Room for Mystery

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Jan. 4, 2009

The word “epiphany” has several meanings, none of which we explore very often in Unitarian Universalist circles.  This Tuesday, for instance, is a holiday on the Christian calendar that for many of us is an afterthought, if indeed we’ve ever thought about it at all.  Many Christians around the world know January 6^th as Epiphany, the feast day celebrating the twelfth day of Christmas and the legendary visit of the Magi from the East to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.  Many other events have been attached to the holiday down through the centuries, including all of the childhood events of Jesus as reported in the Gospels, through his baptism in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, up to what some consider his first miracle, the changing of the water into wine at a wedding in Cana.  This Tuesday, though, in most Western churches, Epiphany focuses on those Wise Men, the travelers who represent the non-Jewish population in the myths surrounding the birth of Jesus.

For myself, growing up marginally Protestant in the buckle of the Bible Belt, Epiphany was pretty mysterious - I never heard much about it in my neighborhood.  Apparently it’s a bigger deal for many Catholics, but my two Catholic friends – [I might explain that in the America of my youth, I knew both the Catholic families in my neighborhood as well as the one Jewish family; the African American families who lived near me when I was young were still kept segregated by the apartheid system of Jim Crow.]  Anyway, my two Catholic friends didn’t talk about religion much, other than trying to defend themselves when my Baptist buddies taunted them for bowing down to the Pope instead of the American flag or for using omygod real wine in Communion.

It’s a miracle we’ve come as far as we have from such divided beginnings.  We’re not quite there yet, of course, but we’ve come a long way.

The word epiphany has come to have other meanings than just the name of the religious feast day and holiday.  Epiphany can now mean a more general manifestation of the divine –an appearance of God or theophany, like, for instance, Jesus appearing to people as Emmanuel (God with us), or like Krishna appearing to Arjuna as the Supreme Lord Brahma in the 11^th chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita. 

Obviously, other religions have their versions of epiphany, too.  In Hinduism, Darshan or Darsana is the name given to visions of the divine.  One might receive Darsana in a temple while worshipping a god or by simply being near a great teacher or guru.  You might have a vision of some divine object or you may sense the presence of a holy entity or person.  You might also call this experience one of hierophany rather than theophany:  hierophany being a manifestation of the sacred rather than the appearance of a god, “the sacred” for us non-theists a term not necessarily having to do with “God” but rather with something holy and transcendent on its own.

In Zen Buddhism, the experience of kensho comes with the realization of the falsity of our human sense of separateness, a recognition of the non-duality of subject and object, of the true integration of self and universe;  in other words, a recognition of the unity of existence:  we are all one in this interconnected web of life.  In kensho, one’s inner nature and pure mind becomes an illuminated emptiness wherein the nature of mind is revealed and Buddhahood becomes immanent.

Of course, the sacred may be revealed outside of traditional religious pathways as well, especially here in our spiritual-but-not-religious present-day American culture.  Many of us here would claim to perceive the divine or to sense something sacred in everyday processes and events, in the beauty of nature, or in the eyes of a child.  It was the 20^th century philosopher Emmanuel Levi’nas who declared that epiphany, the manifestation of the divine, was best found in another’s face – a Humanist teaching if ever there was one.

Yet another meaning of the word epiphany, as listed in Webster’s Dictionary, is “the sudden realization or comprehension of the larger essence or meaning of something.”  This realization may have religious or spiritual dimensions but not necessarily.  I remember distinctly having an epiphany about arithmetic when I was in 1^st grade:  as my teacher, Mrs. Clark, was explaining to our class how to take one number away from another, I remember my utter euphoria when I realized that subtraction was only the flipside of addition – what you can add in, you can take away!  Yeah, I know:  not the mystical stuff of myths and legends, but a sudden comprehension of a larger essence nonetheless.  Thankfully, I still have this sort of epiphany from time to time, since there’s so much more I need to learn. 

Consider for a moment what comes before an epiphany of this sort.  I think you would call it “mystery.”  It was a mystery to me what subtraction was all about:  before my epiphany, that teacher was talking in a language I couldn’t understand about something I had no clue about.  And then all of a sudden, I had a flash of recognition and a comprehension beyond what I’d ever imagined – the world of numbers made sense in a whole new way. 

I’m sure there are still many things in mathematics and arithmetic that I don’t quite get, and some things I will never get.  I know there must be questions no one has ever answered, and maybe never will.  Some mysteries do find answers eventually; some apparently remain mysteries forever.

 

My friend Art Wirth was, as you heard in his credo that we from read earlier this morning, intensely interested in miracle and mystery.  Art was a bombardier on a B-24 in World War II and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross on missions where his unit suffered numerous casualties.  Back home after the war, he had a long career in education, becoming a distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at Washington University in Saint Louis and authoring many books and articles about teaching and learning and the educational process.

I initially became acquainted with Art because we were members of the same church and I saw him as a strong advocate for social justice both locally and internationally.  But I really got to know him in a group called “In Search Of…,” a bunch of spiritual seekers who explored various aspects of different religious traditions together for several years.  During that time, I learned of Art’s struggle to break away from his fundamentalist upbringing, and most especially the consequent acculturation in hetero-centrism that caused severe problems for him and his family when a child of his came out as a homosexual way back in the 1970’s.  Art was not proud of his initial reactions to the situation, but he found a measure of peace as he continued to face difficult emotions and stayed in relationship with all his kids. 

All these things – sexual orientation, family dynamics, hetero-centrism - had been a mystery to Art when he began his journey, but through hard work and steadfastness he came to some understanding, some acceptance, and beyond.  That period of his life helped Art learn to focus on his love of people as a complement to his love of justice.  He became involved in helping many other parents to weather similar journeys in their families, teaching them how to deal with the mysteries of sexual orientations different than their own and teaching them how to deal with the ugly reactions of society to the children they so dearly loved.  In the early 80’s, Art and his wife Marian were instrumental in founding the St. Louis chapter of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).  In 1990, they co-wrote with another friend a book entitled “Beyond Acceptance:  Parents of Lesbians and Gays Talk About Their Experiences.”  As a result of their work, Art and Marian were named Humanists of the Year in 1997 by the Ethical Society in Saint Louis.  [A recent presenter in our 9:30 hour has also received that award:  Hedy Epstein was Humanist of the Year in 1988 for her work as activist for peace and justice.]  Art was a mixture of earthy experience, scholarly knowledge, and spiritual fire.  His life was not easy - in the years I knew him, he was constantly racked with physical pain and he tried many techniques to try to alleviate his suffering, once even submitting to a laying-on-of-hands ceremony of his own devising before undergoing a dangerous surgery on his spinal column.  We Humanists are not known as big laying-on-of-hands people, and it took a surprising amount of courage for Art to ask us to try such a mysterious thing.  Because we loved him, we laid our hands on him; you could say it was a miracle that he made it through the surgery and thrived.  Later, he attributed some of his well-being to that ritual expression of our love for him.

I heard Art deliver this credo of his at a worship service.  In it, he expresses his wonder at the natural world and at his own integral place in it.  Not much of a mystic, and certainly not a true believer in traditional religion, he simply relates his experience of everyday processes and events and reminds us of how miraculous those common things would appear to us if we were to see them in another context, say, on Mars, inviting us to see them - like he does - as the miracles they are, here in our daily lives.  And this Professor of Education, a man intimately involved all his life in teaching and learning, leaves room for mystery:  he admits to not having all the answers.  He knows he’ll never get them. 

I love how he begins.  Some of his first words:  “When I come to from my morning meditation.”  When I come to, when I wake up, when I reach a different plane of consciousness, when things become clearer to me, after an epiphany.  This is someone who recognizes that he is more awake now than he has been at times in the past, and someone we recognize as more aware of his surroundings than the average person.  He is seeing the same things everyone else sees – birds flying, runners running, ducks swimming, the sun shimmering in the splashes of a Forest Park fountain.  To this man, though, these common occurrences are not there simply to be blithely ignored or absently observed from afar.  This is his world, he is a part of it, he is at one with the rest of the universe and is both a product of and a participant in the miracles and mysteries that unfold around him.

The other people there on the bike path with Art were surrounded by the same world as he was – same birds flying, same runners running, same ducks swimming, the same sun shimmering.  But they just saw birds and runners and ducks, they took it all for granted, they saw nothing special, nothing miraculous, nothing mysterious about any of it.  They asked no questions, or if they did, they thought they knew all the answers.  What was it, then, that gave him access to a new attitude toward the commonplace, a new way of seeing the everyday, a new relationship to the world around him?

I harken back to those legendary Wise Men that the myths say came to visit the infant Jesus.  What was it they saw in the everyday?  What was it that gave them access to a new attitude toward the commonplace, a new way of seeing the everyday, a new relationship to the world around them?  After all, other people lived under the same firmament, under a night sky that was there for all to see.  But other people passed under the heavens and gave little-to-no thought to what was up there.  They just saw stars, they took it all for granted, they saw nothing special, nothing miraculous, nothing mysterious about any of it.  They asked no questions, or if they did, they thought they knew all the answers.

And yet the Wise Ones gazed upward at what everybody else had seen and saw there something that others did not, would not, could not see.  What they saw there was enough to make them load up the camels and head out across the desert.  What they saw there invited them on a journey far, far from home.  What they saw there started them on a search for something new that in time would change the world.

As the new year unfolds, may we nurture within ourselves a new attitude toward the commonplace and a new way of seeing the everyday as we build new relationships with the world around us. 

May we open ourselves to epiphanies from wherever they come. 

May we always leave room for mystery.

So may it be.