Good morning. My name is David Radtke – he/him – and I’m a member of this congregation.
***
We are a story-telling species. And we use metaphors – English major here. A search for truth is actually a search for a story – a metaphor – that rings true for us, that helps us deal with life as it happens.
***
When I was a freshman in college I took a course in Ancient Philosophy. The course primarily covered Plato and Aristotle, but we spent a few days talking about the philosophers that came before Plato. Thales of Miletus is the earliest of these.
Thales and the rest of the pre-Socratic philosophers were searching for a uniting “first principle” to explain the world, rather than just attributing everything to the whims of the gods. Thales maintained that the first principle of all things was water. Others argued for fire or air.
Our professor assured us this was just to lay the groundwork. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s not going to be on the test. No one is going to grab you and demand, ‘What did Thales say!?’”
“Everything’s water!”
So of course that’s the part I remembered.
***
And then along came Plato. Don’t worry, this won’t be on the test.
Instead of a single uniting principle, Plato broke it down into smaller parts, easier to understand. He imagined a split; material on the one hand – things you can see and feel – vs immaterial on the other hand. Mind vs body, mass vs energy, particle vs wave. And this physical / spiritual duality became the world’s dominant philosophy.
But that split doesn’t sit right for me. Once I’ve separated the spirit from the body – disembodied the spirit, so to speak – now I have to put it somewhere. So I metaphorically re-embody it – I incarnate it – by giving it a name. I call it “my soul” or “the holy spirit” or maybe even “god.”
But after we do that, then it’s easy to start believing in the metaphor as its own reality. We study it as its own thing, and we forget that it’s only a part of the puzzle. Like your toys, if you take them out to play with them, you need to put them back together when you’re done.
***
So back to being an English major – a complete sentence requires a noun and a verb. My hand. Waves.
My hand is physical, a noun, and the wave is an action, a verb. But what happens to the wave when my hand stops? You can’t separate the movement from the thing that is moving.
Movement is inherent in our bodies. Our nerves feel heat or cold or pain, and send signals through our body to our brain. The energy that runs through our nerves is made up of physical particles – electrons – hopping and skipping and jumping along from atom to atom to atom.
All of our thoughts and beliefs and memories are created in our brains by nerve cells – called neurons – firing chemical transmitters across little gaps at other neurons – a physical process. All of our thoughts arise from the physical activity of our brain.
***
I’ve always loved the Unitarian chalice as a symbol. The first time I came into this room I was particularly impressed by our church’s chalice, this one right here – with the physical hands holding the spiritual flame.
The spirit can’t do anything without the body to do it in. The spirit doesn’t exist without the body to exist in. The body and spirit are one, “being of one substance” with each other.
So, let’s try another metaphor: a seed lying in fertile soil. Instead of God reaching out her/his/its hand, touching the seed, and causing the seed to grow – I believe it’s the nature of the seed to grow, and the growing, blooming, and blossoming is God.
God is not the noun. God is a verb.
***
And now a little about me.
I never knew my father. He was killed in an accident a few weeks before I was born. Growing up I heard stories about him from my mother, aunts and uncles. My older cousins all remembered him fondly. He would play with them, tease them, pay attention to them.
And then each of them – individually, privately – would lean in and quietly confide, “He loved all his nieces and nephews – but I was his special favorite.” Think about that for a minute. He made each one of them feel as if they were the special favorite.
And that’s the spirit of my father, that I try to live up to.
***
When our daughter left home for the first time, she got for a tattoo. I need to describe my mother’s response to her granddaughter’s first tattoo – and to each new subsequent tattoo after that.
My mom would snort in disgust and turn her head away. Then, a sidelong glance and a little turning back, and the corners of her mouth would twitch as she tried to look stern. Then a deep sigh and a head-shake. Then a smile and big hug.
And this perfectly captures the essence of my mother, her spirit, her soul. Her complete and total non-judgmental acceptance and love, in spite of her disapproval.
***
The only immortality we have is in the memories of us, and the stories about us, that linger in the minds of those we leave behind. I realize I’m very fortunate to have these stories, these memories, of my parents. If either of them had been more troubled, or left behind unpleasant or abusive memories, my life, my outlook, would be very different than it is.
When I think about them now, my mom and dad, it would be easy to picture their spirits together, smiling down on me from an immaterial heaven. But that would be a metaphor of separateness, of “there” and “here,” and I prefer metaphors of unity.
***
There are any number of metaphors of unity we can choose from.
Light is as good a metaphor as any. You can’t see light itself, but you need light to see. Experiments prove that – at the quantum level – light behaves as both a particle and a wave. A song lyric says, “A wave and a particle were walking side-by-side. One turned to the other, said, ‘Which one of us am I? Which one of us am I?’”
Speaking of song lyrics, music is another great metaphor. When you hum a song in your head, the neurons in your brain fire at a rate that matches the frequency of the notes. So if you connected little wire electrodes from your brain to an amplifier, the speaker would play the song in your head. The music doesn’t come from outside and make you move. You are the music.
Personally I keep coming back to Thales and water. Water exists in a trinity of forms – as a solid, a liquid, or a vapor. You can’t step into the same river twice. The water has moved on, always changing, always moving. You can’t capture a river in a bucket.
When my body dies, its particles will disperse. And my soul – being “of one substance” with my body – will disperse as well. Like pouring that bucket of water back into the river.
So to wrap it up: this I believe.
Everything is water.
God is a verb.
Thank you.