A growing number of people in the United States define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Study after demographic study shows that this segment of our population is rising steadily, as people growing up in a pluralistic society reject the rigid dogma that they associate with “religion.” Maybe you’re someone who has claimed this title for yourself.
I’d like to make a case for religion.
To be clear, I, too, reject rigid dogma. I reject narrow-minded thinking that groups together only people who believe very specific things into one “religion.” What I embrace, however, is the notion that spirituality practiced alone is missing something. It is missing the relationships that are necessary for human growth and development. The relationships found in religious community.
Too often, I talk to people who substitute a solitary spiritual practice for religious community. Sometimes, those people think they’re practicing a religion. I ache to let them know what they’re missing.
Meditation on a cushion in the corner is a fine thing to do, but it’s not Buddhism. Prayer—whether you pray by kneeling at your bedside or walking through the woods—is a wonderful way to center yourself on the spirit of life coursing through you, but by itself, it’s not Judaism, Islam or Christianity. All of these religions require something more: the relationships built in communal practice, the accountability of having others who are practicing their spirituality with you, the opportunity to learn and grow based on the experiences and thoughts of another.
Religion requires community. And this is a good thing. The word itself comes, it is widely thought, from Latin roots meaning “to bind together again.” Religion requires being bound to something beyond yourself—it requires relationships.
And human beings are meant to be in relationship with one another. We are not meant to be solitary creatures—we have evolved to need to be part of a group. Again—a good thing.
And religion requires only the binding together of people into a group based upon spirituality.
You wouldn’t know this from the ways in which the word “religion” is used in our society. All too often, “religion” is defined as the way in which one believes in a supernatural God. This is not what religion is.
My colleague the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed writes that “the central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.” It’s not about teaching one right way of looking at the world. It’s not about a specific theology. It’s about understanding our intimate and unbreakable connection to everything else in existence.
Religion is about connection. It is about community. It is about accountability. Religion is about having people to share your spiritual experiences with.
Religion is not necessarily about dogma. My chosen faith, Unitarian Universalism, is a creedless religion. We believe it’s more important for people to be in community with one another than to agree—even about the big things like God or death or salvation.
We learn from one another. We challenge one another. We support one another. Sometimes, we even irritate one another, and our response to that irritation teaches us how to live in the world with people we don’t necessarily like.
But we wouldn’t have any of these things—the good, the bad, the uplifting, the challenging—if we chose the path of individual spirituality.
First, let me introduce myself, as this is my first post at Quest for Meaning. I am Rev. Dr. Matt Tittle, minister of Central Unitarian Church in Paramus, NJ. I have been blogging since 2006, most prominently at the Houston Chronicle from 2006-2010. I am delighted to begin blogging here, where I will post every other Monday. You can read a more complete bio at the “bloggers” link above.
When I was kid growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, there was an old man who we called the “peanut man” at the downtown market. Everyday, he would push a wooden cart around selling boiled peanuts. I love boiled peanuts! The peanut man would constantly sing a little jingle. You could hear him coming like an ice cream truck. He would sing, “Peanuts. Get your peanuts here. Boiled peanuts. I can’t eat all these peanuts by myself.” We always bought a bag or two of boiled peanuts whether we needed them or not.
The peanut man was an evangelist. You couldn’t go to the Charleston Market without knowing about boiled peanuts, because he was always sharing his good news. Some people tried the peanuts and didn’t like them, and that was ok. Maybe they preferred roasted, or a different kind of nut altogether: macadamias, walnuts, almonds and pecans, or the ever-elusive and always hard-to-crack filbert. I love boiled peanuts, but I never tried them until I bought some from the peanut man because I didn’t know about them. I try to be like the peanut man in my own evangelism, never pushy, but always present.
In the Bible, there is a similar story of evangelism. After the Exodus from Egypt, Moses and the Israelites set out into the Sinai wilderness where they wandered for forty years, eventually crossing the Jordan River near the plains of Moab, east of the Dead Sea, before going on to their conquest of Canaan. During their wanderings, the people, some 600,000 of them, did a lot of complaining. They were hungry and wanted more meat, they longed for the fish and abundant produce they left behind in Egypt, even though they had been slaves there. Sometimes God would just punish them for their complaining, and sometimes Moses would intercede on their behalf.
One night, early in the journey, sometime probably during their third year, the people were complaining and Moses was having a really bad day. After walking around the camps listening to the crying families inside their tents, he spoke to God and said,
Why have I not found favor in your sight that, that you lay the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me “carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries a sucking child,” to the land that you promised on the oath of their ancestors? Where am I to get meat to give all these people? For they come weeping to me and say, “Give us meat to eat!” I am not able to carry all these people by myself, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once – if I have found favor in your sight – and do not let me see my misery.”
Of course, God knew that Moses couldn’t eat all those peanuts by himself—that he couldn’t minister to 600,000 people on his own, so he told Moses to find seventy others. God put the spirit into them—ordained them if you will—to let them share the burden of the 600,000 with Moses. Hey, that’s less than 8,572 people per prophet, there are many larger congregations.
But, as is often the case, not all of these new preachers followed the rules. Two of the newly ordained prophets, Eldad and Medad, stayed in the camp among the people, and preached there instead of in the tent where prophesying was supposed to take place. When some complained to Moses that there were people preaching in the camp, Moses replied: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them.”
All the Lord’s people as prophets is a message that has continued throughout the ages. In the 16th century, Martin Luther promoted the idea of the priesthood of all believers when he taught that everyone has access to the divine, not just the priests. In the 20th century, Unitarian minister James Luther Adams framed this idea again in terms of prophesy when he promoted the prophethood of all believers. Each one of us is a prophet. Each of you is a prophetic voice in the wilderness with something to say about your faith. Share it. Use your voice. Don’t squander it out of fear or uncertainty.
“Peanuts. Boiled peanuts. Get your peanuts here. I can’t eat all these peanuts by myself.”
I have to be mindful of the baskets of flowers that hang below the eaves. Even though it has rained for four days, the eaves have sheltered the flowers from the rain. This means that though the road is washed out and water sits upon the ground with no where to go, even though the dock is below the lake’s surface and the warbler flycatchers have to hunt not in the air but up and down the hemlocks seeking mosquitoes for their chicks, even though I am living in a surfeit of good cold rain, the flowers might die from thirst.
Spiritually, this is also true. How many spiritual leaders and regular religious adherents have I met who are going through a tough spiritual drought while all around them is running lush and wet? When we’re in those spiritually dry times, everyone we meet and the world around us can seem tremendously fresh and full and juicy, making our own thirst worse, somehow crueler.
Watering these hanging baskets by hand, refreshing the water in the dog’s bowl, I stop to pour myself a glass of cold water, knowing that I can ignore my own thirst for a very long time. I’m busy attending the thirst of plants that cannot draw up their own water, or the thirst of a dog who remains puzzled as to why there are no paws-alone working taps in the house, or to the spiritual thirst of a seeker, a stranger, or a friend. That needs doing. I also need to drink a glass of water, too, stopping to refresh my body and stopping to refresh my soul.
I’ve been quieter than usual lately, largely due to the acuity of an illness I live with – and expect to live with for the rest of my life. I’ve been learning my new limitations, adapting to what has emerged as patterns. Adaptation is just what human beings do, and I believe spirituality is our biggest adaptive response. The Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church taught: “religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” That may be so. I have found that spirituality is my response to the challenges of living. We innovate, we renovate, we create, and these are all forms of adaptation to change, to opportunity, to energy, to possibility. This season of my life has been a wet one, rich with opportunities to grow spiritually, full of change, most of which are not ones I would choose, welcome, or wish for someone else.
Yet, despite all these rainy blessings, I grew thirsty, inattentive to my spirit, my attention absorbed by other changes, by the needs of others, by loss and by the physical difficulty of each day. If one lets a basket of flowers dry out completely, a flood of water will wash off the top of the dry soil. One has to rehydrate the basket slowly, with sips, with gentle attention until the soil is full and spongy again. The same is true with our spirits. When we have gone through a drought or neglected to tend our spirits, we have to return with small, regular sips of life-giving blessings. As we do, our senses come back into balance, and we are more able to serve, more able to struggle well with what is needful, more able to laugh generously and to forgive, more able to fulfill our faithful promises and love this life sparkling in wonder and growing in hope.
Recently, I was on my way out the door at my local library. It was newsletter folding day, and several volunteers were out sick. I was asked to help out.
Now I pray regularly to be ready to help when asked. I had things to be done, but nothing urgent. Still, there was a moment of wrestling with the unplanned request. I stayed. I folded newsletters with my neighbors. I had a wonderful time and we all were able to go into a beautiful day sooner because of working together. It was a joy – and a moment of spiritual practice when I could transcend my expectations and plans for the day and answer the needs I met along the way. I was given the opportunity to live faithfully, to practice neighborliness and to be generous with what I had – time – letting go of my schedule that did not need to be so rigid.
I moved away from Minneapolis to live in Boston and DC from 1989-2004, and then moved back. One thing I love about being back where I spent my young adult years is when I run into people I knew from the 1980’s.
Recently, I ran into a woman who looked dimly familiar. When I heard someone else call her Jean, I realized why and I asked, “Are you … Jean X…?’ Yes, she answered.
I said, “I think you took over the end of my lease in my apartment in a fourplex on 16th Street, back in 1982. It was a sweet little tiny apartment.” Yep, she indicated, that was correct.
“How long did you stay?” I asked. She answered, as I expected, “Oh, a couple of years.” Then , to my shock, she went on, “After that I moved upstairs and I’ve been there ever since.” I must have looked surprised, because she said, “I know it’s a small apartment, but I never got into the job, house, car thing. I bike where I need to go, work enough odd jobs to pay the rent, and mostly spend my time outside.” She nodded to the beautifully cared for community garden, where we stood, and I could see that she spent a great deal of time there, indeed!
This conversation has gone through my head a dozen times since we had it. This woman was still living exactly the way that I, and everyone I knew, lived in 1982! Before we got into the kid thing, before we got into the graduate school thing, before we got into the job, house, car thing.
It made me think of that Sufi story about the old fool, Mullah Nasrudin. As is often the case, Nasrudin is talking to someone much more prominent, successful, well-dressed, and self-important.
The rich man looks at Nasrudin’s house, shakes his head, and says, “You know, Nasrudin, if you could just get a job like mine then you wouldn’t have to live in this small shack and live on rice and beans!”
And Nasrudin looks back at him and says, “If you could just enjoy rice and beans and a simple shack, you wouldn’t have to work at a job like yours!”
Running into Jean made me think about these past 30 years. Am I happy about the changes I’ve made? Has the house, job, car thing worked for me?
Jean’s health and joy was apparent. Unlike most people I know, I’ll bet she does not wake up stressed about how to accomplish the day’s list. Is she living more the way humans are supposed to live?
I don’t know, and I won’t have time to think about it very long, for today anyway. I’ve got a house to clean, errands to run, a job to do! But our conversation keeps reinserting itself as I rush about, and I find myself planning rice and beans for supper.
This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of what is known today as the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians. Its first minister, the Rev. Dr. Norbert Fabián Čapek, created a ritual that is celebrated by Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists all over the world, Flower Communion. Čapek described the ceremony in a 1923 letter to Samuel Atkins Eliot II, president of the American Unitarian Association:
We have made a new experiment in symbolizing our Liberty and Brotherhood in a service which was so powerful and impressive that I never experienced anything like it… On that very Sunday…everybody was supposed to bring with him a flower. In the middle of the big hall was a suitable table with a big vase where everybody put his flower…in my sermon I put emphasis on the individual character of each “member-flower,” on our liberty as a foundation of our fellowship. Then I emphasized our common cause, our belonging together as one spiritual community… And when they go home, each is to take one flower just as it comes without making any distinction where it came from and whom it represents, to confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who is a human and wants to be good.
The marvelous natural beauty of the flowers that are brought to these ceremonies is certainly inspiring, but it is of the utmost importance that we continue to learn the broader and deeper lesson this rite teaches. The idea that we should accept one another, with all our differences, and that we should even celebrate one another’s uniqueness, is a radical notion in any age, but in Europe in the 1920s it was downright dangerous; it became ever more so, of course, in the decades that followed, especially as Czechoslovakia found itself among the first nations to succumb to the opportunistic infection that was Nazism. The Nazis, of course, represent the polar opposite of Čapek’s ideals. Flower Communion is a defiant No! in the face of the brutal racism of Hitler and of the fascists’ craving to erect towering, horrific empires upon pediments of subjugation and terror, and it is a joyous Yes! to diversity, equality, and liberty.
As Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists all over the world celebrate Flower Communion, as so many of us to at this season of the year, we do well to consider what it is that we are saying No! to, and where our joyous Yes! is. Do we continue to defy the forces of intolerance that would seek to deny same-sex couples their civil right to marriage under the illusion of “defending” heterosexual marriages (like mine)? Do we stand together clutching bouquets of righteousness and justice in our hearts as we persevere in demanding compassion for immigrants, for laborers, and for the poor? Do we say Yes! to a future for our planet in which we will coexist with all life harmoniously?
Arrested by the Nazis for the “crime” of listening to foreign radio broadcasts, Čapek spent fourteen weeks at Dachau before being martyred in October of 1942 in the Nazi gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim. He is remembered around the world for how he died, but more so for what died for — and what he lived for.
In his poem “Keeping Quiet” Pablo Neruda begins with this:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
As I read it, I am thinking: The well is dry.
Have you had those times in your own life?
Those times when try as you might to find restoration within
there is nothing there
only parched, dry, places, yearning for a drop of something to
make it to the next moment.
It feels crusty doesn’t it?
The incessant rush of activity that pushes from behind
or pulls at us, tugging without ceasing.
“Without ceasing.”
Often, during our morning check-in, my spiritual companion
will set her intention for the day to “pray without ceasing”
borrowing from Annie Dillard.
I have often thought of that prayer as one with words,
whether they are spoken out loud or remain caught in my throat,
swirling in my mind, dancing in my heart…they were always words.
But. Dillard isn’t talking about words.
In fact, she says: “the silence is all there is”
she says “pray to the silence.”
And I think: move right into the silence. Parched and wanting respite from
a life of constant motion.
Recently, I read something that caught my attention:
“Cornelia is ninety-four years old. She is a beloved founding member
of the board of Bread for the Journey.
Every afternoon she rests – if she can, so busy is her daily
schedule of appointments – because when she rests things fall away,
she says, and come clearer.”
Every afternoon, in the midst of her busy daily schedule, she rests.
She pauses
She restores
She, in the silence, makes room for stresses to fall away.
For life to grow clearer.
That…working and resting every day is a recipe for
nourishing the soul…
Is a kind of praying without ceasing.
Using the hands and heart;
welcoming the stillness,
the silence.
Neruda, says it this way as he closes his poem:
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
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In a small but intriguing book called Religious Integrity for Everyone, my colleague Fred Campbell noted how “transcendence” implies “larger than.” He explained that “Communities are larger than individuals [and] God is a word used to point to some inclusive reality much larger [still].” With such a helpful frame, one can understand the meaningful arc of a life path, using whatever language resonates within.
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I want to start out with two stories.
The first—ancient—is about Abraham, the father of faith for Christians, Muslims and Jews. In biblical accounts it’s difficult to discern what Abraham actually believed. He doesn’t possess a certainty of faith. He is regularly confused and asks many questions, often without receiving very satisfying answers. But this patriarch of the three great western traditions did indeed possess at least one marvelous religious experience.
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When I was a child, I would stand and gaze at the starry firmament and contemplate infinity. As I stood there, the boundary that is time dissolved; I expanded my Spirit to fill the boundary that is space. My being stilled and all fear, anxiety, and anguish disappeared. Forgotten were the chores, the homework, the ordinary around me.
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