Rev. Margaret Keip

I call what I'm about to offer you my "quick tour through process theology for people who have not yet encountered a belief system that satisfies their sense of what is possible and real."

Indeed, many of us have tried on and later shed one or more systems of faith along the pathways that have brought us to where we are now. Faith is a journey, as life is. Certainly, no matter what we each believe now, no one of us is still where we started, way back when we learned of the word "god" for the first time and struggled to attach it to something familiar. Our understanding of such intangible ideas as love or hope or courage or trust or integrity or truth or god grows and deepens as we engage with them in the journeys of our lives. Our Unitarian Universalist way of faith is inten-tionally creedless, to enable freedom and diversity and change. — Because we cherish freedom and value diversity and honor change, and know these to be vital and real.

Freedom and diversity and change. Suppose these values are fundamental to existence...? Suppose there were a theology that holds this to be true...?

There is. It has a twentieth century source, in the person of a kindred spirit who once quipped that "a Unitarian is someone who believes there is, at the most, one God." His name was Alfred North Whitehead. A renowned British mathematician, he accepted an invitation in 1924, at age 63, to shift his field of study and venture across the Atlantic to teach philosophy at Harvard. Here in America, during the ensuing seventeen years of his life, he developed the vision now known as process philosophy, or sometimes process theology or process cosmology. Depending on the personal spin you give it, all three terms fit. I use "theology" because it's shortest and it fits me.

What Whitehead did was to integrate ancient philosophical insights and evolution and quantum physics into a fresh and comprehensive and deeply detailed model of reality that feels not many degrees of magnitude removed from reality itself. A brilliant, original, independent thinker, he was also sincerely religious and freely referred to "god" in non-traditional ways. With tufts of white hair rimming his bald head, it was said he looked rather like an angel whose halo had slipped. The orthodox would say that what had slipped was more than his halo.

Whitehead spoke of God when referring to the ideals he saw embodied in interrelated patterns in and all around us. — Values that give rise to feelings of exhilaration and companionship. Values like adventure, zest, truth, beauty, and peace (that quality of peace that nurtures blooming). Values that have no end-point; their possibilities are infinite. (A vital clue!)

Whitehead's vision was picked up and fully developed as a theology by a brilliant Unitarian Universalist, philosopher Charles Hartshorne. (He lives in Austin, Texas, still zestful at age 103, perhaps the only philosopher whose life has ever spanned three centuries!) In his deft hands, process theology proceeded to unravel the old threadbare images of God as unmoved mover, controlling power, cosmic moralist.

Consider: God as UNMOVED MOVER, absolute, immutable. This lofty view derived from Aristotle and his fellow Greek philosophers, who idealized perfection, and maintained that, as a perfect reality, God would not change, or move; and hence could not suffer, or be moved. How chilling! There is no such god, Hartshorne flatly declares. Only some kind of monster could remain blissful while those it supposedly loved were in pain. Process theology takes the enduring notion that God is love seriously—radically so.

— Shattering the view of God as CONTROLLING POWER, too. When we truly love others we don't seek to control or coerce them. That's tyrant power, born of fear. We don't cajole or pressure them with promises or threats. Instead we seek to entice, to persuade, to offer them hope, to nurture and enable their own creativity. We don't wield power, as with a sword and a whip; we EM-power and entrust them with freedom and loving encouragement. Such a god is not a punishing judge but an ally, acting with and within, not over and above us.

Whitehead described this god in beguiling ways. "The poet of the world" is one. Another: "the fellow sufferer who understands." Under stands — stands under, holding us, receiving all, and offering the best possible alternatives — if we attend and choose them. — If.

Real love, deep love, is love that takes and bears risks. God does not control what happens; nor sanction the status quo. Nothing is predestined. The future is genuinely open; the outcome of this adventure is unknown. Even as this opens existence to danger and to tragedy, it is also the artesian source of life's joy.

Try it this way: God wants us to enjoy! — A startling thought for those of us weaned on the idea that God's prime concern is for us to be moral. Over the centuries, Catholic popes and Calvinists and Puritans have viewed enjoyment as dangerous; something warily tolerated, often shamed. "One does not attend church to have a good time, but to atone for the good time one had the night before."

Process theology, in contrast, holds that enjoyment has been the divine urge throughout the whole creative course of evolution. If God were the COSMIC MORALIST orthodoxy portrays, one whose primary concern is moral behavior — then 99% of the history of our planet was spent in merely preparing the way for beings who are capable of the only kind of experience that really interests God. — It's another god-idea that's too small and anthropocentric.

Divine concern with enjoyment, in the process view, does not conflict with morality. It supports it! God wants us to enjoy, yes. But God wants us ALL to enjoy — thus to enjoy in ways that maximize the joy of others, and contribute to the good of all. Morality stands in the service of joy. — A stunning reversal of the common dogma!

I delight in such a God, so I use god-language with gratitude and joy. But it's optional. Whitehead comfortably incorporated the idea of "god" but he did not stress it. Many process thinkers are naturalists rather than theologians. Process naturalism sees the vitality inherent in creation, the unfolding of ever more complex forms of life, and the intricate relationships between apparently unconnected things, as rooted entirely within natural processes—rather than knit by a cosmic consciousness, threading through all. [Another process philosopher of note, Unitarian Henry Nelson Wieman, weighed in on the naturalist side and called the unifying principle "creative interchange."]

Process ideas work well both ways. When we reach the edges of what we know for sure, we each navigate by our best hunches, each stake our faith, even maybe wager our lives, on what appears to us to be the "most likely story." Process thought has been attracting Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, and Jews and humanists and Buddhists, as well, with numerous scientists among them. What matters is not whether our individual perspectives are accurate, but how worthy are the lives we lead in following their light. I venture to say, any process God has not the slightest concern about being believed in or not, much less worshipped.

Process theology and process naturalism both affirm that we are neither puppets nor machines. Both endow with importance all that we do and feel. Both claim that we are partners in this starbound adventure. And evolution is our saga, an unfolding of creative possibility into ever more complex forms of life, dynamically interrelated, and capable of greater and greater consciousness, enjoyment and choice. In us, the earth becomes aware, and feels and sees and acts. We are indeed partners in an adventure of dazzling creativity, and dazzling risk. Image it as "a continuous dance in which God must continually take the decisions of the creatures and work with them—whatever they may be. For better or worse, each decision of each creature plays some role in the world's process of becoming. And god works to create something good out of what the world makes possible." [Robert Mesle]

Just as this view of god and nature is radically relational, the corresponding view of human existence is radically response-able, and both are intimately interconnected. When I speak of responsibility I tend to open it into two words. For responsibility is exactly this: response ability. And we have it! God is not in charge here.

What we are as human beings is not decided for us by God, or biology, or society, or by our personal past. What will happen depends upon what we will do. We are given freedom and an open future. Mostly, I think, we want to be free, but we'd just as soon not be responsible. And in our fight and flight from response-ability, we have refined our remarkable capacity to make ourselves and each other miserable. And we ask, why is the world this way?

Ever since human beings began to intuit causes and consequences, we've tried to make sense of life's suffering and violence. Over the millennia there have been numerous explanations offered for the existence of evil in the world, no one of which has managed to eclipse all the others. The old ideas of a god who controls and who punishes were convenient, because we could then ask: why didn't—or doesn't—God do something? But this doesn't satisfy for very long, because it leads to another quandary: either God can't fix it (and maybe your god can beat up my god, and I lose), or God can and won't (and who needs a devil to blame when you've got a god like that?) Traditional theism has tackled the problem by denying the ultimate reality of evil; "all things work together for good," though how we may not be able to see within the limits of our vision and time span.

I find that latter answer a lot more comfortable than the one I believe to be true. Which is: that evil is real, and exists at our behest; and that the possibility of evil and the possibility of devastating accident are the immense risks of the freedom at the very heart of existence. As Charles Hartshorne concisely puts it, "with a lot of free beings interacting, things are going to happen that nobody intended, not even God."

You may be beginning to feel in your gut why this perspective has been ignored before whenever it emerged (which it did among the early Unitarians in 16th century Poland*). We don't want such vast responsibility for what happens today and tomorrow; for choices in this moment that may alter the future of the planet — indeed, that will alter it — as inevitably as the beat of a butterfly wing alters weather patterns (as chaos theory has illustrated).

As a poet has put it: "A pebble does not enter a pond without a ripple moving out and in time touching every single shore. We are all, every one of us, in this thing together." [Susan Hillier Parks]

Hands that caress and create and lend themselves in caring service to another are equally capable of inflicting pain, death and terror. Hearts that love can also hate. Increasing our capacity for good simultaneously increases our capacity for evil. But where there is no choice, there is no life. Freedom is the key to creation. The risk is inherent in the gamble that we are.

In his novel, Pilgermann, Russell Hoban, put it this way:

Earlier I have had the thought of many mysterious unseen fragile temples in which God used to dwell among us; now I perceive that these temples are each of us however unreliable, each of us for good or ill, each of us as the total of our actions and our being.... As far as I can see, the will of God is simply that everything possible will indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice is ours, the reckoning God's. And God is in us, one can't get away from God; that is the Fire of it, that is the Garden of it, at the centre of every soul and contiguous with infinity.

The choices that we make everyday in our lives are real choices. If they were not they would have little meaning. The enhancement of choice, and thus of aliveness, is the divine gamble. The enticement comes to us imagine, to grow, to fulfill our potential for life, if we pause and open ourselves to it. It does not coerce us, and thus cannot prevent us from making mistakes. Yet "wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and we are most mistaken, most in error when we quit exploring" [as William Least Heat Moon states it in his classic, Blue Highways].

At the time the Wright brothers first flew their fragile motorized kite in the gusty winds of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, there were very few knowledgeable persons who believed that what they were attempting was possible. Not whether it was difficult, or would require study and effort, but whether it was in the nature of things that human beings would ever find it possible to achieve sustained and controlled flight. What we believe to be in the nature of things (which is the same as to say: what a controlling God or our biology allows), defines what we will attempt to do, because it defines what we believe is possible. [Dwight Brown]

If everything replicates the past, nothing changes, nothing evolves. "New" never happens; is never even dreamed of. Dreams don't happen. There is no future. There is only and always and forever what was. As Whitehead once reflected with a twinkle, "The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe."

"We are in the present," he wrote. "The present is always shifting; it is derived from the past; it is shaping the future; it is passing into the future. This is PROCESS, and in the universe it is an inexorable fact."

What process theology has to offer the human heart centers within the reality of choice, and the psychodynamics of having an open future. And there is always more that we can be than what we are. We call ourselves human beings; we are more truly human becomings. And this appears true at every level of reality. Experience is the essence of existence. Process thought echoes the insights of quantum physics that the universe is sheer activity, and that energy is more elemental than matter.

The process concept of God is radical, even revolutionary. Yet no more so than what contemporary physics has had to say about concrete reality. —Which is that it is not concrete at all. Freedom, it seems, and some degree of self-determination, inhere in every level of existence. At the subatomic level, particles (like electrons), and waves (like light), all can change from waves to particles and back again. So now sub-atomic phenomena are not classified as waves or particles, but as a single category of somethings, called quanta, that are always somehow both.

Atoms are not little bits of stuff—they are little tiny events. Matter...just appears to be stuff; in fact, it is an energy dance. There is no enduring stuff... The closer you look, the more matter de-materializes into dance patterns, waltzes and tangos of quantums and quarks... Particles blip in and out of existence. As far as present day physics can tell, there is no such thing as hard matter that endures through time.... The world is an aggregate of little bits of activity....

Quantum mechanics and relativity theory suggest that each little bit, each moment, is self-determining, and that this is a fundamental feature of reality. Each moment determines itself, out of all it has felt, and out of its grasp of the possibilities of what it could be; and the observed world arises from a constant unfolding of such moments, within a vast field of connection, and a plenitude of possibilities...

If you can — invites Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry, and also a process theologian — picture this whole as a bejeweled net—like an intricate spider web covered with dew, each drop of water reflecting the whole. Then just do one more thing in your mind's eye: Picture this web lasting for only an instant. Then it blips out of existence and in the next instant it reappears, only it isn't exactly the same as the previous moment. It is slightly different. In each moment, the whole is configured in a different way, and over time—over a series of blips—the net appears to be in motion—shimmering or undulating; and these shimmers are people running, tides moving, comets soaring, grass growing, suns burning, rocks eroding; and in the people running there are emotions flowing, thoughts forming and passing, things remembered, things forgotten, and all of it is the cosmos, in an ever changing pulsation of becoming and ceasing, becoming and ceasing, becoming and ceasing.

We live in movement. This is the process view. In each and every moment each existing entity receives the legacy of what has been, and in its own being, its own synthesis of the given and the possible, affects what will happen next. All of existence is actively, inherently relational, interactive, interknit. This is therefore a universe of creativity, novelty and risk. Its destiny is wholly open. We are partners in a divine adventure.

How can we actively live in such partnership? We can keep our senses wide open. Perceive what is. Imagine what may be. Pay deep attention to our very best—most worthy and courageous and hopeful and joyful—yearnings and intuitions.

And what are we then to do? Charles Hartshorne phrased it best in words he spoke personally to Rebecca Parker: "Be a blessing to the world." That's it. Each of us; where we are; right now. That's our mission. That's the hope and glory of existence — yours and mine.

Be a blessing to the world.

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* The early 16th century Unitarians in Poland who held theses views are footnoted in history as Socinians, named for their intellectual leader, Fausto Sozzini (Socinus), a refugee from the Italian inquisition. Eventually they were persecuted out of existence by the Jesuits.

The extended segment from Rebecca Parker is from her 1997 address, "Choose to Bless the World," presented at the 100th birthday celebration for Charles Hartshorne.

I've borrowed liberally from the words and insights of friends and mentors in describing process thought for you. The Wright Brothers illustration is from Dwight Brown's 1982 UUMA Conference on Berry Street essay, "Impersonating the Divine".

SOURCES for learning more about process theology:

• John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, PROCESS THEOLOGY: An Introductory Exposition. Westminster Press, 1976. [An excellent all-round introduction to process theology, and one I've borrowed from here. It's on the academic side, and written for a Christian audience, so some of the objections they address are ones we don't raise.]

• Charles Hartshorne, OMNIPOTENCE AND OTHER THEOLOGICAL MISTAKES. State University of New York Press, 1984. [A lively polemic against features of traditional theism that process theology challenges. The first chapter is a gem!]

— and on process naturalism:

• C. Robert Mesle, PROCESS THEOLOGY, A Basic Introduction. Chalice Press, 1993. [Very readable; Mesle is a process naturalist, though you may not guess it until he gets to the chapter presenting this perspective.]

Formatted for the web by Kasey Melski.