Athiests With Open Hearts

I’m not an atheist.  Only among UU’s would a minister need to make such a confession with a tiny twinge of fear and a little sadness that someone might truly be alienated by my lack of un-belief.  But isn’t that what’s great about us, that nothing’s a given, that confessions here are always confessions of faith?  Daring to question means daring to disagree in love, to stand together with our differences and never turn away from our faith in one another.  Isn’t that what’s magical about us?

It’s true.  It’s obvious enough.  I admit it.  I’m not an atheist.  The word has harder edges and firmer boundaries, than anything I would ascribe to my belief system.  It purports a surety that is not my own.  My belief system is a guiding, clarifying, continually re-imagined house of steel and cards that holds me up when I’m not paying attention and sways gently under its own weight when I analyze it too closely.  It holds no pretension of absolute surety, no line in the sand which once drawn can never be crossed. 

An atheist believes that there is no God.  An atheist has found an answer to the eternal question.  And so I am not an atheist because I can’t bear the thought of letting go of the question.  I am not an atheist because one of the very few things I would gamble my life upon is the conviction that being human means not knowing everything. 

Not knowing the nature of the thing behind the thing - the force behind all the other forces, the beginning of the beginning – not knowing is an essential component of my religious imagination.  I am one of those people who think there might just be an elephant in the trunk of my car.  One of those people, as comedian Penn Jillette has so perfectly stated, who forgot to mention that “my personal heartfelt definition of the word ‘elephant’ includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire.”   

There just might be an elephant in the trunk of my car, or maybe it is only a spare tire, but who am I do define either one of them?  To me, being human is butting up continually against the edges of the mystery and not really knowing, not in the beginning or the middle or even the end of all my searching, who or what shaped the net that holds the stars together, or how, ultimately, the canvass of the nighttime sky was knitted out of nothingness. Not knowing if the architect of it all was God or time or our better angels or DNA, or more likely, believing that it was all of these things and more and that on some fundamental level all of these things are God.  That’s me.

I believe I shall never know, as Einstein once said, ‘what the old one thinks,” or weather or not the old one even exists to catch my house of steel and cards when it sways.  Perhaps I believe people have a better chance of feeling the truth than of knowing it, of responding honestly to the impulses of the heart than those of the mind.  And so I am not an atheist. 

But, as James Luther Adams said, “there is nothing more beautiful than an atheist with an open heart.”  Nothing more beautiful.  There is nothing more beautiful than an atheist with an open heart who, once having let go of God’s hand, reaches out to the world with his or her own. 

Our pews (or chairs, or whatever!) are full of such people, and it is just such people who hold great responsibility for making Unitarianism and consequently Unitarian Universalism what it is today, the godless many who sacrificed much to found our congregations on the assumption that freedom, reason and tolerance were the pillars of religion rather than devotion or piety.  The shoulders of giants upon which we stand are in some large measure the shoulders of the open hearted atheists who fought through the better part of the 20^th century to make real a religion where one didn’t have to check their critical and thinking mind at the door to gain admittance. 

The religious life of the open hearted atheist invites us all to see sunlight, almost tangible enough to grab, to recognize with awe that particles of dust that were once embedded in the rock of Mars are floating past our face each morning, natural-born star-stuff in the air we are breathing.  Wonder of wonders, the open hearted atheist thinks.  I am lonely, but I am not alone.  I am swimming in this cosmos, the untamed and untrammeled soup of spirit and star and element and earth, and I do not need Jesus or any other anointed one to open my eyes to the developing miracle of this flesh-filled moment. 

            This is belief, faith, wonder, awe, reverence for all that is precious, and it is very much present in a belief system which holds that the world is so wondrous that God’s smooth-handed divine sanction is utterly inconsequential.  In the lived experience of an open hearted atheist, the middle-man between the world and the human being has been swept away.   

                I am no atheist.  Mine is a faith that includes devotion and mystery and at least the enduring possibility of an elephant in the trunk.  Mine is a faith that usually but not always includes the word “God,” but I strive and I hope that we all can strive, to be open-hearted, generous of spirit and large of heart.        

              I don’t worry too much about who’s in what category – who’s an atheist, who’s a theist, who’s an earth-centered polytheist with a splash of Buddhist philosophy thrown in.  What I’m attentive to and hopeful for is that each of us can see in one another an open hearted atheist, a theist who also dares to question, and an earth centered polytheist with a splash of Buddhism who doesn’t look down their nose at those of us who don’t know our chakras from our belly buttons.