Counting (or looking) Toward Infinity

Only he who possesses a personal religion, an original view of infinity, can be an artist.

--Friedrich von Schlegel

            This was overheard at a minister's meeting, as a colleague commented about thirty-plus years of sermonizing.  He said, "My brother is a mathematician.  He's obsessed with infinity.  So am I, but I don't rely on numbers to describe it." His view might not reflect your form of liberal religion, but haven't all of us wondered about what in our environment is infinite? 

            It could be said that infinity (or eternity) is the only philosophical concept on which UU's can agree.  (I can hardly wait to hear what Mr. Neale, our resident artist and philosopher of science at Third Church, thinks about what Schlegel said above!).  At the birth of American Unitarianism in the early 19^th Century, Channing at once delimited the nature of eternity by debunking the Trinity: Jesus was the most godly-inspired human ever, but he was just that-a man, not a God.  That didn't stop Unitarians, or others, in looking for it.  At the height of the Transcendental movement, Emerson said, "We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends." 

            Whether agnostic, atheist, or theist in this 21^st Century of ours, interest in the infinite is still compelling.  An American psychoanalyst wrote, "Science holds an infinity of doubt, and implies a faith...in the inexorable laws that govern phenomena."  In traveling across the country this fall, I've had several discussions with folks about religion, politics, and the intersection of the two.  A woman in a church basement in Indiana told me, "There's a lot of talk about hope in this campaign.  I don't need a lecture.  The better day might never come, but my God will never die. [Her emphasis]  Someday I'll see him."  A traditional view, perhaps, but for me it raises these questions: What in our lives is holy (that is, the most important relationship in our lives)?  What happens to this relationship it when we die?

            It's been said that religion replaces doubt with certainty.  Liberal religion, on the other hand, doesn't do this.  Our approach is at once both a challenge and a source of strength for our personal religion, whatever its particulars.  Specifically, the reluctance in liberal religion to accept received wisdom about anything leads to a greater reliance on the truth we find, accepting all the while that this "truth" may not be final.  And the challenge is that this search for our final, non-negotiable truth (or thing that never changes) might never end.

            I'll engage this topic in my first post-sabbatical sermon at Third Church, and I look forward to hearing what your views on infinity are as well.  Do you agree with Schlegel, or Emerson?  More than this, I can't wait to just to see all of you.  It's been a refreshing and fulfilling five months of teaching, travel, solitude and reflection.  But it's time to come back-back to our religious home at the corner of Mayfield and Fulton, just in time for the holidays.

            See you in church!