Face to Face
by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church
Lafayette, Indiana -- August 27, 2000

From A Religion of Realities by Kenneth Patton:
The senses bring us straight to reality,
usher in the world, with the report that it is good,
and the equal of any report that we can know.
The senses make us an elect of the universe,
being all the instruments we need to make the world manifest.
No creature can see more than we when the world blossoms in our sight, when our ears ride the winds, feel more than our fingers feel, taste more than our tongue.
We are initiates, members of that largest of all denominations, the fellowship of life.
Democracy and equality in here in these blessings, with which each of us is born.
We are not cheated in our beings; we are not shut from the world.
There should be no seed of envy in us.
We can take nothing from another, who have all this unmeasured richness of ourselves.
Each person writes an enlarging Bible, a flowing book of the revelation of the senses.
The writings of other prophets pen but footnotes to the scripture of our reports.
Each of us is a temple and a priesthood; Ultimate truth is given us freely, hourly in the revelations of the senses.

It is good to be here -- face to face -- with you. I have spent the last few weeks in meetings, beginning the long process of really settling here with you -- getting to know the concerns, issues, projects, structures, stories, and rhythms of this congregation’s life. But now we’re gathered for worship and my heart is full.

Face to face -- today it is my joy but always this has been key for me --face to face -- eye contact -- seeing and knowing.

In my newsletter article this week I told a story about something I learned with my father. Coincidentally, when I thought about this sermon I realized that my father was there, too.

When I was a girl, in Rochester New York my father and I used to go for long walks on the shore of Lake Ontario. In sweltering hot or blustery cold we would go for these walks -- somehow there was always plenty to talk about. One day -- when I was maybe about seven or eight, I remember returning from our walk and heading back toward the car when my shoe lace became untied. I knelt down to tie it and my father -- a tall man, somehow not noticing, walked on ahead of me. After I had tied my shoe I hopped up and ran after him - only really a few long paces ahead. He looked at me in surprise and said -- "where’d you go? I just noticed you weren't here." I told him that I had been tying my shoelace and he laughed. "I kept talking away to you and just noticed that you weren't there!" Whew! Somehow this piece of information had a deep pact on me. I was shaken. How could he not have known? How could we have failed to connect? It may sound like a modest experience to you -- maybe even a little funny -- but I am sure that it was central in making me passionate about truly connecting in communication. I put a premium on meeting face to face.

Because this spirit of positive encounter is so core for me and because I knew that my heart would be overflowing today I knew that this was what I wanted to talk with you about. About the hunger to be face to face with meaning --

Although I claim it for my own -- in fact this is a classical yearning -- to meet face to face with that which is of ultimate importance -- to see and know the deepest dimension of being. This seeing and knowing can take place -- in authentic encounter with other people, with self, with nature, and with spirit.

It arose in an ancient yearning. The gnostics were consumed with it. Gnosis - the words comes from the same Greek root as to know -- to know the holy. Gnostics sought the sacred through intense spiritual practice. Often this would be described as a terror and a joy. They challenged both faith and tradition for they adhered to a transcending seeing -- not based upon faith at all but upon experience. Not upon faith but upon experience. It was actually just such a gnostic experience that had inspired Jesus of Nazareth. And before him gnosis was a key struggle thought the Hebrew Bible -- in Jacob who wrestled with his god in the form of an angel. In Moses of whom it is said that he spoke with his god as a friend -- albeit a friend shrouded in a pillar of smoke. Gnosis resounded even in the great Silence of Ecclesiastes.

But by and large Gnosticism was either treading a fine line or it was a heresy -- one of the great heresies of the church. It was dangerous to have people taking the sacred into their own hands, minds, hearts.

The Gnostic gospels were excluded from the canon of the Bible but the message reemerged in the 1940’s when they were found and shared again. And the voice of direct experience rang out in the words of John and of Thomas and of Matthew -- to "you that reveals the hidden mysteries".

Therefore, Gnosis was pagan also -- as was Hermes Trismegistus who was "seized b a powerful desire" to hear -- to know and learn more.

The Gnostic impulse was Muslim in the Sufism of such mystics as Jellaludin Rumi who wrote, "There is a way between voice and presence where information flows."

And this deep knowing is even Buddhist -- where the sacred is intentionally encountered directly in either a myriad of gods and goddesses or in the vast emptiness that is the Buddhist true nature of Being.

And so it is that any major religious tradition has its Gnosticism and its gnostics -- those who have the courage to live within experience and decry routine faith. Those who demand a rigor of spirit -- the active testing of understanding against experience and reason.

And thus it is quintessentially Unitarian Universalist. Last week Magdalen began an overview of Unitarian Universalist history that made one thing clear -- the tradition that we call Unitarian Universalism is based on a profound confidence in the human ability to seek and to experience the ultimate and to marry that search and experience in the presence of both love and reason.

It is this wise gnosis that has driven our forbears both Unitarian and Universalist. We stand in a line with generations of visionary, committed, loving, skeptics.

It drove Miguel Servetus to question church doctrine and practice.

It inspired aFrench boy named George de Benneville to have a vision of a loving and benevolent god.

When Hosea Ballou read Thomas Paine's Age of Reason it so strengthened his vision of a loving spirit that he then preached a unique doctrine of radical, complete, and universal salvation.

And it is what Emerson meant when he told the Harvard Divinity School class of 1838 to be sure that "custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, -- are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, -- but to live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind." He protested corpse cold Unitarianism and called for a ministry in which life was passed through the fire of thought -- experience through the engine of reason.

And there was more in the work of empirical theologians such a Wieman and Loomer.

Kenneth Patton, humanist mystic wrote

The most ecstatic mystical transports are sense experiences
The senses bring us straight to reality,

He must have meant a deeper sensing than a superficial glance around the room. A deep knowing. This gnosis, this wise knowing, is our tradition and our legacy. It is far greater than a cantankerous dedication to skepticism -- it is a devotion to the search for and encounter with the ground of meaning -- in all the many names and shapes in which it come to Unitarian Universalists.

This gnosis is the legacy into which we come together. It is our tradition and more --

Patton also wrote these lines, which contain the heart and spirit of our journey as Unitarian Universalists -- not one of a single creed or any dogma one of a shared journey of vision, reason, and experience:

The senses make us an elect of the universe, being all the instruments we need to make the world manifest.

No creature can see more than we when the world blossoms in our sight, when our ears ride the winds, feel more than our fingers feel, taste more than our tongue.

We are initiates, members of that largest of all denominations, the fellowship of life.

Democracy and equality in here in these blessings, with which each of us is born.

So wrote the mystic. This is the costly inheritance we sang of last week -- its bequest and its request -- that we are each the prophets of that heritage. We are prophets in these ways:

First because each one of us -- whether we are new here or a lifelong Unitarian Universalist -- we each come here and stay here because we live in and work with this interplay of reason and experience. We take no thing on simple faith but seek ever for the truth that rests hidden within. In ministry we speak of having a calling -- a calling to service -- but if each of you thinks about your relationship with this tradition you may -- I believe that you will -- find the evidences of a call, as well. For this is no easy religion -- it requires exploration, affirmation, challenge and reaffirmation on an ongoing basis. At our best we are prophets as we expand and deepen world views, as we call ourselves and one another to account against the realities and needs of our world.

Patton wrote:

Each person writes an enlarging Bible, a flowing book of the revelation of the sense.
Each of us is a temple and a priesthood;
Ultimate truth is given us freely, hourly in the revelations of the senses.

So Patton wrote, and it is my experience that we are each the gateway to the ground of meaning. Prophets each of some encounter with the sacred -- in all its many forms. In each of us is an ongoing journey of faith and challenge. We can see it in one another’s faces -- shining from one another’s eyes if we but attend closely. It is what brings me here -- calls me here in joy and in profound hope. Seeking not only my interior sources of wisdom, but yours and ours shared.

Early in the Bible the two in the garden are hiding and their god seeks them

"Where are you" calls out the god. Interesting question for, well you know -- the almighty. Anyway the god can't find them. But we find one another here week after week, meeting after meeting. We are offered time among both humble and and inspired prophets. Therefore let us not hide in any shade.

It was our tradition that first claimed that revelation was not sealed -- was open and ever unfolding in the world and in the scripture of one another’s lives. So it is here that we meet on hallowed ground and find time to think on our own visions, to hear those of others and to bear witness to the profound richness of one another’s lives. To be honest this is often little easier that Jacob wrestling at Peni’el or the prophets with their lips burning from the touch of God. We can find one another tough as Jabbocks. Yet our world is richer when we encounter the holy in a wider range than isolation -- we have come to know the world as too interdependent for that. We demand of a genuine gnosis that it embrace all being -- that largest of denominations -- the fellowship of life.

This takes a true courage -- for experience deeply engaged in will transform. In Patton’s words: Our attention is a transparent funnel down which the world swirls, and in the tidal flood we are awakened and revolutionized. Awakened and revolutionized. As any path to the sacred would be this is a challenge.

But this is precisely what draws us to church -- the possibility of transformation -- the transformation of suffering into healing, of confusion into clarity of isolation into community, insight into deeper insight, joy into shared experience, and life into celebration.

To be awakened and revolutionized. This sort of thing requires courage. To look into the eyes of one another as into the eye’s of prophets and to be open to the message there takes courage. To live one’s own life knowing that it will be seen as a scripture by one’s community -- this takes courage. To open in authenticity and commitment -- this takes courage as well. But it is this courage that will bring a community to a new place -- physically, spiritually. To be heartened by hope and by vision....

It makes my heart pound with hope and unease both -- with awe. I come here, grateful to be called to serve that awe and to work in the prophet hood I see here -- the vision, and strength, the community, the promise, and the keen, clear hope that I have found here. I have already been given new revelations and found deeper truths than I knew before. To be face to face with my own dreams and with your dreams -- let us look one another in the eye, stand face to face and bear witness to those dreams and dialogue with those dreams and share the strength that will give us the courage to work toward them.

Perhaps it is all my father’s doing after all -- for it was he who made me see how important authentic relationship was and how the deepest of meanings could be found in these relationships. And it was my father who introduced me to Walt Whitman whose hymn we sang earlier. It was Whitman who said

To drop in the earth the germs
of a greater religion!
My comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.
Mysterious ocean where the streams empty,
Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!

I echo my bard. Now, Let us sit together for a time of reflection and silence.