Good Morning. May the God in me greet the God in you. This is an African saying. That saying resonates with me because I believe there is a piece of the Divine within each one of us. Not necessarily in a physical way, but certainly in a metaphorical way. Definitely in a real way- for me. This helps me affirm our first Unitarian Universalist principle: "the inherent worth and dignity of every person."

I'd like to take a look this morning at what such a metaphor could mean for us. What difference would it make- to believe- there is a piece of the divine within you? This is a bit of my own religious belief, and of course, doesn't have to be yours. I ask you now to suspend your disbelief for a few moments.

One of the ways to talk about this piece of the Divine within, the God within, is to talk about the Great Self. This is the part of you that is an imago dei, an image of god. This is potential trying to become embodied.

To extend the metaphor a bit, the Great Self is the God (with a capital G) within you and is common to all of us in the same way. The Divine Child is the god (with a small g) within and is unique to each of us.

The Great Self is the part of your personality that wants you to shine, that wants you to shake the foundations of the world. The agenda is to push for wholeness for the Divine Child: for the essence of you. For who you are and who you yet can be. For a fully functioning, spiritually empowered, joyfully alive you.

Both the Great Self and the Divine Child are examples of archetypes. According to Carl Jung, the psychologist who developed the term, archetypes are universal patterns within the minds of all people. They are the classic prototypes that all humans share.

These images occur in every culture and time. They represent eternal forms: the King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, the Queen, Maiden, Crone, the Divine Child. Psychologist James Hillman says he believes that archetypal images are the gods of old.

Jung believed these archetypal images shape our life, that they are mirrors of the self. He believed archetypes are equivalent to the instincts of other animals. He located them in what he called the collective unconscious.

This collective unconscious is located somewhere in our DNA code, just like the salmon's desire to return to its birthplace to spawn, or a swallow's hardwired code that tells it to migrate.

Our Divine Child is our genius. The word genius is from Roman mythology and means a guardian spirit. It was the basis for the Arabic word: Djinni. The word genius also means: exceptional creative power.

Jung believed this archetype, of the child, "represents the strongest, [inevitable] urge in every being, namely the urge [for a being] to realize itself."

Now theory is fine, but what does our Divine Child feel like? Do you remember any of those mornings when it was the first day of summer? Do you remember waking up in the morning and thinking YES! Heehee! It's summer! What a wonderful day this is going to be!

This is your Divine Child speaking. We probably wouldn't want to start every day like that/ but what would it be like to have it happen more often than once or twice in a lifetime?

What would it be like to wake up in the morning ready to pounce with joy? What would it be like to wake up without an alarm clock, every day, ready to go?

This is what the Great Self wants to know. Not the anxiety of a fire drill, not the preferential option of a snooze bar. No, instead: an up, up, get up and Be Alive. To be accessing this Self is to be intense about life.

When we were born, we thought we were the Great Self. The universe was Us. Us and (hopefully) Mommy. We all started as grandiose little beings. Over a period of time, we learn people are distinct and separate from us. We learn that they may not exist only to serve us. This can be a painful lesson.

The people who raise us set the first boundaries about who we are. This is a tough job. While we need to learn that we are not the center of the universe, we are not God with a capital G, we also have the desire to be valued and loved unconditionally. We want to be affirmed and loved for who we are: a god with a small 'g'.

We need to have other people want to see us succeed, to have other people want to see us shine. If these things are in place, our Divine Child can develop. This child in us can willingly make a trade. A trade of grandiosity for realistic greatness. A trade of potential for actuality.

But, the process of growing up can get skewed. It can get skewed by abuse, shaming, or neglect and a child can go into a kind of shock. The Divine Child in us gets split off, locked into a closet. Left behind and forgotten.

Our children are not immune to the world around them. They know this more than they can say or we want to admit. They hear the stories about child abductions, and worse.

Is it any wonder children shut down? Is it any wonder that we can grow up fooling our parents and the people around us that we are somebody else? Is it any wonder that those of us who survive childhood whether it was scary and tortuous or even relatively benign and happy- is it any wonder that we try and lock away our true selves for safe-keeping?

When this happens- when we lock away our divine child- we become sitting ducks. We become susceptible to self-destructive behavior. If we are lucky, years of work or a sudden epiphany may yield something to us.

We may be granted an insight into our past that creates a tremendous nostalgia for something we never had. For something we wish we had always had. We will have re-covered something.

We will know the truth of Oscar Wilde's dictum: Everyone is born king, and most people die in exile, like most kings.

Even without threats of death and molestation, even in relatively safe homes and communities, disappointment growing up is inevitable. It is bound to happen. Our Divine Child gets thwarted. We come to resent those who cared for us in our growing up.

It happened that way for me. Long ago, in another lifetime, it was difficult for me to admit, but I can say now-- with confidence: my parents did the best job of raising me that they could.

That sounds like a simple declarative sentence but what does it mean to really believe it? For me it meant making a trade. Trading away the idea that my parents did not do the best that they could.

As long as I believed that, it meant that sooner or later they should make it up to me. Sooner or later they would somehow go back in time and "fix things." Somehow they would love me the way I wanted and needed to be loved.

To say that they did the best they could/ means that this will never happen.

It means to allow them to be mere mortals. It means to quit holding a grudge and to allow my Divine Child out to explore. It had been difficult for me to trade away who I wanted my parents to be, for trying to see them as they actually are.

Of course, I am a father myself, now- of Jessica the first grader, and Kaylie, the pre-schooler. who is now a year and a half old. Having children of my own makes it easier to forgive my parents. And so the cycle of life continues.

I wonder how Bonnie and I will fare as parents. I wonder how we will help to shepherd these images of God that have entered our lives. We will do the best job of raising them we can, and I suppose- it will have to do.

When we are little, and even when we are bigger-we must trade away pure potential for choosing who we want to become. And then, we look back and see, who we have become, we see-if we look- what road we truly took, which may not be the one we said we'd travel.

Part of growing up is to acknowledge growing old, and to admit we must make some choices and forever pass up others. We must trade away pretending we are the Great Self and choose the more difficult and more rewarding path of letting our Divine Child claim her kingdom. We must become incarnated.

In the Hebrew bible, God reveals his name to Moses in Exodus 3:14. Here is the revelation of the name: I AM WHO I AM. This is in the imperfect tense, an uncompleted tense which implies the past, present, or future. When we are first born, this is who we are. Who am I? I am who I am. In order to move to actuality, we must let our Divine Child become incarnated into this world.

But we need help doing this, this incarnating, and this help is not always forthcoming. When we are little and we are treated by our family members as "ordinary" it does not quite compute with our Divine Child.

We develop a sense of shame and this attacks our self-esteem until it is a smaller thing and we are no longer a Divine Child with capital letters, but we have been booted out of the kingdom by an absent father or evil stepmother and somehow we are supposed to aspire to be an 'ordinary' kid. That is, if we are lucky.

We may be asked: why can't you be like other kids? Why can't you be an 'ordinary' kid? We become small and start to believe it when people tell us we are ordinary. These messages start in on us when we're children and they never let up. You can't open a newspaper, turn on a TV, or listen to the radio.

We believe People magazine when it tells us that there are real celebrities/ and then there are ordinary people like us. We believe all those commercials that tell us if only we would be richer, taller, thinner, have more hair, speak more languages, eat more novelty food, drive the right car- if only- if only we would buy what they're selling, well THEN by God, we would become the celebrity we deserve to be- THEN we would be seen in all our splendor.

We believe People magazine when it tells us that there are real celebrities/ and then there are ordinary people like us. Finally, we tell this to ourselves.

We forget that there is "a great splendor in our soul" as Rumi says. We forget that life ought to be more than merely routine behavior. We forget the magnificence of who we can be. We deny the god within.

We allow something terrible to happen. We forget why we are here, we forget our intention, we forget what our potential for greatness is, we forget because we become enspelled by the world.

It is as if- we have misplaced our intention. It is as if as Robert Bly says, we let an Internal Nixon take over.

Our Internal Nixon chops out the eight and a half seconds of tape that was our intention, that was the set of words we most needed to tell ourselves.

Why is this? Why do we keep our 220,000 volt Great Self so safely buried, benign, and unconnected?

Almost every culture is ambivalent about the Great Self. Accessing the Great Self energy is one way of talking about narcissism and narcissism can be dangerous. It can become pathological, even demonic.

But longing to be special is not pathological. And it only reminds us that we can be an authentic person who leads an unauthentic life.

Trying to forget that there is a piece of the divine inside can take a tremendous amount of energy because the Divine Child doesn't like to be kept in the closet.

There are things which can blow away the closet door. Consider this: all of us, deep down, believe we are immortal. There is scarcely anyone who does not secretly believe this.

When we have a close call with death, it can be an awakening. Such an experience can give us a whole new perspective. It can initiate a new leap forward for us, because we let go of the energy required to pretend we are immortal.

I believe I had an experience just like this. I had an epiphany on an airplane 10 years ago. A routine business flight got nasty and death appeared imminent. The real surprise for me was that my response to the sudden likelihood of my own death was the terror of having wasted my life. Basically, I felt like a fake. All of a sudden, life felt very, very real and I had not been living it.

We are each authentic people. We will occasionally feel we are leading an unauthentic life. To lead a more authentic life, we must look within, we must seek, find, and encourage our Divine Child.

We must become actualized, we must become spiritually empowered. I had not been doing that before my epiphany. The possibility of annihilation opened a door for me, a door that allowed my Divine Child to come out of the closet and speak.

The Divine Child in us can look at the world around us and help us find our unique place in it. The Divine Child in us can help steward our course in developing the courage to face ordeals, limitations, and in asking for help when we need it.

The Divine Child in us can mature to the point where we can act as a steward for other people. I believe this stewardship is the goal of a depth-oriented approach to religion.

We need help in this process, which some call faith development. A congregation can be a place where we share a common myth, a common history. A congregation can be a container of our hopes and fears, our dreams and striving for what the world might grow into.

A congregation can be a place where we are safe to explore who we are and who we might become. When our church functions adequately, we can soothe alienation and protect against grandiosity.

The danger is that we will desire social harmony over individual development. The danger is that we will not recognize the Divine Child in each other, because we don't recognize it in ourselves.

The danger is that we will get used to limiting ourselves and telling ourselves we are ordinary, unworthy, and insignificant.

The danger is we will be lulled into depression by People magazine telling us we're not special. The danger is we will learn to be continually disappointed with life, when Sears fails yet again, to deliver us: "the great life, at a good price, guaranteed."

The danger is that an internal Nixon will keep chopping out our true intentions, and that out of all the possible lives we could have chosen to lead, we will end up looking back at a lfe that wasn't even on our list.

And yet. We have the power to change. You see, there is something extraordinary. There is something we might not like to admit, but I'm going to say it anyway. Listen: there is something in you that thinks it is God. This will not go away. Ever.

Spirituality allows us to relate to the imago dei, the "image of god" inside in a constructive way. Using such metaphor can be helpful. It's important to remember that to have a spiritual need (to need symbols of meaning) does not mean that you are low class or intellectually inferior or neurotic: it means simply that you are human.

When we reclaim our mythic imagination, we can get insights into our life that are otherwise unavailable to us. We can reclaim our intention. One of the beauties of the UU church is that it can be a place where we can work in community to each find our individual doors to our unique gardens.

In there, on a bench we may find our Divine Child. Our Divine child may say to us: Oh there you are. I've been waiting for you.

Now Let us sing out our Divine Child with This Little Light of Mine, printed in your order of service-

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Everywhere I go...
Building up a world...
This little light of mine...

Benediction

For all who see God, / May God go with you.
For all who embrace Life, / May Life return your affection.
For all who seek a right path,
May a way be found,
and the courage / to take it step by step.

Amen.

Rev. Bob Doss, UUMA '86