Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, VA
A diverse, welcoming community of open hearts and minds since 1948
The Big Questions (5): Can Religion Save Us? by Rev. Michael McGee, Feb. 5, 2012
“Big Question 5: Will Religion Safe Us?by Rev. Michael McGee, Feb. 5, 2012 “Sometimes we stumble into history. My husband and I did exactly that last week when we chose to visit Mt. Dora, Florida. Little did we know that Newt Gingrich was planning a visit, too. The Florida Republican primaries were in full swing, and so was the Gingrich entourage. As we ate breakfast on the porch of a historic hotel on Lake Dora we learned that Newt, Callista and the gang were appearing the next morning, to be introduced by Calvin Coolidge himself. We made plans not to attend, although we do like Calvin Coolidge. “Late the next morning we decided to visit the hotel again, certain the hoopla would be over. It wasn't. While we missed the speech and Calvin, the Gingrich campaign was still there, shaking hands, having photos taken. We took a table and watched and listened. From my closest neighbor I learned that as a 'liberal' I should be automatically deported to either France or Greece. (I so wanted to ask this gentleman if Santorini was a possibility.) Small groups of people wearing Patriot Army T-shirts converged on us, which made my heart beat a little faster... “Seeing one of the candidates in person, and being subjected to the negative campaigning on Florida television did make me think harder. I remembered hearing that in 1990 Newt, himself, published a list of words Republican candidates should use when talking about Democrats, so after the event, I searched for it. Along the way I found another list a group at politicalstrategy.org had put together to turn the tables. You'll enjoy the contrast. Newt's list: "Anti-flag, anti-family, anti-child, anti-jobs, betray, coercion, collapse, consequences, corruption, crises, decay, deeper, destroy, destructive, devour, endanger, failure, greed, hypocrisy, ideological, impose, incompetent, insecure, liberal, lie, limit(s), pathetic, permissive attitude, radical, self-serving, sensationalists, shallow, sick, they/them, threaten, traitors, unionized bureaucracy, urgent, waste." Political Strategy's list: "American, Best-interest, Bipartisan, Caring, Children, Choice, Clean, Common sense, Confident, Correct, Courage, Decent, Democracy, Determination, Diversity, Environment, Equity, Fairness, Family, Fiscal responsibility, Forward looking, Freedom, Growth, Hard working, Health, Humane, Innovative, Justice, Liberty, Life, Majority, Middle-class, Moral, New ideas, Open government, Open-minded, Passionate, Peace, Pioneer, Populist, Progressive, Pro-growth, Promote, Prosperity, Protection, Proud, Reality, Responsibility, Security, Solution, Strength, Success, Tolerance, Truth, Unity, Vision, We/us/our, Win, Women, Working, Working-class." “Does any of this sound familiar? “Let's, none of us, Republican/Democrat, or Conservative/Liberal be taken in by lists of words in this next election. Let's listen, but let's search hard for the facts and not be taken in by rhetoric.” Terry's words relate well to the sermon this morning. I want to ask a big question that I'm sure all of us have asked ourselves and each other often: Can religion save us? And to help answer that question, let me share this poem with you: Sermon:I hope you enjoyed Terry's blog about being caught in the middle of a Newt Gingrich rally. While we were sitting there, taking this cultural experience in, Terry and I started talking about whether we could live in a state where the governor and legislature is actively trying to take away the rights of women and minorities and the poor while protecting the privileged and powerful. And then it hit us that we do live in that state. It's called Virginia. This week the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would require an ultrasound before an abortion as one of several obstacles they plan to put in the way of women who need to terminate a pregnancy, including giving rights to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. I loved Senator Janet Howell's effort to turn the tables when she proposed a bill that would require some similar obstacles for those who wish to get a Viagra perception, including a digital rectal examination and a cardiac stress test. I'm also thankful that the Susan G. Komen organization reversed their decision and welcomed Planned Parenthood back into the fold after a deluge of calls and emails.
Rev. Linda spoke eloquently on the Personhood issue last month, but I want to add that I'm frustrated with the political bullying going on both in our state and in our country. And I want to talk about the need for a religious voice that seeks to include all people, not just the chosen few.
I know that some of you claim that you're not religious because religion is about God and salvation and an exclusive politics. I beg to differ. If you're in this church, you are a part of a long and courageous religious tradition in which many individuals have sacrificed greatly to preserve the right of all people to make their own choices and to have their inherent worth and dignity protected.
The word “religion” in its original Greek means to bind together, and our challenge as religious people is to bind together that which has been torn asunder, to heal the wounds of those who suffer, and to make deep connections of love and compassion with all people. Our world desperately needs this religious voice, a voice that speaks for those who have no voice and that does not fear to cry out when someones humanity is damaged or diminished. As the poem I read earlier stated, 99 out of 100 of us are worthy of compassion and all of us are mortal.
How many of you have read the book or seen the movie, “The Help”? Rev. Mark Kiyimba told us on MLK Sunday that this movie about the life of African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 60s made a deep impression on him. I was also very moved by it, but I found another book more helpful in shattering my privileged perspective.
“The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson deals with the Great Migration of some six million black Americans from World War I to the 1970s. The migration was the result of African Americans leaving the near slavery conditions in the South, and traveling by whatever means they could to find some measure of freedom and prosperity in the North and West. The book follows three young African Americans who risked leaving their homes for the uncertainty of rebuilding their lives in a land where there were more opportunities but also the persistent demons of poverty and prejudice.
The stories are real and terrifying for the black people who lived in the South during that time. The Jim Crow laws stripped African Americans of almost every possible freedom and human right. Lynchings of black people throughout the South for little or no cause were frighteningly frequent.
I grew up in the South and I knew little of this hidden world of brutality and inhumanity, and I believe few white people did then and do today. It's a part of our history that should be brought into the light of awareness for all people so we will not have to relive it. And there are ways we are reliving that terror right now, especially with the treatment of immigrants and the poor.
It's hard for me to imagine people treating other human beings in such a degrading way, as animals or even less than animals, as objects to be used and discarded. I see much of the bigotry in that time and in this time as being not only racial but a privileged class trying to protect and expand their wealth and power. But what can religion do to save us from such an inhumane way of treating people?
An inspiring answer to that question comes from another book I read recently, “Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith” by George Vaillant. Vaillant is a psychiatrist and Harvard professor who has spent his life studying how people change and grow over time. Using neuroscience, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, religious studies, and the scientific study of human emotion, he concludes that, “Positive emotions – not only compassion, forgiveness, love, and hope but also joy, faith/trust, awe, and gratitude – arise from our inborn mammalian capacity for unselfish parental love.” These emotions grow out of our limbic brain and are an essential part of our evolutionary heritage. All human beings are hardwired for positive emotions, which explains why they are evident in all major faiths.
These positive emotions, writes Valliant, “are not just nice to have; they are essential to the survival of H*** sapiens as a species... Negative emotions such as fear and anger are also inborn and are of tremendous importance.” But they are primarily about the individual, “whereas positive emotions have the potential to free the self from the self.”
Our capacity for these positive emotions are in fact what makes us spiritual beings. Spirituality, he writes, is a brain-based, evolutionary benefit for our species. Religion differs from spirituality in that “Spirituality arises from biology; religion arises from culture.” Religion supports the survival and evolution of our culture but only when it cultivates the positive emotions.
When religion does not support these positive spiritual values, then it becomes destructive or even demonic. Vaillant believes that a “focus on the positive emotions is the best and safest route to spirituality that we are likely to find.” He notes, “Love, like the other positive emotions, is religion without the side effects.”
There is so much more to this excellent book, but the message is one we need to hear. We live deep spiritual lives when we can integrate positive emotions, such as faith, love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion, and awe, into our daily lives. And when we integrate and incarnate those values into our culture, we become a religious force that supports the continued evolution of humanity.
That's a big, powerful, transforming message, isn't it?
How many of you have seen the TED video on our website called “Atheism 2.0” by Alain de Botton? It's a thought provoking lecture that challenges those who don't believe in God to cease and desist in condemning those who do, and instead look for ways that we can find commonality. Apparently, he's never heard of Unitarian Universalism or he would know that there is a vibrant religious movement that does not require the belief in God to get in the door and instead holds up the higher values of love, compassion, and justice.
In religious language, this humanizing process that Vaillant and Botton are promoting can be described as building the beloved community. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed that, “Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”
If I had to sum up the essence of religion, as well as the vision of our Unitarian Universalist faith and this church, it would be to build the beloved community here and now. The beloved community is the ideal of a community with no walls and barriers to keep out those who are different and to protect us from new and challenging ideas. It is a community where people feel their deep connections, their unity and oneness, not only to those within their walls but to all people and to our earth. And they live out that unity with a radical and universal love. Great place to be, isn't it?
But the beloved community doesn't come easily. It must be built, and that is no small task. It requires work and sacrifice and generosity. But the results are well worth it.
To build the beloved community we need to use language that communicates our spiritual values and respects the dignity and humanity of all. As Emilie writes in her blog, we need to refrain from using the negative language of Newt Gingrich and others that will be bombarding us for the next nine months.
Language does matter, and to save the world we need to use words that bind people together, that help them see our deep connections, that heal and empower and transform. And we need to build a beloved community right here, right now, in this church, and everywhere we go, that encourages us to leave our ego behind and to move steadily towards compassion and justice.
But we also need to proclaim our vision of the world as we want it to be. Someone recently passed me a flyer called, “Symptoms of Inner Peace” that includes this explanation:
“Be on the lookout for symptoms of inner peace. The hearts of a great many have already been exposed to inner peace and it is possible that people everywhere could come down with it in epidemic proportions. This could pose a serious threat to what has, up to now, been a fairly stable condition of conflict in the world.” “Some signs and symptoms of inner peace:
Following the “Symptoms of Inner Peace” comes “Signs of Emerging Outward Peace,” with the call to be on the lookout for signs like these in our country:
There are more signs, but you get the idea. For me, this is a religious vision of the beloved community. and this language is religious language that we need to proclaim.
Another way to put it is given in the book, “The Big Questions,” by Lama Surya Das, when he explains the concept of enlightenment. He writes that “For me, the enlightened state of mind is one of buoyant, incandescent clarity coupled with authentic, transparent presence. Enlightenment is the evolution of consciousness beyond the illusion that one has a separate existence... This is the wisdom of Awareness.”
We are saved as individuals and as a world when we build a beloved community that experiences the joy of compassion, a love that knows no bounds, gratitude that fills our spirits, and a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that gives meaning and worth to our lives.
This is the beloved community we're building here at UUCA. Let me assure you that we are not a country club or community center or a charity or a school. We're a religious community, a beloved community, of people who care about each other and our world, who struggle to live ethical lives, who strive to open our hearts and minds to a greater reality, and who want to make a difference in our world. May it ever be so.
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Photos of the ServiceSermon Sources:“Atheism 2.0” by Alain de Botton on TED.com Questions for Covenant Groups and others:
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