This Delicate, Tender Experience Named “Spirituality”

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

December 3, 2006

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

It was a sunny day with clear blue skies overhead.  Tom, my friend, and I planned on taking a walk along the Palisades on the Hudson River.  We parked in the pull-out at the trail’s head.  Noticing a clump of people with tripods, telescopes, and cameras at the edge of the parking lot, we wandered over to see what they were looking at.  Looking up I saw majestic birds soaring on the thermals.  I loved as their black wing feathers turned grey and iridescent as they wheeled before the sun.  I loved the fine tuning movements they made to adjust to the unseen forces that lifted them.  I loved the arcs and circles that they cut in the air.  How I wish I could soar like those exquisite creatures!  I was enthused with the beauty, the apparent freedom, the wildness.

In my excitement, I approached one of the people with the binoculars.  “What are those wonderful birds?” I gushed.  “Nothing but turkey vultures.  They’re common around here,” he responded dismissively.  (Turns out he was a member of the local Audubon Club and was watching for rarer hawks.)

Then one in the group got excited.  He pointed to a speck, high in the sky – a speck that I could barely make out.  He trained his scope on it, as all the others turned their telescopes and binoculars toward the speck.  “Ah, a raptor(I-forget-the-name).”  They experienced a thrill, I suppose, as I kept turning my eyes back to the birds I could admire nearby.

How did I react to the stranger’s dismissing my enthusiasm?  I had just had a delicate, tender moment when I had felt the awe and wonder of these marvelous creatures, adapted to thermals, driven by the sun – a moment of exquisite beauty with the play of light on feather against a blue sky.  I could have allowed my moment of spirituality to wither under the bored judgment of the birder – “Nothing but turkey vultures.  They’re common around here.”  I’m certainly self-conscious enough and wanting of others’ approval enough that I could have dismissed my spiritual moment with a smirk, “How could I be so stupid to think that turkey vultures are special.”  But what would I have lost?

What do we lose when we dismiss those delicate, tender moments in our lives when we feel something transcendent?

I’ve titled this sermon, “that delicate, tender experience named ‘spirituality.’”  I chose those words because I want to emphasize that spirituality is an experience.  It’s not a belief or a thought, but something that happens in you – to you.  Experience first; then we try to make sense of our experience with our all-too-human words.

As spoken of in last Sunday’s service, it’s an experience that can happen in nature, or in reflecting on our interconnectedness with the natural world.  It can happen when gazing into a whale’s eye that is gazing into yours.  There’s a thrill of connectedness, of shared relationship with this immense creature that lives its life apart in a world you know little of.  But for the seconds of “contact,” there is relationship, connection, a kind of oneness.  It’s a wonderful, delicate, tender experience.

Do you hold that moment – “my friend the whale”?  Do you let it slip away?  Do you dismiss it?  What nonsense to think of myself “communing with a whale”?  All it “thinks” about is food, and mating.  Any connection I “felt” is only my imagination.

When we contemplate that we are of “star stuff” - that we are made of material that was birthed billions of years ago in the explosions of stars - tears can come to our eyes and the hairs on the back of necks shiver with excitement.  Again, if I had to put words to it, I would say it’s that deep feeling of interconnectedness – that we share, across time and space, in the very make up of our being with everything else in the universe.  It’s an extraordinary delicate and tender experience.

Do we hold the moment?  Do we dismiss it?  “Those feelings you’re getting so enthused about are just your projections, infantile yearnings for a reunion with your mother – wish fulfillments for a comfortable, protected life remembered deep in your sub consciousness.  Grow up.  Face it: We live in a cold, amoral universe that doesn’t give a hoot about our individual fate!”

What leads one to savor the contemplation; another to dismiss it?

A couple of Sundays ago, I spoke of remembering those people in our lives who loved us simply for being.  They had no agenda for us, nothing for us to do, or accomplish, but just a deep and complete appreciation for who we were.  Every child, I said, needs such a champion to thrive.  Someone who thinks “you are real!”  Every one of us blossoms in the regard of such a person.  That, too, is a delicate and tender experience that I would name “spiritual.”  In such a person’s presence, we experience what I would name the “spiritual.”  Moreover, when we cultivate in ourselves our growing capacity to be fully present to another – to appreciate their “realness” – we are growing our spirituality.

So far I’ve been speaking of delicate and tender experiences that agnostics and atheists can share, which many would name “spiritual.”  I would now like to suggest that people who use the concept “God” are also putting human words to an experience that they have had – often a delicate and tender experience.

One of these experiences is that of being loved.  It’s the experience that there is a love that holds us that is more expansive than the particular matrix of loving relationships that we are in at any moment in our lives.  Of course, this love is directly experienced in those lovers, friends and acquaintances who care about us.  But, divine love goes beyond all the particular individuals in our lives.  They are the immediate, obvious instruments of this love, but because this love is greater than those individuals, we trust that even when our loved ones die, this greater love will express itself through others unknown to us now.  Indeed this love is present even when all others fail us – indeed when we fail ourselves in, say, addiction.  Moreover, we experience that this love wants the best for us.  It is this love that urges us to stretch ourselves, to heal our hurts and bitterness, to reach out in compassion to those who are hurting around us.  It is this love, which never lets us go, even when we choose to do things that hurt ourselves and others.  It is the still, inner voice that assures us, “You screwed up royally, but I love you anyway; now I will be with you as you clean up the mess.”  It’s the love that when we look back on our lives, we bow in wonder at the “chance” encounters that were life-saving for our spirit.  “How did that happen?” we marvel.  We have that delicate, tender experience of receiving a gift that we did not earn – something, or someone that “happened” to cross our path, that offered us healing and a more fulfilling direction for our lives.  When we try to describe it, we may use words like, “I was directed…something conspired to change my life…God presented me another way…an angel visited me.”

There’s a wonderful poem by Philip Booth about teaching his daughter to float that captures this delicate and tender experience of pervasive love.  Here’s an adaptation from his poem, First Lessons:

Lie back, daughter

Let your head tilt back in the cup of my hand.

Gently, and I will hold you.

You will dive and swim soon enough

On your long thrash to your island in the sea,

Remember, when fear cramps your heart,

what I told you when I held you and let go.

Lie up to the light year stars

a deadman’s float is face down.

Lie up, and the sea will hold you.

What a delicate, tender moment!  What a delicious metaphor for that experience of being supported by God, like water lifting a relaxed body, when we can relax into God’s grace!  To use another metaphor, God, like the thermals lifting eagle’s wings, lifts our spirits when we allow ourselves to soar.

There’s always the cynic’s version: “Lay back, daughter, and the sharks will get you!  Lie back, daughter, and the rogue wave will sink you!  You’ll be spitting up salt water soon enough.”  You know the variations.  “How can I fly like an eagle when I’m flying with a bunch of turkeys?”

But what is lost when we dismiss these delicate, tender experiences?

Going back to the story that I started with.  Isn’t it interesting that both the Audubon bird watcher and I saw the turkey vultures in the sky over the Palisades, but we had two radically different experiences:  I tasted a spiritual experience; he experienced “just another day?”  How different our experiences were!  Thank God for “beginner’s mind.”  If none of the hawks came that he was expecting, he might describe his day as “disappointing – nothing to write home about;” whereas my spirit had already been filled by watching the incredible flight of what he named “turkey vultures,” which to me were “wind-dancers.”  Even if he saw the hawk he awaited would it have stirred his spirit, or simply become a check mark to put down on his lifetime bird list?  I hope for the sake of his soul that his spirit would have been stirred.

Here’s the “good news.”  We can encourage our own spirit to welcome those delicate and tender experiences named “spirituality.”  That’s the promise behind every kind of spiritual practice, from meditation, to drumming, to yoga, to coloring mandalas, to prayer, to walking the labyrinth…and more.  Each of these is a practice that encourages us to open our hearts and minds to those experiences that give us a deep sense of interconnectedness with other life forms, be they wild creatures, other human beings, and/or the divine.  Naturally you have to choose to commit time to a practice.  If your life is “full-up” with busyness and getting by, you may or may not stumble across these experiences.  If you choose to set apart a piece of time each day to welcome them, and to practice relaxing and opening, you are more likely to find them happening more often.  By the way I find it telling that people often associate spiritual experience with nature.  I think that’s because when they are in nature, they are usually more relaxed and open to the unexpected.  But that’s a condition you can foster in your work and everyday world as well.  That’s the point of spiritual practice: to integrate openness to tender and delicate experiences into your everyday experiences.

I want to add a caveat in passing.  Of course there’s a place for reason and critical consciousness in spirituality, for we humans can distort everything, even spirituality, for our own purposes.  But that’s a sermon for another Sunday.  What I would say is this: the fruits of authentic spirituality are well known.  They are the virtues of generosity of spirit, compassion, humility, reconciliation, courage, hopefulness, love, peaceableness, justice-seeking – you know them.  I would suggest that spiritual experience that has merit, and is not simply self-serving, will little by little transform you into a more caring person.

If it does not, I would urge you to consider the familiar words of St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthian Church, words which have been adapted in hymn 34:

“Though I may speak with bravest fire, and have the gift to all inspire, and have not love my words are vain, as sounding brass, and hopeless gain.  Though I may give all I possess, and striving so my love profess, but not be given by love within, the profit soon turns strangely thin.  Come, Spirit, come, our hearts control, our spirits long to be made whole.  Let inward love guide every deed; by this we worship, and are freed.”

I pray for us today that we might treasure these delicate and tender experiences of our lives, that we might foster our welcome to more of them through spiritual practice; that we might invite others to share these precious experiences with us by creating the safety and trust that encourage each other to speak of what is most tender and sacred in our heart.  May this Fellowship radiate with the warmth such sharing will elicit.  May it be so.