The Third Principle: Growing Souls

Rev. Joy Atkinson

Presented to the Unitarian

Society of Santa Barbara

August 26, 2007

Santa Barbara, California

Reading Before the Sermon

Symptoms of Spiritual Growth

1. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experience

2. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.

3. A loss of interest in judging other people.

4. A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.

5. A loss of interest in conflict

6. A loss of ability to worry (this is a very serious symptom!).

7. Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.

8. Contented feelings of connectedness with people, places and things, especially with nature.

9. Frequent attacks of smiling.

10.An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than making them happen.

11. As increased susceptibility to the love extended by others, as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.

The Third Principle: Growing Souls

by Rev. Joy Atkinson

Many years ago, when I was minister at the First Unitarian Church in Duluth, Minnesota, I had a dream that I was a minister in a very conservative Lutheran church, and the dream consisted of my preaching a sermon in that church. I knew that within that particular Lutheran fold I was a heretic, so I had to be very careful about what I said. To make things even dicier, I was also aware that some church authorities were standing in the back—listening for heresy. I was sweating with anxiety, trying to be true to what I believed in, while couching it in orthodox language. I woke up still drenched in anxiety. Then with sudden relief I realized that I was a Unitarian Universalist minister, and therefore free to preach about what I truly believe, including any of my own true beliefs or doubts.

One of the best things from my point of view about being Unitarian Universalist is that we do not expect uniformity of belief. In our congregations, a liberal Christian, an agnostic, a pagan, an atheist, one who practices Zen and one who celebrates the Jewish holidays with family can all be sitting in the same pew. Although we Unitarian Universalists do share our seven basic principles with one another, we are not constrained by any creed. Hallelujah and Amen, say I! Not only do we have a variety of beliefs that we celebrate, but we have come from many different religious paths, before we arrived at the doors of a Unitarian Universalist church. This religious diversity enriches us.

I would like to specifically address one of our cherished Unitarian Universalist principles today: the Third Principle in the covenant we share with other Unitarian Universalists, which calls upon us to "affirm and promote ...acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations." Acceptance of one another is certainly one thing we do, regardless of the great variety of individual beliefs we hold. We have taken the words of Frances David, an early leader of Transylvanian Unitarianism, to heart: "You need not believe alike to love alike.” Frankly, I think many of us would be bored if we always found ourselves agreeing with our fellow Unitarian Universalists about matters of belief and worldview. But what do we do with the second part of that Third Principle: encouragement to spiritual growth? How can we encourage one another to spiritual growth if we don't agree on basic beliefs, and what is spiritual growth anyway?

“Spiritual” is a fuzzy, wiggly sort of word. It means different things to different people, but I think that there are nevertheless some common elements to the idea of spirituality, at least common to most peoples' understanding. Spirituality involves an awareness, an awakeness, to the mystery and wonder of existence, and an appreciation for the world and for life in all of its forms, even in its imperfections and disappointments. This awareness and appreciation are felt experiences, beyond thought, although part of what may arouse our sense of wonder and gratitude is our human capacity for thought and the gift of reason. Spirituality involves a receptiveness, an openness to the sense of awe and wonder.

Another element in spirituality is the experience of transcendence beyond oneself. This experience does not require that you believe in or feel connected to a god or gods, or that you hold to any formal belief at all. It involves a sense of being part of something larger than our small selves, a sense that the universe in all its diversity and individuality is one deeply interrelated whole, and we are one with this “interdependent web of all existence,” to use the language of another of our UU principles. This transcendent feeling does not need to be extraordinary, or overwhelming, although it can be. It can also be a fleeting feeling, experienced in the most mundane and ordinary of settings. Even while taking out the garbage, you may chance to experience a sense of connectedness to the whole of existence. Even while driving down the freeway, you may have a momentary feeling of being transported out of yourself and your ordinary life of schedules, deadlines and appointments and into a larger awareness. Christina Baldwin, in her book, Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, says, “spirituality is the sacred center out of which all life comes, including Mondays and Tuesdays and rainy Saturday afternoons in all their mundane and glorious detail...The spiritual journey is the soul's life co-mingling with ordinary life.”

A few years ago, there was a TV commercial that I happened to catch a few times. I think it was an ad for some chic brand of blue jeans or something like that. In part of the ad, an off camera interviewer asks a young woman “what do you look for in a man?” She replies with a kind of sad and exasperated tone and expression, “A soul!” (The way she said it implied that it's hard to find a man with a soul these days.) “A soul!” It's not a response that the fashion and looks-conscious tone of the ad leads you to expect her to say. But the response struck me. Isn't that what we all want, in ourselves and in those we relate to? A soul! We also want soul in some of the things in our lives: soulful music, or works of art, an expression of soul in a poem or novel, even soulful food has a special appeal, like the robust African American cuisine called “soul food.”

But what exactly is soul, and how do we recognize it? Like spirituality, soul is hard to capture in words. By “soul,” I don't mean the traditional religious sense of an entity within us that lives on after our death. As Therapist Thomas Moore defines it in his wonderful book Care of the Soul, “Soul is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.” Despite its illusive quality, I think that most of us know soul, or lack of soul, when we see it. Two people can sing the same song, or play the same piece on a musical instrument, one soulfully and the other flatly, without soul. We can feel the difference. When we find a life partner, we sometimes say that we have found our “soul mate”—someone whose essence of being connects in a special way to our own.

We can also recognize soul in the world of nature, as Mary Oliver does in this poem:

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

Who has it, and who doesn't?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater

who loves her children?

why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?

When we stand rapt in awe in the midst of the natural world, then we are communing soul to soul—our individual soul at one with the soul of nature. Traditional Christianity has tended to deny the idea that animals have souls. (Of course, that traditional idea of soul, as a supernatural entity, is different from the soul I'm speaking about.) Any one of us who has had a special connection to nature—for example through the love and care of a pet, or care of a garden, or by seeking out wildlife on hikes—knows that the world of nature shimmers and shines with soulfulness.

The late A. Powell Davies, a well-known Unitarian minister of the 1930s to the 50s, once said, “Life is just a chance to grow a soul.” For us human beings, I believe, a soul, in the sense in which I am speaking of it, is something that you can cultivate and develop over the course of a lifetime. You can also neglect and stifle your soul, by getting so wrapped up in the superficial world of outward achievement, of doing and getting and spending, that you can't stop to experience life in its fullness, and you neglect to plumb the depths of yourself and the world. In our modern, fast-paced, commercial and technological world, a world disconnected from nature, we can easily become alienated from our souls, to the point where we deny that soul has any reality, and we lose the ability to recognize it. A sense of value, belongingness and meaning can quickly drain out of our lives, if we don't spend some time caring for our souls.

As the body needs food, as the mind needs ideas, as the psyche needs love, so the soul needs its nourishment. The soul cries out for us to pay attention to it—to pause from time to time and become fully present to the world and to ourselves—to become aware of and fully awake to beauty, mystery, or the miracle of love, to listen, really listen to a piece of music, and not let it become just a backdrop to our busyness, to truly see the shimmering meaning of a work of art, and not let it become a mere decoration, to attentively connect with another person, soul to soul, and not just in terms of what the other person wants or can offer you.

Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul speaks of some of the things we can do to nurture our souls. For one thing, we can learn to recognize the soul struggling to express itself—even in symptoms of psychological distress. As Moore says: “Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods of foolishness.” He would include such feelings as depression, envy, anxiety and loneliness as the voice of the soul trying to express itself, to reach for wholeness. He also points to the value of dream work, ritual and spiritual disciplines such as meditation, prayer and journal keeping as means to care for the soul. Just reflecting deeply can nurture the soul. As Moore puts it, “Ruminating is one of the chief delights of the soul,” and he points out that early Christian theologians would ruminate upon a Biblical story, reading it on many levels at once, from the literal to the deeply allegorical. I love this one because I'm a ruminator. In fact, one of my personal spiritual disciplines is to take a favorite poem or part of a poem, or a passage from Scripture, and meditate upon it, turn it over and over in my mind and savor its many levels of meaning.

The lifelong process of faith or spiritual development can nurture the soul. Our religious evolution is the soul’s slow unfolding. “When faith is soulful,” Moore says, “it is always planted in the soil of wonder and questioning.” Wonder and questioning! These qualities are dear to the hearts of Unitarian Universalists. In fact, Moore says that often, when spirituality loses its soul, it turns into fundamentalism. Fundamentalism contents itself with literal, surface meanings; it lacks the depth and subtlety necessary for soulfulness. But lest we get too cocky about our sophisticated, non-fundamentalist selves, Moore points out that we all at times slip into one or another form of fundamentalism—though not necessarily religious fundamentalism. We are fundamentalists when we too quickly grasp for easy answers to life's vexing questions and problems, whether they are psychological or scientific or political or religious answers. The path of soul is not to overcome life's anxieties, uncertainties and failures, but to experience and embrace existence in its entirety, light and darkness, peace or unease, wholeness or brokenness.

The late singer and songwriter, and Unitarian Universalist Malvina Reynolds, in her little book titled Soul Book, says “You've been directed to look inside yourself for the meaning of life, for your soul. You may find nothing there. Because the soul is not inherent. A soul is something you accumulate in the course of living. The soul is not an inner pearl; it is a patina created during functioning in community...the soul is a function of communal being.” Malvina Reynolds is pointing to another very important source of sustenance to the soul—community. If life is a chance for each of us to grow a soul, then life in community with others is a chance to grow souls together. That is ideally what a religious community like this one can do—not save souls but help to grow them. This is our Third Principle—“acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.”

Because the quality I am calling soul is not tied to a particular religious belief, we do not need to believe alike for us to help each other in this way. In fact, because soul arises in part out of the questioning spirit, being in the company of a variety of beliefs and opinions is nurturing to our souls.

Here in this little Unitarian Universalist congregation, you can, and I’m sure you do, encourage each other in soul-growing. You do it when you take time out from your busy lives to come here on Sunday mornings and join others in worship. You do it when you attend or teach adult education classes, where you listen to each other's ideas, beliefs and life stories. You do it when you celebrate together the turning points in each other's lives--births, graduations, weddings, when you grieve together in memorial services and when you acknowledge other losses and difficulties in your individual lives and your life as a community. You do it when you play and laugh together in the various groups and social gatherings you have, and you do it when you join together to act for peace and social justice. Our Characteristically UU focus on social justice is one of the most soulful and sincere aspects of our work together. Sometimes, people outside our fold characterize us entirely by our ethical, social-action-oriented stance. Many years ago, the late Rev. William Sloan Coffin, well-known peace activist, said of us: “Unitarian Universalists are thin on theology, but thick on ethics.” In recent years, I would say that we’ve “thickened up” our theology, but we haven’t lost sight of our desire and ability to “walk our talk” –to carry on our social activism—to try to actualize in the world our ethical stance.

There are certainly many things we can do as individuals to care for and cultivate our souls; we can set aside time to meditate, or pray, or ruminate, listen to music, experience or create works of art, write regularly in a journal, take a walk in the woods. But how joyous it is to have a special religious community in which to listen to, learn from, and encourage one another. Life is a chance to grow a soul, and a congregation like this, at its best, is a “soul hatchery” or a greenhouse, where the warmth of love and the light of acceptance create a climate for the growing of souls. I look forward to this year among you as your interim minister, and to being a part of the wonderful process of growing souls together.

Benediction: “Spiritual love is a position of standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.”

-Christina Baldwin, Life's Companion