Blessings ~

Practice gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude ~

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Why Religion?


From time to time I’m asked “Why religion?”  I have found different ways to answer the question, trying to make it accessible for the questioner.  For example, a child asking the question might receive the initial response “Well, you know my religion is so important to me that I used to ride my bike to church even when my parents didn’t go! It’s a place I always felt safe, special and alive.  A place where I could question and also try out some of my own answers. ” An adult seeker might receive an answer like “This is the place that calls me to be a better person and to participate in making our world a better place.  The YMCA helps me work out my body, my religious community helps me work out my soul.”  A parent would hear “It played a central role in teaching me to value lives and to live my values and I wanted that for my children too.”  Regardless of how the answer came out, I know now that my religious home was always the place that taught me what it was to be the best human being I could be.  In relationship with other people.  All other people. 

In each of these examples, I always hope the question leads to more conversation.  Anyone asking is likely to be assessing their own relationship, or lack of relationship, with religion.  As a person who has found religion to be so formative and a pathway toward a co-creation of a better tomorrow, I want to be part of that conversation every chance I get!  Our lives today are so filled with things that engage us in consumerism, achievement and self care.  We seem never lacking for shopping opportunities, improving our job, academic or social status or toning, healing, sculpting and primping our bodies.  But what of places and activities that engage our souls? 

·       What reminds us to walk into the mountains and let the mist kiss our faces?  What whispers to us ‘go into the wild and let it remind you that you belong?’  What shouts out take off your shoes and let your toes wiggle in the sand?
·       What activities pull in people of all ages, all genders, all cultures & ethnicities, all affectional orientations, all abilities, all social and educational levels and says you are all welcome & worthy, let’s dance!  And what group does so even knowing they will fall short but has the courage to look and say who are we excluding and how must we change to make it not so?
·       What place calls us to the still place beyond the quiet that we may sit with the mystery of creation that connects us all?  What helps us be still and listen to our best inner self and the force that calls us to be better?  What helps us to forgive ourselves and others and begin again in love?
·       Where are we able to hear the voices that call us beyond what seems to be ‘our world?’ The voices that say “Our destiny is connected and a wound to one is a wound to all, what benefits the least among us is a benefit to all and together we can and must build a better tomorrow?”

This is the religion of my past, present and future.  It is the religion of my great-great-grandparents and I hope it will be the religion of my great-great-grandchildren.  It is a religion that honors the ancient dance that says we each belong, perfectly imperfect creatures that we are – but also calls us onward, holding us in the uncertain transformation we must deliver ourselves to each and every day.  Why religion?  For me, it’s all about salvation.  Mine. Yours. Ours.  How about you?






Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Atheism: All About Nothing? Really?

Reading

Whatever Is
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Whatever is we only know
As in our minds we find it so;
No staring face is half so clear
As one dim, preconceived idea—
No matter how the fact may glow.

Vainly may Truth her trumpet blow
To stir our minds; like heavy dough
They stick to what they think—won’t hear
Whatever is.

Our ancient myths in solid row
Stand up—we simply have to go
And choke each fiction old and dear
Before the modest facts appear;
Then we may grasp, reluctanct, slow,
Whatever is.

Sermon
Atheism: All About Nothing? Really?

A religious woman not her best self when it came to considering the impact of her behavior on those nearby, upon waking up each morning would open her front door, stand on the porch, raise her arms to the heavens and holler “Praise the Lord.”  Her spiritual practice infuriated her neighbor, an atheist, who being less than his best self would open his door and holler back “There is no Lord!” One day, he overheard her praying for food and thought ‘ahhhhhhhh, I’ll take care of this argument forever!”  He went out and bought groceries and got up very early the next morning and placed them on her porch.  Barely able to contain himself, he stifled his laughter and waited.  Sure enough, she awoke, came down, threw open the door, ready to greet the world with praise, opened her arms and mouth,  and just then, saw the groceries!  Without another moment’s hesitation she raised her arms to the sky and proclaimed “Praise the Lord, who provided me this food in my time of need.”  The neighbor (I did mention, being less than his best self, yes?) stopped laughing long enough to holler back “It wasn’t the Lord, it was me!”  Without missing a beat, she in turn hollered “Praise the Lord, not only for providing me this food in my time of need, but for making the atheist pay for it!” **(Story adapted from one found on several websites about atheism)
     Last year after one of our services we created a spectrum of theological beliefs.  It stretched from one end of the building to the other.  At one end was a person, I believe it may have been Jack Weltner, who believed in a personal God.  One with whom he had a conversational relationship with God.  A theistic belief system in which communication flowed both ways.  At the other end was someone who responded to the description that included the words ‘so much of a humanist that it surprises you that you’re even here.”  I may have even used the word atheist.  Was it Hugh Stewart who held down that end?  Or perhaps Bill Smalley?  And all others fell somewhere in between.  As a religious humanist I believe I landed in the Holyoke room around halfway between the two, a bit closer to the theistic end of our living line of theology.  Who else was there?
We  learned things that day.  By seeing where people stood.  Through brief interactions to figure out where we each stood.  How does my religious humanism differ from your more secular humanism?  And where does Paganism fit on our spectrum in relation to pantheism? Panentheism? And how about a strong grounding in liberal Christianity heavily influenced by Buddhism?
    We learned some things about each other but only scratched the surface because the interactions were brief and necessarily motivated by the task of finding our own place on the spectrum.  The interactions were also generally done with people nearby and therefore with people of similar beliefs.  We have such a great opportunity to learn more.  We must learn more!  Because what is also notable, as a larger faith community that prides itself on “welcoming” diverse beliefs, is how we behave in manners that end up being anything but!   Sure, we welcome people and greet people but when it comes times to speaking our truths about beliefs the lived experience of two of our groups tells us that we have some growing to do in terms of the lived welcome.  And along with that there’s some affirmation those two groups could use in the larger world.  The two?  Christians and Atheists.  Differently described, those who hold beliefs that many of us have left, guided by reason, and those who have gone further in their rejection than we have traveled.  Of the two, our Christians are most likely to feel marginalized within our faith, while our Atheists are more likely to feel marginalized in the larger world.  Today, our focus rests with them.
    Atheism has certainly been around as long as people have inhabited the earth.  It claims forebears and contemporaries across all disciplines.  Well beyond Marx and Nietzsche.  Among them in no particular order -
Evolutionary biologist and author of the God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed in America, author Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket, Swedish author Stieg Larsson – I’m reading his The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest right now, playwright Arthur Miller, Christopher Robin Milne, inspiration for his father’s creation – Winnie the Pooh, Noam Chomsky, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Frank Zappa, Robert Louis Stevenson, Albert Camus, Kurt Vonnegut, Sarah Vowell, H.G. Wells, musicians Bela Bartok and Bob Geldof who organized Live Aid, Science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, columnist Dave Barry, feminist writer Germaine Greer and Annie Laurie Gaylor, and of course, Clarence Darrow, Charles Lee Smith who founded the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, was arrested twice in 1928 for blasphemy and was not allowed to testify because he would not swear an oath on the Bible.   Many more were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and executed – just as many who first argued that we could be religious without belief in the trinity, that we could be religious without belief in predestination.  Leading to the birth of Unitarianism and Universalism. And just as our transcendentalists would argue that we could be religious without intermediaries and our humanists would argue we could, in fact, be religious without God.  Heretics all.  Accepted so readily today but somehow, Atheism remains on the fray.
    Somewhere along the way the word ‘atheism’ became negative.  Not just the belief system, but the word.  For many, it is beyond heretic and heard as a complete denial of all they hold dear.  It’s safe to say there’s a great deal of projection involved by those hearing the word and making assumptions about what it means to those claiming it as an identity.  And like any other identity group, there are fundamentalists among atheists who are delighted to fuel that perspective.  Depending on the day, book and interview, Richard Dawkins  can be illuminating regarding his beliefs or condemning and exclusionary.  I am inspired by much of his work.  He calls this humanist to be humble in the presence of our magnificent creation as he writes “The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of nearly nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.” But then he loses me when he calls faith the “great cop-out” and encourages a belief that religion is stupid and organized religion dangerous.
    But as is the case with fundamentalism of every kind, it fuels separation and a righteousness that builds strong barriers to authentic conversation.  Atheism, in religious circles arrives with a bit of a barrier to begin with.  Just as the word ‘homosexual’ arrived with a predisposition to be about sex, atheism arrives with a predisposition to be about ‘God.’  A lot of work over the years went into moving the conversation about identity away from it being about the sexual act to being about love.  In doing so, the threat to one’s own sexuality was lessened and common ground more readily found.  The shift allowed it to move from a place of ‘that’s not what I do or would want to do or makes what I do wrong’ to a place of ‘we all have the right to love and love makes our lives and our world better.  Our conversation about religion benefits from this model.  We need to move the debate away from it being about believing in God or not in God to being about belief itself.  It then moves from a place of ‘that’s not what I believe or what I could ever believe or what I believe is wrong’ to a place of ‘we all benefit from engagement about what ground us, what calls us our better selves and what leads us to make our world better.”
     Some of the people working hardest to make our world a better place are atheists.  And it is a mistake to equate atheism with non-spirituality.  Some of the most ‘religious’ people I know are not who I look to as spiritual guide and some of atheists I know have a sense of purpose, calm and connection to the world which leads me to describe them as deeply spiritual.  The affirmation of a belief that a God being does not exist does not mean a person is not spiritual.  Further, while it could be accurate to suggest atheists lack a religious moral code that doesn’t mean they lack a moral code.  Nor spiritual practices. Nor awe of our natural world. Nor insensitivity to feelings that stir deep within or in the sacred spaces we create together.
Just as my religious humanism doesn’t begin and end with the question of God, neither does that of the atheist -------- or the Christian for that matter.
     And yet, with atheism, like others who have set beliefs, there can also be the holding identity so dear or past persecution that we too forget what it is about our beliefs that feed us.  That which brought us to consider that identity so dear, so clear.  We are perhaps too near.  And so it does us good as well, to step back and note how we arrive at the intersection of beliefs.
     I don’t believe the ultimate question at hand is whether or not there is a God or how God acts or cannot act in our world.  I think the ultimate question is how will we be with one another?  And do we each have something that helps hold us when we are in despair?  Something that challenges us to be better selves tomorrow than we are today?  Something that calls us beyond ourselves to a greater imagining of a world more peaceful? More just? More sustainable? And rooted by those things, how is it we can come together, across all beliefs, and not just within these walls or this faith, but across all borders, joining powerful heads, hearts and hands to build that new way? Isn’t the call to “humanity,” however inspired, where hope lives? Where transformation is possible?
     We begin here, with our spectrum.  Seeking to know each other and all those who arrive.  Not simply suspending judgment during a welcome, but parking it outside – in the remote parking lot and forgetting where we parked it.  We continue by asking ‘tell me more about your story.  How did you arrive here with us today or ten or twenty years ago or last Sunday?  Where did you come from?  What did you hold dear?  What calls you now?  And we continue by sharing of ourselves.  It is in this way, we may build together.
And now, back to our story.  You recall, the two neighbors who, I think it’s fair to say, were not in right relationship.  What might it have looked like if they had pulled up a chair one day and shared.  She telling him, how her faith informs her actions in life.  How faith in her Lord keeps her hopeful when she is in despair, calls her to help those less fortunate, even when her pantry is bare, how pained she was by their strained relationship and how she prayed it would improve.  And he, truly listening, asked her to tell him more about her faith, not because he wants to believe it or discredit it, but because he wants to know her.  And what if afterwards, he told her about his beliefs, how he is rooted in “whatever is.” That he finds hope in looking around at the world and a belief that he can change his own reality. That is it that which calls him to help those less fortunate, even when he’s feeling down and how pained he was by their strained relationship and how he hoped he could figure out how it could improve.  And she, truly listening, asked him to tell her more about his beliefs, not because she wanted to believe or discredit them, but because she wanted to know him.
     Regardless of your beliefs, don’t you think if that happened, the world would be just a bit better today?