Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 7, 2004

Last week my fiancée Jane and I went to the Japanese Garden down by the Arboretum in Seattle. It was a beautiful, sunny day, pleasantly warm with a gentle breeze. A Japanese garden is a beautiful place, especially in Spring when the cherry blossoms are out, as many of them were last week. It is a very carefully controlled and cultivated place. It isn’t at all wild, yet it looks very natural. There are no straight lines or harsh angles. Everything is curved. Everything is soft, subtle, and indirect. It invites rather than overwhelms. It exudes serenity. It is gentle, peaceful, soothing. It is a wonderful interplay of natural beauty and human creativity. As I drank in the beauty and the serenity of the Japanese Garden, I had one particularly strong reaction. This, I thought, is a very spiritual place.

Now, I suspect that most of you get that. Most of us, I suspect, would experience a beautiful garden that invites us in and creates an atmosphere of serenity and peace as a spiritual place. All of us, I imagine, have felt the spiritual power of nature in one way or another. Around here you can hardly avoid it. We all love our mountains and the Sound, our rivers and our beautiful, fertile valleys. They speak to us of spirit. Nature spirituality is quite common among us.

And yet I wonder if we really know what we mean when we say spirit, spiritual or spirituality. My experience of the Japanese Garden in Seattle last week certainly got me thinking about what I mean by those terms; and I suppose the fact that I knew I was going to be talking to you about it today had something to do with that too. The first thing that came to my mind when I asked that question of myself was a definition of God or of the sacred by the great writer on the nature of religious experience William James. James called the sacred "the More," and the More is what I mean by spirit. It is also what I mean by God, but today I want to focus on the spiritual rather than on the specifically religious. Spirit is the More that is in everything that is. In a similar vein, the great (I think the greatest) 20^th century theologian Paul Tillich called it the "depth dimension" of reality, of everything that is. It is the deeper reality behind reality.

Now, if you’ve noticed James, Tillich, and me struggling for words to talk about the spiritual, thank you for paying attention. Even the greatest minds ever to address the issue have struggled for words with which to talk about the spiritual, so what hope does a simple soul like me have? The best I can do is give you their words, struggle and all.

I do, however, take some comfort from one crucial truth, and that is this: There is in fact a very good reason why even the great minds struggle with language for discussing the spiritual. The reason they struggle is that the spiritual is, and to us humans will always be, Mystery. Not a mystery in the sense of a puzzle to be solved, like a whodunit. Rather, Mystery as in something that by its very nature is and always will remain beyond the grasp of our finite human minds. When we talk about spirit, about spirituality, we talk about something that our words are simply inadequate to talk about. Our words come from the realm of the physical and of ordinary sense perception; but spirit is beyond that realm even while it at the same time permeates that realm and suffuses it with meaning. That’s why our words can never quite grasp what spirit is. We really are incapable of defining it.

We are not, however, incapable of experiencing it. I experienced it that day last week at the Japanese Garden. It isn’t a normal sensory experience. We don’t see, taste, smell, feel, or hear spirit; yet we experience it nonetheless. There are times when, if we are open to the possibility and not closed off by an excessively materialistic worldview, that we become aware of a Presence, or, if you prefer, we become aware of the presence of the More, of the depth dimension of reality. The experience is indescribable, but it can be indescribably powerful. It can come on us at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places. Once, in a time of overwhelming grief and despair, I actually felt myself physically grasped by that Presence, by the More that was present in that dark night of my soul even though I was unaware of it until I felt it grab me and lift me up.

And that’s the thing about spirit. It is all around us. It is always present. It isn’t something that pops up here and there from time to time. It is always there. It is a dimension of reality, it’s just that it is one of which we are most of the time unaware. Our being unaware of it, however, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We actually live in perhaps the only culture in human history that has denied the reality and the presence of Spirit. We are children of the Enlightenment and of the Scientific Revolution, those closely related phenomena of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe that did so much to open up the possibilities of the human mind but also did so much to close down the possibilities of the human spirit by denying the reality of anything that cannot be observed, measured, and confirmed by experimentation. The modern, materialistic worldview has put blinders on us. To use a metaphor from Joseph Campbell, the great cultural anthropologist whose long conversation with Bill Moyers is still a staple of public television, we do not see the reality and presence of the spiritual because we have scales over our eyes, scales of rationalism and philosophical materialism that filter out the spiritual. It’s there. Most of the time we just don’t perceive it. Our skeptical minds won’t let us.

So, OK. It’s there. The spiritual dimension of reality exists even if we don’t see it. So what, you might be asking. What difference does it make? Most of us get along just fine going about our daily lives with no real awareness of the presence of the spiritual. Well, that’s true, as far as it goes. Life is possible without an awareness of the spiritual. Some people manage even to live good and fulfilling lives without it I guess, or so it seems. My experience, however, is different. In my experience, life without spirit is just shallower, emptier, that life with spirit. Spirit is the depth dimension, and it gives depth to life.

So why does it matter if our lives have depth? An image came to me as I was working on this talk. It is the image of a ship, a particular ship, an aircraft carrier, specifically the USS Sangamon, a small aircraft carrier of World War II. She was what they called an escort carrier. She began life as an oil tanker and was converted to an aircraft carrier early in the war. Her planes did escort duty and engaged in combat on many occasions. She also acted as a refueling vessel for other Navy ships at sea. She had large storage tanks in her keel that were filled either with fuel for transfer to other vessels or, if there was no fuel there, with water to provide ballast for the ship, which otherwise was quite top heavy because of the weight of the flight deck that had been added to her. Then, late in the war, she took a Japanese kamikaze plane straight through the flight deck. A young second lieutenant, who later became my father, was manning a battle station at an auxiliary helm station at the rear of the ship. The ship was engulfed in flame, and the crew were pumping vast amounts of seawater into her to fight the fire. As the water was pumped in, the ship, of course, began to settle in the water. That’s when my father received an order from the Captain to blow the ballast tanks, that is, to force air into them to empty them of the water they held. I guess the Captain’s theory was that this would lighten the ship and counteract the weight of the water being pumped in to fight the fire. But Dad knew better. There was a seaman standing with him at this aft helm position. When the order to blow the ballast came in, they looked at each other, both shook their heads, and Dad countermanded the order from his superior officer. He knew that if he blew the ballast a huge air bubble would be created at the lowest point of the ship, that she would therefore capsize, and the ship and all hands aboard would be lost. The Sangamon needed her ballast. She needed that weight at the depth of her being. With it, her crew was able to bring the fires under control, and she was able to limp back to Virginia, where she was decommissioned and her crew reassigned.

We are like the Sangamon. We need our ballast. We need weight at the depth of our being. Spirit, the More, the depth dimension of reality, is that weight. Losing touch with the spiritual as we make our way through life is like blowing the ballast on the Sangamon as she fought the fires of war. Without it we’re top heavy. We’re likely to capsize, that is, to lose our orientation, lose our grounding, become unstable and unable to remain morally, psychologically, and even physically upright. With it, we keep our heads above water, we keep our bearings (which may be mixing a metaphor, but oh well). Life in the spirit is a life with meaning. In the spirit we can weather the storms of our lives because we are weighted down with the proper ballast. The winds of fortune and misfortune are less likely to blow us off course, or to tip us over. In the spirit we find peace in the face of adversity and loss. In the spirit we find courage to do what must be done and even to do the right thing when the right thing is unpopular, as it so often is. The spiritual life is rich in the things that matter--love, peace, joy, courage, and commitment. Spirit is Mystery. We cannot capture it with our words. We cannot define or even adequately describe it. Yet we experience it; and we experience that life with the spirit is life as it should be. It is life indeed.

In conclusion, let me say a few words about the relationship between spirituality and religion. We often hear people say that they are spiritual but not religious. The assumption behind that statement is that spirituality and religion are somehow two different things. Usually the assumption is that religion isn’t spiritual. However, I believe that when spirituality and religion are both understood properly, the distinction between them is seen to be artificial and false. Religion is, in fact, a kind of spirituality.

Spirituality is paying attention to our relationship with spirit as I have described spirit in this talk. It is being mindful of the reality of spirit in our lives. It is cultivating our relationship with spirit, spending time with it, communing with it, listening for it, seeking to live in it. Religion, properly understood, is a profound way of doing precisely that. A religion, any religion, gives us a set of beliefs, rituals, and symbols the purpose of which is to connect us with the realm of spirit. Different religions do that differently. They have different names for the ultimate or for the spirit. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we call it God. Muslims call it Allah, which is simply Arabic for God. In Hinduism it is Brahman. These and other religions are simply different ways in which people can connect with the ultimate reality, with spirit. A religion is a particular kind of spirituality. Many religions do a pretty good job of hiding that fact by turning themselves into sets of mandatory beliefs and rigid rules. Nonetheless, a religion--Christianity or any of the great religions--is a way of living our relationship with spirit. Rather than being something separate from spirituality, religions are always a kind of spirituality. Thank you.