Spirituality and Emotions
by Rev. Ricky Hoyt
July 19, 2009

Spirituality and emotions are closely linked.  Too closely linked would say some who see that spirituality can sometimes be overly touchy-feely.  Too closely linked would say those who criticize the sillier spiritual notions intended to address emotional needs but offensive to simple reason.  Too closely linked would say those who wish we could apply to our theology the same kind of dispassionate logic we apply to our science.  Too closely linked would say some follows of Eastern religions who believe that our emotional attachments to the impermanent things of the world is the cause of all our spiritual suffering.  Too closely linked would say some followers of Western religions who see in our emotions a too close identification to the lusts and desires of the body and the natural world and that the immaterial spiritual world is better accessed through the clear cold thinking of the mind.

But spirituality is, after all, primarily an emotional experience.  Spirituality is a feeling we have, not an idea that we know.  There are ideas in religion, thoughts to discuss, doctrines to study, philosophical puzzles to tease apart, but spirituality, even for the theologian is at least as much about the feeling of having a spiritual experience:  the ineffable ecstasy of the sky opening up in cosmic visions.  Spirituality is the emotional charge that calls us to acts of justice.  Spirituality is the inspiration that comes to an artist and makes her think she’s taking dictation from a higher source.  Spirituality is experienced and expressed through emotions like gratitude, and joy, and hope, and compassion, and most of all love.

So, how to respect the emotional base of spirituality without slipping into the excesses of an emotional spirituality that crowds out rational thinking and that encourages us to rise above our too-closely felt emotions that keep us clinging to a narrow material existence we should be trying to transcend?  Are our emotions a help or a hindrance to our spiritual journey?  Should we try to suppress our emotions, or at least some of the emotions, or can emotions be a tool to unlocking deeper spiritual truths in the same way it is our emotions that often introduce us to the original spiritual experience.  Are emotions something to be devalued and shunned as we seek a spiritual equanimity above feelings like anger and lust or even a too-grandly felt joy and pleasure.  Or our emotions a part of the truth of our existence and to be dealt with as spiritual data the same way we deal with every other part of our being?

I confess to being a person who is uncomfortable with emotions.  On the Meyers Briggs scale which categorizes people as either thinker or feeler types I am a strong thinker.  That doesn’t mean I’m an unfeeling person, but it means that I start processing information with my mind and then move to my heart and the gut. I get to compassion and sympathy eventually but before I can get there I need to understand.  I want all the data. My feelings are real but I have to take a little journey to get to them, where feeler types start with their feelings immediately, and then have to take a little journey to try and understand why they feel that way.

On the Enneagram chart I’m a 5, which is also associated with thinking.  5s are labeled the “Investigator.” We’re hungry for information.  And we can happily spend hours by ourselves creating grand philosophical systems that exist only within our brains.  5s are handy because we’re the kind of person you can go to with a problem when you need a reasonable answer unclouded by emtions.  But if you’re a person who lives in the feeling world, 5s can seem a little cut off from reality.

My approach to spirituality then, has been to get at it intellectually.  And an intellectual path to spirituality is completely valid; it’s one of the four named paths enlightenement in the Hindu system, along with worship, and meditation, and actions of justice and charity.  I like theology best because it’s the part of religion that has the most thinking in it.  Theology presents intellectual puzzles, and it doesn’t bother me at all that some of the more arcane parts of theology eventually have almost nothing to do with how a person could or should actually live their life, and maybe nothing to do with the reality of God either.  It’s important to me that religion makes sense.  It isn’t enough that a belief merely feels right.  If a spiritual notion is incoherent I’ll throw it out, even if it’s comforting.  If my intuition is at odds with my reason, I’ll trust my reason and deny my intuition.

Our Unitarian history has historically been a religion that follows my pattern, the Jnana path as the Hindus would say.  We’ve long been the religion that sought to bring reason into spirituality.  We objected to the trinity because it didn’t make sense.  We denied the miracles of Jesus, like Thomas Jefferson taking his scissors to the Gospels, because they offended our reason.  Our Unitarian ancestors were the scientists of the Enlightenment, Newton, and Priestly and Servetus, using the power of the mind to investigate the physical world, and we thought we could do the same with the spiritual world.

For that religious approach, emotions were a bother and a distraction, at best an irrelevancy, but at worse a dangerous temptation to sink into the excesses of religious practice.  We were, after all descended from the Puritans.  We had already cleared our churches of all the images and the paintings and the statuary, and the smells and bells of Catholicism.  Later we had cleared our churches of all the sacraments as well, no more communion, no more baptisms.   God forbid we would dunk a person bodily under water, eventually we got uncomfortable even sprinkling a few drops on a baby’s forehead.  We attacked every ritual with the question, “But what does it mean?” and because rituals, if they’re powerful, rarely mean anything we can put into words, we got read of them.

Eventually we were left with a Unitarian faith that few would describe as spiritual either inside our churches or looking in from outside, and we were proud of that absence.  Banning the spiritual meant that we had succeeded in purifying our religion of everything that disturbed our reason, or our logic, or our worldview that trusted only what we could see with our eyes and touch with our hands, and describe with our science.  Ours would be a religion of the mind, not the heart.  God’s frozen people.

And yet we would not have thought of ourselves as unfeeling, and outsiders would agree that within a narrow band the Unitarian faith was an emotional powerfully faith.  You would never catch us throwing our hands up in the air in uncontrollable joy, and if a Unitarian fell down in the church aisle and started to writhe in ecstasy, we wouldn’t praise the Holy Spirit, we’d call 911.  But we were, more than many other religions, the church to be fired up by politics, passionate about social justice, furious at oppression.  We could get angry.  We could raise our voices.  We could get thrilled and inspired.  We could inspire others.  We could feel courageous, and righteous, and we could feel stirred up to our bones and ready to take on the world, and very often we did.

So we come from a tradition that was, by the mid-twentieth century, emotional, in carefully channeled ways, but not spiritual.  And we come from a tradition that prizes reason as the most important tool for discerning truth, even to the point of denying the existence of spiritual realms that reason cannot reach.

Perhaps, like me, your initial experience with Unitarian Universalism still retained a lot of that quality.  And perhaps, like me, it was precisely that quality that made you feel you had a home here.  And perhaps like me, and like the Unitarian Universalist movement itself, you’ve come to realize that we’ve been missing something along that narrow road.

My fear has always been, and this is also I believe the fear of our movement, that by opening our faith to a more broadly-defined spirituality, that we might lose the essential character of the Unitarian faith that we cherish so highly.  We fear that by allowing ourselves to feel our faith as well as think it, that we might lose the thinking part entirely.  We fear that by allowing emotions to creep into our spiritual practice (beyond those emotions stirred up by social justice work) that the emotions might overwhelm our rationality.  And we fear still, too, that emotions necessarily lead to fuzzy thinking, and fuzzy thinking leads to supernaturalism, and a church that loses itself in the supernatural soon starts to care more about fantasies of the next world than the real problems and suffering of this world that has always been our proper religious focus.

Those fears are real.  Fear, too is an emotion we need to start acknowledging in our spirituality.  But I’m also happy to report from my own experience and the experience of our churches over the last few decades, that the fear is unfounded.  Those who hope for a Untiarian Universalist faith more open to spirituality and emotions, and I count myself among them, are also sensitive to the rich resources of our reasonable, this-worldly tradition and don’t want to lose them.  But we’re beginning to find, and our movement as a whole is beginning to find, that emotional doesn’t mean anti-intellectual, any more than thoughtful means insensitive.  And that spiritual concerns can be applied to this world in a way that deepens our attention and concern rather than diminishing it.

I’m pleased that we are discovering, slowly by slowly, how a broader sense of spirituality, and a freer acknowledgment of ourselves as emotional beings has enriched our Unitarian Universalist spiritual practice.  I say this not as someone who has been a prophet of the movement, but as someone who has learned the lesson for myself and is still learning the lesson.  We’re finding ways to invite ritual back into our worship, and still being careful that the rituals we invent reflect the principles or our faith we need them to express.  We’re experimenting with music that gets us on our feet, and letting our hands start to clap if they feel like clapping.  We’re willing to think of our worship hour as a time to have spiritual experiences, not merely a time to discuss theology and politics.  We’re beginning to see that our social justice work is not a separate concern from spirituality, but that our social justice commitment is stronger when it’s grounded in spiritual principles.

So where do we go from here?  If, as we’ve seen, it is possible to have a Unitarian faith that retains it’s tradition of reason, and intellectual rigor, while also opening ourselves to emotional experience and spiritual concerns, what can we still do to push forward into fuller integration?  How do we fulfill the hope of Ken Patton who urged us in the Reading, “Let us worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits.”  And who then testifies to us, “Life comes with singing and laughter, with tears and confiding, with a rising wave too great to be held in the mind and heart and body, to those who have fallen in love with life.”  Our faith is a faith too great to be held even in the mind and the heart and the body, so we certainly cannot think to contain it in the mind alone.

One strategy to create a faith that embraces the mind and heart and body, is to get over that old prejudice that emotions are a detriment to spirituality.  It’s a prejudice handed down from the Greeks, reinforced by a Christian religion that sought to divorce itself from this world, resurrected by our New England Puritan ancestors, and confirmed  by a sexist 20th century culture that wanted all men to be John Wayne and dismissed all women as liable to hysteria.  We learned to feel that if spirituality had a place at all in our lives it was in carefully contained boxes on Sunday mornings, to be experienced among ordered pews and a sermon that lectured rather than inspired.

That’s a false prejudice.  Emotions have a welcome place in spirituality.  Spirituality begins in our emotions, and without that emotional reality there’s would be nothing to discuss or lecture about. Worship shouldn’t be about denying our emotions, or sealing them away, but giving them expression.  And not only are the positive emotions of joy and hope and gratitude and love, welcome in worship but we should even find room for the uncomfortable, negative emotions, that are nonetheless real parts of our lives.

That’s why I had us sing, “When I Am Frightened” as our Opening Hymn, which may have seemed like an odd choice.  But how refreshing to have a hymn which acknowledges fear and anger, loneliness and uncertainty.  Those kinds of feelings are rare in our worship, and rare in our hymnal.  When I first sang that hymn I imagined it in the voice of a child.  I see now that there’s nothing in the hymn itself that says that.  I was thinking of a child because I couldn’t imagine adult Unitarians bringing those feelings into our worship, but of course we do.  And adults, too, need to be shown the compassion and acceptance that the hymn singer asks for so that we too, even as adults, may learn.

I found another hymn for our Centering Hymn that also brings in some of those emotions we have too long kept out.  And isn’t it interesting that we find these kinds of hymns in our Hymnal Supplement published in 2005 much more easily than in our main hymnal published in 1993; we’ve come a long way in 16 years.  Only now are we finding it possible to sing, “I am worn, I am tired.”  I ache, I feel hopeless.

But not only are those emotions true to our experience, for all of us sometimes, and therefore deserve a place in our this-worldly, reality based spirituality, but those emotions can also lead us to greater spiritual truth.  When we’re facing the spiritual questions, “Who am I?  What does it mean?  What is it worth?  What should I do?”  Allowing our emotional responses to join the discussion along with our intellect gives us a better tool for better answers. “Why do I ache?”  We might ask.  “Why am I tired?”  “What’s making me feel angry?”  “Why am I lonely?”  Those negative feelings aren’t the goal of spirituality, but they can take us there.  Acknowledging when we feel troubled or uncertain can protect us from bad decisions, from walking down the wrong path, from getting involved when we should stay away, or urge us to get out of a bad situation we’ve already landed in.  We may never know, intellectual, why we made a choice one way or another, but better sensitivity to our emotions can give us a different kind of knowing.  If we can only sing our hope and joy, and if worship is only ever about our power and possibility, than we’re missing crucial messages our hearts are trying to tell us.

I’m glad our faith tradition has been moving in this direction, and if not initially a prophet I have become one of this new path.  I’m also a vigilant defender of good thinking and won’t suffer a religion that becomes silly or stupid.  I continue to look for ways to include experiential religion in our worship, as well as lectures about religion.  And I encourage you to do the same in your personal spiritual practice.  If it isn’t already natural for you, remember that spirituality is a feeling before it’s a thinking.  Our spiritual practice should be about doing something, not only reading about somebody else’s experience but having your own.  Not only talking about an experience you had long ago, but searching out new experiences.

We’re talking (simply, actually) about having a religion that is fully engaged with the world, through all the faculties available to us:  mind, and body and heart.  For some of us it remains a challenge to grant our emotions the same respect we give our reason, but we are the richer for it, and our tradition will be more relevant to more people for it, and we will be more effective for it, in transforming the world into the realm of peace and love and justice we seek.