ONE puzzle of the world is that religions often don’t resemble their founders.
Jesus never mentioned gays or abortion but focused on the sick and the poor, yet some Christian leaders have prospered by demonizing gays. Muhammad raised the status of women in his time, yet today some Islamic clerics bar women from driving, or cite religion as a reason to hack off the genitals of young girls. Buddha presumably would be aghast at the apartheid imposed on the Rohingya minority by Buddhists in Myanmar.
Today is Sunday. For many who identify as Christians it is known as The Lord’s Day, and in the past they would impose restrictions upon the kinds of activities one could do — no commerce, perhaps mandatory church attendance. For the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) today is First Day — early Friends decided not to use pagan terminology for months or in any way distinguish among the days of the week, merely instead numbering them in a repetitive cycle. If one goes to an old Quaker cemetery s/he will see inscriptions that, were today’s date the marking of a birth or a death, it would be labeled 9th Month 4th Day.
The setting aside of a particular day for an especial religious focus appears in many religions. Before Christianity, Judaism considered the 7th Day to be sacred, a time when one refrained from work, because according to the first of the Five Books of the Tora, after creating the universe on that day Elohim (God) rested, and mankind should act similarly. After Christianity Islam had a particular focus on what we call Friday, as the most important time for going to a mosque for prayers.
I began with a selection from the column Nicholas Kristof wrote for today’s New York Times, which for some reason has a title that does not reflect the content of the column. The piece is titled What Religion Would Jesus Belong To? I hope that is not off-putting, and regardless of your own religious orientation (and I include in orientation self-describe agnosticism, atheism, spirituality without religion, etc.) you take the time to read it and consider it.
Kristof’s focus is the idea that religions as they develop are often very different than what their founders may have taught, influenced in this by reading a new book, The Great Spiritual Migration, byBrian D. McLaren, who is described as a former pastor, whom he quotes saying
“We feel as if our founder has been kidnapped and held hostage by extremists. His captors parade him in front of cameras to say, under duress, things he obviously doesn’t believe. As their blank-faced puppet, he often comes across as anti-poor, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant and anti-science. That’s not the Jesus we met in the Gospels!”
The problem is not one merely for Christianity, as is apparent in my first block quote, but both because we live in a nation that is still on paper majority Christian, that has seen an increase in strand of that Christianity seeking to impose its beliefs upon others, and that Christianity has in many ways dominate large portions of the world (because of conquests by Christian nations first by force and then for a long time by business and commerce). Yet now we see the nature of both our own country and the polity of the world changing, often in ways that some view as threats because it undermines their privilege and their understanding of the country and the world.
Although ostensibly we as Americans live in a religious nation (think of including “under God” in the Pledge, the frequency with which political speeches end with “and God Bless America/the USA”, and the fact that our rate of weekly church attendance dwarfs that of our Western European allies), Kristof offers us the perspective of Stephen Prothero, author or a book titled Religious Literacy, who says the US, “is also a nation of religious illiterates.” Kristof notes
Only half of American Christians can name the four Gospels, only 41 percent are familiar with Job, and barely half of American Catholics understand Catholic teaching about the eucharist. Yet if Americans suspect that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, or wonder if the epistles were female apostles, then maybe the solution is to fret less about doctrines and more about actions.
When I read those words, several different thoughts immediately occurred to me. First, Americans are often not only ignorant of their own religions, they have really distorted understandings of the religions of others, sometimes with tragic consequences, which is especially true when that ignorance is on display in the words and actions of political leaders, elected and appointed. There is no requirement to demonstrate an understand of the history or belief systems of religions as a condition for high school graduation: at most, one may get one or two weeks covering the so-called five great religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) in a course on World History. One may learn of the Protestant Reformation (largely from the Protestant side), but will learn little of the internal conflicts before that in Christianity. Here I write as one who has taught Comparative Religion both within such a unit on World History (where for the most part the textbooks are execrable) or in a stand-alone course, and as one who far too often in political discussions has had to correct the totally wrong assertions made about various religions, often including those of the person making the assertions).
But the ignorance shown in the blockquote above is paralleled by an equal lack of knowledge of things about our own political system, perhaps demonstrated to some degree by a recent statement of a president candidate about “Article XII” of the Constitution. Mr. Trump was not alone — most Americans cannot tell you how many articles or amendments there are in our governing document, and very few, except while in a course on government, could tell you what each of the 7 Articles or 27 Amendments are about. They cannot name a single Justice of the Supreme Court, and often cannot tell you the names of their elected public officials (of which there are of course too many). If read from some of the more radical words Jefferson offered in the Declaration of Independence they are likely to attribute them to a communist or some other kind of political radical.
And yet, for all of its distortions, religion, organized or otherwise, has had a salutary purpose throughout much of human history, one that may not completely balance in the minds of many the destructive purposes for which it has too often served as a justification.
Kristof acknowledges that he is not the most religious Christian. But, like me, he is fascinated by what religion can do, or that is, what some guided by their religion choose to do. Let me offer his final paragraph before continuing with my own thoughts (remember, I did say this was inspired by Kristof, so it is as much or more my own thinking than it is an examination of his column):
It is not the bureaucracy that inspires me, or doctrine, or ancient rituals, or even the most glorious cathedral, temple or mosque, but rather a Catholic missionary doctor in Sudan treating bomb victims, an evangelical physician achieving the impossible in rural Angola, a rabbi battling for Palestinians’ human rights — they fill me with an almost holy sense of awe. Now, that’s religion.
I have at times written here about my own spiritual quest. I have been fascinated by religion in many ways since childhood. When I was ten I was drawn to the Benedictine monks even though at that time I had no desire to be a Christian. Along the way I have at various times been a member of all three main branches of Judaism, the Episcopal Church, the Orthodox Church, and now the Religious Society of Friends. I have sung in and directed church choirs, taught adolescents and adults in synagogue and in church, gotten a masters at a Roman Catholic seminary, practiced Buddhist walking meditation, read and pondered Sufi poetry and philosophy, spent time in monasteries in the US and in Greece. I have tried to understand the religious impulse, and to find meaning in a world that was often to my mind too inchoate to fully grasp. I do not claim that I have found “answers.”
But I have found things that make sense to me, that help me to understand others in our country, and to some degree the history and makeup of other nations.
Along the way I have become ever more humble about the depth of my own understanding, just as I have about the depth of my own spirituality, such as it is.
I have had as my “sig” the words of the current Dalai Lama: “My religion is kindness.” That fits well with what my wife recognized some years ago, well before I officially joined the Quakers, was my guiding principle, words of George Fox that we were to walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we met. The walking gladly was always harder in part because of my own tendency towards depression, an emotional state that can easily lead to wanting to lash out at others as a hoped-for but ultimately failed method of making myself feel better. From that personal experience I have been able to grasp in part the tendency of some to use religion from motivations that range from fear to the desire for power and/or security in ways that are destructive, that are often contrary to the intent of those viewed as founders.
Years ago I recognized that it is not so much that man is a rational creature as he is a rationalizing creature, able and prone to use his intellect to find “authoritative” statements to justify actions that are in some fashion self-aggrandizing, whether to avoid responsibility for the damage done or to provide an excuse for acting without regard to the impact upon others. I see that in myself, I recognize it in some of those who as they accrue wealth and power start suppressing any concern of the impact upon others of how they gain and use that wealth and power.
I cannot speak for others. I can observe and offer such insight as I have.
For me at least, even when I see what I consider distortions, I prefer to try to find common ground — that is the notion of answering that of God in each person, even if in my own broken state I am not always successful at abiding by my own principles. In at least trying, I leave open the possibility of a human connection.
In a political sense, it is perhaps why I am sympathetic to those who seek to find some kind of common ground, working across partisan divides, as Obama tried and as Hillary Clinton has demonstrated for much of her public life.
It does not mean we do not criticize: remaining silent when we perceive wrong is to be complicit in those wrongs. But it also means there is a certain amount of humility on our part — we express what we see as wrong, but we remain open to the realization that perhaps we see as wrong because we see only in part, through the lens of our own limited experience and understanding. We allow for the possibility that with more complete understanding we will realize where there is good, even if incomplete, in what we at first criticize.
George MacDonald wrote a book that C. S. Lewis said when he read it baptized his imagination. It is titled Phantastes, published in 1858. When I read it, as I reached the end, it had as powerful an impact upon me as it did upon Lewis. That is, there are the words at the very end that challenged me then, and have continued to challenge me ever since. They are burned into my memory:
Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.
Simplicity.
Courage.
Seeing through what we may rightly describe as evil to that of God still present in the one acting in a way we perceive as evil, and attempting to address that.
If I did not believe that “good is always coming” there would be little point in political activity, and still less in the work of the latter half of my adult life in teaching.
This morning I read a column by an award-winning writer.
It spoke to me, to be sure.
It also reminded me to reflect upon what matters to me.
I am shy, albeit an extravert.
At times I have been drawn to monasticism, in part because one is in a community. But I have also been drawn to solitude — sometimes in listening to music, or walking in the woods, or curled up and totally absorbed by a book, or lying quietly as a cat curls up on me or next to me.
By myself I am incomplete. I am not necessarily “completed” in any one relationship, even one as consuming as my 40+ years with Leaves on the Current.
i may never be complete, but I am more complete insofar as I am connected with the rest of humanity, not as a mass, but as each individual person whose life intersects mine.
It is my responsibility to answer that of God in each, even if the question of a deity is irrelevant or nonsense to either or both of us.
It is to do so with simplicity, courage, trust, and humility, to do so as I walk gladly.
As the Dalai Lama says, and as I hope someday will be a true statement about myself:
My religion is kindness.
Peace.