Transcendence – Unitarian Universalists Have It Too!

September 18, 1983
Lakeland

September, 1983
Port Charlotte

October, 1986
Ormond Beach

Amid the wide variety of particular beliefs among Unitarian Universalists, one question asked again and again is about the reality of God, whose “everlasting arms” will carry the troubled and despairing. Beyond all the confusions and dilemmas of this world, is there a transcendent God, who will one day answer the questions, heal the wounds, assuage the grief? Depending on whom you are talking with, the response will be “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.”

The subject today is transcendence. I will attempt definition, outline a few varieties of responses to the concept, and state why I believe that the transcendent is vital to our lives and hopes.

“Transcendent” and related words occupy more than half a page in the unabridged dictionary. Meanings include a belief that goes beyond the limits of experience, an exceeding of reality as we seem to perceive it. It would include certain feelings, intuitions, or subjective convictions which cannot be demonstrated to another. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, reasoned that there was knowledge and meaning which we cannot perceive by observing objects, knowledge that prior to any transient conditions of human reason, observation, or testing. Thus he and millions have postulated that God is. [CJW note: Even though there is no unquestioned evidence available to our senses or reason.]

Among Unitarian Universalists, according to questionnaires, a majority, perhaps 70%, indicate that they believe in God. At the same time, about the same percentage describe themselves a Humanist. This seeming inconsistency is resolved by the indication that of those who use and do not object to the word “God,” only 3% believe that God is personal, or a person. The majority among us who use the word “God” do not believe in God as the shepherd who leads us through the valley of the shadow of death or who upholds us with everlasting arms. God is, to them, a Creative Force, the primal energy behind the universe. Or, in some cases, God is thought in social terms, the power that leads us on to make ideals real or the unconditional love which some would hold to be the highest value. There are many other variations.

Such varieties of God ideas have in common the perception that the universe is impersonal. The volcanic explosion, the hurricane, the flood, the lightning bolt will sweep away human victims. Those lucky enough to escape never quite satisfy our minds or morals that God, a personal Deity, spared them while extinguishing others who may have been better or worse persons than the survivors.

This difficulty some of us have with faith or a transcendent Divine Being who cares for persons is well illustrated by a parable told by the British philosopher, Anthony Flew (See Kaufman, p. 470). “Once upon a time, two explorers came on a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener.’ So they pitch a tent and watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barb-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds (for they remember H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man could be smelled and touched even though he could not be seen). But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movement of wires suggests an invisible climber. The bloodhounds do not bark. Yet still the believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden he loves.’ At last, the sceptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or no gardener at all?’”

Of course, if one believes devoutly in a personal God, this parable will not shake that faith. Many believers would respond in terms of Elijah, who did not find God in the storm or wind, but in the still, small voice. In our day, this search for God has taken some along the path of inner peace and truth through mental disciplines, meditation, yoga, or obedience to some guru or other. I have no quarrel with other faith statements or spiritual search along roads I do not choose to travel. In our Unitarian Universalist diversity, anyone’s loyalty to belief statements may be open to dialogue and inquiry, but not hospitable to disparagement and scorn.

But for those of us who tend to be with the skeptical explorer, is there a transcendent? In the early days of TV, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a popular program. A witty, captivating speaker, one of his delightful remarks on one occasion was “an atheist is one who has no invisible means of support.” One could include not only atheists, but also agnostics and humanists who hold no traditional views of God, and ask, have we no invisible means of support?

There may be a few who accept the Epicurean compromise, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” But to me, this is an impoverished way to return the gift of life.

Leo Tolstoy, without doubt one of the greatest writers of the last 100 years, was an exceedingly complex man, continuously torn between conflicting emotions and despair about the meaning of life. Before he arrived at his religious beliefs, which were heresy to the Orthodox Church, he contemplated suicide many times. At that self-tortured period in his life he was fond of recalling an Oriental fable: “A man pursued by a tiger climbs down into a well. A the bottom of the well he sees the gaping jaws of a dragon. Unable to go either up or down, the poor man clings to a bush growing between the loosened stones. As his strength begins to fail, he spies two mice, one white, one black, gnawing at the branch he is hanging from. A few seconds more and he will fall. Knowing himself about to die, the man makes a supreme effort and licks two drops of honey from the leaves.” For Tolstoy, the two drops of honey represent his love for his family and his love of literature – the two compensations for the meaninglessness of life in that period of personal search.

Are the two drops of honey – love of one’s family and love of one’s vocation – a sufficient substitute for the transcendent? Undoubtedly for many, although there are more drops of honey – TV, friends, travel, aesthetics, sports, beer. There is nothing inherently evil in such drops of honey between birth and death, but they are not substitutes for the transcendent.

I suggest to you that for the skeptic explorer, as I believe I am, the transcendent is perceived in the unrealized dreams of humankind.

In the beginning I said that the transcendent is beyond or over the limits of experience. The human family has nurtured dreams of a world free and fair. But this has never been real – never been our experience.

There is the dream of peace. In the entire history of the human venture, there has not been peace. War is the strong current in the tide of human events. From ancient times until now, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Europeans, Asians, Americans – wherever you may look in previous times or now, there has never been a time when, world over, one could sit in peace under one’s fig tree with no one to make him or her afraid. Peace is a transcendent value. Yet in all the bloody centuries there have been those who have been faithful to the unachieved value of peace. Peace is a transcendent value.

There is the ideal of justice. The ancient Hebrew prophet proclaimed “let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Yet never has justice prevailed everywhere and in all times. To believe in universal justice is a transcendent hope.

Do you know the lines of Robinson Jeffers?

The Beaks of Eagles

“Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men’s hopes and thoughts
and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged,
Their powers and their follies have become fantastic,
The unstable animal has never changed so rapidly. The motor
and the plane and the great war have gone over him,
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry
and is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the
throats of these living mountains.
It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace
and anguish, not to go down the dinosaur’s way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for
him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact
in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.”

Hope is transcendent over despair. As the poet reminds us, “It is good for man to try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish, not to go down the dinosaur’s way.” Hope is transcendent. Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live can endure almost any how.”

Many of you know the story of Victor Frankl, the psychologist who was a prisoner at Auschwitz during World War II. In his years in the concentration camp, he saw that those [who] gave up the struggle and resigned themselves to death did die. The survivors won over the unspeakable conditions and treatment. Those who gave up felt that the future was only pain and punishment. They died. Others, against all their Auschwitz experience, believed that the Nazis would be defeated, the prisoners delivered, if they had the courage to endure. It was the transcendence of hope that saved them.

The transcendence is not the “deification of man,” a charge commonly made against humanists. We humans are not gods. We are created beings. Creativity seems continuous in what we call our universe, and destruction seems the inevitable companion of creativity. A few days ago, astronomers announced that there seems to be indications that another solar system is forming in a far-off galaxy. The creating force or forces in this universe remain a mystery. Each discovery and modification does not solve the riddle, [it] only deepens the mystery. The ultimate origins and destiny will not be made plain.

Those who have faith in God as a loving, caring parent and those of us who find no warrant that the basic mystery of the universe has us for its basic purpose and caring, can find common ground in the transcendence of hope. The hope one day that which we have never experienced will come about – universal peace, universal caring, universal justice – an I-Thou of all humanity. This common core of transcendent hope can be found in all the world’s religions. It is the common ground with all the structures of different creeds, faiths, institutions built on it. It is the common ground and transcendent hope. The priority is human responsibility, not any alleged deification of man.

Albert Einstein once said, “I am a deeply religious unbeliever.” In the sense I have been describing, a person can be the skeptical explorer of Flew’s parable and be deeply religious, if a transcendent hope for the human venture is that for which we labor and that which we cherish.