Ministers Musings
If God were a verb: Practicing Process Theology
Rev. Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry
April 6, 2008 – Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
Hildegard . . . meet Einstein!
Earth-based spirituality . . . meet quantum physics!
Welcome to the world of Process Theology!
I first encountered Process Theology in seminary, where one has the privilege of spending hours thinking and writing about heady things like the nature of existence. I’d rejected the white-bearded God of the Trinity and all that he stood for when I rejected Catholicism in my youth. For years, I’d made activism my sacrament, and I still do believe that we humans have a responsibility to each other and creation – after all, we are the creatures who seem to have gotten us into the most messes, and who seem to be the ones with the most wits to get us out, although that may be debatable. But activism without spirit –without the thread of something larger to hold it together – soon felt void.
The Earth-based traditions, which my Oakland women’s group and I shared with you last week, ignite my imagination with imagery and ritual that spark subconscious connections. And the discovery and study of process theology ignited my intellect in such a way as to integrate my activist self, engaged in the world, and my mystical self, full of cosmological metaphors and images of reality.
Process theology is a modern theological movement based primarily on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, and later Charles Hartshorne, who had strong Unitarian leanings. “After having focused on mathematics and the philosophy of nature in his native England, Whitehead came to Harvard University at the age of sixty-three and quickly created the most extensive philosophical cosmology of the twentieth century.” Whitehead believed that cosmology –or the study of the Universe in its totality –the meaning of it all – should be based on aesthetic, ethical, and religious intuitions as well as on science. He witnessed how scientific developments themselves were pointing away from a mechanistic world view of material objects in play with one another toward an world view of inter-related fields of energy. Through his study, Whitehead slowly turned from agnosticism to theism – formulating an image of God in stark contrast to that of the omnipotent creator/judger God of traditional Christian theology.
I know that the term God is a challenging one for some of you –and a meaningless one for others. “God” conjures up so many images – the white bearded guy in the sky that many of us rejected early in our lives – the Hindu Gods and Goddesses – too many to name – some sort of ‘spirit’ floating around controlling things. So, I want you to take all those old images that the term God conjures up for you – whether they feel harsh or ridiculous, painful or irrelevant – and set them aside for a moment. I need to speak of God, because God is a part of process theology –that’s the word they choose to use. But I don’t want a simple word to get in your way of the exploration of this cosmological construct. As usual, take what works, leave behind anything that does not, but do pay attention to what pushes your buttons, because that just may be a place for growth for you.
Albert Einstein, who brought us this new scientific understanding to the cosmic world of energy and matter said “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” For me, process theology brings science and religion together with logical elegance. Einstein also said at one point that his work was merely ‘tracing the lines that flow from God”.
In process thought, that “God” is not a controller, but a persuader, a presence, almost in verb form, luring all of creation toward its highest potential. Process theology takes the science of quantum physics, and concludes that reality is made up not of constant, concrete substance, but momentary ‘events’ always in an internal process of becoming.
Quantum physics? I told you this was heady stuff. I’m living with the simultaneous fear that I either won’t be able to explain it in a useable fashion in the time that I have, or that I’ll overly simplify some concepts that even I have a hard time understanding, after living with this cosmology for years now.
But here we go:. In the same way that physicists observed atoms as being both matter and energy simultaneously, so, too are we, really as much energy as matter. In this world where energy and matter morph, we are always living on the brink of our next moment of being, and that moment is full of potential. Or, as Martin Buber said, “All actual life is encounter”. We are swimming, dancing, moving from moment to moment, experience to experience, each moment influencing the next in conscious and unconscious ways.
In process theology, free will, or self-determination is the primary change agent. The role of God, if you will, is to provide the best possibility for each moment of experience. Our role is to see it and move with it. The God of the process theologians is changed by the experience of the Universe, although the abstract elements of God –goodness, wisdom, etc. – are not.
This is the part that attracts me. I experience life as moving toward greater and greater possibilities for goodness, even greatness. The fact that we came from stardust and have become sentient beings capable of feeling empathy for one another is evidence of this for me. I’ve stated before when I look at how far we’ve come in human rights over the past few centuries, I can believe that the Universe bends toward justice. But I’ve never believed that a God controlled all that. There is too much suffering for an omnipotent loving God to tolerate.
The God of process theology does not control –this God provides the lure toward the greatest possibility – the encouragement for the fish to step out of the water, you might say –to reach greater potentials on land.
Process theology also makes room for the existence of evil, which, if you recall in my Easter sermon, was lacking in the liberal theological movement earlier in the twentieth century. Here’s how I understand it: with a God that does not control, but lures toward goodness, and free will, all entities have the choice NOT to choose their highest potentiality.
This could be concomitant to the Christian doctrine of ‘sin’ as ignorance, or ignoring the ‘will of God’.
But Process Theology goes even further to explain the horrors of the world and our expanding potential for evil. As creation evolved toward higher and higher forms of goodness, the potentiality for evil expanded as well. Imagine it this way –when we were all early Sapiens, the best we could do for each other pick nits out of each other’s fur, and the worst we could do was throw coconuts at each other. As we’ve reached higher and higher states of potentiality, we have simultaneously enabled higher and higher states of evil to evolve as well. So now, as we are empowered to discover a cure for AIDS, we also have the capabilities to destroy the world as we know it with a nuclear bomb. Free will and an all-embracing but not all-powerful God have allowed for those potentialities to co-arise. Does that make sense?
And the part that really speaks to me is our responsibility in it all. Each entity –that’s us and more than us– has self-determination to either look for that lure, pay attention to what’s the greatest good in any given moment – or not. We do not ask for help from God, for God to ‘decide’ whether to intercede or not, as traditional Christian practice would encourage, we open ourselves up to the presence that always exists, offering to us the greatest ‘opportunity for experience’ in each moment of existence.
Somewhere in all of this, the intellectual merges with the mystical for me. Somewhere, as I imagine our profound interconnection as energy moving and shaping, lured toward our highest potential in each moment – Hildegard’s image of God’s embrace emerges. And the Sufi mystic Rumi’s call to ‘let your heart be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love” comes to mind. In all of this science, the ancient Hindu vision of Indra’s net – bejeweled with sparkling dew drops all connected – is drawn for modern eyes. And I credit Albert Whitehead with enabling Hildegard and the ancient mystics to shake hands with Einstein and the quantum physicists.
I’ve lived in moments when I felt like I was quite connected to this presence – this lure of God – when I felt as if my series of choices from moment to moment were divinely guided –I may be living in one right now. I’ve also lived in moments when I felt quite disconnected, like I was swimming upstream — and I’m not a very good swimmer. And I have to say that these ‘moments’ did not always correlate to external events –there are times when I can weather life’s toughest challenges, and times when a rainy day will throw me completely off-course.
This is where I believe spiritual practice comes in.
What matters most to me is how theology is ‘lived’ — practiced. How is it that we strengthen what we believe to be true about ultimate reality with practices that support those beliefs? After years of guilt that I couldn’t sustain a ‘serious’ spiritual practice, I’ve come to adopt the definition of Spiritual Practice from Phil Porter and Cynthia Winton-Henry: Spiritual practice, they say, is anything you do on a regular basis for the good of yourself, the good of others or the good of the earth. Simple!
In a speech at the first ever African American Buddhist retreat, writer, poet and social critic Alice Walker said:
This is not a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful, self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion. Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry, or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world. . . . Perhaps singing in the choir at your church or trance dancing with friends is the connector to the All for you. Whatever it is, now is the time to look for it, to locate it, and definitely, to put it to use.
Since I was the one who designed this sermon series, I’ve had to ask myself the same questions I’m asking you. What is my practice? What do I do to support my current belief in a mystical earth-based, science-process theology inspired cosmology? How does, or should this belief system inform my limited days on this earth?
For me, when I think of spiritual practice –two words come to mind –reverence and gratitude. When I think of the vast complexity of it all, I can do nothing but feel humbled by my little part in it. And yet, I realize that I am a butterfly and the flapping of my wings makes a difference. That’s the activist speaking. So my reverence serves as a reminder that what I do matters, in each and every moment. My reverence has engendered a practice of treading softly on the earth –whether I am choosing to line dry my clothes, not buy bottled water, or think before I get into my car. What I need to support this is time in nature – regular hikes and bike rides, stopping to notice the singing of birds and the howling of coyotes as spring approaches, — a practice of slowing down my pace, at least occasionally, to smell the flowers.
Gratitude also flows from my limited understanding of this great cosmic trip we are on. The Rev. Robert R. Walsh writes:
Life is a gift we have not earned and for which we cannot pay. There is no necessity that there be a universe, no inevitability about a world moving toward life and then self-consciousness. There might have been . . . nothing at all.
When I connect to that possibility of nothingness, my gratitude for all that is overflows. What a gift this all is –the struggle and the joy. And I think of mystic Meister Eckhart who said if you say only one prayer, say this “Thank you”.
So, I try to say thank you each and every day for the gift of life. And I try to remember to thank all the people in my life for being here and flapping their wings with me.
And this is how process theology has taught me to live –grateful, reverent, flapping, intellectual, mystical, loving, challenged, open, and vulnerable, all wrapped up in an energy ball that looks surprisingly like a woman in the prime of her life.
How do you live?
Questions for Reflection:
Process theologians tell us that quantum physics has eliminated the false duality between mind and matter, as the energy of a thought is in kind the same as the energy of matter. Can you imagine, as quantum physics is telling us, that we are more like constantly moving energy waves than static matter? If so, how has that impacted your understanding of what makes you you?
In process theology, “God” is not creativity itself, but the lure to our highest creative potential. From my reading of this, this imagining of God, while not a controlling God, still maintains an absolute Truth. Do you believe there are absolute “Truths” in the areas of say, justice, or morality?
How does the image of “God” or the Source of All as a lure toward the highest potential of each being appeal to you?