Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, April 14, 2025. Sermon title from Dorothee Soelle’s book, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance.

Do you know the name Matthew Fox? He’s a former Roman Catholic priest who was kicked of the church because of his expansive spirituality. Almost fifty years ago he embraced feminist theology, calling God “Mother,” and instead of original sin he talked about original blessing.

Years ago I read an essay about Fox and the creative ways he was practicing his spirituality, and I still remember what he said to an interviewer as he came out of Native American sweat lodge. Asked is there was a lesson that he’d learned there in the heat,  Matthew Fox smiled and said, “More joy.” 

In this month when we’re reflecting on comfort and discomfort, in these seasons of spring and Easter, when the invitation is to be looking for signs of new life, that sounded like a sermon: “More Joy.” Who among us couldn’t use more joy?

So that was my working title for today’s sermon. Until I Googled it, and discovered that “more joy” has become a meme. You’ll find it on stickers and flowery social media posts, and spirituality blogs. There’s even a company called “More Joy” that makes expensive t-shirts. I guess that’s what I get for using the Google. 

I’m not giving up on more joy—we certainly need it—but not the shallow version. We need more than a bumper sticker or t-shirt. We need real lived and embodied experiences of joy. And there are multiple ways to get there. I’m sure you know some—anyone wasn’t to say a way you open yourself to joy? (People said dancing, grandchildren, children, travel, playing Scrabble, playing the piano, daffodils, singing, dogs, poetry, midnight walks, doing art)

One way is to practice allowing yourself more joy; giving yourself permission to do what you love, to celebrate and savor these moments of everyday life. Like this moment. During Covid, we couldn’t be here on Sunday morning. There’s something to be joyful about: we’ve come through that difficult time and look, here we are! 

There’s an old way to joy that I’m thinking about today—it’s still around, and you can find it at the margins of church and society. Practiced by those who don’t fit into neat boxes, whether in faith traditions or in the wider culture, it invites the practice of living more fully into life; it calls one to resist the forces that stand against life. It’s called mysticism. 

A mystic is anyone who has a personal and direct experience of the Divine, or who seeks such an experience. Jesus was a mystic, Terasa of Avila was a mystic, Rumi was a mystic, Mary Oliver was a mystic, John O’Donohue was a mystic. And some of us are mystics too.

Too often mystics are seen as eccentric outcasts, or criticized as navel gazers, at least in their own time. St. Francis was a mystic: he found the holy in the natural world and all its creatures. He wrote a praise song to Brother Sun and Sister Moon, to his siblings Fire and Water, to Mother Earth and Sister Bodily Death, and this song eventually became the hymn we sang earlier, “All Creatures of the Earth and Sky.” 

The inspiration for my sermon comes from the feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle and her book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. One of the chapters is called “As if We Lived in a Liberated World.” Soelle asserts that “Mysticism desires to get away from the privatization of joy, happiness, and oneness with God.”

Several of you have told me about your experiences of this week’s solar eclipse. You’ve described the awe and wonder you felt as the moon slid in front of the sun, turning it black, the blessing of gathering with others in stillness as our earth, in mid-afternoon, went dark, and the unabashed joy that came when the light started to return, the cheering and hugging, and sense of oneness this miracle evoked. One of you, at our Board meeting on Wednesday, put it this way: “It was the most spiritual thing I have ever experienced.”

So what do you do after an experience of that awe, and that oneness? Many of us long for these kinds of mountaintop experiences, but how do you live once you have had one? Once you have tasted the way we humans are meant to live? Dorothee Soelle addresses this in the words I put at the top of the order of service: “Mystical experience is bliss and simultaneously it makes one homeless. It takes people out of the home they have furnished for themselves into homelessness as it did to young Gautama, known later as the Buddha.”

In his life, Jesus experienced and expressed this homelessness; speaking to a man who wanted to follow him, Jesus warned,“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Talk about comfort and discomfort! The mystic experience brings you bliss and it opens you up to the the fact that we are, all of us, siblings and kin. But we live in a society that doesn’t believe this, and certainly doesn’t act like it. No wonder we can feel homesick, adrift, and alone. 

So it’s understandable that people are tempted to stay in the shallow end—to buy a t-shirt that says “more joy,” to pacify themself with a pumpkin spice latté, when we are thirsty and hungry for so much more. I know about this—I come home some days and stand in the kitchen, mindlessly eating. Hungry for something that food won’t satisfy. 

This is why we still have faith communities like this one, because we need places where we can share our experiences of the Holy, where we can share our hungers and our longings, where we can be reminded of what we forget, that we are here to be religious, in a good way: filled with the spirt of life, ecstatic with the wonder of it all, so we act like the creatures of the Divine that we are, so we remember that we do belong to one another.

I worry and wonder about those who aren’t grounded by some kind of tradition and community. There are certainly new ways of finding spiritual community these days, and we can learn from them—the church isn’t the only one, and doesn’t work for everyone. But I remain grateful and hopeful for the church. Because I know that our human hunger for a holy place has not diminished; that hunger is all around. And we are here to feed others, and to be fed ourselves. This is what we are about. 

But the spiritual journey doesn’t come easily—it’s not all rainbows and unicorns! It inevitably requires a battle with one’s ego, which puts up defenses against the Mystery. Like Goethe says in his poem, “The Holy Longing”:

And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

What needs to die? Our belief in rugged individualism, the part of our ego that sees the self as separate and apart. Our desire to control everything.

Growth does usually involve some kind of death, and these little deaths are going to be uncomfortable. But beyond them is the promise of more abundant life.

And we know something about this; that death is part of life, that what is temporal is part of what’s eternal. that spring always follows winter. The mystic perspective offers the holistic view that befriending death and the shadows will open in us a larger space for joy. 

We live in a challenging time, and in a culture where consumerism and rationalism and cynicism are dominant forces. No wonder we can feel lifeless and discouraged and separate from one another.

And still, we get theses blessed moments when we glimpse a different reality. When we look up at the stars, or into the eye of a friend or a stranger, and we remember who we are, and whose we are. That we are not strangers on this earth. 

The invitation, always, is to wake up to the wonderful reality, that mystics both ancient and modern are pointing to, this mystery that is accessible to us all. As Denise Levertov confesses (in “Primary Wonder”),

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
                                                        And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

What if we would act as if we lived in a liberated world? What then?

Amen.