Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Relation Is All: The Rest Just Sound and Smoke”
Rev. Rod Debs
February 13, 2005
Nine days ago, Ossie Davis died. Ossie Davis was a distinguished actor and advocate for civil and human rights. He was described as “a citizen of the country, first, and of the world” (Mario Cuomo). In a eulogy for Malcolm X, Ossie Davis projected some of himself when he said: “(Malcolm) talked to all of us (saying): Get up off your knees. Come out of your hiding place. If your hiding place is gold, come out from behind it. If your hiding place is prestige, come out from behind it. If your hiding place is poverty, if you live in the slum, if you live in the gutters, stand up, look at the sun, you too are a (hu)man.” The challenge Ossie Davis heard was to come out of our hiding places of self-absorption and into the relationships of “brotherhood.” He said: “The choice is to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.”
The reality is, we are together. We cannot choose not to be together. The question is: how we shall be together, whether we shall choose to live as brothers, or choose to perish as fools.
On Valentine’s Day tomorrow, many people will celebrate the fleeting blush of romantic love felt by and between individuals. But along with Ossie Davis, I want to talk about the greater reality of our wider relationships. What is reality? What is the moment-to-moment phenomena of our existence?
Philosophers ask the question: What is real? It’s common sense to think that material things you see are real! Rocks and plants, tables and chairs are real—things we can see and touch. But what about electricity and gravity, heat and light that you can’t touch like a rock? Scientists say, what we see and touch is a lot different when you get it under an electron microscope. When you look at the subatomic level, everything is made of interpenetrating energy fields: energy relations.
A lot of folks would say, God is real. God is ultimate reality. In Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen asks Faust whether he believes in God, and Faust replies: “Who may name God, and who declare: I believe in God. Who can feel and dare to say: I do not believe in God!”
Then Goethe’s Faust goes from talking about God to talking about reality, as if they are one and the same. Faust continues: “Does the sky not arch above us up there? Does the earth not lie firm down here? And do not with kind glance the eternal stars rise? Do I not look at you eye to eye, and does not everything press upon your head and heart and weave in eternal mystery invisible and visible around you? Fill your heart, as big as it is, from that, and when you are completely blissful in the feeling, then call it what you like: Call it happiness! Heart! Love! God! I have no name for it! Feeling is all; the name but sound and smoke, enshrouding heaven’s glow.” (lines 3426-3465)
Goethe’s Faust questions how anyone can name God. Then he turns to speaking of reality, coming down to this conclusion: “Feeling is all, the name but sound and smoke.” For years I have loved this quote. “Feeling is all, the name but sound and smoke.” Sensory experience, inner and outer feeling seems to be the test of what we imagine to be so. But I have adapted Goethe’s saying a bit. Relation is all, the rest but sound and smoke. The private, immediate world of feelings is secondary to the relational source. Relation is all; feeling and sensation, their evidence; the names and thoughts of them, but sound and smoke.
Try an experiment with me for a moment, if you will. Close your eyes and imagine that you can no longer see the world. If we could not see the world, it would be easier to perceive that life is made up of relationships, relations with things and people and with our selves. Relations are the source of sensory feelings we come to name as things, even as God.
To say that God is the ultimate reality doesn’t help me much because, by definition, no human mind can grasp infinite God. What humans think of God is religious imagination. The book of Daniel paints God as a wooly-haired King on a golden throne in heaven. Michelangelo painted God into our imaginations as a white-haired white man floating on high. In recent years we have come to imagine God to be a super-mind without a body, like in the Star Trek episodes about Q, that obnoxious know-it-all with all power and super arrogance. All, religious imagination. What is the divine ultimate reality?
Within the Christian Bible, the Gospel of John says “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Forget Casper the Friendly Ghost spirit floating around. What do we imagine Spirit to be? `Spirit’ is our word for the breath of life, inspiration, invigorating feelings, energizing intuitions, that sometimes subtle, invisible source that wakes us up. Ghosts, inspirations, a super-mind, a God-King, energy fields or simply the things we can touch? What is real? We have a rich imagination.
The Christian tradition also says “God is love” (I John 4) as well as spirit. That’s much easier for me to understand. I know a little about what love is. Yet it’s a challenge to imagine that love is more real than rocks and what we feel in our hands. Love is invisible. Hard to touch.
In the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, the new toy rabbit asks, “How does a toy become real?” The old skin horse replies, “It takes a very long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Maybe a long relationship makes you real.
This is my Teddy-bear from the 1950′s. His name is Cinnamon. I have touched and hugged and tossed and tumbled and kissed and played with my Teddy-bear until its eyes are gone and some of its fur is worn smooth. It’s rather shabby. Cinnamon feels real to me.
But even more real than my Teddy-bear are my mother and father. Mostly because my Teddy-bear just laid there when I hugged and played with it. But my parents did stuff with me, and I, with them, day after day, minute after minute, year after year. A real relationship. We both participated. It was real.
The range of my childhood relationships included my parents, my Teddy-bear, our dog, the kitchen at home, my yard and bicycle and the streets I rode, my school and teachers, my brother and sister and the kids I played with from next door. They all took a lot of wear and tear of long time relationship, like the Velveteen Rabbit. They were real.
But there were some things that I did not relate with, and were not real to me, but were real to others. For example, the neighbor kids’ dad whom I never met. And those scents that our dog gathered with its nose. And lots of things I read about in books and could only imagine, like whales and dinosaurs and dragons and unicorns and angels. I had no physical relationship with them—unless you consider reading about them in books to be second-hand experience.
What is real? I have come to think that relations are everything. Scientists might prefer to say experience is everything, and when it comes to illusion, invisible and second-hand experiences, they institute a scientific method of experimental verification. But whether we believe in things, energy fields, a God-King, a super-mind, inspirations, or spirits, it all starts with relational experience. Relationship is everything.
The kind of relationship that is DIVINE—even ECSTASY! is the two-way or mutual relations some call love. Relations of mutual kindness create an atmosphere of delight, a heightened energy field, a special, call it “holy” spirit whether between two people or in a group. “God is love” (I John 4), is the Christian text. Mutual loving-kindness is God. It’s not all of reality—not all of our relationships are mutual love. But it seems true to me that mutual relation is divine reality.
What grasps me about mutual kindness is that it is in our hands, in our relationships, to create God or not. We create relationships. We can live in mutual loving-kindness and create God among us, or we can do other things to one another and experience hellish, God-forsaken relationships. God doesn’t do things to us or for us. It is we ourselves who together create the divine spirit—or something else.
John Buehrens, President of the UUA told a story in the World magazine (Sept/Oct, 1997): A 4th century desert hermit in Egypt whose name was Makarios had been taught to pray for the dead who suffer in hell. One day he saw a skull on the ground, and he picked it up. He asked: What good will it do for me to pray for you if you are in hell. Will it make the flames less painful? The skull answered him: Flames are not what makes us suffer in hell. We suffer not from fire but because we are bound to one another back to back and cannot look into another human face. But when you pray for us, the ropes are loosened and we can turn to see each other again, face to face.
I wonder, how do we relate to one another? I go to the store, ask for service and put money in a hand. A peasant whose face I will never see planted and harvested the food I eat. Someone fixes my car, and I pay the bill. Someone long dead built my house, and I write a check to a faceless bank. We sit in classes and look at ideas in our heads coming from mouths. We drive over land and rivers, among living things, and seldom touch or are touched, even if we do see.
Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” That’s sometimes true. Augustine said, “Man is wolf to man.” He is at least partially wrong; we are not obviously red in tooth and claw. But do we see each others’ faces and relate life to life, or are we bound, back to back? What reality do we create in relationships? Is it generous and kind, allowing space for the other to be?
Perhaps we should be haunted by the fact that we do not see the foreign faces of those who pick our fruit, sew our garments, process our food, and make our computer chips? Though we do not have a formal caste system, our class system isolates us from those not like us, and when we do meet by chance, I know that I have learned to look away from those who don’t look like me.
You know I raise pedigreed rabbits; well, it’s not just show-rabbits that are judged by looking at body-type and coat. We screen our relationships based upon clothes and hair, teeth and face, attractive display of legs and breasts or muscles, and whether one carries oneself “cool” or in dignified clothes. In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher calls it “lookism.” Add lookism to classism and sexism and racism and agism and ablism and anthropocentrism—is there anyone we relate to face to face, life to life? Are we in hell, bound to one another, back to back?
If relations create our reality, what are the relations that shape where we live? Consider the following as metaphors for our relational reality: a closet, exile, ghetto and home.
At home I have a front-room office, like a private closet. In the privacy of my own mind, in my closet I am safe from the judgment of others—as long as I don’t bring all the isms in with me, judging myself. My rabbitry is much the same. I can be myself there, in my safe closet. For some it may be your room at home or on the golf course where you can shut the world out—your safe closet.
When we leave our closets, judgmental people turning their faces away, tearing us down, it is easy to feel that we are in exile—strangers, outcasts who don’t belong. There’s no way we can meet all the demands to look right, perform right, think right, talk right. When we can’t even look ourselves in the face, when we no longer see our own precious worth, there is not even a safe closet we can go to. We are in exile from ourselves.
Sometimes we take a strong attitude—that we belong wherever we are; we do what we do and let the chips fall where they may. And the chips do sometimes fall. Whether we get kicked out or merely see faces turn away, that is exile!
I am talking about relationships, and I think there is nothing more real. A closet is more than walls and door. It is a lack of relationship with the world. Exile is an even worse loss of relationship, rejecting ourselves. A ghetto is different from either closet or exile. In a ghetto we are cast out and alone—but with others. The terrible thing about a ghetto is that it could become a community, a home, if only the exiles did not turn their faces away from themselves. A ghetto is a matter of relationships too.
Now imagine a fellowship, community and home. A community is more than houses, streets and green places. A home is more than rooms, walls, doors and windows. Community and home are both safe places of welcome. In community we mingle, stepping outside our homes of those like us, and we risk and enjoy diverse relationships.
When I reflect on the reality of this Unitarian Universalist congregation, it seems to me that the fellowship is a community of hospitality, welcoming strangers to expand our relational diversity. My prayer is that we will not be anyone’s “secret garden” or closet with our door safely locked against anyone different. I hope our Unitarian Universalist values and principles gain notoriety through the reality of our relationships. May the light of truth, the warmth of compassion and the energy of social action really be a visible flame to everyone on the Emerald Coast. The challenge is for us to step out of our safe UU closet and to offer wider and wider hospitality to those who would share our covenant of mutual support.
Nor should we be exiles, defining ourselves only by what we are not. We have worthy forbears including religious heretics, great Americans, social reformers and even saints like Albert Schweitzer listed among UUs. We have lofty values “commonly held among us” and articulated in the positive language of our UU Principles. They are not dogmatic doctrines nor legalistic “thou shalt nots.” We can boldly say that we covenant to affirm and promote the “inherent worth and dignity of every person”—and that is just the beginning. Unitarian Universalists who embrace the right of conscience and religious freedom are no exiles in this “land of the free.”
We must refuse to be a ghetto of exiles, outcast from others and unable to accept ourselves. We break the bonds of rejection when we look into one another’s faces—without judgment of ideas or of how articulate or of personality or style, but when we look, life to life. A fellowship is where each of us embraced as precious and irreplaceable.
This is a beautiful sanctuary. I do not mean the wood and glass. This is a beautiful sanctuary because it is a place of relationships even broader and more daring than our communities and homes. I mean small group activities, Adult Enrichment classes and private conversations where we engage one another face to face, life to life. May we deepen our sense of community, of being a safe and beautiful home where we accept one another.
There is a Scottish saying, “He is wise who can make a friend of a foe.” May we turn our faces toward rather than away from one another’s imperfections including our own. May we share ever-deeper relations over time and grow more real, even if our hair is loved off, and our eyes and ears fail, even if we get stiff in the joints and very shabby.