First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh

  605 Morewood Avenue
  Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2999
  412-621-8008

CREATIVE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION

By David Herndon
May 15, 2005
Music Sunday
First Unitarian Church
Pittsburgh, PA

For thousands of years, human beings have been trying to give expression to the depths and aspirations of their religious understanding.

We have told stories and we have sung songs. We have made masks and invented dances. We have written sacred histories. We have created images and names for God, for the Holy, for the Sacred, for the Divine. We have made poems and composed oratorios. We have built temples and cathedrals and pyramids and remote monasteries and circles of standing stones. We have put together stained glass windows and we have put together illuminated manuscripts. We have prayed and preached, we have painted and carved, we have imagined heaven and hell. We have put together detailed pictures and we have insisted that any picture must be inaccurate or incomplete. We have invoked the supernatural and we have insisted on the use of reason and evidence. We have experienced intensely personal mystical visions and we have insisted, in the words of Unitarian Universalist minister Jesse Cavileer, that "there is no path to God that bypasses our neighbor."

Some instances of creative religious expression have endured for hundreds or thousands of years. Others have been fleeting and impermanent. Some instances of creative religious expression have been the distinctive creation of one well-known individual. Others have been offered anonymously. Some instances of creative religious expression speak broadly to people from many different times and places and cultures. Other instances of creative religious expression speak very intensely within one particular religious or cultural tradition but speak in a more limited way to people outside that religious or cultural tradition. Some instances of creation religious expression speak to different people in different ways.

FOR THE 9:30 SERVICE:

This morning we have the opportunity to participate in three distinct artistic modes of creative religious expression-poetry, music, and art. For poetry, you will have the opportunity to write your poem using the cinquain form. Instructions and examples are in your order of service. For music, we will learn a new but familiar song, and we will try singing it in parts. For art, we will draw inspiration from the Buddhist tradition of religious expression and work together to make a mandala on the tables in the center of the room using various materials. I'd like to add that we will be experiencing a contrast between permanent and impermanent modes of religious expression this morning. You poem may survive for thousands of years. Our collective mandala will not survive past the end of our service this morning. The music includes both aspects: the music that has been written down will survive, but our performance of it is thoroughly fleeting and impermanent.

May we open ourselves to the devotion, the aspiration, the beauty, of what these ways of creative religious expression can offer. May they draw forth from within us a deeper, more powerful, more holy response to the world around us in which we live and move and have our being.

FOR THE 11:00 SERVICE:

This morning we have the opportunity to experience a very special instance of creative religious expression-namely, a performance of a choral work entitled Gloria by the Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi.

May we open ourselves to the devotion, the aspiration, the beauty, of what this particular way of creative religious expression can offer. May it draw forth from within us a deeper, more powerful, more holy response to the world around us in which we live and move and have our being.


	Copyright 2005