Meaning in a secular world

I wake and read about James “Guadalupe” Carney, an American-born Catholic who becomes a Jesuit priest in order to serve the poor in Honduras. At first, his work is pastoral and sacramental. In the end, he becomes a revolutionary, an agent for radical social transformation. On September 16, 1983, he is thrown out of an airplane by the Honduras army, alive, to die on the mountains below.

It is the Spirit of Jesus who inspired his work.

I am taken by this thought, this allegiance to embody the spirit of an exemplar, and search my own heart for such an example. But in my Unitarian Universalist way of putting together a living faith, I find that I am moved to social action and right living by the moral compass of being human. I am moved to passionate justice by an ethical upbringing and an innate sense of compassion and empathy. I am living out my faith because I am an inspired being (sometimes), in gratitude for life.

So what do I worship? What do I make more important than my own secular desires? What guides me to think beyond myself?

I believe what guides me is the need and the desire to find meaning, the need and the desire to find connection. I do this in a secular world that seems to have outgrown the need for religious living.

Sallie McFague writes, in her book “Metaphorical Theology,” that we are no longer people who live with the understanding that the sun rises and sets and that the seasons change because there is a God who is pleased or displeased with us. We have traded a sacramental way of living for a secular one. We make God a personal one, a force that we call on when we are in trouble. Interestingly, with this personal one-on-one relationship, and without this sense of mystery or awe surrounding existence and a lack of connection with everything around us, words that surrounds God “inevitably go awry either in the direction of idolatry or irrelevancy or both.” (p.2)

And it seems ironic to me that we live in our secular world, with ironclad beliefs and great ties to our pain filled connections in the world, and yet we are blind to their influences on our lives. We give recognition to science and hard facts, all the while being buffeted around by our core beliefs.

But what of Father Carney? For him, the living essence of the Spirit of Jesus filled his life and gave him strength. In the manuscript he handed to his brother and sister, Carney had written, “Since my novitiate, I have asked Christ for the Grace to be able to imitate him, even to martyrdom, to the giving of my life, to being killed for the cause of Christ. And I strongly believe that Christ might give me this tremendous Grace to become a martyr for justice.”

Certainly most of us don’t aspire to be a martyr for justice. In my own life, I aspire to embody a strong and calm spiritual essence that illuminates a truth and a loving presence in the world. Taking conscious steps, I begin my day with the stories of saints, prophets and witnesses who embodied that faith and lived their inspiration. And it is my desire and intention that this inspiration will bring a religious focus to my day and make living in a secular world relevant.