Awake to Wonder©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
December 2, 2018

One August night, I found myself stretched out on my back on a splintery wooden dock on the shore of a New Hampshire pond, gazing up at the sky. It was during the Perseids meteor showers, and my family and I were rewarded by quick glimpses of shooting stars suddenly flaring across the dark sky. It was one of the clearest nights I have ever experienced, and the stars were so thick and bright that they were reflected perfectly in the black, still water of the pond. Only the dark ring of hills around the water separated the vision of stars above us and stars below us. It was magical.

Two days later, the weather changed, as it always does when I go camping. I set out in my kayak into silent, thick fog, with barely a shadow of tree trunks on the shore to navigate with. I paddled slowly, often just drifting. A loon emerged from the fog just ahead of me, silent, ghost-like. Then it called. Again, magical, and yet, magic of a very different kind.

The world offers us so much to see, so much wonder, if we have the time and opportunity to witness. This week the Internet has been flooded with fascinating photos from Mars. Just think about that for a moment – we are seeing the surface of Mars! And even though it’s 28 years old, photos from the Hubble Space Telescope continue to amaze us and fill us with awe and wonder.

This month, our theme is Mystery. It’s such a timely and thought-provoking topic, as the light in the sky lessens, and trees and plants that were vibrant and colorful just weeks ago now appear lifeless. Where has life and light gone? Will it return? It’s a time to remember miracle stories: of one day’s worth of sanctified oil that burned for eight days. Stories of God coming to live among us in the most vulnerable and humble way: as a newborn baby born in a stable, lowly and poor. We ask, are the stories true? And, why? There is much to ponder, much to wonder about.

We Unitarian Universalists are encouraged to wonder, to explore mystery. We encourage everyone to seek their own answers. And we offer guideposts along the way, places to turn for knowledge. We make much of our seven principles, but we also are a living tradition that draws from six sources, our guideposts. And our very first source, mentioned before any religious traditions, is this:

“Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

What this tells us is that all people, across any religious belief system or cultural tradition, has access to wonder, to awe. No matter who we are or what we believe, we have access to those moments that make us sometimes feel very small, such as when looking at the night sky, or can make us feel, fleetingly, for a second, at one with everything around us. A moment when the universe seems to open somehow, and life changes for us.

“Religion,” wrote author D. H. Lawrence, “is about awakening, opening our eyes, and looking out with new wonder upon the creation, becoming not someone other than ourselves, but more fully ourselves.”
Our religious ancestors, the Transcendentalists, knew this: knew the importance of awakening, of allowing themselves to be awestruck, to experience Mystery. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau could both be quite ecstatic in describing the mystical experiences they might have while in nature. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson recorded the moments of wonder that for him occurred most often in nature, where, as he put it,
“We return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity.. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
As Emerson saw it, in those moments we no longer see ourselves as separate from God and all of existence, but within the whole of existence. We are part of it, and it is part of us; transcendent and imminent.
Henry David Thoreau wrote of a mystical experience of his own, following an attempt to summit Mount Katahdin in Maine in the summer of 1846. He described hiking through a desolate area called the “Burnt Lands”, writing, “I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there…This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night…there was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. We walked over it with a certain awe…Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” (H.D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods, p. 78-79, 1848.)
As I said a moment ago, they could get a little ecstatic out there in the woods. But we hear Emerson’s and Thoreau’s authentic experiences of awe all these years later. “I see all!” “Who are we? What are we?” “I am nothing…I am part and parcel of God.”
There have always been two strains of thought running through Unitarianism. In its earliest years, in the 1820’s and 1830’s, Unitarianism was highly analytical; extremely academic. American religious scholars were exposed to German theologians, and adopted a practice of attempting to analyze religious belief. In particular, the Harvard-educated Unitarian leaders spent a great deal of effort attempting to prove whether or not the Biblical miracles were true. Finally, led by Emerson, those who became known as the Transcendentalists rebelled against what Emerson called “corpse-cold Unitarianism”. Mostly through his study of Eastern religions, Emerson came to understand mysticism, and those moments of unity that can come to us when we pause, and allow ourselves to awaken to wonder.
We see the analytical strain of Unitarianism today – it’s alive and well. We tend to want answers. We enshrine in our principles the affirmation of the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We try hard to explain everything, to understand and analyze everything. We want and expect the truth. Is there room for Mystery? Do we welcome wonder, and awe?

And if we are searching for truth everywhere, for the facts, do we allow ourselves to be awestruck, to notice what life is offering to us if we only stop to pay attention?

Those early Unitarians believed that they could create a religion by researching the facts to arrive at Truth. Emerson, Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists believed the opposite: that you start with yourself, your own experiences and observations to lead you to religious belief. And so the question becomes, do you have to believe in God in order to be religious? Or let me ask the question this way: what comes first – our sense of wonder and awe, our religious impulses and reactions, or what we are taught to believe about the Holy? (This segment draws from the Affekt Theologie of Friedrich Schleiermacher, as interpreted by the contemporary work of the Reverend Dr. Thandeka.)

Our moments of awakening, our glimpses of holiness, of divine energy, of Oneness, can and do come to anyone and everyone, across belief systems, cultures, and education, before labels or facts, or religious beliefs. Consider babies and small children: they have feelings and reactions – they feel fear, they startle, they feel happy without having names for their emotions. They learn about their emotions later. So is it with our moments of awe or wonder. We don’t control them. We don’t have them because we are staunch Catholics, or UU’s, or Muslims. No, we have them because we are human. Emerson put it this way, in his essay, “The Oversoul”: “It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud…” We have moments of awakening, of Mystery, and our human response is to turn to religion for insights.

We explore religious belief to try to understand better our feelings and our experiences of that inbreaking of the divine. Religion, our own search for truth and meaning, becomes our response, not our starting point. Remember the quote from D.H. Lawrence we heard earlier: “Religion is about awakening, opening our eyes, and looking out with new wonder upon the creation, becoming not someone other than ourselves, but more fully ourselves.” Whether we go on to believe in God, or Buddha-Mind, or Brahman, or simply in the wonder and glory of nature, is purely up to each one of us.

Let’s return for a moment to that first source of our living tradition: direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder. It’s easy to miss those first words: ‘direct experience.’ We expect people to have their own experiences of the inbreaking of the holy, of grace, of those moments – whatever we choose to name them – when we feel the unity of all creation, or sense the mysterious divine energy in us and around us. We honor not just the famous mystics: the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Rumi. There is room for us and our own experiences in our tradition as well. Thanks to the Transcendentalists, our tradition, Unitarian Universalism, grants us the authority to trust our own eyes and ears, our own feelings. Emerson put it this way: “I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” (The Oversoul)

Stars in the water. Shooting stars. Loons emerging from fog. What do you see? What do you know, deep within yourselves? My wish for you is that you have these experiences, know them for what they are, and trust yourselves and your feelings. Know that your own experience of mystery and wonder is valid, and part of your human life. May you know awe and wonder, in this season of mystery, and always.

Blessed Be.
Amen.