"How Can the World be Saved? Taking Religion Seriously" (Part 2 of 3)

“Taking Religion Seriously” (Part 2 in a series)

By Rev. Dr. James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

November 13, 2011

            In Karen Armstrong book’s A Case for God, she describes what it’s like to visit prehistoric cave paintings in southern France. To reach some of the caves requires you to crawl through a tunnel - - barely a foot high in some places - - in total darkness.

            One visitor said, “I felt as though I were creeping through a coffin. My heart is pounding and it is difficult to breathe. It is terrible to have the roof so close to one’s head.” As he and the other members of the group crawled through the darkness, he could hear them groaning. When they finally reached the vast underground cavern, the visitor said, it felt like “redemption.” As Armstrong says:

They found themselves gazing at a wall covered in spectacular engravings: mammoths, bison, wild horses, wolverines, and musk oxen; darts flying everywhere; blood spurting from the mouths of the bears; and a human figure clad in animal skin playing a flute. Dominating the scene was a large painted figure, half man, half beast, who fixed his huge, penetrating eyes on the visitors. Was this the [a deity]? Or did this hybrid creature symbolize the underlying unity of animal and human, natural and divine?

            These cave paintings in southern France were created between 17,000 and 30,000 years ago, and scholars agree that the caves were sacred sites. The early human beings who painted these caves most likely practiced shamanism, believing that there is a spirit world that underlies this one.

            However, it would be wrong to think of the paintings in these caves as only depictions of shamanistic beliefs. These caves, scholars speculate, were most likely used as part of a religious ritual, perhaps initiation ceremonies that marked a young male’s transition from adolescence to maturity. Visiting these caves most likely evoked feelings in Paleolithic young males even more intense than those experienced by more recent 20^th century visitors and were meant to evoke a change in consciousness.

            But this, Armstrong argues, has always been the purpose of religion. More than about believing things, religion has always been about doing things that evoke in us a different way of being in the world - - a different way of conceiving the world, a different way of perceiving the world, a different way of feeling about the world, and a different way off acting in the world. Religion has always been about doing things that change us, especially things that make us feel more alive.

            In ancient India, a central tenet of religious belief was that the individual self or atman was at one with Brahman, the source of all being. But religious sages did not ask their disciples to “believe” this. Instead, the teachers put their students through an initiation and asked them to do spiritual exercises that made them look at the world differently. As Armstrong says, “This practically acquired knowledge brought with it a joyous liberation from fear and anxiety.”

            The historical Buddha also had a preference for religious practice over belief. In her book, Armstrong repeats the well-known Buddhist story about a particular monk who constantly pestered the Buddha with metaphysical questions instead of performing religious practices:

Was there a god? Had the world been created in time or had it always existed? The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow and refused medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from. He would die before he got this perfectly useless information. What difference would it make to discover that a god had created the world? Pain, hatred, grief, and sorrow would still exist. These issues were fascinating, but the Buddha refused to discuss them because they were irrelevant: “My disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana.”

            Similarly, Armstrong says, the Chinese sage Confucius, preferred not to speak about the divine “because it lay beyond the competence of language, and theological chatter was a distraction from the real business of religion.” Confucius used to say, “My Way has one thread that runs right through it,” and that way was the religious practice of treating others with absolute respect.

            Though it’s sometimes hard to see this today, it’s not only indigenous or Eastern religions in which religious practice is more important than belief. This is also historically true of Western religions.

            Judaism has always been a religion of religious ritual and practice more than belief, and for many centuries, Christianity was too. Probably one of the best examples of this is St. Francis of Assisi, the 12^th century Catholic friar. A quotation I like, which is often attributed to St. Francis although there is some doubt about whether he said it, is “Preach the gospel constantly. If necessary, use words.” Whether he said it or not, it does reflect the values by which he lived his life. For St. Francis, it wasn’t important what one believed about Jesus as much as imitating Jesus’ life as much as possible. As Armstrong says, “Francis emulated the absolute poverty of Christ in his own life; he and the Franciscan friars who followed him begged for their food, went barefoot, owned no property, and slept rough.”

            Even more than Judaism and Christianity, Islam is a religion of practice. All of the five pillars of Islam, Armstrong says, are commands to certain kinds of activities. This is very clear in four of them, which call Muslims to activities of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage, but its even true of the first - - “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet.” As Armstrong says, “bearing witness” means demonstrating in one’s life that no other gods - - which include political, material, economic, and personal ambitions—can take precedence over one’s commitment to God alone.

            Let me pause for a moment here because I suspect some of you are wondering, “Where are you going with all this?’

            I suspect that if you ask most people for a generic definition of religion - - not of their particular religion but of religion in general - - they will say something about religion being about belief, and more specifically about believing in something supernatural.

            I suspect that if you then ask most people about a definition of religious ritual or religious practice, they will say the purpose of religious ritual and practice is to manipulate or control supernatural powers.

            These were the basic definitions of religion and religious ritual that I learned when I took an anthropology class in college, and I think they’re more or less the most common understandings among most people today.

            I also happen to think they’re simply wrong, almost backward.

            Last week, I talked about spiritual experience, suggesting that spiritual experiences are a natural part of human experience, even suggesting that the ability to have spiritual experiences were probably naturally selected through early human evolution. I talked about how those experiences often lead people to greater feelings of love, joy, peace, and hope as a well as a higher degree of “relational consciousness” - - a felt awareness that all of our lives are interconnected and interdependent on each other and the natural world in which we live. I even made the bold claim that more people have more “relational consciousness” is what’s necessary to save our world. I also suggested that one of the purposes of religious ritual and other religious practice is to help us intentionally nurture and cultivate those kinds of spiritual experiences that sometimes happen to people naturally but irregularly.

            During this past week, I’ve wondered if I could have offered an even simpler explanation of spiritual experience. (Ministers, you know, do a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, always wondering how we could have said something better.) The answer I’ve come up with is “spiritual experiences make us feel more alive than we’ve ever felt before in our lives.”

            So religion is all about intentionally doing things that nurture and cultivate those kinds of experiences that make us feel most alive. Religion is all about intentionally doing things that shape how we experience the world.

            You might think about it like this.

            I recently purchased a new pair of running shoes, and these running shoes are different than any shoes I’ve ever purchased or worn before. They are “minimalist” running shoes, are very light and have no cushioning, heel support, arch-support, or cushioning. They are five-toed shoes, which means they fit over my foot more like a glove. In fact, the whole idea is that they are supposed to simulate running barefoot.

            When I wear a traditional running shoe, I’m more likely to land on the heel of my foot. Some people think this leads to more force and more injuries. These new shoes make me run more on the balls of my feet, which is the way human beings ran for thousands of years before Nike invented the cushioned running shoe in the 1960s.

            In other words, these new shoes are making me interact and experience the world in a different way, and it really doesn’t matter very much what I believe about them. I want to suggest that religion is similar to this.

            Or you might think about it like this.

            Psychology tells us our feelings, thoughts, and actions are all interdependent on one another, but studies also tell us it’s easier to think our way into a new way of feeling than to feel our way into a new way of thinking.

            For example, let’s say there’s somebody in your life right now that you’re having a hard time with. Trying to make yourself feel better about that person by an act of will is almost impossible. But if you sit down and make a list of all that person’s good qualities - - in effect, changing your thinking about the person - - you’ll start to feel better about the person without too much effort and might start acting nicer to the person.

            But studies also tell us that acting our way into a new way of thinking and feeling is even more effective than trying to think and feel ourselves into a new way of acting. For example, if you really want to change how you think and feel about somebody, buy them an expensive gift. Your mind won’t be able to handle the cognitive dissonance and you’ll start thinking and feeling differently about the person.

            In my life, I have several individual religious practices - - things I do for the purpose of shaping how I think and feel about my life, other people, and the world. As I’ve shared with you before, one of these is a daily practice of contemplative prayer and meditation that includes both a spoken prayer and a time of silent meditation. When I regularly follow this daily practice, I feel more grounded, more centered, and more alive. When I fall out of practice, I feel less so.

            I also regularly read poetry because reading poetry encourages me to see the world in a different way in a way that makes me feel more alive and more connected. Sometimes instead of poetry, I will read sacred scripture. My favorite to read is the Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching. If you ask me, do I believe every word of what I’m reading, my answer would be no, but I also would say that’s the wrong question to ask.

             When Paula plays a piece of music on the piano or when our choir sings, it makes sense to talk about whether the piece was moving, what feelings it evoked, but it really doesn’t make sense, at least to me, to say, “You know, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 6 doesn’t fit with my worldview.”  That would be like saying that one doesn’t like a Picasso painting because “it doesn’t look anything like a woman” or saying one doesn’t like Harry Potter novels because one doesn’t believe in magic or saying one doesn’t like Broadway musicals because real people never break out tap dancing in real life. As Karen Armstrong says, literalism in religion leads to either fundamentalism or atheism.

            For me, religion is more like art than it is like science, and the question we should ask about anything religious is not “Does this tell us something true about the world?” but rather “Does this lead our mind and heart to a greater capacities?”

            This is my goal in my individual religious practices, but it’s also my goal when we come together to worship as a community.

            You know what’s my favorite way to think about worship here at church? I like to think of worship like baking a cake. To bake a cake you need ingredients, you need a pan and an oven, you need directions, and you need heat.

            In this analogy, some of the ingredients are parts of our religious tradition: our hymns, our readings, the sermon, and our other rituals. You might even call these the dry ingredients; though I hope the sermon is never too dry. Other ingredients include whatever is happening in our individual and shared lives - - the joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, and yearnings each of us bring to worship.

            The pan and the oven are our sanctuary, the containers in which we hold all the ingredients.

            Then there are the directions, the specific way we mix all these together. This is our order of service, our liturgy. Just like when you bake a cake, it matters how you mix up the ingredients.

            What about the heat? I think about the heat this way… if you try baking a cake without heat, you start with glop and you end with glop, but if you bake a cake with heat, you start with glop but you end with cake. Something different. Worship is the same. When worship doesn’t work well, we walk out feeling about the same as when we walked in. But when worship works well, a change takes place. A transformation occurs. We make some sort of connection between a line from a reading or a story in a sermon or the words of a hymn and something happening in our own lives, and we experience a shift. Like any other ritual and practice, the way we think and feel about the world is transformed. So if you want to, you can call the heat God or spirit or “the magic.” Or if you want to, you can call it an unconscious restructuring of one’s psychological processes that creates a change in consciousness. But what’s most important for me in this analogy, is that worship is something we do, and as a result of this doing we are shaped or transformed in some way.

            Ralph Waldo Emerson said in our reading this morning, “A person will worship something - - have no doubt about that…Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

            As I’ve shared with you before, the word worship comes from two old English words and literally means “worth shaping” or “shaping what is of worth in our lives,” and I interpret Emerson’s words to mean that everything we do in life shapes how we think about, feel about, and act in the world, and there are certainly many powers-that-be in our society that are trying to shape us, not always for our own good.

            What I understand us to be doing here - - through whatever individual religious practices we may have, through our Sunday morning worship, and through everything else we do together as a community - - is undertaking practices that shape us in ways that we want to be shaped, moving us from indifference to compassion, from greed to gratitude, from bitterness to forgiveness and acceptance, from despair to hope - - even from deadness to life.

            My hope for this religious community is that it is and will always be a place that helps us come alive.

            So may it be. Amen.