Rev. George Downey
First Parish Church of Groton
My thoughts today come from my own rational empiricist philosophy. You could ask, “What is a rational empiricist philosophy?” It is the search for knowledge by observation and experiment. That is how I made our Chalice and our Candle Table for the church. It is where my religious journey has taken me. It will not be the same as your journey. That is for you; to shape your beliefs as you choose.
My heritage as a human being is to try to make rational sense of my world. My mind tells me to look for meaning in this otherwise mute Cosmic Reality. The Cosmos doesn’t talk aloud to me, It is just there, and I must supply an interpretation. Research helps. Experience helps. Education may help.
The operational, defining word here is STORY (capitalized). STORY is the place where everything begins. WHether one is thinking of culture, societies, nations, or religion, the birthplace for it all is STORY. Let me say that again: the birthplace for it all is STORY. The facts, myths, legends, and fables mix together to start the flow to turn the tales into STORY. The STORY begins to create explanations, answers. With apology to Shakespeare, who said “our lives are rounded with a sleep,” I am saying out lives are rounded with STORY. No culture or religion can be sustained, and in fact would not have been created in the first place, without STORY!
STORY has been our way of imagining answers to the world’s puzzling questions. It is the beginning of the Religion Phenomenon. Where did we come from? What caused that to happen? Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, says, “Religion has the power to make you think nothing is random.” Indeed! Randomness is perhaps the most baffling concept with which the human mind must grapple. One way we respond is to imagine cause-and-effect lodged off somewhere with a deity.
So as Homo Sapiens’ problem-solving brains expanded, they began to create STORIES to interpret their world, such as:
We must reach back as far as anthropology, paleontology, archaeology, and geology can take us to get clues about evolving humans. Between 6 million and 3 million years ago the northern hemisphere was covered with an accumulating vast ice cap that locked up a huge portion of the planet’s water. Major sea and land changes resulted. Evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea actually happened. Newly emerging drained ocean basins and the drying out of the thick tropical forest changed the habitat for all living things.
In this period between 6 and 3 million years ago Proto-humans (Hominids), just recently breaking away on their own branch of the Tree of Life, lived at the edge of the East African tropical forest. It was rich in plant foods and fresh water. They lived much like their near relatives, the chimpanzees. They had short leg bones and lived a sedentary life and probably spent some time in the trees.
With the declining rainfall the wooded environment of East Africa turned arid. Food sources and fresh water became scarce. The area became savannah grasslands. Leisurely foraging turned into more strenuous food gathering. Now leg bones lengthened. The upright walking Hominids became hunters about 2.6 million years ago.
The striding and running expended more energy in food gathering. The elevated hunting-gathering activity increased the risk of overheating. By 1.6 million years ago the evolution of naked skin appeared. Nina Jablonski, head of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in a 2009 issue of Scientific American: “The loss of thick hair on the body and the evolution of sweat glands on the skin cooled the active body and protected the temperature-sensitive, enlarging brain from overheating.”
Now the roving groups moved farther and faster, no longer needing to walk with short legs and knuckles. They may have kept mainly to the ocean's edge in East Africa, where food could be found. Those growing brains gathered information as the evolving Hominids ranged deeper into new habitat. Boston Globe op-ed writer James Carroll says, "It was not enough for our ancestors, as their brains evolved, that they should know. What made them our actual human forebears was that they came to know that they knew." It pointed to an emerging self-consciousness. Uniquely human abilities — to think in symbols, to recombine those symbols into infinite meanings — were pointing to the arrival of Homo Sapiens with STORIES. Carroll says there was a brilliant shift from seed gathering to seed planting. But that is recent history. We are ahead of ourselves, and must reach farther back in time.
The evolving human species that separated from the Simian root stock had much to learn about everything around them. As communication skills and rudimentary language sounds — grunts, signals, vocal alerts — developed, oral sharing of knowledge began. Vocal dexterity evolved with the enlarging brain. Of course, this was long before the technical skills of writing appeared. Now we are back to that focusing word, STORY. Sharing learnings, the wisdom of the tribe, the fears, the warnings, came as STORY told and retold. It was the vehicle for sharing information. The STORY carried the essential teachings for the children. It carried the marks of tribal identity. It imagined answers to the puzzles that the natural world presented.
This bundling together of imagined answers into tribal STORIES provided the fabric for the group’s social identity. Add a few hundred thousand years of evolution and Homo Sapiens’ brains sort out the best stories with the best answers to their bewildering existence.
The slowly evolving human species began to migrate from East Africa, going north, turning east to the Middle East, to India, to Australia, and to Mongolia. Another group turned west to the Mediterranean area. Their tribal stories went with them, reshaped to meet new questions needing new answers. THey took these, their STORIES, and these became the primitive cultural traits that gave them their unique identity. This now manes the setting for the Religion Phenomenon.
The rapid development of the human species, the physical and mental growth in brain capacity, in a relatively short time on the planetary clock, elevated Homo Sapiens to the pinnacle as the questioning and the STORY-creating animal. And the systems of STORIES form the embryo of religion. There was a need for more and more answers in a complex world. STORIES brought drawings on rocks and on cave walls. STORIES for animals, for seasons, for birth and death, for strange natural mysteries, and all other new questions, came together to shape early human societies. The search for the fulfilling STORY was the compelling theme. It said, “This is the way we want it to be in our imagination.”
STORIES contained the balm to soothe, to give comfort. STORIES with answers became the Religion Phenomenon. This prehistoric awakening saw the spread of language. Then STORIES began to shape societies. Eventually minds found a way to make marks represent the language. It evolved into a way to write. Recently, Israeli archaeologists found a fragment of clay with cuneiform writing dated around the 14th century before the common era in Jerusalem. Cuneiform writing uses wedge-shaped symbols made on soft clay tablets. A giant modern step had been taken with writing!
The Religion Phenomenon is as varied as evolving human societies. If there is a sameness, it is with the questions. Then answers went in many directions. It was god, one god, many gods, no god. It was Heaven, Zion, Paradise, Transmigration, Reincarnation. Or it was a god with anthropomorphic features, thoughts, emotions like us. It was the promise of eternity, the release from suffering, answers for the good and evil dilemma, or denial of randomness, all issuing from the same human longing. Or it began with “Where did we come from?” The Hebrew story written down about 3,000 years ago says God created Adam ad Eve. But was it really the other way around? Many cultures with many answers. The Native American tribes had different answers for their origins: Came on the back of a great turtle; From a sacred mountain; From an animal family; and so on.
Of course, the STORIES were eventually written down as people developed writing. They grew in complexity and they were given sacred meaning. The Holy Book with the Prophet’s messages from the Deity was the modern outcome. STORIES became integral to their societies.
In 2007 Sam Allis, a writer for the Boston Globe, interviewed Peter Gomes, who, in plain English, said Allis, is Harvard’s preacher. It was a devout Christian being interviewed by a self-declared “dreaded secular humanist.” Allis asked Gomes if he believed in heaven and hell. Gomes replied, “I don’t have a better explanation for a future of misery or a future of joy. Heaven and hell are fine metaphors for me.” Gomes told the atheist, “Ultimately there is an accounting. Eventually the wicked will be punished and the virtuous rewarded. I don’t choose to believe this. I have to. I can’t believe that the universe is sheer chance and chaos!” Gomes said. Do you hear that terrible “randomness” word crowding in?
In 2001 the Unitarian Universalist World magazine, November-December issue, carried an essay by Forrest Church, then the minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Dr. Church has since died. The article was taken from his speech delivered to the U.U. General Assembly. He writes, “I define religion as our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We fill in the space between the dual realities with myth and metaphor, with poetry and paradox, with story and sacred text. We are the religious animals.”
But I would say we are first the STORY-making animals, filling the space between the realities. What can we say? We are always re-imagining our world. When the human mind is charged with the power of myth, a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning, in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims, the result is the simplifying of problems and issues to a single fact and then magnifying the fact into an absolute.
It is the Religion Phenomenon.
If I were to write a sequel to this essay, it would be titled “Religion — the Good and the Bad.” I would see Religion politicized, imperialized, ethnocized, and nationalized. On the other hand I know Religion brings many satisfying, comforting answers; supporting, nurturing communities; help in time of loss; and a STORY to cling to.
May your STORIES carry meaning for you on your religious journey.
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Created 2009-12-16