Experience Precedes Theology

Back in 2002, while I was serving the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, Maine, I preached a sermon I'd titled, "Experience Precedes Theology."  Seven years later, when I was preaching in a worship service at that year's conference of the Unitarian Universalist Musician's Network, I offered an updated version that I called, "We Hear Music in the Air."  This is yet a further refinement of the thinking I've been doing for the past 16 years, nearly my entire career as a preacher/teacher/pastor.

Very often, as I sit with people who are working to make sense of their efforts to "try God" (as I put it in my last post) we come upon the same stumbling bock.  Lots of us -- especially the people who tend to seek me out are pretty "heady" people —we like ideas and concepts.  And in the western religious traditions, at least, intellectual theology plays an important role—most of the churches in which most of us grew up (or that we've heard about) have creeds and doctrines, theories and theologies, that we were expected to learn.  Once learned, they were expected to inform our spiritual lives.  “Here’s what God is like,” we were essentially told.  “Now go look for God.”  For many of us -- particularly those who have rejected the more traditional teachings about, and understandings of, "God," -- we get stuck in those concepts, we can’t see beyond them, and so we end up finding nothing.  Since we've been told quite clearly what "God" is, if "God" is not that, then what could "God" be?  If  "God" isn't what the priests and pastors have told us that "God" is, then "God" must not be.

Not all religions are like this, of course.  There is wonderful series of interviews between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell that took place in 1988, "The Power of Myth."   In one episode, Campell told the story of a Shinto priest at an interfaith religious conference.  Someone asked him if he could explain the Shinto theology, their ideology.  The priest thought for a moment and then replied, “We don’t have a theology; we don’t have an ideology.  We dance.”

There are other traditions like this, of course, other traditions that do not put such weight on the working of the mind, traditions that do not imply that we can think our way to a spiritual life, yet the dominant religious traditions in the United States -- the ones many of us have come from (or are still in) -- approach "God" in this way.

There's a powerful spiritual which offers a key that can help us take advantage to past the road block of orthodox teaching.  

“Over my head, I hear music in the air.  Over my head, I hear music in the air.  Over my head, I hear music in the air.  There must be a God somewhere.”

If we start our search with the idea, the ideology, the theory, the theology, we may find ourselves unable to find anything. To paraphrase the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, the biggest obstacle to finding God is our assumptions about what we are looking for.  Augustine of Hippo wrote, "Si comprehendis, non est Deus" -- if you comprehend it, it's not God.

But that’s not the way the song goes.  It is only after hearing this "music in the air" does the singing recognize that there is "a God somewhere."  Because of their actual, first-hand, unqualified, unfiltered, experience of the sacred and the holy they are able to say with conviction that “there must be a God somewhere.”  Their experience precedes the theology.

So if you’re someone who feels a longing to connect with the Sacred, who wants to live a life that is more in touch with the Holy, but who long ago (or maybe only just recently) gave up on the anthropomorphic deity—the old white guy with the long white beard, or any of his stand-ins—yet who can’t figure out what to put in its place, let me encourage you to stop looking for something specific.  Stop looking for something that you've been told the "Sacred Something" ought to look like, and start simply looking around you.  Stop listening for some particular Something, and listen.  Look for those places in your life where you have felt yourself to be in the presence of the Holy.  Listen for those experiences in which you have heard your connectedness.  Seek in your own life—your own feelings, your own moments—those places where you have encountered—or are encountering—the something you might call Sacred. 

When you find such places, then begin to think.  Think about what those moments, those experiences, tell you about “God” (if you even decide to use that word).  Think about what they tell you about the way the world works and the spirit moves.  Build your theology on your experience, rather than the other way around.

At the beginning of that service when I first shared these thoughts with the congregation in Yarmouth I told a story by Kathleen Connelly, a member of that congregation: 

In 1979 I was living in Jackson, Wyoming, and working the breakfast and lunch shift at the Silver Spur Coffee Shop, where the waitresses had the dubious distinction of wearing the ugliest uniform in the world.  I wasn't crazy about the job, but getting out of work at 2 every afternoon made getting up before dawn worthwhile.  Nearly every day as soon as my shift was over I got into my ten-year-old, falling-apart, hole-in-the-trunk, white Mustang and drove north toward Jenny Lake and Yellowstone National Park to go exploring.  The last thing -- or perhaps I should say the last person -- I expected to find on one exceptionally beautiful September day was God.

My belief in the Deity was pretty much dormant at that point.  Twelve years of force-fed Catholic education and theology hadn't strengthened my faith, it had smothered it.  I believed there was Someone out there, but the facet of this Being that Catholicism insisted was the only one meant nothing to me, despite my spending many years and tears trying to understand.  This had left me so religiously exhausted that I hadn't even tried to explore other faiths.  I certainly didn't expect the simple act of driving along a deserted country road to be the catalyst that would re-ignite my spiritual curiosity and send me on the long quest that brought me here.

On that watershed day I drove slowly along, enjoying the pine-scented air and the sound of golden aspen leaves rustling in the breeze.  Then I rounded a curve, and actually gasped and stopped the car to stare at the most glorious mountains I had yet seen.  When I was writing this last night I closed my eyes and tried to summon up a mental photograph so I could tell you in detail how magnificent they were.  But all I can remember is the impression they gave me: that they rose into the sky like a wall of Gothic spires, that the sunlight gleamed on their snowy peaks and gray flanks, and that I sat there with tears in my eyes thinking, "THAT'S God!"

The road I was on went toward them so I drove on, wanting to get as close as I could.  And as I got nearer I discovered I wasn't the only one to have had that reaction.  A sign at the foot of the mountains told me their name: The Cathedral Range.

Pax tecum,

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