“Welcoming the Atheist Within”
Sermon by Heather Starr, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon
February 25, 2007
Host: Melissa Hochshield
CALL TO WORSHIP
Good morning. It is good to be with you this morning. May we take this time together to savor the care we feel for one another and for our community, to appreciate the abundant freedom we have here to think for ourselves and learn from one another’s perspectives and experiences. May we cherish this community through our attentive journey alongside each other. Come, let us worship together.
SERMON "Welcoming the Atheist Within" Heather Starr
Here’s a story to which I’m fairly certain a good many of you, regardless of your theological orientation, can relate. This is Central Oregon after all, and this is simply a story about a walk in the woods. “An atheist was taking a walk through the woods, admiring all that the wonders of evolution had created. "What majestic trees! What powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!" he said to himself. As he was walking alongside the river he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to look. He saw a 7-foot grizzly charge towards him. He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was closing in on him. He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. His heart was pumping frantically and he tried to run even faster. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw the bear right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him.
At that instant the Atheist cried out: "Oh my God!....." And time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. As a bright light shone down upon the man, a voice came out of the sky: "You deny my existence for all of these years, teach others I don't exist, and describe creation as a cosmic coincidence. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?" The atheist looked directly into the light, and said "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask You to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps could You make the BEAR a Christian?" "Very well," said the voice. The light went out. And the sounds of the forest resumed. …And then the bear dropped his right paw ..... brought both paws together and bowed his head and spoke: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful."
…Well, there are no end of jokes out there pitting atheists and Christians and their beliefs against one another. Atheists are a rather castigated lot, and instead of that being less the case as time goes on, it only seems to be becoming more the case. In less urban places where I have lived and worked as a minister like northern Minnesota and Central Oregon, I’m acutely aware of how, well, for lack of a better word, fundamental going to church is for many folks, and how perplexed and even appalled some people are by finding out that one doesn’t identify as Christian.
And yet we here are a religious community that identifies as a church and welcomes atheists. In fact we are indebted to the atheists who have been active in our faith tradition for paving the way towards the creation of communities that are religious, humanist, and committed to creating spiritual community together, all without requiring our members to share a common belief in God.
Within our Unitarian congregations in this country, ministers have been preaching on atheist ideas and using the language of humanism since the early 1900’s. As long ago as 1920, Unitarian publications were publishing articles pondering the place for ritual and for ministers in a faith community that no longer considered the Bible the inspired word of God and viewed Jesus “only as a qualified authority” “who had some keen insights and some that were not so keen” (Olds 36). Still, even then, even within developing humanism, “there would still be a place for church,” a place for “the ‘aesthetic element’ of worship,” for ritual, for “addressing social problems and education for social life,” for “opportunities for open discussion to consider all sides of any worthwhile subject” (36).
These debates of 1920 and the years following are debates we continue to find ourselves having today; my feeling is that if we welcome the conversations and read up on the historical discussions of our faith tradition, we could move further forward and become more active and productive in our larger world, rather than getting bogged down in expecting unanimous answers to these age-old questions.
I want to make sure we here together this morning can have a conversation with at least some comfort with these theological terms. For the sake of that conversation, I would define atheism as believing that there’s no god, agnosticism as believing there there might be, but then again there might not, and I can’t be sure, and humanism as believing in the human experience as the place for spiritual growth. Former Unitarian seminary president William Murry’s identification as humanist is quite beautiful and will sound familiar to most of you because of its language drawn directly from our Unitarian Universalist Principles—he writes “I am a humanist because I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, because I believe life is most worth living when we strive to make the world a better place, and because I believe the only possibility for a world in which love, justice, peace, and freedom prevail is through human beings working together to transform the world” (10).
It has been a valuable lesson for me to revisit how essential the dissenting, openly questioning, doubt-raising, and thought-provoking tradition is within our Unitarian and Universalist faith. I am grateful to the couple who bid on this sermon at our fall auction for inviting me to wrestle more with this topic than I have thus far. Questions and disagreements—this diversity of thought rather than homogeneity—has always been at the center of this Unitarian Universalist faith path. By prioritizing the act of questioning above one particular answer, we are prioritizing the act of critical thinking, the skill of civic engagement, the process of discovery over a product.
Writer and scientist Barbara Kingsolver makes the astute point that, essentially, our cultural conversations about the intersections and disjunctions between religion and science have digressed. We live in a television-oriented culture driven by soundbites and interrupted with commercial breaks. I know I for one am eagerly anticipating Ellen DeGeneres’ certain one-liners this evening and the fast-and-furious thank-you speeches that get cut off by the Academy Award theme music booming overhead. But in a culture that is constantly truncating the opportunity for explorations of any real depth, it’s harder and harder to engage in a conversation that lasts long enough to really investigate theology and distinguish between myth and mystery.
I see what scientist and social critic Richard Dawkins sees, dumbfounded, when he travels to evangelical America on Sunday morning and observes with astonishment that people are flocking towards beliefs, speeches and sermons that were fully challenged and disproven 50 years ago, if not more 150, or 500. 45% of Americans, he quotes, aghast, believe that the whole Universe, the Earth included, is less than 10,000 years old. Somehow the comfortable clarity and apparent certainty of a homogenous and hierarchical message beckons. We need the atheists within to hold open the door to a deeper, more challenging, less plasticly-packaged conversation.
As a life-long Unitarian Universalist and an agnostic, I feel myself open to possibility, every day. There are days in which I really do feel moved by an encounter with the world, the strong faith of a close friend, or an event so unbelievably perfect that it seems like there must be some logic, some Being-Greater-Than-Myself, some energy greater than me at work in the world. And then there are days in which it all feels so incredibly raw and dysfunctional, the pain of the world so great and horrific, that I simply can’t believe that we are anything but struggling, clumsy beings bumbling alongside one another. On those days, I have to ask myself if belief in an external entity, a God, isn’t entirely the human projection of our internal yearning for something timeless, something all-powerful.
Minister, professor, and author William Murry writes: “The history of religion is so soaked in blood that we might be well advised to shake ourselves free from its claims. However, human history would suggest that we are hard-wired to be religious. Human beings seem to be religious animals by nature. Even those of us who reject traditional theist religion do so religiously. We seem to be driven by a need to relate our quotidian existence to cosmic concepts, to find in the events of daily life some hint of eternal significance. So it is important that we be as intentional as possible in our religious expression, so that we can examine and understand the function of religion in our lives” (Murry, xii).
There is a skeptic, a doubter, a questioner within each and every one of us. To different degrees, we let that wonderer wander. First we must allow that journey to begin within ourselves, and to surround ourselves with people who support and encourage us on that journey, regardless of where it may take us. Fritz Williams, Leader of the Baltimore Ethical Culture Society, tells of this brief moment: “I can remember only one occasion when my mother asked me why I had left the church. As gently as I could, I told her that, largely as a result of my biblical and theological studies, I no longer believed in most of the things the church teaches. She looked at me sadly. You could see she felt sorry for me. ‘But…wouldn’t you like to pretend?’ she asked.”
Some people do choose to pretend, some people believe very ardently, some experience the outdoors as their church, and some choose to find a faith community that welcomes their questions and explorations. Each of these journeys is valid; the language we use can become more of a stumbling block for people than the actual questions or the beliefs. Herb Silverman, President of the Secular Coalition for America, writes this: “Many atheists are uncomfortable with the [negativity of the word ‘atheism,’] and not just because it’s been demonized in our culture. It says what we don’t believe, rather than what we do believe. Other labels that some atheists prefer include humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, rationalist, freethinker, and skeptic. While there may be fine distinctions among these words, which most of us like to argue about, I think it comes down more to a matter of taste than to deep theological or philosophical differences. And,” he goes on, “I even know a number of atheists in this very church who proudly call themselves…Unitarians!”
I welcome the atheist within when I’m feeling very calm and present and brave. It takes strength and focus to be here, in this moment, this day, and say “this is all there is. And I’m going to savor it as much as I possibly can. I’m going to make the most of this life, this year, this moment, this breath.” Herb Silverman again: “[Atheists] are people who do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, not because of future rewards or punishments. A talk-radio caller once said to me that as an atheist I probably feel free to go out and rape and murder and do anything else I think I can get away with. I responded: ‘With an attitude like that, I hope you continue to believe in God.’”
Above all, the atheists amongst us demand a religious engagement with this world, emotionally, ethically, intellectually, environmentally. I love this passage from Unitarian Universalist congregant Betty Mills who writes “who are these Unitarian Universalists, standing around the coffee urns on Sunday morning discussing last night’s movie and next fall’s election; reviewing the morning sermon, designing tomorrow’s education, storming over next century’s oceans? Joyful celebrants of the gift of [this] life, mixing nonsense with the quest of the ages, turning secular need into concerned action, serving wine on the lawn and petitions in the foyer!”
“Religion,” writes humanist William Murry, “refers to becoming more fully human through living as intensely, as joyfully, and as responsibly as possible, and it includes the affective and the ethical as well as the intellectual dimensions” (14). I agree with Murry’s premise that how we define religion has so much to do with whether or not we feel that religion has anything at all to do with our daily lives, and so I want to read this definition for you again. “Religion refers to becoming more fully human through living as intensely, as joyfully, and as responsibly as possible, and it includes the affective and the ethical as well as the intellectual dimensions.”
…There were times while working on this sermon that I felt incredibly sad. What was going on with me, I wondered? I found myself all tearful as I looked out the window at the snow and the cloudiness—was it the weather? Having too much to do? Fighting off a cold—what? Or was it about this topic—and all the big and difficult questions of good and evil, life after death, if there is a God, how he, she, or It can allow such awful things to happen as happen every day, every hour. And then it was the words of essayist Barbara Kingsolver, struggling to respond to the tragedies of the world in the days following September 11, 2001, that opened me up to what I was absorbing, and that is this: grief.
Yes, atheism can be a very positive, very Universalist approach to the world—there is no hell, no eternal suffering for broken people, and that is a blessed thing. But atheism also challenges us to reckon with the preciousness of the here and now—this is it, baby, the atheists are telling me. This is all. And most days I find This so overwhelmingly precious and beautiful and miraculous that I zoom around town astounded and amazed. It is only when staring out the window at the snow-covered mountains, at all our busy and also quiet lives trying to sort out what’s most important, today, how to live as best we can, that I am brought to tears by the delicate-ness, the fragility of it all. And that is grief.
The simple and overwhelming silence that I know I will experience after someone else that I love dearly dies, that difficult and slow reengagement with my own “one wild and precious life.” Mary Oliver wrote a very simple poem, one of a series mentioning her dog,
Percy. She wrote this poem not long after the death of her beloved partner Molly:
Percy (Four)
I went to church.
I walked on the beach
and played with Percy.
I answered the phone
and paid the bills.
I did the laundry.
I spoke her name
a hundred times.
I knelt in the dark
and said some holy words.
I went downstairs,
I watered the flowers,
I fed Percy.
[…]
That is all. That is all the words of the poem, it is all that she was taking in, I’m sure. It is a simple putting one-foot-in-front-of-the-other. It is doing the daily tasks of life. It is saying some holy words in the dark, because—perhaps that will help, or perhaps not. It is keeping a loved one’s presence near, noticing her so-palpable absence, by speaking her name. So, for me, anticipatory grief is part of the voice of the atheist within me. On the days when I really do feel that this life is all there is, I try that much harder to relish it, to say with e.e. cummings the words: “I Thank You…for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.” Even in this awestruck gratitude, I catch myself getting caught in poetry, language and story which is deeply sacred in me and which yearns for something transcendant, something timeless—because even in this poem of deep, heartfelt gratitude, the actual line that cummings wrote is “I Thank You God.” So often poetry reaches for the transcendant, the ineffable, the mystery, the words for the awe we feel within us, and so often those words take on a religious quality. So then it is to the atheists around me that I turn to both find awe in atheism and find reason in my faith.
The atheists within keep me searching, wondering, thinking, reasoning, pondering, ever honing and investigating my human experience of this world and how my faith is a part of that experience. For me, these questions, this searching, is itself a spiritual practice. It is a practice, an ongoing journey and effort, that has to do with every day paying attention to what I’m finding meaning in, and why. “Doubt,” wrote Rev. Bob Weston, “is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery.” And so I end this sermon with a message of welcome for the atheists and the theists within each one of us and within our community: we need one another in order to experience and learn more of this world, in order to challenge, question, and be changed by one another. I believe we come together in religious community to change the world and to be changed within ourselves. Let us welcome the questions which cause us to live more fully, each precious day.
May it be so.
CONGREGATIONAL RESPONSE AND REFLECTION
Let us take a few moments now for silence. I invite you to think about what these words have stirred in you, what they’ve reminded you of. When in your life have you been challenged to change or rethink your religious beliefs? What is most important to you about being together in spiritual community that supercedes our all agreeing on the existence or non-existence of God? How do you think we can best encourage religious dialogue in this community and this region?