Religious Rafts
May 21st, 2009 by Bill
Religious Rafts
Today (25th January, 2009) marks the end of the week of prayer for Christian unity. Although we Unitarians are rarely officially invited to participate in such events – the suggested order of service this year includes the recitation of the Trinitarian Nicene Creed, automatically excluding Unitarians – I usually like to mark this period of the year, and to preach on unity; but not just on Christian unity, but the unity of all religions.
When we have a wedding or a christening in church I will often draw the attention of the congregation to Paddy’s sculpture and tell them that we in this church try to find the things which unite the religions of the world, rather than dwelling on the numerous things which seem to divide them. I point out that the sculpture contains the symbols of the major world faiths, and when I tell a children’s story on Sunday I like the children to know the story’s origins – Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian etc. This is really an attempt to get them used to the idea that all religions have worthwhile elements, all have something to teach us, and we should keep our windows open to every breath from heaven, whatever its source. Often, too, preachers in this church will use a passage from a non-Christian scripture, or even from a secular poet, giving the impression that we Unitarians want to create a super-religion, a huge amalgam of all the religious systems, in which Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim elements all sit cosily side-by-side and all the peoples of the world would come to be united under the auspices of a world-wide Unitarian movement. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the U.S.A, believed that in his lifetime, every young man in America would be a Unitarian, so confident was he that the denomination’s liberal message would be found universally appealing. (Obama’s grandfather)
Jefferson was wrong, and all prophets of a world-religion have hitherto been wrong. What’s more, in my view, it’s a good thing that they have been wrong. Religions are about much more than ideas. A religion is bound up with a culture, and every culture has been produced by unique historical, geographical and sociological factors which it would be foolish to ignore and inhuman to eliminate.
Even within a culture like our own, which has been firmly rooted in Christianity for centuries, differences in religious systems abound, and this is only to be expected because different temperaments demand different styles of worship and practice. ‘Ought it to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements?’ asks William James in his classic work of a hundred and ten years ago, The Varieties of Religious Experience. ‘No,’ he answers, emphatically. ‘And my reason is,’ he goes on, ‘that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties….The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole lot of us to spell the meaning out completely.’
Temperament, as James suggests, has a lot to do with religious choice. Some people are naturally drawn towards the dramatic and colourful worship of Roman Catholicism; others to the quiet reflection found in a Quaker meeting house; and there’s a whole host of styles in between. We Unitarians are generally quite happy with the sort of ‘wordy’ worship we find here – vocal prayers intoned by a worship leader, readings intended to provoke mental activity, long sermons on intellectual topics and the like. This kind of worship would be uncongenial to people of more exuberant temperament – the Pentecostals, for example, who like to be carried away emotionally by their worship, and for whom music, singing, and dancing even are more important than intellectual discourse. There is no value judgment intended here. To say that something or someone is ‘intellectual’ is not to praise them. An intellectual may not be all that intelligent. An intellectual is one who approaches the world primarily through the mind, one who is happiest when exchanging ideas, or, more usually, when expounding ideas, no matter how inane these ideas may be. Unitarians have been defined as people who believe in salvation by bibliography, and we like to think of ourselves as ‘clever’, but others see us our worship as dry and emotionless – ‘as dull as a Unitarian chapel on a wet Tuesday afternoon’ is a simile that amused me when I first read it. James Martineau, who was minister here in Dublin in the 1840s (before this church was built), left Dublin for England, where he became one of the most celebrated theologians of his day (second only to Cardinal Newman). He was said to be ‘incomprehensible on Sundays and invisible for the rest of the week’, but this didn’t deter people from going to listen to him. One woman, so the story goes, met an old friend in the street. ‘Where are you worshipping these days?’ her friend asked. ‘I go to listen to Dr. Martineau.’ ‘Do you understand him?’ ‘I wouldn’t presume to understand Dr. Martineau,’ said the lady. This lady obviously liked to be seduced by words, and many Unitarians are like her. But this doesn’t suit everybody.
And even the people it does suit for a time, may tire of it and look for something else. And why wouldn’t they? I sometimes feel that I need something else – something a little less sombre, something to get my blood racing, or something to elevate my spirit into a wordless, idea-less communion with the ineffable. Sometimes, I just don’t want to be given another history lesson, or another reminder of my civic responsibilities, or something to think about, or to argue about. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife once said that she thought that sometimes it was a sin to go to church, and I agree with her. Sometimes our worship would be more sincere and more rewarding if we were to walk quietly in the woods, or to sit and watch the ducks on the park lake. Variety is what our disunity and our religious freedom afford us, and variety is what we need. ‘One law for the lion and ox is oppression,’ wrote William Blake; and one style of worship for everyone is religious tyranny.
We may fondly imagine that the Christian Church was united in the beginning and only subsequently fell into division. But this is a fiction. Even a cursory reading of the Christian scriptures will show that the earliest followers of Jesus were divided over many issues. The most obvious one concerned the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. Remember, the first Christians were Jews, and so the question inevitably arose about whether converts to Christianity should be circumcised and whether they should be expected to keep the Jewish dietary laws – no pork, no shellfish etc. St. Paul thought that these were unnecessarily restrictive, but it would appear that James, called ‘the brother of the Lord’, believed that you couldn’t be a Christian without first becoming a Jew. St. Peter was in the middle, first espousing one point of view, then another, and in his Letter to the Galatians, Paul condemns Peter for his vacillation. Eventually Paul’s point of view prevailed.
In the Letters of John we can detect traces of another important controversy, a rather surprising one. John tells us that there were people denying that Christ had come in the flesh, which probably means that they didn’t believe in a historical, flesh and blood saviour called Jesus. Called ‘docetism’, it was a prominent strand of thought within early Christianity, influential enough to be condemned in the earliest Christian writings. Today, there are estimated to be over two thousand Protestant denominations within Christianity – there are over a hundred offshoots of Mormonism – and even Catholicism’s apparent unity can only be maintained by the official silencing of dissident elements. In times gone by, that specious unity was enforced by the sword and the stake – witness the wholesale slaughtering of the Cathars in medieval France, one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Christian religion.
What is true of Christianity is true of other religions. Division and diversity is the norm. Contemporary Judaism is divided (mainly) into Conservative, Liberal, and Orthodox; Muslims are Sunni or Shi’a; Buddhists are Mahayana or Hinayana. And within these major divisions are countless minor ones.
I am glad of such disunity, and wouldn’t want it otherwise. For one thing, it gives us all limitless choice, but, more important, it ensures that no religious system will ever again become strong enough to dominate the world; the concentration of power in the hands of the religious will always result in tyranny.
What about ‘truth’ you may be asking? Surely a religion is either true or it is false. The word ‘true’ is a very tricky one when used about religion. In science and in mathematics we have rational and empirical ways of distinguishing truth from error, and the truths of science are always considered tentative and provisional rather than absolute. But how can we ever know which – if any – religion is true and which are false? It would take ten lifetimes to investigate the truth claims of the various groups within Christianity, to say nothing of the other religious systems. Religions are not true or false. They either do their job properly or they don’t. And what is the job of a religion? In my view, a religion has one primary role: to deepen our sensitivity to life, or, to put it in the words of our children’s story today, to foster within us the twin virtues of concentration and compassion. If a religion does this for a person, it has a valid reason for existing. If it does not nurture these virtues, if, instead, it narrows our vision and rations our sympathies, then it is an abomination.
Jesus himself said that his followers would not be recognised by the probity of their theology or the beauty of their worship. ‘By their fruits you will know them,’ (Matthew 7:20) he said, meaning that the way a person acts is the only criterion by which we can judge the worth of his or her religion. A certain rabbi Akiba, a contemporary of Jesus, was asked to sum up the Jewish religion while standing on one leg: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your brother,’ said the rabbi. All the rest is commentary.
The Buddhists have a parable which we could all do to ponder. The Buddha asks his disciples a question. Imagine, he says, that a man finds himself in a dangerous place. He can escape to safety by crossing a river so he cuts down some trees and builds a raft. Would he be acting sensibly if, when he gets to his destination, he says to himself, ‘This raft was a great help to me. With its aid I have crossed safely over to this side. It would be good if I carry this raft on my head or on my back wherever I go.’ What do you think, O monks? If he acted in this way would that man be acting properly with regard to the raft?
‘No, sir,’ reply the monks.
‘In which way, then, would he be acting properly with regard to that raft? Having crossed and gone over to the other side, suppose that man should think, “This raft was a great help to me. With its aid I have crossed safely over to this side. It would be good if I beached this raft on the shore, or moored it and left it afloat, and then went on my way wherever it may be.” Acting this way would that man act properly with regard to the raft?
“Yes, sir,’ say the monks.
Religions, says the Buddha, are like rafts. They are vehicles which can carry us towards a more compassionate life. Our problems arise when we mistake the vehicle for the destination. As far as Christianity is concerned, and as far as religion in general is concerned, the only unity we really need is the unity that will eventually and inevitably flow from this important realization.
January 25th, 2009