Faith Infiltration: First Unitarian Church

Every Sunday, Flimsy and I attend church. Sometimes, we're just trying to see if we'll erupt in flames once we enter the sanctuary. Most of the time, we're there to see what other people believe, to see what draws them to church, and to hear what pastors have to say to their congregations.
This is our 18th church. That's right, we've actually been going to church for over four months. We don't have a specific goal in mind for how many we'd like to visit - we'd figure we would do it until we lost interest.

This week we attended the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis. This place looks like a church. It is a early 1900's church with a light stone face, a sanctuary with modest pews, and all the trappings of a typical Christian church, minus the Christianity.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Unitarianism, let me just tell you that this is one of the churches where we weren't afraid to tell the pastor we were atheists. Unitarians are not united by their dogma or docrine or specific beliefs - rather they encourage people to follow their own spiritual path.  Here, the pastor mentioned "non-theists" in a positive way - this is the first time we've heard something like this during a sermon.

The opening reading was not from a Bible or holy text, but from a by Chet Raymo's book:  Natural Prayers and was good enough that I feel it warrants repetition, in part, here:

The earliest prayer I can remember is "Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep". Head on pillow, tiny palms pressed together, parent sitting close at hand, I sleepily mumbled the words. "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." The prayer was formulaic. It might as well have been a nursery rhyme or a string of made-up words like "abracadabra." It was in fact an incantation, a magical plea to the powers of the universe to guide me through the little sleep of night into the light of another day.

I was raised in a culture of petition, from an early age inculcated with a repertoire of formulaic prayers addressed to God, his angels, or his saints. All the prayers assumed a response: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, healing, forgiveness. Never did it pass my mind that my prayers were not heard. My education was hemmed about with a huge body of stories affirming God's intervention in human affairs. The evidence of efficacy was overwhelming. Or rather, the evidence for the efficacy of prayer appeared overwhelming to a mind predisposed to belief. Later, I trained as a scientist and also studied the history and philosophy of science. I learned something about controlled experiments, the statistical analysis of data, and the appropriate exercise of educated skepticism. Most importantly, I learned how belief can influence judgment even the judgment of scientists - and how scientists seek to minimize the role of belief in the evaluation of evidence.

In the light of my new scientific skepticism, the evidence for the successes of petitionary prayer became a thing of smoke and mirrors, a compilation of mere anecdote.

For many of us, the hole in our lives has been filled by a new story of the creation that does not require a God who interferes in the day-to-day unfolding of events: an evolutionary story that reaches inward to the ceaseless dance of the DNA and outward to the spiraling galaxies. It is a scientific story that places human life and consciousness squarely in a cosmic flow of complexifying energy. This new story is solidly grounded in the empirical method, but open to revision as we learn more.

So far, the majority of religious people have recoiled from the new scientific creation story, instead seeking security and comfort in Scriptures and traditions that derive from an older, more human-centered cosmology. In the older cosmology, an Olympian God mostly listens and responds individually to our prayers. In the new cosmology, God reveals himself in and through his creation, as law and chaos, light and darkness, creator and destroyer. He is, in the words of the Jesuit theologian David Toolan, "the Unnamable One/Ancient of Days of the mystics, of whom we can only speak negatively (not this, not that), a 'wholly other' hidden God of Glory." Or again, in the words of the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis: "We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly. And this deeply felt emotion is indispensable if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic." The God of the new story does not take note of our childish cry: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, healing, forgiveness. Rather, he sweeps us along on the grand wings of his abiding plan and presence.

How are we to pray in such a universe, to such a God? Thomas Merton says, "The option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope by the pure and humble supplication of monastic prayer." He defines monastic prayer as "a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of 'the heart.'" Learning to pray, then, as I understand it, is learning to listen with the mind and heart - making oneself attentive to what the poet Mary Oliver calls "the light at the center of every cell." It is a fearsome task, best suited to solitude and silence. Our prayers are not answered with miraculous gifts, tagged with our names or those of loved ones, but with beauty and terror. For the prayerful listener, the world becomes the sublime scripture, full of stories of structure and chaos, law and chance, complexification and decay, including the individual stories of the human persons in whom the universe becomes conscious of itself.

David Toolan writes: "We are here to make sacraments of nature - signs that give grace, life, hope - whether in raising a family, educating children, running a corporation, governing a city, searching for a synthesis of all physics, collecting garbage. All such activity takes nature's energy and transforms it, tries to pour soul into it, makes poetry of it, a thing of beauty. Liturgy is the big clue: here we regularly take fossil fuels, stone, metals, silicon, water, fire, grain, grape, animal stuffs, air waves, and sound - indeed, as much of space-time as we can sensuously lay our hands on - convert it into a gathering of voices, a ceremony of praise and thanksgiving."

Praise and thanksgiving: these are enduring motives for prayer. All of my life has been a re-learning to pray - a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and the vain repetition "me, Lord, me": instead watching attentively for "the light at the center of every cell," listening for the "dread essence beyond logic." It is a watching and a listening that is informed by science, because reliable knowledge is a prerequisite for love. "Less and less do I see any difference between research and adoration," wrote the great Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin Teil·hard de Char·din   , Pierre 1881-1955.

French priest, paleontologist, and philosopher who maintained that the universe and humankind are evolving toward a perfect state.  near the end of his life. A scientific experiment that rebuts the effectiveness of intercessory prayer could itself be a revelation of God's modus operandi in the world. Let me watch and pray, then, in utter silence, or aloud in a gathering of like-minded souls, raising our voices in praise and thanksgiving. Prayer is for me now being mindful of a story - the story of the unfolding of life and consciousness in a universe of godly dimension - an activity summed up in Saint Augustine's words Noverim te, noverim me, "May I know you, may I know myself."

During the sermon, the pastor told his congregation that he knows God means different things to different people. To him, "God" is poetry or a metaphor - an abstraction that is within each of us but beyond all of us. This is a church that wholly accepts non-theists and atheists, people of whichever gender, and whose ultimnate goal seems to be communion of all people with all beliefs. Yes, we're adding this one to our reccomended list.

*Flimsyman:

It's not hard to see why we like this particular church.  How to describe the deliberate atmosphere in a simple way . . . it is very literally as if no one at this church would ever be derogatory or condesending to someone simply because they disagree with you on a theological issue.

It seems that the Pastor is homosexual, and the church and it's members are quite proud of how inclusive they are to those often excluded from so many other church families.

And that is exactly why The First Unitarian Church makes Ziztur and I, on the whole, proud of the human species.  Even the theistic portions of it.