If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

 

 

 

The Rev. Ron Sala

The Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

September 12, 2004

Once upon a time, a well-dressed man came into a small, dusty town, looking to mail a letter. He asked a young girl, passing by on her bike, “Excuse me, darlin’, can you tell me how to get to the post office?” She hit her coaster brake and confidently replied, “Turn right on Main Street, go three blocks, and turn left under the railroad bridge.” The man was impressed, and said to the girl, “Hey, you seem like a nice young lady. I’m the Rev. Billy Bob Beauregard, and I’m having a tent meeting outside town tonight. Why don’t you and your folks come, and I’ll show you The Way to Heaven!”

As she quickly rode away the girl called back over her shoulder, “Heaven? That’s a tall order for a guy that can even find the post office!”[1]

Yes, we all know plenty of people who think they know better than you or I what to believe and how to act. And their opinions reverberate every day though TV, radio, and Internet. Maybe, I’m just one more. Maybe, I’ll have nothing to tell you this year. Perhaps our other speakers or participants in discussions, poetry readings, or public forums won’t have anything meaningful to say either. After all, our approach to religion is based on a gamble. The gamble is basically that, even though you or I may be wrong about many things, there’s a chance that we might be right about some too. And by joining together many people with many diverse experiences and viewpoints, we hope to boost our chances of finding something of value.

I have an uncle who pans gold as a hobby. There are those who say there is no gold where he lives, but he comes home with nuggets, right out of Pennsylvania streams many think contain nothing but trout. I am convinced that there is not one person you can’t learn from, no one whose stream yields no gold. What it takes is open-minded attention.

So what gold do we seek here? Why do we return, September after September, to this our religious home? Why did many of us attend services over the summer? I don’t believe that anyone comes here by accident. And they certainly don’t return by accident. There’s always a reason.

Some of us come here because we’re recovering from addiction and want a positive space in which to extend a moment of clarity.

Some of us come here because we how we think or who we love are discriminated against in other houses of worship and in society at large.

Some of us come here because late at night we wonder what will happen when we die.

Some of us come here because we crave the companionship of other caring people.

Some of us come here because we want to find a meaning in the apparent chaos of our life situation.

Some of us come here because we are appalled at the injustice around us and want to join hands and voices with others to change things.

In short, we come here because we share a common human condition: We find that we are alive and are destined to die and want to make the most of a life that didn’t come with an instruction manual.

I’ll admit that the obstetrician who delivered me didn’t find directions attached to my umbilical cord either. I’m in the same boat as you. All I can do is share with you some of what seems true to me, even as I hope you will share with me this year.

The more I ponder spiritual life, the more I experience the working of something good and true in me, the more convinced I am that there’s really just one message behind the seemingly divergent trappings of religion. The great mystics of the world’s religions speak with a harmony that embarrasses many of the guardians of their religious institutions. This explains why Hildegard of Bingen and Matthew Fox were marginalized by the Roman Church, just like the Sufis continue to be persecuted by their fellow Moslems. They realize the message is accessible to all and can never be monopolized by any organized power.

Nor can the message ever be put definitively into words, which is why we need the variety of viewpoints I talked about earlier. It can be so easy to get caught up in religious words and details of belief systems. I’m sometimes asked to define spirituality. I can’t. And I’ve never read what I consider an adequate definition. It’s like the famous court decision on pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” That’s because it’s not a static thing to be defined but an experience.

Albert Einstein, whose equations rewrote physics, could not find an equation that reflected our basic human condition. He did, however, attempt to put into words the very spiritual insight toward which countless spiritual teachers have pointed. Einstein writes,

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Religion, when it’s doing it’s real job, and not, as it too often is, simply serving as a tool of selfish interests, is to bring every person into the felt realization of what Einstein alludes to. You are a part of the universe! You don’t have to be the prisoner of “I, me, and mine.” You have the love deep within you that will heal yourself and others. Beauty is all around you, if you would only see it!

The experience that the Buddha called awakening or enlightenment is the exact same one that Jesus called the “kingdom of heaven” or “becoming like a little child,” that Lao Tzu called “Tao,” that Mohammed called “surrender” or “Islam,” that the prophet Elijah called “a still, small voice,” and that J.R. “Bob” Dobbs called “slack.” One enters the experience by being fully in the here and now. It is only in the here and now that one can realize one’s true identity as pure consciousness. Only by going deep within can we fully accept ourselves and others, and find real security and unconditional love.

A chief way this realization has been accomplished through the centuries is through meditation. In her 2001 book, The Places That Scare You, American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes about her experience:

Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered….

        By simply staying here, we relax more and more into the open dimension of our being. It feels like stepping out of a fantasy world and discovering the simple truth.

The Western world also has its own rich tradition of spiritual growth through self-discovery, though it tends to be more marginal or hidden from the mainstream of religious life. One small example of this is something we see every Sunday here. Up there is our famous stained glass window of St. Peter, said to be a product of Renaissance Italy. Many of us know that St. Peter is regarded to be the keeper of the pearly gates into heaven. If you look carefully at our Peter, you’ll see two keys in his hand, to open the doors, it is said, to heaven and hell. According to Roman Catholic theology, Peter was the first pope. What’s not so well known is that the Christians’ borrowed many aspects of Pagan symbolism in depicting Peter. For instance, remember rooster that the Gospels say crowed three times before Peter denies Jesus? The rooster was long earlier established as a symbol of Janus, Italy’s oldest God.

We usually hear about Janus around the time of New Year, when someone will comment that January gets its name from Janus, the two faced Roman God, one face looking back at the old year, one looking forward at the new. Janus also is related to another familiar word, janitor. He was the janitor, or “doorkeeper” of the sun. The Romans believed that Janus, like Peter after him, carried keys. His keys opened and closed the solar year on the winter and summer solstices. His keys also represented his stewardship over the mysteries, or schools of spiritual instruction. Cybele [SIH-buh-lee], the Earth Goddess of Asia Minor, also carried a key to her mysteries. The ancient mystery schools, at their best, could unlock within the initiate the door to the “sun behind the sun,” the “midnight sun” of enlightenment, the discovery of the true Self.

Fans of the rock band The Police will recognize this idea in the song, “Invisible Sun”—Sting is rumored to be an initiate of a modern mystery school.

And there are further resemblances between the Pagan Gods and the Christian Peter. Just as Janus represented the solar year, so did Peter, as can be demonstrated by a careful examination of his name by gematria or the numerical value of the letters comprising a word in ancient languages. Every letter was believed by the Greeks and Hebrews to have the value of a certain number. When you add the numbers of all the letters in the name, you get a number that could convey hidden meaning about the person or thing named.

Good Sunday school students will recall that Jesus says to Peter, “I say to thee, thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church. The word for “rock” in the Greek original is petra. “Peter”/petra—you probably didn’t know Jesus used puns! The gematria value of the word petra is 486. Cristina, our resident mathematician would immediately recognize 486 as the surface area of a cube that is nine units on each side. Picture if you will a cube nine-something high—it could be nine inches, nine kilometers, nine light years, whatever. Not only would such a cube have a surface area of 486 units, it would contain 729 smaller cubes, or 9x9x9. The cube of nine is 729. It also happens to be the numerical value of Cephas, which is what Jesus calls Peter in Aramaic, which is said to have been their native tongue. As if that’s not enough, the number 729 can also be used in a magic square. In this square, the numbers 1-729 are laid out in such a way that adding them vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, you come up with the same sum. In the very center of the magic cube is the number 365, the number of days in a solar year. But what’s really interesting is that if you take a circle with a circumference of 486 units, or the number of petra or “rock,” it will fit perfectly inside a square 619 units around. 619 is the value of the word “Delphi” where the Greek sun God Apollo is said to rule over the foundation stone of the world. Inside that square, you can also perfectly fit three overlapping circles that have a combined measure of 729, which, you’ll recall is the number of Peter’s other name, Cephas. It’s also the number of Delphinion, the name of one of Apollo’s temples.[2]

Clearly, whoever wrote the Christian Gospels, and we really don’t know the identity of the authors, whoever wrote them were clearly well versed in Pagan knowledge and didn’t seem to mind melding these influences with what they were developing in their Judaic-offshoot religion. As we learn of the many gematria in the New Testament, we begin to see texts written not to be history, but to be a coded guide for the initiate or convert to share with him or her a type of holistic philosophy of human beings as the microcosm and the universe as the macrocosm—and their mystical merger.

In fact, many scholars deny or at least question the flesh-and-blood existence of such figures as Peter and even Jesus. Could it be that they were literary figures laid out to allegorize the progress of each person toward enlightenment?

One thing to keep in mind while discussing Christianity is that very few living people have ever seen it. What I mean is, that the original Christianity was forever changed in the year 325, when Roman Emperor Constantine organized the Council of Nicea. It wasn’t pretty. Constantine surrounded the Christian bishops with armed guards and demanded that they remake their theology and practice to suit imperial needs, that is, to be a convenient way to hold together an empire that had seen better days. All of us here in this room have been affected, directly or indirectly, by a Christian religion and culture that carries heavy baggage from hundreds of years of abuse by quite unenlightened so-called Christian leaders, be they emperor, king, pope, or priest. Since the Roman imperial takeover of Christianity, that is, since 325, or when Unitarianism and other variations became a “heresy,” Christendom has often reached shameful levels of abuse of power, greed, and willful ignorance.

But, in its first centuries, it espoused pacifism, had a relatively positive attitude toward women, had married priests, and a healthy diversity of belief and practice.

One of the most beautiful writings of the early Christians was a “secret” gospel called Thomas. In it, Jesus says, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.” Is there any greater description of human awakening? Know what’s in front of your face, and what’s hidden will pop out! That is, be fully present in the moment, and you’ll realize a new way of experiencing the world, in true open-mindedness and open-heartedness.

Next month, I plan to offer a course based on Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, which was the source of our contemporary reading this morning. I know of no one who so wonderfully blends insights from West and East and can introduce one to them in the simplest language. I hope you’ll come, and I hope that it will change your life as much as it has mine.

This finding of our deepest Self is the ultimate homecoming. In your travels, you may have seen a sign on an apartment building by a busy highway that says, “If you lived here, you be home now.” When one finds enduring peace within, one is at home everywhere. This is the fulfillment of the spiritual quest, in whatever culture.