UUA News & Events: The Soul and the Language of Reverence

Reclaiming a Vocabulary of Reverence

“The Soul and the Language of Reverence”

© Enrique Gómez

July 20, 2003. Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Tuscaloosa

Reading
From Oscar Wilde's De Profundis

People whose desire is solely for self-realization never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognize that the soul of a man [sic] is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his [sic] own soul?

Sermon.

The first of Galileo's discoveries took place in 1581 when he was studying medicine at the University of Pisa. As legend has it, he was attending services at the Cathedral when he found himself watching a swinging chandelier driven by air currents. To Galileo, it seemed that the time of swing was the same regardless of how widely it oscillated. He tested this by his pulse beat. In his experiments he set up two pendula of equal length and swung one in larger sweeps and the other is smaller ones. They kept together and he found he was correct.

The pendulum was one of the first phenomena that was described physically. This means that, given a set of rules derived from physical observations, I can write a set of numbers that will identify the position of the pendulum at any moment in time, even accounting for friction and air drag. The success of such a method in the physical sciences has given our conception of the world as one that can be fully described by such rules: rules that can be elucidated by method and consequently shape our perception of our place in an ordered cosmos. We approach the motions of the planets the same way. The development of organisms. Human society. The economy. This is a deterministic world view ordered by causality. A clockwork universe. If we know those rules, presumably we master these phenomena and we know everything that there is to know about them.

Lets go to the next exhibit. A double pendulum consists of two simple pendulums in tandem: One attaches a single pendulum to the end of another. The equations that we write using the rules of physics are what we call non-linear. So now the motion becomes quite irregular and very sensitive to the conditions found at the beginning.The motion will never look the same no matter how hard I work at replicating its starting condition. This kind of behavior is the hallmark of chaos. Chaos occurs in all kinds of phenomena and it implies that even systems, which at first glance appear naively simple, can show complicated behavior which is essentially unpredictable. However, chaos is very different from stochastic or random behavior. We have no control over a random process. But here I can control all the parameters that are relevant. The mass, rod lengths and friction, are all under control. Yet there is no way I can tell what this is going to do after a few seconds. This is not because I’m lazy, or don’t know the math or the physics. The mathematics themselves guarantee that I cannot come up with a string of numbers that accurately describe the behavior of the double pendulum.

Some years ago I attended a lecture at the University of California Santa Cruz by Michael Nauenberg on the history of chaos theory. He showed several instances where physicist analysed the double pendulum since Galileo's time. Before 1950, none of them recognized its chaotic behavior. It was not until the last few decades when developments in mathematics and computer science forced us to recognize that there existed a new form of behavior that frustrated any attempt of a scientist to model it mathematically. Because we did not have the language to describe a phenomenon, we did not see it at all.

I present these examples to show that it is not necessary to observe the farthest galaxy or subatomic particles to reach the limit of scientific language. Like the double pendulum the vast majority of phenomena cannot be reduced to a set of rules that give us the power of prediction. Most of the time we have to do with approximations that are applicable for period of time or isolated in space. For instance, the weather on Earth is chaotic. That’s why even with a battery of satellites and weather stations we still cannot predict the weather past a few days or even a few hours.

We live in a deterministic universe of atoms and force fields in time and space. I cannot say anything about ghosts, demons, gods, spirits, and other unknowns agents that will not subject themselves to tests (if they exist at all.) But I can say this. We live in a haunted world. It is a haunted world because it is a chaotic world. A world with processes and relationships that we are not clever enough to elucidate. There are even phenomena like the double pendulum where we are guaranteed that we will never be able to describe fully. We interact with these things every day. We make meaning of them because we experience them with our senses. They are part of what we know as real. William James, founder of the American school of Pragmatism, observed that “nothing that is real is absolutely simple.” There is no one grand mathematical relation to which you can reduce anything fully to a set of rules.

Most of the time we do well with rules whether they are society’s or the rules we derive from nature. We take comfort in their measure of predictability. But when we experience the chaos that underlies experience, that is when we know what is our religion. Here I’m not referring to a denomination, theology, or spiritual community. I’m talking about the things that we do when all the rules have failed us. The visions that come to us in despair that offer hope. The words that we seek even when we regard them as false or meaningless within any formal system of logic. Most of all we need the words that allow us to address the numinal level of the world.

We have been struggling with such words as late.

This past January, Rev. William Sinkford delivered a sermon titled “ The Language of Faith ” at the First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church in Fort Worth. Rev. Sinkford is the president of the of the Unitarian Universalist Association, so it’s natural that his sermon began a controversy by suggesting that Unitarian Universalists need to reclaim, as Rev. David Bumbaugh suggests, a "vocabulary of reverence" and begin to “name the holy”.

From the media coverage of this sermon, you would think that the denomination was about to split. Headlines like “words of 'reverence' roil a church” and “theological firestorm” have lit the papers in a time when Uuism scarcely makes a note at all. I rest assured that, as a faith community, we are mature enough not to be so readily balkanized. In this I agree with Sinkford. We are not going to see an overhaul of the Principles any time soon.

What this controversy highlights is the tension between theistic and humanist currents within the denomination. The Boston Globe’s coverage of General Assembly this year included a quote from Rev. Victoria Weinstein, the minister of First Parish Unitarian Church of Norwell. In her words: ''I don't want to drown in euphemism anymore, and I certainly don't want to play that old game of, `If you can't prove it, I don't want to hear it,' I'm talking about the hot-button words, like `God' and `spirit' and `spiritual' and `soul' and ‘sacred’; the intangibles that frighten people because they've been used against them at some point in their religious life.''

There have been suggestion in the press that after decades of rejecting theism and theistic language, the “pendulum” of the denomination is ready to “swing back” towards a more traditional religious language. What I hope to illustrate this morning is that it can be naive to invoke a simple model to predict what an organic system like a religious community will do next. Indeed, such analogy fails in the case of a double pendulum. We should not let our imagination of religious community be too controlled by metaphor and language.

Nevertheless, language is important. If we adopt a vocabulary of reverence (whether as individuals or as a denomination), we will do so because we intend to use it. This means that in this space we will be making assertions and negations about words like God, spirit, and soul . Many UUs writing in electronic bulletin boards have complained that before we invoke these words, we should define least we become fooled into worshiping a deity in our own religious home.

Can we use these words in a worship context without defining them in a technical fashion? I believe it is possible. There is a precedent for this in our intellectual life: there is no functional definition for life or consciousness, yet everyone has an intuitive grasp of what these words signify. I want to suggest some ways in which the word “soul ” could be understood and used in our religious context.

It is helpful to study the etymology of the word. Soul comes from the old German saiwalo, which may be a cognate of the Greek aiolos . “Quick-moving, changeful of hue, shifting.” It may also mean “wily” or “shifty”. It denotes something that you can only see from the corner of your eye. Elusive as a butterfly, and hence its connection with the term Psyche.

Ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as Europeans of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance thought of the soul as made of a fine substance that entered your body in the womb and left it on the moment of death. It would be a material substance, which you could conceivably capture and experiment with it. We know there is not such substance.

On the other hand, there are poets, mystics and theologians that have stressed the elusive, ever changing quality of the soul. James Hillman, in his book Re-Visioning Psychology illustrates this in this passage:

Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it by itself apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being a soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.

I believe that the best way to think about soul, guided by its etymology and the imagination of poets, is that it is some kind of process. Not just any kind of process, but a process of a certain quality. I will not be so impertinent as to say in words what is such quality. The best I can do is suggest examples that instantiate that quality.

What is it about a live performance by an accomplished musician that a commercial jingle on TV doesn’t have? What is it about an old family-owned store in a vibrant neighborhood that beacons to us the way a generic strip-mall store cannot? What is it about such cities as New York, San Francisco and New Orleans that makes them instantly recognizable no matter how far or close you see them? What do aboriginal cultures have that settler societies like ours long for so desperately? What is it about certain Sunday church services that come to our memories so readily and that we long to experience more? What is it about a mountain spring that cannot be captured in a table top water fountain? What is it about an old growth forest, a mountain range, or a night full of stars that moves us to wonder? What is it about living entities like pets and living plants that take us in with their presence? What is it about the company of human beings that we do not receive from electronic gadgetry?

These questions point to something, and if you think that there is a straight forward answer to any of this questions you may be missing their essence. When we confront these matters, we value sophisticated responses drawn for psychology or anthropology. And these views do offer insight. But it takes a special intelligence to behold and appreciated the mysteries inherent in the questions. These are mysteries that are embedded not in the ethereal world of ideas or in some astral plane, but in the substance of the world itself. Like the chaotic pendulum, these things can never be fully figured out. What presents a soul to us must clearly, also keeps many secrets.

We also see the soul in the complex interplay between the world and our imagination. A soulful entity may be a powerful source of meaning to us, but we may fail to put into words its significance. A home is much more than an enclosure where we rest and eat. A town is much more than an urban grid. A religious community is much more than an assembly of people that agree on theological issues. Most of the time we give no mind to what this other thing is, but we can experience great loss when our home life and community change drastically and definitely. On this point James Hillman gives a central role to the soul and relationships:

By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.

So matters of the soul seem to inhabit a place between a chaotic world and our mind's ability to make meaning. But it is important to know that the soul has an existence independent of our mental projections and cultural proclivities.

People of all cultures have understood, to some extent, that the soul in their life and community was important and have developed all matter of technologies to address it. One of the great places in my soul map of the world is the city of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. This is a place inhabited by the descendents of the people who first domesticated corn and who still speak two thousand year old languages. The houses are an explosion of color: greens, reds, oranges and yellows framed by ever-flowering bugambilias. Its main market is an avalanche of sights, aromas, and flavors from products made locally and by traditional means. I remember this city most of all because it is one city where I can still see people smile with their eyes. Specially the older women. I also know that life there is much harder than here and that most people live below the poverty level. Without sentimentalizing the place, I know that people there know to cultivate the soul in order to live.

On the other pole, the city I am most troubled by is Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl. A city twice the size of Birmingham, it is one of the largest cities in Mexico. It is a city made of concrete and gray adobe houses, almost entirely unpainted, under a canopy of power lines. Many roads are unpaved. The people who work at all work for large multinational manufacturing plants that are not located even within the city. People shop in supermarkets where the food comes in plastic wrapping and often is imported from the US. What I remember most from this city is the eyes of a homeless kid: empty. What does it say about us, a global civilization, when the majority of human beings have those eyes?

If you want to be convinced of the phenomenology of the soul, look to where people experience pain: pain that is present in poverty and in places of where people know material success. To treat that pain we turn to commercial culture and addictions. Some of us turn towards theologies of guilt and discipline. The wiser of us turn to therapies or to medication. To various degrees, these approaches all ease the pain and permit us to function, yet the soul and its needs are not addressed. It seems to me that we would all do better if we began to speak of the soul intelligently: less as an ethereal animal that needs to be saved from the fires of hell and more an intelligence within individuals and communities that processes information about our world. Particularly, it becomes dysfunctional under the stress of modern industrial culture that values efficiency and profit over humanity.

There is no doubt in my mind that the soul exists in its own fashion, even when I fail to define it. It belongs to the province of religion. It is in this sanctuary where the soul and its needs can be discussed properly, and its cultivation is the calling of a faith community. A liberal religious community has a soul, and hence the soul has a place in the language of liberal religion. We should address it not as material, transcendental, or metaphorical concept. We should know it as a process, a perspective, an intelligence, and a real entity that has a history and wisdom that cannot be fully known.

The Unitarian Universalist approach to religion shows great promise for the future of religion as a whole. It can accept the counsel of reason and the results of science while at the same time experience the world as a wondrous place, an enchanted place, a place alive with the soul.

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