Sermon: Halloween Unmasked

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If an alien came down to earth at Halloween time, it would probably be really confused. Halloween is such a strange holiday. Not typical of earthling holidays. Most holidays are fun happenings about happy things, like a new year or giving thanks or the birth of someone really awesome. Halloween is also a fun holiday, but it’s about death. People put fake coffins on their front stoops, kids run around wearing plastic butcher knives and ketchup blood and decorate their lockers with ghosts and skeletons. 

 

The confused alien would look at all this say, “I’m confused. I thought humans like to avoid death, avoid scary things, avoid pain, and avoid things they don’t know about.”

 

And we would explain, well, you see we are avoiding it. That’s kind of the point, see. It’s a holiday about death, but we make death “cute.” We make death funny. We make light of it and people run around dressed like vampires and ghosts and we watch the Exorcist and we pretend we’re possessed so that we can reassure each other that these things are not real. Of course it’s all fun and games until someone loses a loved one, as we have here this weekend, or receives a terrifying diagnosis. Then it’s not so funny and not so easy to avoid.

 

And the alien would say, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Do earthlings really think that the only reality is what they see around them? You earthlings have only five senses and one brain at most. Surely you must know that this is woefully inadequate to compute all the realities.”

 

Of course the alien would be right. We only have five senses and one brain at most and that is just not enough to compute all the realities that are out there. Our senses and our reason evolved, if you believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution, as part of a cocktail of features that would enable us to eat, avoid being eaten, and mate. Any additional senses that didn’t help us accomplish those things might or might not have gotten passed along. Any senses that interfered in any way with accomplishing those things would have hit an evolutionary dead end.

 

But of course whatever those additional senses would have perceived would still be there, we just wouldn’t be perceiving them. Animals who spend their lives underground or in the dark at the bottom of the ocean often can’t see. It’s not that there’s no visual information to be had, it’s just that the information isn’t relevant to their survival. Other animals can’t hear. Plants can’t see or hear. And that doesn’t mean that there is nothing seeable or hearable, but just that they get along fine without knowing about it.

 

So how arrogant it would be to assume that our human senses capture all of reality. That unlike our compatriots in the animal and plant worlds, our senses just happen to be exhaustive in their reach. Seems really unlikely to me. It seems much more likely that, just like everyone else, we perceive the portion of reality that’s relevant to our survival. (This is true in our social interactions as well, but that’s a topic for another sermon.)

 

Of course there are other realities or other dimensions. And of course we sometimes catch a glimpse of them. I think a lot of us catch glimpses of them, but we’re not supposed to talk about it. At least not in polite, liberal, rational, intellectual society. The closest we can get is make jokes about it at Halloween.

 

We love to “explain away” all that stuff — visions, voices, premonitions, visits from the beyond, deja vu, strange coincidences, near-death visions, white light out of body experiences, spiritual flashes, ghosts mysticism. We dismiss it all as childhood fantasy — the domain of new-age nutcases having flashbacks in California. Disillusionment with such things is seen as a rite of passage.

 

But the fact is that these things are not just New Age and not just for kids. They are part of every religious tradition and Unitarian Universalism is no exception. Much of the wisdom and knowledge that has been passed down to us through our traditions in the form of teachings and texts originated in someone’s direct experience of that knowledge of other dimensions or truths, one way or another. A direct, visceral experience of knowledge. So not an intellectual transmission of information, but something that happened to that person that radically changed his or her understanding of reality.

 

And then usually as that person takes this radical experience and tries to talk about it and write about it, something gets lost in translation and what we receive centuries or millennia later is a very watered-down, tame, flat version of it. There’s a little mini-teaching about this that I love – that one day a tiger came into the sanctuary, roaring, eyes flashing, tail whipping around. Three weeks later, he was part of the liturgy.

 

Some of the ancient Israelite prophets had “experiences of knowledge” that were so literal it was almost a joke. Ezekiel, for example, is made to eat a scroll with words on it. He literally ingests knowledge. God speaks to him: “‘Mortal, heed what I speak to you. Do not be rebellious. Open your mouth and eat what I am giving you.’ As I looked there was a hand stretched out to me, holding a written scroll. He unrolled it before me, and it was inscribed on both the front and the back. He said to me, ‘Mortal, feed your stomach and fill your belly with this scroll that I give you.’ I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey to me.”

 

Unitarian-Universalists today often sense that we are refugees from exactly this type of hogwash. We’ve escaped from the oppressive, murky, supernatural swampiness of religion to the pure, clear, light of reason and clean thinking. It’s like we’re here, in this room, almost like it’s a boat. The world outside is drowning in the flood of superstitious insanity, but we’re here all dry and comfortable and warm and safe. We are safe now. We’ve bailed all the water out of the boat. We’ve successfully escaped and dried off. Right? But unfortunately, it’s not so simple. Because for a long time now we’ve been secretly stealing out for midnight dips in the ocean when no one is looking. Our tradition itself originated in that same water. It originated, in part, in some guy’s out of body, post-death experience, from which he returned to this reality and preached about it. For real. I’ve mentioned him before.

 

It was the 1700’s and this minister named George de Benneville tells of leaving his body and having a powerful vision that convinced him of universal salvation – the idea that everyone is saved, saints and sinners alike. He was very sick, near death, and he writes:

I felt myself die by degrees. Exactly at midnight my soul was separated from my body and I saw the people occupied in washing it, according to the custom of the country. Immediately I was drawn upward as in a cloud, and arrived at a place which appeared like a level plain, so extensive that my sight was unable to reach its limits, filled with many kinds of delightful fruit-trees, sending forth such fragrant odors that the air was filled with incense. In this place I found that I had two guardians, one at my right hand, one at my left, beautiful beyond expression. They had wings and resembled angels, having shining bodies and white garments. He at my right hand came before me and said, “My dear soul, take courage: the most holy Trinity hath favored you to be comforted with an everlasting and universal consolation – that he will restore all his creatures, without exception, to eternal salvation.”

 

So with this vision, de Benneville became a Universalist, helped to found the movement, and so here we are today. He had an experience of life after death. People simply have these kinds of experiences and they always have! Even UUs! Even us in this room. When I talk with people about this stuff, half or more have had some experience or other that was somehow magical, ineffable, inexplicable, supernatural even. They all say, “Well, I don’t usually talk about this, but…”  Or, “Don’t think I’m crazy, but…” Or , “I know I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks this, but…” Or, “This probably doesn’t mean anything but…” And then they proceed to tell me some extraordinary story.

 

I’m starting to think that mystical experiences, whether as simple as a premonition or as dramatic as deBenneville’s are much more common than we usually imagine. It seems that there are plenty of perfectly normal, relatively sane, intelligent, functional adults who have mystical experiences. And this can actually be useful on the spiritual quest. De Benneville had an experience of knowledge, Ezekiel had an experience of knowledge. These experiences can be more than just curiosities or trippy movies playing in our heads. I believe they can actually teach us about the world we live in, teach us things that we don’t learn in school, don’t learn from reading the newspapers, don’t learn from scientific advances. So why not take advantage of the fact that many of us have such knowledge? Why not share our resources and look for common threads between our different experiences? Why not compare notes? That way, we can all learn from each other and we don’t have to feel like freaks.

 

I want to suggest that in this Halloween season when we’re contemplating death and the unknown in our weird sublimated way, that we take a breather from bailing out our boat of all the waters of superstition and ignorance and blind faith. Because in bailing out buckets of gullibility and blind faith, we’re also losing openness. In bailing out ignorance, we’re losing a sense of mystery. In bailing out superstition, we’re losing magic.

 

I want to suggest that we can begin to slowly let down our guard a little. Maybe at night, sneak out onto the deck of the boat and dangle our toes into the water. There are gleaming jellyfish there and phosphorescent coral. There are tides of warm and cool, salty and briny and thick with life. Not the waters of traditional religion per se. But the waters of experiences that don’t quite fit into our rational, scientific understanding of the world. The round peg in the square hole. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that there is more to all of this than meets the eye. There is a lot more going on here than our normal, rational understanding permits. The ocean is wide and deep, and our boat here is just one little dot in all that expanse.

 

Let’s find some humility in this season and say – We just don’t know.  This is the reasonable stance. It would be reasonable even to an alien visiting us from afar. We just don’t know. So, as it says on one of our dharma flags, let’s “use everything we’ve experienced.” We don’t know what happens after we die, we don’t know what dimensions of reality may be right here in front of us but invisible to our senses. And we don’t know what we don’t know. My experience or yours or George deBenneville’s from 300 years ago might just be true. May we open ourselves to the vast ocean of possibility.