Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

Finding Walden

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

September 17, 2006

In her memoir Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen wrote this about flying with her friend Denis Fynch-Hatton, in the early days of aviation: “Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. ‘I see:’ I have thought, ‘This was the idea. And now I understand everything.’”

When I was a young teenager living in Hawaii, there was a back way we used to go from our suburban neighborhood across a meadow of seven-foot-high grass, through a dense forest and up onto the steep path to the top of Mount Olomana, a peak high enough to let you see the whole Windward side of the island of Oahu and a hundred and eighty degrees of horizon in the Pacific. The tropical forest ended on a shoulder of the mountain with a grove of tall long-needled pine trees, and in the constant trade winds they made a steady sighing noise. I always stayed there for a long time before I started the climb, lying on the pine-straw and listening. Everything felt right there. I thought of that sound as the mountain breathing. I can still hear it sometimes. It’s become the sound of entering holy ground for me.

Have you ever had that feeling—the feeling that you were catching a glimpse of the whole fabric of the Universe, a glimpse of your own place as a thread interwoven with uncountable others? Have you ever felt, just for an elusive moment, as Isak Dinesen says, “I see: This was the idea. And now I understand everything?”

Our STARS story today illustrates the first of the Sources of the Living Tradition named in the U.U.A’s Principles and Purposes: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” Take a moment to really think back, to consider your own experience. Has such a direct experience ever been part of your life? What was it like? What were you doing? Who else was there? Where did you go to enter the mysterious presence, the Source of all? Where were you when the mystery called to you?

There’s no single way a transcendent experience happens. You might be alone, or with thousands of other people. You might be out in nature, or building a storage shed in your backyard. You might be singing Handel’s Messiah, or teaching a political science class on revolutionary change, or looking at a string of equations on a blackboard that suddenly adds up to something new, or sitting on a front porch with a friend and a beer. And suddenly--or slowly, as it happened to Thoreau on his mountaintop—you become aware that you are in the Presence of something enormous, something that holds this moment along with every other, that holds the deepest truths you can imagine.

Leslie and I chose Henry David Thoreau’s story about his experience climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine to illustrate that first Source of Unitarian Universalism for several reasons. The children who’ll be in the STARS Studios for the next four weeks will spend some time exploring the story, so we wanted one that has historic significance in our movement; Thoreau and the Transcendentalists were very important influences in 19^th century Unitarianism. We also wanted a story that didn’t depend on the religious language of any particular culture or faith tradition, so that the children and studio leaders wouldn’t have to “translate” religious images, stories, or symbols before they could start thinking about the direct experience itself. We wanted to open the possibility that a “spiritual experience” doesn’t depend on a particular religious framework.

Thoreau’s experience on Katahdin echoes the stories and experiences Abraham Maslow writes about in his 1964 study Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. Maslow, a psychologist, found some common dimensions and characteristics that led him to argue that these experiences are not once-in-a-lifetime events, even though they are rare and powerful. They are very real, he decided, not hallucinations or imaginative flights of fancy, and not supernatural. And although such experiences are the foundation of almost every religion, they don’t always have an explicitly religious content or context.

Many of my own moments of transcendence have been musical. I remember standing in the tunnel that leads into Michigan State University’s stadium before a football game started, in my marching band uniform. The moment comes when the band takes the field for the pregame show, and there’s an incredible roar as the drums start up and everyone shouts and runs in place, and then almost three hundred musicians pour onto the field and race into position. Our feet slam down and there’s an instant of complete silence and then a gigantic chord begins a fanfare. I was completely transported by that event over and over again. I felt joyful and strong and ecstatic, caught up in a huge sense of anticipation and release. It was a combination of skill and planning and physical discipline and practice, and total abandonment to the moment. I didn’t play music in those moments—I was music.

That’s one moment I recall when I think about “direct experiences of transcending mystery and wonder.” Do you have a memory of that kind of moment? What would it mean to think of that moment as a spiritual experience, a moment of being awake to the deep reality of life?

It’s not easy to talk about this kind of experience. Once Thoreau began explaining his new insight that nature is not defined by human limits, or even necessarily friendly to humankind, he left the realm of experience and entered the realm of interpretation. In order to share a transcendent experience, we have to put it within a framework of meaning. But as soon as we do that, we lose the experience. Transcendent experiences aren’t transferable. I think about my musical moment with the marching band: If I took almost anyone in the room and transported you there somehow, at the end of it all you’d probably say something like “Wow, that was really. . . loud.” There’s no way to guarantee you’d have the same experience I did, and my description of it, let alone my explanation of why it was so moving for me, can’t really bring you into the experience itself.

What happened to Thoreau on Mount Katahdin was unexpected. The circumstances were arranged by chance—leaving his friends behind, the gathering of clouds on an otherwise sunny day, the stark wildness of the landscape. The experience itself was disorienting and out of keeping with his sense of himself. He was a big climber and bushwhacker, the kind of confident explorer who went up waterfalls and didn’t worry about leaving behind his companions on the side of a mountain without paths. He certainly didn’t expect to start feeling that the landscape was somehow hostile and unwelcoming to him. “Why did you come here? This land was never prepared for you. Isn’t it enough that I smile in the valleys?”

His reaction to that feeling is very important: He stays. I don’t know about you, but if I’m out in the woods and the environment starts to feel hostile, I’m not inclined to hang around to find out if I’m about to have a mystical experience or if I’m just having a premonition that a bear’s coming around the next bend. I’m out of there. Maslow says that “peak experiences” are almost always unexpected, and that fully entering into them requires us to suspend our impulses to cut the experience short, to run away, to regain control of the situation by trying to explain what’s going on within some familiar framework. We have to be willing to stay with it, to abandon our sense of safety, and to follow where our experience leads us.

That makes it hard to find space in our life for direct experiences of mystery and wonder. Our culture disapproves of risk, and leaves little room for abandon, for being totally immersed in the experience of the moment. Our moments are organized and regimented into disciplined increments, and in general we place a high value on control. We aren’t comfortable with things that are unexpected and overwhelming. That makes it hard to talk about them, too. Just a little while ago I asked you to remember and think a little about a transcendent experience you may have had. Now suppose I had asked you to turn and tell the person next to you about it. Would you have been comfortable? Even in the most positive context, it’s a little embarrassing to admit that we’ve had an experience that is overwhelming. We’re afraid it will seem trivial; we’re afraid it won’t be received respectfully; we’re afraid we won’t be able to talk about it coherently.

I think we need to try; I think we need to make room for mystery and wonder and transcendence in our lives. Our spirits can be drained by the rush and worry and hurt and demanding pleasures of living, and we need to be renewed. We need to find ways to feel the presence of the forces that create and sustain life. Yet there’s a paradox—if direct experiences of mystery and wonder are always unexpected, how can we seek them out?

Thoreau didn’t go to Maine in search of a transcendent experience. In fact, he was getting away from the place he had deliberately gone looking for transcendence, the pond at Walden and his self-made retreat there. He went to Maine to go on a hike—but what he found there was what he’d been looking for at Walden. From the distance of a hundred and fifty years or so, I can’t help but think that his time at Walden was preparation for what he found on Katahdin. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” he wrote later in Walden. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” At Katahdin, he found one part of what he sought, a sense of our proper place in nature. And he brought back more than an idea; the deeper questions he confronted on the mountain—Who are we? What are we? Where do we belong?—became a core theme of his work from then on. Living at Walden was Thoreau’s spiritual discipline, a necessary practice to open him up for that unexpected moment on the mountain.

If we want to have our own “mountaintop experiences,” we can’t just go looking for them directly. We need to find our own Walden—our spiritual discipline, our place of preparation where we can live deliberately, where we can learn to be open for that unexpected moment when the doors of life will fling open and give us a brief glimpse of our place in the fabric of the Universe. We need to practice staying with what’s risky or difficult or alarming, teaching ourselves that it’s all right to let go the rigidity of our self-control, all right to abandon ourselves to the moment. We need to open ourselves to the possibility that we will be transformed by what we find when we confront the forces that create and uphold life. We need to learn to let our spirits sing, in welcome and in recognition and in gratitude to the Source of life and of mystery and of wonder.