Before I came to First Parish as a ministerial intern, I worked for one and a half years as a receptionist and newsletter editor for Congregation Beth Israel-Judea in San Francisco.  I joined the High Holyday choir and was officially proclaimed by the rabbi, in front of 600 people, as an “honorary Jew.”

I remember the first time I stepped inside the synagogue.  I faced a wide wall covered with white plaques about a foot wide, three inches high, and half an inch thick.  Each of the plaques bore a name on them, and a date.  Some of the dates were written in English, and some in Hebrew: 13 Adar 1 5750.  These were memorial plaques, marking the death of a loved one.  During the week of the anniversary of the loved one’s death, or yahrzeit, a wooden frame was placed around the plaque and the name of the deceased was included in the Sabbath worship service.  People made donations to the temple in honor of their loved one on their yahrzeit, and I announced each donation in the newsletter.  Each month, about five pages out of eighteen were devoted to the listing of such donations in honor of yahrzeits, wedding anniversaries, bar and bat mitzvahs, and more.  I also published wedding anniversaries for the month.

Names are very important to Jews, as Rabbi Morris often reminded me.  And not just names, but people – individuals with their peculiar personalities and histories.  And this temple was packed full of personality.  Pietism clearly took a back seat to honest self-expression.  Rabbi Morris walked around with a temple’s worth of personality just by himself.  Aside from those occasions when he was angry, he was usually very cheerful.  “Tip top,” was his greeting of choice – I’d never met anybody who actually said “tip top” before.  For him, life was to be thoroughly savored.

“Hi Rabbi, how are you?”  “Tip top, tip top,” he’d say, smiling and lightening the office atmosphere.  After I’d returned from my sister Kathy’s wedding, just a couple of months after ending a two-year relationship myself, Rabbi Morris asked me if I had had a good time.  “I had a great time,” I said, still beaming that my sister had finally found a worthy mate.  Rabbi looked at me slyly, looked around, bent over, and said, “Oh yeah?  What was her name?”  Then he winked and slinked away.  I hadn’t had a date since my break-up, and he knew it.  But his remark put me in a good mood the rest of the day.

The Jewish scriptures are not God’s recitation of eternal laws and truths, like the Islamic Koran.  They are not well-reasoned discourses on the causes of suffering, like Buddhist scriptures.  While they have elements of each of these, what makes them stand out from other holy scriptures, I feel, is their endless stream of colorful, flawed characters, many heroes but few saints, and a God who is known through historical events.  While other religions cut straight to the universal, Judaism is thoroughly enmeshed in particularities – a particular group of people with a particular mission bound to a particular land, eating particular types of foods and constructing their arks and temples with particular materials, all carefully delineated.  One of the practical effects of this emphasis is a high regard for particularity in human personality.  What is it about you that makes you different from others?  How do YOU interpret this passage from scripture?  Rabbi Morris wants to know!

Huston Smith, in his book World Religions, writes that the Jews have a God of history: a God who intervenes at times of great importance.  Not all moments are equal; some are more clearly connected with the presence of God.  Consequently, Jews are left with a sense of urgency, a sense of looking for special moments in life and seizing them, making the most of them – and remembering them through holidays and other rituals.  The human role in this process is crucial; I was reminded of this every time Rabbi Morris said goodnight.  “Make it a good one, Steve,” he said.  Not “Have a good one,” but “Make it a good one.”  Centuries of theology in a simple “good-night”!

Religion has great power to shape people’s lives.  There’s so much more I can say about my time with Beth Israel-Judea – the rounded temple architecture, so unlike the Christian steeple, that reinforces a horizontal sense of community with other people rather than a vertical connection with God above; the bizarre High Holyday Torah parades during which I sang with the choir an endless stream of songs -- “Ya da di da di da” -- while the rabbi, cantor, and torah bearers shook hands and schmoozed with the congregation; the direct, passionate communication style of Rabbi Morris and so many others; and the love of debate in a religion where some of the Holy Scriptures are themselves arguments.

Religion indeed does have great power to shape people’s lives.  In the World Religions class that I’ve been leading here since November, we’ve explored Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Humanism.  This Thursday we’ll study Primal Religions and Earth-Based Religions, and we’ll have a concluding session two weeks after that.

Many people have reservations about the way we Unitarian Universalists make liberal use of other religious traditions. In our quest for inclusivity and breadth, we often fail to stick with something long enough for it to challenge us in meaningful ways.  Using pop music for an analogy, we tend to take a “Greatest Hits” approach, picking and choosing from various sources a collection of hit singles, ignoring the long ballads and other songs too complex or too dark to make it on the radio.  We sometimes parade symbols without taking them seriously, all the while patting ourselves on the back for being so inclusive and enlightened.  We can be spiritual tourists, fearing commitment to a single form.  We engage in a free search for truth and meaning, but not always in a free and responsible search.  In our naïve desire to “have it all,” we sometimes borrow from other traditions without doing so in a thoughtful, respectful way.

I have voiced these concerns myself, and yet – I love that we honor wisdom from a variety of sources.  I love hearing the fresh perspective that only a Taoist can offer.  I love the gentle, unrelenting compassion of a Buddhist like Thich Nhat Han, the good-natured humility of Confucius, and the enraptured devotion of the Sufi poet Rumi.  As the Hindus know well, there are many paths to the Sacred, to God, to the spirit of life that sustains us all.

Many have argued that you can’t walk all of these paths, or even two of them, at the same time.  Reverend Scotty McLennan, author of Finding Your Religion and a Unitarian Universalist minister serving as chaplain at Tufts, describes the world’s religions as well-marked paths up a spiritual mountain.  Unitarian Universalism he calls a “crossroads religion”; at a ministers’ meeting last month he likened our religion to a sort of tent under which Christian UUs, Buddhist UUs, and others take a break from their specialized disciplines to worship together.  Rev. McLennan is himself a Christian Unitarian Universalist.

It is true that many people do gain much from a disciplined, specialized spiritual practice such as Christian prayer or Buddhist meditation.  It is also true that many people dabble as a way of avoiding the real work of committing to something.  But I now believe that there is a way of interacting with several religions and practices that is not dabbling, that is a sort of discipline in and of itself – perhaps another path up the mountain.

The World Religions class has been this sort of discipline for me and, I believe, for most if not all of the class participants.  Our format has been very simple: each session we discuss a chapter of Huston Smith’s book World Religions, guided by a set of questions found in a curriculum published just for this purpose by the Unitarian Universalist Association.  We open our sessions with a reading and chalice lighting, we talk, and then we close with another reading.  Our class goals include not only to learn about world religions, but to learn about religion, and to learn to listen better.

Following Huston Smith, we set aside the institutional trappings of each religion to engage with their core spiritual outlooks.  We set aside the crusades and jihads to listen to the essence of Jesus and Muhammad.  We ask, “What does this religion have in common with Unitarian Universalism?  Where does it differ?  What can we as Unitarian Universalists learn from this religion?”

We engage ourselves with each religion, looking from its perspectives at the world and at ourselves, as a religious community and as individuals.

One of the most surprising sessions was on Confucianism.  Confucianism puts its faith in tradition, rituals, and habits, while Unitarian Universalism, a child of the Enlightenment, puts its faith in reason.  Huston Smith claims that if Confucius were alive today he would argue that tradition, rituals, and habits form character more securely than does reason.  Wendell Berry and other westerners in this century have advocated a Confucianistic respect for context, for form, for limits.  I asked the class, “Where do you see tradition or ritual at First Parish?”  I was astounded at the response.  Overwhelmingly the class pointed towards the Joys and Sorrows portion of our worship service, a ritual just two years old.  In a very short time, many here have become quite attached to this ritual.  It reaches a place in us that words and reason cannot easily access.  For many, it teaches interconnectedness with a power no sermon can rival.

In a recent class on Islam, we found ourselves face-to-face with a religion that has close to absolute uniformity in religious practice throughout the world – facing Mecca and praying five times a day – yet greater diversity in ethnicity and class than we can even dream of.  It seems that, paradoxically, it is precisely Islam’s uniformity in practice that allows for such diversity.  Shoulder-to-shoulder – literally, touching – pray Muslims of very different backgrounds in gatherings all over the world.  Everyone is equal when they bow before Allah.  Islamic religious practice is not something that varies according to taste or preference – or to class or background.  I am not suggesting that our religious faith should try to adopt uniform practice – somehow, the image of herding cats comes to mind – but this class did leave me with a greater respect for faiths radically different from our own.

Having explored several Eastern religions, when we came to Christianity, we were able to do so with fresh eyes.  One class member said very innocently, “I wonder what it must have been like to meet Jesus.  He was obviously very charismatic; he had a tremendous effect on people.  But what was it about him, exactly?”  Another class member answered that she knew a woman from her workplace who held herself with such dignity and treated others so kindly, that her presence seemed to affect the very atmosphere in which she worked.  The class member spoke more eloquently than I can now.  The class became very quiet.  “Maybe that’s what Jesus was like,” she said, “Only more so.”

This, to me, is what religious education is all about: people learning to notice the religious dimension in the particularities of their own lives.  In this class, we do not just hold these religions and analyze them from a distance.  As our trust in each other has grown, we have done less talking about the religions and more engaging with them.  We have done our best to approach each religion non-judgementally, respectfully, seeking the good in each, mindful of the context out of which each grew.  And that’s how we’ve treated each other, too.

We have learned not only a heightened appreciation for particular religions, but also a greater respect for religion – for the many things it can do for so many different people.  We have come to see that many religious ways are worthy of being honored.  We have begun to ask ourselves, “What are our ways?  What is religiously significant about Unitarian Universalism?”

My answer to that question lies in the context in which the question was asked – the class itself!  As Unitarian Universalists, we are a people who are curious about the world, open-minded, and warm-hearted.  We see learning as a religious act.

In a superficial sense, I suppose, we are dabbling.  A week of this, a week of that.  But on a deeper level, we are doing more: we are dancing with that which cannot be fully named.  I speak of the “it” in our first hymn, “It Sounds Along the Ages”:

…From Sinai’s cliffs it echoed, it breathed from Buddha’s tree,
it charmed in Athens’ market, it hallowed Galilee;
…It calls – and lo, new justice!  It speaks – and lo, new truth!
In ever nobler stature and unexhausted youth.
For ever on resounding, and knowing nought of time,
our laws but catch the music of its eternal chime.
    -- William Channing Gannett

“Please call me by my true names,” Thich Nhat Han writes.  “Names,” he writes, not “name.”  He believes it is important for the Divine to be known by many names.  So does Old Turtle from our children’s story.  When each being began using each other’s name for the Divine, for God, then the people changed.  “After a long, lonesome and scary time, the people listened, and began to hear…And to see God in one another and in the beauty of the earth.”

The study of world religions is more than just a pleasant diversion.  It is an essential part of the Unitarian Universalist commitment to being multilingual in our understanding of the sacred.  For to know the Divine by many names, through the eyes of a wide variety of people, is to acknowledge the presence of Spirit in each of us, to witness the individual strings that create the blessed symphony of Life.

Amen.
 

Bibliography
Huston Smith, The World’s Religions.
Douglas Wood, Old Turtle.
Thich Nhat Han, “Call Me By My True Names.”
Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion.
Herman Wouk, This is My God.  (An introduction to Judaism)
 

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