A Direction of the Heart
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenious. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling … it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.”
While I cannot agree wholeheartedly with this great existentialist poet about what religion is not, I share his sense that, whatever else it may be, religion is a direction of the heart. I mean this in a two-fold sense: any religion worth embracing will, in and of itself, contain an element of emotion which is both inspiring and satisfying. At the same time, any religion worth embracing will be sufficiently reasonable and encourage sufficient spiritual discipline so that it will serve to channel our feelings in positive ways—that is, it will offer direction to our emotions, tempering them when they are out of control and provoking them when they are sublimated in unnecessary or unhealthy ways.
Much of the history of liberal religion, in general—and Unitarian Universalism, in particular—has been devoted to crafting an approach to religion that is more rational, more reasonable, more intellectually coherent, and more congruent with empirical evidence than more traditional belief systems. I celebrate our cultivation of reasonable religion. But the life decisions we make—great or small—rarely lend themselves to purely rational processes. The value judgments we all make on a daily basis—about what we eat, who we love, what we enjoy, what work we undertake—may all lend themselves to attempts at rational explanation by social scientists but arriving at those personal judgments is anything but a purely rational exercise.
What separates the sanctuary from the laboratory, the church from the academy, the congregation from the learned society, is the richness of human feeling that goes into shaping and expressing the values we affirm and promote. And so we strive to find the balance between head and heart, to create a worldview that meets our deepest emotional needs without acquiescing to the ridiculous. A faith which represents a direction of the heart need not be grounded in simplistic sentimentalism or frivolous feeling – although sentiment and feeling will be found within it – perhaps even simplicity and a certain measure of frivolity, but it will esteem love and compassion, kindness and responsibility.
Waldemar Argow warned that, “Religion without emotion is a stunted, ineffectual thing. Religion that is all emotion is a childish and even dangerous force quite incapable of solving the problems we have to deal with. The ideal in religion is to establish the proper balance between mind and emotion, the thinking mind showing us the way we ought to go and the loving heart leading us to walk in that way.”
The New Face of Courage
Courage comes in many forms and it wears many faces. We often think of those who put themselves in harms’ way for the sake of others as being courageous. The firefighter who rushes into a burning building. The soldier who risks life and limb to save a buddy who’s been wounded. The mother who shields her baby from imminent danger.
This past week, I saw another face of courage. It was worn by a young woman who lives in Arizona, whose mother brought her across the border when she was an infant. All her life she lived in fear. In fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. In fear of the police who patrol her neighborhood. In fear that when she came home from school her mother would be gone, taken to a detention center to be deported.
This young woman, now in her twenties, has declared her freedom from fear and has become an advocate for the rights of undocumented people just like herself. She has attended and spoken out at immigrant rights’ rallies. She has “bucked the system” and achieved both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from Arizona State. She has started a “language exchange” in Phoenix, where undocumented youth from her community can come and teach Spanish, thereby earning a little cash to support themselves while they also learn to speak English from their students. (See the video here: Spanish for Social Justice ) She is, in all aspects of her life, proclaiming her heritage, her identity and her status in the face of frightening, brutal and repressive forces. And she’s doing it with joy and love. The face of courage that I encountered last week wears a big smile, and it is beautiful.
After hearing this woman’s story, I’m called to ask myself where courage comes from. Not the “run into a burning building” courage (which, while certainly admirable, often is more a reaction to circumstance), but the kind that says “I’m in this for the long haul, no matter what.” The kind of courage that enables and empowers us to get out of bed, day after day, to face a world full of risk and danger. I have to believe that this kind of courage is grounded in love. In the love that we receive from others and in the love we have for the world.
We need a community of love around us to provide the foundation for all that we do. Knowing that we are loved, no matter what, by our family and our friends gives us the courage to venture out into a hostile world. It also forms the basis of our self-esteem, the basis of our belief that our lives matter and that we can make a difference. This kind of love empowers us to declare our own worth in the face of those who would deny it.
A love of the world calls us to engage with it, in all its beauty and all its horror. When we love the world, like a parent with a troublesome child, we acknowledge its imperfections, yet we cast our gaze to the horizon of its potential. Love for the world allows us, in the words of Bobby Kennedy, “to dream things that never were, and say, why not?” And it creates in us the commitment to do what we can to make those dreams a reality.
As I move through the days ahead, I will carry the image of this young woman with me. She is, for me, the new face of courage.
Peace,
Peter
Fear and Love at Tent City
There is a protest at Tent City tonight, the place where Sherriff Joe Arpaio holds thousands of immigrants in his self described ‘concentration camp.’ Where there is never any relief from the Arizona heat, where humiliation is a daily occurrence.
I’m with my people, in our bright yellow Standing on The Side of Love shirts that match the school buses that take us there, Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix for our annual convention. There are hundreds of us going, a couple of thousand maybe, mostly white, middle class, documented. And yet I am afraid.
I’m afraid because I’ve heard there will be counter-protestors, militia folks maybe, perhaps with the weapons which are legal to carry in Arizona. I’m afraid because it’s so hot, because I’m not exactly Olympics material in my physical fitness, because I am taking a teenaged child whose safety means everything to me.
And then, as we sit in worship and prayer, preparing to go, speakers from the local Latino community speak. A young woman describes her decision to commit civil disobedience, to be arrested by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, because she is tired of living in fear, of her whole community living in daily fear of being rounded up for real or imagined infractions and thrown into the Tent City, as they have been for the past 20 years. A young man describes arriving in the United States at age one, and now facing deportation –leaving the only country he’s ever known to be sent to one which is foreign to him.
And I begin to feel embarrassed by my fear. Not ashamed, not guilty, just embarrassed. As if I am a kid who grabbed too many cookies off the plate. And I think, this fear that binds us all, this fear of being arrested and humiliated and tortured in our own country: How does that hold us back? How does that diminish us? The young woman who chose to be arrested says, Yes, she was afraid, but she’s been afraid all her life. This arrest, in a way, freed her. I think of the words of the poet Audre Lorde, in her essay which is desert-island-essential to me, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
As we get into our bright yellow school bus, a minister offers a prayer for our journey. I say to the driver, Are we holding our departure up because we are standing up praying? And she looks up with some annoyance and says, “No! I am praying!” As I begin to lead the crowd off the bus, she says, “Thank you so much for doing this. My husband is in there.”
At Tent City, I don’t see any counter protestors, with or without weapons. I see a small gaggle of brave locals, who have come to thank us for being there. One woman I speak with tells me that her inability to pay for a traffic infraction landed her there for ten days. She describes the endless heat, the lack of adequate drinking water, the horrible food. She says then, tears in her eyes, “My girlfriend is in for a year.”
Another man holds a sign charging Joe Arpaio with homicide. I ask him how many people have died at Tent City. He says at least five. I ask him if his church stands up to speak out about this. He replies sadly, “I am still Catholic but I do not go to church anymore. Most of us don’t. There was one priest who spoke out for us but they got rid of him.”
As I get back on the bus to go back to air conditioned comfort, a shower and clean pajamas, his words stay with me most. I wish that I could have responded, in Arizona or in my own home state of Minnesota, “You would be welcome in my church!” I know that the Phoenix UU church is doing fantastic work to be welcoming, to stand tall as an advocate for justice for immigrants. And yet I know that, while we stand on the side of love, sometimes we stand too far off to the side, in our fear, in our privilege, buffered, unwilling to disrupt our comfort. I offer a silent prayer and wake up this morning with his words still piercing my heart.
(Photos by Jie Wronski-Riley)
Saying Goodbye
A few years ago, a member of my congregation with a background in science asked me why, in his words, “so many people insist that there’s some kind of life after death?” I don’t think he was prepared for my response, which was to say that it’s because there is.
I believe that that death is not an end, but a change in the way we are in this world.
I believe that life and death are, in the words of Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, a “twisted vine sharing one root.”
I believe that though what we call “life” may end at death, existence does not.
Surely, our molecules do not die—whether they are burned and scattered, or buried in the ground, the molecules of our being become part of the Earth. They are recycled in the clouds and the rain, falling into streams that sing as they rush towards the sea. They are reclaimed by the bacteria of the soil, reused by the tree that grows in that soil, and then consumed and changed by the flame that feeds on the wood from that tree.
Any student of advanced chemistry can tell you that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Again and again, our molecules will cycle through all of life, for all of eternity. They will change and be changed, they might be converted to energy or infused with more through complex pathways. But our substance exists long after our life has ended.
Surely, our actions do not die—they are remembered in the thoughts and deeds of our loved ones, they are used by people seeking to learn, they serve as inspiration or lessons, memories or building blocks for something new. Every interaction we have ever had with another being changed the pattern of neurons in that person’s brain. We have made imprints—tangible, concrete imprints—in the lives of many, and those imprints spread out like ripples. Our deeds live on in the lives of others. Our presence in a particular place at a particular time creates a different future for all those who would follow us.
So, even if the conscience dies, if there is nothing of a soul to carry on after we are gone, can it really be said that the dead are really dead if there is someone to remember and celebrate them? If there is someone, somewhere that carries their genes or something, somewhere that is using their matter? If there is someone, somewhere, whose life is different for having encountered them?
Can it really be said that the dead are no longer with us if there is someone among us who reads what they wrote, or cooks from their recipes?
Someone who is warmed by the quilts they stitched by candlelight or who treasures the picture of an ancestor they never met?
Someone who has been inspired by their life, someone who has made better by their work, or someone who has learned from their mistakes?
This week, I had the honor and privilege of conducting a funeral service for the father of a member of the congregation I serve. Funerals and memorials are among the very hardest thing I do as a minister—and yet they are also among the most meaningful.
Part of how I face this task is by making visible all of the ways in which the departed loved one we are celebrating lives on. It means we are not so much saying goodbye, as learning to live together in a new and different way.
Improv to Improve
I recently participated in a church board of trustees’ retreat in which a congregant, Travis Ploeger, lead us in some improv exercises in the style of his work with the Washington Improv Theater. It was challenging and fun to be a part of a group stepping a little out of its collective comfort zone (no Robert’s Rules that night, that’s for sure) and engaging challenges requiring us to think on our feet and open ourselves to what was a novel learning experience for most of us. I was reminded by this experience of some important aspects of religious life and of leadership:
Pay attention to patterns. One of our exercises was a “fortune cookie” challenge in which we all stood in a circle, and each person had to come up with a word to follow his/her neighbor’s word, forming a (hopefully) coherent sentence — or deciding that the sentence had come to an end. One pattern I noticed was that many of our “fortune” sentences began with a noun. Many fortune cookie aphorisms, in my experience, begin with a pronoun (e.g., “You will find good fortune”) or an adverb (e.g., “never,” “always,” etc.). I wondered if one person began with a noun, and others in the group, perhaps unconsciously, followed suit. Patterns can be a source of stability and confidence, through which we can build on the creative and constructive work of others. Patterns can also be confining and can sometimes lead to staleness or to lack of insight — exemplified in the familiar aphorism “But we’ve always done it this way!” By paying attention to patterns and naming them aloud, we are not only calling attention to behaviors that may have gone unnoticed, but we can explore whether those patterns are a source of vitality or an unneeded burden.
Be willing to take risks. Self-consciousness is a prominent factor in a lot of human behavior. Most of us don’t want to look or feel foolish. We want to fit in and to be accepted. Being attentive to social decorum and others’ expectations can help us to meaningfully connect with others. It can also be a source of rigidity and anxiety. A goal of religious community is to establish and maintain human connections in which we can dare to take risks and “think outside the box” in the company of others of whom we have the right to expect forbearance, respect and yes, love. It can be scary to take risks, to throw ideas out there that may seem to be outside the realm of the familiar and the comfortable in the group we’re in; in a religious community, we should encourage that kind of daring from each other, and accept it from one another with appreciation.
Closely related to risk-taking: Creativity is a hallmark of both a rich religious and spiritual life and of constructive leadership. The great religious sages and spiritual leaders of history were not only deeply committed to the ideals and morals of their faith commitments; they were creative, original, and imaginative. Gandhi’s spiritual and political leadership of India’s independence struggle, through the strategy of satyagraha, was a triumph not only of moral rectitude and political savvy, but it was marvelously imaginative. It was a means to an end with scarcely any precedents in history. Undoubtedly Gandhi drew inspiration from sources like Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” but the application of those concepts to the effort to dismantle an empire was an astounding gesture of creativity. By contrast, the heinousness of Nazism was remarkable not only for its sheer brutality, but for the appalling lack of imagination Hitler and his minions showed in trying to address difficult social problems. Scapegoating innocent people is a miserably unimaginative response to communal challenges, which is probably why it never accomplishes anything of value.
How is God calling us to attend to patterns, to take risks, and to use our imagination to meet the challenges we face?
Asking for Wonder
For as long as I can remember, I have striven to be successful. Even in the earliest years of school, I wanted to be first in my class, whether or not I actually learned anything. As an adult, I have sometimes cherished the prestige of a position more than I have been satisfied by the work. When playing a game, I play to win – and when I repeatedly lose at a particular game, I lose my enthusiasm for it and stop playing. Now when kept in check, the desire for success is hardly a shortcoming, but when the quest for success – we might say mere success – becomes an all-consuming passion, then it is simply idolatrous. But I have grown bored with the outward measures of success. True success is the natural consequence of a job well done, a commitment honored, an endeavor brought to fruition – in short, a life lived with personal integrity. Success is an outcome, a consequence – but as a goal, in and of itself, the quest for success is rather elusive – as often as not, a complete waste of time.
Like other human institutions, spiritual communities are full of people who are driven by the desire to be successful, whether at work, in their personal lives, or even at church itself. Perhaps you are someone who nurtures such ambition. Yet it is apparent that even those who are driven to achieve the outward signs of success come to church looking for “something more.” Men and women discover that, even with the accumulation of wealth and the achievement of fame, our appetites are never fully satisfied. Public acclaim and personal comfort never quite mask the sense that there is “something more” which somehow eludes us.
In the preface to his book of Yiddish poetry, Abraham Joshua Heschel aptly summarized his own search for the holy when he wrote, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder; and you gave it to me.” How different our lives might be if, in place of success, we too asked for wonder!
In more traditional expressions of religion, this sense of wonder may derive from the supernatural or a magical understanding of the miraculous. In our naturalistic faith, the sense of wonder is found in the everyday and commonplace. We speak of the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” This transcending mystery and wonder is experienced in many ways – when we gaze upon a beautiful vista, when we are caressed by the excited touch of a lover, when our ears tune in to the songs of the birds or the melodious strains of a violin, when the poems of the heart tumble from our lips, or when the golden silence of creation surrounds us in meditation or prayer.
Success is elusive for most of us, especially when we set our sights too high, but wonder surrounds us. We are bathed in the phenomena and experiences that provoke our sense of wonder and awe, if we would only take the time to pay attention. As we wend our way through life, let us ask not for success but for wonder, assured that we will receive it in abundance. The universe is simply bursting with it!
“I didn’t say it was fair, I said it was the law.”
I asked my ex, my partner of almost twenty years from whom I separated three years ago, the co-parent of a teenaged kid, to attend a $14 community education session with me and update our wills.
We had spent thousands of dollars asserting, in two different states, that we were in fact related to one another: that sharing a home, a car, a life, a bed in fact meant that we would be responsible to one another even after death did us part. It turns out that, as difficult and expensive as that assertion of relatedness was, telling the state we had broken up was a breeze, and cheap to boot.
Our state of Minnesota, and our nation, enthusiastically agrees that we are no longer an item. In fact, they never believed that we were. Since we were all in agreement about this matter, I entered the community ed class in a calm place. I’m cheap, and my cheap self felt pretty happy that $28, for the two of us, would get our affairs in order.
I’m not saying I didn’t feel a tinge of sadness. I wondered, as I felt our after death wishes fit so easily into the pre-typed will templates which the lawyer leading our session had brought, just how much it had cost our relationship to be swimming upstream all those years, asserting that in fact love does make a family. I wondered if, had we been able to relax and float instead, supported without exerting an ounce of energy, our relationship might have survived.
But mostly I concentrated on filling in the forms accurately and quickly, initialing what needed to be initialed and checking boxes that needed to be checked. Everything goes to the kid. Check. Until the kid is 25, not too long now, a trust is established, with the following executor. Check. My ex and I whispered in consultation, no tension or disagreements between us, only wanting to get things set and done.
Most of the people in the room appeared, from their questions and comments, to be leaving their estates to their husbands and wives. They checked the box that said, to my spouse until their death, and then after spouse’s death to our children (insert names here).
But then. At the next table, a man, probably in his late 60’s, raised his hand. “If I want to leave everything to my friend, and then after he dies, to the kids, what box do I check?”
The lawyer clarified. “You want to leave everything to your friend?” “Well, yes, for the rest of his life,” said the man. “And then to our kids.”
The lawyer said off-handedly, “Well, you need to write on the blank line that you disinherit your children.”
The man’s mouth fell open in horror. “I don’t want to disinherit my children! I just want my friend to have what he needs for the rest of his life, and then the children would get it!”
The lawyer asked, as if he were cross-examining a witness, “Did you not say that you wanted to leave 100% of your estate to your friend?” The man nodded. “So that leaves zero percent for your children. Hence you must disinherit them.”
My mellow cheap self was suddenly gone from the room, and my mother tiger self was sitting in my seat instead, with adrenalin-clear vision. I was picturing what it would be like for my own kid to learn, after my death, that she had been disinherited. Like every other adopted child she will be processing, for her entire life, some amount of grief and loss about her birthmother. At that point, she’d also be processing the death of one of her parents. And then to be disinherited on top of it? I wondered, quite seriously, if she would survive.
Glancing at the man who had raised the question, I realized that I didn’t even know if he was gay or trying to care for some other friend after his death. But I did know I wasn’t going to sit quietly. I raised my hand. “So you are saying, “ I asked the lawyer, “That a gay couple could adopt or bear a child, raise that child together, and then they would both have to disinherit that child in order to provide for each other legally?”
The lawyer looked bored. The forty or so people in the room looked longingly at their will templates, studiously not looking up. I went on, “So you are saying, that even without the proposed Consititutional amendment on our ballot in November, which explicitly states that marriage is only between a man and a woman, loving and committed couples are forced to renounce either their children or each other in order to have legal wills?” The lawyer looked annoyed, but I couldn’t resist pushing it. “Are you saying that?”
“Look,” the lawyer said, “I didn’t say it was fair. I said it was the law.”
My ex and I finished filling out our forms, had them notarized, and left. As we walked out, this $14 class didn’t feel like such a bargain.
Human Kindness
Imagine this:
The day is hot and the line at the gas station is long.
After all, it’s the least expensive gas in town.
I pull in behind a tan Toyota, tired and dusty – ready to fill up my
gas tank and make my way home.
Only the Toyota isn’t moving.
The Toyota and its occupants seemed to have settled in for the afternoon.
Parked and content to sit next to the gas pump without actually
exiting the car to pump the gas.
I was cranky and
growing increasingly annoyed as the seconds – and I do mean seconds – ticked by.
All the other pumps
were occupied and I was stuck waiting with
mounting impatience behind this car that
was going no-where, doing nothing…it was just sitting there.
Finally – after about 30 seconds wait time – the driver of the Toyota emerged
apologetic and mildly frazzled:
“My car” she says “It won’t start. I’ve never had car troubles before.
I just had the battery changed yesterday.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to her.
I only drive my car, I don’t actually know a single thing about cars.
Just then, in a flash, they seemed to arrive out of thin air –
unlikely superheroes – two men were pushing the Toyota.
One, a lanky white guy with a buzz cut, covered from neck to wrists
in tattoos. He was guiding the rescue. Steering the car through the window
as he pushed.
The other, young clean cut Latino gave his all to the task.
I finished pumping my gas and to justify all the hours I put in at the gym,
I joined in pushing the car and driver to safety.
Once safely parked, the three of us fanned out in search of jumper cables.
It became an “operation” and just like that, I forgot that I was hungry, tired, and dusty.
At one point, I paused to look at us. An unlikely tangle of individuals
coming together in community to help a neighbor in need.
Sure, we didn’t live next door to each other, but in that moment
in that gas station, we were neighbors:
A Caribbean woman, an Asian American woman, Latino youth, tattooed white male – we were all working together for a single purpose
Human kindness / overflowing
in a small – yet for the driver of that Toyota – significant way.
Moments such as these unfold for us everyday.
We can choose to step into them or step around them.
It’s always a choice. It’s always a choice to slow down and give our full attention.
To see another into being.
To stop and engage giving of our very best in that moment
whether to ourselves or to others.
No one else has the right to define for you
what your best may be at any given moment.
Only you know what that is
what it looks like
feels like – and truthfully, what you have the reserves for
because, let’s face it: there is a lot of need in the world
There are needs everywhere…and we determine when and how much we give.
Sometimes we are asked to stretch way beyond our places of comfort
To truly see another…to attend…to listen…to be present…to give…
When that happens, when we are able to do that, when we reach back out into the world
Sometimes a little bit of magic happens.
A little bit of salvific hospitality leaps into our reality…into someone else’s reality
and for a moment, we are less lonely.
We are less afraid.
Summer and Sabbath
My thirteen-year-old daughter and I have different ideas about what it is that she will be doing with her summer vacation, which will be upon us in a few days. I think that the summer before she enters high school would be a good time to get a jump start on subjects she finds challenging. Also a good time to learn to type properly, or play the piano. Not to mention that there are a good number of household projects that could use some manual labor. I know that she will be bored with the vacant hours, and I have warned her repeatedly that her days will not be spent in front of the computer or TV screen.
And I keep asking her just what it is that she expects to do this summer. What is it that her days will look like when she is not off at camp or visiting an out of town friend? All I get for an answer is that she doesn’t know – and doesn’t want to be asked.
She doesn’t have a way to say it, but I think what she is looking towards is sabbatical time – a Sabbath of the school year where she can, to paraphrase Whitman, loaf and invite her soul. She wants to be free from pressure, free from schedule, free from things that have to be done and other people’s expectations that she do what other people think is good for her. That’s what the Sabbath is for. It is a time of forced openness, when you give up work and see what remains. Outside of the structure of daily life your soul gets a chance to stretch out.
OK, I confess I’m a little scared to see what remains for my young teen outside of her structured life. It’s hard to trust that her soul will be well served by weeks of openness. But there’s something to be said for being bored, for sitting with the emptiness long enough that something from deep inside might come to fill it. There’s not that much to be said for being the mom who has to listen to the whining that accompanies that boredom until that mysterious something comes along, but I guess that comes with the territory.
There isn’t any magic formula that decrees how much of our lives needs to be given to work, or to improving our selves and the world around us. But the tradition of the sabbath and the sabbatical teaches that a seventh of our time is not too much to give our souls the space to expand. I’ll let you know how it goes.
A Case For Religion
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.
