February 10, 2008
“The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment in the wood-of-no-names,” says Rachel Naomi Remen. I think this is true. The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment. The unbiased, open child on the beach sees treasure washed in from the sea; sees beautiful white birds soaring with angel wings; feels a sense of communion with her surroundings. Her heart follows the birds. She longs to fly with the birds. Many years later, the judging, labeling adult sees only “bits of seaweed and garbage” littering the shoreline; sees “seagulls everywhere, screaming raucously, fighting over the garbage and the occasional dead creature the sea has given up.” The judging, labeling adult feels no sense of communion, feels disappointment, wants to leave, leaves.
There is a truth to what the child encounters on the beach in Remen’s meditation. There is a truth to what the adult encounters on the beach. Both have value. But somehow the sacred lives beyond labels and judgment. Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I contend the way the child sees in this meditation—without labels—is the way of peace, joy, serenity, creativity, love, spirit. The way the adult sees is the way of separation, alienation, constriction, limitation, anxiety, foolishness and, at times, evil. The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment.
I am reminded of the way Diana Eck, a professor of comparative religion, once described her encounter with Jiddu Krishnamurti, a great 20th century Indian spiritual thinker and teacher. Krishnamurti, she says, “did not fit any category at all…. Not only was he not a Christian, he was not a Hindu, not a Buddhist. That was just his point. ‘Truth is a pathless land,’ he said. ‘You cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect…’ He did not care for the labels of any religion. Indeed, he observed the way in which we fearfully, anxiously, shape our whole lives by religious, political, cultural, and personal labels and names—all of which function as a buffer zone of personal security between ourselves and the experience of life.” Eck continues: “No one in my world had ever asked about the value of labeling, judging, discriminating, and categorizing experience and suggested that by doing so we distance ourselves from experience. We call it a beautiful sunrise on the Ganges and don’t ever really see it because we have dispensed with it by giving it a name and label…. We name so-and-so as a friend or an enemy. The next time we encounter that person, the pigeonhole is ready…. And what about religion? Is it really just a name? I had to ask myself about being a Christian. Did the name matter? Did the name provide me with a shelter or barrier to shield me from real encounter and questioning?” The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment.
I am reminded still further of the familiar words of the Sufi poet, Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
How do we do it? How do we learn to recognize, as adults, all the accretions of our lives, all the layers of labels and judgments, unexamined biases and assumptions, ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, all the layers of nonsense, humbug, rubbish, layers of—please forgive me—crap that build up in us, giving us names that don’t adequately reflect our true nature, giving us names to identify people, animals and things that don’t adequately reflect their true nature, clouding the way we encounter the world, clouding the way we encounter each other, stunting our ability to discern beauty, stunting our passions and desires, creating those safe buffer zones which prevent us from fully experiencing life, separating us from ourselves, separating us from others, denying us our natural state of communion with great white soaring birds? How do we do it?
In Lewis Carrol’s wood-of-no-names—a place of no labels, a place of no judgment—Alice and the fawn relate to each other, connect with each other; they do no harm to each other. They belong to each other. At the edge of the wood where names, labels, biases and judgments matter, they become estranged from each other. They no longer commune. The fawn, in particular, becomes afraid and flees. I suppose this makes sense. Labels and judgments may block our approach to the sacred, but we also need them in order to survive and function. People really do eat dear, and certainly the fawn is justified in fleeing. Carrol’s wood-of-no-names is fantasy, but does it not point us in the direction of a real spiritual path? I think so. Even if we can’t live entirely without labels and judgment, might it not be possible to at least learn to recognize how they function in our lives, to learn to recognize all the layers of nonsense, all the layers of rubbish and then—then!—might it not be possible to transcend them for a moment, and another, and another, so that we might spend more of our time living with the sacred? How might we cultivate regular, daily moments wherein we travel in the wood-of-no-names; moments wherein we lay down in Rumi’s field; moments wherein we experience life with no buffer; moments wherein our hearts fly after great white soaring birds with angel wings?
Well, I’m not going to answer this question this morning. Not fully. I suspect it takes an entire adult life to answer this question, to regain the child’s way of seeing, to learn to live beyond labels and judgment. But I am going to offer a starting place by returning to the third Unitarian Universalist principle, “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” This is one of the final sermons in my series on the Unitarian Universalist principles entitled, “How Shall We Live?” You may remember I began this series by preaching on the third principle. I noted then that the third principle is really two principles, acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. I talked about spiritual growth that morning and vowed to return to acceptance of one another at a later date. This is the later date.
How shall we live? We shall accept one another. OK. I’m going to cut straight to my problem with this principle. In my view, acceptance is the wrong word. It’s a good word. It’s an important word in a multi-racial, multi-cultural, religiously pluralistic society like ours—we need to learn the virtue of acceptance. But for me it doesn’t qualify as a compelling religious principle. It doesn’t have sufficient depth to sustain a religious vision. To some degree, it’s a ‘lowest-common-denominator’ principle or a ‘do-the-bare-minimum’ principle. The Sunday Services Committee was speaking about this the other night. Penny Field, who co-chairs the committee, said “acceptance is what happens when you finally stop fighting something.” I think she’s right. As a principle that guides how we shall live, I’m not sure acceptance demands anything of us other than that we not fight with one another. It doesn’t ask that we go out of our way to help one another. It doesn’t ask that we nurture and sustain one another. It doesn’t ask that we challenge and confront one another, that we deal with each other directly, that we speak our hard truths to each other, that we take the time to learn each other’s stories, that we hold one another and stay present to one another in the midst of tragedy. Instead of acceptance, what about love? Love demands all these things. How much more compelling—and demanding—would this third principle be if it began with the words, love for one another?”
If you could be accepted for who you are, or loved for who you are, which would you choose?
I remember a sermon Rev. Fred Small delivered when we were in seminary—I believe it was later published in the Unitarian Universalist World Magazine. He pointed out the word love doesn’t appear in the Unitarian Universalist principles. It appears in the sources, but not in the principles. I had never noticed this omission, but when he pointed it out it seemed absolutely glaring. What religion doesn’t in some way explicitly include love among its core principles? What religion doesn’t expect its people to love one another and love the world? Acceptance is critical, but love comes prior to acceptance. We need love in our hearts in order to truly accept those who are different from us. Without loving hearts, acceptance becomes difficult. Rev. Davidson Loehr of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, TX, makes an excellent point when he reminds us that Unitarian Universalists have great discussions about what we say we believe, but we rarely take the time to ask the question, “What’s worth believing?” Friends, it is worth believing in the power of love. It is worth trusting in the power of love. It is worth committing ourselves to love one another. It is worth cultivating loving relationships here within our congregation, because if we can’t do it here, then what makes us think we can do it out in the world? What makes us think our cries for justice, our cries for an end to war, our cries for a world community—what makes us think any of it has any meaning at all if we don’t practice loving one another in our professed spiritual home?
Or think of it this way: acceptance, as important as it is, often perpetuates and even glorifies labels. Love transcends them. We accept people because of labels. I’m a heterosexual pastor. I accept gay and lesbian people because that is how I contribute to the end of homophobia and heterosexism in our society. Don’t hear me wrong. Such acceptance is absolutely critical in the struggle against oppression. But I don’t love gay and lesbian people because they are gay and lesbian. I love them because they are people—with lives, with experiences, with joys and sorrows, with profound stories that may have very little to do with sexual orientation, people who’ve sought out a liberal religious community so that they can grow spiritually, so that they can heal, sing, dance, worship, pray, meditate, breathe. Love sees beyond labels, sees the heart of things, sees the nature of things, just as the child sees great soaring white birds with angel wings.
If this is true—if we accept people because of the labels that adhere to them—then acceptance will never get us to the sacred which lives beyond labels and judgment. If love is that capacity in us that enables us to see beyond labels, beyond the surface, then love, my friends, begins to answer the questions I posed earlier—how do we get to the wood-of-no-names? How do we get to Rumi’s field? How do we get beyond our self-imposed security buffers? Love is the first step to recognizing all the layers, all the rubbish and nonsense, all the false ways of seeing, all the barriers we’ve erected against unbridled experience, all the biases and assumptions that inform and limit our encounter with the world. Love is the first step in transcending all these dead-ends. Love helps us see the whole; helps us commune. Like Alice walking with her arm around the fawn in the wood-of-no-names, love helps us understand how we belong to each other.
Our opening hymn, “I Will Change Your Name,” is a hymn about the power of love to recognize and transcend labels—in particular, the labels adhering to us because we have been, as the hymn says, ‘wounded’ in some way; because we have been cast out in some way; because we live with loneliness; because we live with fear. We might add because we live with mental illness or post-traumatic stress disorder; because we are addicted, unemployed, bereaved, closeted, struggling in a marriage, homeless or struggling in school. We might add because we are a survivor of abuse—sexual abuse, ritual abuse, religious abuse—a survivor of rape, a survivor of neglect. We might add labels such as prisoner, felon, immigrant, refugee, chronically ill, widowed, lost. Such names never tell the full story of a human being, yet it is so difficult to hear the story because these names speak so loudly, drowning out the other facets of a person’s life. Love has the power to change these names. Love looks more closely. Love looks more deeply. Love looks into the heart and discerns the person beyond the label. That seeing—that knowing—has the power to change our name to confidence, joyfulness, overcoming one, faithfulness, friend of God, friend of good, one who seeks my face.
Dear ones, we are capable of profound love. We are capable of seeing each other beyond labels. We are capable of encountering each other in the absence of judgment. We are capable of knowing each other fully, without assumptions, without biases, without pigeonholes. We are capable of speaking our hard truths to each other. We are capable of being direct and honest with each other. We are capable of holding each other accountable for our misdeeds. Love demands all these things and we are capable. There is a wood where no names are spoken. There is a field out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing. There is a sunrise over the Ganges that no words can express. There is a beach where great white birds soar on angel wings. Love is the way there. I’m sure of it.
How shall we live? We shall love one another. We shall love one another. We shall love one another. Amen and Blessed Be.
