The supernatural, they say, has departed from the world. The supernatural that seems to have disappeared is the one defined as “a fundamental category of religion asserting that there is an other reality that is not subject to the laws of nature” – an other reality beyond, above, and separate from our ordinary reality. Some people still accept the supernatural as an “other” world reality above their day-to-day reality that intrudes into day-to-day life from time to time, but nowadays many do not. Rather, many live as one of my favorite religious humanists, John Dietrich, once described it: seeking to “discover and disclose the unused resources of vitality and power in human nature …” without expecting something beyond this natural life and beyond our human resources to intervene to give them special attention or to solve their problems.

However, as Dietrich came to realize in his old age, and as many have suspected all along, it is as Hamlet told Horatio: “There are more things under the heavens than are accounted for in our philosophies.” Also, in our moments of more consistent logic, we realize that belief or non-belief in the supernatural has little to do with its factuality. Rather, what a person believes about the supernatural, surely, depends on what that person accepts as knowledge. It, also, depends on definition – quite like a golfer defining a miracle in this way: “If the ball goes to the right, it’s a slice. If it goes to the left, it’s a hook. If it goes straight, it’s a miracle.” My suspicion is that anything naturally occurring in the world that we can’t do or haven’t learned to do seems supernatural but is still part of natural processes.

We live in a culture where science has directed progressive thought for several generations. Today many believe that science has disproved the existence of “an ‘other’ reality” beyond our day-to-day reality. And yet, by its very nature, the supernatural, as it is popularly conceived, lies beyond science’s capacity to examine. Besides, there is ample evidence that the scientific view and a sense of “something more” in this world than we can see and touch may exist side by side in the same person without undue conflict. Examples: the Hindu or Buddhist physicists who easily hold the latest scientific views while continuing their belief in the power of meditation (or meditative prayer). And then there are the scientists who find Christ, as metaphor, does not contradict responsible inquiry. However, some would compare such folks to the Eskimo who got so cold in his kayak that he lit a fire in it. It sank, of course, proving that you can’t have your kayak and heat it, too.

Probably more important than science to diminishing belief in the supernatural is the secularization of consciousness that has accompanied the development of western civilization. That is the focus on this world here and now which excludes what does not seem to fit directly into the here and now. This focus has resulted in a highly secularized world view in which the sense of the supernatural (so-called) has been pretty much driven underground. Because it is largely underground, it is less likely to surface as wonder and mystery than it is to invade our minds as superstition, magic, fear of death, alienation, and lack of a sense of our own identity in relation to the cosmos. Because of secularization, many people are rather dubious about the place of religion itself. They fear that religion will contaminate them with notions of the supernatural that “good sense” led them to reject.

How has this secularization come to pass? Well, there have been a long series of serious challenges to religion. First, the supernaturalisms of religion were contested by a physical science that displaced the earth from the center of the universe. And then, supernaturalism was challenged by a biology that displaced human beings from their previously unique position as a special creation of God and made humanity a part of the general evolutionary process.

Next, historical thinking undermined traditional theology by pointing out that religious traditions, even at their most sacrosanct, are human products – each with a history and a beginning in time, none with any truly non-human or supra-human beginning. For example, many today consider the cross to be sacred but it was not considered to be so until early Christians said it was sacred. The cross is a religious symbol created by the human mind – as is the swastika, which is simply another form of the cross. So it is with whatever people consider to be holy. The holiness comes from the meaning they impart to the thing or the symbol. Next, psychology suggested that religion itself could be explained as a gigantic projection of human needs and desires – a process that does not need any help from a supernatural power.

Finally, sociology gave a coup de grace by demonstrating that religious beliefs are held not because one set is more accurate and more valid than any other but because one set is simply more plausible to the holder than any other. This is to say that sociology has shown that religion is basically a matter of what is persuasive to the individual because of that individual’s conditioning and background. Suddenly, all religion is profoundly relativistic and pluralistic, with no one point of view having the right to claim greater validity or truth than any other. With this, all thought about religion, especially about such emotionally charged things as belief about things we cannot see, is thrown into a morass of subjectivity from which there is no escape. Unitarian Universalists have known this for a long time. This may not be clear to a traditional “believer”, but to others, who do not believe the same thing, the relativity of that believer's beliefs is obvious.

And yet, this pluralism and subjectivity enable us to look on the imponderable aspects of religion with new eyes. After all, that so many different people are trying, in their own way, to deal with a larger reality than we usually acknowledge suggests reality may, indeed, be larger than we usually take it to be. Because of this we may look for natural clues and signs indicating the presence of that which is other than the reality we ordinarily recognize. There are such clues and signs and they lead human beings to project their needs and desires onto the universe and call their projections religion.

This is to say, people have an experience and then they use that experience to postulate the presence of something else. They want to feel “at home” in this world, so they create notions that help them feel “at home.” In a way, even the scientist is party to such projection when he or she uses reason to seek that for which there is, as yet, no rational proof. Theirs, too, is response to the wonders and mysteries of existence.

Humanity’s need to “project” is as much a part of human reality as are the soil or the stars. Religion is as real in its function as any other existing thing is in its function. And religion, regardless of how stripped down and secular it may become, still speaks of a reality that is more than we ordinarily admit – a reality that goes beyond what we ordinarily know or feel and that binds us to ideas and experiences that point to more than we presently are.

What we project onto the universe becomes extremely important. We may project our need for love or justice or security onto the cosmos and call its reflection back to us “God” or some such thing. This is a prototypical human gesture and it suggests that we expect more because we sense that more is there. I call these expectations of the “more” signals of transcendence-- experiences found within the domain of the natural world but that point beyond the reality we usually experience. To put it another way, we human beings expect things in life for which there is no clear reason to expect; and these expectations show themselves in our experiences in the world and with one another. This is where we see signals of transcendence.

Each person can compile his or her own list of such signals but I would suggest at least five. I first ran across this particular five in a book by a sociologist who was also a lay theologian. His name is Peter Berger and the book was entitled A Rumor of Angels. First on the list is our human propensity for order. For some as yet not fully identifiable reason, human beings are able to see reality not as chaos but as an orderly existence whose reliability they can trust and can comprehend in both an immediate and cosmic scope. Seeing order signals that there is more to existence than our own erratic, disorderly selves. If we look, we can find a harmony that rearranges the messy jumble of existence into creative, even elegant, encounters with reality. Mathematics and science do this. As do poetry and other great literature. Music, for me, is a special instance of bringing aesthetic order to the existential and emotional chaos of our lives.

Another signal is our ability to -- and our need for -- play. This capacity allows us to step outside serious reality and set up situations that respond to rules that we, ourselves, (not God, not the Cosmos) create. When we play, we leave our ordinary world behind. We leave ordinary time behind. Nonexistent time becomes possible to us. Perhaps this is how the notion of eternity started. Just watch children on a playground or a golfer on the course and see if their invented reality doesn’t lift them out of ordinary reality into a world in which time seems to stop. Religious ritual, too, does this -- when it works.

A third signal of transcendence is the human propensity for hope. We are, after all, oriented toward the future in a way that, often, refuses to recognize physical limitations and impossibilities. In a profound way, we refuse to allow our awareness of death to smother our sense of life. Quite the contrary. Our awareness of our own deaths can orient us toward the future in such fashion that we work for “things-to-come” more urgently than would be the case were we expecting this day – or this life – either to last forever or to have no importance beyond itself. Hope is knowing that things can be done with the time we have as individuals and as a species.

There is another signal that may not be easy to understand, although everyone here experiences it in some way. It is damnation. Our ability to damn something or someone – in our own minds to consign them to the inner recesses of hell – indicates our awareness of a dimension of life that extends beyond our usual approving and disapproving, beyond our usual yea and nay attitudes. Some things [like the Third Reich’s murder of German Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals; or Pol Pot’s killing fields; or the gratuitous suffering created by the tragedies of the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing, September 11, Abu Ghraib, and other unreported atrocities in Iraq] so outrage our humanity that there is nothing strong enough within our ordinary world that we can bring to bear against them. Some actual crimes and behaviors so exceed our usual conception of punishment that we have to believe there must be some consequence somewhere that matches the crime or behavior. So, whether there is or not, we assert that there is. We damn.

The fifth signal I would suggest is our sense of humor. This human capacity is so ordinary – so everyday – that we usually overlook its importance. But, we all know how it works. Human beings can detect that which is fundamentally discrepant, incongruent, and incommensurable about life and then can go beyond it by transcending it with laughter. We can see the imprisonment of the human spirit in this world and lift ourselves above that imprisonment with a comic response. [It is suggestive to me that the word “comic” is the word “cosmic” without the “s”. Perhaps the letter “s” in “cosmic” stands for “serious” and the “serious” has to be removed (transcended!) to keep such a large concept from overwhelming us.] Laughter is all the proof I need that there is more to life than we, usually, recognize. For me Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Allen, and Grouch Marx demonstrate the reality that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts! Perhaps one could say that a “hole” has to be dug larger or you can’t put all of the parts into it.

These are common, ordinary phenomena: our propensity for order, our ability to play, our propensity for hope, our sense of damnation, and our sense of humor. But each in its own way points to a larger reality than we, ordinarily, experience. They are indications of a greater depth of spirit than we, usually, think exists. By taking them as clues to what exists beyond what we see, we have a reliable basis for expecting more of life than our day-to-day world suggests is there. If we will seriously explore what our propensities to order, to play, to hope, to damn, and to laugh mean, we can come to a more natural concept of what transcendence really is and how it works to make life livable in this day-to-day world. We may come to see that these signals point not to supernaturalisms that intrude into life but to superlatives that are naturally in life. We can see that they flow from within ourselves and from others like us, that they are not the supernatural as the supernatural is ordinarily taken to be but rather the superlatively natural! I would settle for that. A superlatively natural world would have all the qualities that people project onto a supernatural world; but, it is not grounded in superstition.

We come to our religion not just for theories, or doctrines, or ideas. We come not even just for ethical guidance. Rather, we come to our religion (even more) for a wisdom and a spirit that will enable us to lift ourselves out of our estrangement from others and above our alienation within ourselves, above the fear of death and the insensible superstitious reliance on luck and magic that plague us. We would have our religion heal the disjointedness and the empty character of the world we live in.