My Way Or the High Way

MY WAY OR THE HIGH WAY

A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan

University Public Worship

Stanford Memorial Church

March 7, 2010

God exclaims in this morning's reading from Isaiah:[i] "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways." So, my way, as a human being, is portrayed as the low road, and God's way as the high way. There's either my way, which likely won't get me very far, or God's way, which I'm told will lead to eating and drinking what is good and to living well. My way or the high way, and the high way is far to be preferred.

How can we even begin to understand and follow God's way, though, if God insists that "my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways." One traditional possibility, pursued in all religions, and the one I want to talk about this morning, is to listen to our mystics. For they are the ones who report direct experiences of God, who say they've seen God face to face, who have heard and felt his presence all around them and within them, who know the most about the high way. The biblical scholar Marcus Borg speaks of Jesus as a mystic. For Jesus, God was an experiential reality. Jesus was one of those people for whom, as William James put it, God was "a firsthand religious experience rather than a secondhand belief."[ii] Matthew, Mark and Luke's gospels all report that when Jesus was baptized by John, the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of God descended upon him like a dove.[iii] Then he went out into the wilderness on a kind of vision quest for forty days, during which he was led by the Spirit.[iv] He fasted and had what we might call now call hallucinatory experiences -- demonic as well as divine. There were many times in Jesus' life when he felt the Spirit of God upon him.[v] He healed through the power of God's Spirit, he taught with the authority of the Spirit, and he was accused by his enemies of being in league with an evil spirit."[vi]

Of course there have been many others in the history of religion who've been considered mystics. Take the Buddha, for example, and the bodhisattvas who have followed him. Both the historical Buddha and a bodhisattva named Siddhartha appear in Herman Hesse's novel with that title. Siddhartha's Self by the end of the book has merged into unity with the universe: "There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things."[vii] Siddhartha remains in his worldly occupation as a ferryman, literally taking people back and forth across a river on his boat, but also helping to ferry those interested to full mystical awareness, as he does with his friend Govinda.

In his comprehensive text on mysticism, which he sees to be at the root of all religions,[viii] F.C. Happold expresses this phenomenon as an apprehension of “the temporal in the eternal and the eternal in the temporal” which occurs both in feeling and in thought.[ix] It’s an understanding that there’s a “Divine Ground in which all partial realities have their being.”[x] Happold also speaks of a spiritual dimension within each of us, or spark of the Divine, which can be consciously reunited with the Divine ground of being through mystical awareness. That can take place in a variety of ways – often through contemplation or meditation.[xi]

Even an atheist like Sam Harris writes generously of mystical experience as revealing “a far deeper connection between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity.”[xii] He doesn't define mysticism as God-consciousness, of course, but he explains that "At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one's experience of the world radically transformed... [There is] a form of well-being that is intrinsic to consciousness in every present moment."[xiii] He describes the change in consciousness that Jesus experienced "after forty days and forty nights in the desert," or that others experience "after twenty years in a cave," or that can be brought on simply when "some new serotonin agonist has been delivered to your synapses."

Mysticism for Harris has a long history in "our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants."[xiv] But it can't all be dismissed as simply a matter of brain chemistry, because there are also behavioral, ethical, and political dimensions of how mysticism get created, played out, and later described.[xv] Mysticism, as Harris explains, is always "amenable to inter-subjective consensus, and [to] refutation."[xvi]

I had two personal experiences during my late teens which I later came to call "mystical." One occurred the summer before my freshman year in college when I almost fell a couple of hundred feet to my death in the Grand Teton mountains of Wyoming. The other happened one night on a beach in Florida during a freshman year vacation. In the first case, I became hyper alert, and all of my sense perceptions were heightened well beyond anything I had ever experienced – feeling my heart beating, every breath in and out, each muscle tightening and loosening. I sailed through a huge range of emotions, and saw more brilliant colors than I’d ever imagined. In the second case, I felt I’d merged with the wind and waves and light of the moon. Everything, including me, throbbed with connection and pulsated with the same rhythm.[xvii] Both of these experiences undoubtedly had biochemical bases -- aided no doubt by adrenalin in the first case and alcohol in the second -- but they've also had lifelong impact as they've given me broader understanding of the expanse of consciousness,affected the way I think about the world, become part of my personal narrative, and been related to others' experiences as related in poetry, art, literature, and drama.

By the second semester of my freshman year in college, I’d become interested in the human phenomenon of mysticism. I come upon a book by Aldous Huxley called The Doors of Perception. First published in 1954, the book discusses Huxley’s claim that identifiable biochemical changes in the brain produce the state of mind that has long been called mystical awareness. Huxley’s book title is taken from these lines of the English visionary artist and poet, William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through' narrow chinks of his cavern." Huxley explains that religious mystics have long used methodsto alter their brain chemistry and thereby cleanse the doors of perception, like fasting, sensory deprivation, yogic breathing exercises, prolonged chanting, shouting or singing. He predicts that it will not be long until mystical experiences can be stimulated simply “by touching certain areas of the brain with a very fine electrode.”[xviii]

But Huxley refutes those who would say that mysticism, which he feels lies at the root of all religions, is merely a matter of biochemistry operating in specific locations of the human brain? For all of our experiences are chemically conditioned: As he puts it, “[I]f we imagine that some of them are purely ‘spiritual,’ purely ‘intellectual,’ purely ‘aesthetic,’ it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.”[xix] The logical, rational thinking of scientists and philosophers is just as chemically conditioned as the mystical experiences of religious people.

I may sound as if I'm getting a long way from our Bible lessons for the day and from what will be helpful to you, as parishioners here in Memorial Church, as you face exams and term papers, go to work, live in the time of the Great Recession, and just try to keep your head above water. I have two specific suggestions for you to consider in this Lenten season: meditation and appreciation of nature during the "lengthening of days" -- the etymological meaning of the word "Lent."[xx] These are methods to go beyond "my way" in search of the higher way.[xxi]

The Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh has written a clear introduction to mediation in his book Miracle of Mindfulness. He asks us to sit in a comfortable position for as little as twenty minutes a day. Keep your back straight -- try it right now. Keep your head and neck aligned with your spinal column. Focus your eyes a yard or two in front of you. Relax your muscles, starting with worry-tightened muscles in your face: "Let all the muscles in your hands, fingers, arms and legs relax. Let go of everything. Be like the waterplants which flow with the current, while beneath the surface of the water the riverbed remains motionless. Hold on to nothing but your breath..."[xxii]

One way of focusing on your breath in mediation is simply to count "one" in your mind as you breathe in, and then count "one" again as you breathe out. Then count "two" as you breathe in; count "two" as you breathe out. Continue up to ten, and then start over again at one. If thoughts and feelings arise during mediation, you should try neither to get lost in them nor to chase them away. You should acknowledge their presence without becoming attached to them. For example, you may think, "It's late and the neighbors are really making a lot of noise," or "I'm feeling sad." The ideal is simply to say to yourself, "I'm thinking about my neighbors now," or "A feeling of sadness has just arisen in me," and then return to your breath."[xxiii] Meditation as a higher way will give you an overall sense of peace and well being, according to this Buddhist monk. By learning how to follow your breath, you can be more present to simple, everyday actions like eating an orange, washing the dishes, or going about your work. The more mindful you become, the more of a sense of wholeness you will experience.

Another higher way is appreciation of nature. What better place to be able to do that than here in California? The founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, mystically communed with God in the high country of this state. He wrote: "I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in "creation's dawn." The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day."[xxiv] He claimed that "In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness."[xxv]"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings," he taught. "Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail."[xxvi]

I got some sense of what Muir meant when I taught at Tufts University's European Center in the French Alps for several summers in the 1990's. There is a walled garden behind the Center overlooking the cleanest lake in Europe, Lake Annecy. The lake is rimmed with mountains, some of which retain snow on their peaks well into June. I invited interested students, faculty and staff to join me to sit outside in the garden in silence before classes began each day. The vista beyond one wall was of a great spreading tree to the left, plunging cliffs to the right, the blue-green lake ahead, two razor-backed mountains beyond, and a palatial sky overhead. With the changing weather, the tableau kept shifting its elements and emphases like a kaleidoscope.

Rays of sun slanted over another wall to warm our backs on some days, and other days we bundled against the early chill or hooded ourselves in a gentle mist. Even on rainy days, when we had to sit insidenext to the open windows, the birds outside serenaded us, the sweet, fresh smell of flowers drifted in on the breeze, and we were enthralled. In the last five minutes of fifteen each day, I would break the silence to ask if anyone had a favorite poem to read, and it usually would be from nature literature: Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Annie Dillard, e.e. cummings, William Wordsworth, Denise Levertov. There were also offerings from the Muslim poet Rumi, prayers of St. Francis of Assisi, scripture from the Hebrew Bible and the Hindu Vedas, sayings of the Buddhist lamas, and Native American voices. We felt we had some access to what the mystics experienced on many of those early mornings in the Alps.[xxvii]

That kind of nature consciousness is available here virtually everyday on the Stanford campus, walking up to the dish in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. In the words of the Stanford Hymn:

Where the rolling foothills rise

Up towards mountains higher,

Where at eve the Coast Range lies,

In the sunset fire,

Flushing deep and paling;

Here we raise our voices, hailing

Thee, our Alma Mater

Jesus tells a parable of a gardener in a vineyard in this morning's gospel reading.[xxviii] The owner had found that his fig tree hadn't been bearing fruit for three years and wanted it cut down. But the gardener asked for another year to tend the fig tree, with the expectation that it would indeed bear fruit with careful attention. May we pay attention in our own lives -- in particular to our own breath of life and to the glory of nature that surrounds us -- so that we may get on the high way toward God, toward a personal experience of the foundational energy of the universe. May the Holy Spirit make a dwelling in each of us, giving us strengthso that we might live fully in its glory. AMEN.

BENEDICTION

(The closing words are those of Ralph Waldo Emerson:)

"Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought;

That the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature

are in our own minds.

Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence,

The universal beauty, to which every part and particle

is equally related, the eternal One.[xxix] AMEN.
NOTES

1

[i]Isaiah 55: 1-9.

[ii]Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), p. 60.

[iii] Matthew 3: 16; Mark 1: 9-10; Luke 3: 21-22.

[iv] Matthew 4: 1; Luke 4: 1; in Mark 1:12 it is reported that "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness."

[v] Luke 4: 16-21,

[vi] Borg and Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, p. 63.

[vii] Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (New York: New Directions, 1951), p. 111.

[viii] F.C. Happold, Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 16.

[ix] Happold, Mysticism, p. 19.

[x] Happold, Mysticism, p. 20.

[xi] Happold, Mysticism, p. 20.

[xii] Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), p. 40.

[xiii] Harris, End of Faith, p. 204.

[xiv] Harris, End of Faith, p. 210.

[xv] Harris, End of Faith, p. 226.

[xvi] Harris, End of Faith, p. 220.

[xvii] Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), pp. 64, 207-209.

[xviii] Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), p. 121.

[xix] Huxley, Heaven and Hell, pp. 127-128.

[xx] T.F. Hoad, "Lent," The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1996), Encyclopedia.com. 6 Mar. 2010 (

[xxi] What follows in the next two paragraphs is from Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), p. 143.

[xxii] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), p. 35.

[xxiii] Hanh, Miracle. pp. 21, 38.

[xxiv] John Muir, "Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon", Overland Monthly (August, 1873); republished in John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979).

[xxv]John Muir,Alaska Fragment (1890).

[xxvi]John Muir,Our National Parks (1901).

[xxvii] McLennan, Finding Your Religion, pp. 156-157.

[xxviii] Luke 13: 1-9.

[xxix] Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Oversoul," in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), #531.