Religion 101

6 June 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Sixty years ago today, U.S. forces landed on the beaches of Normandy for the D-Day invasion that began turning the direction of WWII toward victory. But the cost was very high, paid in the currency of young dead soldiers. While the sacrifice of soldiers is something we must not underestimate, it must be balanced by a sense of the terrible loss, the human tragedy, in a game played by sacrificing young soldiers as wars do. So for our prayer this morning, I have chosen Archibald Macleish’s poem to speak for these concerns. The poem is titled “The Young Dead Soldiers.”

The Young Dead Soldiers

by Archibald Macleish

The young dead soldiers do not speak. Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them? They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

They say: we were young. We have died. Remember us.

They say: we have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: we have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

They say: whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: we leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

SERMON: Religion 101

I’m trying something old this morning, reworking a sermon I wrote in my first year of ministry, in the fall of 1986. I was surprised to find how long it was: 4500 words! I’ve cut out about 2,000 words here. So let’s talk about “Religion 101.”

At the end of his book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran’s “prophet” is asked to speak of religion, and he gives a brief lesson in Religion 101 when he says:

Have I spoken this day of anything else?

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, and that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate our faith from our actions, or our belief from our occupations?

… Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all….

Here’s another short quote about religion 101, from the American psychologist William James, who was quoting one of his favorite professors:

“Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 487)

The words are taken from James’ book The Varieties of Religious Experience, written in 1902 and still better than anything in its field. There are, as the title of his book says, many varieties of religious experience. Not just one kind, not just one path, not just one flavor or style or rhythm, but many varieties of religious experience, many roads to this nebulous thing that answers to the name of ” religion.”

” Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.”

For many people, there is nothing of value in religion. As a physicist I knew in graduate school said, ” religion is just a dangerous mental virus: it takes over your mind, and if you don’t get rid of it, it metastasizes, and before you know it you’re a slobbering mystic.”

A more famous, if less picturesque, definition of religion came from Karl Marx, who called it ” the opium of the masses.” But to lift only that last phrase out of what Marx said is to miss the poignancy of the two sentences which preceded it. What Marx really wrote was this:

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the masses.”

(from Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Marx and Engels, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 263)

It’s worth a paragraph to explain what it meant, calling religion the opiate of the masses. In Marx’s time, the wealthy routinely used heroin for a high-priced high that they accepted as solace and enlightenment. But heroin was strictly an upper-class drug then, and Marx was saying that the masses got their sense of solace and enlightenment at a much cheaper price from religion.

If we want to understand what religion is about, let’s start with the word itself. The key parts of the word are the “re-” and the ” -lig”. The prefix “re-” means the same that it means in other words, like re-make, re-turn, or re-do: it means to do something again. And the “-lig” means the same that it means in words like ” ligament’ or ” ligature:’ it refers to something that ties or binds together, that connects. So the word “religion” means a kind of re-connecting, re-binding things which have become separate. Specifically, religion means the reconnecting of life with meaning, of the human spirit with an enduring purpose, of people with themselves and their world.

It is a special kind of re-connecting, the connecting involved in religion. It is a connecting with orientations, values, and centers that can give to life a deep sense of balance, harmony, and peace, with a picture of the world that provides a caring place for us in it. There seems to be the feeling that, sometime, we must have been connected. That may not in fact be true, but it comes, in part, from the deep feeling in almost all people that they know what they are seeking. And how, then, could they know about the sense of peace, balance, and harmony which they are seeking unless there were something profoundly natural and innate about it.

It is as though we each had a kind of hole inside. A Southern Baptist minister friend of mine calls it, predictably, a “God-shaped hole”, but that is only partly right. For the kinds of insights and wonderings and gropings which have been put into God-language are only a few of the ways in which people have tried to put a name to that which could fill this hole, this need, this persistent sense that there could and should be more to life.

Basically, and to be a little too simple about it all, there are two directions that this search for connection takes. And, while they seem very different, together they show us much about what is really being sought in this religion business.

The first direction is to look for reconnection to a bigger sort of reality outside of us, to try and find patterns in the cosmos of which we are a part, and to feel ourselves anchored in this larger reality in a comforting yet challenging way. This is the route that could be called the path of all the sciences. The task of our grand speculative sciences is not only to describe some kind of outside reality, but to make the universe meaningful in human terms, to make it meaningful to us. Or, to take it a step farther, the task of the sciences is to present us with an understanding of the cosmos that can make it feel like a home to us, a grand reality of which we are a part, in which we have a place. If a science stops short of this, if it doesn’t present us as part of its grand picture, we have the feeling that it isn’t quite done yet, that further developments or discoveries are needed to make it all more relevant to us.

What has all this got to do with “religion”? It has to do with the deep and persistent yearning that we have for a sense of the whole of things that includes us in meaningful ways. If we look out to the world around us, that religious impulse is pursued mostly through our scientific endeavors. But the need to find a place for ourselves in the grand scheme of things, it’s worth mentioning, is not a scientific problem at all, but a religious one. It’s the yearning for a sense of re-connection to a larger reality, to the over-all scheme of things, for a persuasive feeling that we are somehow included in the grand scheme of things.

You can put some of the aims of religion in much simpler terms. In plain language, every religion worthy of the name is the attempt to become better people, better partners, better parents and better citizens. It is the attempt to make a positive difference in the lives of ourselves, our children, and our larger community and world. It’s concerned with trying to feel re-connected in meaningful ways with a larger and more enduring reality. The first route, the one I’ve been trying to sketch up until now, looks outward, to the world and universe around us, and tries to paint a picture that finally includes us in significant ways. The direction, to reduce the whole field of science to a grand gesture, is to look outward, to trace the outlines of a horizon of all that is, in a way that at last brings us into it.

But there is also a second direction where the religious impulse carries us. This is the journey within ourselves, that deep looking-within for value and purpose, for worth and direction. While the direction is different, however, the goal is the same. It is the goal of re-connecting us with a larger picture of ourselves and the world around us.

The first route is the route of science, and pseudo-science and even of superstition. The second route is the route of psychology, philosophy, and the more existentialist approaches to religion. One poetic way this second route has been characterized is as “the soul’s search for God.” Or, in the older terms of Greek mythology, Psyche’s search for Eros: the soul’s search for divine love. It is written about not in the language of science, but the language of poetry. This is the route you’ll find in so many of the wonderful psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is also the route taken by the mystics of all times and places. In order to recognize the religious dimensions of writings along this second route, we have to read them not as science but as poetry. I’ll read you one, to make this both more clear and more beautiful. It is a paragraph from the great fifth century Christian thinker known to us as Saint Augustine.

Augustine’s influence in western religious thought cannot be overestimated. He was the most profound single person in the whole history of Christian thought, and easily the most influential. His theology became the orthodoxy of Roman Catholic thought for a thousand years or more, and he is often called the grandfather of the Protestant Reformation, as well. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, and both Luther and John Calvin, the other great Protestant reformer, quoted Augustine’s writings more than all other thinkers combined. But besides being a first-rate theologian, he was a first-rate religious poet. Listen to this single paragraph, taken from his autobiography, where he tries to talk about his God. Don’t think of the word “God” here as meaning some sort of a giant critter, some kind of a large old man with a beard, or fingers and kneecaps, or you’ll miss it completely. This is not science, but religious poetry, and religious poetry of the first order. Here are Augustine’s words, written nearly 1600 years ago:

What do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not blown away by the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God. (Confessions, p. 211)

When at last I cling to you with all my being, for me there will be no more sorrow, no more toil. Then at last I shall be alive with true life, for my life will be wholly filled by you. (p. 232)

Augustine, here, uses the masculine pronoun for this “god” of his, but it’s pretty clear that he’s not talking about a male, a man, or a superman. Nor would it be any more helpful to use feminine pronouns, for he’s not talking about a female, a woman, or a superwoman, either. It is clear – and this is true of most of the great theologians – that the anthropomorphic language is being used for poetic reasons, not scientific ones. Grand scientific theories, when they work, can make us feel included in the grand scheme of things. That’s the goal of the first road to religion, the road that leads outward. But the second route is quite different: Augustine didn’t feel merely included in reality, he felt cherished by it!

Every mystic, every poet, and the artists, musicians, dancers, and romantics of all times and places would recognize a kindred spirit in these words of Augustine’s.

Less poetic and more modern versions of this interior route to the quest for connectedness are the hundreds of psychotherapies to which people go in search of the elusive sense of reconnection. Nor should that seem odd: remember that the Greek word psyche, the root word in both “psychotherapy” and “psychology”, means soul. So the therapy of the soul consists, as it always has, in re-connecting it with a sense of wholeness.

By now you are perhaps picking up a pattern here, which is that I can find religion everywhere. And that is true. I find it, as so many others have, underlying most of our scientific wonderments; I find it in fairy tales, children’s tales, in mythology, literature, the arts, music, psychology, meditation, cultural anthropology, yoga, and a hundred other human endeavors. If our religion is our search for wholeness and connectedness, then it is like a sacred melody, singing through everything we do.

And it is. I began by speaking of religion, and then I went on, it may have seemed, to speak of many other things. But, to repeat the words of Kahlil Gibran with which I began,

Have I spoken this day of anything else?

Who can separate our faith from our actions, or our belief from our occupations?

… Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all….

You bring your religion, as I do, into everything you do, and woven deep into the fabric of all our endeavors we’ll find that golden thread, that part of our very core that is seeking for a kind of connectedness and re-connectedness above, beneath, and through it all.

Think, this week, about what your own religion really is: the ways in which you look for connectedness within yourself and in the world around you. Think of the things that seem to work, and those that do not, and the blind alleys that may exist. Think of the difference between feeling merely included in your world, and feeling cherished by it. And wonder about some things, as well. Wonder what it is you are trying to be re-connected to, and whether it is worth it; wonder who has helped you to be more connected to meaning and purpose in your life, whether you have ever told them so; and wonder who you might help connect to those things worth connecting to.

My friend the physicist was partly right. Religion is sort of like a mental or spiritual virus, and – if we’re persistent – it can indeed begin to take over our life. At least that’s the hope. Religion is about trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. It is about trying to make a positive difference in ourselves, our children, and our society and world. It is about returning to the place where we began, recognizing that place, and our place within it, for the first time.

But this is all so much talk, so many words about what religion is! Really, it is much simpler. Really, when we think of religion, we shouldn’t think of it as a noun. We should think of it as a verb, as an action word urging us into motion. Then, when religion is understood, the whole subject of “Religion 101” can be summed up in just two words: your move.