I am indeed honored to be asked to introduce the Rt. Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish to you this evening. I'm tempted to talk at length about her remarkable parents, Obert and Grace, to talk about how much I miss Obert. I'm tempted to talk about her long and deep friendship with Sterling and Natalie over the years, but I will refrain. We'll talk about Carolyn. Certainly, anyone living in Utah in the past year really needs no introduction to Rev. Irish since her ordination as the Episcopal Bishop of Utah. It was widely talked about in the media and it was warmly received by people of all faiths throughout the state.

Those of us who attended her ordination experienced her inclusiveness, her ecumenism from the very first processional drumbeat led by Clifford Duncan, a native American Ute, and the Yellow-Elk women singers and dancers to the final act of consecration, the laying on of hands by the 20 bishops who encircled her. It was deeply moving to me. As she donned her robes of green and blue, the colors of earth and sky, I was reminded of her love of this landscape, I was reminded of her friendship. Her attentiveness to me in times of need. I was reminded of those she has nurtured, four children, parents, co-workers at the O.C. Tanner Co., or parishioners in Michigan and Washington, and many, many others.

In the tradition of her father, Callie graduated from the University of Michigan in philosophy. Then on to Oxford where she received her master's in lit. She wrote her thesis on the problems of moral justification. She completed her masters of divinity at the Virginia Theological Seminary in 1983. Callie's spiritual exploration started in her early years in Utah, and has continued as she studied, as she raised her children, as she taught and guided, and now as she returns to her native land to lead the Episcopal diocese. This journey reminds me of some lines in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring we will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time." Perhaps Callie you are knowing this place for the first time. We thank you for your presence in our lives, we thank you for being about God's work, we thank you for being here tonight to deliver the Sterling McMurrin lecture on religion. Bishop Irish.

Thank you Greta for that most gracious introduction.

I begin tonight with a story told by the late Anthony Demillo, who was a Jesuit priest of India. It seems that the president of a prestigious university, convinced of the master's mystical experience, wanted to make him head of the Theology Department. He approached the chief disciple with this proposal. The disciple said, "The master emphasizes being enlightened, not teaching enlightenment. Would that prevent him from being head of the Department of Theology? As much as it would prevent an elephant from being the head of the Department of Zoology."

I feel marginally more competent than an elephant to give a lecture about religion, though I do need to say that I am more used to speaking from faith, than about it. More used to a pulpit than a lecture hall. The linguistic genre of religion as I know it is that of narrative and imagery, symbols and sayings. More than abstract thesis or quantifiable reports. My perspective is as much retrospective as it is prospective, and many of my thoughts arise from and answer to norms and purposes outside those of the modern academy. Thus how I hope I will not be unscholarly. It is well for us all to know the difference between one who seeks to follow scholarly disciplines and one who seeks to become a disciple.

I am deeply honored by this assignment. Like so many of you I was devoted to Sterling McMurrin, both as a teacher and as a friend. I hope that my remarks will honor his memory and particularly his sense that religion should bring consecration to life and direction to human endeavor.

I have chosen the theme of nature and religion with some sense that we need direction in our human endeavor. This is a slight agenda that I think Sterling would approve of. It has to do with our need for healing, in ourselves and in the natural world which human beings have violated unconscionably. I doubt very much if such healing is possible without the united efforts of academic, religious and many other institutions now operating so independently of each other. And, so I encourage you to listen imaginatively tonight, especially around your present images of what constitutes religion or nature.

Religion is inescapably interwoven with nature, which Webster's Dictionary describes as "the created world in its entirety, the totality of physical reality as contrasted with mental spatial temporal phenomenon." It is however, the nature the essential characteristic of human being that while we are a part of the natural world, made up of its elements and sustained by its provision, our nature does not exclude mental spatial temporal phenomenon. Fish are probably quite unaware of water. That being so much part of their world. But human beings as evolved can, and do, stand back from nature. We notice ourselves within it, subject to it, occasionally and to some degree in control of it. Among all living creatures we know that we are finite, that we will die. We know ourselves completely dependent on nature's provision, vulnerable to its slings and arrows, capable of impacting it for our own or larger purposes. In the natural world we also experience tremendous awe, joy and thanksgiving. All of this is the stuff of which religion is made.

The experiential basis of religious instinct. The desire for and recognition of our connection to life. Whatever credo beliefs or institutional expressions may derive from that. I would not claim that human beings are by nature religious, for all their capacity for reflective self-transcendence. What we are, by nature, and almost by definition, spiritual creatures. In the Hebrew language we are nepheshes; unitive, seamless creatures, living breathing embodied spirits, living breathing inspirited bodies. Our spiritual nature, our capacity for self-transcendence gives us a sense of freedom which is both real and limited. But it does permit us to engage a spiritual path. In Christian terms we might describe such engagement as a choice to alie and align ourselves with the holy spirits. Our source as it was of all creation and of Jesus, according to the Christian faith.

But these same capacities permit us other choices. The spiritual life of many is lived out without religious ideation at all. Perhaps through appreciation of, or participation, in music or other arts, direct experience in nature or the earth gardeners or seeker's of wilderness, in laboratories of discovery, or in a fine and noble passion for justice. Our freedom also includes, alas, the choice of a permanent kind of adolescent willfulness, fixated on my rights, my entitlements, my way be done.

Tonight I want to speak in terms of spirituality. The experiential base of religion as much as in religious terms and teachings. As I say, religion generally suggests both institutions and belief systems which often divide us. Spirituality is a dynamic and integrative awareness of life. One which invites us to look at our life in this world without such fixed labels, templates or overlays. It draws on all our intellectual, aesthetic and moral capacities. And is blessed by the freedom of retrospectivity. The writer Eudora Weltie has said "The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time. But in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order, the continuous threat of revelation."

When I was 13 years old Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norkay reached the top of Mount Everest, the highest place on earth. Hillary, I am told, plunged a flag through the ice in that ultimate gesture of success, victory, triumph, yes! We see that in sport, in science and in religious affirmation. Yes! Amen! But Tensing's first response was to kneel down and ask for forgiveness for disturbing the gods of the mountain.

I remember that I loved and participated in the heroic sense of accomplishment that was Hillary's and I probably would have thought Tensing superstitious had I known of his response at the time. But retrospectively, looking back, this story has come to represent something quite different to me. I now appreciate the response of humility in Tenzing Norkay's gesture. Both gestures are good and indeed spiritual responses. But in our world, the Western world, we lack the balance and correction expressed in Tensing's reverence. We didn't, for example, see or hear much of it in most accounts of the splitting of the atom a few years earlier, or in the moonwalk a few years later. I doubt it will play a significant role in our response to the possibilities of cloning that we are now playing with. For we are, as Wendel Berry points out "far more given to acting on the basis of our bits and pieces of knowledge than on the basis of our vast ignorance." So I am grateful for our capacities for retrospective reflection and discernment, which can in reverent, non-violent and appreciative ways inform the way we impact this world.

Scholars tell us that the biblical narratives are entirely retrospective, both in content and as canon. They do not give us eyewitness accounts of events in the lives of the people of the ancient near east. But accounts that were told and written and edited and canonized and translated by others, in later generations whose concern was their significance. All of us may experience this kind of revelation of meaning in our own lifetimes as well. For example, when I was 6 or 7 years old I saw a copy of a Look or Life magazine in which the centerfold picture showed hundreds of dead horses on a battlefield. Many of them still bore their burdens of saddles and bundles, but all were lying their dead, no people were about. And, I remember slamming the magazine shut and hiding it. I think it was my first experience of pornography and what I felt was shame. But much later in my life, when I heard people speaking of institution of sin, this was not just a conceptual construct for me. For I had a graphic picture of it in my memory of that photograph.

I also recall an incident that happened when I was about 8 years old. It was this time of year and the earth was softening. I walked through a field to fetch my own horse and I smelled the awakening of life in that field. The scent was, of course, that of death and the decomposition of last year's life. But I knew it was also the possibility of new life, and I threw myself down arms outstretched as though to embrace the earth. I see now that this was a gesture celebrating life, a spontaneous expression of thanksgiving for my life. At the time, of course, I did not share these experiences with anyone. For I had no language for interpreting and integrating such startling responses. I came to recognize their significance for me later. Again creation, nature, violation, sin and blessing. The stuff of religious life, taught to me through nature. [continued ...]