YOU SAY YOU'RE NOT RELIGIOUS
by Forrest Church
January 22, 2005
I'd like to speak this morning especially to those of you who are thinking of joining this congregation or exploring joining by attending our orientation workshop after church today. If I were to fashion a single refrain from thousands of conversations with new members over the years, it would have three parts. "I am spiritual," you assure me, but not religious." "And not a joiner," you add. "And I don't quite really believe in God."
I'm never sure how to respond to these defensive affirmations. Should I rush to assure you that joining All Souls won't ruin your perfect record as a non-religious non-believing non-joiner? I don't think so. Because it will. Not right away perhaps, but eventually it will. If you become an active here, you will slowly grow and change. Rather than standing apart from your neighbors you will stand among them and then feel and be a part of them—you will become a joiner. And you will become religious, nurtured by a supportive religious community and the discipline of religious practice. Finally, in the company of fellow seekers who have rejected narrow caricatures of God and yet have found a way to believe in a power greater than their own, you will define your own faith in a more capacious manner. Rather than being sure of all the things you don't believe, you will begin to discover principles of belief to guide your through your days.
I know what you mean when you say your aren't religious. Perhaps you came from a Protestant background, but quit attending church as soon as it was your choice, not your parents. Or attended Mass as long as you had to and then rejected the church and with it religion. About a third of our members hail from Jewish families. You may have been Bar or Bas Mitzvah'd and then never returned to Temple, save perhaps to placate your parents on High Holidays. In recent years, a growing proportion of our new members grew up without any religious affiliation whatsoever. So you naturally think of yourselves as non-religious.
Let me draw a distinction between being religious in the conventional sense and being religious as an essential dimension of being human. Most of you know by now my own definition of religion. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing we must die. We are not the animal with complex tools or advanced language, but the religious animal. Knowing we must die, we question what life means. We may arrive at non-theological answers to these questions, but the questions we ask arise from a religious condition: Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What is good? What, evil? What is life's purpose? And, where can I find meaning to sustain me through my days?
To be religious in the conventional sense, we fit ourselves into religious boxes. We call ourselves "Christian," "Jew," "Moslem," or "Buddhist." Or, more narrowly, Presbyterian or Catholic or Conservative Jew or Reformed Jew. This is a Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Most, but not all of us, identify ourselves as Unitarians. Some further identify themselves as Christians, Jews, or Buddhists. With no doctrinal stipulations save those affirmed by the oracle of our minds and derived from personal experience, we believe outside the box. The nomenclature of our faith here is various here and rich. But that isn't what makes us religious. Thomas Jefferson said it well: "It is in our lives and not from our words that our religion must be read." Ave Maria and Praise the Lord are stirring affirmations to be sure, but far more telling is how we treat our neighbors and loved ones, how honest we are in our dealings with each other, and how good our hearts are. Here at All Souls the religious proof is not in the cookbook, it's in the pudding.
I mean not to demean the great orthodox faiths. It is perfectly possible to belong to an orthodox church and have the truth of your faith redeemed by your deeds. There are thousands of ways to be saved from our baser selves. Many people are saved by Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad or Moses from living empty, hopeless, undirected lives. Yet many individuals belong to a religious group and do not live a religious life. Their professions of faith jar almost completely with the way they act. We see this and are tempted to reject religion, even as we see believers inspired to hate in the name of God and are tempted to reject the very idea of God. We also know from experience, our own and observed experience, that it is possible not to belong to any religious group and still be loving and humane in the deepest of ways.
So why bother with organized religion in the first place? Why trade in your Sunday morning New York Times, cozy chair and Bloody Mary for an hour in these relatively hard pews? Why not remain vaguely spiritual rather than join All Souls and risk becoming actually religious? There are many good answers to this question. Here are a few.
First, being religious implies a moral concern for values that are universal and humane. The Latin root, "re-ligere," means literally "to bind together." Much organized religion doesn't bind God's children together under a single code of loving kindness, but instead divides one tribe from another. But here, in a congregation that stresses deeds over creeds, there are literally dozens of ways to bind ourselves together with others in performing acts of loving service. To do so is to practice the kind of religion that saves, not the kind that damns.
The words we use to express loving-kindness are telling. We are religious when we console—console—literally to stand beside another in his or her aloneness. And when we commiserate, when we open our hearts to share the misery a loved one or neighbor is going through. And when we offer comfort—the word comfort meaning to bring to another our strength. Those who serve others in God's name with the primary goal of converting them attach coercion to the help that they offer. Dr. Albert Schweitzer ran into trouble with the financial backers of his hospital in Lambarene, because he refused to proselytize. At the end of his life, weary of Christian hypocrisy, he identified himself as a Unitarian, but even then he didn't package his faith with his medicine. It was in his life and not from his words that his religion was read.
Second, to be religious means to be open to the universe. A great deal is implied in this statement. There are many people who call themselves religious who are completely closed in their thinking about this wonderful universe in which we live. They have narrowed everything down to a tight-straitjacketed theological system, a way of salvation, brokered through unqualified acceptance of a certain set of theological tenets. The chief object of such religion appears to be to get others to believe as they do, and thus be "saved." Being religious in the largest sense of the word—that which binds us, all of us, together—can be completely cancelled out by belonging to a group that believes it alone has the truth and that every one else is damned to Hell. If a person believes that all of the truth has already been vouchsafed through a special prophet or a sacred book, and the sole purpose of religion is to convert others to this proposition, then belonging to a religion can lead to what can only be called irreligious, even demonic behavior. How different this is from being open to the universe. Here at All Souls the only books of revelation are the book of nature and the book of human nature. If we study both closely we will be left with a deeper sense of wonder and awe than any salvation narrative could possibly offer. But to experience this wonder and awe, we must read the books of nature and human nature with due reverence. We must embrace each day as the miracle it is and fashion our very lives into instruments of praise. This is religious work and it requires religious discipline. We perform that work together weekly in our Sunday liturgy. Once a week we pause and pinch ourselves. We can't take this life for granted. We must receive it as a precious gift, a pearl of great price.
This may sound like too broad a definition of what it means to be religious. But how many of us, even in secret, remember to say, "Here I am universe, speak to me in whatever way that you can?" "Show me beauty, show me justice, show me truth, show me joy. Reveal to me your secrets." How much more religious is this humble, open posture than locking one's mind on a single set of facts and then laboring with all our might to impose our ideas upon the universe, fitting the larger picture onto our little screens. One reason to join a congregation like All Souls is to discipline our gaze beyond the limited horizon of our daily scheming. Beauty surrounds us and we constantly miss it. We spend so much time trying to plant our tiny flag atop the next hill that we miss the looming mountains and beyond them the gateway to the heavens. We choose to be religious together because alone we may forget to remind ourselves how fragile and precious life truly is until the trap door swings and we are left with nothing more than a final desperate prayer.
Third, to be religious, we must discover a sense of oneness with all of creation. Unitarian Universalism is, above all, a faith that celebrates oneness—one God or ground of being, Unitarianism, and one shared destiny, Universalism. Schweitzer spoke of this principle as reverence for life. We are apart of, not apart from, a vast and mysterious living system. To recognize our oneness with the creation is consciously to participate in its abiding glory.
Mystics of every faith proclaim this sense of oneness. Thus the Brahman-Atman relationship of Hinduism, the sense of Nirvana of the Buddhists, and the concept of Jesus that "I and the Father are One." All of these are examples of mystical oneness.
This feeling of communion can come through rigorous thought or it can come by letting our minds rest. We can reason our way to the sensible conclusion that a world at peace is better than a world at war. We can use our reason to fashion ideals that may help to create a better human society for all God's children. But we also need to set our minds at rest and let the peace that passes all understanding flood our very beings and transform us for a blessed time into a peaceful, non-anxious presence, a receptor of goodness and grace.
The great religious prophets have all recognized that beyond the intellectual realm lies a numinous oneness that transcends all differences, call it the Holy, the divine Spirit, God—it doesn't matter. This kinship extends to the Heavens. The mystic oneness of person to person, which we may capture in lovemaking or deep listening or true empathy is but a simple expression of the greater mystical oneness of all existence. The great prophets have preached cosmic oneness not only because it makes good metaphysical sense, but also because it answers a profound human need—to be one within ourselves, reconciled to our neighbors, and at home in the cosmos. Human feelings of friendship and empathy are but a faint reminder of the essential mystical oneness of all creation. Theologians may reason their way to oneness, but mystics experience it—as we all do in magical moments of connection—when we set aside the intellect and connect our souls to the great chain of being.
The goal is not to get lost there, but found. We get lost when we mistake the unseen for the seen, when we sacrifice reason to faith. Yet when we have reached the end point of reason we do well to journey beyond. We do well not to let our intelligence keep us earthbound. I am not speaking of the kind of religion that says you must accept something on faith. I am speaking about the kind of insight which is not always given to us by purely intellectual processes, but which, starting there carries us into the numinous realm where God is love and all is truly one. To experience the Eternal, an experience that we cannot adequately describe, is more meaningful perhaps than any other experience in our lives.
Finally, and we now complete the circle, to be religious is to let this sense of the Eternal make a difference in our lives. I say that we have completed the circle because in a sense we are back where we started. I suggested in the first place, that we ought to be good neighbors, that it is in our lives not our words that our religion must be read. I believe that there is something beyond humanitarianism, a tremendous and fascinating mystery as theologian Rudolph Otto described it, mirrored within our very lives. But once we have made a trip through the stars and have discovered that the universe is one, this sense of cosmic kinship cannot help but uplift and transform our personal lives. Such religion exalts our neighbor and ourselves at once by placing us together in divine kinship.
All I have really done this morning, by the way, is to frame the essential teachings of Jesus in more universal terms. According to his two great commandments that sum up all the law and the prophets, we are to love God with all of our heart, mind, and soul and our neighbors as ourselves."
The two great commandments start with we and end with ourselves. You can be spiritual on your own, of course, but we can only be truly religious together. Here at All Souls we always have and always will welcome those of you who consider yourselves non-religious, not-believing, non-joiners. You will follow in a long and distinguished line of people who joined this congregation before you feeling very much the same way that you do now. But, in the spirit of full disclosure, it is only fair to warn you. By joining this church you run a real risk. You will become a joiner. You may well become religious. And, if you are not very, very careful, you may find yourself waking up some resplendent Sunday morning and see the sunlight dancing through your window and offer up a prayer of thanks to God.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.