“What’s Religion All About Anyway?”

by Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Church

Des Moines Washington

August 28, 2005

 

 

This morning I want to talk about a rather simple topic. I want to talk about the question, “What is religion all about anyway?”

Some people will tell you that religion is about what we believe. I met a man like this once during my travels. I was sitting next to him on an airplane. First, he asked, “What do you do?” I sometimes hesitate to answer this question honestly, especially when I am trapped in a very small, confined space such as an airplane cabin next to a total stranger for several hours. I know of colleagues who have answered such questions by saying that they are in the “salvage and reclamation business” or that they are in “very upper management,” but I answered the man honestly.  “I am a Unitarian Universalist minister,” I said. His next question, of course was, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” He wanted to know whether Unitarian Universalist believed in God, believed in Jesus, believed in Heaven, or believed in Hell. For him, it was these matters that religion was all about. I glanced at my watch. There was still an hour before we landed. I decided to give him the long answer.

This morning I want to suggest that religion is not primarily about belief.

Why?

The problem with thinking of religion as all about what we believe is that it doesn’t seem like belief makes a lot of difference in people’s lives. National surveys repeatedly report that more than 90 percent of Americans believe in God, but in his book, Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life, the sociologist Douglas V. Porpora discusses how irrelevant this belief is to the majority of people. Porpora did in-depth interviews with a cross-section of individuals across a variety of religious traditions. He found while a great number of the people he interviewed said they believed in God, only a few reported that this belief made any difference in how they lived their lives. It did not affect their values. It did not affect what goals they chose for their lives. It did not affect how they treated others. “For many Americans,” Porpora says, “belief in God is...just something to accept and skip over.” Thus, if we think of religion as belief, we have to conclude that religion is irrelevant, which doesn’t seem quite right to me.

Some people will tell you that religion is only about how we act. People who say that religion is mostly about how we act will say that it’s not terribly important what we believe. Rather, they will say that it’s most important whether we are good people and follow certain rules of conduct.

Now I happen to believe that how we act is much more important than what we believe or what we say we believe, but this morning I also want to suggest that religion is not primarily about how we act.

Why?

My in-laws visit us from Tokyo each summer, but I’ll always remember the first time they visited us in the Seattle area. Since my father-in-law loves horse racing, I decided to take him to Emerald Downs, a race track not far from where I now live. This was my first time to ever go to a race track, and I thought it would be an interesting experience.  During the sixth race, my wife Hiromi and her parents decided to walk around but I stayed in my seat. It was soon after this that I heard from behind me, “Is that you James?” I turned around and saw two members of my congregation, a very nice, young couple who had recently joined the church. I stood up, unshaven for three days since I was on vacation, wearing an old t-shirt and old jeans, holding a half-drunk plastic cup of beer in one hand and the daily racing form and a betting slip from the fifth race in the other. "Mom," the young woman said to the older woman standing behind her, "This is James, the minister who is going to marry us in August."

The problem with thinking of religion as how we act is not only that we sometimes get surprised when we discover that people who are supposed to be religious, such as ministers, at least sometimes participate in activities that we don’t usually consider to be particularly religious, such as drinking and betting at the race track. The problem is that this perspective seems to reduce religion to mere morality or ethics, which doesn’t seem quite right to me either. This perspective also doesn’t seem to account for people like Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose motivations to work for good in this world somehow seem connected with the fact that they were also deeply religious people.

But if religion isn’t all about what we believe or how we act, what is religion all about?

I want to tell you about three experiences. All three happened during the same summer a few years ago, and together they helped me better answer the question, “What’s religion all about, anyway?”

In June of that summer, I attended the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalist from all over the U.S. I had not attended a General Assembly in several years because I always have mixed feelings about going to a General Assembly. It last too long. There are always too many meetings and workshops scheduled, I never eat or sleep well while there, and I usually feel exhausted by the time it’s over.

On the other hand, ministry is often lonely work. I do not mean to complain. This is the nature of the job. So it was good to be together with other ministers who know both the joys and the sorrows, the tremendous privileges and the occasional pain of being called to serve in the liberal ministry. Being together with several hundred other ministers once a year reminds me that I am never really alone in the work that I do, and that this work is a part of the work that my colleagues are doing in the congregations that they serve. Similarly, being together with several thousand other Unitarian Universalists representing hundreds of congregations across the United States reminded me that this congregation is not alone in the work that it does in the world. So even though I left General Assembly feeling exhausted, while I was there, there was a feeling of connection to something greater than myself, and this was good.

On my way back from General Assembly, I stopped over in Chicago for a few days, and I stopped for only one reason. My brother Mike and his wife Kathi had their first child together. Jackson Parker Kubal was born on June 10 of that summer. This was a special event for my family. I have two brothers and a sister, and my brother Mike was the first to have a child.

As I sat on my brother’s living room couch holding Jackson, I could already see family resemblances, ways that he looked like my brother and others in my family. I even knew that there was even some part of me, or something that the two of us shared, inside of him, and I knew that in the future, my brother and his wife would pass onto him values that came in part from the experiences of family life that my brother and I shared growing up.

As I was holding him, an unbidden thought came to me, and the thought was that this baby would most likely live to experience things that I never would, that his life would go on beyond mine, just as my life will most likely go on beyond those of my parents, grandparents, and other relatives who have come before me. These thoughts of my own mortality did not make me feel anxious or sad, however. Instead, as I held my nephew in my arms, this baby born out of his parents’ love and out of life’s longing for itself, there was a feeling of connection to something larger than myself, and it was good.

Not long after arriving back from Chicago, my in-laws arrived from Tokyo for their annual visit. That summer we rented a mini-van, and the four of us and our two dogs made the 900-mile two-day trip to Yosemite National Park in California.

Hiromi and I had been to Yosemite several years before on our honeymoon, and it was an extraordinary experience, but I worried that over the years my memories had become exaggerated and it could not possibly be as wonderful as I remembered. However, when I arrived at the park a second time, I was not disappointed. If you have never been to Yosemite, I don’t know whether I can describe it to you, but I can say that I have traveled in North America, in Europe, and in Asia, and for me, at least, there is no place quite like it. With its majestic cliffs and rock formations, elegant waterfalls, groves of ancient towering redwoods, it is one of the most beautiful places I know.

The park was full of visitors while we were there, and as I was walking one day with my mother-in-law and father-in-law through the Yosemite Valley, they commented to me on how many languages besides English they heard.

“I know,” I said. “Damn foreigners are everywhere.”

My in-laws were right. People from all over the world were visiting the park. Why had they all come?

I think I know the answer. For me at least, Yosemite is not only a beautiful place. It is a holy place that inspires feelings of wonder and awe, a place where I witness the wondrous powers of creation on a grand scale, and just as pilgrims have been drawn to holy places throughout history, people from all over the world are drawn there.

As I stood on the top of Glacier Peak one evening, with the setting sun on my back, its rays bathing Half Dome in front of me in hues of pink and orange, listening in the silence that surrounded me to my own breathing and the beating of my own heart, I knew that the same wondrous forces that made this place had also made me, and there was a feeling of connection to something greater than myself, and it was good.

Religion is not all about what we believe.

Neither is religion all about how we act.

Religion is all about feeling connected.

As the Rabbi Sherwin Wine has written, “There are times when we feel connected to all the people of the world...the universe itself - - the evolutionary drama of life, the very stars and beyond.”

Religion is about a connection with our It is about a connection with others. It is about our connection with those institutions of which we are a part, such as this church, our workplaces, and our government institutions. It is about our connection with nature. It is about a connection with that creative power within all existence that I sometimes call God.

We can see this in the roots of the word “religion” itself. “Religion” comes from the Latin word religare which literally means to connect again.

As my colleague the Unitarian Universalist minister Davidson Loehr has said, it is in seeking this connection that brings us to church. “ [It is] though we were once connected but have somehow come loose...And we come to churches, still hoping that somehow something might happen on Sunday to help us find the path between who we are and all the we are meant to be. We come hoping that a greater set of possibilities and connections might somehow be called forth, and that we might find ourselves in the presence of that holy possibility, and here and even now.”

But it isn’t an intellectual connection that we are seeking. It isn’t a physical connection. It’s an emotional connection. To put this another way, religion isn’t an affair of the head, and it isn’t an affair of the hands, but it’s an affair of the heart.

That is not to say the head and the hands are unimportant. Like many affairs of the heart, if the head isn’t involved, we may end up doing things that are impulsive or  irrational, so we need our heads not to get rid of our feelings, but to give them perspective. Likewise, if our hands don’t get involved, the affair is likely to be rather empty and unsatisfying. After all, who wants to have an affair of the heart where our hands and our bodies don=t get involved at some point along the way?

We sometimes forget, though, that religion is ultimately an affair of the heart.

There is a story that my colleague the Unitarian Universalist minister Richard Gilbert tells of a woman from South Carolina who came into a large church in New York City where the ushers all still wore suits and the atmosphere was quite cold and formal. While the minister was delivering the sermon, this lively, vibrant woman enjoyed a certain point, and yelled out in this quiet, formal church, “Amen!” One of the ushers came up running and asked, “Lady, are you sick?” “Sick?” she answered. “No, I got religion.” The usher replied, “My God, lady, not here!”

It’s an emotional connection to something larger than ourselves that we are seeking, and it seems like this is a universal human need.

.           When it is missing from our lives we feel disconnected, alienated, estranged, ungrateful,

empty, bored, dissatisfied, depressed, alone, and anxious.

I read that clinical depression seems to be at epidemic levels in this country, and according to one researcher at the University of Washington, it is the most common problem a primary-care physician treats, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s related to the lack of connection that so many people report feeling in their lives.

However, when this connection is a connection to only part of humanity, to only part of all that it is, it can be one of the most dangerous things in human existence.

I think of the 19 terrorists who crashed their planes into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Did they have a feeling of connection to something beyond themselves. I’m sure they did. The problem was the connection did not go far enough.

Closer to home, I can tell you about a church I once visited in Federal Way, where I live. It was an Evangelical Christian congregation that I was visiting, and though its theology is different from mine, I actually liked it very much until the minister started a 20-minute diatribe against the evils of homosexuality and the dangers that gays and lesbians pose to our society.

Did that minister and that congregation have a feeling of connection to something beyond themselves? I’m sure they did. The problem again was the feeling of connection did not go far enough.

These events brought to mind Jonathan Swift’s remark about individuals who have enough religion to hate, but not enough to love.

When this heart connection is fully present in people, it can lead us to do extraordinary things. In her book, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity, the political  scientist Kristin Renwick Monroe, interviewed people who risked their lives to save Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe before and during World War II.

Did they risk their lives for religious reasons? Well, sometimes religion, when defined by belief or action - - seemed to get in the way. One woman harbored Jews in her home, and when a Nazi officer found out, she agreed to become his mistress to buy his silence. However, the young woman was also a devout Catholic, so she went to church to confess this sin and to ask for forgiveness. The priest, who quickly figured out what she was doing, told her to turn in the Jews and stop endangering her mortal soul. The young woman turned around, walked out of the church, and never went back, she said.

What Monroe did find among those who risked their lives to save others was a world view in which all of life constitutes an [interconnected and interdependent] whole. She said that all of the rescuers shared, “a spiritual feeling of closeness to others or a belief that we are all part of a human family.”

It is not only extraordinary individuals who experience this sense of connection, however.