For me, the many spiritual goals can be reduced to two.  All that we strive for are contained in these paired concepts:  a freedom to be and express all that we are uniquely created to be as individuals; and to celebrate that every individual existence is also an existence bound into networks of relationships that sustain our lives.

            To finish a church year where we started talking about spiritual practice, the “what” of religion, and then moved to talking about spiritual goals, the “why” of religion, I want to offer my ideas about the two spiritual goals.

            Just two.  Two goals.  Two words.  I find them guiding my personal spiritual life.  I find them at the core of our Unitarian Universalist faith.  I believe these two goals are the central purpose and the guiding values for healthy human spirituality of any expression.

The two goals are: connection, and freedom.  Spiritual health and maturity, manifests in an increasing sense of connection with the world and an increasing ability to know ourselves deeply and freely express ourselves truly.

            Those two goals: community connection and personal freedom, contain all the other spiritual goals we have for our religion and for ourselves.  Values like love and peace and mercy, the interdependent web, all grow from connection.  Individual freedom contains values like justice, and democratic process, and inherent worth and dignity.  

            Promoting connection and freedom in our own lives, and in the life of the church, and for all people everywhere should be our spiritual goal.  

            When I was a child I remember learning that every time I breathe in, some of the molecules of air I’m breathing were previously breathed by Leonardo DaVinci.  It makes sense.  There is a finite amount of air surrounding our planet and over DaVinci’s long lifetime he breathed a lot of it, and the air he breathed is still floating around the planet and so mixed together by now with the air that he didn’t breathe that every time we breathe in we breathe a little of the same air he breathed.

            Of course the same would be true of any long-lived person who lived long enough ago: one finite atmosphere shared by all breathing things.

            I learned about the life cycle in other ways too.  The cycle of water that moves from the ocean into the clouds, then back to the earth in rain, and then in streams and rivers back to the ocean.  Think of a tree, falling to the ground and rotting, returning to the soil, and then the soil feeding the growth of a new tree.  

            The food we eat connects us with the whole history of the world.  Just eating a piece of fruit connects us to soils and seeds, and lives and deaths and rain and sun and far off lands.  Genetically I am connected to my parents but also my grandparents and all my ancestors, and my ancestors have other children that connect me with everyone else on the planet, and our earliest ancestors were the ancestors of every living thing on the planet from starfish to doves.

            Even the Earth itself was born of the same stuff that created the sun and the other planets, and every star I could see (as well as billions that I couldn’t see) had at one time been connected together in a single massive point that exploded, creating all of us.  As separate as all the stars are now, their light reaches our eyes, and gravitation has a force that stretches across distances.

            Connection is not just a physical fact but also a very beautiful and important fact.  Every particle of the universe connects to every other particle stretching in every direction across all of space, and also in time through the entire history of the universe.  It thrills me to think about this, and knowing that I am included in this connection comforts me and even makes me proud.

            As a child I thought spirituality had to do only with religion, and only with the particular kind of religious subjects taught to me in my Sunday school.  I thought religion was concerned only with God and Jesus. When I lay in my back yard at night looking up at the stars, I didn’t connect the excitement I felt to anything to do with religion.

            Now I realize that that thrill of connection is the core of religion.  Spirituality is the joy of finding that we are not alone, that we are not isolated beings but that we are connected in every particle of our being with every other particle that ever was.

            That discovery of connection is at the heart of every mystical vision I’ve ever read, whether it be a Christian mystic, or Hindu, or Buddhist.  If you’ve had a spiritual moment in your life, I dare say it included this feeling of losing the boundaries of yourself, and opening up to your connection with all that is.

            When Vedanta Hindus says that the Atman is the Brahman, they mean that looking inward to the self at our deepest core is the same as looking outward to the true nature of all of existence.  All is one.  

            Once the Dalai Lama was asked how it was possible to actually care about everything in the world.  The Dalai Lama suggested that as you meditate you think about those people or things that you already care about, and really feel your connection with them.  Then ask yourself, “what things do those people care about?  And what things need to exist beyond these people in order to ease their suffering?”  So the list of things you care about expands one step.  Then you can take a third step of asking what do these additional things care about and what affects their happiness or suffering?  Until, in not too many steps the whole of the planet is included.

            Our spiritual goal is not to make everything connected, because the truth of the universe is that everything already is and forever will be connected.  So our spiritual goal is to become more consistently aware of the connection that already exists.  Our spiritual goal is to not be deceived by those times when we feel isolated or alone.  There is no isolation when we are infinitely connected throughout all space and time.  Our spiritual goal is to catch ourselves when we are about to say, “I can ignore the fate of that other person, or that other part of the world, because they have no connection to me,” because we recognize the truth that every particle of the universe is connected to us, and it does matter to us what happens to other people and to other parts of the world.

            We will grow spiritually the more often and more consistently we recognize our essential connection with all that is.  Feeling that connection leads us into lives of caring, and love, and responsibility, and generosity.  We can measure spiritual health by noting how our times of feeling alone and isolated decrease, and our times of feeling that we belong and that we have an important place in the universe increase.

            Connection is augmented and balanced by a second spiritual goal:  the increase of freedom.

            You are held in an eternal embrace by the oneness of the universe, but your importance in the universe is defined by your uniqueness.  You are important not because your existence brings more of what is already here, but because your existence brings something new that isn’t included anywhere else. Connection alone is not enough as a spiritual goal, because the merging into oneness implied by connection has the tendency to obliterate the gifts we have as individuals.

            So we also pursue a second spiritual goal: the freedom to completely express who we truly are.  Every one of us has something unique and valuable to add to the story of the Universe.  Only you can give the world this particular something, and therefore it is imperative that we act in ways that preserve and encourage your freedom to express what only you can express.  

            The first of our Unitarian Universalist principles, the inherent worth and dignity of every individual means that just by being who you are you hold within you something valuable.  Because you are the only you that was ever born or ever will be born, you add something of value to creation that cannot exist without you.  Inherent worth does not depend on creating something, or being powerful or famous, or the best or the smartest.  Inherent worth is not earned, it is a birthright gift.

            Encouraging our freedom means becoming aware of those physical circumstances and social and cultural norms that tend to force us to be smaller than we are, or something other than we are.  Forces like sexism, racism, or homophobia that force us into pre-defined roles, and therefore discourages the unique self we are born to be.  Our Unitarian Universalist commitment to inclusiveness and diversity grows from this principle of individual free expression.

            So to fulfill the goal of spiritual freedom we help people discover who they truly are:  and we remove the blocks that prevent that true self from being expressed.  Our social justice work emerges from the spiritual goal of freedom.  What are the barriers that keep people from knowing and celebrating with their true self?  What are the legal and social barriers we must take down because they constain the free expression of each person’s gift?

And by the way, I believe that the true nature of all people, which we seek to give freedom to, is not naturally oppressive or dangerous to others.  Those kinds of expressions are a pervision of the true self.  A dangerous or oppressive nature is itself a kind of box constraining the true self which we should work to liberate that person from.

            But spiritual freedom is not license to do anything we want.  Our spiritual freedom is constrained by our spiritual connection.  Our freedom is limited by the need of everyone to have the freedom to express who they truly are.  If my free expression oppresses someone else, or is dangerous to others, then my freedom should properly be limited.  The goal is to maximize freedom for all, not for some at the expense of others.

So the two spiritual goals: connection and freedom, in some sense limit, or even contradict each other.  We are free but connected.  The need to connect constrains our freedom.  We are connected but free, and the need to be ourselves, requires us sometimes to find our own path separate from others.

The tension between the two doesn’t make either less fundamental.  Our spiritual health is measured by how tenderly we hold these together:  connection and freedom.  

            I’ll say one more word about these two spiritual principles and how I see tham at the core of our Unitarian and Universalist faith.  Connection, in the form of love, is the core belief of Universalism.  Freedom, in the form of human agency, is the core belief of Unitarianism.

            The Universalists believed that the supreme defining quality of God was love. Love is the force that flows through and surrounds all things.  Love is what holds us up and holds us together.  Love is the reason that when mystics describe their experience of oneness they describe it in terms of ecstasy and joy.  It is God’s love for us, and our love for each other and all existence that connects us together.  The Universalists showed us that to talk about salvation for some and not for others is impossible. We will arrive together at the goal.

Break not the circle of enabling love 

where people grow, forgiven and forgiving, 

break not that circle, make it wider still, 

till it includes, embraces all the living.

            The Unitarians believed that every individual has true freedom.  We are free to save or damn ourselves.  Reacting against a Calvinist theology that said that everything was in the hands of an all-powerful God, Unitarians said, no, you are important, you have in your own self something important to add to this world.  You have a responsibility to speak your truth, because we can’t hear your truth from anyone else.  Your actions, good or bad, are your responsibility.  The Unitarians showed us that our individual gifts and skills and ideas can make a difference in the world either for good or for ill.

Join then the movement of the love that frees 

till people of whatever race or nation 

will truly be themselves, stand on their feet, 

see eye to eye with laughter and elation.

            Let us create communities of deep connection and liberating freedom.  

            Let us all recognize our place in a vast and interdependent web.  Let the web hold us and comfort us and banish our fears of loneliness and isolation.  Let the truth of connection teach us our responsibility to care for all existence. 

            Let each individual recognize their inherent worth and the unique voice sounding only within each heart.  Let us find ways to discover who we are, and release our gift into a world that needs what only we can give.  Let us work faithfully to remove the blocks that keep others from discovering and expressing who they truly are.

            Let us arrive together at a salvation where all are profoundly connected and utterly free.