August 25, 2019 | Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
This Sermon is Part 2 of a three-part sermon series entitled Unitarian Universalism and the Crises of Life | Unitarian Universalism has sometimes been accused of failing to provide sufficient comfort & guidance during the crises of life. This sermon series will refute that view, providing both theists and humanists with a (not the!) Unitarian Universalist approach to these common human struggles. We will draw from a new emerging “myth” contributed by process theology and our belief in the “interdependent web” of all life. ((This sermon series is loosely based on A Faith for All Seasons: Liberal Religion and the Crises of Life by UU minister William Murry))
Audio coming soon.
When I step foot in a hospital, the smells of bleach and hand sanitizer always take me back to the summer I spent at Central Maine Medical Center as a hospital chaplain.
To become a credentialed UU minister, one of the many requirements is to do one unit of CPE: Clinical Pastoral Education – usually in the form of intensive hospital chaplaincy. The idea is that regardless of what kind of ministry we want to do, we have to pass through the fire of hospital chaplaincy.
Facing suffering head-on usually burns away all our false notions about what it means to help people.
Everyone else who walks into a patient’s room has something to do – medication to administer, procedures to perform, charts to fill out, medical advice to deliver. The ways they help are concrete and measurable. But a chaplain’s role is simply to be present. That’s one of the things we were to be learning: how to show up with what in ministry we call a “non-anxious presence.”
It’s hard not to have anxiety in the face of suffering – in the face of a stranger – in the face of the burning question: what do we do with this suffering before us?
I sometimes felt jealous of my Christian colleagues who were hospital chaplains alongside me because when they got anxious, they could fall back on well-known rites and rituals. Not sure what to do? Say the Lord’s Prayer with them and leave… Offer communion… Pray the rosary… Offer the sacrament of last rites.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those rituals – they can be beautiful.
But as a non-Christian Unitarian Universalist, they weren’t mine to give – and I was usually ministering to patients or families who didn’t want them.
When I walked into a room, I wasn’t wearing a clergy collar; I wasn’t carrying a rosary or a prayer book or a container of communion wafers.
At first I felt embarrassingly and terrifyingly naked and empty-handed.
Thankfully, CPE also includes deep group reflection with our supervisor and fellow interns. With these conversational partners, I sifted through my experiences with patients in the cancer waiting room and families in the ICU.
I asked hard questions about what suffering means, and how then shall we live? And my other conversational partners were the patients and families themselves…
Because we didn’t share assumptions about what prayers to say or powers to invoke, we explored together alternative stories, symbols, and even rituals that might be meaningful to them in their suffering.
Or, we just sat together and held witness to life in all its brokenness and beauty.
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This sermon series asks how Unitarian Universalism and other religiously liberal beliefs provide meaning and comfort without the black and white certainties that fundamentalist traditions promise. Last week we talked about meaning and purpose; next week we’ll talk about facing death.
This week we consider responding to suffering.
When it comes to suffering, I am opposed to some of the black and white fundamentalist answers out there because I think they do damage. Perhaps you, too, chafe at the idea that natural disasters are brought by God in exchange for a community’s sinfulness. Or that people are poor because they haven’t mastered the tenets of the prosperity gospel. Or that children die painful deaths because God prefers them in heaven with him.
Suffering is not punishment for our sins.
Suffering is not caused by an all powerful God.
Just as parenting wisdom has thankfully – mostly – changed since the time of discipline by rulers and belts, religiously liberal people do not believe an angry, jealous God shows His “love” for us by causing our suffering.
We talked last week about a new myth forming to replace the old myth.
Suffering as punishment comes out of the old myth –– regardless of what religious tradition you were raised in, this theology permeates our culture. [1]
So the tricky thing is – if we haven’t fully integrated ourselves into a new myth, we might find ourselves still responding to our suffering from the old myth.
How many of us, when something bad happens to us, and we’re in our worst place with it…how many of us think: “I don’t deserve this.” Or “I do deserve this.” or “This isn’t fair” or “This is because I wasn’t good enough – I didn’t do x or y thing.”
All those questions come out of the old myth.
But the question of “Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People” just doesn’t even make sense if we’re coming out of the new myth.
Even if you don’t believe in God – in any sense of the concept – even if you believe the events of life and the universe are completely random, as UU minister William Murry says:
We all need to maintain a faith that life is good and worth living despite the existence of suffering.
Now, to review from last week: when I say myth, I mean not something factually untrue, but stories, symbols, and rituals which help us to make sense of our lives and call us to deepest living.
This new myth is inspired by a modern scientific understanding of the universe, and a new wave of philosophy and theology called process theology. Process theology can be embraced by both theists and naturalists and humanists and atheists. So I’ll be trying to provide translation as I go – but as always I invite you to be practiced Unitarian Universalists and work on your own adaptations as you hear God language – or lack of God language – that doesn’t fit you.
So again, here’s a stab at just five points summarizing process theology:
- All things are in process, and the world is imperfect and incomplete.
- God – or the foundation of all reality – is love and is omnipresent – here even in suffering, suffering with us.
- All beings are wound together with God and interconnected, interdependent.
- God – or “the Silent Working of Good” – as our emeritus minister Les Pugh put it – acts in the world like a magnetic pull persuading us… calling us…toward many options of greater good and love and justice.
- We are free to choose as we co-create this ongoing process of evolution and transformation – Even God learns and grows as the universe unfolds.
Now if all this seems too complicated, it brings to mind my colleague Robert Walsh’s statement:
We hold on to hell (consciously or unconsciously)[2] because when we discard it we glimpse through the clearing smoke a God who is too complicated for us.
Or you could say “a world too complicated for us.”
And yet I’m taking the time to talk through this theology because it does matter what we believe.
Most of the time I emphasize that how we act is more important than what we believe. And it’s true: We say, “deeds not creeds.” But what we believe is important – especially, in the case of suffering, if it leads us to think – deep down (even on an unconscious level) that we must have done something wrong to have all this suffering. We need beliefs which help us see that life is good and worth living, even though suffering exists.
So in this new myth, suffering happens for a variety of reasons.
I’ll name the three big ones.
FREEDOM & THE INTERDEPENDENT WEB Some suffering happens because we humans have freedom. Choices we make have ripple effects for good and for bad. In process theology, God is that energy that seeks to pull us toward the good, the loving, the just…but God cannot directly cause good or bad in the world without us.
We and all of life are partners with God – with that Spirit of Life and Love. And so I could do a whole sermon series on a UU concept of sin & evil, but suffice it to say for today that sin does not come out of any inherent badness on our part – but on our freedom as humans, especially humans embedded in systems, to make choices that move us out of concert with that Spirit of Live and Love – or, for atheists, with that ethical vision of goodness and truth.
THE HUMAN CONDITION Some suffering is part of the human condition. The Buddhists say this for sure. Cheryl Strayed says
Suffering doesn’t always mean something’s gone wrong; it just means you’re living a life.
There will always be loved ones lost, hopes dashed, change and grief… Moreover, we live in an interdependent web. Just as the lion must feed on the gazelle, sometimes the flu virus must feed on us.
RANDOM CHANCE Some suffering is from random chance: Those natural disasters not exacerbated by humans… A rock fall… an accident no one could have prevented…These things just happen.
…Which brings us to our conclusion:
What do we do with suffering?
How does this new myth help us live into a different response to suffering?
In our Opening Words, my colleague wondered about the child stung by the bee: ((Victoria Safford “Stung by a Bee” in Walking Toward Morning))
“What will you do now?” she wondered…
“Will you always be scared of bees? Do you still love to look at insects? Would you like to learn more about bees and wasps and hornets, or maybe steer clear…Shall we put up a sign to warn other children?”
How we respond to our suffering determines what kinds of lives we live and what kind of world we create.
What happens when we respond to suffering from this new myth:
What happens to our response when we believe that there is a Spirit of Life and Love and Goodness moving and growing in the world – whether you call it God or not – an energy – for lack of a better word – that is not all powerful but is all Good and is seeking to evolve – hoping we join with it – to create greater good?
If we do call it God, that God pains with us in suffering – is wound and bound up with us and all the world, and so in our suffering also weeps with us, mourns with us, laments with us… and then gets up to keep working in partnership with all of life to make the world better.
Even if you believe that the universe is not good or bad, but just IS – our response is still what matters.
We can help change the conditions that cause some of the world’s suffering. And for the suffering that cannot be removed, our love can join with that deep Love Beyond Belief to provide witness and comfort.
Central to this new myth is the idea that we are in this together – so we cannot process suffering alone.
So with the suffering people in those hospital rooms – and with my fellow hospital chaplains:
we cradled suffering together,
we witnessed grief together,
we searched for meaning together,
we told stories of pain and hope together,
we make our way forward together.
May it be so for us and for you.
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
[1] See A Faith for All Seasons: Liberal Religion and the Crises of Life by William R. Murry
[2] Parenthetical is my addition
FURTHER READING:
Process Theology: A Basic Introduction – C. Robert Mesle
On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process by Catherine Keller
Monica A. Coleman. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology
A Faith for All Seasons: Liberal Religion and The Crises of Life by William R. Murry
Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us by Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Ann Parker
Water in the Wastelands: The Sacrament of Shared Suffering by William Blaine-Wallace
“Suffering on Trial: Three liberal theologians take on the problem of suffering” UUWorld