It was early evening when the phone call came. "Please come to the emergency room at Harborview hospital. Your son has been in a car accident. He has a head injury".

I remember very clearly the first words that came into my mind: "Please God, let him be all right".

Now I imagine that this is a pretty normal response for any parent in this situation. But for me, a professed non-believer, this struck me - even then - as a little odd. By "non-believer" I mean that I don't believe in any sort of God that would actually answer a prayer.

Looking back on my reaction to the phone call, I can say that it was not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the situation, like when you might say without thinking "God almighty" or "thank God" or even "God damn". No, this was a straight-from-the-heart admission that my love for my son was no longer enough to protect him and I needed help, big time.

"Please God, let him be all right".

During the twenty minute drive to the hospital, I continued this "conversation". You might say I was following Saint Paul's admonition to "pray without ceasing". But again, as a non-believer, just exactly whom did I think I was talking to?

Well, I arrived at the hospital to find that my son was not gravely injured as I had feared. He had been crossing the Roosevelt bridge when his car got sideways on the steel grating and swerved into oncoming traffic. He had been wearing his seat belt ("thank God"). There were no broken bones, but plenty of ugly contusions. One side of his head was grotesquely swollen and discolored and embedded with chunks of glass from where he had broken the side window with his head and face. He was joking with the ER doctors by the time I arrived. My prayers had not been needed after all.

So the question of just exactly who or what "God" I had been talking to was put aside and life moved on.

A couple of years later Jackie and I were visiting her brother's family in Texas. At the time Jackie's niece Kathryn was about five years old. When we sat down to dinner one night we were invited to join hands while Kathryn recited a prayer thanking God for the food we were going to eat. So I closed my eyes, took hold of Kathryn's hand, and found myself once again in a conversation with God. By that I mean that I was not just listening to Kathryn's words, but was instead actively engaged in giving thanks for the food and the opportunity we had to be together. Now I think I know to whom Kathryn thought she was talking. But I couldn't say the same for myself.

Various other events since then - most notably the birth of our granddaughter Marjorie which I was lucky enough to witness - have contributed to a growing awareness that "God" is a scary word for me. Not only "God", but also "faith", "salvation", "prayer", and "belief", to name but a few. I suspect that these words are also scary for a large number of Unitarian Universalists. For some who have left oppressive religions behind, these words may have emotional connotations they would just as soon forget. For others, the words may have been stolen by the Religious Right, and are tainted and unusable. Or, as in my case, the words may carry with them a kind of mystic irrationality that leaves me uncomfortable and looking for firmer ground.

There was a time when I was young that these words had real meaning. I was raised in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church. My great-grandparents were Lutherans when they left Germany for this country in the late 1800's. Their son, my mother's father, grew up in the church and in turn raised his five children the same way. My father became a Lutheran by being baptized and confirmed as a United States Marine on board a ship bound for the war in the Pacific. After the war my family was among those who built a new church to accommodate us new baby-boomers. I remember watching the men carry the shiny oak pews into the new building. My parents are still members of that church, some fifty years later. My mother sings in the choir. My father serves as an usher.

While I lived at home I went to that church every week, sometimes twice a week. I was confirmed there, which consisted of taking classes in which Luther's answers to theological questions were memorized and recited. In the summer I went to the church's camp at Lake Okoboji. When we visited our grandparents home on a Sunday, we went to their church, and I remember several times feeling like an honored visitor as I sat in a Sunday School class taught by my grandfather.

When I was a young teenager I was in a youth group that met weekly. Some of the best memories I have of my teen years are with that group of kids, one of the few youth groups around which consisted of mixed ages. I remember one night in particular, sitting around a campfire at a lake singing folk songs under a wonderful summer night sky. It sounds pretty corny now, but that night I had no doubt that God was sitting right there in that circle with us. Even now a whiff of campfire smoke can take me back to that night.

I left that religion behind when I moved away from home to attend college, a typical story I'm sure for many of us here this morning. Leaving home usually means leaving our family communities behind, too, and that includes church. We may or may not find our way back to religion later in life.

A few weeks ago I came across a book entitled Amazing Grace, by Kathleen Norris. It's the story of her struggle to return to the Christian church of her childhood after many years away. What she found was that it was the language of Christianity that most distanced her from her former faith. Words like "faith", "judgment", "salvation", "sinner" -- even "Christ" -- formed what she termed her "scary vocabulary", words that "had become so codified or abstract that their meanings were all but impenetrable."

What I found in reading her story is that it opened a way for me to revisit some of the traditions of my childhood religion. I found that her book helped me to see that I might again have "faith" -- the first and biggest "scary word" -- although it undoubtedly won't be the faith of my great-grandparents.

According to Norris, "in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion. Growing up doesn't necessarily mean rejecting the religion of our ancestors, but it does entail sorting out the good from the bad in order to reclaim what has remained viable." I think that's a great way to look at it.

Phil Jackson, the ex-Chicago Bulls coach (now stuck with the evil Lakers), has written a book entitled Sacred Hoops. In it he describes his life growing up in a Pentecostal family. His father was a minister, his mother an evangelist. He writes, "We were taught to believe that the apocalyptic version in the Book of Revelation was about to be fulfilled any minute, and if we weren't prepared, we'd be left out when Christ returned and gathered up his saints. As a little boy, I was terrified of being excluded from the 'rapture of the saints,' as it was called, and losing my parents. One day, my mother wasn't home when I returned from school and I got so frightened the rapture had started without me that I ran all over town looking for her. I was shaking when I finally tracked her down at a local radio station, taping a religious program with my dad."

Jackson's spiritual journey has come to grips with the pain of that childhood, and now he says that love, not fear, is his prevalent memory. One sportswriter theorizes that Jackson's struggle to get away from his childhood religion, but at the same time to hold on to some of it, the best parts, has resulted in a quiet inner strength that has led to his great success as a professional coach.

A few weeks ago UU minister Karen Taliesin spoke in this pulpit. She is a UU minister who helps terminally ill patients and their families. She said that your faith is wherever your heart is.

Norris suggests that faith is best thought of as a verb, not a thing that you either have or don't have. Faith is not synonymous with certainty, but is the decision to keep your eyes open. It means being in right relationships with others. Not forming a list of "things I believe", but instead experiencing a continual process of learning and relearning what it means to love God, my neighbor, and myself. It means believing, as the UU minister Rebecca Parker says, "that there is a universal love that has never abandoned us and never will." Which brings us to the next scary word.

Sam Trumbore, a Buddhist and UU minister, says that salvation is "an inner awakening of our human nature and capabilities". He writes, "It would be sort of like a leaf blowing in the wind feeling very separate and unique among leaves until one day it notices it is connected to something and later gets a glimpse of the tree. Wow! At the same moment the leaf is so small and insignificant, it also realizes how grand and magnificent it is. This feeling of union with the principle of life of which we are an expression is our UU definition of salvation."

The Universalist side of our UU religious tradition was founded on the then quite radical idea that God's love was so limitless that everyone would be granted salvation. Beginning in 1817 Unitarian minister Hosea Ballou proclaimed that "punishment for sin is limited to earthly life and that at death the soul is purified by divine love and enters immortality." Most UU's -- and probably most mainline Protestants and Catholics -- no longer believe in a literal heaven and hell, but Ballou's idea that "what goes around comes around" certainly rings a bell with us even today. We are punished for our sins, and the punishment happens in this life.

The other day I was talking to my 75-year-old mother on the phone about some of this stuff. She said that Lutherans believe that hell is not a place, it is just the absence of God. Interesting, I thought. She also surprised me by saying that she now thinks that perhaps this life is all there is after all. This is quite a radical idea for a Missouri Synod Lutheran.

This change in her religous ideas may have been influenced by the many failures of her religion to provide help to her family in times of crisis. My youngest sister had a stillborn baby some years ago and the pastor was utterly unable to provide meaningful comfort to her. My sister just could not understand how an all-powerful God could let that happen. And then a few years later another one of my sisters died at home in the arms of my mother. When my mother called her pastor to arrange for a funeral service, he refused to officiate at the service or to let the church be used for it since my sister had not been attending church regularly. My sister was obviously not to be granted salvation, so use of the church building was out of the question.

Kathleen Norris points out that the Hebrew word for "salvation" means literally "to make wide" or "to make sufficient". So she likes to think of salvation as kind of a recurring miracle where God is always around to make the road wide a bit wider in front of us so that we can put our feet back on it after we have strayed. I like that image.

The mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi wrote:

"Friend, our closeness is this:
anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.

How is it with this love,
I see your world and not you?"

I think that Rumi and Jesus and the rabbi Martin Buber and the psychologist Victor Frankel were all on the same page. Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which we can aspire. Our salvation is through love and in love.

The Greek root of the word "believe" means simply "to give one's heart to". But today when people ask, "What do you believe?" they are usually asking, "What do you think?" Many of us skeptical and rational UU's tend to consider religious beliefs as a sort of "suspension of the intellect." Me too. And yet, and yet…

A few weeks ago it was announced that a University of Washington geochemist has uncovered a key piece of evidence suggesting that about 250 million years ago the largest extinction in the history of the Earth was caused in large part by the impact of a massive comet or asteroid. It was between four and seven miles wide and hit the earth at something like 50,000 miles per hour. Its impact caused an earthquake of magnitude 12, a million times that of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was powerful enough to turn a plume of erupting lava in what is now Siberia into a runaway lava flow, further altering the Earth's climate and atmosphere. After the impact, in just a few thousand years, almost all marine life vanished, as did most of the plants and animals living on land. This opened the way for the rise of the dinosaurs.

Here's the really interesting part: the comet was not from our solar system. In fact, say the scientists, it likely came from a star that had died in a supernova before our sun was born.

Voltaire says: "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one." We UU's might say: "When there is no meaning in the universe, then we will seek to make it meaningful." But what meaning can we attach to the idea that before our sun was even born there was a cosmic bullet flying straight at us at 50,000 mph? How can our intellect put a meaning to that?

The story is told of the first Russian Cosmonaut returning to earth and being granted a private interview with Premier Khruschev. The Premier asked if he had seen anybody out there. The cosmonaut replied: "Yes, I did. There is in fact a God." Khruschev said: "I know that already, but please don't tell anybody." Later the same cosmonaut met with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. This eminent churchman also asked if the space traveler had seen anybody out there. "No," replied the cosmonaut, "There is no God." "I know that already," said the patriarch, "but please don't tell anybody."

Kathleen Norris has finally come to the point in her journey of appreciating religious belief as a relationship, like a deep friendship or a marriage, something that she plunges into without knowing exactly what she is doing or where it will lead. As a poet, she is used to saying what she doesn't thoroughly comprehend. So she has learned to live with this same ambiguity in her exploration of religious beliefs as well. She has learned to not rush to judgment but to be "attentive and vigilant". And she found that, in her words, "believing, like writing, is more process than product, and is not, strictly speaking, a goal-oriented activity. There is no time limit."

Her breakthrough here was one that I think might be particularly helpful for all of us skeptics to understand: she has learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of her disbelief and doubts as she is of her growing faith.

So now we come back to the question: to whom was I talking? I can't answer that yet. It still is a bit scary. I think I've come to the conclusion that it's better not to know. We need a little mystery in our lives to keep us interested.

Scientists confidently call quarks fundamental matter particles when they actually can't prove that they are real. They cannot separate them out, at least not yet, so how do they know they are there? The answer is that all of their subatomic calculations depend on their existence and give the right answers for the experiments. Well, okay, I guess. I'll buy that. But how can they be that confident that they're fundamental particles? How do they know that there are not more particles inside quarks, and yet even more particles inside of those particles? Isn't it the uncertainty - the mystery - that keeps them all plugging away at their experiments?

There is the story of the well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) who once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

Many people coming to Unitarian Universalist churches feel that something is missing in their lives, so they are searching: for God, for faith, for a deeper spirituality. There has to be something more! Norris says that "probably the best thing we can do is relax, take a deep breath, stop thinking about what we want or need, and forget about it. Seeking God, that is. Instead we might wait, and begin to silently ponder the ways in which God may already have been seeking us, all along, in the faulty, scary stuff of our ordinary lives."

As the poet Rumi said towards the end of his life:

For sixty years I have been forgetful every minute,
but not for a second has this
flowing toward me stopped or slowed.
I deserve nothing.
Today I recognize that I am the guest the mystics talk about.
I play this living music for my host.
Everything today is for the host.