The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
November 5th, 2006
“Break
not the circle, make it wider still, till it includes, embraces all the living.” We
find this sentiment in Whitman’s 1855 poem, “Leaves of Grass,” and
Higginson’s 1871 essay, “The Sympathy of Religions.” Whitman
says his faith encloses “all worship ancient and modern, and all between
ancient and modern.” Higginson says his religion “must not include
less than the piety of the world.” Both men imagine an endlessly wide
circle including and embracing, as the hymn says, “all the living.”
I offer their
words this morning as eloquent examples of a radical 19th-century American spirituality.
They refused to limit themselves to one religious practice or to one religious
community. They refused to believe in the righteousness of one particular religion.
Instead they set out upon the open road, eager to explore the wisdom of the world’s
religions, eager to know a multiplicity of practices and practitioners, and eager
most of all to discern the truths common at the core of all religions, seeking
what Higginson called “the sympathy of religions.”
This sermon
is the fourth in a series on the sources or building blocks of the Unitarian
Universalist living tradition. This morning, and again on November 19th, I am
focusing on our fourth source, wisdom from the world’s religions which
inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life. To some it seems odd that
a small, historically Protestant, liberal denomination in North America would
claim as a source of its tradition the “wisdom of the world’s religions.” I
know this because it often seems odd to me. There are thousands of religions,
and not all are consistent with Unitarian Universalism. Not all profess wisdom
that flows easily into the liberal religious mind and heart. But there is a story
behind this idea which I want to tell you now, and hopefully give you a sense
of why it continues to be a critically important story for our times.
The American
religious landscape of the 1830s was technically interfaith. There were small
Jewish and possibly Muslim communities. There were many Native American communities
with distinct religious identities. But the vast majority of people were Protestant
Christians, who made up an even larger majority of the U.S. population then than
they do today. Christianity was taken for granted—the assumed religious
identity. Anything else was inferior, foreign, heathen. There was a popular political
concept of religious freedom, but not religious pluralism. There were no interfaith
coalitions or prayer-breakfasts. It was a deeply homogenous society, which makes
it all the more compelling that a small cadre of highly educated, Boston-area
religious radicals known as Transcendentalists—most of them with some connection
to the Unitarian Church—began rejecting the theological doctrines and institutional
rules of liberal Protestantism and reached out in their studies and spiritual
wanderings to the religions of the world.
It was unprecedented.
Although religions have always tended to borrow from and blend with each other
as they’ve come into contact, to my knowledge the world had never seen
anything quite like the intentionality and vision with which the Transcendentalists
created a new, eclectic, mystical spirituality embracing the teachings of the
world’s religions. It was unprecedented.
Their project,
as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, was to “collate . . . the grand expressions
of the moral sentiment in different ages and races.”1 After
leaving the Unitarian ministry Emerson became famous as a Transcendentalist leader.
His journals, essays, and lectures show he drew deep spiritual inspiration from
Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism and Sufism.2 As
co-editors of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial in the 1840s, Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau published commentaries on what they called “ethical
scriptures.” On the pages of The Dial one could find excerpts
of scriptures from China, India, the Arabian Peninsula—profound spiritual
insights from religions across the globe. Emerson sought both an original and
a universal spirituality, a common human religion beneath all superficial religious
differences. In 1844 he wrote in his journal, “Friend and foe are of one
stuff, and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of surface are unimportant.”3
Another practitioner
of this new spirituality was Lydia Maria Child, a Unitarian, a Transcendentalist,
an abolitionist, a woman’s rights activist, and author of “Over the
River and Through the Woods.” In 1854 she published a three volume academic
study entitled The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages,
and then a similar work in 1878 for popular audiences entitled Aspirations
of the World: A Chain of Opals. In that book she “sought to avoid
the ‘endless mazes of theology,’ which divided one religion from
another, and to concentrate instead on ‘the primeval impulses of the human
soul.’” 4 She “imagined
an ‘Eclectic Church of the Future which shall gather forms of holy aspirations
from all ages and nations.’”5
Thomas Wentworth
Higginson was a Unitarian, a Transcendentalist, an abolitionist, a woman’s
rights activist, an army colonel. His essay, “The Sympathy of Religions,” became
the premier statement of this new American spirituality in the late 1800s. Historian
Leigh Eric Schmidt’s says that for Higginson, “cultivating sympathy
was a way of bridging differences and recognizing commonalities; it was a basis
of overcoming isolation through affective connection, joining people in shared
enterprises, and creating mutuality through identification with others.... In
[Higginson’s] hands, sympathy became an instrument for transforming Christian
uniqueness into religious openness: ‘When we fully comprehend the sympathy
of religions,’ [Higginson] concluded, ‘we shall deal with other faiths
on equal terms.’”6 To
sum up this new American spirituality: it saw Christianity as one among many
religions of equal value; it proclaimed that all religions share a common core
despite theological and practical differences; and it engendered a profound sense
of liberation at the prospect of tapping into the world’s vast religious
canon for sources of inspiration and spiritual insight.
Universalists
began expressing these views in the 20th century. In a 1949 sermon, the Rev.
Brainerd Gibbons, soon to be elected president of the Universalist Church of
America, proclaimed “a new type of Universalism … boundless in scope,
as broad as humanity, and as infinite as the universe. Is this Universalism’s
answer: A religion, not exclusively Christian or any other named brand, but a
synthesis of all religious knowledge which passes the test of human intelligence,
a truly universal religion?”7 That
same year in Boston the Rev. Kenneth Patton founded the Charles Street Meeting
House with the intent of putting this redefined Universalism into practice. The
congregation’s goal was “to combine the art, literature, idealism,
philosophies, music, and symbolism of all the world’s religions into a
religion for one world.” 8 On
a platform in the front of the sanctuary was a large bookcase which housed the
major writings of all the world’s religions and cultures. “Whereas
dogmatic religions sometimes put ‘the one book’ front and center,” said
Patton, “we put the many great books of [humanity] together as a symbol
of our acceptance of all human wisdom and poetry and literature as ours.”9 On
the interior walls were painted 65 “symbols taken from the world’s
religions, ancient and modern.”10 The
very meaning of Universalism was shifting from the traditional liberal Christian
notion of universal salvation, to this broader ideal of a universal religion.
And today
if you look through our hymnal you will find hymns and readings either inspired
by or lifted directly from a variety of religious traditions other than Unitarian
Universalism. Today, many ministers wear stolls depicting the symbols of many
religions. Today, we teach our children about the religions of the world. So
the story continues.
Some words
of caution. The Charles Street Meeting House is now the home of a Starbucks or
some high end coffee shop. The experiment in crafting a universal religion didn’t
last. The eloquent architects of the new American spirituality were a bit naïve.
Their notion of a universal religion was wonderfully idealistic and profoundly
impractical. It’s one thing to find inspiration in the wisdom of the world’s
religions. It’s quite another to start constructing a universal religion
drawing from the supposed truths of all religions. What we know today is that
we can’t just claim other religions as our own, at least not without doing
the spiritual work those religions call for, and not without first connecting
deeply with the communities and cultures to whom those religions belong. We can’t
just take a scripture, ritual or concept out of one religion and place it into
another. They lose their power and authority; their meaning changes. And who
are we to tell people from other religious traditions that the surface elements
of their practice are inconsequential, that they ought to shed the outer husk
and get to the kernel of truth lying beneath? There’s arrogance and even
racism in this suggestion. For so many people, the surface features of a religion
are the pathway to that religion’s truths. You can’t get there any
other way. You can’t magically separate the internal truth from the external
features.
I also caution
us about the assumption that all religions profess the same truth at their core,
that we are all heading up different paths on the same mountain. I don’t
think this is true. I think we are more likely all heading up different mountains.
When you look at theology, Christianity and Buddhism are not saying the same
thing under the surface. Neither are Judaism and Taoism; neither are Hinduism
and Islam. I think it is true most religions come to
the same ethical conclusions about the value of compassion and love and treating
neighbor as self. But two religions that agree on ethics do not necessarily agree
on the deeper truths—on the nature of God or the self or history.
Finally, while
these radical spiritual innovators envisioned a gradual falling away of religious
differences and the evolution of one world religion, throughout the late 20th
century and now into the early 21st century, religious divisions have hardened
throughout the world; political leaders have brought the art of religious manipulation
to levels unparalleled in human history; the star of religious fundamentalism
has risen to counter pluralism and liberalism in both their secular and religious
forms and that star seems nowhere near to waning. Violence, war and death have
been the result of fundamentalism running to extremes in recent times. It is
unfortunate: the liberal proponents of the sympathy of religions were wrong in
their predictions.
But I tell
you, when I am sad and fearful about the violence in the world so closely linked
with religion in our times, I find courage and strength and hope precisely in
these Unitarian and Universalist religious forebears who were naïve and
impractical and idealistic enough to believe that unity was possible, that peace
was possible, that a grand co-mingling of the great religions was possible. Today’s
world needs that naiveté, impracticality and idealism. Recall that the
idea of ending slavery and the idea of women voting were seen by most in the
1830s as naïve, idealistic, and impractical. But people like Lydia Maria
Child and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, grounded in this new American spirituality,
knew that you had to fight for what is true and right no matter how entrenched
and powerful and massive the resistance.
We need that spirit now more than ever, not to build a new world religion, but
to bring to bear upon all those who would resort to violence the power of religion
to demand and create peace and justice. We need that spirit now more than ever
to counter the atrocious and sinful ways in which religion and the concept of
morality have been abducted and redeployed in the service of violent political
and economic aims. Is it naïve and impractical and overly idealistic to
call for that spirit in the face of this terrible war in Iraq, in the face of
religious terrorism, in the face of the Israeli-Palestinian-Hezbollah conflict;
in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions; in the face of American
and British economic and militaristic imperialism backed up by Christian fundamentalism?
Yes, it is naïve and impractical and overly idealistic and I make no apologies
for it. The alternative is to join in the violence or say nothing and hope the
violence won’t touch us, and neither of those alternatives appeals to me.
When we Unitarian Universalists name the wisdom of the world’s religions as a source for our living tradition, we are not trying to be all things to all people, and we are not trying to be something we are not. But we are saying very clearly “Break not the circle, make it wider still, till it includes, embraces all the living.” We are saying very clearly that inter-religiousdialogue is possible and necessary, that religious pluralism is a strength of our society and our world, that many religions can co-exist, that we can learn from and inspire each other, and that together we can plumb the depths of our various traditions to make peace and justice real. Yes, it may be naïve, impractical, and overly idealistic. And yes, we will continue in this project, this now-old-but-still-new American spirituality, in the spirit of our forebears, learning the wisdom of the world’s religions, because the piety of the world and the sympathy of religions are quite possibly all that will save us. Amen and Blessed be.
2Richardson, Robert, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) pp. 378-9, 423.
7Gibbons, Brainerd F., “Address to the Universalist General Assembly,” Rochester, NY 1949, quoted in Cassara, Ernest, ed., Universalism in America (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1984) p. 272.
