I’ve thought a lot through the summer about what I wanted to talk about in this Water Communion service, which is a great and grand tradition of Unitarian Universalism. When you have a tradition and you have to do it every year, you want something fresh; and I began to think that water is an absolutely crucial element in geopolitical considerations all around the world. It will be one of the major issues in the upcoming century. On the other hand, it is one of the most ancient symbols we have of what is healing and holy. It is no coincidence that earlier in the service, on a child’s brow, we put a touch of water. It has long represented this quality, in all religious traditions.
There’s a reason for that, too. Earth, air, fire, water: these were the four classic elements that our ancient forebears believed constituted reality. No matter what religious tradition they might have come from, the ancients believed that there were four elements that combined, intertwined, and must be kept in balance. They developed interesting philosophies, as well as medicines and psychologies, out of these four simple elements.
Over the summer, I read a great biography of the poet Shelley. This biographer didn’t just tell the facts of his life; she went into his notebooks, and she looked at elements of earth, air, fire, and water. She wanted to try to understand what sensations this poet had, and by that, enter into his life and into his soul. It was one of the most fascinating biographies I’ve ever read, because she didn’t do anything normally; she did it in an interesting, strange, odd way. It’s the way you and I live our lives, through what we feel, sense, see, and touch, and are touched by.
She talked about a moment in Shelley’s life. In 1812, he produced these little wax-paper boats, and in them, he intertwined, almost as a sail, a universal declaration of rights that he had written. It’s fascinating what it said; there were 31 elements, but the basic one said—and you can’t even imagine how radical this was at the time—“A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew have equal rights.” He went on to say that everyone had an equal share in the life of their government. He gave a universal application of what dignity meant: more than just rights, but what it meant to be a whole soul. He put it into little hot-air balloons, and he launched them toward Wales and Ireland. He put them into the water to cross the channel. He took this vision of what a world might become—what the writer Jay Winik, in his new book The Great Upheaval, called this universal unfolding, this upheaval of human nature—and he trusted it to the elements. The elements themselves would contain this message, a universal message of love and dignity that cut across all artificial divisions—and yet bloodied and compellingly ancient and venerated divisions—of nation, race, and creed.
These little boats and the little balloons that Shelley put together were very, very fragile. Perhaps you could say they were merely a poetic conceit. But it’s what you and I do every single Sunday; we cast our voice and our hopes into the wind, into the airwaves, into each other’s hearts and hands. That’s what we do every single week as Unitarian-Universalists. We trust that there is a larger message that we may embody and carry beyond our body. We Unitarian-Universalists cast our beliefs into the winds of change and chance: trusting, trusting. And I thought about the Water Communion, and how much of our faith is based on these primal principles that are as present as the modern ecological crisis of global warming, and as ancient as the Greek beliefs about the elements. What an interesting contrast to what people call the fundamentals!
We all know about fundamentalism. We know that fundamentalism cuts across all religious traditions; there are fundamentalisms in virtually every religious tradition. These are people who take “the word of God” in a literal way. They believe that their scriptures are without error, and that basic points of belief become more important than humanity itself. Now, they do cut across all traditions, but the one I know best and most intimately (having grown up in east Tennessee, in the town of Clinton) is fundamentalism within the Christian tradition. But we misunderstand fundamentalism, and that’s part of what I want to talk about today, in contrast to our Unitarian-Universalist trust in the elementals. In the ancient sense, of course there are beliefs, scriptures, and saviors; but fundamentalism is a modern creation. It’s absolutely a modern reaction to the world itself. In 1910 and up until 1915 in America, two wealthy brothers in Los Angeles published twelve pamphlets. They were called The Fundamentals, and they basically said, “You have all misunderstood Christianity. You may think that a liberal interpretation of Christianity is sufficient; but no, we are going to create a new kind of Christianity.”
It was going to be based on what they called the fundamentals, and they started with virgin birth, atonement, the resurrection of the body, literal miracles, and something that they called premillennialism. That sounds very high-falutin’ and very eschatological, and it is, because a lot of it is virtually made up. It’s taking poetic images in the scriptures, and creating a kind of pseudo-science around it. Premillennialism means they believe that they have the absolute truth: Jesus returns before the millennium; there is a Rapture where all the believers are lifted up; and you’ve seen the bumper sticker that says, for Christians, “The Rapture: what a way to go!” (You and I are left.) The unsaved, the heathen, the unbelievers, and Methodists: they are all left, and they have to go through the Tribulation. They have to suffer, and millions of people will die. Then Jesus comes back and kills more people; and then (it’s unbelievable) there’s Armageddon, and Revelation. This is the premillennialist vision that they constructed, and it was done in this century. This is a kind of Christianity that Paul and Jesus would never recognize. This is what potentially up to a third of Americans believe, but it’s certainly what (rock-bottom) 20% of all Americans believe. This is modern Christian fundamentalism, quite different from Evangelical thought; they’re not the same, although they overlap. This is fundamentalist thought. The whole edifice is a modern development, and the idea is somehow that human beings are to live in fear of Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Revelation. The old joke is, of course, that Jesus appears, and they call Jerry Falwell, and he answers. He says, “I understand that Jesus is here. Well, I left the instructions behind me.” What are the instructions? “Look busy.”
That’s a narrow view. Let’s talk about the elementals, not the fundamentals. In ancient Greece, and for centuries in the west, and in its own fashion in the east, in the origins of medicine there was a different kind of thinking. It was a map of reality that was really quite different. It said that our inner being was reflecting the cosmos itself, and therefore, through the interaction of earth, air, fire, and water, we could reveal and see our character, our psychology, our appearance, and our behavior. Linked to the four elements were four humors, which were fluids and which were all essential to our functioning. They called them phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and blood; and they then extrapolated more, to an explanation of the inner and outer reality, and how they come together as heat, cold, dryness, and moistness. So our forebears believed that all of reality was to be understood in terms of these elementals.
Something powerful of these ancient beliefs still remains with us today. We recognize it when we do the water communion. We recognize it when we light this chalice. (Little Ian, before the service, looked up and said, “Turn it off!” He was right, because we had to turn it off so we could relight it to begin the service.) Further, if you had an excess of any of these humors, it created an imbalance; it is out of this that we got our “dis-ease” or disease. That’s the way medicine, psychology, and deep philosophy all began: a deep wisdom, a way of looking at everything, and everything must be held in balance. There was no narrow constriction of certain beliefs that you had to believe. That was fundamentalist thinking; but elementalist thinking is quite free and open. They also had a vision of things that said the body and the mind were intertwined and interfused. Everything, including the world and the cosmos that holds you and your body, was all one system—flexible, mixed, fluid, and emerging. Yes, some of this has been lost in modern science; but as Unitarian-Universalists, we go back to this ancient wisdom over and over: the elements and that precious, precarious balance. Health, the health of your body and the health of the world itself, was seen as the very energies of the cosmos coursing and intermixing in our bodies, the humors in balance, in energies and particles and currents of your nerves.
Oddly, our largely scientific-humanist faith is in fact now highly attuned and centered on this most ancient of wisdoms, not as fundamentalism but more as a way of looking at a ceaselessly changing world that today is seriously out of balance. The elements of earth, air, fire, and water: yes, they go back to the ancient creation myths; but they must also move into the future that we must sustain together. The fire of the Big Bang; the heat held in the seas; the care of the earth’s crust; the aerial fluid of the atmospheres; present and past both; reality and poetic self-understanding combined; most of all, we must seek this balance. The elementals of earth, air, fire, and water are ultimately are about the earth; but ultimately as well, they are about transcendence, about being at one with the fluid energies of earth and the universe that has created us. Mary Oliver is a great poet of our time. She talks about “the other book of God.” Yes, we’ve always had the scriptures; but even the ancients believed that there was another way to read God’s message, and it was the world itself. St. Augustine talked about nature itself as another kind of bible that you could open:
But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it.
Mary Oliver does that for us:
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
...
now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever.
We’ve always heard, growing up, about the God of Heaven or the God of heaven and earth; but we also need a God of dirt, a God of the humors, a God of the elements, of the great balance.
I’ve talked about this before, but to be human means to be connected to the ancient word humus, the earth, the dirt; and to be human is also to be, at our best, humane. A fundamentalist could go back to Genesis and read,
Out of the dirt of the earth Yahweh created the earthling, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life.
They could say that’s the story, that’s it, and you must believe it literally; but those of us who are attuned to the elementals will see that story and read it quite differently, as an understanding that the power of creation is binding earth and air into the saga of life itself, and into the very breath that you draw in the next second. And so we find ourselves bound up so intimately and poignantly in the reality of earth, air, fire, and water, from the amniotic fluid of your mother’s womb, into the breath you draw twenty times a minute, to the fiery passion that animates our being and nerves, to the earth. Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Buddhist Vietnamese teacher, says
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
Believing and trusting, this truth: It’s not the same as creating something called elementalism to oppose the fundamentalism; but let us today, and each day we gather, accept and trust in the free-flowing instinct that we are not only attuned to this beauty and balance, but also deeply and intrinsically opposed to fundamentalisms of any sort. Let us believe in gentle practice; in the open way, not the narrow. Let us be forgiving and not judgmental. Let us be fluid and expansive, and not so meanly and keenly defined as to leave out most of the world’s religions, cast into the artificial dream of eternal damnation.
There is an old story of the Desert Fathers. One young student, who has been training and struggling to become attuned to the harmony of God, went to his teacher Joseph and said,
“Abba, I have fasted; I have prayed and meditated; I have tried to live in peace; and as far as I can, I have purified my thoughts. What else can I do?” And the old man stood up and stretched out his hands. He lifted them up, and out of each finger came a flame; and he stood there, bearing the fire of existence, and said, “If you will, you may become all flame.”
Let us in our tradition, attuned to the elementals, burn in the only belief that matters—that makes us free in our caring, open in our generosity, and ready to serve the only world we have; and in all of this, keeps this gentle balance. Let us acknowledge that even our breathing, our consciousness, and our will are all gifts so mysterious that no fundamentalism can hope to capture, or tame, or confine them.
Fundamentalism is powerful stuff, especially in modern guise tapping into the old symbols. But I believe it is not powerful enough to overcome the Elements themselves – not if we live with Fire inside! :Let us burn in the only belief that matters, that makes us free in our caring; open in our generosity; ready to demand and to protect the human rights of all; ready to save the only world we have – and all of this, a gift so mysterious that no fundamentalism can hope to capture or tame or confine it. As Emerson said, “A spark of fire is infinitely deep, but a mass of fire reaching from earth upward into heaven, this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul.”
Amen.
