Davidson Loehr
Published in the Austin American Statesman
December 29th 2001
As a Unitarian, I’m a religious liberal. And for me, religion isn’t about God. It isn’t about Allah, Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, the Buddha or the rest. Religion is about the music, not the individual songs.
The distinction between the songs and the music is what sets liberal religion apart from other spiritual styles and opens it to dialogue with all sincere beliefs.
Why go to church? Because we are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. So salvation for us is salvation by character. (The word “salvation” comes from a Latin word meaning health or wholeness.) Few of us think of the payoff coming after we die. The goal is to grow into a deeper, more aware, compassionate and responsible kind of person in the here and now.
When I look for a simple way to explain what I think life and religion are about, I’m often drawn to the old Hindu parable of the blind people and the elephant. A bunch of blind people discover different parts of an elephant and try to explain to the others what this elephant is.
“It is like a tree,” says the man who grabbed a leg.
“No, you fool, it’s like a hard, thin rope!” says the woman who grabbed the elephant’s tail.
“You’re both wrong,” says the third, who holds the elephant’s ear. “It’s a huge flat leathery leaf.”
The fourth shouts back, “How can you all be both blind and stupid? An elephant is like a very thick, strong, snake!” — this, of course, from the one holding the trunk.
Our “elephant” is a metaphor for life, which is bigger and more complex than any one of us can ever grasp. Each blind person symbolizes one way of perceiving — one religion, one philosophy, one kind of science or art. We each have a tiny piece of the truth about life embedded in our different religious, cultural or scientific traditions. And like the blind people, we are always tempted to mistake our pieces of truth for The Truth.
Yet the quality of our beliefs is shown not by our certainties but by our actions toward people who hold a different piece of the truth.
For sermons, I draw from a variety of world religions, literature, myths and folk tales. I look for what is both useful and worthy of the highest ideals to which we can aspire.
The opposite of liberal religion is literal religion. After Sept. 11, we learned that fundamentalism of any kind is the mortal enemy of both freedom and democracy. It was sobering to hear that the “hate list” of the Taliban — liberated women, individual rights, homosexuality and freedom of religion — was echoed in our own country in that remarkably unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on “The 700 Club.” Against this background, religious liberalism may be the most American of all faith styles. In the Hindu story, it is comical to reduce the elephant to just a tiny piece of it. In religion and politics, it can be deadly.
That is part of the reason I am an active member of the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. I know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full choir. Goethe once said, “The person who does not know two languages does not even know one,” and it’s even more true in religion. Unless we are learning to understand several religious idioms, we are not likely to be part of the solution and may well become part of the problem. We show our religious maturity through dialogue, not proclamation.
It’s true that we lose something when we can no longer pretend that our particular beliefs are the center of the universe — when our “songs” are heard as just small but important parts of the more universal music of the human spirit. But we gain something, too. We gain a bigger world and a bigger family of brothers and sisters. If that enterprise isn’t sacred, I’m not sure what could be.
