First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

On Becoming a Grown Up, Part Two

Alright; here’s the deal: those of you who twitch when you hear the word "spiritual" are going to indulge me for one paragraph, and then I will indulge you and not use that word for the rest of this sermon. I want to begin by calling to mind the three stories we told last week – and by the way, this isn’t that paragraph; none of those stories used the word "spiritual". One was a tale about a wandering Hindu wise man, who came across a huge diamond on the forest floor. That evening, a villager approached, demanding to be given the precious stone. The sage gave it to him graciously, and the man went away delighted. But he returned the next morning, after a sleepless night, saying, "What I really want you to give me is the wealth that enables you to give this diamond away so easily." Then there was the seeker who observed a tiger sharing his food with a disabled fox, and decided that he too would simply trust God to fulfill his needs. After almost starving in his passivity, he finally realized that he was supposed to be the provider, not the recipient. And finally, there was the Buddhist monk who broke the rule of his order so as to serve the higher law of compassion, and his companion, who could not stop scolding and reproaching this behavior. The first monk left the woman at the riverbank; the second carried her with them for the rest of the day.

Okay, here’s the paragraph. All these stories are about a quality that I would call spiritual maturity. The sage with the diamond has it, and the villager to whom he gives the stone comes to realize that that quality is more to be desired than wealth. The starving seeker who at last gets it that he should be helping others rather than waiting to be provided for, makes a move in the direction of spiritual maturity. The monk who can carry a woman across the river and then move on is more spiritually mature than the one who obsesses about the rules. It is my conviction that there is a quality of spiritual maturity which is distinct from physical, intellectual, or emotional maturity. It involves attributes of compassion, integrity, awareness, gratitude, connection, humility, acceptance, and trust. People who are spiritually mature are engaging and challenging to be around; they are at peace with themselves, and by their presence, they call others to be their own best selves. This quality has been called many names – enlightenment, Buddha-nature, Christ-likeness, wisdom – but every culture and every religious tradition recognizes it. And I would argue that the fundamental purpose of religious community is to cultivate spiritual maturity in its members. A given church may produce astonishingly beautiful buildings or music, or admirable works of charity, or even social movements that sweep across the culture, but if its own members remain shallow, angry, selfish, unhappy, or oppressive people, then it has failed in its most essential task. A community of people intentionally growing toward authentic spiritual maturity will almost necessarily call forth beauty, generosity, and transformation as the result of their work together, but these are by-products. And I refuse to accept the proposition that the achievement of spiritual maturity is less accessible to me as a humanist, or to us as a humanist community, than it is to any other theological cohort. There, now; that’s the end of the paragraph. Let’s see what we can do without that troublesome word.

I have been following with interest the dismay of the leaders of the mega-church movement as they have discovered a gap in the reported satisfaction of those of their members who might have been expected to be the most happy – the long-term, highly active and committed participants, who say that something is missing for them. These folks have done everything the church suggests; they have taken classes, they are active in small groups, they respond generously to service opportunities and requests for financial support. Earlier in their involvement, the congregation met their needs stunningly well, but the longer they stay, and the more integrated they become, the more a vague void starts to appear. Now we might want to say, and I would agree in part, that this mounting frustration is inevitable because the theological ideas they have embraced are ultimately untrue and unsatisfying. Yet it seems to me that this experience of wanting something more from one’s religious involvement is not unique to any specific belief set. It happens to Unitarian Universalists, and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Pagans, and everybody else. The unique thing about the Willow Creek mega church folks is that they do constant surveys, so they have caught it statistically as well as anecdotally, and thus given us a new way of looking at the phenomenon.

What it looks like is that there is a threshold of church involvement – quite a high level of church involvement over time – after which congregational programming stops being the driving force behind an individual’s sense of growth as a religious person. Please note that this in no way lets any of us off the hook for providing meaningful, engaging opportunities for participation in congregational life, or for making that participation a priority in our own lives. No matter how old or wise we get, we will always continue to need community, and our communities, if they are functioning as they should, will always be called to serve people who have just begun to discover their possibilities. What it does mean is that you can’t use the growth in numbers of those participating to measure growth in those participating; it’s just not that simple. And for some time now, the popular wisdom of the contemporary church movement has pretty much assumed that it was. But for me, as for Bill Hybels at Willow Creek and others, the growth of the church itself is not ultimately the point. If we here at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis are doing an excellent job of supporting and encouraging one another to lead lives of integrity, and to become the best people we have the capacity to be, and if every person within fifty miles of this place is aware of what we have to offer, then I’m satisfied with whatever membership we get. I can have my ego needs addressed in other ways.

In point of fact, I think that we are by the nature of our tradition, one large step ahead of the evangelicals in addressing this issue. For what the Willow Creek study suggests is that the congregation cannot be the exclusive soil of its members growth forever without ultimately stunting them. If we are going to become as wise, compassionate, aware, grateful, connected and trusting as we could, we must ultimately be rooted in the world, not in the church, and at some point we have to take responsibility for our own emerging maturity. Congregational programming is important, but it should be aimed, at least in part, at giving people the tools they can use to pursue their own faith development on their own terms. This, it appears, is what was at the root of the Willow Creek veterans’ unhappiness; the assumption on the part of the church that it was permanently responsible for doling out whatever instruction or experiences or information they might need in order to continue growing as religious people. Their responses seem to indicate that there comes a point when maturing in wisdom has to become a personal, rather than a collective, project. If, when you reach that stage, there is no one to offer guidance about how to take it on for yourself, you end up circling around and around the structures designed to help with the previous steps, and become stagnant, unable to move forward.

It’s easy to see how this could happen with a one-size-fits-all theology, which assumes that both the issues and the resolutions of the human condition are necessarily the same for everybody, and therefore the same process of formation will work universally. By contrast, the liberal and humanist traditions begin with the premise of inherent diversity, that people learn and grow in various ways, and that all forms of maturity, while they may have some common characteristics, must be achieved by the individual in his or her own process. Thus it should come as no surprise to us that our task in the church is to give our members tools for their own personal journeys, as well as shared experiences and common values. As we have seen this morning from our four speakers, people bring differing ambitions for their better selves, as well as different learning styles and developmental stages to their participation in this community. We have to assume that no one process will work equally for all of them, and that an important part of the church’s task is to help each of us take responsibility for our own growth toward maturity. In part, this is because we believe that each of us is unique to begin with, and in part it is because we know that eventually, those who stick with the process will reach the point where institutional activities don’t serve to move them forward much any more. Again, to be clear, people who reach this point don’t need to stop attending on Sunday morning, or participating in small groups; in many cases they still like those experiences, at least for awhile. But they need something more, even though they find it hard to articulate, and the scary thing is that if they don’t get that new itch scratched, they can begin to drift away from congregational activities, despite the fact that they don’t have any problem with those activities in themselves.

This research is preliminary at best, but it offers three tantalizing hints about the kind of tools that long-time church members need in order for their growth to continue in a way that engages and satisfies them. The people in this segment who were least likely to report feelings of stuck-ness:

While they had not been transplanted anywhere else, their roots had spread beyond the local congregation, and they were finding sustenance in a larger community of connection and endeavor, as well as a deeper personal awareness and intentionality. Perhaps ironically, this suggests that long-time members will be more satisfied with a church community that points them beyond its own walls and programs, and invites them to take increasing responsibility for their own growth into the mature individuals that they hope to become.

It is my perception that this kind of development happens almost intuitively for some people; we are often wiser than we know. I want to explore each of these categories a little bit, so that we may be better able to recognize and articulate these kinds of maturity when we see them.

The first indicator of continuing growth for veteran church members was meaningful service to and involvement with people who are different in a challenging way, either from another culture, or class background, or faith tradition. Actually, anyone who has raised teenagers has had this experience to some extent, and significant generational difference can be another form of it. It seems to me that this process is most effective when it comes with some commitment to honor the differences of the other, and not seek to impose one’s own values and interpretations immediately. Some examples of this kind of involvement might include working with marginalized communities as an organizer, an advocate, or a service provider; tutoring in an under-resourced school, volunteering in a women’s shelter, working with a food shelf distribution, helping immigrants with social or legal services, participating in a medical mission project to a third world country – anything that takes a person out of his or her comfort zone, and engages them in looking at the world through the eyes of others, discovering how someone else makes sense of it all. When you seek to do this respectfully, without instantly pointing out how the other person is wrong, it always requires you to think, to see your own perspective in a new light, and to consider alternatives you hadn’t thought about before. Working in an interfaith context with people whose religious vocabularies and convictions you don’t share can be challenging and rewarding in the same way. To the extent that religious communities are usually composed of the like-minded, it is true by definition that you can’t have this kind of experience within your own congregation. The church can help you to prepare for it, and reflect on it, but you have to go outside the institutional programming to be stretched in this way.

The second tool for growth that characterized the most satisfied long term members was that they were more likely to have an ongoing commitment to some intentional practice of disciplined personal reflection. In orthodox traditions, these may be identified as prayer, devotions, Bible study, or spending time with the Lord. However, there are also long histories of practices which transcend the vocabularies in which they arose, and have proven their value across all manner of theological traditions. The essence of such disciplines is a three-fold pattern of de-clutter, focus, and open. Perhaps the most universal of them all is meditation, which comes in a variety of flavors and techniques. In its simplest form, it requires a commitment of time undistracted by any other activities, in which you seek to think about what you choose to think about, and nothing else, or perhaps to think about nothing at all. If you have ever tried this, you know that it is much more difficult than it sounds, for our minds are highly distractible, and filled with minutia that bob about seemingly beyond conscious control. The effort to eliminate the mundane clutter, to focus on a chosen value, and to become open to insight about who you are and what you truly want, can be amazingly transformative if it is pursued consistently, even when it doesn’t feel immediately productive. Much the same result can be had from physical disciplines like yoga, or even sports if they are approached in the same spirit. Other established systems include journaling, and the practice of art, as described for instance in the book The Artist’s Way. Even traditional techniques like fasting are still effective, and poetry or other texts may be more accessible to us for committing to memory than ancient scripture, but the principle is the same. Any of these practices can help an individual to de-clutter, focus, and open, and having that ability deeply established and available is one of the tools for continuing to grow into a fully mature human being. Obviously, no one has time to engage in all these disciplines; it is necessary to choose the one that you feel drawn toward, and it can be helpful to get advice from those who have mastered it in their own lives. There may even be groups for support and discussion among those who are pursuing the practice, and yet in the end it is personal, inner work that you can only do for yourself. Being part of a six-week meditation group at church can help you experiment to find the technique that is right for you, but that technique will only unfold its value as you come to it on a regular basis, letting it teach you as you grow.

Finally, the long-term members who were least likely to be dissatisfied with their church experience were more likely to be involved in sharing their own wisdom, in mentoring or teaching others how to move toward greater wholeness and integrity in their lives. It is often said that if you really want to learn something, undertake to teach it. Whether formally or informally, in groups or in private conversations, those who found a way to make what they had learned about their own religious path useful to others, also found themselves feeling more fulfilled in their church communities. Merely participating in more congregational programming didn’t satisfy them, but rising into positions of leadership, where they could serve as guides to others, was a different story. And doesn’t it make sense, that those who have been the most involved and dependable over the longest time, might have something of value to offer those in the beginning stages of the journey?

The truth is that we all have a lot to learn, no matter how long we’ve been at this business of humanism, or this business of life. There’s still a lot to learn about what it means to be fully human, to be true to our ideals, to realize the capacities within us. How can we grow beyond our pride and greed, our ignorance and self-concern? What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness? And we surely can never do it alone, no matter how long we’ve been at it; there is no moment in life when the community of memory and promise doesn’t matter. At the same time, it is also true that one of the things becoming a grown up means is taking responsibility for our own continuing development. There is some truth about yourself that you will only discover in the depths of your own mind and heart and soul, and that is an encounter you must undertake alone. There is a wider world out there than you imagine, and you will only find it by giving yourself into connections with those whose lives and ideas are different from your own comfortable community. And the wisdom you most truly possess will always be that which you have given away to those whose seeking follows your own. Whatever may come after this life is not our concern at the moment; our task right now is to make the most out of this ultimately brief opportunity to live and learn and love and grow. The challenge is to put away childish things, and take responsibility for the integrity, compassion, and wisdom unfolding in us. It is for this task and this journey that we would equip one another, here in this beloved community, where we seek to build the common good, and make our own days glad.