Gnosis, Mystery and Unitarian Universalism

by
Jeva Singh-Anand

© 2001

April 1 is perhaps the only safe day for the likes of me, those ornery temperaments who have cultivated a profound infatuation with Paganism and a weird animal called the Hermetic Qabala, to discuss gnosis and mystery in any church. It is my modest hope that the following musings I present will fall upon at least somewhat receptive ears.

This church does not revere any particular deity or pantheon. A creed cannot be found here. Instead, at the core of the Unitarian Universalist religion lies a set of principles. This is a church which favors the posing of questions over accepting sets of prefabricated answers.

Human nature, being what is, tends to favor answers over questions. The pursuit of questions requires a considerable amount of work. Although the rewards of this approach are generally considered to be much more valuable than those of the alternative, accepting on blind faith the cookbook remedies for salvation posited by others, there are plenty of individuals who would rather "starve on a penny than work for a dime ", as Washington Irving put it so aptly. The saddest, most ridiculous, and most dangerous results of such spiritual and intellectual laziness are religious fundamentalism and atheistic fundamentalism.

"Demon est deus inversus ," wrote the French Magician Eliphas Levi. "The Devil is God inverted."

Each is the flipside of the other, and both are part of the same thing. Thus, religious and atheistic fundamentalism are merely different aspects of the same destructive doctrine: fundamentalism. I do not mean religion per se, nor do I mean atheism per se.

I mean the religious fundamentalism which is destroying priceless and irreplaceable art treasures in Taliban. The fundamentalism that is stunting the intellects of our youngsters here in the United States by insisting that Creation "Science" deserves the same place in school curricula as the theory of evolution. The religious fundamentalism that endangers their very lives by insisting that only "abstinence" be taught in sex education classes, not information that could save lives. I mean the loudmouth atheism propagated on television programs such as "The Atheist Viewpoint", a low budget production in which three angry persons lambast on a weekly basis every news clipping which uses the word "God" without the suffix "dammit". The atheistic fundamentalism that, for a while, made it illegal for students to say grace in American school cafeterias or to exhale frantic appeals for divine intervention when they realized that finals week had arrived and the school had indeed not been lofted away by Dorothy's tornado. There are two kinds of stupidity, a wise man wrote: to believe everything one is told and to doubt everything one is told.

Both religion and atheism have made assertions I have found useful in my own spiritual pursuits. Religion asserts that there is an omnipotent intelligence which has created the universe, and considering the complexity of such a task, does a reasonably good job of managing it. While God has not kept human beings from committing all sorts of cruelties toward one another, She has been kind enough to let truly cosmic disasters, such as supernovas, occur in very far away places. Atheists, on the other hand, are quick to point out that religion does a poor job of proving God's existence and that it has failed dismally in communicating the Will of God to the general public. As proof for the latter assertion, atheists point out how quickly religious zealots resort to plunder and bloodshed whenever they run out of arguments, attaching to their pernicious deeds euphemisms such as, Crusade, Jihad, Endloesung. Atheists run into problems when they claim that God does not exist, simply because no religion has managed to prove Her existence. The explorer John Speke never was able to prove Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile, and it wasn't until twelve years after his death that his theory was proven.

But arguing methods of proof may not be as useful as one might think. If we are to assume that God is an infinite being, then She remains by necessity outside the spectrum of that which can be perceived by human beings, whose perception is -- need it even be stated? -- limited.

Yet it is too easy dismiss the religious experiences of many people from many different faiths who have had them. More difficult even to dismiss the confessions of those many individuals who feel the presence of the divine in their lives on a daily basis. Such experiences differ widely, even among followers of the same religion. The 19th century philosopher William James correctly pointed out that a religious experience that cannot be verified by standardized means of measurement cannot be generalized for the public at large. This qualification, however, cannot properly be used as a blanket dismissal of the religious experience per se. If God is a being too vast to be grasped by human understanding, then any one person's encounter with the divine is in fact quite likely to be vastly different from that of another person.

The personal knowledge of God is called gnosis. It is "not a trusting in, or a submission" to a particular doctrine, as Harold Bloom explains in Omens of Millennium. "Rather it is a mutual knowing, and a simultaneous being known, of and by God."

Attaining gnosis requires a Herculean struggle. It is not a simple process. And here is where the Christian fundamentalists err when they claim that a 'personal relationship with God' can be attained in three of four easy steps. Indeed, religion is merely a step in this long and arduous journey.

Those who consider religion the be-all and end-all of their spiritual progress will never attain what they seek. Any religious doctrine is merely a map, not the territory itself.

In the Book of Law, revealed to the 20th century mystic and magician Aleister Crowley, it is written, "I am ... the blasphemy against the gods of men."

Religion for its own sake is idolatry, driving the worshipper away from God, rather than bringing him closer to Her. Religious doctrine is by necessity a condensed and imperfect account of the religious experience of others, and of conclusions drawn which hold validity in a very limited scope -- limited by geographic location, local custom, and the conditions dictated by historical circumstance. This is why new religions come into being all the time. This is why old religions die when they have outlived their usefulness, and it is why old religions which have stood the test of time have been revised and reformed. It is why we no longer practice ritualized cannibalism and blood sacrifice, as did our esteemed ancestors in the stone age.

Antoine de-Saint Exupery, who was deeply steeped in Roman Catholicism, arrived at a similar conclusion, phrasing it much more gently than Aleister Crowley's angry muse, "An equality that was founded upon God involved neither contradiction nor disorder. Demagogy enters at the moment, when for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into a principle of identity."

While religion is a useful pedagogical tool to raise in the general public an awareness of a reality beyond that which can be established by consensus. The King James Bible has not saved a single soul, nor has the Quran, the Torah, the Gardnerian Book of Shadows, nor any other sacred book. No priest, no saint, no prophet has been able to accomplish this task. That business is the sole domain of God.

The task of religion is to make us aware that the voice that has wakened our souls from their deep slumber belongs to the intelligence which has formed us, to make us aware of the long journey we must undertake. And it ends there. Those of us who answer this call leave behind the domain of religion and enter into a vastly different area of spirituality: mystery. While faith is a passive approach which requires of the individual only to receive the teachings of others, mystery is an active approach, an approach that demands a great deal of effort from the individual. The believer thinks herself to be in more or less direct connection with the Will of God. It is very different with her who walks the path of mystery. I once stated, "God does indeed exist, but she surely likes to lead one down the garden path."

The alternative to this garden path is he well-paved road of faith. While the believer has little trouble submitting his own Will to the Will of God, he who walks the path of mystery, often finds that his own ego at odds with the with the divine will. We will shout at God, fight bitterly with Her -- only to find himself put in his place over and over again. We can find many such mystics in the Old Testament. Theirs are the more memorable stories: Jonah, who was such an ornery character that God had to put him in that humid, dark time-out room inside the whale's belly; Jacob who dislocated his hip wrestling with angels; Samson, the Biblical archetype of the troubled teen, who wrestled lions in the desert and whose hair-trigger temper often landed him in serious trouble. In Greek mythology we have Heracles, Dionisius, and Odysseus. Those who find themselves on this path, rarely embark on it of their own choosing.

This is the path of Joseph Campbell's Hero with the Thousand Faces, a path, Campbell threatened, all of us have to walk at one point in our lives. The well-publicized formula of separation - initiation - return is incomplete, and one does not have to read much farther that The Hero with a Thousand Faces to discover that. To briefly recount, in step one of Campbell's formula, the hero is called forth to embark upon a quest. In step two, he survives all sorts of dangers, in the course of which he is changed in very profound ways and at the end of which he receives a sacred reward. In step three, the hero returns to his community triumphantly. But in The Hero's final chapter, Campbell admits that the hero usually doesn't live happily ever after. The hero's experiences in the world outside the realm of consensus experience often change him to the point at which those who have never ventured abroad find his very existence a threat to their daily routine, and frequently the community that has welcomed him with pomp and circumstance on the day of his return becomes in time more deadly than the monster infested road from Troezen to Athens. Thus Heracles is killed by a jealous wife, Siegfried is murdered by order of his best friend, and Jesus finds himself nailed to the cross. Having ventured outside the realm of consensus reality, the person who has experienced mystery, who has been touched by the divine fire, can never again share in it. Having traveled outside Plato's cave, she knows the shadows on the wall are just that. But how can she convince those who have never known otherwise that this is so?

But death and apotheosis, the ascension to the divine, make poor copy; they don't sell well to the masses. That is why many of Campbell's mass marketers do not speak of it too loudly. Mystery is not chicken soup for the soul; it is broccoli for the soul.

As far as religions go, Unitarian Universalists, are in a unique position. Guided by principles, rather than being compelled by dogma, we are challenged to freely pursue our search for truth and meaning. Drawing from many sources, the ancient mystery schools, the words and deeds of many prophetic men and women, the world's religions, and from many other sources, Gods and pantheons become helpful tools in our spiritual progress . But we are wary of permitting them to become absolute realities; the divine, God, remains outside the realm of consensus comprehension. And we are wary of the idolatries of the mind and spirit, the dangers of fundamentalism, religious or atheistic.

But living the Principles of Unitarian Universalism is neither easy nor convenient. The Unitarian Universalist Association is a Nutty Professor's laboratory of religious experience, where green smoke billows thickly, where strange noises are heard, where lab accidents devastate our most cherished prejudices. Our questing nature has made us a congregation of mystics, each of us traveling the garden path God has set before us. Each garden path leading us to different and equally valid conclusions. The conclusion that God does not exist is very likely one of many valid conclusions, but that is the topic of another sermon. If God has any sense at all, I am certain She prefers an ethical atheist over a militant zealot.