A group from the local Hindu temple recently contacted me about jointly celebrating the 150th birthday of Vivekananada, the Hindu priest who took the World Parliament of Religions by storm back in 1893 and introduced Vedanta Hinduism to the Western Hemisphere. Vivekananda spoke at the congregation where I serve as senior minister, the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, not once but twice on his initial US visit.

I enthusiastically accepted the invitation. I was pleased that First Unitarian Society had been thinking so far outside the box back in 1893 and wanted to continue that tradition.

This would not be a lecture. This would be a joint worship service—or, as we call it in my staunchly humanist congregation—Sunday Assembly. I point this out to highlight the fact that our Sunday Assembly does not tend to begin with “prayers to the guru” in the order of service.

The four tenants of Vedanta Hinduism run like this:

Definition of the Eternal Truth:  Consciousness is Brahman.

Statement of Advice: That Thou Art.

Statement of Direct Experience: This Atman is Brahman.

Roar of Realization: I am Brahman!

Yes, this needs some translation. “Brahman” is the ultimate divinity in Hindu thought—all that is. “Atman” is the singular self. The ego, as Freud would say. How might such a view fit into any sort of humanist translation?

Here’s my shot at it:

Definition of the Eternal Truth: Consciousness is the ultimate.

Statement of Advice: That’s you.

Statement of Direct Experience: Your consciousness is identical with all consciousness.

Roar of Realization: The ultimate (“god” or perhaps Heidegger’s dasein, “the being (that is) there”) is all consciousness.

How far off the beam is this? Not so far, I think. Remember that “Hinduism” is what the British called the various practices of the natives of the Indian subcontinent. Indians had never considered themselves Hindu or codified a “Hinduism.” The broad brush of colonialism painted everyone in the subcontinent. “Hinduism” was, and still is, a congeries of very localized practices that are “religious” only in a Western sense. They are, actually, ways of life. Vivekananda’s gift was to take the essence of Hindu practice—developed by his master, Ramakrisna—and present a cogent philosophy that moved Indians toward an understanding of nationalism that led eventually to the overthrow of their colonial rulers. (Vivekananda is celebrated by not one but two national holidays in India.) Then, Vivekananda took the show on the road, as it were, bringing Vedanta to a world that had hitherto-fore viewed Hinduism as barbaric.

We do well to remember that “Hinduism” contains the Carvakas, from the Sixth Century BCE, the first recorded instance of a truly atheist philosophy. Explicitly atheist?  Yep. A skepticism based in a deconstruction of logic. Remember, it took the Western World another 2000 years and more to produce such ideas.

(And, need I mention, that that level of skepticism is still rare in the world?)

But back to Vivekananda, who once said, “He is an atheist who does not believe in himself.” At first glance, that sounds like the rankest new-ageism. But look back at those four points of Vedanta. If the self is Brahman . . .

Sounds a bit like American Transcendentalism, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that. British philologist (and one of the colonizers) William Jones, better known as “Oriental Jones,” made Hindu thought available to early-Nineteenth Century Americans of a particular intellectual persuasion. People such as the Unitarians inclined toward Transcendentalism—including the Peabody sisters, Thoreau, and Emerson.

Vedanta’s third point is direct experience. The Transcendentalist knew what that meant. They put themselves in the way of lived experience. They lived for those moments.

What Oriental Jones, the colonialists, or even the Transcendentalists, did not know is that “Hinduism” was way ahead of Western thinking. Hindu thinkers had already realized that “religious” breaks down into very different sorts of human activity—what we might nowadays characterize as character or personality types or “intelligences.” This has been categorized in Hindu tradition as the four yogas: devotion, service, meditation, knowledge.

This about covers the waterfront, doesn’t it? For some, devotion to “the holy” is the center of meaning and of religious practice. For others, service to others—what we nowadays call social justice—is the center of meaning. For others, meditative practices calm the mind and center the self. For others, it’s study, study, study and the next theory or book. And some—some practice a combination of these or all four.

Westerners are too often “my way or the highway” sorts of folks. The insistence of belief and belief only as key to Christianity has confused Westerners for some time.

Today? Reflect on the fact that the world’s most populous democracy is not England. Or the United States. It is India. And the children of Vivekananda? They’re fine, thank you. Still multifarious, and now free, despite the broad brushes of colonialism.

And, maybe, just maybe, leading the way into a future few of us yet comprehend. I’m looking forward to celebrating Vivekananda in my congregation. When he came that first time, in 1893, he was a lone voice crying in a Europeanized wilderness. Now . . . Hindus are our neighbors and we are theirs.

And this business about consciousness being the ultimate truth?

It bears some thinking about!

 

I was sitting in a small desk, and Mrs. Graham was at the front of Room 3 in Overbrook School in Charleston, West Virginia, the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Randall Hainey’s mom came running in the side door with a transistor radio to tell us.

Handing out lined paper, Mrs. Graham said solemnly, “You will remember this day always. Write down exactly what happened, because you’ll want to tell your grandchildren about it. You are part of history.”

I remember sitting there in disbelief. Someone could shoot the President? I was part of history? Mrs. Hainey and her transistor radio would matter to my grandchildren? I might have grandchildren? Mrs. Graham believed in us, not just as children, but as life itself, as part of the living movement of history. (She remains my favorite teacher ever, all these years later.)

For me, just two days into my eighth year on the planet, it was all a jumble. I could see that my parents, the only Kennedy supporters in our Republican neighborhood, were unraveled.

JFK was the last president who I saw simply and completely through the loving eyes of a kid, a President with kids of his own about the ages of me and my younger brother, whose wife wore clothes that my own mother admired. I’m too young to have had the kind of adoration that my older siblings did—adoration fused in knowledge of any issues or policies that Kennedy might have supported or opposed. I knew The President as The Most Important Man in the World, whose very existence was in some way undifferentiated in my mind from that of Superman or Julius Caesar or Santa Claus.

In the hours and days following his assassination, I remember watching my mother, sitting quietly on the floor, playing with my dolls but riveted by her emotion, while she ironed and watched our black and white TV incessantly. I remember her telling the story, over and over, as if trying to believe it herself, the story of seeing Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on live TV.

My mother, a West Virginia activist, had been quite involved in the JFK campaign. Hubert Humphrey’s  brother  had been slated to speak at our small Unitarian fellowship in early 1960. He was sick, his brother Hubert was in town, so Hubert covered for him. My mother then leveraged this to call the Kennedy campaign and say, “Humphrey came, so you should, too.” Readers who follow history will recall that West Virginia was critical in this election. So, lo and behold, Kennedy came, and my mother was central in his coming—though he spoke in a much larger venue than our tiny congregational building. (I’m too young to remember any of this. My mother told it to me years later, and my older brother got to shake his hand!)

What’s the point of this blog? I guess, as we spend the week inundated with stories of what happened and what might have been, stories of JFK as larger than life as either Sinner or Saint, what is most interesting to me is the small stories. The stories of how his life and his death woke up people of all ages to our own place in history. If there is anything I want to learn at this fiftieth anniversary, it’s not more details about Jackie’s blood spattered dress. It’s about how ordinary people can claim our lives and our power as being the stuff of life itself. It’s all the tiny ways in which a stunned nation moved forward together, grieved and recovered and made sense of the insensible, whether at elementary school desks, in corridors of power, or over ironing boards. Those lessons—of stepping up, living through, making sense and caring for one another, matter every day.

Mrs. Graham’s words, “You are part of history,” woke me up. They rang like a bell. They were heard by some tiny, incredulous part of me that said, Really? I am a part of all this? I will exist beyond recesses and piano recitals, I will remember this as I create my own adult life? And so it has been. From teachers such as Mrs. Graham, and my mother, and yes, from watching a dignified widow and her children standing in a strange cemetery, I came to understand myself as having a role to play, a role that could matter. Whether we were born in 1963 or not, may this anniversary wake us up to that fact.

It may be that every elementary school, across the whole South, has at least one self-appointed Playground Atheist. You know the type: when all the other kids are showing off their new “WWJD” bracelets and mooning about how cool the youth pastor is, there’s a sharp-eyed fellow, standing there by the slide, not believing any of it for a second. When the typical debates come up—for instance, do dogs go to heaven—it’s the Playground Atheist who explodes the whole conversation. “Heaven!” he’ll say. “Heaven?! What are you, a moron?” Yes, it’s this kind of gentle, persuasive approach that has endeared Playground Atheists to junior Christians through the Southland for time immemorial. And, at Bearden Elementary School, as the Reagan years came into full bloom, the Playground Atheist just happened to be me.

From time to time, the Tennessee State Legislature will cook up a wild idea. So it happened, when I was in fourth grade, that a reporter from the local NBC affiliate came to visit, with a camera-man in tow. The legislators in Nashville were considering whether to mandate prayer in school, and this reporter was on a mission to find out what the fourth-graders thought. To start off, she had us all bow our heads, our hands folded on our desks. Then, she opened it up for discussion. Well, what did we think? To absolutely no one’s surprise, it was Matthew who spoke first. Everyone in the zip code knew Matthew loved Jesus. Just adored him. Brought him up all the time. So, his eyes shining, Matthew accepted the chance to lay out his convictions. All around the room, heads were nodding. The reporter gave thanks, then asked if there were others. A girl in the back chimed in, to reinforce Matthew’s point: this was a world that stood ever in need of more prayer. Reporters are trained to fish for intrigue, for friction. So, as hands waved in the air, she wondered if anyone had a different opinion. The hands dropped. There was silence. A friend is someone who knows just what lapses in judgment you are prone to make, and will leap in to stop you. My lapses tend to be about talking at times when I shouldn’t. I recall the face of my good friend Jeff in those slow-motion seconds staring at me intently from across the room, shaking his head, and mouthing the word, “Don’t.” But there it was. I had raised my hand. The microphone dangled close. The camera drew near. The room emptied of air.

Later, I recalled having made mention of things I happened to know about the Constitution. I still believe it is possible I uttered the phrase, “church and state.” But none of these high-minded words and ideals appeared on the local news that evening at 6:00 and 11:00, and again on the early-morning show. No, instead, what the good people of East Tennessee saw was a chubby boy with thick glasses, announcing to the whole world that God didn’t exist.

As soon as the reporter departed, the whisper of scandal began threading its way through the entire fourth grade. And then the whole school. By the next morning, certain classmates were able to tell me just what their parents thought about a boy who’d say something like that on TV. My parents, I gather, also took in some feedback. What I had was not fame. It was outright infamy. Before, my atheism had been an occasional source of wonder, the kind of pride you take when a neighbor happens to own an exotic bird of bright plumage, to have some proximity to something so odd. The Christians even seemed to enjoy my earnest challenges, seeing it perhaps as a kind of a trial. But this time, it seemed, the Playground Atheist had taken it too far. To say something hateful about Jesus at recess was one thing. To broadcast it so everyone could hear it? Unacceptable.

The week ratcheted on, in the slow agony of exile. But then, Thursday afternoon, two hand-written letters arrived. Both from the Unitarian Universalist church. One was from my Sunday School teacher. The other, from the Minister of Religious Education. Without even opening the envelopes, I knew what to expect. And sure enough, there it was: they were proud. Not of my atheism, per se. But of the character they said they saw in what I’d done. Like ancient prophets our Sunday School class was studying that year, said one, I had stood my ground, and had said what I thought. The next day, the purgatory of exclusion continued. But somehow, I didn’t mind it as much—a cold shoulder was nothing beside what Jonah or Amos had faced. And by Monday, it seemed, all was back to normal.

In all the years since, my theology has evolved. I have taken communion, stopped in awe before mountains. I have prayed till tears come, and sat in meditation for long hours in a dark Buddhist Zendo. But, truth be told, it was as an atheist that I first came to see, in a way that was real and has not failed me since, how I am part of a love wider than my own life, and how that spacious embrace makes itself known to me, most often, through a community like the one that first told me, “You are not alone.”

“We think that honesty and living in truth are better ways to live than propaganda and denial and comforting stories.” –Tom Schade, “Religious Community is Not Enough: Unitarian Universalism’s purpose is much bigger than gathering with like-minded people for mutual support,” UU World Winter 2013.

Earlier this year the Board members of the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal voted unanimously to attend an Undoing Racism training offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. While most of the members of the Board consider themselves anti-racist, we are stretching into what it would take to intentionally shape the Center to be an anti-racist institution. A primarily interpersonal understanding of racism limits our collective ability to address institutional, internalized, and ideological racism. With support from the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, the entire Board registered for the November Regional Training in New Orleans.

Beloveds, it is not enough to send off one or two of a congregation’s more social justice-y members to a training and consider the work of anti-racism done. It isn’t even enough to go through a congregation-wide training – once. This system of inequity, so deeply in the bones of our country’s constitution that you can take white people out of leadership and have the system continue to provide a preferential option for whites, requires a diligent commitment to undo.

One white member of the Center’s Board was attending this training for the “umpteenth time” since beginning to attend in the 1980’s and was clear that she would keep coming back. What has been done to us as a nation is a powerful, hypnotic thing. It lets me think, as a white woman, “I worked hard for what I have” and not even begin to reflect on how hard my neighbors of color have worked to have not even half as much.

It is hard to express my gratitude to the members of the Center’s Board for showing up for the training, day after day, for an exercise in living in truth, unpacking and confronting propaganda and denial. And doing it together. While I have attended multiple-trainings as an individual, this is the first one I have attended as an intentional member of a collective – and I experienced this training profoundly differently than the ones before. Instead of getting stuck on my own abilities (and lack thereof), I was able to think about the resources and structures of the organization I was a part of – and this has sent me back into the world with energy and hope.

The strongly individualistic (white) values of this nation will not serve us in the task of undoing the structures of oppression. Dismantling systems of oppression is collective work, friends. Find your collective. It is not enough to be a lone crusader in the work of undoing racism. This position only enforces the structure of isolation, designed to prevent collective organizing. If this is your position, look around. You are not alone. All of our lives are diminished by the structures of racism.

Organize, beloveds. The work will not be done perfectly, but together, we can begin to heal that which is profoundly broken.

You’re wanting to know about the crucified squirrel. But first, here’s what happened to my Christmas lights.

I lived in Iowa City, in a second-floor walk-up over Iowa Ave. Without any warning, November was here. Late fall in the Midwest is like if the planet Venus ends up shoved to the back of the fridge with the celery and other things nobody wants until it gets soft and bruised, and then what do you do? You don’t want it. You can’t throw it away. The interminable winter had not yet arrived, but already people walked the streets with a look of surrender. The sun would sort of give up and sink around noon. Then, for hours, it would rain flecks of ice. I decided to take things into my own hands.

At a store in the mall, Christmas lights were on sale. I filled a basket. Brought home packing tape. Crawled through my window, out onto the roof of the porch. Did up the front of the house, at least the second and third floor. It took over an hour. By the end, everything was a-twinkle, you might say, if you happened to talk like a magical elf. Zig-zags. Curlicues. A milky radiance out into the gloom. At long last, the place seemed like somewhere a person could live.

What I had done was not only for me. It’s not like I should have received a peace prize. But when it came down to being a neighbor, there was the sense of having done what I could.

Then, one day, I come home. The Christmas lights are inside, ripped from the socket, tangled up on the floor. On the tangle, a note. Magic marker. Capital letters. Signed by a person I never had met. The husband of the woman I thought was my landlord. He seemed overcome by rhetorical questions. Hadn’t I realized the risk I had been taking? To go out on the roof? What about the liability? If Christmas lights were so important, why hadn’t I asked?

Look, I get all of this now. I pay on a mortgage. I’ve seen my children bleed. But, at the time, I was what? Twenty-four? All I knew was someone came into my home, and destroyed all I had in my life that would shine.

I checked out the roof. Then, came back, and turned over that same piece of paper. Scribbled out a rebuttal. While I’ve never been up on the law of the land, I was pretty sure a landlord should not just barge in. There should have been a phone call. Arrangements. He should have asked my permission. Who did he think he was, was the gist of my letter. I stuffed it in an envelope, and trudged over to the house, left it in their mailbox.

The next afternoon, I came home to a new note, slid under my door. Same handwriting. But it came out all different. He said he could see my point. He hoped I’d forgive him. I had to, he said, of all things, understand. He had worried. He’d let the worry turn into anger. He wanted me to know that his wife made excellent pumpkin pie. Wouldn’t I come over to enjoy some with them? Pie! The nerve. It was beyond comprehension.

So, the crucified squirrel. In October, walking home, I noticed a squirrel on the side of the road. Killed, almost flattened. Then, in the next block, another. I would not own a car until many years later, so, in those days, doing anything at all always sent me out walking. Which was how I saw these little casualties, splayed out horrifically, in plain view. Carnage, all over town. But try to mention it, and people would shrug, unimpressed, as if I were reciting the order of months: October, November, dead squirrels on the road. I wanted to be heard. To be known. Admired as a prophet. But people seemed to think I was just someone talking.

That’s when I decided on the crucifixion. A squirrel on a cross would make an impression. I’d bring it downtown, or to some public place. As a statement. An indictment of modern society. Or something like that. I wish I could tell you this was somebody else.

Collecting a squirrel took a shopping bag and a shovel. Back in my apartment, the smell of rot sent my project quickly out to the roof. With rubber kitchen gloves, I completed the task. Nailing two sticks together, and then securing the tiny paws to the sticks. I’d intended it all as a message for others. I saw myself squarely on the side of the squirrel, and, for that matter, of all the small creatures who live near the road. Putting forth the perspective of God. But try to crucify something and keep yourself clean. You can’t. Drive a nail through flesh, and you get implicated. I left the squirrel there on the roof, where the rain kept on falling.

Remember the tangle of lights? And the note along with it? Seeing them, what came first was not anger. What came first was shame. The squirrel. The landlord had seen it! He must have. How to ever explain? But, scrambling out through the window and onto the roof, there was nothing. No squirrel. No cross. Only roof. Only rain. It meant the freedom to write the angry letter I wanted.

All that fall, it seemed like God had been folded, and stored until spring in a box up in somebody’s attic. To pray was to stand in another house, in the cellar, asking no one in particular where that box could have gone.

But what happened in that mess was a matter of grace. Not the squirrel being gone when the landlord arrived. A neighbor might have removed it. Or maybe some weather blew it down to the ground. The squirrel’s absence was only dumb luck.

Grace is more than dumb luck. It’s careless anger getting met by an invitation to sit down with pie. Despite what I’d done, and the words I had said, without even seeking it, I was forgiven. But a gift takes receiving. And this one I hadn’t yet learned to accept. It was asking too much. And so winter set in. The universe kept up its ponderous churn. And from wherever God had been hiding came a soft, tender sigh. The sound of one who’s been waiting.