Other People's Religions

When I was about 14 years old, my family drove from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Among many places we visited was the shrine at Guadalupe, and it was there that I first learned how different other people's religious experience could be. At Guadalupe, pilgrims come from all over Mexico to ask for blessings from the Virgin or to thank her for blessings received. Many travel the last several kilometers of the journey on their knees, saying a prayer with each step. Nothing in my previous experience could help me understand what these people were doing. It seemed bizarre, primordial, impenetrable. The sight of these people, who were so devout, so committed, so assured in their relationship with the Virgin, stayed in my memory, a haunting reminder that I really knew next to nothing about the depths of human longing.

In the intervening years, I have seen or read about many other kinds of religious ecstasy: fire walkers in Indonesia, the Sun Dance among the Sioux in which young men thrust stakes through their pectoral muscles and hung by ropes attached to them, women who received the stigmata, practitioners of Santería who are ridden by their gods, Native Americans who use peyote to achieve a mystical state, Sufis who get to the same place by whirling around and around until they are thoroughly disoriented, and Hindu ascetics who get there by sitting absolutely still, and Hebrew prophets filled with zeal for God.

Except for a couple of strange, unplanned experiences, none of this has ever found its way into my life. I look on all these practices as being possible to any human being who wants to pursue them, but I have never wanted to be so disconnected from normal life. The one or two times I have experienced what I would call religious ecstasy were so unsettling I have not actively tried to go back there, although it's possible that I should.

Because I know that religion can take people to lots of places I am not culturally prepared to go, I don't accept the idea that all religions teach basically the same thing. I don't spend a lot of energy trying to identify the commonalities among faiths. I don't buy the idea that the different religions are different pathways up the same mountain. I suspect that they traverse different mountains entirely.

If there is some one thing they all have in common, it is that all religions provide answers to the dilemma of the human condition. They all offer ways to bridge the divide between consciousness and instinct and between the needs of the individual and the needs of society; they all offer a perspective on our awareness that we must die; and they all try to give us a sense of our place in the world. So the questions the different faiths start from may be quite similar, but the answers they give can differ significantly.

I find it useful to think of religions as distinct languages, of which the earth had at one time over 6000. Each language is correct and appropriate to the context in which it is spoken. Each language is capable of eloquence, humor, poetry, and clarity of expression. And each language developed in response to a long history of cultural development. Every language spoken on earth today grew organically, rather like a huge oak tree. The only synthetic languages in use today are those developed for computers and those sign languages developed for the deaf in parallel to spoken languages. And even sign language has its dialects in which local usage has given a new shape to the received and official language.

The same principles apply for religion. Religions grew out of historical contexts, and they were shaped by local politics, economics, and folk traditions. They were even shaped by local geography. I doubt very much that Judaism could have developed in the rain forest, nor could Norse religious beliefs have developed in the desert. Where we find a single religion holding sway over vast populations, we also find hundreds of local dialects. The Christianity of the slums of Sao Paolo is very different from the Christianity of upper eastside New York, and both are different in turn from what is practiced by those penitents at Guadalupe. There exist dozens of varieties of Hinduism and also of Buddhism. Confucianism in Japan has a distinctly different flavor from Confucianism in China.

Fifty or sixty years ago, it was fashionable among Universalists especially to prophecy that they were the religion of the future. By the year 2000, or 2050 at the latest, most Americans would have seen the light and accepted Universalist belief. Well, it hasn't happened quite the way those folks expected. What did happen was that mainstream Christian churches moved in the direction of Universalist doctrines. So Universalist ideas may capture the collective mind of America some day, but the Universalist church that spawned them hasn't grown. The other churches learned from us. Can we, I wonder, learn from them?

Our denomination has embarked on an intense study of successful churches in this country. We pay almost as much attention to the methodologies of the mega-churches as we do to the methodologies of big business. Our covenant groups have developed out of that study. And last fall our district growth consultant led a workshop here in which he showed us a videotape that explained how a megachurch in a Chicago suburb has managed to grow a congregation of something like 12,000. We looked at how they treat visitors, how they structure their worship services, and how they go about drawing people into the congregation. Some of the techniques we learned about from that videotape have even found their way into our practice here.

But I'm not sure we are asking the right questions, or that we are trying to learn the right things from these successful churches. We are focusing on technique, on technical solutions, when it may well be that we should be focusing on message.

Huston Smith reminds us in his introduction that one thing we can hope to learn from other religions is how they have contrived to deal with problems whose solutions have escaped us. He was not talking about different ways of organizing church committees. He was talking about how religions respond to human needs.

Oscar Hammerstein wrote the following description of a theater audience for his show, Me and Juliet:

It's a big, black giant, that looks and listens,

with thousands of eyes and ears,

A big, black mass of love and pity,

trouble and hopes and fears.

Some nights it's a laughing giant,

other nights a weeping giant,

Some nights it's a coughing giant,

other nights a sleeping giant.

Every night we fight the giant, and maybe if we win,

We send him out a nicer giant than he was when he came in.

In a few lines, Hammerstein reminds us of the problem we must confront: how to speak meaningfully to that big, black giant. How to address that big, black mass of love and pity, troubles and hopes and fears. The answer has to do with message, not with technique.

I suspect that we need to be looking at other faith traditions to see what they talk about, not to copy their message, although cautious borrowing may be advantageous from time to time. As Jacob Trapp tells us, different faiths focus on different things, spirit, self-discipline, reciprocity, inaction, responsibility, submission, unification. When we have questions in any of these areas, it would behoove us to turn to those who have a centuries-old tradition of teachings in that area.

I think the problem for Unitarian Universalism is that we are so unsure about our own message that we can't articulate it sufficiently to allow us to focus on any particular thing. Freedom may be our leitmotif, but that's true also of Judaism, and frankly, their tradition is richer and more nuanced. The question I want to keep returning to is, what is uniquely our own approach to the human condition? What is our distinctive note?

That's a question that a bunch of thoughtful UUs have been working on for the last couple of years -- maybe longer. The word coming out of the seminaries today is that the message we can preach and teach and call our own is a combination of our understanding of the interrelatedness of all things and our sense that everything is in process, including ourselves and including God.

Sydney and I have spoken on both of these topics enough that they shouldn't require much elaboration. We know in our hearts that our actions an inactions affect those around us, that in small or large ways we contribute to or subtract from all the problems we can name that arise from living in the metropolitan area. We know that we can alter the emotional tone of conversations and meetings by our choice of words and our body language. We know that our economic choices reach to Latin America, Korea, and South Africa. And we know that our political choices touch millions of other people. We know that we are co-creators of the world that is coming into being.

We also are quite aware that the world we live in experiences rhythms of change, cycles of change, seasons of change. Nothing is static, not even the rock of Gibraltar. The entire state of California is moving north at a rate of some three inches per century.