The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words:
their voice is not heard;
Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
And we all know how to wonder, don't we? From the depths of a Kosmos too miraculous to believe, from the heights of a universe too wondrous to worship, from the insides of an astonishment that has no boundaries, an answer begins to suggest itself, and whispers to us lightly. If we listen very carefully, from within this infinite wonder, perhaps we can hear the gentle promise that, in the very heart of the Kosmos itself, both science and religion will be there together to welcome us home.
There are moments in our lives when we feel the need to pray... when we see the stars in the heavens or the miracle of birth and want to express great gratitude or joy, when something or someone fails us, perhaps even our own selves, and we feel profound disappointment, when we lose a loved one and need to express grief, when we are discouraged and seek hope and encouragement.
Yet if you don't believe in the personified God who talked to Moses through the burning bush or the God of Christian doctrine, who proved his power through the miracle of the resurrection, to whom or what do you pray? If you trust science more than story, can you conceive of a different kind of God ... whose very image does not ask you to abandon reason or to suspend disbelief? How do you pray to a total unknown, a mystery? There is a way, a God that merges both religious faith and science, the God of creation and evolution.
Too often those who call themselves religious and those who value science are seen by mainstream America as being at opposite poles. Last fall, we heard and read in the news a great deal about the court case of the Dover School District in Pennsylvania. You might remember when the Dover School Committee voted that Intelligent Design was to be taught along with Darwin's theory as an alternative scientific theory. This was on the grounds that Darwin's theory was not proven and was open to question. The judge in the case wisely ruled Intelligent Design was not real science. It is not a theory which can be test in a scientific manner, but that it is merely a religious opinion.
Intelligent Design is really a religious viewpoint dressed up as science by Creationists, those folks who take the Biblical story of creation literally. You know, the story in Genesis that Heaven and Earth was created in six days about 5,000 years ago... not billions of years ago. Creationism has been soundly rejected by educated people. So the Creationists changed their tactics to say that the world was just too wonderful and complex to have been created by chance alone... that it was the result of some great Intelligent Designer. And that the Intelligent Design theory was incompatible with evolutionary science. They don't name the designer, but they mean, we can rest assured, the God of the Bible. The God who knows us personally and who controls all the details of our lives. The mighty micromanager of the world.
Many more progressive Christian and non-Christian clergy have come out in support of the decision of the judge in the Dover case. They object to the adversarial position taken by the religious extremists ... pitting religion against real science. Science and religion aren't enemies, they declare, but simply present different perspectives on the world and on truth. Over 10,000 clergy have signed on to the Clergy Letter Project, which says that science and religion remain two very different but complementary forms of truth.
The project's Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science, says:
"Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible - the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark - convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between the Creator and creation... Religious truth is a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts."
Many Unitarian Universalists, including myself, may disagree with the "timeless truths" of the Bible. We know that the men who wrote it were patriarchal and fallible, even if they felt divinely inspired, and that other, more egalitarian or universal views, have often been excluded from the sacred texts. But I agree with the letter that religion is about transforming hearts.
The letter goes on to say that there needs to be reconciliation between modern science and religion. And that Christian congregations should engage in open dialogues on the subject. I assume that we as Unitarian Universalists are already pretty enlightened about this and don't see any basic conflict between science and religion. But overall, I thought that, yes, the compatibility of science and religion ought to be a topic of discussion in many churches. In the end, I felt uncomfortable with the exclusively Christian language of the clergy letter since I don't identify myself as Christian. I couldn't, in all honesty, sign it but I support the other clergy who did.
Yet the question remains, if we don't in believe in the traditional biblical God, if we need to pray, to whom do we direct our prayers? Maybe you are like many other Unitarian Universalists. We are quick to say that we don't pray or that we're not praying to that old man with a long white beard in the heaven. Or to a man who was God incarnate, who came to Earth two thousand years ago, and who is still alive in heaven now.
As smart and capable as we are in many things, we are often awkward about praise and prayer and prefer the word "meditation." This is less threatening somehow, which is why I call the moment of silence in our service "a time for meditation and prayer." It's like saying "Take your choice. You may pray. But if you can't bring pray, then you can at least sit and quiet your mind, focusing on your breathing or on the flickering of a candle or the sounds in the room around you. Or you may think about the words of the prayer I just read and what it means to you.
And yet we feel a longing to relate to something greater than ourselves, something greater than all humanity, greater even than the whole world. We'd like to know we're not alone in the universe. And we'd like to feel that that universe possesses a general benevolence toward life... and maybe even to us individually. We want to believe that we as the human race would ultimately survive whatever tragedy is thrown our way ... even war or global warming. That the long arc of the universe bends toward justice and peace.
I, too, have longed to believe in a benevolent and loving God who made sense to me. And I have struggled, knowing that I might never reach whatever IT was, but knowing that part of my happiness depended on getting somewhere with the question. Where is the God I can embrace? And who can embrace me in my joy and my sorrow?
Some months ago, I came across a beautiful book, Prayers to an Evolutionary God. It's written by William Cleary, a former Catholic priest now married to a UU minister. (Although I don't know the details of his life, I love these kinds of stories.) The purpose of Cleary's work was to create prayers which fit in to a modern, sophisticated view of the world. These are prayers to the God of Charles Darwin, and of the process theologians who followed Darwin... like the French priest, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Unitarian Alfred North Whitehead.
This is a God who does not intervene in nature to create miracles. This is not a God who answers petitionary prayers or who promises us an afterlife in heaven if we just believe in Him. It is a God who may even not listen with a conscious mind to our words.
So now that we know who this God isn't, Cleary only give hints as to whom or what this evolutionary God is. It is the mysterious energy behind the Universe, the force which creates and destroys and creates again. It is what has caused life to emerge from rock, water and the energy of the Sun. It is what has caused life to evolve into ever more complex and sophisticated forms through chance mutations and natural selection. It created beings who need families and clans for survival. Think beyond human beings, but to other forms of life, even bees and ants. The need for cooperating social groups gave rise to accepted rules of social behavior.
This evolutionary God is what has created us human beings, with our consciousness and appreciation of the beauty and wonder of the entire creation. With our need to be loved and to love. With our evolved ideas of morality and justice. With our many unique capabilities: to create music and art, to do good and loving deeds, and to search for ultimate truths. It is a God who has not completed the creation, but who is still in the process of creating. And we are privileged to take part in this process.
As Cleary so eloquently puts it, "An evolutionary God is the one whose fingerprints and embraces and music we find in the evolutionary patterns in the unfinished world around us, the elusive mother and inventor of this ever-changing milieu. It is a God who pretends-for some purpose we do not comprehend-not even to exist, but whom we can reach out for and give thanks to, if we wish-as most of our race has done throughout its history." (ix-x)
Again, there is no compulsion to believe in this God either, because God is not something provable or disprovable by science. But there are meanings, values and purposes to be discovered quite aside from science. And a belief in something like God or at least a sense of something greater than our mere human selves seems to help. Science and religion address different, but complementary realms... although at the far end of scientific research, like quantum physics or astronomy, they seem to overlap. I'm struck by the sense of wonder for the mystery of creation that scientists like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Steven Hawkins hold.
William Cleary has given us, with his book, another gift. He has given us more than the abstract concepts of the God of evolution, gleaned from the writings of scientists, philosophers and process theologians. He has given us prayers by which we can address this God of many names, this Life Force, this Creator of the Universe.
Simply Pray is the book that our Sunday school is using this semester to learn how to pray. It is by the Rev. Erik Wikstrom, the pastor of the First Universalist Church in Yarmouth, Maine. Wikstrom makes the point that you can talk about prayer all you want, but it is not the same as experiencing it. It's much like trying to explain the feeling of being wet to someone who has never been in water. Nor can you talk about a meal to someone and give them the actual taste of the food. It is all too intellectual. The listener may have an abstract understanding, but he or she must experience something directly to fully and deeply know what you're talking about.
In fact, too clear an idea of God can be an obstacle. As an archbishop of Russian Orthodox Christian Church wrote, "the moment you try to focus on an imaginary god, or a god you can imagine, you are in great danger of placing an idol between yourself and the real God." In the matter of prayer, Wikstrom says, "If you long to connect with the Sacred, if you desire to live a life more in touch with the Holy, stop listening for something and start simply listening." This is to take the attitude of the child, open to the experience without preconceived notions.
So here is a prayer of listening I've selected from Cleary's collection:
"Creative presence, our God,
We would be-with your help-wiser than we are.
We would observe always what we glimpse occasionally:
The wisdom incarnate in all living things,
the harmonies and dissonances within cosmic symphony.
The moving, breathing world of creatures
alive and living around us
is full of astonishing feats of intelligence,
wonderful patterns and structures of cells and organs
that speak continually of your limitless divine life
and confidence in us,
confidence we will find the way
toward living perceptively.
Guide us on the way of faith-and wisdom. Amen"
After we have listened and sensed something of the sacred in our prayer, we may, like adolescents, begin to question. Questioning God itself is a form of prayer. Why, dear God, is the world the way it is? Why does pain and suffering and unfairness exist? Then as we mature into adulthood, we begin to realize that life is often ambiguous and the answers are not clear. Yet we still see beauty in the mystery. And although we might not understand it all, we pray for courage and hope in the face of the mysterious and incomprehensible. Then, as our faith matures further, we may gain a feeling of intimacy with the divine, to feel a deep gratitude for the wonders of creation and the small part we play in the entire scheme.
As Cleary describes it, "The purpose of this creation-if we harmonize with the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin and of process theologians since his time-is beauty, adventure, the challenge of soul-building, of connectedness discovered and created. Teilhard made it all wildly exciting for religious people by suggesting that it is religion that completes-not competes with evolution. Our evolutionary God is above all a God of desire and love, of every kind of love we know and of loves we cannot know, a God of colossal wisdom, inventiveness, and risk; a God utterly beyond us, within us, and ahead of us.
Cleary ends with the following prayer of gratitude:
I give thanks, Holy Mystery,
to have a part in this evolutionary phenomenon,
and to strive for communion with all life,
however diverse and bewildering,
to be alive and conscious
in the midst of an unfolding universe
whose existence stretches back
an almost unthinkable passage of time,
across an almost inconceivable ocean of space.
To know my own true name this day
is to recognize myself to be your creature, your child,
your very hope and promise,
and to pledge myself as faithfully as I can
to celebrate my part in this colossal drama
with passion and humility.
Amen.
William Cleary, Prayers to an Evolutionary God. Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2004.
Erik Walker Wikstrom, Simply Pray. Boston: Skinner House, 2005.