Roadmaps for the Soul (or: Hunting, Gathering, Singing)
In “Tombstone Blues,” a song released in 1965, Bob Dylan sang, “The National Bank at a profit sells roadmaps for the soul / To the old folks home and the college.” In the context of the song, Bob clearly doesn’t think this is a good thing. Commodifying the meaning of life?
Yes, well . . .
Suppose for a moment that all the religious and philosophical speculation through time, and all the art and architecture to boot, have been about the same thing as the hunting and the fishing, the gathering and farming. Suppose that all human actions—from the sacred to the profane—have been and are still . . . ways to survive. Ways for us to adapt to our environment and, perhaps, thrive.
Sounds Reasonable, Doesn’t It?
Does such a supposition denigrate—or cheapen—all the blood and tears shed in service to the gods? Or in service to art? I don’t think so.
Is a symphony less because it’s an adaptive trait rather than a window onto absolute truth? What if the search for truth and meaning is itself an adaptive trait—a way of surviving.
Put this way, it’s hard not to say, “well, duh!” Yet we often don’t go quite far enough. Yes, human activities of all sorts are attempts at survival. But if our search for truth and meaning in all its manifestations, from fine art to fine dining to religion, is an adaptive trait, doesn’t it follow that the search for truth and meaning is an entirely human construct? It’s filling a need but has no larger purpose.
It’s Easy If You Try
Like most people, I searched for a “really true truth” for a long time. Hey, I’m a Baby Boomer, it’s what we did. It was a brilliant marketing ploy. Forget the gurus; the tax dollars you lose giving churches tax-exempt status is seventy-one billion dollars a year.
That’s a lot of moolah for Moloch. (And full disclosure: as a minister, I ride that particular gravy train.)
The search for truth and meaning puts a lot of food on the table and a lot of money into retirement accounts for various sorts of people. No, this isn’t about tax exemptions. It’s about the price we are willing to pay purveyors of truth and meaning. After all, yoga alone is a twenty-seven billion dollar a year industry.
The Fine Print
We pay a lot for truth and meaning, in bookstores, museums, churches, and storefront meditation centers. To repeat, I think that’s great. It’s an adaptive trait. Yet, it’s good remember that there is no one truth to find.
This particular survival trait only becomes problematic when we fall into the trap of thinking there’s a truth out there to find. It’s problematic when we begin paying a high price for one particular roadmap for the soul, or when those around us begin paying too high a price.
Until someone gets hurt.
Yes, it’s the search itself that is the answer. Not the answers. Or the roadmaps.
The Proof’s in the Pudding (or What’s Churchy about Church?)
Imagine
I’m sometimes asked how humanists can have “church” without invoking god. Here’s how I think about it:
Imagine this scenario: When Imhotep in ancient Egypt invoked the great god Ra, he was invoking the human consciousness, not Ra Almighty.
Imagine this: When Zadok, son of Ahitub, entered the holy of holies of Solomon’s brand new temple, perhaps he was talking to the greatest power on this earth—the human imagination.
Imagine this: When the evangelist Billy Graham made his vast alter calls in stadiums across North America, the Christ that thousands flocked to . . . was the human psyche. Whatever you think about powers beyond, imagine this for just a moment.
Entertain the thought for just a moment that every shaman, priest, and prophet who has ever lived . . . has created worship without god because . . . there never has been six or three or one to begin with.
Shared Subjective Reality
But wait! Isn’t there more to the question? Because, even granted the accuracy of my imaginings, didn’t Imhotep and Zadok and Billy Graham each have the advantage of speaking to people who shared a subjective reality?
Didn’t the Egyptians of Imhotep’s time have a mental image of Ra and the Hebrews of Zakok’s time have a notion of Yahweh and the Christians of Billy Graham’s time a common picture of Christ the Lord?
Good question. Did they really? Are people really like that? Or did the priests and preachers have, rather, the apparatus of worship embedded in a particular place and time—Ra’s temple, Yahweh’s temple, or the vast football stadiums of Jesus with great PA systems?
Could it be that what they all had is an apparatus for worship that individual psyches journeyed to . . . . Can we seriously argue that each ancient Egyptian had an identical psychological understanding of Ra? Not likely. But they did have a temple, didn’t they? Doesn’t the very fact of the rabbinic tradition argue that Hebrew worshipers exited Zadok’s services with very different views of ultimate reality? Still, they had that temple, didn’t they?
Weren’t there as many Christs as there were Christians in Billy Graham’s vast alter calls? Yet they came to that structure of power and fame called a stadium or an auditorium, didn’t they? They came to hear Billy.
All Churchy
What’s so churchy about church? The apparatuses of worship change with time, as do the words and the concepts. It is the human mind and human needs for purpose and meaning that remain that same and come to the temple, the stadium, or the storefront church. These are what remain the same. For humanists, that’s as holy as it gets. And that’s fine: the proof is in the pudding. Ra’s pudding doesn’t do much for many of us. But the pudding of gathering together into community is quite tasty.
Just imagine that the point of worship (humanists prefer “assembly”) is calling individuals into community. Imagine that a community created in this way agrees to agree—despite individual understandings—on particular values that sometimes—in the best-case scenario—lead to objective common actions that may be considered moral and ethical (actions better because they spring from a common purpose).
That’s what “worship”—uh, assembling—will or won’t do. Gathering to invoke Ra or any of the deities or no deity at all leads to the same thing. It’s the human mind imbued with meaning and purpose and communal action that matter.
Imagine . . .
Disappear or Die: Southern Black Trans-Experience
Today we bless Tela La’Raine Love as she prepares for her gender reassignment surgery. Every day, Tela blesses this world with her courage, her determination, and her clear vision of a world where transwomen of color live safe, fulfilling, and long lives. Only in her 30’s, Tela serves as an elder, a mother, and a mentor to many young transwomen of color, struggling to survive in a culture that tells them to disappear or die.
Although we hope that “it gets better,” 2012 saw the 4th highest murder rate of LGBTQ and HIV-affected people (LGBTQH) in recorded history, according to the Hate Violence Report released annually by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP-http://www.avp.org/about-avp/coalitions-a-collaborations/82-national-coalition-of-anti-violence-programs ).
People of color, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of homicide. Black and African-American people “were particularly overrepresented in the homicide rates: over half of reported hate murders had Black or African-American victims, even though Black and African American people made up only 15% of total survivors and victims of hate crimes overall.” In 2012, LGBTQH people of color represented 53% of total reported survivors and victims of all hate crimes, but 73.1% of homicide victims. Living at the intersections of racial, gender, economic, and sexual oppression, trans-women of color are told to disappear or die.
In the midst of a dominant cultural narrative of oppression and repression, Tela Love is living into her journey towards wholeness with a spirit fully grounded in her inherent worth and dignity. She is the co-founder of New Legacy Ministries (http://www.newlegacystartstoday.com/), a grassroots organization striving to raise the voices of marginalized communities, especially transgender women of color, and create a spiritually welcoming and sustaining community.
Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience, will be a documentary of her experience as a openly HIV Positive trans-women of color in the south undergoing gender reassignment surgery June 18,2014. In sharing this personal window into her life, she understands that she is taking a risk. Traditionally trans-women have disappeared into the constructs of a patriarchal society after their surgery, rather than remain targets for hate and fear.
Tela realizes that she is allowing herself to be a target for greater judgment and persecution than that of which she already endures. However, inspired by the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “silence is betrayal,” she has determined that she can be silent no more. She cannot be silent when waking from her nightmares of another young transgender woman being murdered or dying because she’s too ashamed to follow through with her HIV treatment after being diagnosed out of fear of being further alienated. Tela cannot be silent while there are little or no job opportunities for trans-women, while there are little or no housing opportunities (unless HIV infected), while black trans-women walk the streets in order to survive.
And neither, beloveds, can we. Our silence, too, is betrayal. Let us speak into the space of fear and hatred, ignorance and oppression. Let us bless Tela and every one of her sisters with the welcoming arms of beloved community. (https://www.facebook.com/Blacktranswomenarepowerful)
Please support the creation, production, and distribution of the documentary Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience. Together, let’s re-write the narrative of oppression into thriving, joyful beloved community.
Donations to support the creation of this documentary can be made via PayPal or sent to the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal marked “Designated Donation: New Legacy Ministries” 2903 Jefferson Ave, 2nd FL, New Orleans, LA 70115.)
Spiritual But Not . . . Keep Talking
Literary critic Terry Eagleton said, “The din of conversation is as much meaning as we shall ever have.” I like that. On first glance, it appears to be bleak—human conversation is all the meaning there is?
But imagine what human conversation has given us.
Imagine the din of conversation under the porches and under the trees in Athens during the time of Socrates.
Imagine the din of conversation in Baghdad in the late 700s when an institution called the House of Wisdom opened it’s doors—an attempt to gather all the wisdom in the world.
Think of the din of conversation in Florence that led to the Renaissance. The din of conversation in Shakespeare’s London. The din of conversation in cafes that created the Vienna Circle at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
The din of conversation in the Paris of the 1920s. Or Greenwich Village. Or North Beach in San Francisco in the 1950s that gave rise to the Beat Generation.
Think of the din of conversation in Liverpool, England that led to the Beatles. Or the din of conversation in a little recording studio called Sub Pop that led to the Seattle Sound, better known as Grunge.
Too often we think of lonely geniuses but genius is seldom lonely. Shakespeare and his Globe theatre were not the only show in town. Shakespeare’s London had twenty-seven public theatre venues. More than fifty British bands made up the so-called British Invasion. The Beatles weren’t alone.
Looked at from this perspective, from the view of what gets created in the crucible of human sharing, Eagleton’s phrase does not sound quite so bleak: “The din of conversation is as much meaning as we shall ever have.” Why ever would we want more than human conversation?
Would we really want a voice from on high coming to proclaim the once and final truth? Isn’t the mystery more beautiful, the stabs in the dark of the millions of human beings who have taken part in this great din of conversation, this lovely human project of creating meaning?
I believe in community. A place where people talk with each other. In coffee houses. In bars. In streets and market squares—public spaces and the din of conversation—this is the meaning of meaning. And it is why totalitarian regimes fear the public square and religions burn books.
The term “conversation” originally meant “intimacy with others.” It also meant “sexual intercourse.” Only later did the term take on its present meaning of talking.
Let’s just say there’s something intimate about conversation.
What if the increasing din of human conversation, and perhaps its increasing complexity, is the hope of humankind? Would it be so bad if the talking that led to the Renaissance and a band called Nirvana is all the heaven we humans shall ever know?
Let’s take one conversation as an example. Two human beings, Michael Murphy (not the pop singer) and Frederic Spiegelberg, started a conversation. They agreed that the human spiritual impulse need not necessarily follow any one religious tradition. They thought that people could be “spiritual but not religious.” That phrase is a cliche now, a whipping boy for various dogmas. But in its day the phrase was a radical new thought. Spiegelberg published a book titled The Religion of No Religion.
The two men founded an institution called the Esalen Institute. Now, whatever you may think of what the Esalen Institute became, look at how pervasive a conversation between two people back in the 1950s has become. “Spiritual but not religious” as a concept is destroying traditional religions in the United States. And Murphy and Spiegelberg would not be upset by that. The Esalen motto is “No one captures the flag.” No religion has all the truth. And science doesn’t either.
Aren’t gratitude and grace and compassion and love and astonishment part of human nature? Part of our evolution? How could any one religion steal the flag of wonder or awe? As a matter of fact, how do any of these things have anything at all to do with religion?
Isn’t gratitude and grace and compassion and love and astonishment just as available in art, in music, in poetry? Available to each of us somewhere in the din of conversation?
Isn’t science a conversation too?
Today, we are creating a new conversation. One that is perhaps even beyond (and free from) “spiritual but not religious.” Yes, the din of your conversation is as much meaning as we shall ever have—but it is enough.
Eduardo Matania Beim Die geschlossene Bank 1870s.jpg
Keep talking. Increase the din. Converse. Remake the human reality.
Earth Day Notes from New Orleans
Last week the Center hosted two groups of youth, one primarily people of color, one primarily white people. As the groups co-navigated the space of the Center and the programming, it was pretty clear to everyone why we talk about race and an analysis of racism as a gateway to serving in the New Orleans community. This week the Center is filled with another group, this one primarily white people from a place of primarily white people. Many in this group have been coming to New Orleans to volunteer for years and some are not sure why they have to talk about race and racism each time they come – other than that it seems to be the price of the trip to New Orleans. There are moments of joy in the work of unraveling oppression and moments of despair.
As I write, my garden fills with love bugs, lettuce, stinging caterpillars, and thyme. Despair and joy ripple through this Earth Day 2014. Those with power to change the laws and hold those who are destroying the Earth’s ability to sustain life as we know it are busy arguing semantics and pocketing short-term profits. Perhaps this is not surprising in a country founded on the belief that land could be bought and worked at the expense of human life.
And so we have to talk. To each other. About uncomfortable truths.
Our silence will not protect us… will not make sure that my niece and your child have trustworthy water and air that will not poison them. The environmental crisis of the Gulf and West Virginia has moved inland with the advent of fracking. White people are learning that their whiteness will not protect them from the brutality of our current economic system, from the impact of decades of valuing imaginary numbers over real life.
And here we are, called to continue the struggle for collective liberation – imperfectly, madly, hopefully… Happy Earth Day, beloveds. Let’s talk to each other.
Pagans, Cheasters, and Nones: Easter and Open-Source Religion
This coming Easter morning, many people will rise and look east. Some will go to a Christian church for their only visit this year. Many will be reminded by priests and preachers that this one day is not enough. Those strangers to churches will be telling the oldest of religious truths: it is the people, not the priests, who make the gods.
“Easter” we call the day, namesake of a deity of the Northlands, Eostre, goddess of the dawn. English speakers still call the direction she arises from “east.” She is the goddess of new beginnings and of fertility, her day celebrated as the earth comes back to life after a long winter.
The holiday (holy day) called Easter is a movable feast, tied to both the cycles of the sun and of the moon—Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.
Religious holidays are celebrations of recurrence. Children in the Northlands have been searching the wet, awakening grass for eggs on Easter morning for thousands of years. The celebration has spread to other lands; to other religions. To the far corners of the planet.
Nineteenth Century German philologist Jacob Grimm reported that in some remote German villages of his time people still celebrated Eostre with sword dances, bonfires, and the baking of “heathenish pastries.”
It’s difficult this time of year—at least in the top half of the Northern Hemisphere—not to think of new beginnings. Difficult not to dance just a little bit. The iron grip of the deathly ice is finally broken and life is emerging from the long-dead earth again.
This is one of only two days the so-called “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christians—also known as Chreasters—fill churches. There are something on the order of eighty-five million Chreasters in the United States.
Statistics indicate that less than one-quarter of US Christians attend church even once a month. But Easter brings ‘em out—even more than Christmas or Mother’s Day(!). Why? Might it be because Easter is such a blend of religious traditions?
Reflect on the potpourri of religions and cultures that make up the concept of Easter as it is celebrated in the United States today. We have a fertility goddess from Northern Europe who survived the invasion of a Southern European tradition, Christianity, based on a Middle Eastern tradition, Judaism, itself an amalgam of religious thinking from the earliest agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia with a pinch of Zoroastrianism from a certain Babylonian captivity thrown in.
All those ideas added up to create a lunar holiday celebrating a solar god in a myth echoing human sacrifice that originated in Egyptian mythology concerning the god Osiris, a metaphor for the planting and growth of vegetation in the Nile delta.
All that adds up to Easter brunches. And chocolate.
Why Easter? Why is Easter Christianity’s greatest hit?
“Syncretism” is one of those ten dollar words that permeates theology. The word describes the human propensity for combining religious ideas from various traditions.
The poet Wallace Stevens—an atheist by the by—made a very good point when he said, “The people, not the priests, made the gods.” Yes. The people, not the priests, meld ideas to create their religions.
Reflect on one of the greatest failures of human history. In 1231 the Roman Catholic Church opened its Office of Inquisition, nowadays known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Yes, it’s still in existence. Yet, after nearly 800 years of terror and cajoling, there are more heresies now than ever.
Wallace Stevens continues to be correct: the people, not the priests, make the gods. And we the people continue to vote with our feet. And the more information that flows on our nets and our webs, the more people are going to . . . well, what are we people going to do?
Some will become Cheasters. Some double-belongers. Some nones.
Return to the case of the goddess Eostre. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great was walking one day in a slave market in Rome. This was in the 600’s CE. Pope Gregory saw a couple of blonde slaves and asked his handlers where blondes came from. The handlers said they were Angles, which at the time meant either the English or Northern Germans. The pope was so taken with these blondes that he decided to devote his life to converting the Northlands to Christianity.
In 601 CE Pope Gregory instructed the missionaries he was sending to England with these words:
. . . the temples of the idols in those nations ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed.
For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed . . . may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they are accustomed.
Syncretism. Gregory’s order was an act of genius. It was a strategy that led to a Christendom that included the far North. But it also introduced a blue note; a note of mystery. Were those people out in the country—“paganus,” pagans, which means “villagers” or “rustics” in Latin—were those pagans, were those people of the heath, those people of the wastelands, those heath-ans—were those away from the centers of power, away from the army and the police of the king and pope and bishop—were they really Christian? Or were they going to their old temples for other reasons?
No one ever knew for sure. And we never will know. But is it a coincidence that the largest concentration of atheists on the planet today . . . happen to live in those Northlands that Pope Gregory Christianized?
Syncrenism. The people, not the priests, make the gods. In computer speak, it’s called Open Source: people with different agendas; different talents; different points of view, all have access to a program. And the result is a better program than those developed through controlled access. Maybe that’s why Easter is Christianity’s greatest hit.
The people, not the priests, make the gods. Religions are the oldest open source software.
Earth: Our Deep Home Place
The Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist cluster gathered in an oak -filled park on Sunday to celebrate Earth: Our Deep Home Place. As Earth Day approaches, I share with you a meditation, my invitation to celebrate our beloved planet:
Cosmologian Thomas Berry wrote “Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.”
We who are of the earth, children of the everything seed (http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/loveguide/session1/sessionplan/stories/168158.shtml),
we are intimately and ultimately connected to all creation. Through mystery and mutation, we have risen from the fertile mud to look around and celebrate the miracle of earth. As humans evolved, so too evolved rituals to celebrate and interpret the wonder of this place.
When Lao Tzu, the great Daoist philosopher asked, “Can you hold the door of your tent wide to the firmament?” poet Mark Nepo believes he was “challenging us not to define the world by whatever shelter we create but to let in the stars, to throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order receive and listen to the flow of life.”
Part of my own deep sense of home place in south Louisiana comes from the insistent presence of earth here. There is no day I can travel through town without noticing the majesty and intelligence of the plied live oaks, the whip-like flexibility of the pomegranate trees, the persistent resurrection of the bananas and the gingers. Summer days hum with the life cry of the cicadas, seagulls and crows caw throughout the year, mosquitos whining past your ear, and if you listen closely, I swear you can hear termites chewing away on darned near everything.
This place takes us deep, past language, to a pre-verbal space of knowing, to a place before naming, categorizing and limiting.
When we are still, when we breathe in and breathe out, when we trust that there is space for us and everything else that emerged from the everything seed, then beloveds, we can let go of our fears and submerge ourselves into the deep sense of collective belonging, the vast compassionate love that saturates creation.
Daily we make a thousand choices that shape the earth. May we throw our tent of mind and heart wide open in order to be shaped by the earth, our deep home place.
Let’s Agree to Agree on Subjectivity
There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
~Gertrude Stein
In last week’s post I looked at one way to smooth the waters between theists and non-theists, Pragmatism. Pragmatists say, if it works for you, it’s true.
Now, I know that’s a bit hard to swallow for some people, idealists, mostly. So, allow me to try to get to the same spot from a different direction.
For an idealist, there’s something out there that’s true. Idealists will admit that we see the world as we have learned to see the world; that our seeing affects us and those around us. It affects the world. Our seeing does not, however, make the world into what we see. The world is always as it is.
For example, I may decide that the tree in front of my house is possessed by an evil spirit. I may perform various rites to exorcise the evil spirit. I may even cut the tree down and burn it, thinking that that extremity will at last do away with the demon.
Perhaps I even believe that I succeeded in exorcising the demon and feel better about it all. Whatever I think, the fact of the matter is a dead tree, not an exorcised demon. One is measurable, the other is not.
Before going looking for something. It’s good to know what you’re looking for. What do we want in a god? I suspect the answer is: meaning and purpose in human life; a moral direction to the universe where the good and bad get what they deserve; perhaps even a cheerful afterlife where everyone is twenty-five years old and we get to talk with our grandmothers . . . and hang out with Abraham Lincoln.
That sort of thing.
This is the sort of god that the mainline monotheisms at one time posited for us. It’s the sort of afterlife promised by the sort of churches I attended as a child. Then I read Sigmund Freud (as did the generation a century before me). And I began to think there is a big problem with this god concept: it sounds suspiciously like wish fulfillment. And it can’t be measured.
Mainline Christian theologians don’t paint this picture of God anymore. They have gone in two broad directions: process theology—“god” is in the processes of nature. (A topic for another day.) Or the psychological route, saying: OK, we’ve got two things here:
There is that which is inside the human brain; and that which is outside the human brain.
This is, after all, how we experience reality: the personal and the impersonal. “God” is subjective: inside the human brain. God is not in the scientifically measurable outside realm.
These theologians will argue that putting god in the category of human subjectivity is not a denigration or demotion of God. Lot’s of important things exist only in our subjectivity. For example, I have spent much of my life fighting for “justice.” (Again with the quotes!)
“Justice” is a human subjectivity. “Justice” does not exist in the outside world as a measurable thing. You can’t weigh it. Consider: “Justice” has no meaning to a crocodile. A crocodile cannot act justly, at least from a human perspective.
Is justice an insignificant or untrue concept because it is the product of the human mind? Admittedly, we can say, “That was a just court decision” or “that was an unjust court decision.” But those are instances in time. The are not the concept “justice.”
Groups of human beings agree on the subjectivity called “justice.”
And the same is true of the several concepts of God. God is a shared consensual subjectivity among various groups. A shared consensual subjectivity. We agree that our subjectivities agree with each other and that the concept “God” is this way or that way … for us. That’s why various faith traditions require creeds said aloud: they are attempting to keep the shared consensual subjectivity similar in various minds.
Now clearly this concept of God pushes the idea of human understanding beyond the true / false dichotomy. Beyond the dichotomy that objective is true and subjective is false or at least suspicious. But consider—so far as we know, human consciousness is the most complex thing in the universe. So let’s give ourselves a little credit–maybe everything isn’t a zero or a one.
Computers are better than we are at chess. But not at writing poems. Or symphonies. Everything is not zero or one. Crocodiles or rocks don’t write poetry. People write poetry. And “God” is poetry. God is a human art. Knowledge is more than information.
It may well be that “religion” or “god” or “gods” exist in the same category as we consider abstract concepts such as “justice”—in objective reality these concepts don’t exist, yet the human brain is capable of creating these concepts out of the chaotic particulars of human experience.
Fact is, no matter how many times the US Supreme Court makes a really, really stupid decision, I’m going to keep working for what I see as justice. For many people, the same is true for “God”—despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is a concept that still makes sense to them.
This is why—despite the fact that I don’t share the subjectivity called God—I don’t get angry and shout about it. It can even be fun—and instructive—to to talk over our subjectivities. We might even learn something from each other.
Fallen Angels, Rising Apes, and the Knowledge of the Serpent
I.
In addition to the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, the congregation that I serve as minister ascribes to a set of aspirational statements that are specifically humanist. Our first Aspiration is, “To live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”
Why do we say such a thing?
Because we are countering a long tradition of life-denying dogma common in the Western world. Doctrines such as that of Original Sin are not an affirmation of life in this world, and, in our view, that’s the only life there is.
You don’t have to go farther than our bulletin board to see an implication of what we mean. Just now we have a poster advocating “sex-positive reproductive justice.” We are countering a culture in which sex-negative attitudes impact the fundamental rights of women.
In my blog post last week I discussed Dostoyevsky’s assertion of free will:
“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”
Well, it’s certainly “joyful” to do “one’s own fancy,” but such actions may not meet the ethical or “reverent relationship” criterion. Dostoyevsky’s definition of free will, the freedom to really mess things up, is a negative assertion of freedom. There’s always a the poles: Sex-negative. Sex-positive. Freedom-negative; freedom-positive. Navigating those can be problematic. And traditional Western religions are the problem, not a solution.
How to be sex-positive and life-affirming. That’s why UU congregations take OWL, Our Whole Lives education courses, so seriously. We have this “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver puts it, and we have to figure out how to live it here, now—as ethically, lovingly, and reverently as possible.
In Dostoyevsky’s time philosophers were grappling with the implications of the discovery of Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician, who realized that the numbers of births, deaths, house fires, crimes—even the types of crimes—proved to be fairly consistent from year to year. Predictable, in other words.
This led to both the insurance industry and the field of sociology, among other things. My inability to diet and the number of people who die of heart attack and stroke each year in the United States has some connection, now, doesn’t it?
The insurance industry certainly sees a connection.
Unlike in Dostoyevsky’s time, we don’t think much about it nowadays when we hear how many Americans will die of Type II Diabetes or high blood pressure this year. Nowadays we are saturated with statistics. So much so that, with the addition of computers, we live in the next iteration of statistical analysis: “big data” or “predictive analytics.”
Netflix can tell us what movies we will enjoy with a high degree of accuracy. Amazon can send us discounts for things that the crunched data indicate we will consume next. I love a sentence I read about predictive analytics: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”
Think about that: “Analytical Customer Relationship Management can be applied throughout the customer’s lifecycle.”
So when you start getting coupons for caskets . . . watch out.
It makes me want to go Dostoyevsky’s route and buy something REALLY crazy.
II.
One of the oddest things I have to deal with in multi-faith work is answering the accusation that humanists don’t have a “theology of sin.” As in, “you don’t have a theology of sin, therefore . . . you’re just not all that serious about religion.”
To which I’m tempted to say that humanism doesn’t have a theory of onomatopoeia either.
It’s not that humanists don’t understand what people are talking about when they discuss onomatopoeia, it’s just that it lies outside the purview of a humanist ethic.
It’s simply that I don’t put any credence in the idea that people are born into a “fallen state.” As far as I can see, a “theology of sin” has a lot of baggage that just has nothing to do with reality. It’s a complicated answer to a simple question: Why do people act like animals?” When St. Augustine came up with his theory of Original Sin, people didn’t know that human beings were animals. Call it self-denial. But now we do.
How could an animal that has evolved a consciousness such as we have be “fallen”?
I think that anthropologist Robert Ardrey put it best:
We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. (African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, 1961.
Claiming that “original sin” is not a true description of reality is in no way saying that human beings are “born good,” any more than saying “I have no vacuum cleaner” means that I can’t clean my floor.
Original sin is a theological concept that serves theological ends. And it is a complex answer to a simple question that does not survive Occam’s Razor.
There’s nothing original about sin. But there is something very original about acting up to human aspirations toward ethics and compassion. We are risen apes, not fallen angels, and we are “armed killers” besides. That is a considerably clearer place to start considering how to be ethical, loving, and reverent, it seems to me.
Allow me to take a crack at a humanist theology of sin, necessarily taking into account evolution. How about this: “Sin” is a lack of cooperation with others.
Looked at from this angle, Dostoyevsky wasn’t defining free will, he was defining actions that do not take others into account: “One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice . . . one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy . . .”
Excessive drinking; smoking; eating too much—these aren’t “sins.” They’re merely really bad behaviors, given what we know about their outcomes. Those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony—they’re bad for the self and they are bad for others.
“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.” Too often our incredible reason and creativity has been allowed to invent sharpened sticks . . . and a few other things to kill each other with. This is “sin”: it is a lack of cooperation and compassion for others.
Our challenge is to look reality in the face and do what we can with what we’ve got.
That tale of the Garden of Eden is a good story, but it has led to some bad behavior. Sin isn’t very original.
Allow me to take another shot at a humanist theory of of sin:
Some things, such as what have been called sins, are the default settings on the human body. The out-of-the-box model, so to speak. But every car enthusiast knows that if you want more performance, you’ve got to get yourself an after-market muffler. Human ethics are like that.
Our aspirations toward living “ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature” are mostly after-market add-ons.
OK. So I know that my metaphor doesn’t have the sizzle of two naked people and a talking snake. (That’s good writing!) Still, my metaphor is truer to the human condition.
We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are prone to un-original appetites, irresponsibility, and killing. Still, we can aspire “to live joyfully and ethically, in loving, reverent relationship with humanity and nature.”
Not bad for a bunch of primates.
Do Justice
I am ever so grateful that I was assigned The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb: A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community, written by Eric H. F. Law, during my studies at Loyola Institute of Ministry – New Orleans. It has been an invaluable source of wisdom as I bear witness to the ways Unitarian Universalism is and is not welcoming. I gratefully commend it to ministers and lay leadership.
Law is an ordained Episcopal priest who grew up in Hong Kong, then immigrated to the United States when he was 14. He has a lot to say about external and internal culture, both the breadth and depth of hospitality. Law offers a helpful paradigm for understanding how to get beneath the surface of what limits our ability to welcome multiple cultures. He writes:
[E]xternal culture – [music, food, dance, art] – constitutes only a small part of our cultural iceberg. The larger part is the hidden internal culture that governs the way we think, perceive, and behave unconsciously… the “instinct” of our cultures…The cultural environment in which we grew up shapes the way we behave and think. Implicit in this cultural environment are the cultural myths, values, beliefs, and thought patterns that influence our behavior and the way we perceive and respond to our surroundings.
Most of the time we are unconscious of their existence.
They are implicitly learned and very difficult to change…Internal culture is like the air we breathe. We need it to survive and make sense of the world we live in, but we may not be conscious of it.
Internal cultural difference is not a matter of different ways of singing or speaking or dressing. It is a matter of perceiving and feeling.
Some of you may remember the scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) when Harry Potter sees a strange reptilian horse pulling the carriage and asks “What is it?”
Ron Weasley: What’s what?
Harry Potter: That. Pulling the carriage.
Hermione Granger: Nothing’s pulling the carriage, Harry. It’s pulling itself like always.
Luna Lovegood: You’re not going mad. I see them too. You’re just as sane as I am.
While being called as sane as Luna Lovegood was perhaps not particularly reassuring to Harry Potter, I hope that the image can be useful for Unitarian Universalists.
The carriage of our faith does not pull itself. Unitarian Universalism swims in the waters of implicit culture. This faith, our congregations, and each one of us have internal cultures.
And as Law explains:
The same event may be perceived very differently by two culturally different persons because the two different internal cultures highlight different parts of the same incident… To discover the unconscious, implicit part of our culture is a lifelong process. Some of us go through life like a fish in the stream and never know we are living in water… “When whites and people of color recognize that there are cultural differences in their perceptions of power, they take the first step toward doing justice.”
To Eric Law’s multicultural list I will add other layers of internal cultural perceptions of power differences that usually receive only external attention:
* cis- and trans- gendered,
* the gender spectrum from female to male,
* the spectrum of abilities and mobility,
* the sexual orientation spectrum,
* the class caste from poverty to the 1%,
* the ageism that saturates our lives from infancy to elderhood…
Law believes that “because of cultural differences some people are perceived as lions and wolves and some as lambs and calves” unconsciously, setting up “an uneven distribution of power before groups even meet.”
He writes:
If the church is to become the holy mountain on which people from diverse cultures shall not hurt or destroy each other, we must respond to the call to do justice.
Doing justice in a multicultural environment requires us to understand the consequences of these cultural differences in power perceptions. Doing justice commands us to reveal this unconscious and disproportionate distribution of power. Doing justice compels us to develop new leadership skills that can confront injustice. Then we can create a just community when people from different cultures encounter each other with equal strength.
Our call in this time, as a people of faith, is the same one found on the cover to The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, namely, “Don’t Panic.” Realizing that our perceptions will be strongly influence by our internal culture, let us look around at life outside of our stream and honor that the water we live in is not the totality of the human experience.
Let us welcome grace into our midst, offering mercy to ourselves and to each other as we discern how we are together and how we wish to be together. May we bring our whole and holy selves into a community committed to collective liberation, to radical inclusion, to equity and compassion in human relationships.
Beloveds, let us do justice together, faithfully.
