When we think of the mission of the church, what comes to mind first is work we do (or ought to be doing) outside the church. But the work we do inside the church is just as worthy, if not more so. It is in worship that we connect with that ground that supports every other expression of our faith
About twenty-five years, shortly after I did my internship with you, I took a trip to India. This was a bus tour. Very touristy. We visited all the major sites in northeastern India: Dehli, Agra for the Taj Mahal, Varnassi, The Ganges, Jaipuhr.
At the end of the trip, we also flew up to Nepal and spent a few days in Kathmandu. Very cool.
Besides the forts and palaces and the touristy stuff, I did manage to see some of the religious sites and religion of India. I came home with a container of water from the Ganges. Well, not all the way home because the container came open inside my suitcase, soaking all my clothes.
And I had, for several years after I got home, a leaf from a tree that a tour guide in the Deer Park at Varnassi told me was a sapling from the actual Bodhi Tree that the Buddha was sitting under when he achieved enlightenment. Eventually, I decided keeping that leaf was silly, and also very un-Buddhist, so I threw it away.
Besides the Buddhist sites, I also experienced some of the Hindu culture. We visited one active temple and observed their food distribution program and a ceremony of veneration of Ganesh. But it was while visiting a palace in Jaiphur that I had a more significant worship experience.
As we pulled up to the palace, the bus driver told us that he was a follower of Kali, and that particular day was a holy day for Kali, so while we were touring the palace with our guide, he was going to visit a small temple inside the palace and participate in a worship service devoted to Kali. He invited anyone who wanted to, to join him.
Most of the tour group decided they’d rather see the palace, so they went off with the tour guide. But I, and a few others from the bus, went with the bus driver. He took us into the palace complex, but turned away from the main tour. Down a long bare hallway, in the interior of the palace, we came to a very plain, small, private, temple space.
The hall was entirely covered in marble. High ceilings, but not grand, and mostly unadorned. There was no place to sit. At the front there was a slightly elevated space separated from the rest of the hall, with a statue of Kali standing on a table.
Now, Kali, is an interesting figure in the Hindu pantheon. She is the feminine form of Shiva, or his consort. In the Hindu trinity, Shiva is the destroyer, and Kali takes the role to its highest degree.
She is usually depicted making a fearsome face. Her eyes are stretched open wide, and bright red. Her mouth is open and her tongue sticks out and hangs below her chin. Her skin is pitch black or dark blue. Kali’s special color testifies that her nature is so transcendent that she exists beyond the categories of light and dark. She emerged from the primordial void before creation, and she will continue to exist even after the universe is extinguished again.
She has four arms. The two on the right present gestures of blessing. In one of her left hands, she holds a sword, in the other she holds a human head. Around her neck she wears a necklace of human skulls. She wears a skirt made of human arms hanging from her waist.
She stands with her right footing resting on Shiva’s chest who lies prone beneath her, illustrating a famous story where her rage for destruction once grew so out of control that the gods feared she wouldn’t stop until she had destroyed the entire universe. Shiva lay down beneath her and when she stepped on him, she was brought back to her senses and ended her rampage.
But Kali is not a demon. Her rage is not against the good. She is a warrior against human ignorance.
The sword in her left hand is a symbol of wisdom, in Indian culture. And the human head she holds, and the skulls around her neck are symbols of her help in conquering human ego. The arms that hang from her waist are a symbol of the karma she has lifted from her followers. Her role is a liberator. She is the grantor and guardian of moksha, enlightenment.
But her path to liberation is a fierce path, not an easy path. Not quiet meditation. Kali warns that enlightenment must be won, taken by force. Spiritual liberation is a battle against the self. Temptations are everywhere. Our human fears, and lusts, and ignorance are enemies of our salvation. They must be conquered as on a battlefield, by power, by aggression. Those who pursue enlightenment cannot hold themselves back by decorum, or timidity, or laziness.
So there she was, this fierce goddess at the front of this small temple.
I and the few others from the bus tour, and the bus driver, and a handful of other Kali worshippers, stood at the back.
And then, when the time for worship arrived, the doors at the other end of the small hall opened and in walked eight or ten men, dressed in black, each of them holding some kind of an instrument, a drum, cymbals, a hand organ, a horn, a trumpet.
And then, they began to play. But I shouldn’t say “play”, because it wasn’t music they were making but just terrifying noise. I suppose “play” has nothing to do with venerating Kali. This was sonic battle, the loudest, ear-splitting, racket, I have ever heard. And you must imagine how it resounded in a small hall, covered entirely in marble.
Some of the other folks from the bus left immediately, holding their ears. A few others lasted a little longer and then, as the noise continued, they retreated, too. It was painful, but I figured I could stand it, and I was curious to see what would happen.
The band of priests, played like this for about twenty minutes. The horn and trumpet players would take a breath and begin again. A constant drone, accompanied by endlessly, arhythmic clanging and pounding. The bus driver stood beside me, with his face upraised, his eyes closed, his hands outstretched, palms up.
At last, the priests exhausted, the noise stopped. The echoes in the marble room lasted a little longer and the ringing in my ears even longer than that.
And then there was a simple ritual where the devotees of Kali went up to the statue to pay homage and receive a blessing. And to each of them, one of the priests took a handful of red clay and smeared their face. Not a discrete dot, but a blood-colored mess. The bus driver got his face smeared. I did not. All the rest of the day we would see people everywhere marked this way with red.
As the bus driver and I walked back to the bus, I asked him about the loud noise and what it had to do with worship.
He said that, for Hindus, the aim of the spiritual journey is to achieve a state of pure consciousness. Usually, our minds are completely occupied with a running narration of chitter-chatter. Buddhists call this the monkey mind, constantly skipping from one mundane thought to another, like a monkey swinging from branch to branch. Our minds are so filled with this stream of ego-silliness, that we cannot glimpse the true nature of our reality, or the bliss of pure consciousness, just beyond this screen of ego-self.
It is this screen of ego that Kali wishes to pierce.
The bus driver asked me, “When the music was playing, what were you thinking?”
And I realized, that at the beginning of the twenty minutes I thought, “I have to get out of here!” But as I forced myself to relax, and breathe, and I stayed in the room, for much of the time, the noise forced all thoughts out of my head, and I entered the same kind of state I can sometimes achieve in silent meditation; the same ecstatic state I could see the bus driver had entered when I glanced at him that one time during the worship. The noise had forced all ego-thought from his mind, and he was experiencing pure consciousness.
This reminded me of a story that I heard in art school when I was studying music composition. A teacher told us of an evening when Beethoven was premiering a new piano sonata he had composed by playing it for a few friends in his studio. His friends gathered close to the piano. He played through the sonata, with his usual manic energy and bliss. At the end of the performance the friends expressed their appreciation. But then one of the friends got up from his seat behind the piano bench and went to the piano. He said, to Beethoven, “I have a question.” He paged through the piano score on the rack until he found a particular passage, and then he pointed to the page.
“See, here, Beethoven. I noticed in your manuscript that at the end of this section you marked this concluding chord double forte, as loud a sound as you can make. But I noticed when you played, when you got to that chord, instead, you played the chord pianissimo, as softly as possible. Why did you do that?”
Beethoven shrugged and said, “Same thing.”
We’re talking this season about mission and vision in the church. “What is the church, for?” is the question. What are we here to do?
Last week, I said that at its most basic level the church isn’t here to do any particular thing, but simply to be. The mission of the church is to gather a community, to be a container, in which the members can do various works, following their individual interests, desires, talents, resources. We do many things, but our first and best work is simply to maintain and nurture the community. Everything else rises from that foundation.
We build and support the container together, and community is primary, so we don’t give license for every individual to do entirely their own thing. We prioritize programs that will bring us together and keep bringing us together. But the church doesn’t insist that everyone participate in every program, or that we all participate in the same way and to the same degree. Our mission isn’t to do one particular thing all together, but to be a community equipped generally to do many general things.
Over the next several weeks we will look at the categories of things that a church community gathers to do.
I wanted to start this series with the category of worship, because worship is the most characteristic work of a church, and because worship in its way, includes all the others. Worship is the center of our community. If community is the chalice of Unitarian Universalism, then worship is the flame.
Two weeks ago, when I introduced the topic of mission and vision by looking at the example of Martin Luther King, I observed that mission flows from the combination of an internal drive meeting an outward context. Mission is the intersection of what I am drawn to do and what the world needs.
People need regular connection with the transcendent. The church is uniquely equipped to meet that need.
People need the sense that their lives matter to something larger than themselves. They need the sense that they belong to something greater than themselves. They need relief from the mundane pressures and anxieties of life. They need peace, contemplation, calm, quiet. They need beauty, joy, and hope. They need the sense that life is not just one day after another, but that life has a direction and a purpose they can contribute to. They need some greater sense of accomplishment than simply surviving, or amassing material wealth, or Instagram followers. People want their lives to be for something: something greater, larger, deeper; and pointed toward something: something important, lasting, beyond. That’s the transcendent.
Whether you define that transcendent quality in terms of pure consciousness, as that bus driver did, or salvation, in Christian terms, or ecstasy, or ego-death, moksha, liberation, eternal life, or world community with peace, liberty and justice for all, or perhaps something else, the longing is the same. How can I rise above this day, rise above this life, if only for an hour, commune with that higher realm where I know my true spirit resides?
Because Unitarian Universalism is a multi-path religion, we don’t assume that everyone’s path to the transcendent is the same. Some seek a wisdom path. Others a service path. Others seek the transcendent through prayer and meditation. Some through acts of compassion, charity, or justice-making. And so our worship is needfully complex.
We can’t offer a single experience, like Kali worship, or Ganesh veneration, or a weekly Eucharist ritual, or a yoga class, or a Beethoven concert. I enjoyed that Kali worship, and I’m still telling the story twenty-five years later, but I wouldn’t want that experience every week. We need to be more varied than that, because our community needs are more plural than that.
So Unitarian Universalist worship features a sermon, feeding the need some have for religious education and inspiration, a curious idea to sit with for an afternoon, or a week. We feature an anthem and other music feeding our need for beauty, and the emotional expression of music, as well as sung texts, often, that work as their own kind of sermon. Hymn singing and responsive readings, call us out of our individuality and into collective identity. Our joys and sorrows, deepens our community connection and opens our compassionate hearts. We accept food donations as a nod to our path of service to others, and collect an offering to open our sense of selflessness. Our chalice lighting and covenant, remind us of the higher principles we wish to embrace in life, ideals that can be forgotten among the more mundane necessities of the everyday.
Our worship service is a series of sign-posts pointing to many paths toward the transcendent, which is to say that our worship hour probably doesn’t offer a transcendent experience in itself, very often. If you’re having a transcendent experience during my sermon, it only means you’re not paying attention.
Rather, our Unitarian Universalist worship is designed to provide motivation and resources for you to use to power your own spiritual journey, not just in this hour but throughout the week. Like our primary mission of community which supports multiple expressions, our shared experience of worship supports multiple spiritual paths. Our worship offers a nod to justice-making, an inspiration to learn more, an encouragement to reach out with care to those in need, a taste of beauty, a bit of fun, a sample of beloved community, so that those themes might continue and blossom throughout your life.
Whether that urge toward the transcendent during this worship hour comes in silence, or in noise, it’s the same thing. Some need a quiet hour. Some need a boisterous children’s message. Some need the familiar face of a friend in the worship associate chair, or the considerate gesture of an usher. Some weeks the music meets our need for something more from life with verve and a strong back beat. Some weeks we’re comforted by a familiar hymn. Some weeks we long to look beyond the distractions of work and politics and rent and groceries for an hour of peace and tranquility, for the winds of our life to cease blowing, for the storm clouds to pass and silence come.
This is a mission of our church. Not our only mission, but one thing that we do, and we do uniquely, and we do well: to open our doors each week to a sacred space. To mark a sacred time. To fill the space with our community. To fill the time with intimations of eternity.