Those familiar with the illustrious cast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus may only know about their …. ummm… “theological” work from films like “The Life of Brian” and that delightful scene in “The Meaning of Life” in the prep school chapel.

Who can forget the chaplain’s prayer, “O God, you are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh. We’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you”? And then there’s the Eric Idle “hymn” the boys sing, “O Lord please don’t burn us, don’t grill or toast your flock, don’t put us on a barbecue or simmer us in stock….”

Monty Python’s approach to religion is to choose its most ridiculous or fanatical aspects and to give these the full satirical treatment. What some overly religious leaders seem to miss is the manner in which this comedy troop lampoons that which our own best theologians have long called into question, beginning with the great Christian humanist Erasmus (in his excellent Renaissance critique of “utopia,” a term he invented). The tradition of satirical gadflies is a hallowed one, and the Monty Python crew took to it with gusto.

Relatively few folks, however, are aware that the actor and comedian John Cleese, one of the most renowned of Pythons, while serving as “Professor at Large” at Cornell University, actually preached a sermon. Cleese holds a law degree from Cambridge University, and he was also awarded the honorary LLD by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in recognition of his long service as rector of the university, but very few knew about his spiritual life until now.

So what does Professor Cleese have to say about faith?*

Quite early in the sermon we have his disarming confession: “I’ll be blunt. Church of England religion, vintage 1950s, turned me away from religion for twenty years because I thought that’s what religion was — great for some people, but not for me, and not for 90 percent of my friends.”

In the wake of the breakup of his first marriage, however, and the therapy in which he sought out after that breakup, he began to explore what the British philosopher Alan Watts meant when he wrote, “Psychotherapy is about analyzing the contents of consciousness, the sacred traditions are about taking an attitude ... to the contents of consciousness.”

Cleese says that it was about this same time that he came upon a lecture Aldous Huxley once delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In this lecture Huxley drew a distinction between religion as a deeply personal immediate experience of the divine and religion as a set of symbols or beliefs to which one must hold.

Cleese explored the ways in which Quakers comprehend the posture of “openness” to those forces within and among us which transcend conventional understanding. And he began to realize that the religion that demands adherence to a set of beliefs and that regards non-belief of these ideas as tantamount to rebellion against God was not the only show in town. And, as he also had learned from Huxley’s essay, the immediate experience of the divine is not restricted to a tiny population we call mystics, but is available to all people provided we are willing to engage in disciplined spiritual practices.

Cleese says, “I am still puzzled why, in the West, there’s been so little interest in experiencing the divine and so much emphasis on religion as crowd control.” Why, Cleese asks, do western religions have such a hard time blessing the individual who seeks divine experience? If the rationale is to prevent psychotic or destructive forms of faith, the strategy of belief-systems enforced by religious institutions hasn’t really worked.

Cleese, like philosopher William James, believes that the proof of a religious pudding lies in the quality of life it produces. He finds in Jesus, for example, precisely the kind of life one hopes a human being would live if one has a deep connection to the divine. And he takes his cue from Jesus; in order to cultivate that experience of the divine, one has to enter into practices that will quiet the mind so we can pay attention.

Cleese says, “it’s clear to me that we’re unlikely to have an experience of the divine while we’re dashing around, ticking off lists, caught up in quotidian details and pretty much unaware of our own existence. We’re not going to have the sort of attention we need for a subtler experience while it’s all being wasted on ordinary life. .... So we need to be quiet.”

It has long been recognized, of course, in Christian spiritual practices that there is no substitute for silence and solitude if we want to open ourselves to God. God is always there; we just don’t tend to show up ready to notice God’s presence.

Toward the end of his sermon, Cleese says something utterly transparent and vulnerable: “I have a real hunch that, if I could ever get quiet and free for a moment from my negativity, that I might get a gift from God.”

He closes by saying, “Thank you.”

I’ll close by saying, “Amen,” and “Thank YOU, Professor Cleese.”