Members of One Another

This is the text of the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve on Sunday, September 23, 2018.

The various traditions and lineages of Buddhism disagree with one another as much as the different branches of Christianity do (or, for that matter, people who understand Unitarian Universalism differently).  These various traditions and lineages do share many common teachings, of course.  One of these is that all Buddhists — from no matter what specific tradition — vow to “take refuge” in the what’re called the Three Jewels (or the Three Treasures).  I’ll get back to just what those are in a moment.  First, I want to look at what it means to “take refuge.”

The dictionary definition of “refuge” is:  “the state of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or difficulty.”  You can trace its roots through Old French — where it meant, “a hiding place” - back to the Latin word refugium — re, meaning “back,” and fugere, meaning “to flee.”   In other words, the root understanding of “refuge” is that it is a place we can “flee back to,” a place to which we can return again and again and be assured of safety. 

In addition to doing my usual online research, this week I called out to my Buddhist friends Facebook friends.  Those who responded agreed that that’s pretty much their understanding of what “taking refuge” means in the Buddhist context.  I asked one of them if it’s about refuge from “the distractions and delusions that flesh is heir to.”  He replied, sagely, “Yup.”.  One of the articles I read put it like this:

The English word refuge refers to a place of shelter and protection from danger. What danger? We seek shelter from the passions that jerk us around, from feeling distressed and broken, from pain and suffering, from the fear of death. We seek shelter from the wheel of samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth.

So a Buddhist “takes refuge” in the Three Jewels, the Three Treasures — the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.

Saying that I take refuge in the Buddha, a Buddhist I am saying that I turn to the Buddha for shelter.  I could mean the historical incarnation of the Buddha in young Prince Siddhartha roughly 26 centuries ago.  I could also mean the concept of “the Buddha,” the Buddha-nature that is in all things.  I could also be talking about a commitment to seeking out the Buddha within, for according to some traditions each and every one of us is, right now, a fully enlightened Buddha.  (Most of us just don’t know it, and few of our family and friends would confirm it to be so.)  To take refuge in the Buddha could mean any — or all — of these things.  What it boils down to though, is that a Buddhist recognizes “the Buddha” to be a source of shelter and safety from the bombardment we all too often find ourselves under.

Similarly, dharma can be understood in a number of different ways. It can mean anything from the specific, particular teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, to the deepest and most profound wisdom wherever it is found and however it is expressed.  Taking refuge in the dharma, then, is saying that when I am in danger of stepping off “the middle way,” I will seek safety in wise teachings.

The third of these refuges, the sangha, is the one I find most interesting, especially in the context of this community this morning.  “The sangha” is “the community,” and that can be as specific as the particular people with whom you practice, all Buddhists, or even all sentient — even all non-sentient — beings. That this is one of the Three Jewels surprised me.  Maybe it’s because the stories and images I knew best depicted the Buddha alone (on his own beneath the Bodhi tree, for instance).  I don’t know if any of you share this perception with me, but I had always thought of the Buddhist tradition(s) as a particularly solitary path.  That’s why I was more than a little surprised to learn that one of the Three Jewels that all Buddhists commit to taking their refuge in is the sangha, the community — that the community is on a par with the Buddha and the dharma in importance, and is understood to be equally efficacious as a place of shelter and support.

This is a community.  It’s a human community, of course, and we humans do not always live up to, in to, or out from our best selves.  Yet at our best, the members of this congregation — from long-time formal members to the most recent recurrent newcomers — at our best, the people who make up TJMC make up a community.  And one of the things that’s promised of the Beloved Community we strive to be is that we, too, can turn to this community as a place of refuge from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” which we find flying towards us with (at times) frightening frequency.  When we, as a community, are at our best, we provide a shelter for one another.

And yet …

And yet, if I want this congregation to become the true community I know it can be, I have to recognize that it can’t be all about me.  It just can’t be all about doing what I want to, when I want to, in the way that I want to.  It can’t even be about my getting my needs met all of the time because, to put it simply, you’re here too.  You’re here, and you have wants and needs, too.  And you’re wants and needs won’t always be the same as mine.  It’s possible that they’ll hardly ever be the same as mine.  It’s possible that your needs and my needs will conflict with each other at times, and when we bring that person into the equation, and that other person over there, then it becomes less and less likely that everything will be done the way I would do it, or that everything I want — or, again, need — will be done at all.

This is nothing new, of course.  This is no great revelation.  We all know that it’s not all about us; we all know that, to borrow a phrase, “[we] can’t always get what [we] want.”  We know this, we say this, yet it’s also true that the first time something doesn’t go my way, or the first time I feel that a real need of mine hasn’t been met (or wasn’t met in the way I thought it should have been), I forget all of that stuff about it not being about me because, gosh darn it, in this instance I think it should be.  After all, even though we all know that it’s not supposed to be all about any one of us, shouldn’t my wants and needs matter?

Now … let me just take a minute to say that I feel pretty certain there are some people who are thinking that I’ve been talking about them.  And I feel equally certain that there people who think they know what group or person I’m talking about, and I’d be disingenuous if I said that I didn’t have some specific examples in my mind as I worked on these reflections this week.  Yet it’s important to be clear that I was also thinking of examples in my own life, times when I’ve forgotten the “it’s not all about me” mantra.  (And believe me, there have been plenty of those.  Actually, a few current examples I hadn’t even been aware of came to light while I was writing.)  The deep truth is that if we’re honest with ourselves, none of us is immune to forgetting from time to time that while my wants and needs are most important to me, they are not necessarily most important to the community.

The Apostle Paul said in one of his letters to a fledgling Christian community that they should understand themselves to be “members of one another.”

[J]ust as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so […] we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.

We belong to one another.  I belong to you, you belong to me, and we both belong to that other person over there.  There’s a hymn — #317 in our hymnal (we’ll be singing it at the end of the service).  It’s called “We Are Not Our Own.”  We are not our own.  The Vietnamese poet, peace activist, and Buddhist teacher, the Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh, created a term to express this deep interconnectedness – he says that we “inter-are.”  [Inter-are]  You and I “inter-are.” We belong to one another.  We are a part of one another.  Our very being depends on each other.  We cannot exist — at least, we cannot exist in deep, life changing, world changing community — without one another.  More than being “interconnected,” we “inter-are.”

And that means that when I come to this community one of the things I most fervently want, one of my own deep needs, is that you get the things you want and need.  One of my deepest desires is that you find your desires fulfilled.  Even if that means that I don’t get what I want and need.  This way, when things go your way and don’t go mine, I actually have gotten something that I wanted – I got your getting your needs met.

Of course, I most certainly hope that I will get my way … at least some of the time.  My wanting you to find what you want and need is only one of my own wants and needs.  And I’d be pretty foolish to stick around too long if things never went the way I want, if I never got my needs met.  Yet there is a corollary to my wanting you to get what you want and need even if, at times, that means that I don’t get my own needs met.  The corollary is that at the same time I’m thinking about you, you’re over there wanting the same thing for me even if you have to let go of some of your assumptions and expectations.  And that other person over there is hoping this for that other other person.  And so it goes.  Each of us deeply desiring the best for the other; each of us remembering that our own needs are only part of story.

Last week I talked about an aspect of the Beloved Community and said that it’s a vision of a community in which, “No one […] is considered […] less.  No one is considered, ‘Other.’  Each is recognized for the gifts they bring; each adapts to the other because we’re all kin.”

This morning I’ve offered another – a community in which we all know ourselves to be “members of one another,” who “belong to one another.”  The Beloved Community is one in which our needs are balanced with, integrated with, those of everyone else.  A community where we “inter-are,” where we recognize that our very being depends on the being of others.  A community which, for many, we already are.  A community I have no doubt we can ever get closer to.  A community in which we can indeed find refuge.


Pax tecum,

RevWik

Living Dayenu

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 28, 2018 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, VA.

The poet, peace activist, and Buddhist monk, the Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh, makes quite a bit of “smiling” as a spiritual practice.  “Breathing in, I relax body and mind,” one of his breath prayers goes, “Breathing out, I smile.”  “Smile, breathe, and go slowly,” is his advice on how to live.

A woman came up to him during a retreat to ask him how she was supposed to do all of this smiling when she had some real grief and pain she was going through.  He told her, essentially, that she was being like a television set that thought it was NBC29 just because that was the station playing at the moment.  She thought that she was grief and pain because that’s what was “playing” in her life at that time.  But a TV isn’t just one thing, isn’t just whatever channel happens to be on, even if that channel is on most of the time, making up the background of our lives.  All the other channels are always broadcasting, too.  Yes, there was a lot of grief and pain in this woman’s life, but it wasn’t the only thing, and he told her that she could choose to tune into the Smile Channel, if you will.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that when you find this Smile Channel the Grief-and-Pain Channel has gone off the air.  This isn’t the all-too blithe assertion we should just think “happy thoughts” when things are bad, and all the bad things will go away.  Whenever I hear someone say that I think, “Oh yeah.  I'm just supposed to pretend to be happy.; I'm just supposed to act like everything’s great.  But when I'm done, all my very real problems are still going to really be here, so what’s the point?”  What Tich Nhat Hanh’s television metaphor reminds me is that all too often I pretend, I act like everything’s going wrong, focusing only on my problems and my pain.  I forget that my very real joy is also very much really here.

What makes Tich Nhat Han’s “smiling” a spiritual practice, a spiritual discipline, is that it’s both really simple, and nowhere near as easy as it seems.  It takes work to “change the channel.”  Not like today.  When I was a kid, if you wanted to change the channel you had to actually get up out of your chair, walk across the room, bend down, and turn that clicky little dial.  Now you don’t even have to exert yourself to pick up the remote, you can just say into the air, “Alexa, please change the channel and put on Grey’s Anatomy.”  Changing channels used to be a bit of work; changing “spiritual channels” still is.

But why do it?  And why do it even in times like these?  Cypress asked some really good questions in her Opening Words:  “Is it appropriate to sing “Dayenu!” [she said] when it seems that so much is going wrong in the world?

Our Chalice Lighting, from the American Jewish World Service’s “Global Justice Haggadah” explicitly reminds us that sometimes is simply is not enough.

And a couple of weeks ago, and a month or so before that, we said together a litany which its author, Viola Abbit, titled, “The Promise That Binds.”  Repeatedly we lamented that, “the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should have been enough to bind us together in love.”

Sometimes, apparently, and perhaps obviously, it is simply not enough to smile and say “Things as they are are enough.  Things as they are, the way the world is, the way my life is, is enough.”  Not at all.  Sometimes, as Dr. King said, we need to be “maladjusted” to the way things are.

And yet … (And there’s that “and yet” I love so much.)

And yet it can be so easy to get caught up in those things, to get lost in them, to forget that the world is not just ugly, and brutal, and mean (in both the sense of nasty and base).  Said another way, it's so easy to think that the world is FOX News, forgetting that Rachel Maddow and John Oliver are both broadcasting, too. 

The  problem here is that when we get so caught up in what is wrong with the world, when we forget that it’s also beautiful and good, we can easily drown in the pain, and become cynical, overwhelmed, and, eventually, numb to it all.  When we see only what is not “enough,” pay attention only to what isn’t okay, we too easy to crawl into a false comfort, pretending that everything is okay.

If we want to really be alive to the full experience of Life, then we need we need to be able to see both Life’s pain and its promise, its beauty as well as its brutality, its grotesqueries and its glory, both.

Which brings us back to smiling, and brings us back to dayenu.  The spiritual practice of living dayenu is not at all about pretending that everything’s okay even when it’s not.  It is about realizing, recognizing, remembering that even when everything’s not okay, something is.  Recognizing that “something,” realizing that there is always something to smile about, remembering that some things are “enough,” grounds us when the maelstroms of malevolence which makes up so much of life threatens to render us mute and impotent.  Living dayenu can give us strength when otherwise our strength might be sapped; can give us hope “when hope is hard to find;” can give us a reason, and a means, to “keep on singing.”

Many of us today have no doubt come here in some sort of pain, worried by some kind of problem that seems pervade every corner of our lives.  Our congregation is right now in the midst of the kind of turmoil it hasn’t seen in a long time, a disorienting dis-ease that some are calling a crisis.  And our country?  Well, I don’t think I need to say too much about that.

But there is so much that is good, and beautiful, and inspiring in the United States – just look at the youth who are taking to the streets and the hall of power.  And there is so much that is well worth celebrating in this congregation – just think about all the loving ways we have reached out and touched one another’s lives, been touched ourselvesand the community around us.  And no matter how it might look to you in this moment, you have had, there are now, and there always will be things in your life to bring a real smile to your face.

I want to end these reflections with a way of practicing dayenu, a tool, if you will, to assist in the changing of our channel when our channel needs to change.  I’m going to teach those of us who don’t already know it the song “Dayenu.”  Not all 15 verses, but even if the chorus is all you know … well … dayenu.  It will be enough.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

This Wonderful Sound

This is the text of the reflection I offered to the congregation I serve -- the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Charlottesville -- on Sunday, September 24, 2017.  (This re-telling of the parrot's story is my own, with references to the book by Martin and Gabar.)


“Do the little thing that comes from your heart and everything might change, in ways no one could imagine.”  That was the message lifted up during Children’s Chapel last week.  “Do the little thing that comes from your heart and everything might change, in ways no one could imagine.” 

They’d just heard a story called The Brave Little Parrot, by Rafe Martin and Susan Gabar.  It tells of a little parrot who lived in a large forest with lots of other forest creatures.  One day, during a storm, a bolt of lighting hit an old dead tree, setting it ablaze.  Because of the winds from the storm, soon the entire forest was burning.

The little parrot could smell the smoke, and began flying to and fro, shouting, “Fire! Fire!  Get to the river and safety!” Yet as she flew to the river herself, she could see just how quickly the fire was spreading, and she saw below her many of the forest creatures trapped by the flames.

She had an idea.  She flew more quickly to the river, and asked the elephants to take up water in their trunks and return to the forest to put the fire out.  But the animals there all agreed that it was hopeless.  The cheetah said that, fast though she was, the fire was spreading too quickly.  The elephants said that they were indeed very strong, but they weren’t strong enough to break through those flames.  “We should all stay here by the river where it’s safe,” the animals all agreed.

But the little parrot wouldn’t accept that all was lost.  She dove down into the water, getting her feathers all wet.  And then she picked up a little, cupped leaf that was holding a drop of water, and she flew toward the flames.  When she got to the fire, she shook herself, and droplets of water fell from her body, and she tipped the leaf, and that single drop fell.

Back to the river she flew, diving into the water and getting water in the leaf.  She returned to the fire and repeated what she’d done before.  Back and forth the little parrot flew, until her eyes burned from the smoke and her feathers were singed.  The other animals cried out for her to stop, and yet, she persisted.

It so happened that at this moment some goddesses and gods were drifting overhead in the cloud palace, and happened to look down upon the scene unfolding before them.  “What a silly little bird,” one said.  “Doesn’t she know that the water’s turning to steam long before it hits the ground?”  “Doesn’t she know,” another one said, “that what she’s doing is hopeless?”  

One of the goddesses took pity on the parrot, and changed into a golden eagle.  Down the eagle flew, until it came up on the parrot.  “Silly bird,” the goddess/eagle said, “What you’re doing has no chance of succeeding.  Surely you will die in this effort, without affecting the fire one little bit.”

“Great eagle,” the parrot said without stopping from her work, “time is running out to save the forest and the animals.  With all due respect, I really don’t need advice right now.  I need help.”  And off she flew to once again dip her body in the water, getting her feathers all wet, and filling that cupped leaf with the single drop it could carry.

The eagle flew high, back up to the cloud palace.  For the first time, she felt ashamed.  “We are goddesses and gods,” he thought, “yet none of us is as brave as that little bird.”  And with this thought, the goddess began to cry.  Great, big tears … tears coming in waves … coming in sheets … coming in torrents.  And everywhere a tear fell, the fire went out.  And after the last ember was extinguished, the goddess continued to weep, and these tears brought the scarred forest back to life.

“Do the little thing that comes from your heart,” Leia said in Children’s Chapel last week, “and everything might change, in ways no one could imagine.” 

That story was originally a jataka tale from the Buddhist tradition.  Jataka tales are teaching stories, said to tell the experiences of the previous incarnations of the Buddha (who was said to have been incarnated as every kind of living thing before his incarnation as the man who would discover enlightenment).  Pretty sweet, right?  (And in case you’re wondering, you can go to Children’s Chapel whether you have children or not.  Those services take place in the Parlor, at the same time as these sanctuary services take place in … well … the sanctuary.  I tell you, they’re worth a visit.)

But what does any of this have to do with singing bowls and wonderful sounds?

Sound is produced whenever anything vibrates.  Those vibrations cause the medium around it to also vibrate – air, water, jello, what have you.  If these vibrations reach our ears, they cause the tympanic membranes to also vibrate, and our brain converts these vibrations into sounds.

<Invite the bowl to sound … .>  The bell vibrates … the air between it and our ears vibrate … our tympanic membranes vibrate … we hear the sound of the bell.

Now … here’s something cool.  If two sound waves intersect, interesting things can happen.  If the two waves are in sync with each other, they magnify one another.  If, on the other hand, two waves meet that are out of sync, the diminish one another.  If two wave forms that are exact opposites of each other meet … they create silence.

The Vietnamese poet, peace activist, and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that in the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition monks learn a gatha to go along with nearly every act.  A gatha is a short phrase or two intended to remind monks to remain mindful.  There are gathas for when you wake up, when you get out of bed, when you brush your teeth.  And there is a gatha for when you invite a bell to sound:

Listen. listen.  This wonderful sound calls me back to my true self.

“Listen.  Listen.  This wonderful sound calls me back to my true self.”  The monk who invites the bell to sound says this silently before placing the striker on the bell.  The monks who hear it say it silently along with the sound.  If it is one of the large temple bells sounding, the monks outside pause in whatever it is that they’re doing and recite the gatha:  Listen.  Listen.  This wonderful sound calls me back to my true self.  When I was in Japan, working with the Kanjiyama Mime Troupe, there was a temple on one of the mountains that surrounded their studio in the countryside.  When they would sound their gong to call the monks to zazen, its sound would echo.  And when the vibrations from that big, beautiful bell set the air vibrating, and when those vibrations reached my tympanic membranes, I would pause in whatever I was doing:  Listen.  Listen.  This wonderful sound calls me back to my true self.  I repeat this gatha whenever I sound the chime to call us to worship.  Listen.  Listen.  This wonderful sound calls me back to my true self.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that we can use anything as this bell – the doorbell, the ring of a telephone, the red brake light of the car in front of us.  Anything can serve as this bell, calling us back to our true selves.

I think that that foolish little parrot was a mindfulness bell for that goddess.  The sight of that bird brought her back to her true self, called her to be who she really was.  She had forgotten that who she was, in her innermost core; she’d forgotten her better self; she’d forgotten who she knew she could be.  And that brave little parrot called her back to herself.

Do you ever need to be called back to your true self?  I do.  I do … often.  When I am frustrated, or tired, or hungry, or scared … it can be easy to forget who I am.  When my feelings are hurt, or I think I’m being judged, or I hear too clearly my inner demons judging me (always too harshly) … I can so easily lose sight of who I am at my best.  I can so easily act out of my worst.  You too?

Let’s spend the rest of today … the rest of this week … looking for and listening to every mindfulness bell we can.  And when we hear it, let us remember that we have a true self to which we can return … and, if needed, return again, and again, and again.

One last thought.  You know how, when you drop a pebble into a pond, the ripples spread outward, and then bounce back in on themselves?  That one little pebble can affect the entire surface of the pond.  That brave little parrot was a mindfulness bell for that goddess, because she was vibrating her true self, and the ripples of that vibration went in all directions.  The elephants, and the cheetah, and all of the forest animals could feel it – when the vibrations of love she gave off caused their own hearts to vibrate love and compassion as well.

You can I can be bells, sounding pure and clear who we truly are.  We can be the wonderful sound someone else needs to come back to who they truly are.  And when you vibrate love, and I vibrate love, and each of us and all of us vibrate love, those love waves intersect, and amplify one another.

“Do the little thing that comes from your heart and everything might change, in ways no one could imagine.” 

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Across the Great Divide (part two)

In the last post I suggested that the long-standing debate within Unitarian Universalism between theists and atheists doesn't serve anyone.  The word religion comes from the Latin relegare, which means, "to bind together."  Our particular religious tradition can largely be summed up in the affirmation, "we are one human family, on one fragile planet, in one miraculous universe, bound by love."  Why then do we seem so determined to push one another apart?

The divide between the theist and the atheist need not be an uncrossable chasm.  In 1966 the Catholic (and, so, very theistic) monk Thomas Merton met and spent some time with the Buddhist (and atheist) monk Thich Nhat Hanh.  The tradition of the former asserts that God is the source of all things, to which all things return.  God is the very "ground of our being;" the ultimate reality.  Nhat Hanh, naturally, sees the world quite differently, as his tradition teaches that there is no solid ground upon which and in which all of existence rests.  The fundamental nature of reality is emptiness.  While Merton suggests that if you look closely enough at any thing in this world you will ultimately see God, Nhat Hanh affirms that a close enough look at anything will reveal nothing (no-thing) there.  It would be hard to imagine to more diametrically opposed world views coming into contact.

When Merton left the encounter, however, he said that he'd found he had more in common with the Buddhist monk than he did with most Catholics he knew.  How could this be possible?  Wouldn't they have had to compromise their own firmly held convictions in order to find some common ground?  Or else, wouldn't they have had to have reached an impasse at some point and simply agreed to disagree?  Yet neither of these things happened.  In fact, it was probably only because each held firmly to their deep convictions that they were able to meet and, more, to see in one another a kinship that surpassed the one they felt with the majority of people within their own traditions.

That may seem counter-intuitive, yet it is truly the only thing that really works.  Look at it this way: because each knew the ways their own lives were deeply grounded in their own religious understandings they had no need to defend their position.  They met as equals, as well -- both profoundly practiced their faiths -- and, so, whatever else might separate them they had that in common.  Each knew that there was nothing they could say to shake or convert the other, so neither felt compelled to try nor to put up defenses against it.  If only more interfaith encounters proceeded so respectfully and from such places of security!

One of the things the two discovered was that they were both led by their faith traditions to the realization that we are all connected -- one to another and each to all.  Merton might say that it's because we're all children of God, while Nhat Hanh might say that because no-thing exists independently of everything else, we "inter-are."  What mattered most to these two spiritual giants is that they discovered a common experience of interconnectedness with all of creation and the call to love and justice they'd each found flowed naturally from that experience.  With such fundamental and essential similarities, what did their differences matter?

It's important, perhaps, to underscore that this was not an exercise in "translation."  I doubt very much that either gave up his own language, his own traditions and teachings, his own referent point.  Instead, they truly listened to one another and, more, listened through one another to the truth within and beyond their words.  Together they were able to create that field Rumi spoke of, the one "out beyond thoughts of 'right' and 'wrong.'"  And in that field the only thing truly visible, the only thing that really mattered, was their kinship ... just as the deepest understandings of each of their different traditions promised.

That last assertion may need some defense or, at least, further explanation.  For the Buddhist there doesn't seem as though there'd be any real difficulty in meeting the Christian on equal ground, but doesn't Christianity teach that Jesus alone is the way?  That, of course, is open to interpretation.  Even within the Christian tradition(s), the meaning of that teaching is open to interpretation.  When Merton had his profound revelation on that street corner in Louisville in which he saw everyone and everything shining with light and intimately connected, he didn't distinguish between Christians and non-Christians.  He didn't see some people as shining brightly while others were clearly waiting to have their lights turned up once they'd joined themselves to the "one true church."  There is no indication that when Paul wrote to the Galatians, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" he meant that they were only one after giving up their previous individuality. It's more likely that he meant that in this new "way" such distinctions no longer needed to divide.  Support for this interpretation might be found in Jesus himself being remembered as praising the faith of a Syrophoenician woman and a Roman Centurion as above that of any Jew. He didn't require their conversion to earn his respect. 

Coming back to Nhat Han and Merton, these two seemed to have been able to set aside the creeds and dogmas of their own traditions in order to look for a deeper, experienced reality. Isn't that what we Unitarian Universalists claim that we do?  Why, then, do so comparatively few of us succeed in doing it? 

First, I think that few of us are really all that firm in our understanding of our own faith. Remember that Merton said he didn't feel this same kinship with most Catholics? It is far more than merely possible to belong to a religious community yet not know at a deep, heart level where and on what we stand. In fact, it's incredibly common.  You can find such people in every tradition. 

And You could no doubt find in every Unitarian Universalist congregation many people like the woman who said to me, "When I first became a UU twenty years ago I was so grateful that no one was going to tell me what to believe. But it's twenty years later now, and I still have no idea what I really believe because the responsibility of 'building my own theology' was put on me without anyone giving me any tools with which to do it."

Yet below the level of the words we use, behind the things we deny and dismiss, beyond even our beliefs about what we believe, what matters most is our lived experience of what's really real. It is what ultimately grounds women and men like Merton and Nhat Hanh, yet so few of us trust it. Without this foundational "knowing," however, it is so very hard to feel secure in one's faith and so very easy to feel the need to defend it.

This is certainly true in any religious tradition, yet it seems all the more prevalent, perhaps, in the Unitarian Universalist tradition.  While the percentage ranges from by some accounts 60% to a high of 90% there is no question that a great many UUs have found their way to this religion from somewhere else.  And many of those who did so left their former tradition because of an argument -- an argument over something we were being asked to believe, or a practice that at best made no sense to us and at worst we saw as harmful to ourselves or others.  Many of us had felt, or been told, that our own sense of what is real was unwelcome and, so, we either did a lot of debating or we learned to keep our thoughts to ourselves.  In a sense, then, such people came into Unitarian Universalism already somewhat on the defensive.  With so many people feeling the need to defend, and so many different things being defended, it is not surprising that the kind of trust Merton and Nhat Hanh brought to their encounter is so rare.

Let's expand on this a bit.  Historically, Unitarian Universalists have been among the most educated of religious groups.  We have had the highest percentage of PhDs per capita of any other denomination.  There has also been a critique long leveled at, first, Unitarians and, now, Unitarian Universlists -- UUs tend to spend an inordinate amount of time in our heads.  This is a generalization, of course, but one not entirely without some grounding in reality.  It should not be altogether surprising, given this background, that Unitarian Universalists can be more likely to argue over a point than to let it go for some promised "larger truth."  It's been said that the natural position of a Unitarian Universalist should be agnosticism -- except that that would require us to admit that we might be wrong about what we believe.  When asked, "is it better to be happy or to be right," some would have to think about it a bit and others would no doubt value being "right."

There's another thing to consider here as well.  For at least a generation or more Unitarian Universalism presented itself as the "un-religion."  At least, we weren't like the religion you've been hurt by, or have for any of a number of reasons rejected.  Many of those who gratefully joined our ranks in response to this invitation may well have thought that they were entering a community of "like-minded people."  This is, in fact, one of the most common answers given when someone is asked what they value so much about Unitarian Universalism -- that here you can find a group of like-minded people.  Especially for those who had previously felt themselves to be a beleaguered minority this would have been tremendously exciting.

Imagine, then, the consternation felt on discovering that here -- even here -- there were people using the same old language, referring to the same old books, and even looking askance when you said aloud the things you'd thought it was finally safe to say.  Add to this that the history of the American Humanist movement is deeply rooted in the Unitarianism of the late 20’s and 30s – about half of the signers of the original HumanistManifesto had been Unitarian clergy.  For a while it had seemed that Unitarian Universalism provided just the kind of soil atheistic humanism needed to flourish.

[Before continuing, an aside.  There are many kinds of humanism, just as there are many kinds of Buddhism or Christianity.  To paint all humanists with the same brush is actually one of the problems faced in our efforts on moving forward the interfaith dialog between UU theists and atheists.  (Should that be "intrafaith dialog"?)  I was being intentional, then, in modifying humanism with the adjective "atheistic" in the last sentence of the previous paragraph.  I am specifically referring to the sense of possibility many atheistic humanists felt when encountering Unitarianism and, then, Unitarian Universalism.]

It should not be at all surprising, then, that these sometimes long-time, sometimes quite new, members would feel themselves being pushed aside by the movement's apparent shift to emphasizing "the language of reverence" (which is often understood and experienced as a return to "God talk") and an embrace of "spirituality" (whatever that even means).  Why, though, should UU theists feel at all threatened when, it seems, their perspective is in the ascendency?

Until next time ...

Pax tecum,

RevWik