into the proposed union or not. Thus the union, the next creative advance of evolution, will come about only if we freely consent to form it because the energy exchange itself, which forms the bond of the new-level cosmic organization, consists of free acts. It is its pleasure to give itself, to expand and radiate. The whole cosmic enterprise now hangs on our decision: we are evolution.

INTRODUCTION

I want to thank my friend, Jay Abernathy, for his kind invitation to return to, what I believe, is one of the most important centers in our community, where science and spirit, where mind and heart, where the depths of intellectual striving as well as a global moral conscience can witness to the power of mature religion. This is what the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Fort Wayne means to me, and it is so good to be back, so good to be back with you, and in this place that I love so much. I believed while I was here and I believe it more than ever before that the message that you proclaim here, that you embody here is more important than ever, an ever-more-vibrant and authentic liberal religious presence – simply, my friends, we need you now more than ever. And given the present state of affairs in the world, what is the word that we from you that we need to hear most of all? Embrace evolution! Embrace evolution!

It’s a crying shame that most discussions of evolution focus on a Darwinian conflict with creationism and its insidious step-sister, Intelligent Design. Enough already! These folks certainly need to be marginalized politically, and as heirs of the Enlightenment, we in the liberal churches need to stop expending our energies trying to fight superstition masking as faith, and instead let the ever-evolving universe demonstrate how ridiculous it is.

We live in an unfinished universe that’s moving toward an ever-greater complexity, and it’s up to us to complete it. My friends, it’s up to us. That is both our great burden, and our great joy. Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel, Voltaire, and other Enlightenment greats all understood: Evolution is a present dynamic process, and if some religions must speak of God, well then, let’s speak of God not as some being outside creation, but as that very process, the very evolutionary impulse of Life itself seeking its fulfillment. Entropy is not the last word, my friends; the universe has an unmistakable direction. Social psychologists, cultural anthropologists, biologists, cosmologists, and philosophers are telling us more and more about our developmental and psychological, our physiological and spiritual breakthroughs to new frontiers in human consciousness, and we owe it to ourselves to listen to and learn from those who are looking deeply into the human mind and spirit.

We are not the goal of the universe, but we know that we are standing on the cusp, at the threshold of a new global consciousness; and as, at least as far as we know, the first creatures self-aware, it is in our hands to be midwives of this transformative, tectonic shift that’s taking place, this new birth of consciousness, a new reality being born in us and through us that’s now being envisioned only by dreamers and poets and those unburdened by orthodoxies, scientific or religious.

I recently gave a paper at a conference in Amman, Jordan, where the keynote speaker was my former boss from the Jordanian royal family for whom I worked as a speechwriter and researcher, King Hussein’s brother, Prince El Hasan bin Talal. Prince Hasan is a devout Muslim, and one of the wisest men I know, an internationally renowned leader in human rights and inter-religious dialogue. In his keynote address, he introduced himself to the sixteen hundred scholars in attendance – "I am a Marxist," he said, "of the Groucho kind." Sometimes the world needs crazy fools to get through to the wise. We have a human dignity deficit, he says. In this Age of Informatics, this computer age, we have an abundance of virtual reality but not enough virtuous reality.

Again Prince Hasan:

"We must stop thinking of ourselves as Muslim and Jewish and Christian tribes and begin thinking of ourselves

as children of Abraham, one common humanity,… The bombs we face are not just chemical, biological, or nuclear; rather, the terror we face is poverty, the depletion of environmental resources, imperial domination, illiteracy,

prejudice, and intolerance, and most importantly of all, fundamentalist ideologies and fundamentalist religion."

If we take the long evolutionary view, we understand that the loud noises made by the Religious Right in our country today are nothing but the last gasps of a dying world-view. Fundamentalism, my friends, has killed joy; a form of self-hatred projected through a self-created god onto others, a bloodthirsty god who picks some and leaves others behind. The real fundamentalist fear is that they will have to shed the skins of their certainties – psychological, cultural, moral – and learn to live with the ambiguities, both the glories and tragedies of their lives, to deal honestly with themselves. That’s it – fundamentalists are afraid of their own mirror-reflections. Like Captain Ahab attributing Evil to the Great White Whale, the apocalyptic language of "you’re either with us or against us" fetishizes evil by projecting the threat onto a scapegoated "other." The problem is that this, what I call, "Moby Dick Syndrome" presently consuming the religious and political Right will in the end consume us all.

Prince Hasan says, "We need domestic and foreign policies shaped no longer by a unilateral militarism, but rather, by a multi-lateral humanitarianism." And he says that there is only one way to counter literal extremism, only one weapon against fundamentalism, and that is "illumination." Enlightenment.

This illumination, this participation with evolution does not happen naturally. We must want it; we must will it. Either we believe we have the power to change the world, or we don’t. It is not that we lack the skill; it’s that we lack the will. It’s not that we don’t have what it takes; the problem is that we have what it takes but don’t believe it, we don’t support it. And shame on us. Seven guiding principles provide the foundation for Unitarian Universalism, and two underlie the others are: [1] the inherent worth and dignity of every person; and [2] respect for the interdependent web of all existence. I call this "mature religion"; and this is not Religion 101. We must will it; and, my friends, it is in our power to choose. We will either evolve, or we will die.

Let me say this clearly, as one friend to another: hospitality and generosity create abundance – not vice versa. It really is as simple as that. People will follow a vision, people will generously support a vision. So we must offer our people a vision worthy of their generosity. And this vision – it is so clear to me – this sacred trust, this responsibility, this drumbeat to align oneself with the evolutionary rhythms of the universe; well, my friends, really, does it get any more exciting than that? Let me say it again: Hospitality and generosity create abundance – not vice versa. What you have here – perhaps you can’t see the forest for the trees, and you need someone from the outside to tell you – what you have here is precious and powerful and we need a vibrant, a courageous, a bold, a clear vision and word from you.

Finally, if it is true that "love is the spirit of this church, and service is our law," then we believe that in this place – do you believe it – that we will find a different spirit, a different modus operandi than we do outside these walls. Recently, in our local Fort Wayne paper, there was a review entitled, "A Fall Into Grace Marks A Beautiful Memoir." It was a review of Here If You Need Me: A True Story, by author Kate Braestrup.

After her husband dies tragically, Kate picks up his dream and enters the seminary. She tells her professors on her first day that, "I’m here because my husband isn’t." Upon graduation as a Unitarian minister, she accompanies rangers in the forests of Maine locating people who’ve been lost and ministering to families whose loved ones have died in the wilderness. One of the most powerful passages comes after Braestrup has accompanied the wardens on a grueling, hours-long search for a man who vanished while on an ice-fishing trip.

Let me quote from the review:

First light revealed not only an open patch of dark water in the inlet near the boat launch, but also a neat set of snowmobile tracks leading right to it." After the missing man’s frozen body is recovered, she accompanies a lieutenant who has been a game warden for 32 years to tell the new widow of her loss. She explains, "Mrs. Levesque will put me to use as witness, as crutch, as Kleenex … – a temporary substitute for all the neighbors, church folks, friends and family members who will soon come bursting through her door to share her grief. I am a transitional love object…. What a strange privilege it is to be so used." As he drives her home, the lieutenant muses, "It’s like standing right on the hinge of someone’s life. You know? Right there on the hinge, while the whole world swings around, and that widow, or that mother or dad’s life, is suddenly completely different, permanently different."

"As witness, as crutch, as Kleenex, a transitional love object … standing on the hinge of someone’s life, right there on the hinge while the whole world swings around." That’s where I want to look for you.

And so we come full circle. My friends, you have the right message for this time, for this place, and we need you now more than ever. The evolutionary impulse drives us to each other, not apart. No matter color or creed or class or condition – an open church that welcomes all people with open arms and open hearts and open minds to an open fellowship. Will you be the community you say you are? For when is an unconditional acceptance of the dignity of all people, when is an unconditional love that never, not ever, a love that never lets you go no matter what – when is that ever not the right message?

Jonas Salk put it this way:

"The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living beings. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution consciously and unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born."

Embrace evolution, my friends. Now more than ever, that’s the word we need from you. Embrace evolution!

BLESSING

In 1994, I spent two and a half days with the Dalai Lama in St. Louis, and as part of the interfaith worship service where I was Master of Ceremonies, His Holiness placed a prayer shawl around my neck, and it is the one I wear whenever I preach anymore, the one I wear this morning. My closing blessing today is a traditional Buddhist blessing, retranslated by the Dalai Lama in his book Ethics for A New Millennium.

May we become at all times, both now and forever
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those who have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without a light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need. Amen.

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