Reverend
Emmy Lou Belcher:

Selected Sermons

Listing of available sermons

Sept. 19, 2004

"Something Moving Over Me"

“I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.”

“I still think of that old cat, mornings when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange birdcall. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away.”

“The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means good walking.”

“When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is [a] level field; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish. In summer’s low water, frogs and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, crayfish hump along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky green heron’s eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycamore log over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to read. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot. I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm.”
(excerpted from pages 1-5)

SERMON: Something Playing Over Me,
Emmy Lou Belcher

I was returning from a meeting of ministers in Plainfield last week, when I took a look at the map. Between Plainfield and my home in Morristown, there was an intriguing green shape on the map. And it had an even more intriguing name, “The Great Swamp.”

The name called to me, echoing of creatures from the dawn of time, of reeds and shadows and water. I found there was a road through this green space on the map, and I thought I might have a chance of finding it – although in New Jersey, one never knows if one will find the road one thought one was heading toward! But I took another look at the map, set my face toward the Great Swamp, and stepped on the gas.

I only had to stop and re-read the map two times before I realized that I had come out of the endless houses, shops, driveways, and was traveling through a different sort of place. The road wound between old trees, meadows, ponds dotted with plant life. A deer wandered into the road, looked at my car, then wandered off into the grassy verge. Up ahead the road took a sharp right hand turn. I realized that in front of me was a large pond with overhanging trees, and, in one of the trees was a egret. It never moved. But then I only saw it for a moment before the car and road took me away. But to this day I can see that scene as though it was a picture painted on the walls of my mind: pond, still beneath the blue skies, trees, branches alive and some dead, lilies on the pond surface, and the stark, white egret in the tree, looking into the pond. For a moment I was transported. The car was being driven by auto-pilot in one corner of my brain, but my most conscious brain was seeing and then remembering the egret and the trees and the pond. I think I gasped. I felt I was drawn into another place than in the car on a road in New Jersey. I was drawn into primordial, deep time. Into that which precedes and exceeds all that I am.

As Annie Dillard awakens feeling something powerful is playing over her, whether it is memories of the cat’s feet or a call to the wild unknown, when I saw the egret, I felt something powerful was playing over me – I was in a different realm and time than where we usually dwell.

Actually, I was still in this realm and time, just more aware of part of its truth and being. I was experiencing something called a mystical experience. If I were the poet Rumi, I would talk of being one with the Beloved. If I were a Buddhist, I would speak of shedding the self for the reality of life.

Each of us here walks with a story as our guide to making sense of life. Sometimes we recognize that it is a story, spun together out of whatever we have been exposed to. Many times we declare that we walk with the truth, or facts, not a story. But whether our story is illustrated with a character named “God” and his creation or is illustrated by photographs from the Hubble telescope, each of us has formed an idea, a story, that explains life and what we are supposed to do with it.

Embedded in this story will be a context and a direction. The context explains how the universe works. The direction extrapolates from that explanation what it means to be human and therefore, what our lives should be about. Human beings have this ability to take what we see and what we yearn for and to spin them into relationship. We also have an ability to critique the story we have formulated, to become almost outside observers looking in to our own story and deciding what of it we will keep and what we will discard, to re-spin the story.

Over the years, many have labeled this process with the word “religion.” Anyone’s religion contains the context and the direction of their story, or explanation, of life.

One of the things we know about ourselves is that we grow in both wisdom and stature over the years of our living. A theologian named James Fowler looked at the changes in religious story over the lifetimes of people and came out with a concept of stages of faith. Just like the stages of psychological development, of moral development, etc., we also undergo a journey in our concept of what the story of life is and what, therefore, we should do with our lives.

Fowler names six stages in faith development. The first three are almost mandatory, being closely allied with our mental/social/psychological development. Most adults end up in stages three, four or five. I’m making this all much more simplistic than it really is, of course; but here are the main components of stage three, four and five.

The easiest way to explain the differences is to look at authority. Where does one locate the source of authority? In stage three, authority is located outside the self. Some thing or some one else is the ultimate arbitrator of our lives. A stage three person might put this as a superhuman being who makes the decisions about what will happen in life. Our task, as human beings, is to figure out what this superhuman being wants and then to do it. Of course, there are huge ranges in stage three among the subtleties of this pattern of authority and behavior.

A person who is a stage four has been a stage three and now re-locates the source of authority. In stage four, authority is located in the self. Unitarian Universalists, as seen in the late 20th century, are rampant stage fours. We see the ultimate authority as being in us. When asked who should ultimately make decisions, the answer is “the individual.” When asked the source of moral decisions, the answer is each person. The founders of this country were examples of stage four religious development. They entrusted authority to the individual and developed a governmental system designed to allow the individual the freedom to use that authority. The community operates to allow individuals their own pursuit of happiness. The purpose of government is to stay out of the way as much as possible. Ultimate authority lies not in the community or any one religious understanding, but in the individual making choices.

Likewise, in Unitarian Universalist congregations, there is not an outside authority. Neither a single scripture nor a hierarchy of offices makes decisions for us. Each congregation is an individual in pursuit of its own happiness, its ultimate authority being the vote of the individuals who make up the congregation. Not the Pope, not the Bible, but the vote of the individual.

I’m not here this morning to ask that any of that change. Instead I would like to point out that the cutting edge in Unitarian Universalist congregations is stage five in Fowler’s depiction of faith development..

Stage five is where the person recognizes that authority is both inner and outer at the same time. Not an either/or but a both/and situation. Stage five people think of themselves as living in a context where decisions are made by more than the individual and by less than the authority outside a person’s self. Life is lived, for human beings, in a mixture of both inner and outer authority.

One of the stimuli for that movement has been science. Many of us were schooled in what is really Newtonian science – the science of the laws that are immutable. The world is, according to this concept, made up of foundational laws which are immutable. It is also, in its smallest form, made up of atoms that are impenetrable. Atoms may link up in chains to create differing substances, but the foundational block is absolute. By observation, it was believed we could uncover the secrets of the universe, its laws, and thus know what is our source and our fate. In the last 70 years, that has changed for scientists. It’s been slower working its way into the populace, but the so-called “new science” is more likely to draw some of its analogies from relativism and relationship than from a concept of clear, defined laws. The following are the words of Ian Barbour, a former professor of physics and of religion at Carleton College.

“The world is a network of interactions. Events are interdependent; every event has an essential reference to other times and places. Every entity is initially constituted by its relationships. Nothing exists except by participation. Each occurrence in turn exerts an influence, which enters into the becoming of other occurrences. ..Formerly [in physics] we imagined independent, localized, self-contained particles bumping into each other externally and passively without themselves undergoing alteration. Today we talk about interpenetrating fields that extend throughout space and change continually. The biological world is a web of mutual dependencies.”

The basic analogy for interpreting the world is not a machine but an organism, which is a highly integrated and dynamic pattern of interdependent events. The parts contribute to and are also modified by the unified activity of the whole. …The world is [not a collection of individuals] but a community of events.(Religion and Science, page 285)

Barbour does not end up with the world as just a unity, in which the parts are swallowed up in the whole. “An event is not just the intersection of lines of interaction; it is an entity in its own right with its own individuality. …Each entity is a center of spontaneity and self-creation, contributing distinctively to the world.” (ibid.)

The Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams used to say, “By their groups shall ye know them.” Individuals are known not just for the self they have gathered but also by the events in which they are participating. These events change the individuals, and the individuals create the character of the events. Individuals have both interiority and integration, holding both at the same moment.

The Buddhists would observe that when people get too caught up in the concept of a self, then they become separated from reality. Scientists today would say the same. The concept of an independent, impenetrable self is an illusion.

In the fifth stage of Fowler’s stages of faith development, one realizes that authority, ultimate power, lies both within and without the individual at the same time. How we tell the story of that concept makes a difference. Is the community equally as important as the individual? If so, what communities do we want to be part of? If everything is so mutable, so changeable, what is the purpose of life? What does it say about ethical decisions? What leaves us struck with awe? The word “awe” implies both wonder and fear in the same moment. What leaves you awe-struck?

For me, part of the dialogue is with what is moving powerfully over me. I am not alone, indivisible, absolute. I am part of everything that is. A part of the just and of the unjust. A part of beauty and a part of destruction. Do you see yourself this way? If so, what does that say about your living day to day? What informs you about power and compassion? How do you make decisions in such a mutable world?

One of the things that helps me is experiences such as the Great Swamp. The picture in my mind of the egret brooding over the pond is a sort of icon, a religious picture. It links me with all that I am and am not at the same time. It is part of the story that guides my life.What is your story, your icon, your island in Tinker’s Creek that calls to you like an oracle? Oracles tell of the future – what does your place tell you?

I close this reflection, this sermon, today with the words of the poet Wendell Berry. I leave them for you without comment. Take what from them penetrates you. Take what joins with your soul.

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where
the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
And the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world,
And am free.

AMEN

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Last updated Dec. 24, 2004

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