God Taught Me How To Gargle
Ana Levy-Lyons
May 4, 2014
First Unitarian, Brooklyn
A few weeks ago, I was folding a sheet and I asked my 3-year-old daughter, Miriam, if she wanted to help me. To my knowledge she had never folded a sheet before, and I thought it would be fun to try it with her. She said, “Sure.” I handed her one side of the sheet and I took the other and she immediately found the corners and began folding it in half while I mirrored her on my side and then she expertly found the new corners and folded again as if she had been doing this for decades. I said to her, “That’s amazing, Miri! I didn’t know you knew how to fold a sheet. How did you learn to do that?” She shrugged her shoulders and said, “God taught me.”
“Really! God taught you?”
She said, “Yeah.”
“Is there anything else that God taught you how to do?”
She thought for a minute and said, “Hmmm… God taught me how to gargle.”
When I thought about it, her testimonial really made perfect sense. Gargling is something so personal, interior, and experiential, it’s really not something that someone can teach you from the outside. You just have to kind of figure it out. And yet Miri’s memory was not that she had figured it out. Her memory was that God had taught her how to do it. Her God must be, like gargling, personal, interior, and experiential. And very real. God teaches her things from the inside that no one can teach her from the outside. To her, this was all very matter of fact and obvious.
To the outside observer, however, in this case me, it’s not obvious at all. Is saying that God taught you something just a fancy way of saying you figured it out yourself? Is there any real difference? Is there some active agent involved in the “teaching?” Is there anything beyond your ordinary self involved at all?
The distinction I’m wondering about here is not just between theism and atheism but between a mytho-poetic worldview and a more rationalist worldview. When I say “mytho-poetic,” I mean a spirituality that’s rooted in mythology, as in sacred stories and traditions, and poetry, meaning the artistic and aesthetic, the “bells and smells.” Everything is dense with meaning, dripping with symbolism. Spiritual forces animate our lives. God actually teaches you how to gargle. That’s mytho-poetic.
A rationalist worldview, on the other hand, is cool, scientific, and composed.
It tries to examine the florid claims people make about religious experience and boil them down to some more easily digestible, universal truth. God didn’t teach you, you figured it out. Religious liberals are known for being reductionist in exactly this way. Over the centuries, the mytho-poetic understanding of religion has fallen away, at least in certain circles, in favor of a stripped down, rationalist understanding. We’ve moved from high church to low church (although this particular sanctuary is about as high church as Unitarian Universalists get, with its Tiffany windows and high pulpit and historic pipe organ).
Norbert Capek, who we’re celebrating today in our flower communion, was a perfect example of this journey from high to low church. He started out life as a Catholic in the ultimate world of bells and smells. As he grew up, he found that he couldn’t embrace the theology with all its specific creedal claims about Christ and miracles. And along with that, he couldn’t stomach the liturgical extravagance of it, the elaborate rituals designed to bypass the intellect. So he moved from Catholicism to Protestantism. He became a Baptist minister in the U.S. where the theology and liturgy were stripped down. Even here, though, he was too liberal for his congregation and they eventually tried him for heresy and forced him out.
Finally, he found his home as the minister of a Unitarian church back in Prague. There he would preach in a plain wooden room, with plain wooden pews. No music, no art, no ritual. He wore a suit, not a robe. Everyone would just show up on Sunday mornings, he would lecture for some period of time, and then everybody would get up and go home. That was it. Nothing liturgical to interfere with pure thought. Nothing sentimental or supernatural to sweep you away. Nothing involving one’s body, God forbid.
But the story goes, and this might be mythology itself, that this spartan religious existence was ultimately unsatisfying even to the Reverend himself. It was depressing. He missed, and he guessed that his congregation missed, having something of beauty. Some symbolic ritual to bind the community together. And so, still seeking something democratic that spoke of people’s uniqueness rather than conformity, he asked his congregation to bring and exchange flowers. It was a wild success and the tradition has been carried down in Unitarian Universalist congregations ever since.
Norbert Capek’s story illustrates this anxiety that runs through much of liberal religion. You see the pattern play out over and over again throughout history. People run screaming from the overly superstitious practices, the God as big man with a white beard, the hierarchy of church authority and liturgy. We strip everything down to the bare essentials. Then we tend to feel empty and disconnected. So we try to reclaim pieces of what we lost, based on nostalgia and our desire for beauty. There’s a bit of a rebound. This pattern might have even played out in your own life and it is certainly playing out in Unitarian Universalism as a whole. My sense is that the pendulum is swinging cautiously back from a very heady humanism to a more spiritual, mytho-poetic sensibility. We don’t live on bread alone. We need bread and roses.
Flowers have had mytho-poetic resonance since the very dawn of mythology and poetry. Think of the Garden of Eden story. You have this verdant, fecund garden, bursting with flowers, and two nubile young people who are in direct conversation with a personal God who actually walks around in the same garden. The humans live in ignorant bliss. They don’t need to work, they don’t know they’re naked, and they don’t know how good they have it. That knowledge is sealed in the fruit of a tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They eat this forbidden fruit and their punishment is to be evicted from the garden. Now their eyes are opened to the harsh world, childbirth becomes painful, and they have to work hard for their food. They are alienated from God.
The rationalist would say — Well, that’s a pretty story, but really it’s just a decorative way of saying, look, when we’re children, we live in ignorant bliss (if we’re lucky) and then we make mistakes, we grow up, have experiences, and our innocence gets lost. It’s not that some “God” kicks you out of some “flower garden,” it’s just a natural process. It’s just what is. It’s not that God teaches you how to gargle, you just do it. So this is the liberal religious project in a nutshell: the Garden of Eden story and stories like it as well as music and art are merely pretty renderings of universal principles. You can and should strip off the narrative clothing to reveal the true essence beneath.
It is for good reason that religious liberals have undertaken this project. Religious mythology, liturgy, and discourse have carried seeds of violence and oppression through the generations. They have reinforced the subservience of women and affirmed a narrow-minded tribalism. It is understandable that progressive people have wanted to shed all of the particularities of tradition in favor of a fresh start of rationality and ethics.
But the problem with trying to surgically remove some universal message from its mytho-poetic context is that it doesn’t really work. When you rip a flower from the soil, it dies. The wisdom is inextricably connected to the story it grew in. They are not separable. Ideas are always embedded in history – in a particular time and place and aesthetic sensibility. They don’t exist in a vacuum. Norbert Capek’s plain wooden sanctuary didn’t work. And he and everyone else could feel it.
You can try to claim that the Garden of Eden story with all its sights and smells and drama and a walking, talking God is merely another way of saying that knowledge changes us and forces us to shed our innocence. But the two are simply not equivalent. They each have advantages and disadvantages, but they are not the same. And they are primarily not the same because they are not experienced the same way.
We humans don’t experience life at the level of the abstract and the universal. We experience life at the level of the story – our own stories and those of others. We experience music as the soundtrack of our lives. We experience God, if we experience God, as a presence or a force or a lover or a teacher, not as an intellectual idea. I believe that there are truths available in our lived experience and in the mytho-poetic expressions of lived experience that are not available to pure reason and intellect. And, as religious liberals, this is nothing to be embarrassed about and it’s nothing to be scared of. You don’t have to put your spiritual experiences in quotes and the word God in quotes if this is the way you experience reality. You don’t need to keep an ironic distance from the things that move you.
What my daughter offered when she said that God taught her how to gargle was a testimonial. She gave a personal testimonial to how God showed up in her life. And, rather than try to reinterpret for her what happened in a way that fits with a scientific understanding of the universe, I take her at her word. I respect her experience. Personally, I think God probably did teach her how to gargle. And I’m grateful. Because I sure wouldn’t have known how to teach her something like that.
People have experiences like this all the time, often with more weighty subjects than gargling. They come and tell me these great mythic stories of personal transformation, experiences of forces beyond their own capabilities, beyond the grasp of their own intellect. They tell me of flowers blooming in the unlikeliest of places. Who am I to question their testimony?
The world is great and mysterious and teeming with powers that we do not understand. The impossible seems to happen with some regularity. So if you tell me that God taught you how to gargle or how to sing or how to stop drinking or how to survive a great loss or how to get free from whatever has enslaved you, who am I, really – who are any of us, really – to say that it isn’t so?
