“Spirituality and Religion: Why We Need Both”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

September 3, 2006

            I want to talk about “spirituality” and “religion” this morning. People sometimes use these words to talk about the same thing, and they sometimes use these words to talk about very different things. For me, these two words are related, but different, and I’d like to talk about how I understand these two concepts this morning, but more importantly, I’d like to talk about why I think both spirituality and religion are important to our lives.

            Rather than start off giving you two dictionary-like definitions, however, I want to start off with a story, a story about a short trip I took over the summer.

            In the middle of July, I took a trip to Crystal Mountain Ski Resort, which, for anybody who doesn’t know, is down near Mt. Rainier. I went with Hiromi and her parents, who have been visiting us this summer from Tokyo.

            I had never been to the top of Crystal Mountain before, but I had heard that even in the summer you could take a chair lift to the top and there were some beautiful views.

            I convinced Hiromi and her parents to come along with me by telling them that I would buy them lunch at the small restaurant at the very top of the mountain, which my guidebook told me was the restaurant at the highest elevation in Washington State.

            In explaining this to Hiromi’s parents, I used the Japanese phrase, “Washington-shuu no ichi-ban takai no resutoran,” which can also be understood to mean either “Washington State’s highest restaurant” or “Washington State’s most expensive restaurant,” but knowing me well, I don’t think they were fooled.

            We drove down on a beautiful day in the middle of July, and bought tickets for the chair lift at the bottom of the mountain. All four of us managed to squeeze in the same chair on the chair lift.

            Now at this point in the story, I have to tell you that none of the four of us have done very much downhill skiing in our lives, and so riding chair lifts is not something that we had done a lot of.

            As the chair in which we were riding started to get higher and higher off the ground, Hiromi turned to me and asked, “Isn’t there supposed to be a safety bar?”

            “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think there is.”

            “Well, where is it?” Hiromi asked.

            “I’m not sure,” I said, looking down, realizing that we were now about 50 feet off the ground and one wrong wiggle might send all of us plunging to our deaths. It was at this point that I also remembered that that I was afraid of heights.

            You wouldn’t think that being afraid of heights is something you would forget,  but for some reason I do. There was one time that Charles Moorhead was fixing a leak up on the roof of the religious education building. I asked, “Charles, do you need some help up there?” “Sure,” he said. It wasn’t until I climbed the ladder and was walking around on the roof that that I remembered that I was afraid of heights, and I also remembered while riding in that chair lift.

            “There has to be a safety bar somewhere,” I thought to myself, all the while really not wanting to look around or move around too much, but when I did eventually look up and behind me, I saw that there was a safety bar over our heads that could be pulled down, which I quickly did.

            Finally feeling secure, my fear dissipated, and I was really able to look around and see where we were. I thought to myself, “This is drop dread beautiful,” drop dead being a phrase that had recently been rambling around in my brain, but it truly was.

            Looking to either side of us, we could see snow-capped peaks. Looking below us, we could see tall, majestic pines, small lakes, and wild flowers blooming on the hillside.

            I was overcome with feeling. Now a more skeptical person might say I was just feeling overcome with relief having realized just a few moments before that I wasn’t going to die, but I honestly believe it was more than that.

You see, every once in a while in my life, there are moments in when I realize just how absolutely, scandalously amazing the world in which we live really is, and this was one of those moments.

As the chair lift lifted Hiromi, her parents, and me higher and higher up the mountain, I found myself amazed by the fact that the world exists rather than nothing existing at all. I found myself astounded that not only does the world exist, but does so with beauty, order, variety, and complexity.

I found myself overcome by a sense of the preciousness, or one might even say the sacredness, of all life, including the life of the small wild flower blooming on the hill below me as well as my own.

I found myself experiencing a deep sense of connection to all that was around me. Tagore, the Bengalese poet, has written about such a feeling of connection, saying that there were times in life when he felt that “the same stream of life that runs the through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures” and “shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers,” and indeed I was feeling something similar.

I also found myself experiencing a deep sense of gratitude that I had been given the chance to live on this earth for a few short years to experience what I was experiencing.

All of this came in a rush to me as we were ascending the mountain, and at the moment I was experiencing it, I doubt I would have been able to put into words at all what I was experiencing. If Hiromi and her parents noticed anything peculiar about me, it was only that I might have had a faraway look in my eye.

However, for me, this was a spiritual experience, and it epitomizes what I believe spirituality is all about. It’s not about believing anything or doing anything. It’s about feeling.

It’s about feeling amazed, astounded, and awed. It’s about being in touch with the “isness” of things. It’s about feeling that all life is precious or sacred. It’s about feeling connected to all that is. It’s about feeling extreme gratitude. It’s about feeling very alive.

I believe such experiences are universal and that all of us have them from time to time. Often time they happen in nature. They sometimes happen during extraordinary events such as the birth of a child. They sometimes strike us, however, in the midst of an ordinary day.

And they can be life changing, or at least invigorating for a while.

            There’s even reason to believe that even non-humans may have such experiences.

            I remember several years ago reading about biologists who were studying a particular group of chimpanzees in Africa and couldn’t understand why the chimpanzees in this particular group all participated in this ecstatic dance whenever there was a rain storm. The best explanation the biologists could come up with was simply that the chimps were overcome with a sense of awe when they heard rain falling in the jungle. The monkey’s dance was their way of saying, “Wow!” to the universe.

            But if this is what spirituality is all about, then what is religion all about? And whatever religion is about, if this is what spirituality is all about, do we even need religion?

            To answer this, let me first acknowledge that religion has a bad rap these days.

These days if you say you want to talk about spirituality, people smile. If you say you want to talk about religion, people wince.

            It seems that for a lot of people in today’s society, spirituality is like floating on your back in warm ocean waters in the middle of the afternoon. Religion is like a cold shower at six in the morning.            

Spirituality is like bread fresh from the oven. Religion is like eating your vegetables.

Spirituality is like going for a massage. Religion is like going for a root canal.

More specifically, people say that religion is about believing things that are difficult to believe. Religion is about meaningless rituals. Religion is hypocritical. Religion is about going through the motions. Religion is about power and hierarchy.  Religion is divisive. Religion inspires violence. Most of all, religion is about rules.

Awhile ago, I was talking with a woman who I thought might be interested in attending this church. “Oh,” she said, “I’m very spiritual, but I don’t like organized religion.”

“Well,” I said, “we’re not that organized.”

            Of course, criticizing the emptiness and formalism of religion isn’t anything new.

            The Herbrew prophets did it. Jesus did it.

            Ralph Waldo Emerson, who started his career as a Unitarian minister, did it, too.   Religion’s bad rap is why, I believe, so many people these days say they are spiritual, but not religious, and believe that religion is at best irrelevant and at worst harmful.

            And let me say that “organized religions” in general deserves some of its bad rap.

            But I also want to say that spirituality isn’t enough for me, that I need religion, too.

Why? Why do we need religion in our lives, in addition to spirituality?

There’s a story about a wife waking up her husband on Sunday morning so he can go to church. “I don’t want to go to church,” he says. “Nobody likes me there, and the sermons are always boring,” he says. “Tell me one good reason why I should go.” “Well, his wife says, “You’re their minister and they pay your salary.”

I don’t know if I ever felt as down as that man, but I do know that I don’t always feel as up as I did on that mountain. Those kinds of experiences are great when they happen, but they don’t happen regularly or enough for me to depend on.

There are plenty of days when I wake up in a funk. There are days when I feel cynical. There are even days when I feel mean, which is hard when you’re a minister, because ministers, damn it, are supposed to be nice to people.

There a days where all life doesn’t seems so sacred or precious, and I wonder whether to carefully capture the spider crawling across my bathroom floor and set him free in my backyard or just put an end to his already too-short, miserable existence with the bottom of a shoe.

There are days when I feel disconnected from other people, when other people seem to be only an annoyance, like the other day when I was standing in line at the grocery store and there was a man in front of me buying bananas, and I found myself thinking, if it wasn’t for you and your hankering for bananas, I would have been out of here five minutes sooner.

            There are days when I get overcome with the endless, minute, boring, annoying details of life and the long list of things to be done, and walk around like a horse with blinders on, unable to see anything but the ground in front of me and the location of my next step. There are days when life seems not so miraculous, but ho-hum at best, and I take everything for granted.

            There are days when I wonder whether anything I do or anything anybody does makes a difference in this world and whether the world is worth caring about at all.

            Perhaps I am the only one that feels like this, but I have at least some reason to believe that I am not. My colleage Kendyl Gibbons says there are some days that she wonders whether it’s all worth it, days when she wonders whether she should just toss the aluminum can in with the regular garbage and start shopping at Walmart.

            And on some of these days, not only have I completely forgotten all the things that I felt up on top of that mountain, I’ve forgotten that such experiences in life are even possible.

            Some of you might say that the answer to my problems is to go back up that mountain more often, but I know from experience there’s no guarantee I feel again like I felt that day.

And this, my friends, is why I need religion. More specifically, this is why I need a religious community. It’s why I think religious community is important for all of us.

            Not because we’re bad people. Not because need to be forgiven for some tawdry list of second-class sins. Not because we need to grovel for special treatment from any angry, vengeful deity. 

            But because we are human beings and we forget.

            In the quotidian coming and goings of our every day lives, we forget. We forget what an amazing, beautiful world we live in. We forget the preciousness of all life, and our own lives. We forget how connected we are. We forget to be grateful. We forget to be compassionate. We forget to be forgiving. We forget to be hopeful. We forget that each of our lives do make a difference, and that with commitment, perseverance, and a little luck we can change for the better the world in which we live.

            And because we are human beings and we forget, we need religion and religious community to remind us and reconnect us with the possibility of a broader, deeper, richer, more fulfilling experience of life than the narrower, more limited experience of life into which may have been lulled. We need religion and religious community to help remind us and reconnect us to the ideals which we once held high but may have temporarily forgotten or been lured away from by the myriad of distractions of modern life.

            We can see this when we look at the etymological roots of the word religion. Religion comes from the Latin word religare, which literally means to reconnect. Similarly, the etymological roots of the word worship comes from an old English word that literally means “to shape that which is of worth.”

            You wouldn’t think that we’d be so forgetful. You’d think that a couple of years of Sunday School during our growing up years and then maybe coming to church a couple times a year for a refresher would be all that would be needed for us to remember the things we need to remember in order to lead good lives.

After all, life’s not that complicated. The Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Fulghum even wrote a nice little essay about it, “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” I think Fulghum is right. The things we need to remember to lead good lives are not that difficult.

But we do forget them, at least I do.

And I need to be reminded, at least on a weekly basis, if not more often.

And that’s why I’m thankful to have this religious community in my life, as a place where I can come to remember and reconnect to the possibility of a broader experience of life, to remember and reconnect to those values that I hold highest.

“Yeah, but you’re the minister,” I know some of you are thinking. “You’re supposed to be reminding us.” But as I’ve told you before, on many Sundays, I’m preaching for myself, and the rest of you get something out if it, well, that’s good too.

More seriously, let me finish with words from Albert Schweitzer, which I think describes well what all the members of this community help do for one another. “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

So may it be. Amen.