Words for Contemplation, Reflection, or Meditation
As a church, we subscribe to Soul Matters (independently owned UU business) and we receive monthly religious education, small group, and worship packets. The worship packets help us to plan service topics, suggest music, and provide stories for all ages. More often than not, there’s so much good material that we can’t possibly use it all. Mystery is such a great theme, that this is one of those months that there’s an abundance of inspiring material. So, I thought I’d share some of the quotes, excerpts, and poetry with you today. Take your time with the material and maybe just read and reflect on one passage each day or so. See how it shows up in your life! And if you like this sort of thing, consider joining a small group!
On Letting the Mystery Be
Quote – Richard Feynman
I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask, “Why are we here?” I might think about it a little bit, and if I can’t figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose – which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell.
Quote – Gilda Radner
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
On Mystery’s Call to Humility
Excerpt from a sermon entitled On the Way, Luke Stevens Royer
My prayer is that… we focus on what this church means to us in the positive rather than how it is better than, different than, more evolved than, more intelligent than, more educated than, more justice-seeking than, someone else’s faith, creed, hopes, or dreams… to remember we don’t have all the answers, that our openness to mystery and questions doesn’t become an absolutism of rejection
of any tradition that offers something different; and that we don’t assume we are the only ones who are open, loving, have questions, love mystery, or have different ideas about religion and faith and God and love and humanity…
Quote – Rev. Kathy Tew Rickey
There is no more important time for us as UU’s to examine how we value, perhaps over-value knowledge. Unitarians have a longstanding expectation of “learned” clergy. We boast of being a faith of reason in which you don’t have to check science at the sanctuary door. While our non-dualistic faith is what attracts people like you and me to Unitarian Universalism, we might also accept that the Truth and Meaning we are called to seek can be ascertained not only by knowledge and reason, but also through the heart, the soul, through deepest contemplation, or highest conscience. In letting in the Mystery, in being comfortable with not knowing, in embracing the ineffable, we must take our minds down from their pedestal and inhabit the rest of our body every now and then. Try taking a deep bow or engage a Downward Dog pose – get the head below the heart which is the first step toward humility.
Quote – Chet Raymo
I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery. Let this then, be the ground of my faith: All that we know, now and forever, all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or ever will have, is as an island in the sea. Still the mystery surrounds us.
Quote – Pico Iyer
Knowledge is a priceless gift. But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance. Thinking that you know your lover or your enemy can be more treacherous than acknowledging you’ll never know them. Every morning in Japan, as the sun is flooding into our little apartment, I take great pains not to consult the weather forecast, because if I do, my mind will be overclouded, distracted, even when the day is bright… In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know.
Poem – Mary Oliver
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
by Mary Oliver
On Mystery & Mysticism
Quote – Lilly Tomlin as “Trudy the Bag Lady”
On the way to the play we stopped to look at the stars. And as usual I felt in awe. And then I felt even deeper in awe at this capacity we have to be in awe about something. Then I became even more awestruck at the thought that I was, in some small way, a part of that which I was in awe about. And this feeling went on and on. My space chums got a word for it: ‘awe infinitum.’ ‘Cause at the moment you are most in awe of all you don’t understand, you’re closer to understanding it all then at any other time. And I felt so good inside, my heart felt so full, I decided to set time aside each day to do ‘awe-robics’.”
Quote – Herman Hesse
Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far-off farm,
I hold still and listen a long time.
My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, were my brothers and sisters.
My soul turns into a tree…
On the Mystery of the Person in Front of Us
Quote – David Rynick
In a true encounter with another human being, we come face to face with the mystery of life. In some way, every other person, no matter how well we know them, will remain as mysterious to us as a country across the ocean we only read about in books… whenever we encounter another human being with respect for this essential unknown, we create the possibility for something genuinely new to emerge. In every interaction, whether it is with a stranger or our longtime partner, we can be surprised by what we have not yet seen or even imagined.
Quote – Cole Arthur Riley
To be able to marvel at the face of our neighbor with the same awe we have for the mountain top, the sunlight refracting. This manner of vision is what will keep us from destroying each other
Links to other inspirations:
TED Talk – The Beauty of What We Will Never Know, Pico Iyer
“The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn’t always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility. And in my life, I’ve found it’s the things I don’t know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards, much more than the things I do know….”
Book – In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology, Gordon Kaufman https://www.amazon.com/Face-Mystery-Constructive-Theology/dp/0674445767/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1531262009&sr=8-1&keywords=in+the+face+of+mystery+by+Gordon+Kaufman
“Kaufman is also a kind of mystic. The matters with which theology deals—the purpose of human existence, the nature of ultimate reality, etc.—are unknowable mysteries. Accordingly, all of the things humans have said about such matters over the millennia are just that: human. Theology is and always has been the effort of finite human beings to find orientation and construct meaning in face of the mystery of life.
“My piety toward the mystery qua mystery compels me to acknowledge that when we [theologize] we come up against the very limits of our language and our minds, we really do not know what we are saying” (IFM, xii). The failure to fess up to our agnosticism is tantamount to idolatry.”
“The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn’t always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility. And in my life, I’ve found it’s the things I don’t know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards, much more than the things I do know….”
Book – In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology, Gordon Kaufman https://www.amazon.com/Face-Mystery-Constructive-Theology/dp/0674445767/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1531262009&sr=8-1&keywords=in+the+face+of+mystery+by+Gordon+Kaufman
“Kaufman is also a kind of mystic. The matters with which theology deals—the purpose of human existence, the nature of ultimate reality, etc.—are unknowable mysteries. Accordingly, all of the things humans have said about such matters over the millennia are just that: human. Theology is and always has been the effort of finite human beings to find orientation and construct meaning in face of the mystery of life.
“My piety toward the mystery qua mystery compels me to acknowledge that when we [theologize] we come up against the very limits of our language and our minds, we really do not know what we are saying” (IFM, xii). The failure to fess up to our agnosticism is tantamount to idolatry.”