A little over a week ago I was walking with my three-year old, Mason, at low tide around Skaket Beach in Orleans, MA on Cape Cod Bay. Skaket reunited me with one of my favorite childhood sea creatures, the hermit crab. Near the shore we would typically and frequently encounter little hermit crabs, in half inch shells, scurrying around tidepools, looking for places to dig into sand, avoiding sea gulls who seem to prefer the larger, meatier bodies of spider crabs, but who will hunt hermit crabs if no other morsels present themselves. One of our routines at Skaket was to pick up a hermit crab, watch it walk around in our cupped hands, then gently put it back in the warm, salty water.

The hermit crab is not Mason's favorite sea creature. He was far more interested in catching sea gulls. He was 0 for 46 for the week. And if you think that is an exercise in futility, you should see him yelling at the incoming tide, pleading with it not to knock over our sandcastles. "No water. Go back water." I stayed focused on hermit crabs, watching Mason chase gulls from the corner of my eye. The farther out you walk, the deeper the tidepools, the larger the hermit crabs. I don't remember as a child ever finding them in shells this large. Four inches, five inches, six inches-fat nautilus shells, beautiful spiral shapes, formerly the homes of snails and slugs and mollusks, now inhabited by these big hermit crabs with large front claws that retreat into the dark, safe depths of the shell when you pick them up. They carry these shells along the ocean floor with remarkable agility, even when all sorts of other creatures have attached themselves. Most of these larger hermit crab shells are covered with barnacles, snails, various plants and algae, and some larger, shimmery shells I couldn't identify. I picked up one nautilus that was completely covered with these shimmery shells. I could even feel them when I stuck my fingers into the inner recesses of the shell. It was bumpy and slimy and, luckily, uninhabited. I couldn't help wondering if maybe the decorations were out of style in hermit crab society. Or perhaps this shell was just waiting patiently for its next inhabitant to come along. Or perhaps the most recent owner had just lost a battle with one of its winged predators.

It's really hard to catch a sea gull, no matter your age; and even the deepest moat cannot stop the most gentle tide from slowly taking your sandcastle back to sea. The beach teaches valuable lessons about futility, frailty and finitude. But I stayed focused on hermit crabs. Like so many coastal creatures, hermit crabs endure. They comprise an ancient species, far older than human beings. They are as old as life before it first slithered out of the oceans to make its way upon dry land. In fact hermit crabs skirt that murky evolutionary line between water and land as there are some in the deep south and the tropics who've adapted to land and no longer visit the ocean. There were moments when this act of finding a hermit crab and holding it in my cupped hands filled me with spiritual intensity, with joy, with serenity; moments which brought me back, one step closer to the origins of life; moments in which I could bear witness to life's evolving, curious pathways; moments infusing me with awe and wonder, instilling in me faith: faith in a power larger than me that creates and upholds life and inspires me to live as best I can, to live creatively, to live in such a way that my commitments also uphold life. It is a quiet, inner experience, intense and fleeting like the life of a sandcastle, yet it remains with me, a reminder of life's preciousness and profundity.

In her August newsletter article, Vicki Merriam, our Director of Religious Education, wrote about a similar experience of spiritual intensity in her garden. "And sometimes," she says, "without any forethought, the weeds become part of my garden, Queen Anne's Lace among the Black-eyed Susans and purple clover mingled with the daisies. Some great unknown design beyond my ken is fulfilled. Long after we are gone, the garden will still be there. This is my faith." I had to look up the word 'ken.' It refers to what we know, what we can see, the extent of our vision. It's a beautiful sentence: "Some unknown design beyond my ken is fulfilled."

Some might call these experiences mystical. They are marked by strong emotion and sudden, often paradoxical insight in which, as some mystics say, we have comprehension without comprehending. Or in Vicki's words, we do not know the design, yet we can witness it being fulfilled. These are experiences wherein we suddenly, and fleetingly, discern the whole and our relationship to it; experiences wherein we sense ourselves connecting and connected to all other life; experiences of unboundedness; experiences of borderlessness; experiences of unity, of all-in-all; experiences of joy.

I don't assume everyone has such experiences. I do, however, note that I have always had them in my life, that Vicki speaks of such experiences in her life, and that many of you describe them in your lives. Unitarian Universalists most typically describe having these experiences in the presence of nature, but nature is only one source. Music, art, dance, yoga, exercise, prayer, meditation, festivals, holidays, being in community, possibly even listening to a sermon-these are all sources for this kind of intense spiritual experience in our lives. Suffering can also be such a source. Our experience of suffering, whatever form it may take, however difficult, can be, or can become in time, the source of powerful spiritual experience. It is often in the midst of suffering that we suddenly discover previously unknown reserves of strength, courage and resolve. It is often in the midst of suffering that we suddenly realize what matters most in the world and how we are called to transform our life commitments.

I've been reflecting on spiritual experience this summer in response to a book I've been reading by the liberal Christian theologian, Dorothee Soelle. The book is called The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. I intend to say more about this book in the fall. For now, I want you to know that until I read this book I would not have called myself a mystic. But one of her purposes in writing is to democratize mysticism. She contends mysticism today is often misunderstood, that it appears to occupy an obscure realm within religion and that one must be a determined practitioner in order to reach the heights of spiritual ecstasy and insight we associate with mysticism. Soelle says this is wrong and that, in fact, we are all mystics. She says "mystics are quite ordinary people: shoemakers, nannies, dyers of wool, home-care workers, or physicists….God is common, that is to say, accessible to everyone."¹ She says mysticism is the natural religious inclination of children. "I want to remind us," she writes, "of the buried mysticism of childhood. There are moments for many of us-I want to say all of us-moments of heightened experience in childhood in which we are grasped by a remarkable, seemingly unshakable certainty….Such certainty does not derive from the authority of a book, dogma, or priest. The highly charged moment gives the child a deep sense of unity without mediation: God is here. The pure river of living water flows also for me. Here and now, I am united with the…whole of life."² For a variety of reasons, children, especially children in consumer-oriented societies, learn to discount these experiences, to ignore them, to stop examining and reflecting on them, to bury them.

And yet, there I am with cupped hands, holding a hermit crab. There is Vicki, sitting in her garden. There are many of you, grasped by a remarkable, seemingly unshakable certainty, a sense of oneness, a sense of awe, a sense of mystery and wonder. A spiritual potential has always been with us. No matter how deeply buried, it still shines through the layers of social convention from time to time, though we don't often recognize it as such; or if we do recognize it, we're not sure what, if anything, we should do with it. We often just let it recede once again into the background. Do not put it back below the surface, says Soelle. Let it stay unburied. Let is shine. "Experiences of this kind abound," she writes, "whether they are articulated in theistic or nontheistic terms."³ She urges us to "take our own [spiritual] experiences seriously, to save and to frame them like an important photograph."⁴ This is what she means by democratizing mysticism.

I have also been reflecting on spiritual experience this summer in response to the 171-page report of the Unitarian Universalist Association's Commission on Appraisal, published this past June, entitled "Engaging our Theological Diversity." Every four years the Commission publishes a report on some aspect of life within our denomination. This 2005 report asks the question: what is the core of Unitarian Universalism? Given a wide variety of theological positions within Unitarian Universalism, what is it that holds us together? Or, another way they put the question: "What features of Unitarian Universalism, if you took them away, would leave us with something that is no longer Unitarian Universalism?"⁵

I won't discuss now how they answer these questions in the report, but I will tell you one of their findings: despite theological diversity, Unitarian Universalists, including ministers, don't talk about theology very much. Here's a quote from the report: "Many adult UUs have told us that discussing theology and beliefs is not a frequent part of their congregational life. When pressed, most acknowledge that this is in part an attempt to avoid conflict and disagreement. A number of youth agreed with this assessment, adding that they felt many adults do not like to talk about what they believe because they are not sure what that actually is and are afraid of looking uninformed or unintelligent." ⁶ This is a strong and challenging assessment of Unitarian Universalists, perhaps even harsh. And although I assume this dynamic manifests differently in different congregations, it strikes me as essentially true. I think there are important historical reasons why it is true, and the reasons are more complex than we don't want to look stupid. Nevertheless, can you think of ten people you know in this congregation-or any UU congregation-whose theology or religious world-view you can articulate in depth? Or, possibly more challenging, how comfortable are you speaking about your own theology to your fellow UUs? The truth is we don't talk about our theologies very often. We're extremely articulate in saying what we don't believe; and we're utterly lucid when upholding each other's right to believe whatever it is we believe. We just don't often express whatever it is we believe. I'm not saying it never happens; it's just not a regular part of our congregational life.

I don't feel badly about this, and I don't want you to feel badly either. We don't have it easy. If you think about it, in almost any other religious institution the basic theology is laid out for you. You can articulate your neighbor's theology because it's the same as yours. If not, then either you or your neighbor is doing it wrong. But we UUs really have to work at this if the promise of our theological diversity is to be fulfilled.

My sermons in September are going to respond to this Commission on Appraisal report in greater depth. And in October I've decided I will do a series of sermons on my theology. This morning I'm just giving you a heads up: we're going to start talking about theology at UUS:E. And this is why Dorothee Soelle's book on mysticism and resistance has been so compelling to me. We all have this buried spiritual potential. We don't all necessarily have mystical experiences, but we have an inclination toward seeking out and paying attention to the things that matter most, things that, for us, are sacred, ultimate, holy. We did it as children. We can do it as adults. We have the resources within us to engage in a conversation about theology. It doesn't matter whether or not we know the big academic words or the difference between high and low Christologies, or even if we know everything about the historical significance of the words Unitarian and Universalist. What matters, I believe, is that we have experiences out of which we can make theological meaning, and therefore we can participate in conversations about theology. The Commission report gives a wonderful quote from Margot Adler, a Unitarian Universalist and a Wiccan whom some of you may know as a National Public Radio reporter. She says: "The battles I would wage would be my own, under my own authority…rejecting all answers that did not come from [my] skin and bones and my always ambivalent, continually doubtful, heretic's heart."⁷ She has learned to trust her skin and bones, to rely on her heart. She knows that what she experiences matters. We need to know and trust that what we experience in our skin, in our bones, in our hearts matters when it comes to theology.

Our living Unitarian Universalist tradition draws upon six sources which you can find listed in the principles and purposes statement near the front of your hymnal. The first source stands out to me as the closest thing Unitarian Universalists have to a core theological statement, and it is very consistent with the notion of trusting our own spiritual experiences as well as with Soelle's notion of democratizing mysticism. That source is the "direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life." Like Vicki's experience in the garden, where "some unknown design beyond [her] ken is fulfilled;" like the hermit crab in my cupped hands, flitting about and making me comprehend, for a brief, wonderful moment, all that is sacred in my life; from time to time it will shine through. Let us learn to hold onto these moments, to keep them above ground. Let us always remember that what we experience in our skin and bones and hearts matters. And let us learn to talk about theology.

Amen and Blessed Be.