Reflecting on a weekly basis

There is a vibration of urgency that is permeating our world. Coupled with an underlying uncertainty and discontent, this urgency is compelling us to break down the walls that keep us separate from each other, to learn new language skills to communicate, and to awaken to the concept that our world is being run amok with a Western-influenced capitalistic imperialistic agenda. This new awareness is urging us to live our lives in the knowledge of our truth and embrace a course of action that will destroy the system and save the people.

I heard these messages this week from Meganwind Eoyang at the Center for Nonviolent Communication, the Dr. Rev. Dorsey Blake at the Pacific School of Religion, the Rev. Dwight Webster at the Starr King School for the Ministry and the Rev. Donald Guest at Glide Memorial Church. It was basically a secular message, set, for the most part, in a religious environment.

Howard Thurman elucidates this commingling of secular and religious thought in “The Luminous Darkness” when he writes that “in times of disaster, when the only thing that is relevant is that a man is stripped of all superficial categories that separate and divide, one gets some notion of what it means just to be a human being in the world among other human beings who are all structurally bound together by a total environment.” In those times, he says,“ everybody is counted in as an essential human being, possessed of certain resources that are needful for the survival of a common life. The new experience, he continues, does not know anything about what brought it to life; it knows nothing about the crisis situation.

And this bonding as human beings, with inherent worth and dignity, is the ethical insight brought into the stream of contemporary life by religious traditions.

This experience, “to feel life moving through one and claiming one as a part of it,” is total, unified and unifying. According to Thurman, “It is not the experience of oneself as male or female, as black or white, as American, European or African. It is rather the experience of oneself as being. … One man’s response to the sound of the genuine in another man is to ascribe to the other man the same sense of infinite worth that one holds for oneself. ”

While there are some that question whether Unitarian-Universalism has the theological grounding to count itself worthy in the world of great religions, it is interesting to note that Thurman elevates the concept of inherent worth of an individual, the first of the seven principles that guide UU religious thought, as a primary and essential religious concept.

The place,” he says,” where the imagination shows its greatest power as the agent of God is in the miracle which it creates when one man, standing where he is, is able, while remaining there, to put himself in another man’s place.”

But the commonality between the secular and religious is challenged with Thurman’s thought that in order for human beings to have the experience of recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of each person, human experience of inherent worth, must be set in the light of ultimate values and ultimate meanings and is what religion undertakes to guarantee.

But what I hear in the urgency to become involved is that the literal salvation of the earth brings us that unity of purpose that is larger than our individual lives. These curious times bring into focus the undeniable reality that the existence of our globe depends on our individual and collective strengths, gifts, and unique abilities to get beyond our own self-interest and long-held limiting perceptions. In our current predicament, there is an ultimate meaning and ultimate value that is beyond individual selves, our national identities, and our religious and political affiliations. This concept of impending doom offers a profound reality of a larger and more pressing truth of collective worth beyond theoretical or socially imposed divides.

There is a vibration of urgency that is permeating our world. It is a vibration that will tumble the foundations of the many walls that keep us separated. It is a vibration that has the capacity to shake us into a sustainable way of relating to each other and to our world. From this urgency, this quickening, a new way will be born and not know of the crisis from which it came.

It is, indeed, the commingling of the secular and the religious. It is, indeed, a function of the mysterious energy that encourages our transformation and the very idea that we are one.