I have always wondered what Adam and Eve must have said to each other as they fled into the wide world east of Eden, looking back on that cherub who guarded the gates of the Garden with a twirling and flashing sword, the angel assigned to keep them out of their former Paradise.

My guess is that one of them turned to the other and said "Say, isn't it your night to cook.?"

Robert Coles suggests that the secular mind was born in that moment.  There was no need for a secular mind in the garden -- it was never anyone's night to cook, never any dishes to do, never any anxiety about what to eat tomorrow.  According to the myth, there was no death, so there was no fear of getting old.  Many of the early Christian theologians have suggested that Adam and Eve, being immortal, would have had no need to reproduce, and were completely innocent in matters sexual.  There goes another whole set of things to obsess about.  And before they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they didn't even have to spend time reflecting on morality and the qualms of conscience.  No gossip either.  Adam and Eve had so little to think about that they didn't need to think about their Selves any, since they were not under any threat.  But once out of the garden, they had everything to worry about.  That part of the mind which is used for practical and realistic thought to provide for and protect the Self, was born.

One of the critical points of Robert Coles book is that the secular mind is nothing new; humans have always a portion of their minds devoted to figuring out what's for dinner, dedicated to planning how to survive.  The mind we use to  think about gaining prosperity and security, and providing for our children, whether it is at the level of finding food for them to eat, or paying their tuition in college.  That part of our minds is very powerful and effective.  All of humanity's technical and scientific knowledge comes out of our encounter with the material reality of the world.  But even back to biblical times, the time of Moses in the desert or the prophets in ancient Jerusalem, , it is clear that most of the people, even then, were spending most of their time thinking about mundane, wordly, nitty-gritty things of this world.  The great religious writing of that era is was preserved and remembered because it was a protest against the prevalence of the practical and secular minds of most people.

The main idea of the religion conveyed in the Old Testament, ancient Judaism, was that God was a part of this ordinary world, not separate from it.  God made this world, and in some indeterminate way, controlled what went on in it.  The ancient writers of the scriptures were trying to persuade people to recognize God's hand in the world and act accordingly.  Christianity took this characteristically Jewish idea and extended it one step further -- saying that God did not only have a hand in this world, but  actually become one human being, Jesus of Nazareth, to better call us out of our secular minds, and to think differently about everything.

And so Christianity bequeathed to the Western world a great divide between the secular mind, as defined by Coles as the mind that emerges out of the human interaction with material reality, and the spiritual mind. And since the Enlightenment, the secular mind has been given primacy, as being the mind that we go to for the real deal, the one most in touch with real and useful truths.  And I suspect that that this divide is now becoming global, as western secular thinking becomes dominant throughout the world, as the worldview of business and commerce.

And so we have come to accept as normal, throughout the culture that there is a weekday truth and a Sunday truth, and they may be entirely contradictory.
Further, and I think that this is the meaning of the story of the Italian Catholic immigrant in the reading, that we have come to subtly shift our understanding of our religious minds to conform to that part of our minds which is governed by concern for self.   It is not only that we ask God to suspend all the rules of the Universe, and help us out with a miracle, or even just  good weather for the picnic -- we also like to say things like "I go to church because it makes me feel good."

This church and this congregation are a part of a religious movement that began as a post-enlightenment form of Christianity.  Faced with the division between the secular mind and the sacred mind, we quite explicitly chose to build our church on the secular side of that wall.  Many of our older churches, and the one I serve is one, uses a covenant statement that balances as equal, "the love of truth" and "the spirit of Jesus".  We would be governed by reason, and if there were tenets of the Christian faith that could not make sense to the everyday mind, then they should go and be tossed out.

Unitarianism had, as its most long running feature, was that you could have your secular mind, and still go to a church.  It used to be said that "We were the church where you did not have to check your mind at the door"  It was one of our catch phrases, almost a marketing slogan.  And the typical Unitarian conversion experience, which I have heard told now by dozens and dozens of people, is that one day, while reciting the Nicene or even the Apostles creed in the Congregational, Methodist, Episcopalian church, they realized that they didn't believe it.  It offended their secular minds which they brought here to the Unitarian Church.
So here we are.  Modern people in a modern church, in a church in which the workings of our everyday minds are given freedom, unrestricted by ancient creeds and formulas, in which there is less pressure to conform, and where the claims of tradition are held at arm's length.

So why are we so filled with yearning?

What are you yearning for when you come to church?  What is it that happens on a good day that sends you home, saying "service was good today".  What is it that is missing when you say that "hm, not quite there today!"  What is the nature of our spiritual hunger, and how do we satisfy it?

I suspect that we have started to realize the link between the secular mind and the prison of the Self.  Our pragmatic and restless brains can go anywhere, examine anything, explore anything, and figure out how to make any situation work for us.  The one thing that it cannot do is turn itself off.

And so, in the church I serve, there is a repeated and strong note of struggling with the Self, trying to get beyond the Self.  Last year, I used as an inspirational text for my ordination a quote from one of our previous pastors, the Rev. Wallace Robbins:  This church offers to liberate us from our enthrallment to self and thus open the way to faith, for consequent righteousness and love. I quoted the Rev. Robbins, but had to confess that I didn't have any particularly good ideas on how liberate myself from my self-enthrallment.

So, I have been reflecting on how we might to pierce the veil between our secular minds, and its ever-present sense of self,  and a larger reality that we hope and suspect is beyond our present ways of thinking.  How do we escape from the cage of narcissism?  And I have an idea.
I do not plan to tell you today that I have finally the deduced the answer to the most pressing problem in contemporary religion, or have resolved the spirit/flesh conundrum that has plagued Western culture since its beginnings.

All I have been doing is watching what we do, what we like, and how we do it, and inferring why we do it.
I believe that we use Beauty as a way to pierce the veil and transcend the Self.

Let me give you an example:
Let's take an incident of overwhelming and unsurpassed beauty.  There are many to choose from, but I'd like to use a film clip of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together.  Do you remember the first time that you ever really watched them dance in a film?  That is beauty.  They, themselves, were beautiful and attractive.  And they moved with such grace and elegance, and they appeared to be so effortless.  I remember watching them with a lightness in my chest, like a bubble of joy was just swelling up inside of me.  And I sensed that time had slowed down, or stopped, or that the Universe had somehow synchronized all of its myriad processes so that time itself unfolded to the rhythm of their dancing feet.  I was completely in time with Fred and Ginger, watching them in each second trying to see what was happening right now, and each second replacing the one that came before it, and which was gone forever as soon as it had passed.  I didn't want to blink, because each instant was irreplaceable.

You see, the moment, the 90 seconds - 120 seconds of their dance routine was out of my control, I was in their control.  I could be surprised.

Another thing, I was outside of my analytical mind.  I like to dance, but I have certainly never studied tap dance.  I realize that there are probably names for one of every little routines that made up their dance together.  They has to be, for how do they talk about it when rehearsing?  But I didn't know any of those words and names and without words, my mind shuts down and I am in the grip of direct experience.

So, having acceded to their control and being outside of my analytical mind, my secular mind, my response to Fred and Ginger dancing was not greater understanding, or deeper insight, but only joy, purest joy.

I want to suggest that beauty, the emotional response that arises when we are open to beauty, is a clue to what liberation from the enthrallment of self is like. It is in that one moment that we can be transported, moved outside of ourselves.

It is no wonder, then, that churches and other houses of worship are adorned with the greatest beauty a community can muster. And it is no wonder, that there can be as many conflicts in a church's life over what is beautiful as over matters of deep theology What is beautiful is path to the sacred and so it is very important to people, but of course, no one agrees about what is  beautiful.

But it is not beauty itself that we worship, not beautiful objects, nor beautiful music, nor Fred and Ginger.  Instead, beauty creates in us a different response, a way if being that hints of how it would be to free of the Self.  That wordless wonder, that bubble of joy that swells in the chest,  that complete surrender.  It is our hunger to live life with the same lack of self-consciousness with which we allow ourselves to gape with utter surprise and joy at Fred and Ginger, arms outstretched, feet flying, tapping and gliding on the screen.  That is our hunger, our yearning and it hints of way of being in the world that observes the holiness in everything, and lives out the sacredness of every moment.

I do believe that we have to accept the division of our minds as a fact.  We must remember the angel with flaming twirling sword who still stands at the gate of the garden, and prevents our return to the full and uninterrupted presence of God. The story, at least in this part, seems to convey the permanent unsettlement of the human condition, that it is in our nature now to have this division, to have this hunger which can only be partially fulfilled, a small bit at a time.  And that  we would wrack our brains trying to find ways to transform all of our lives into moments of deep attention and joy.

That is our deepest heart's desire, is it not?  That we could know life like that, all the time.  Be blessed with that deep joy that could only really come from being in the presence of God at all times.  And at times, we feel it and it seems possible.