"Spiritual Growth is for Everyone"

As we have already learned from the lesson Catherine Farmer presented earlier, our religious exploration program embarks today on the study of our third Principle: "Acceptance of one another and encouragement of spiritual growth in our congregations." Unitarian Universalists adopted this affirmation, along with the rest of the Principles and Purposes, twenty years ago.

Since then they have provided us with a sturdy foundation. They come as close as we have ever come to a common understanding about who we are and what we value. But like all religious texts, they are open to interpretation.

One meaning holds true for all of us, however. The values of acceptance and of spiritual growth apply to everyone: child, youth, and adult. We know that acceptance and growth are connected, as they are in any healthy living system. That is why we include them when we speak of our church. Today we look more closely at these two values and ask ourselves how we can be more attentive to them. They go directly to the heart of the experience we share, as children, youth and adults.

Narrative accounts of childhood religious experience resonate with certain common themes. In Edward Robinson's "The Original Vision," we see the child as a mystic, drawn by the beauty of the natural world and easily moved to wonder. The book offers numerous accounts of adults - in their forties and fifties, even their eighties - remembering experiences from their early years. These early experiences are formative and unforgettable.

Perhaps you have such memories. Many of us do. I wasn't a mystical child, but I do recall how I loved to inspect flowers - from the cultivated plants that grew in our backyard, to the swamp blossoms I found when I ranged farther from the house, to the sweet bushes that bloomed each spring outside my piano teacher's studio. I felt related to them somehow, and I visited them, like friends, throughout the week. Their names - trumpet vine, jack-in-the-pulpit (a personal favorite), honeysuckle, were vivid and evocative. While it wasn't ecstasy that I felt, the flowers did affect me spiritually. I would gaze at each delicate aspect, with a quality of attention that it would take hours of meditation practice to achieve today. I have never done a better job of staying in the present moment than I did back then, when I didn't even have to try.

There is a true self that we carry with us throughout life, a self the child already knows and then mourns as it becomes buried in the work of becoming an adult. That true self - what one person called "the essential 'me'" - knows intuitively one's place in the universe. In that knowledge is security and an acceptance of all that is - for it is good to be part of the "great unity," as she described it. Spiritual practices such as meditation and contemplative prayer, help us rediscover that true self and the reality in which it lives. A child moved by an exquisite view finds that reality all by herself.

Those who hold onto the memories of such childhood experiences are very fortunate. These memories provide consolation as the child grows up and experiences the adult pressures of life and the disillusionment that is often associated with religion. One man in Robinson's book, now in his fifties, remembers the feelings of "spiritual ecstasy" that came to him as a child, feelings that seem "natural and right" even now. As he recalls, first "the governess began to snarl this up," as she introduced sin and suffering to his tender spirit. Not long after, he "had an awful feeling that Jesus was not my man," as he puts it. By the time he became an adult, he had embarked on a "long and joyful period of self-repair . . . the effect was to get back to and start again from those very earliest feelings." One task of spiritual growth from child to adult is to let the adult get to know the child once again. Whether it is to nurture the ability to be in the present moment, or to heal from all that has wounded that true self within, spiritual growth can take us back to where we began.

A lot happens along the way, however. Once we have left childhood behind, acceptance is just as needed, but harder to find. Self-repair is not something we can do all alone.

In our church community we make explicit the yearning for acceptance and its role in healing our lives. When we state in our Principle that we practice "acceptance of one another," we are safeguarding each other's true selves, as if they were a spark of divinity within. But we are also calling on each other to become our best selves - the people we are capable of becoming, with the encouragement and support of one another. Spiritual growth is moral growth: learning ethical rules to follow, gaining skills in reciprocity and fairness, building character and courage. Spiritual growth is relational growth, gained only by knowing and being known by others. We aren't always our best selves. We are here to help each other work on it.

"I believe that the child has a wholeness," said one eighty-one year old woman in Robinson's book. "Looking back," she adds, "it seems to me that I was not yet disturbed by the sorrows that came later, at school. I was open, therefore, to receive. That simple wholeness is something like the wholeness of an animal, but more conscious perhaps. I would compare that simple wholeness with the more complex wholeness that you work towards slowly. I think I am much more whole today at eighty-one," she concludes, "than I was at forty. And perhaps when a new wholeness has been achieved out of the complexities of life, one will be able to see the world invisible again."

Our spiritual path takes us back to where we began, but we are not the same as we were as children. We cannot escape the complexities of life that make us who we are, our true selves burnished by experience. To become whole again is a task we begin as soon as we leave childhood.

One opportunity for spiritual growth for our young people is our Coming of Age program. Coming of Age is a year-long experience our fourteen-year olds undertake, culminating in a worship service they create themselves. It demarcates the line between childhood and the rest of their lives - a crossing over to be celebrated a lot and mourned a little too.

One of the traditions of Coming of Age is the reading of the credos - statements of personal belief - to the congregation. But I get to hear them first. Each year David and I have the Coming of Age group come to our home for dinner and the sharing of the credos a couple of weeks before they share them with the congregation. The gathering is always a little chaotic, and our dog enjoys it immensely. The year four Coming of Age girls were with us, they passed him from one to the other. His feet never touched the ground the whole evening.

In the transition we call Coming of Age, we see the child trying to hold on to the true self, and actively creating, at the same time, the self who will become the adult. Everything is in flux. And it will be for a while. But there is something that comes from taking all that energy, chaos and flux and shaping it into a statement, a service, and a celebration that will go with them as they grow. Something that says that being whole is a collaborative act, requiring us to hold on to our true selves and also to each other, a good lesson for a church to teach, I would say.

This morning, while we are in our sanctuary, our high school youth, many of them graduates of our Coming of Age program, are leading our younger children in a worship service about the third Principle. What they have to tell each other about "acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth" is something I am eager to find out. Whatever they say, I am certain of this: there is great value in exploring what it means.

Our faith is grounded in experience - and not just the experience of adults. It begins in our experience as children and grows from there throughout our lives. With acceptance and encouragement, each of us grows and flowers as a whole person. But we are always whole, at any age, our essence intact, our work ahead, to become who we always meant ourselves to be.

The readings in this sermon come from "The Original Vision: A Study of the Religious Experience of Childhood," by Edward Robinson (Manchester College, Oxford, England, 1977; reprinted by Seabury Press, New York, 1983).