Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

OK, what do I mean by my sermon title: “Where Spirituality and Religion Meet”? Maybe the following story will illustrate part of the problem:

One day Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance and evil, was traveling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara’s attendants asked what that was and Mara replied, “A piece of truth.” “Doesn’t this bother you when someone finds a piece of the truth, O evil one?” his attendants asked. “No,” Mara replied. “Right after this they usually organize and make a (religious) belief out of it.”

Isn’t that the truth! I am often told by people I meet that they are not religious but that they are spiritual because they do not like organized religions. Yet, many are attracted to spirituality even if they are not sure what spirituality means. Some are certain from past experiences that they do not want to become part of a religion. They may have been turned off by religious experiences that were controlling and rigidly doctrinaire or maybe religion seemed focused on concerns that did not seem to relate to their real life issues.

Today, I hear people sincerely asking:

What does religion have to do with my life?
Haven’t we outgrown our need for religion?
Why doesn’t religion deal with issues and concerns of vital importance in today’s world?

Sure, they say, maybe there is a need for spirituality, but what need do we have for organized religion? Many fear that religion is like the person in the story I started with who looking for meaning in life or performing a spiritual discipline like walking meditation. He discovers a piece of truth right there before him and he lights up with wonder. If you are totally convinced that you have found an important truth, what keeps you from taking that piece of truth and organizing your life around it like a religious institution?

I think it is possible to be spiritual and not religious. Maybe like the person who came out of church one day.

The preacher was standing at the door (as we preachers always seem to do) to shake hands with those leaving the service. This preacher grabbed the man by the hand and pulled him aside. The Preacher said to him, “You need to join the Army of the Lord!” The man replied, “I’m already in the Army of the Lord, Preacher.” The Preacher, not quite accepting his answer asked, “How come I don’t see you except at Christmas and Easter?” The questioned man whispered back, “I’m in the secret service.”

Many who don’t regularly visit religious institutions feel that they are spiritual. They may feel as Kahlil Gibran, the Maronite Christian, from northern Lebanon wrote, “…a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the(ir) soul, even while the(ir) hands hew the stone or tend the loom.” Gibran, however, merged what we often refer to as our spirituality, our ethics, our work, our daily life and the entire natural world into religion. This is also the way I see religion.

But, saying I am religious can mean any number of things! We may say that we are religious about brushing our teeth. That simply means that we do it regularly, after every meal. Or we may mean by being religious that we are a member of a religion, meaning that we are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Unitarian Universalist or a member of some other religion. We might say we are religious to indicate that we regularly attend the specific religious services of a given religious congregation, like UUCWC.

Even as it is possible to be spiritual but not religious, it is equally possible to be religious and not spiritual. One can be and many people are part of a religion such as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, UUism or some other organized or disorganized religion but not feel at all spiritual. You may like the form or the ritual of a given religion but not necessarily be or want to be spiritually moved. I had a member of another UU congregation that I served complain to me that he wanted to come to church to hear an interesting intellectual sermon but did not like the fact that I often left him with a challenge or something to think about when he returned home. And he certainly did not want to be spiritually or emotionally moved. A person can identify with the ethnic or cultural tradition of a given religion or the ethical standards of a religious tradition, BUT you they don’t want to feel as Gibran wrote “… a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul.”

We have had people resign from our congregation because they thought we were too spiritually oriented and others resign because they thought we were not spiritually enough. People take their religion and their spirituality very seriously, even when they do not see them as part of the same experience. You can definitely be religious and not spiritual or spiritual and not religious.

My friend and UU colleague, Peter Richardson, has written several books about spirituality. Recently he wrote, “As I often mention, I believe that congregational life is one of the most exquisitely difficult of all spiritual disciplines.” It is true, living a regular religious life within the context of a specific congregation; say here at UUCWC, can be one of the most difficult of all spiritual disciplines.

Sure we think the discipline of sitting meditation, yoga, tai chi, or various forms of prayer are important and challenging spiritual disciplines. They do take concentrated and regular discipline to master. So does living an active ongoing congregational life. How often do you put your participation in the life of your congregation on the same level of importance as practicing a spiritual discipline? Living an active ongoing congregational life is difficult and we ought to give it as much energy and focus as we would to master tai chi or yoga.

There is a story about a group of Buddhist monks. They were meditating in their monastery. They knew that to do this properly required spiritual discipline. They were meditating for some time when all of a sudden the prayer flag on the roof started flapping loudly. The youngest monk came out of his meditation and said: “Flag is flapping.” A more experienced monk said: “Wind is flapping.” A third monk who had been there for more than 20 years said: “Mind is flapping.” The fourth monk who was the eldest and was visibly annoyed when he said: “Mouths are flapping.”

What do we do with the popular assumption that there is a clear distinction between religion and spirituality? Most people see them as two different ways of relating to the sacred. To most, religion categorizes a social, more public and organized way that we connect with the sacred. On the other hand, most people identify spirituality with the more private, personally and often emotional way of connecting with the sacred. It seems more accurate to understand the religious and the spiritual simply as two aspects of doing the same thing, relating to the sacred, not two completely different ways of relating.

For me, Gibran describes a unity between the religious and the spiritual that cannot be divided into two different things: “Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations? And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his songbird in a cage. The freest song comes not through bars and wires. And he to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are open from dawn to dawn. Your daily life is your temple and your religion.”

Still, I am sympathetic to those who are tempted to understand spirituality and religion separately. The word origins are fascinating. The Hebrew word ruach is translated as spirit, breath, air or wind. In the Greek New Testament the word pneuma again is translated as spirit, breath and wind. In Hebrew, a person’s ruach is not understood as just a spiritual entity but is understood as that person’s character. The root of the word “religious” comes from the Greek ligare meaning “to bind,” think of the word ligament or obligation. Religion is often defined as that which binds us back or binds us again to the Ground of Being or God or we might say to the Interdependent Web of All Existence.

There has always been a natural tension between those who are influenced by the wind or the divine breath and those who are more focused on being bound together with the divine and the community with all its institutional form, practices and beliefs that have been passed down as within the community and its tradition. Spiritual people talk about that which is not seen, but is sensed or felt like the wind passing through the air. Spiritual people often don’t want to be tied down by tradition or held back by rules and rituals in order to be in touch with the mysterious divine.

Whereas religious people focus on the importance of a community with its traditions and rituals that have passed down from the past. They connect with the essence of the holy that has slowly been developed over centuries. Religious people highlight the importance of obligation and duties shared by a community that looks to the past for inspiration and strives to remain strong for future generations.

We have had the very same tensions within our UU movement. The Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned his parish ministry and became an independent speaker on things spiritual. William Ellery Channing was reluctant to found a new religious institution called Unitarianism. But, eventually he realized the essential need to offer his leadership to help organize Unitarianism in America. Then after the Civil War, Henry Bellows who served the First Unitarian Church in NY (later called All Souls) is credited for helping solidify Unitarianism as a solid and growing religious association. He did so to help liberate the more ephemeral spiritual qualities of human beings.

Like the old Jewish man who spent all his spare time going to the edge of the village and planting fig trees. People would ask him, “Why are you planting fig trees? You are going to die before you can eat any of the fruit that they produce.” But he said, “I have spent so many happy hours sitting under fig trees and eating their fruit. Those trees were planted by others. Why shouldn’t I make sure that others will know the enjoyment that I have had?” (Told by Megan McKenna in Parables)

So it is, you discover or experience a piece of truth, a bit of spiritual inspiration, a vision of what is good and holy. Then, you share it with others who may or may not find it has meaning for them as well. Eventually, you attract more people and not only build a physical structure around that piece of truth, but add rituals, traditions, creeds and even hierarchies, all to protect a defining vision that gave meaning and purpose to life. Eventually, however, that which has been built up around the piece of truth could calcify around the vision and severely limit and distort the original vision.

Our challenge is to remain spiritual and religious. Our challenge is to religiously sustain the piece of truth that we have seen without restraining it to death. That is one of the reasons why UUism has self-consciously worked to remain a spirited movement rather than a static denomination. On the one hand we need the community of faith to help prevent us from climbing far out on a spiritual limb or an ego inflated dream and be as free as a bird without securing the important piece of truth to others in case we come crashing down. At the very same time we also strive to retain the freedom of the pulpit and the pew by denying the need for a creed or any rigid set of doctrines.

It is deceptive to pile all that seems restrictive, rigid and negative on religion while picturing spirituality as purely positive. It is a fact that religion and spirituality meet where people exist. Spirituality may be more personal and private. Religion tends to be more public and organized. But the lines are not that clearly drawn. I challenge you as I challenge myself, to be open and honest about our religion and our personal spirituality when we compare and/or contrast it with that of others. Remember, religiousness and spirituality are on the same continuum.

Our human tendency is to form or join a religion to help us search for and find meaning and purpose in our life. That tends to be a very personal goal. Being bound to the others in the past, present and future, makes religion communal. It is not something we do alone. Unitarian Universalists have built this tension right into the fiber of our movement. Ironically, we are part of an institution of anti-institutionalists. There is built right into our religious communities an anti-institutional bias. We have demanded that our rules, rituals, beliefs and traditions be like windows that are left open from dawn to dawn.

Congregational life in the context of Unitarian Universalism is one of the most exquisitely difficult of all spiritual disciplines to practice. We want a religion totally open to the universe. One of my all time spiritual heroes, the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote: “Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere; its temple, all space; its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living,”

And, let ours also be a religion as universally inclusive as another of my all time spiritual heroes, Universalist minister John Murray admonished us: “Go out into the highways and by-ways. Give the people something of your new vision. You may posses a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not hell, but hope and courage. Preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”

I challenge you to join me in practicing this spiritual discipline religiously.

August 24, 2008