Reaching
Beyond, “Beyond”
A Sermon by the Rev. Aaron
McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara, August 8, 2010
It was a long labor. My ex-wife and I had done all the classes and
prepared as thoroughly as we knew how for the birth of our first child. But from the moment the first labor pains
began, everything was a blur, for me at least.
I was, in a word, befuddled!
As we left to go to the hospital, I
stood dumbly, looking around the living room, “Do we have everything”, she
asked? “Yep, I think so.”
It wasn’t until I started the car,
about three blocks away, that I realized I had forgotten the only
non-pregnant-person thing we needed – the carefully pre-packed bag we had
packed specifically for this occasion and which was sitting where it had been
for weeks, right next to the door.
I ran back to get it, opened the
door, and stood there (befuddled once again) at the threshold, utterly unable
to remember what it was I was looking for!
And that’s pretty much how the next
few hours went for me: a dreamlike blur.
I hope I wasn’t as useless as I felt.
But then, everything changed. When the moment of truth finally came and my
son, Alex, was actually, visibly, on his way – something amazing happened. Time slowed down, way down, and I could feel
my whole self, focusing in with crystal clarity. Every color and sound was both distant
somehow yet perfectly clear and beautiful, every line of texture as sharply
defined as a tiny mountain range.
And then there he was, slithering
out all at once like a little pink salamander.
The hospital staff cut the cord and
moved him to a little table to clear his lungs, and then he took his first
breath in this world - and everyone and everything else but him fell away. I stood there looking down at him, my baby,
lying there naked and new in a pool of white hospital light. I reached out and put my hand on his head,
just like this, as if cupping a baby bird.
His head was warm and damp like a
newborn kitten or duckling or rabbit or puppy and yet unlike all those
things. Unlike anything I had ever
touched before and yet so familiar.
He opened his eyes and we looked at
one another, and in the deep darkness of his eyes it seemed I could see where
it was he had come from. In his eyes I
saw stars, and the echoes of things I cannot name.
A powerful wave washed through me
and I knew, not intellectually, not in thoughts or concepts – I knew
experientially, with every fiber of my being, that nothing I would ever do in
this life could possibly touch the hem of creation’s gown the way I touched it
right then. Nothing I would ever do
could be more beautiful, more important or more sacred than the little life
lying right there under my (Father’s) hand.
As I looked deep into those two
little eyes, so full of stars, I went beyond, all at once, the walls and
boundaries that had always defined me.
In that moment I grew two or three sizes and touched something, glimpsed
something, just for a moment that left me forever changed.
It was a transcendent
experience.
Transcendent experiences take us
beyond the beyond: beyond the previous boundaries that have defined us. In the rare moments of transcendence that
sometimes come to us we get a glimpse of what lies beyond: beyond our
conception of who we are or what our lives are for, beyond the ways we usually
see the people and the things around us, beyond the ways we have learned to see
and think about the earth under our feet and the stars in their dusky
firmament.
They can be disorienting and even
frightening, but if we are brave enough not to write them off as a waking dream
or a stray moment of madness – we will discover that we are somehow more than we were before.
To experience transcendence is to
touch the divine, to drink of the sacred cup.
Not to think about the divine,
but to actually experience it, to
feel and embody it – directly. To think
about the inherent worth and dignity of every person is a different thing than
to experience it and to believe in
the interdependent web of existence is an altogether different thing than to feel it, and to know, experientially
that you are part of it.
For me, transcendence is the lived
experience of reaching and of Be-ing,
beyond myself, getting a glimpse of that which lies beyond than the “I” I am
today.
A few nights ago, I was wrestling
with how on Earth to talk about transcendence, which seems by its very nature
to defy description. I shared my
frustration with one of our members, Craig Bennett, who is a neuropsychologist
at the University.
Craig told me about some amazing
research being done on the brains of people in deep states of prayer or
meditation. Normally something in our
brains is always working like a GPS device.
We always know where we are in space, and we perceive the rest of the
world in relationship to ourselves. That’s the spatial part.
We do the same thing with time,
calculating based on our lived experience of passing time: “I am here, in this
pulpit”, “I am me, in this body, at this time”, “You are there, in the pews,
but in another hour you won’t be there anymore.” “I know your names, most of you, and I know
how I feel about you, based on my personal experience of you.”
Everything is rooted in our own
individual experience and perception, in what Jewish theologian, Martin Buber,
calls the “I.”
When scientists like Craig load us
into their scanning machines, they can clearly see these parts of our brains
working. But when they scan the brains
of people who are deep in prayer or meditation, something amazing happens. The brain activity that have to do with “I”:
where and who I am relative to everything around me, these activities literally
“uncouple” as Craig puts it, and, as far as our brains are concerned, we are no
longer a dot on the GPS – we ARE the GPS, simultaneously nowhere and
everywhere; simultaneously ourselves, no one and everyone; everything and
nothing.
As Jalaluddin Rumi put it about a
thousand years before the invention of MRI machines:
When you
are with everyone but me, you’re with no one.
When you
are with no one but me, you are with everyone.
Instead of
being so bound with everyone, be everyone.
When you
become that many, you’re nothing. Empty.[1]
Now I understand why the Dalia Lama
is so interested in neuroscience! It is
a place where science and spirituality connect – and the lived experience of
that connection, whether in prayer, meditation or daily life – is transcendent.
Fortunately for us, we do not have
to be masters of meditation in order to have transcendent experiences. In fact, most of the people I talk to can
identify at least one. Powerful
experiences can often trigger transcendent experiences, like the birth of a
child, a brush with death or a sunset that strikes you just the right way.
Nature itself is often the truest
guide, which is why self-described Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau looked to creation
itself as the most beautiful and true of all sacred texts.
About a dozen years ago, I was
driving down the California coast from Oregon in my not-so-trustworthy old
Volvo. I was listening to a recording of
Beethoven’s 9th symphony that I had never heard before.
I got off of Highway 101 at the
Humboldt Redwoods and started down the Avenue of the Giants, and just as I did,
just as my car passed through the first rippling shadows of the great Redwoods,
the 4th Movement began. This
is where, after a long musical journey, the final movement begins quietly,
carried first by a few strings and then a single baritone until it erupts in
the glorious choral strains of Schiller’s great poem, “Ode to Joy.”
I rolled the windows down and
turned the volume up as my beat-up old car rolled slowly through a cathedral of
trees. The early morning sun slanted
across the road and the shadows of trees that were already old when Columbus
sailed rippled across my face.
And then the music and the trees
and the winding ribbon of road all became one and “I” nothing more than a leaf
on the wind, a fleeting speck of consciousness, like a firefly gliding on a
breeze not of my own making.
Overcome, my eyes full of tears, I
had to pull over. And so I sat for I
know not how long, breathing in wonder, mystery and awe through every pore
until even the music fell away. I turned
off the stereo and listened to the symphony of the trees. Not even Beethoven could go that far.
Later, after I’d set up my tent, I
read the liner notes. Wilhelm
Furtwangler and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra recorded the version I’d been
listening to live in 1951.
The Festival had been suspended
during the War, and now, surrounded by rubble, burned out buildings and the
memories of the dead, the orchestra performed the 9th as it had
never been played before and never will be again, the music leading a seared
and mourning audience deep into the very depths of their suffering before
lifting them again, rising up defiantly, gracefully, humbly, inextinguishably.
The war had ended, the worst war in
our long human history of atrocity, and despite all that had been lost, despite
all the pain and grief; rage and shame – look, the sun still rose, the dust
settled and they were still alive in a world that still, against all odds – had
music in it. What could they do but
throw their prayers to the heavens in a great symphony in the name of all that
was lost.
“Furtwängler,
the conductor, believed to the depth of his soul that music was a force for
moral good, a route out of chaos that would assist the cause of humanity. In
1943, he wrote: "The message Beethoven gave mankind in his works ... seems
to me never to have been more urgent than it is today." He later told the
Chicago Daily Tribune: "It would have been much easier to emigrate, but
there had to be a spiritual center of integrity for all the good and real people
who had to stay behind. I felt that a really great work of music was a stronger
and more essential contradiction of the spirit of Buchenwald and Auschwitz than
words could be."
That is what I heard in the
redwoods that morning so long ago: I heard the sounds of a million
still-beating hearts, the sound of human beings just like you and I playing and
singing with their very souls! I even heard myself in there. And for a time I
became one with them, with the music, with the trees, with everything. I’m sure Craig would have loved to stick my
head in an MRI machine right then, but that would have spoiled the moment.
And so many things do spoil the
moment; so many things get in the way.
Our endless scurrying busyness.
Our culture’s almost pathological impulse to avoid discomfort and risk –
for experiences like these almost always happen on the edges of things, at the
borders and boundaries that both define us and help us feel safe. And our pride can hold us back, for pride is
the fiercest guardian and propagandist of the “I.”
Our personal egos are that part of
us that insist, whether we admit it or not, even to ourselves, that what
matters most is what “I” desire, think, feel, dream about. It is that part of us that believes we are
most special in our apartness.
What transcendent experiences do is
almost the exact opposite of this: in drawing us beyond ourselves, they bring
us into an experiential oneness, a profound sense of unity that makes it very
hard to go on seeing others - and their needs, fears, hopes and dreams - as
fundamentally separate from ourselves and our needs, fears, hopes and dreams.
Our intellects can also get in the
way. After all, experiences like these
often work in ways that bypass the intellect altogether. They are hard to explain, hard to understand and
let’s face it – often sound a little crazy.
They don’t make sense the way we want the world to make sense and so we
tend to rationalize, ignore or dismiss them – and something terribly important
can be lost.
We must make room in our lives, for
spaciousness and stillness. We need to
trust that we will continue to exist in all our uniqueness, even when we are
not asserting it.
Not long ago, one of you told me
that the word “Transformation” makes you uncomfortable because it seems to
imply that you aren’t good enough as you are – and that you need to change,
transform, into a different person in order to finally be worthy. That whenever you hear words like
“transformation” or “transcendence” you feel judged, as if you need to
transcend yourself to reach something somehow higher and finer than who you are
today.
I suspect you are not alone in
feeling this way, my friend. Religions
the world over have been hammering this perspective home for many centuries
now.
I do not accept this
definition. To be transformed, to
experience transcendence doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, or that
you are unfinished, except in the perfectly natural sense that we are all works
in progress, and it doesn’t mean you need to change into someone or something
that you are not.
What it does mean is that there is more
to you, more to everything than we
can ever know. There is always something
more beyond even our conceptions of beyond, and the footprints of our souls are
always bigger than whatever metaphorical shoe we happen to be wearing.
You are beautiful, unique and
wondrous just as you are – and yet – sometimes in life, every now and then - a
window will open and you can catch a glimpse, feel a feathered brush or scent
an elusive whiff of that which lies beyond
the beyond. May you have courage then,
may you find stillness and quiet, and remember to pull your car to the side of
the road and breathe deep.
As the wise poet Rumi once said:
Don’t worry
about saving these songs!
And if one
of the instruments breaks,
it doesn’t
matter.
We have
fallen into the place
where
everything is music.
The
strumming and the flute notes
rise into
the atmosphere,
and even if
the whole world’s harp
should burn
up, there will still be
hidden
instruments playing.
So the
candle flickers and goes out.
We have a
piece of flint, and a spark.
This
singing art is sea foam.
The
graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere
on the ocean floor.
Poems reach
up like spindrift and the edge
of
driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a
slow, powerful root
that we
can’t see.
Stop the
words now.
Open the
window in the center of your chest,
and let the
spirits fly in and out.[2]
Amen.
[1] Jalaluddin Rumi, in The Essential Rumi, Edited and Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) p. 28
[2] Jalaluddin Rumi, “Where Everything Is Music”, in The Essential Rumi, Edited and Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) p. 34