A literal understanding of God creating the world in seven days and Moses parting the Red Sea, that just doesn’t work for me. If did for many years as some of you know. I grew up in a pretty Fundamentalist environment and didn’t question it much until I started taking courses on religion that helped me expose me to a very different way of understanding religion.

I discovered that scholars had for quite some time been speaking of the ancient stories as mytho-poetic, an entire genre it in its own right with profound meaning—that didn’t have to be taken literally. And so I began to see the ancient stories more like poems that didn’t have to be taken literally. When the poet Rilke says that God whispers to each of us as she makes us and then sends us out into the world, we don’t have to picture God actually whispering. There’s a deeper truth being expressed. The great poet W. H. Auden said once that language is the shadow cast upon Truth. We do the truth a disservice when we insist on narrow understandings of the words. The world is just bigger than that.

In the same way we’re far more complex and mysterious than we normally give ourselves credit for. I’ve started talking about dreams lately because they have been such a profound gateway to the spiritual dimension to me. I’m intentionally talking about dreams these days in an effort to share a little with you all about how I see the world and what spirituality means for me. I figure I’m still new enough here that we need to keep getting to know each other.

One reason for that is because dreams are not coming from the rational part of our minds. They arise from what psychologist refer to as the unconscious. Of course scientific psychology is still just catching up to what the ancients have known all along: that inner space is just as vast and miraculous as outer space. And that the material arising from our inner depth is interwoven with natural and spiritual wonder.

But that view has yet to really permeate modern consciousness. We’re still very much enslaved by the "what you see is what you get" mentality that pushes spiritual things out to the margins and leaves us dried up and starving for meaning.

I wanted to show that clip from At Play in the Fields of the Lord because that film, much like The Poisonwood Bible, dramatizes these historical forces and holds them up for our critical evaluation. The modern, rational approach of the missionaries shows us the epitome of our western scientific approach. We want to cut down all the forests and put up strip malls and get the whole world wired in to ATMS so we can eat at McDonalds.

I believe the war in Iraq is ultimately a consequence of this basic imbalance. That’s why I preached on King Nebachadnezzar last week. There’s nothing new about political empires that get out of balance and seek to replace the sacred. But Nature herself seeks to restore that balance. We saw it in the ancient story of Daniel interpreting the King’s dream and we see it being played out today across the headlines of the New York Times.

But it’s important to remember that, as egregious and mind boggling as the mismanagement of our country’s resources has been, we are all ultimately complicit. What we are seeing in the Middle East is part of a much larger problem: the struggle of our species to figure out how to live in peace and in harmony with the natural world.

The missionaries back at the base camp establish radio contact, trying to tell him to come back, that he's dangerously low on fuel.  And in that moment he's us: he's a powerful symbol of western civilization, running out of fuel, puttering along with our mechanized solutions to the world's problems.  They ask him what he's doing and in that moment, at the upper reaches of western's civilization's powers and yet on the threshold of the sacred, he looks around and says, "I’m at play in the fields of the Lord."  The missionaries exchanged perplexed looks.  They are in the heart of the sacred and yet they are utterly blind to it.  But Tom Beringer’s character, "Moon," is beginning to see.

Now I don’t know if you’re with me on this, but as I see it, he’s having a moment of clarity in relation to the madness of western civilization. The limping western technology (symbolized by the droning little plane) blend with his Native American spirituality and his eyes are opened: he sees the world as a beautiful, mysterious place. And I love the fact that he just jumps out of the plane to rejoin the Earth’s people. Wow. That’s making an existential choice in the moment with profound spiritual implications.

So the question is, How can we do that? How can we jump out of the plane our civilization is flying in? How can we reconnect with nature and our own deeper selves? These are challenging questions and needless to say the most I can do is ask them.

But fortunately you all have begun to answer the question before I ever got here, by creating a faith community that honors the world religions, that holds fast to the idea that something profound and sacred is emerging in them.

The religious right in America and throughout the world wants to say there’s only one way. But you all are part of a growing movement of people who are facing the need to grow up spiritually, to see the Earth as our home and God as our mother and father, that sees all humanity as one family.

You have broken with the patriarchal missionary approach that throws out the indigenous spirituality of the Earth’s first peoples. Instead we seek to weave their tapestries into our own, and our own with our neighbors. You are part of the powerful grass roots movements seeking to forge bonds that celebrate a multiplicity of ways.

I just want to touch briefly on the upcoming Children of Abraham peace walk in this context, since I think it’s a concrete manifestation of what we’re all about here (religion as a force that brings people together across social and religious boundaries). This is the event coming up in June in which an inter-faith group will walk from a synagogue (in Park Slope) to a mosque right here in Kensington.

Gandhi new a little something about inter-faith worship. He held early morning prayer every day at his ashram at 4:20 AM, saying that the early morning, along with the evening, dawn and dusk are liminal moments, the junction between day and night.

His grandson has this to say about his grandfather’s prayer meetings as compared to other kinds of worship:

I’d like to close with one of the prayers Gandhi would recite at his morning prayer meetings. It may sound slightly foreign in that it does come from another tradition, but, much like Sistashree’s chanting, it resonates with the universe’s sacred song.

Let all humanity join in hymns of praise this day.

Happy Mother’s Day to you all. Amen.