Some of the best stories I've heard over the years have come from my rabbi friends.
One rabbi, whom I'll call Harold, told me about his once having been part of a large religious council composed of ministers, rabbis and priests. It was recognized as a very effective council. Its members got along well together as they worked on important community projects.
But there was a kind of unwritten premise in the organization, and that was that theology would not be discussed. So they didn't. And it worked.
Then one day they began to look at that underlying premise critically. And basically they said "After all, we are theologians, to one degree or another. Theology is presumably our most important concern. Why shouldn't we be able and want to discuss among ourselves the matters that are closest to our hearts?"
So they set a date when they would come together only to discuss theology, in a reasonable format.
That day came, the discussion took place, and it began to get fairly heated. At one point Harold and a minister friend of his found themselves both standing addressing the other. Harold said, "Now John, let me get this straight. Here we've been friends all these years, we've worked on the same projects, and you are saying to me that, unless I accept exactly your interpretation of Jesus as my personal savior, I am damned to hell through all eternity when I die?"
And his minister friend said, "Harold, with all due respect to you, and you're a marvelous man and we've fought for the same causes, and I have nothing but the highest regard for you, yes, that is exactly what I believe."
And Harold said he was surprised to hear himself say, as he sat down, "Well, I'll be damned."
Whenever I've told that story I've gotten an explosive reaction. It proves to me that theology is a very live issue for all of us. Under the surface of daily activity there is a very deep concern for such things as the nature of God, for who gets damned and who doesn't get damned, where exactly Jesus fits into the scheme of the universe, and how we conduct ourselves in the face of those with very different opinions.
In fact, when you think about it, 'damnation' really isn't a funny subject at all. A child born in the Sudan today, and in many places of the world, has a life expectancy of a few months to maybe several years. Any of us could have been born just as easily into that situation. Can we, for more than a few seconds, contemplate the life of a 6-year-old dying of starvation as if it were our own life? If we want to use the word 'damnation,' it seems to me to best befit the lives of children who have no hope.
The word applies suitably to other situations, the family forced from their home and all their possessions and made to march endless miles, perhaps separated forever from loved ones. Or the person in such physical pain that he or she can only wish the next moment were the last. Or the person whose mind and emotions are so scrambled that nothing can make sense any more.
'Damnation' is not pretty, and we can find it all around us, and even catch glimpses in ourselves of what a living hell might be for us.
And this in a world that for most of us, most of the time I'm convinced, runs from benign to wonderful. Just in being able to look at a tree in bloom, or at someone returning a smile, or in eating a super-rich dessert (or just in thinking about eating a super-rich dessert), life is full of one happy surprise after another for most people, punctuated by the occasional downer that we learn to cope with.
The reason the story of the rabbi and his minister friend is so funny is because it says that the ideas of heaven and hell can become so abstract, even for clergy, that they have no connection to everyday life.
That's the irony of most religion, it seems to me. Religion, which should be the great unifier of people, which in every case attempts to set out the highest aspirations of a people, be they Muslims, or Christians, or Jews or whatever, in its institutional form tends to divide people, not only Christians against Jews or Muslims, but Christians against Christians, and Jews against Jews, and Muslims against Muslims.
I'm convinced that the reason most people don't go to church or temple is that they see this aspect of institutionalized religion all too clearly, and they want no part of it. It takes a particular kind of vision, and I think a lot of Unitarian Universalists have caught it, that says that how we act toward one another is the measure of our religion, not what we say in our loftiest or most opinionated statements.
Joan Campbell, Director of the National Council of Churches, reports that at a recent conference on abortion involving leading spokespersons from various faiths, a Roman Catholic cleric explained at the end why he personally opposed abortion. But then he had the grace to say, "I offer this statement as the deeply-held belief of my church. But I also offer this statement with the deep conviction that I might be wrong."
What a remarkable thing for him to say! For anyone to say! "These are my strong beliefs. But I just might be wrong."
Such a person is really willing to listen to a different point of view, engage in civil discourse, and be changed if logic dictates.
More often we are changed not by logic but by simply experiencing the other person or culture. We are thrown into a situation where we are no longer in control. We sit in a classroom where the children take charge. Or in a catastrophe we find ourselves working shoulder to shoulder with someone whose path we normally would never have crossed. At a dinner party we find ourselves suddenly outnumbered by people with radically different values and life styles. It's happened to all of us.
Many of you may have caught the May 23 NY Times Week in Review section, with its page of excerpts written by students of Columbine High School in Littleton who had survived the April 20 massacre. I found all of the excerpts illuminating and to the point of who we are and what we should be doing.
Janelle Behan, one of the students, wrote, "At first when this happened, people kept telling me that 'everything happens for a reason.' That made me so angry! How could there ever be a reason for something like this to happen, and what good could ever come of it? Well, as each day goes by now, I am seeing more and more good that is coming from it....
"Some of the good began even before everything was over, while I was still in the choir office with 60 other students. There were people I hardly knew who were comforting me, hugging me, and telling me that everything was going to be O.K. There was a group of about six boys who literally saved all our lives. If it hadn't been for all of them, none of us would have known what to do. It was kind of funny, because many of these boys are thought of as goofy kids in everyday life. But they had taken the panels out of the ceiling to lift girls through who couldn't breathe, and they kept all of us quiet so that we couldn't be heard outside. I learned that many of the people at the school whom I thought I really didn't like, I love them all!....."
Patricia Doyle wrote, "I do not believe I will ever understand what those horrible boys were thinking. That is, what bugs me most, what were they thinking! This tragedy though has taught me many things."
"The way I live my life has come into my head many times. Am I doing the right thing always? Am I making people feel bad by the way I am treating them? I know joking is a part of life, but I will never make fun of someone jokingly again. I hope many kids see, instead of just hearing about it, how much teasing can hurt a person."
As a clergy person, I'm glad that many of the young people, in Littleton and elsewhere, are waking up to the fact that what we say to other people, and words that imply rejection, can come back to haunt us, and even exact a price.
I hope they realize too that even more important than words, spoken in jest or otherwise, are the underlying attitudes we have about people, which are transmitted like poison darts, or like rays of sunshine, without our hardly being aware of what they say.
This past March Polly and I had the opportunity of spending three weeks on the west coast of Africa, sailing from Capetown up past Gibralter to Italy, and stopping in countries whose names we knew, like Namibia, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal, before visiting more familiar places like the Canary Islands and Morocco.
It was a remarkable vacation, and we learned a lot. Now we can at least picture each of those countries as an entity, some French-speaking in addition to their native tongues, some English-speaking like Ghana, and more oriented toward England and the United States, some heavily Muslim in their culture and religion, others like Togo and Benin, most influenced by voodooism.
Indeed, Benin is considered the birthplace and the seat of voodooism. From Benin it spread to other African countries, but particularly to the Caribbean through the slave trade. It is a religion that is every bit as serious to its practitioners as is Christianity to Christians or Islam to Muslims.
Moreover, while I have not come to terms with the level of scientific understanding of the voodoo priest, who uses the skulls of animals, or the skins of monkeys, or other animal viscera to effect his cures, a part of me warmly resonates to the idea that there is a 'spirit' in every living thing, from the giant oak to the ant that crawls on it, and in all inanimate objects as well. In voodooism, this church building has a spirit, and it is up to us to keep it a 'well' spirit, or help heal it if it becomes sick.
But there is one aspect of our trip to West Africa that troubled me then, and continues to trouble me today.
Polly and I, and I dare say just about everyone on the Pacific Princess, felt we were on a good will mission, as well as a great vacation, hoping to gain understanding of a part of the world that that doesn't have a lot of visitors from North America. Cotonou, Benin, located almost on the Equator, doesn't see many passenger ships during the year, as compared to South and East Africa, with their popular animal photo safaris.
Our ship was modest, especially compared to the mega-ships that are being built today to accommodate the upsurge in world sea-travel. But I have to tell you that our medium-size Pacific Princess must have been easily the biggest floating object a lot of people in West Africa had ever seen.
So the piers were decked out waiting for us, with some of the finest art objects the continent could sell to tourists. The dancers danced on the pier, the drums beat until they rang in our heads, and the native costumes outdid one another.
I'm sure we created an image of a boatload of hopelessly wealthy North Americans on a sight-seeing trip of a very poor continent indeed.
Forget that Abidjan on the Ivory Coast is a metropolis in surprising ways, with more than a million people, skyscrapers and lovely hotels and parkways. In the shadow of one hotel hundreds of men who could not get jobs in their home country of Mali and had migrated to the Ivory Coast did the laundry of the better-off in the river, and laid out thousands of garments on the hillside to dry, without any problem apparently of laundry getting mixed up or lost.
Forget that we had come to West Africa with a thirst to know more about the slave trade, and that we visited the dungeons where for almost 300 years slaves were held, separated from their families, awaiting shipment overseas under the most cruel conditions that guaranteed that a large percentage of them would die en route.
Forget that we did spend some money, but for trinkets, because we don't have room for anything more in our New York City apartment.
Forget these things, because the contrast was too great.
As our ship inched away from the pier in Dakar, where we had visited the Ile de Goree, the most notorious of all slavery centers, the merchants on the pier were putting their wares into their vehicles. The drums and the dancing had stopped. One merchant made a gesture toward the ship of "Good riddance!" I don't know how much he had expected to sell to all those rich Westerners that day, but he obviously had fallen far short of his expectations.
I wondered then, as I wonder now, what it will take to saving a dying continent, where AIDS runs rampant, and the list of diseases alone is frightening. We know that we can no more cut Africa off our conscience than our own country can cut off New York or California.
We are all in the same leaky boat, folks!
I started out with a light-hearted story of a rabbi hearing himself say "Well, I'll be damned."
I end with the thought that in the long run, we may all be damned if we don't do everything we can to make bridges between cultures and religions and economic groups.
There are people of good will in all countries, by the millions, even by the billions. If we are to avoid the harsh judgment of history, and great suffering for ourselves and those dear to us coming after us, we must link up with those people and help our governments steer a better course than they collectively have been doing.
We've caught a glimpse of the abyss.
But we've also been shown the pathway to heaven, through love.
May each of us choose, carefully. Amen Copyright AllSouls 1999.