I have a memory of the day John Lennon died.
I was a senior in high school on Dec. 8, 1980. The news of his shooting death was, of course, unexpected, and particularly impactful to me at the time.
I liked the Beatles and Lennon’s solo work well enough, but I wasn’t a diehard fan. It wasn’t so much about being a fan, though.
It was more about recognizing, in a 17-year-old way, that an important voice for peace and goodwill had been silenced…
…the creator of songs like Give Peace a Chance, War is Over, Across the Universe.
I must’ve have been incessant about the gravity of this loss, because I vividly remember my mom finally saying, “Sheesh Lori, you’re obsessed with this!”
Obsessed? Was I obsessing over this? Was I missing something?
One of his songs that spoke to me most was Imagine. The crux of it was deeply inspiring to me…imagine living for peace, nothing to kill each other for, bringing down the silos of nationalism and materialism. Just brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, with no competition, but instead sharing all the world.
As much as I liked it, for many years I didn’t love the “above us only sky” and “imagine no religion” parts, as if he was questioning the existence of God.
Based on similar concerns, some would consider this song blasphemous.
Others, not so disturbed by that, might say that its emphasis on peace, sharing, and oneness speaks to godliness, but not about God per se.
With the passage of time, as my imagining of Divinity -who or what God is- continues to evolve, I find that I discover God more in this song, and have fewer and fewer “Yeah, but’s…”.
When I examine why, I think it has to do with becoming less logically linear about how I approach this concept of God.
I have two examples of religious linear logic, one from 2,000 years ago and one from 20 years ago.
We’ll start with the older one. Last week we heard Rev. David speak about how, 325 years after Jesus was killed, the emperor Constantine instructed the Jesus-following leaders to develop the tenets of this new religion…a doctrinal road map.
From that came the Nicene and Apostles Creeds, which nearly all Christian denominations espouse…
This is what that particular doctrinal map looks (or sounds) like:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.
Point A to point B. Concrete. Believed. Known.
It’s understandable that we would gravitate towards this understanding of God, because we, especially in the western world think largely in tangible terms.
I am here. You’re there.
It’s what we know, it makes sense. It’s provable, certain. And the sureness that this brings is comforting.
When you’ve purchased and covet this map, it can be disconcerting when you find yourself on a detour off ramp.
This happened in a conversation with my mom about 20 years ago.
We were discussing homosexuality from a theological standpoint. Mom loves me very much, but if pressed, she’ll say that homosexuality is not ordained by God.
However, she also doesn’t think that gay people consciously choose a same-sex orientation, so it left her in a juxtaposition those many years ago when I suggested that if it’s not chosen, it must be part of our divine creation.
She couldn’t abide by that, and when I gently pointed out the inconsistent reasoning, she said, “I don’t know. I’ll have so much to ask Jesus about once I get to heaven.”
Ah, those pesky detours to logic on the linear road.
There’s a marble board game that illustrates this idea of a linear approach. It’s a great metaphor about our lives, and our movement toward God.
See if you can remember this game, in which each player has several marbles that all start in the home spaces, and the object is to move your marbles out of the home space, around the board in a linear fashion, and back into the home spaces.
Your marble movement is based on chance from rolling dice, and are vulnerable to being picked off by your opponents, sending that marble back home to start over.
Does anyone remember what this game is called? Yes, Aggravation.
Many of us approach life and God this way. We’re raised at home, and then we emerge and make our way through life, attempting to make decisions that will forward us along in life,
each marble representing different life aspects – education, employment, religious choices, security, and we experience inevitable setbacks along the way.
We move along the path of life, with the imperative of bringing all our marbles safely back home when the game of life ends, and if we do all of this well, we win (which is to say, we receive our heavenly reward).
Let’s take a moment to look at the packaging for this game. You’ll see that it says ‘…be the first player to move your marbles around the board to home, a classic race game.’ Yes, competition.
And WARNING! Choking Hazard. Not For Children Under 3 Years.’
Yes, this game could potentially choke the abundance of this life out of you while you’re intent only on the end game.
It’s not suitable for children under 3, because the curiosity and imagination of those young people are still without bounds.
As I mulled all of this over, a man kept coming to my mind. It’s someone with whom we’re all are familiar, and if we didn’t know better we would say that he was a master at the linear approach, a devotee to the formulaic A to B plan.
It’s Albert Einstein. Einstein was a person who found the balance between rational intellect and the liberated spirit.
He was the one who said, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Here are other quotes and quips that reflect this from him.
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
“When the solution is simple, God is answering.”
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
Here’s one last Einstein quote, which loops us back to the song Imagine:
“Imagination is more than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
As we allow our spirits and minds out of their boxes (we all have one because we’re older than 3 by now)…
…the song’s message might broaden our ever-unfolding experience of God.
Our experience of God, not to be confused with our knowledge of God.
It’s now clearer to me that I don’t have to look beyond where I am, in the here and now, to experience divinity. It becomes okay that above us is only sky, because God is here.
John is correct that, A) some would say he’s a dreamer, because this Imagine plan is void of any semblance of a road map. And B) that he’s not the only one.
Albert Einstein is right there with him. Jesus wasn’t a road map guy either.
Here’s an example of how this plays out in my life.
Often when I’m walking my dogs I’m thinking about the past or the future. Finishing the newsletter, something a neighbor said last week, or pondering my next Sunday morning reflection.
As I’m walking along, when I say yes to the internal nudge to be truly present, to appreciate the reality of sacredness that is all around me…
…it’s like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy leaves the black and white Kansas and steps into colorful Oz.
It’s not that I wasn’t present before, but the experience becomes deeper, richer. Conscious immersion into sacred creation does that to you.
It is in those moments that I appreciate holiness, divinity…God’s presence.
It’s not that I’m merely seeing the object of someone’s creation like viewing Van Gogh’s Starry Night in a gallery. Instead, I’m a part of that creation, more like Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.
In these moments I don’t need some other heaven in some other place, because there’s a sense of completeness in the peace and connection – to the Universe, to the Earth, to you, to myself.
Years ago I concerned myself with if I was missing something because of my mom’s ‘obsessed’ comment. These days I concern myself with missing what’s right in front of me.
It’s in this spirit that UU Jacob Trapp wrote the piece entitled “To Worship” that we heard a couple of weeks ago, in which he says in part:
To worship (to celebrate God, to see God) is to stand in awe under a heaven of stars,
before a flower, a sunlit leaf, a grain of sand.
To Worship is to recognize God within a tree astir with the wind,
It is to find and praise God through kindness and acts of love.
In addition to the ways that you connect with God, does it resonate to also experience God’s presence in these ways?
Last week someone asked our guest speaker Rev. Pyle how he experiences God, and he said through the holy spirit.
That’s pretty evangelical-sounding from a UU guy. And I couldn’t agree more.
Traditional Christianity embraces the father, son, holy spirit parts of the trinity. We heard that in the Creed earlier.
The holy spirit part – a pervasive spiritual presence in our midst – that speaks to my soul. It’s more about experience than doctrine.
Trappist monk Thomas Merton spoke to this when he said that Eastern religions have much to teach Christianity about experiencing God, and little to nothing to offer regarding doctrine.
The topic of doctrines and theological alignment has come up frequently recently as we endeavor the process of discerning with which denominations to affiliate.
That’s OK, it factors in. But at the end of the day – not waiting until the end of our lives, but the end of our day – may we be free enough to imagine God without limits.
May we embrace the spirit of Lennon and Einstein, allowing ourselves to move beyond the constructs of religion, to not only to look beyond doctrine, but also to broaden our horizons of how we experience God.
To this, no more beautiful words have been spoken than these… (taken from our own Covenant Statement)
When we use the word “God,” we refer to the Mystery in which our days [here and now] are set, a Mystery which moves us to awe. We experience God as a presence at the center of our being and of all creation [yes, every blade of grass, every moth, every cloud, every person]
A divine power and love our logic cannot define or our spirits deny.
John and Albert, and Jesus, would be so pleased.
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