© Rev RexA E Hunt. MSc (Hons)
ANZUUA Service
19 June 2022
A Zoom Service and Address for Unitarian Churches/Fellowships in Australia and New Zealand by Rev Rex Hunt
THE SACRED ‘WONDEROSITY’ OF NATURE…
A supernova explodes in some far-flung corner of the universe.
Billions of years later, driving to work, your memories are recharged
listening to jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong performing What a Wonderful World.
(Music - Louis Armstrong. ‘What a Wonderful World’)
As I continue this reflection I want to offer a quotation
from one of my mentors, Bernard Eugene Meland.
He wrote it in 1931 just home from post graduate studies in Germany
and still formulating his ‘mystical naturalism’.
Subsequently, it has helped shaped much of my thinking and living religiously
within a naturalistic framework.
The quotation:
“Have you ever communed in the first person
with this total wealth of living life about you?
Have you ever stood with awe and wonder
before the unbounded totality of all reality —
this ongoing process we call the universe,
feeling your own intimacy with all its life,
thrilling with the realisation of the magnitude of that relationship,
relating you to all the world’s life, past, present and future?
If you have, you have experienced first-hand religion.”
(Meland 1931:665. Also Meland 1934:234)
Meland was a breath of fresh air to this then theological student 55 years ago.
Because Meland inspired, and later others[1] suggested…
There is no good reason to believe that taking nature to heart
leaves me or others with any fewer spiritual benefits
than taking to heart the teachings of supernaturalist traditions.
If we can go to special places, built by humans, which are designated as sacred,
surely we can go to special places, shaped naturally,
which are recognised as sacred.
Now all of that was an ‘aha’ moment for me! So what am I on about?
Briefly put, there is a new ‘old’ kid on the progressive spirituality block.
It’s called Religious Naturalism, described as the ‘forgotten alternative’.
It has a long pedigree, stretching from Pre-Socratic philosophers
into Christian medieval times, through to today
where it has been preserved primarily within the academy
and small pockets of Unitarian spirituality.
Echoing cell biologist Ursula Goodenough at the 2021 IRAS[2] Conference,
“A religious naturalist takes nature to mind and also takes nature to heart — seeking, and finding, deep resources in these understandings for spiritual (inward)
and moral (outward) orientation,
including an ecomoral orientation.”
Religious naturalism is simultaneously a religious and a naturalistic way
“of understanding and being oriented morally within the world”.
(Hogue 2010:37)
It has two central aspects.
(i) Naturalist views, grounded in science,
provide a framework for understanding what seems real.
These include the grand story or ‘drumbeat’—the epic of evolution—
that explains the origins of the cosmos and humans,
with perspectives from which to consider why we do what we do.
And where the metaphor of ‘web’ is used to describe this interrelatedness.
For instance:
Everyone participating in this gathering
shares about 35% of his/her/their genes with a yeast cell.
And 60% with a banana, 85% with a mouse,
and 96% with a chimpanzee.
We are all one big astonishing family.
“For just as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a galaxy, and an orchid is the universe in the form of a flower,
we are the universe in the form of a human.
And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky
and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe,
we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.”
(Thomas Berry)
(ii) Religious orientation includes spiritual responses,
which can include feelings of appreciation, gratitude, humility, reverence, and joy
at the wonder of being alive.
It also includes moral responses, involving values rooted in nature
— to seek justice and cooperation among social groups
and balance in ecosystems.
Wonderosity[3] and awe when contemplating the immense scale of
matter, space, and time, is surely appropriate once we realise
we belong to something so very far beyond us.
Such naturalistic wonder and awe counts as deeply spiritual.
In short: Religious Naturalism, or as Meland called it, ‘mystical naturalism’
features a blending of world-views and ideas
that explores trackless places and experiences
which are different from most traditional expressions of religion.
Deep attunement. Deep knowledge.
Honouring nature all the way down.
So as a Religious Naturalist, I want to claim:
Nature and naturalism are for us today ‘the main game’.
Indeed, the ecological crisis has brought ‘nature’ to the foreground.
But where to start personally?
Start with your own life.
With the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
that are converting energy to make protein right now
so you can hear these words and see other colleagues.
Or… if you want to know where the environment is, just feel yourself.
The skin is not a wall around us.
The skin, the lungs, the digestive tract are permeable membranes
designed to let the environment in.
We ignore the environment at our peril.
Or… it may be one thing to know the most common component of sand
is silicon dioxide in the form of quartz.
It’s another, to walk along Takapuna Beach (NZ) [Taw-kaw-poo-nuh] near sunset,
with the sand squelching between your toes
as waves dance around your ankles!
Or… spend autumn — the season of beauty and decline — in Canberra (AUS),
amid all the coloured maple leaves, fitting of an artist’s palette.
Nature scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring…
Yet spoiled by the awareness that every year autumn
is becoming more silent! Death amidst life!
Or… take a three year old child (maybe your grand-daughter or grandson)
for a walk along a wetlands track. Don’t plan to be in a hurry.
Every twig. Every muddy pool of water.
Every duck or small lizard to cross your path.
Every dragon-fly will be an occasion
for closer ‘looking’ and ‘excitement’ and ‘wonder’.
The miracle of each moment awaits our sensual wonder.
Hosannah! Not in the highest, but right here. Right now. This.[4]
Horizontal transcendence.
Natural not supernatural.
An experience animated by a sense of wonder, belonging, and relatedness.
A Newer Testament.
The gospel of the natural present moment.
Allow yourself to be shaped by this creativity. This wonder.
Webs of culture, life, and cosmos.
Together they are expressions of how we experience the world.
To be alive is to experience.
We have no inner spiritual development without outer experience, writes Thomas Berry.
“When we see a flower, a butterfly, a tree,
when we feel the evening breeze flow over us
or wade in a steam of clear water,
our natural response is immediate, intuitive, transforming ecstatic.”[5]
The sacred is not a separate ‘supernatural’ sphere of life,
driven by blinding-light revelations.
The sacred is that which evokes the depths of wonder.
In a time of ecological vulnerability and dislocation of the social fabric,
contemporary Religious Naturalism’s conceptions of and attitudes toward nature and religiosity have much to commend it.
Especially its willingness to entertain radically new approaches,
as it engages with some of the most pressing religious and moral issues
at the core of the ecological crisis.
And to move beyond traditional religious language
that has become brittle and lifeless.
Because…
“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 is available now.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, 1996:367)
The chief mark of ‘religion’,
according to philosopher William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966),
is not unity but fertility.
Religion is the ‘mother’ of all the great cultural interests of human life.
But it lives only while we are making it up.
While our imaginations and creative juices are firing
and we are generating — crafting —
new angles, new narratives, new metaphors
within the particular context of the moment
because these things are liberating.
Thus the task of religious faith and the purpose of religious life today
is to re-read what is going on in the world.
“[T]o re-connect to those purposes and values that,
in our best collective judgment, through the critical examination of faith,
will most truly and effectively inform our negotiations
f what’s going on in the pivotal twilight
between the religious moral present and future.”
(Hogue 2010: 227)
Is nature enough?
Nature does not provide for complete and final fulfilment
of our deepest desires and longings.
Neither does it promise perks like eternal life nor an interventionist deity!
But it is all we have, and it will have to do…
Plus gather people prepared to interfere
with the ongoing destruction of ‘earth mother’.
Bibliography:
Goodenough, U. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998
Hanh, Thich Nhat. “Present Moment Wonderful Moment” in E. Roberts & E. Amidon. Life Prayers from Around the World. 365 Prayers, Blessings, and Affirmations to Celebrate the Human Journey. New York. HarperCollins, 1996
Hogue, M. S. “Religion Without God: The Way of Religious Naturalism” in The Fourth R 27, 3, (May-June 2014), 3-6, 15-16
————, The Promise of Religious Naturalism. Maryland. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010
Meland, B. E. “The Worship Mood” in Religious Education 26, 8, (October 1931), 661-665
————, Modern Man’s Worship. A Search for Reality in Religion. New York. Harper & Bros., 1934
Sagan, C. The Varieties of Scientific Experience. A Personal View of the Search for God. (Ed). Ann Druyan. New York. Penguin, 2006
Sanguin, B. Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of The Cosmos. An Ecological Christianity. Kelowna. Copper House/Wood Lake Publishing, 2007
Stone, J. A. Sacred Nature. The Environmental Potential of Religious Naturalism. New York. Routledge, 2017
[1] The formulation of words following was shaped by Jerome A Stone [2] Institute on Religion in an Age of Science [3] Sam Keen invented the word ‘wonderosity - combining both ‘wonder’ with ‘curiosity’ [4] Goodenough. The Sacred Depths…, 169 [5] Berry. ‘Forward’ in (ed). Kathleen Deignan, When the Trees Say Nothing. Thomas Merton. Writings on Nature.
ORDER OF SERVICE: ANZUUA ZOOM SERVICE
ORDER OF SERVICE
1.00pm AEST. Sunday 19 June 2022
Theme:
“Wonderosity of Nature”
Gathering Music
Welcome by First Peoples
Led by Rev Clay Nelson (NZ)
Opening Words
Led by Rev Rex Hunt (Aus)
I also wish to acknowledge the First Peoples, past, present, emerging,
and their stewardship of the Darkinjung Country on which I now live,
And I recognise and give thanks that we are creatures of the Earth
living in the ecosystem—flowers, trees and insects;
land, waters and mountain range—
that is unique to this part of Australia.
May we honour one another and honour life itself.
(Pause)
As surely as we belong to the universe, we belong together.
We gather here via the technology of Zoom
to transcend the isolated self.
To reconnect,
To know ourselves to be at home,
Here on earth, under the stars,
Linked with each other.
Thus let us celebrate the richness and diversity of life.
Lighting of Chalice/Candle
Those who are able, I invite you to light a chalice/candle
in recognition of the energy that allows life to occur:
The energy of atomic fusion
The energy of photosynthesis
The energy of primitive metabolisms, still active in our cells today.
The energy of campfires, labour, and growth.
And, the energy of our communities. (Adapt.JCH, public domain)
Joys and Concerns
We are people of all ages who share this safe time together
and who bring our joys and celebrations, our griefs and concerns.
Sharing
Song “When I Rise” (World/UUA Choirs)
Reading
“The Pulse of Earth” Connie Gibbons (Melbourne UU)
By Norman Habel. Rainbow of Mysteries/112-113
In my mind
I now know that Earth is alive
pulsing
deep within the core
and across the crust,
a vibrating mass of living matter.
But how do I feel the pulse of Earth?
Can I put my finger on throbbing extremities,
or connect with the life Forces
and hidden impulses
that permeate this planet?
If I hold a wild flower in my fingers,
place my hands on the trunk of a tree,
touch the beak of a pelican
or grasp a silver eel,
will I feel the pulse of Earth?
The impulses to live,
to sing,
to express wonder,
are in every throbbing cell of our planet.
Finally
I begin to feel the pulse of Earth
with my hands in the air
my feet in the ground
my spirit embracing
the throb of life
in every murmur
of mystery.
Address
‘THE SACRED ‘WONDEROSITY’ OF NATURE…’
A supernova explodes in some far-flung corner of the universe.
Billions of years later, driving to work, your memories are recharged
listening to jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong performing What a Wonderful World.
Song ‘What a Wonderful World’ (Louis Armstrong)
As I continue this reflection I want to offer a quotation
from one of my mentors, Bernard Eugene Meland… (more)
Open Discussion/Reflection
Extinguishing of Chalice/Candle
For those who have done so
I invite you to now extinguish your chalice/candle, symbol of our Gathering…
Candle is extinguished
Parting Words
May you know fully and deeply the blessings of each of your heart's seasons
The inward turning of winter
Springtime's lush renewal
The effortless, steady growth of summer
And autumn's rich harvest
May your passage from season to season be blessed—
Eased by hands to hold, and by the light of love
to guide you on. (Andrew Pakula)
Closing Song “Blue Boat Home” (Peter Mayer)