Engaging Our Seventh Principle: The Tangled Web

Martha Hodges - 2007-06-10

To feel lonely – as we all feel lonely from time to time, no matter how many people may surround us – this is not necessarily a bad thing. Our culture teaches us that, to be happy, we must be in constant communication with other people, constantly occupied, constantly distracted from this experience of loneliness that is, after all, inherently human. To be lonely, we are taught, is somehow unnatural – something to be remedied as quickly as possible.

I say it’s not necessarily so. Loneliness can be a gift if we use it well, if we use it as an opportunity to think. An opportunity to think, to observe, to learn and to feel. In our lives of continual busyness, chatter and deadlines, it’s not so easy to stop and look around, to pay attention to our thoughts and feelings, to let our minds wander off in new directions.

But there is another kind of loneliness. This is the deep, aching sense of isolation, of alienation from our fellow humans and all the structures we human beings have thrown up to counter this profound and inescapable knowledge that we are – after all – alone. This is the kind of loneliness that we try to fend off with addictions, with compulsive work or exercise, with acquisitions. This is the kind of loneliness, the kind of separation, the alienation, that the truly bereft must feel. But I would guess that most of us have had an unwelcome taste of this kind of separation – some of us more often and for longer periods than others.

This experience of this kind of essential aloneness is frightening. It’s frightening even to think about it. I wonder if it’s not this kind of alienation that is at the heart of the search for God, at the heart of all religions. We seek solace and reassurance from one another, yes, but this kind of frightening and soul-killing sense that we are alien, that we are totally without importance or significance of any kind, cannot easily be assuaged by friends and family. This is the dark night of the soul. This is the experience that prompts some of us to cry out to God.

Those of us who can, with integrity, turn to a loving god in these moments may be blessed. Others of us may have sought this kind of comfort only to find that our attempts felt fake, inauthentic – that we couldn’t do this without pretending to not know what we know of ourselves and what we know of life.

Does our Unitarian Universalism offer anything at all in these moments? Does it offer anything at all in the way of solace, comfort, reassurance, meaning – those blessings that others find in prayer, or in the faith that another, better world awaits, one in which they will feel whole and healed?

I believe our Unitarian Universalism does offer us something like this. I believe this something is our seventh principle that affirms that we are part of something larger than ourselves. That we are connected to all beings, to the universe itself. Motes of dust floating in the universe we may be – but we are motes of dust that are connected to one another and to that universe. The universe is not alien. It is made of the very stuff we are made of. The butterfly effect – that observation that has become a truism – that the tiniest change in the interdependent system of the universe – the movement of a butterfly’s wings – sets in motion effects that reach around the world – this is a fact. Not the imaginings of a human mind desperate for reassurance, but a fact of natural law. The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings in China could theoretically set off a chain of events that would result in a tornado in Texas.

If this is true of a butterfly’s wings, what of your own wings, your actions, your words? In fact, you are an integral part of the universe. You are not separate from nature, from other creatures, or from the past or future. The interdependent web of being exists in time as well as space and in spirit. We are linked to what came before us and what will follow. In the physical world, we are drawn to one another and to all of existence by our common heritage and the laws of the natural world, as subatomic particles fly together, pulled by invisible electric charges. We are bound to one another, to the past and to the future and to the worlds of nature and imagination. We are bound in spirit, by our capacity to feel, by our thirst to understand, by our will toward wholeness and healing for ourselves, for other beings, and for the earth itself .

Take comfort from these words that we say every Sunday and may they bring meaning to your own dark night of the soul:

We are a separate, single people, linked into community by love and need and our search for truth. What touches one of us touches us all. We live by our shared concern, our gathered love. We are part of a web of life that makes us one with all humanity, one with all the universe. May we be grateful for these sacred connections that enable us to remember, to love, to care, and to celebrate.

Amen.