February 6, 2005

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

The Meaning of Words

One of the most intense experiences in the preparation of Unitarian Universalist ministers comes near the end of seminary. All candidates for our ministry are required to complete at least one unit of clinical pastoral education, or CPE as it is commonly known.

Clinical Pastoral Education brings theological students and ministers of all faiths (pastors, priests, rabbis, imams and others) into supervised encounter with persons in crisis. Out of an intense involvement with persons in need, and the feedback from peers and teachers, students process a new awareness of themselves as persons and of the needs of those to whom they minister.

I completed two units of CPE at Georgetown University hospital. During my time there I worked primarily in the Lombardi Cancer Center, the cardiac wing, the emergency room and a major medical wing.

I chose Georgetown because of its reputation as a teaching hospital and because I found that the Jesuit approach to health care which is dedicated to tending to the whole person—body and spirit—was in sympathy with my own Unitarian Universalist ideas pertaining to the inherent worth and dignity of all persons.

My CPE class consisted of two men and two women—a catholic priest, an Episcopal theological student from the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, a Lutheran graduate student from Princeton Theological Seminary, and myself—the first, and perhaps last, UU to have participated in the Georgetown CPE program.

In addition to visiting with patients, the three other chaplains and I would meet weekly with our supervisor to discuss our progress. These discussions were based on written verbatim of our contacts with patients and staff.

In reality, our verbatims served as vehicles to draw us into conversation about our deepest feelings and responses to the people we visited and with one another. We quickly learned how to push each other into very intense discussions about our families of origin, our ways of reacting in stressful situations and our theologies.

There is nothing like spending an hour or two in a small room with a group of peers who are challenging your every statement and forcing you to admit to all of your prejudices and bigotries and superficial thinking to help you to come to the awareness that indeed, you are the emperor with no clothes.

One discussion in particular has stayed with me since I left Georgetown. One afternoon we got on the subject of life after death. My colleagues eagerly offered their deeply held beliefs about heaven, the soul and the glorious reunion with family, friends and God.

Heaven they agreed was a very real place where individuals would be re-united in some form with all those who have gone before. For some this would be a physical event that would take their bodies to a new level of existence. For others, while they were unsure what form they would take, they were certain they would know eternal life.

We debated the nature of the soul, the existence of sin, the devil and eternal damnation. It was interesting that there was less conviction over the existence of hell than agreement over the existence of heaven. We tied ourselves up in endless theological knots.

As the conversation went on I found myself growing angrier and angrier as my colleagues discussed their various notions of eternal life and the underlying theologies that assured them that what they were saying was absolutely true.

When asked for proof they offered up the importance of faith in God and God’s plan for each of us. Finally, I could stand it no longer, and blurted out in total disbelief, “How can you all believe this stuff?” This question was met with some uncomfortable laughter and the conversation turned quickly to a new topic.

However, in the days and weeks that followed, each of my colleagues in their own way tried to answer this question. They tried to give me insight from scripture, they tried prayer, they questioned me to examine my own beliefs about life and death and where they came from and how I arrived at certain conclusions.

But working in a hospital with people who are dying and people who have lost control of their quality of life is a powerful experience. It brought me in touch with the very basic elements of human existence and our innate drive to hold on to our humanity and our dignity regardless of our life situation.

In time I found that some of my discomfort around their religious language was changing. I became more comfortable with words like prayer, soul, spirituality and the Divine. I became more comfortable with the meaning of words that earlier in my life I had dismissed as irrelevant and meaningless. I arrived at a new place in my understanding of how people can believe what I had called “all that stuff”.

Through my own life experiences, I came to see how important religion is to those who gain strength and understanding from its teachings. Although my worldview is informed by the teachings of the world’s religions, in particular the teachings of our Judeo-Christian traditions, I am skeptical of their dogmas and creeds. However, my hospital experience taught me that I couldn’t be so arrogant as to deny the true believer his or her idea of faith.

You see, I have come to believe that our views of religion and religious practices are the result of our experiences with living in the world. How we experience the world directs our religious impulses.

If our experience has been negative, if we have viewed the world as a threatening, uncertain or unpredictable; if we have been hurt by others or if we are unsure of our way, we may look for a religious system that brings order to the chaos, peace in the violence, and provides a sense of well-being, of safety and being loved.

These beliefs may separate us from the world as we choose to segregate ourselves with other like-minded individuals but the reward is to live in a structured, predictable, and understandable universe.

If we are uncomfortable with the randomness of the cosmos, in our understanding of God, we can create structure, accountability and certainty in the future. We can believe that the world was created in seven days and that it took more than random chance for our eyes to be able to see and for brains to be able to signal our thumb and fingers to pick up a pin.

On the other hand, if we view the world as open, accessible and predictable we may be willing to be more self-sufficient in the ways we interact with others, we may rely more on our own recourses, our own intellect, our own experiences, our own understanding of science and the cosmos to answer questions about why we exist, why we must die, and where is our place in the universe.

These are the folks who are comfortable knowing that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past—approximately 13 billion years ago--, for reasons unknown, there came a time known to scientists as T=O and this universe began. Bill Bryson in his book *A Short History of Nearly Everything, quotes Edward Tryon of Columbia University as saying “In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.”

Forrest Church has written, “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”

He continues, “Knowing we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit upon our lives, it also gives a special intensity and poignancy to the time we are given to live and love. The fact that death is inevitable gives meaning to our love, for the more we love the more we risk loosing.

Love’s power comes in part from the courage required to give ourselves to that which is not ours to keep: our spouses, children, parents, dear and cherished friends, even life itself. It also comes from the faith required to sustain that courage, the faith that life, however limited and mysterious, contains within its margins, often at their very edges, a meaning that is redemptive.”

I like this definition of religion because it leaves lots of wiggle room and because I love the phrase the “dual reality of being alive and having to die.” We are each of us on this planet for a finite time. In this time we ask ourselves those unanswerable questions such as what is the meaning of my life? Why must I die? Why was I born into this family and not the Jones’ next door? Why did my child die? How do my eyes function to allow me to see a beautiful sunset, and how does my brain communicate with my hand when I want to pick up a pencil?

The beauty of Church’s definition is that it allows us to examine religion from both a scientific and a spiritual viewpoint. I know I exist simply because my parents had sex on a night conducive to my conception and here I am and all is well.

The question is was this just dumb luck or a part of some larger plan? I think my parents might have viewed it as some kind of cosmic joke since they already had four children ages 15 to 6; but I am comfortable with the idea that I am the result of a series of specific, if random, random events. Or to borrow from an earlier quote, I believe that I am just one of those things that happens from time to time!

I know that I can expect to live only as long as my body is capable of producing viable cells that permit my organs to function in support of life, and I am comfortable with this reality. However, having had two very close near death experiences, I occasionally allow myself to wonder if I’m here thanks to some kind of supernatural intervention. Here’s the dilemma:

When I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure seven years ago, my doctors put me on diuretics to get rid of the excess fluid built up in my body due to the reduced efficiency of my circulatory system. I lost 25 pounds in five days! Immediately my doctors put me on a number of cardiac meds: There was digoxin to strengthen my heart beat; ACE inhibitors and Beta blockers to stabilize my heart rate and to reduce the heart enlargement that often accompanies heart failure; and blood thinners to reduce the risk of stroke. There were anti-arrhythmic meds to help regulate the heart’s own electrical system.

These chemicals all did their jobs well, and today I am happy, healthy and thankful to whomever it was that coined the phrase better living through chemistry. Truly, I was the poster child for better living through chemistry. The drugs corrected the condition end of conversation. Or was it?

Some months after I was well on the road to a total recovery, I was talking one afternoon with my administrative assistant, a devote Southern Baptist, about how well I was and how the doctors had treated my illness aggressively and how lucky I was to have had a disease that received lots of research money and wasn’t modern medicine a wonderful thing when she suddenly said, looking me straight in the eye, “But Henry, don’t you realize how many people were praying for you?”

So which is it: science or religion? Chemistry or God’s intervention in my life?

I guess for me it’s not an either or question. I believe that it was science that took care of chemical imbalances in my body; but I also believe that many people were genuinely focused on my recovery and I am not willing to deny the power of love.

When I think of spiritual matters, I am thinking of those great human questions that I raised earlier. Does an understanding of physics in any way lessen the beauty of Saturn’s rings; does the mathematics of harmonics diminish Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Does the understanding of how humans acquire language lessen our love of poetry and prose?

This morning instead of the bowl I usually ring, I used two Tibetan cymbals that are tuned slightly differently so that they send out two tones—the ying and the yang of our existence: the competing, yet complementary ideas of science and religion; of spiritualism and humanism; our response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.

And what of the discussion of life after death that began this whole mess? Whenever the time comes that I die I am comfortable with the idea that my soul, what I call my essence—my genes, my personality, my world view—will live on for generations and generations. To this end, I do believe in the immortality of my soul.

For me this is the answer to the question, is there life after death? Indeed there is. Is it measurable? I’m not sure, but I know that when I look at my daughters, I see there reflected their grandmother, and great-grandmother and so it goes. Just moments before he died, The 19th century Congregational minister Henry Ward Beecher reportedly said, “Now comes the mystery.” Indeed, I suppose death may be the ultimate human mystery.

“…Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart,” wrote the German poet Rilke, “Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart, and try to relish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search for the answers which could not be given to you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live these questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one day live right into the answers.”

The meaning of words will always be up for debate. Remember the classic Clinton parsing of the word “is”. What does “is” mean? What does the word “spiritual” mean or the word “God” or the word “humanist?” or the word “soul”? No doubt there are as many understandings of these words as there people sitting here this morning. In fact on a continuum from negative one thousand to positive one thousand there will be someone at every point along the line because our understanding of the meaning of these words is colored by our emotions, our feelings, and our worldviews.

And this is the abiding strength of our Unitarian Universalist faith. As we are neither creedal nor dogmatic in our approach to understanding the world, we can draw on those lessons from both science and religion that inspire us to attain our best selves. Let us not quibble over definitions; but let us look for common experiences and from our common experiences let us build loving and lasting relationships. I think it is far more important that we keep talking about what we mean when we use these rich and evocative words, rather than to declare mere words acceptable or not. Or as Humpty Dumpty said: "When I make a word do a lot of work like that "I always pay it extra."

Let us chose our words to heal and to make connections; never to create separations or hurt others. Indeed, the mystery is not how we die, but how we are to live.

Amen