Elijah goes to the mountain top, perhaps the same mountain where Moses beheld God Face to Face. And a still small voice comes to him and asks “what are you doing here Elijah.” (1)

William Ellery Channing, transcendentalist and Unitarian Universalist Minister, and, you probably didn't know, founder of the Unitarian Sunday School Society, says that the purpose of religious education is growing souls. We have heard our fundamentalist neighbors talk about “saving souls” and are perhaps used to thinking of a soul in that “Family Circus” kind of way, a white outline drawing of our physical body that ascends into the clouds after our death. We know in that paradigm that a soul needs to be saved from an eternity of hellfire and damnation. Some in this congregation have told me that the word soul makes them uncomfortable. Bill suggests that maybe it is an old fashioned word, that evokes an anachronistic Theology. It is true that Channing used this word over a hundred years ago. But when a thinker, a Unitarian like Channing talks about souls, he must mean something different. I am hoping that today we can reclaim the word “soul” from the literal religionists, and that we can use this word to help explain what draws us to come together in community on a sunny Sunday morning.

I hope that some of you remember the celebration of my installation to the ministry of this church 3 years ago. It was a celebration of our covenant, like the one you will celebrate with our new parish minister Amy Zucker this January. It is traditional on such an occasion to offer a charge both to the new minister and to the congregation. My mentor, Geoff Rimositis, Associate Minister of Religions Education at the San Jose UU church, gave me this compass as he began his charge to me. In explaining metaphorically how to use the compass, he warned me that “We often confuse magnetic north with true north. Magnetic north is the direction the compass points because of the geology of the continent and is often several degrees off of true north, which points to the north pole.” This has been a powerful image for me. There are many powerful almost magnetic pulls on each of us as we move through the world. Sports fan, parent, businessperson, consumer, artist, activist. Each of these personas we occupy has its own ethics, values, paradigms for living. I stand in the toy department watching my son examine a new plastic truck. My activist self wonders if the men and women who made that toy were paid a fair wage, and worries about the effect of so much plastic on the environment. My family accountant self thinks the family economy can handle the $5 blow to the budget, but wonders why I'm out shopping again so soon after the last trip. My mother self weighs the visible joy he is taking in this new truck with long term consequences of deep entanglement in consumer culture, and too much immediate gratification of his desires. Each of these magnetic forces is very strong. Each guides me in a slightly different direction. How do I know what is true north in my own life?

I was driving home from a board meeting the other night. It was a good and productive meeting. I had felt that communication was good, and was optimistic about the upcoming year with this team. About half way home, I started to feel unsettled, and couldn't figure out why. Hadn't everything gone well? Then I thought of Geoff’s compass. Geoff had said “The ministry has a powerful magnetic pull on you. You will fall in love with these people and this congregation, but they are not your family. The ministry is not your true north. Your family that tends the fires of hearth and home is where your greatest lob and support will be found. If you can give the best of yourself to your family, you can give the best of yourself to your ministry.” Aha! I thought. I feel ungrounded because I have been steering myself by my ministry, and now that I am alone in my little blue car, I need to find my true north. I thought of my family, waiting for me at home. That felt better. But alone in my car even that didn't’ make me feel completely balanced and whole. Then I realized that my Self was the magnetic pull I needed to find. I needed to locate the center of my own being and follow that pull more strongly than all the others. Some call this center the self. They choose this word because it signifies for them the deepest, most important part of the individual. This can be used in opposition to the term “Ego” or “persona” the roles and habits we collect which form the facade we present to the world. Some people use the word self with a capitol “S.” The translation I use of the Bhagavad-Gita thinks of the Self this way. They mean to remind us that in Hindu theology the individual self is at its most essential level one with everything that is.

I use the word soul, not because I want to debate the biology or metaphysics of life and death.

Dr. Jerome Berryman, at this year’s Sofia Fahs lecture at the General Assembly, was speaking about a history of children. He said of the Neanderthal children “They are creatures who are born to die. No one can make the journey in- out- inbetween for them. They need meaning to make their lives worth living, and the meaning must be of their own creation since they must live by it. Otherwise it feels like it's pasted on: a vicarious living. There is no difference between us and children” he said” when it comes to the existential issues of life and death.” The point Dr. Berryman was trying to make, was that our existential limits, our existential issues of every person of every age and time are the same. These are the issues a religious community exists to serve.

I want to offer some characteristics of the Soul, at the risk of objectifying this all ready concretized concept, but to create a common lexicon for us for this morning. Here are some qualities of the soul: rare like a role or a persona, but creates continuity from birth to death Each soul has inherent worth and dignity. In the words of Margaret Fuller “All souls are equal before God”

Integrates all the aspects of you
The soul loves honesty
The soul loves beauty
The soul loves fairness and compassion in relationships, dare I say Justice
The soul can experience pain
The soul withers when neglected.

Nothing spooky or metaphysical yet, right? It is the most ordinary of things. Perhaps the Soul is nothing more than an organizing concept- a cognitive or neurological process of integrating and synthesizing the tremendous quantity of information absorbed by the mind and body each day. A physiological compass if you will. But I believe it is essentially human to crave such synthesis and integration.

I believe it is the function of the religious institution to help one remember the level of living that touches the soul. We come to remember who we really are, to re-align our lives from that true center. We let go of our responsibility to the stockholders, to our boss, to cultural images of the roles we inhabit. For a moment we remember the integrity, dignity, and beauty of our own particular self. When we watch our favorite football team crushed in a humiliating 17-0 defeat, we live in a paradigm where some people are winners and some are losers. The soul remembers the value of simply being. We gather in religious community to remember to look for the souls of the people around us instead of being high jacked by their age, race, or displays of social status. We use a different language sometimes to help us locate this place. We use poetry and symbol. We listen to music as much as words. Here stars and a rustling breeze are critically important. Here elder and teen, householder and child all have something to teach and something to learn.

James Michael Lee, a professor of education at the University of Alabama says ‘there are nine molar formal contents which go to make up religion as religion is taught in the religion lesson. These molar formal contents are present in one way or another in every religion lesson. The molar formal contents are product content, process content, cognitive content, affective content, verbal content, nonverbal content, conscious content, unconscious content, and lifestyle content. He says that ‘religion is the holistic operational integration of all the molar substantive contents of which it is composed.”(2)

But the soul is fundamentally relational.

Gordon Allport is among those who hold that “ideal human maturation involves growth from egoism to altruism” (3). Theorists from Ericson to Maslow believed that the end of human development or actualization if a move from the selfish to the selfless. A move from the ego to the Self which is fundamentally one among all beings. William Ellery Channing said that “the purpose of education is to call forth the powers of the soul – to think, feel, imagine, create and act for good in the world.”(4)

You are a song, a wished-for song.
Go through the ear to the center
Where the sky is,
Where wind,
Where silent knowing.
Put seeds and cover them.
Blades will sprout where you do
Your work.
-Rumi

Footnotes

1. Kings 19:13 The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version
2. James Michael Lee "Lifework Spirituality and the Religious Educator p. 32, 33
3. Gordon Allport Becoming p. 30.
4. Cited in Rebecca Parker "Meticulous Mercy is the Work of Travelers" Starr King President¹s Lecture General Assembly June 2001.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Darcey Laine