A few weeks back I got a form letter from the Islamic Center of Muncie, IN.  It was to invite all religious people to tour their new facility and share in an open house.  They have chosen as their new worship space a building that is very visible on a major shopping artery only a few blocks from our UU church.

The first paragraph of the note gave basic information but the second paragraph read as follows:

“This life is entrusted to us as a gift and we must live to serve the oppressed and the needy because it is our duty. We must learn to create kindness, compassion and love for each other to alleviate mutual distrust and enmity between people of different ethnicities, races and faiths. The Islamic Center of Muncie hopes that you will support us in this effort.”

Reading this I thought, “This could have been written as a mission statement of a UU church.”  I liked their opening in a stance of gratitude, their emphasis on service, on promoting kindness and love and alleviating enmity. I liked their invitation to cooperation and unity.   I know that not all Muslims, even in this center, are of the same mind, but their current leadership has set them on a progressive course.   Of course a UU statement would also include something about the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Furthermore I know that Muslims  in general are not thinking of gay or lesbian, bisexual or trans-gender people as among the oppressed.  But they can be our allies in many ways.

For instance there is the Maryland legislator, Saqib Ali, who has considered the oppression of glbt people and has taken a stance in support of gay marriage even though he fully understands and accepts that there can be no gay Muslims [or more accurately, if one is to  submit to Islam one must accept its strict prohibitions against homosexuality]  (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111770008).

As I learned in community organizing, there are no such things as permanent allies, there are no such thing as permanent enemies.  Each may take different paths but the struggle for peace and justice is universal.

I have been studying Buddhist thought for more than thirty years, since I first got a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones in high school.  For more than ten years I have been learning about Buddhist practice, integrating meditation into my life and attending Buddhist ceremonies of various sorts.  Thus, as I was listening to All Things Considered yesterday to a report from Sichuan China, I was surprised to hear about someone who had lost his faith in Buddha.

Some NPR reporters had returned to Sichuan a year after the terrible earthquake.  One year ago a reporter had spent a day with a couple who were looking for their child in the rubble.  The body of the child was eventually found in the arms of his grandparents who had also been killed.  A year later the couple felt too fragile to talk to the reporter, but the man’s sister was willing to tell how her brother and sister-in-law were doing.

What struck me was how she described her brother’s religious thinking.  I paraphrase here: “He says he no longer believes in Buddha.  There is no point in burning incense, no point in praying.  He says, “My parents were good people, they lived a good life, my son was an innocent two year old.  There can be no Buddha or Heaven if such people die like this.” “

I thought this kind of tragicly flawed thinking, that if you pray good things will happen to you (and when bad things happen faith is lost), was only a product of Christianity, or monotheism and the idea that ‘God is in charge.’   I have been trained to think of the Buddha as a man who said, “Don’t put faith in me; test everything I say with experience; hold to the light within as the only light.”  I have been trained to think that Buddhism is about awakening the mind, not about calling upon the protection of supernatural powers.  (Though as I think about it I can remember several counter examples.)

The point is that many things are universal, including tragic and hurtful forms of magical thinking.  Superstition is not a creation of any one religion, or of any, but of the human mind, of our desires, craving, sin or tanah.  Thre will alwys be misplaced faith, trust in the wrong things.  Thus there will always be people who need the balm of a liberal faith, one that explains why we should live by love, ‘agape’ or ‘metta’, that helps us to face death and disaster with courage and an affirmation of life, that does not give us false hope, but an enduring and cosmic hope that transcends all time and tides.

So I was wandering around in my WordPress dashboard when I noticed that someone had linked to my page from somewhere in Mexico.  So I checked out the link and found the Libre Congregacion Unitaria de Mexico.  If that was not cool enough they had translated one of my sermons, “No Immaculate Conception” into Spanish.  How cool is that?  I know some Spanish, enough to get into trouble, as the saying goes, but I could never have done that sort of translation.  Now I can preach one of my sermons totally in Espanol (sorry, but I don’t know how to blog with Spanish accents yet.)

The Mexican Unitarians had even added illustrations.  Wow. I had never thought to add visual elements to my web works.  The translator had added hyperlinks into my text, such as a link to an English language biography of James Luther Adams.   They included links to my Muncie UU website, the photo (now old) from that site, as well as links to my WordPress blog.  I did not know any of this had been done, but as long as they give credit where credit is do I think the whole thing is very, very cool.

As they say at the top of the site: El amor es la doctrina de esta iglesia, La búsqueda de la verdad su sacramento, Y el servicio es su oración.

This is the third in a series on theological depth.  (see: http://http//uulte.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-more-what-is-deeper.html)

My favorite story about UU lay theological education comes from the parents of a child in the church I now serve.  She was about ten and playing on the playground at school when another child came up to her and said with accusation in her voice, “Do you believe in God?”  The UU child responded “Which one?”

A conservative theological education is usually about learning the difference between the right way and the wrong way, sometimes the many wrong ways.  On the other hand a liberal theological education is about understanding something of the many paths.  It has been wonderful to hear the President of the United States say, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers.”  The UU Child had learned this basic lesson of religious diversity that the more conservative child had not learned; there are many ideas about God, and we can be a nation, one people, despite this diversity.  UUs should be the leaders in our nation and world on this matter, but instead we have been sidelined by a tendency to avoid God language all together.

I have long asserted that the key question before UUs is not “is there a God” but “what can we know of God?”  As ‘Unitarians’ we naturally assert a fundamental unity to absolute reality.  But how to summon that unity that is both inclusive and has integrity?  If the UU child were asked “Do you believe in the Christian God?” Would our child be able to distinguish between the God of Hell and Damnation and the God of Universal salvation?  Would he or she be able to ask if the other is interested in the God of rules and discipline, or the God of the free Spirit that is bread and joy to the world?  Would the UU child be able to explain that the one ultimate God is beyond anyone’s ability to know and thus there are many faces we give to the divine?  Would he or she be able to say that the ultimate truth is seen as clearly by those who see only grace in the natural forces of the universe as by those who know God as Krishna, or the resurrected Jesus?

There is one man in my congregation who has drifted over to the Anglican church and then back to our UU congregation.  The center-point of his religious journey was in a very dynamic and liberal Catholic church.  There he developed a very personal relationship with God.  He also found loving inclusion of him as one of many gay and lesbian people.  When he came to Indiana he found the same feeling and spirit only in the UU Church.  But after several enthusiastic months with us he left, troubled at having to explain (or avoid talking about) God, his desire to praise God, and to thank God for loving him as a gay man.    At our last meeting he told me, in essence that he feels God’s presence in our church, even if we don’t talk about him enough, and so somehow he will have to make do with less God talk.  I told him I would try to include his needs in my worship leading as best I could, despite my personal grounding in scientific naturalism and a non-theist Buddhism.

Theologically I find that the Hindu religious tradtion has a longer history of celebrating and exploring unity within diversity.  We too should develop such a theology in English rather than Sanscrit.  But we must also develop a way of helping people distinguish between the weaknesses and dangers of the many paths… even if there is “one mountain” it is still possible to fall off… which leads me to my next post.

To continue my response to the call for creating theological depth in UU Churches, I have three issues: Covenant vs. Creed, Theism vs. Atheism, Answers vs. Practices.

I will keep saying, until someone gives me a good reason not to, that ours is a covenential rather than a creedal faith. I draw my ideas of covenant from James Luther Adams and to a lesser extent from the Jewish religious tradition. A creed is a statement of belief that is used as a test or touchstone for belonging to a religious community. At most a statement of faith is the source of salvation; at least it is used as the central defining feature of a religion. UUism, on the other hand, allows for radical divergence of ‘credo’ (literally – “I believe”) on many matters. What we do believe in is making sacred promises, or covenants. These are agreements on how we will act, and on what principles will guide our actions. Our congregations currently have covenanted to affirm and promote seven principles.

Thus theological depth in UU religious life requires that we understand the difference between faith as ‘trust’ and faith as ‘belief.’ It requires that we understand that belief is central to Christian and Muslim faith, but not to every religion. Depth requires that we think about the difficulties caused by rejecting belief as a cornerstone of a religion, and to understand the ways that covenants are mis-used and mis-understood. It means that we think through the difference between covenant and contract, covenant and non-sacred promises, etc.

Most people in American and Eropean Culture begin their studies of religions in terms of belief. “What do Jews believe?” they ask for example, or “What do Hindus believe?” not realizing that these are Christian questions that may not lead to an adequate understanding of Hinduism or Judaism. To some extent the whole idea of “Hinduism” was created by British Christians who wanted to understand the religious culture of India, never realizing that there was not really “One” Hindu faith until they began asking, over and over again, what is Hinduism, and what do Hindus believe. The same thing happens with UUism. In order to break from this yoke we must be able to speak clearly to the theological justification of Covenant as the way that the true and good comes into human lives.

Thus an understanding of covenant and a deeper shared use of that term and the practices behind it is the starting point for UU Theological depth.

The Panel on UU Lay Education has begun a conversation about depth in UU theology. See this site:  http://uulte.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-more-what-is-deeper.html

It is an essential question, what would UU depth look like, and deeper than that, is UU depth even possible? I was first challenged with this question at least fifteen years ago when a UU friend of mine began to become more explicitly Christian. When I asked him about it he told me, “UUism has great breadth, but I needed depth.”

For my friend spiritual and theological depth went hand and hand. Perhaps the first step then in developing theological depth’ is to distinguish it from ’spiritual depth’ and clarifiy the purpose of theology. In my nomenclature spirituality has to do more with feeling and intuition, theology more to do with clarity of language and integrity of thinking, but it may not be so for everyone.

One of our perennial problems is that we are rather fuzzy on the use of religious language. We often borrow and reinterpret words from traditional Christianity, and sometimes from Hinduism or Native American traditions, but with little clarity about what they mean traditionally and we give them rather vague and fuzzy definitions for our own use. Instead, theological depth demands clarity of language.

We need to be clearer about why we are seeking “depth” in order to determine how to get it. I think one of the goals that may be behind this drive for theological education in a UU context is to gain an ability to respond to family members, co-workers, and people in our communities who speak so assuredly of God or Truth or the Bible. Instead of responding with vague questions we need to know which questions to ask, and were to go with responses to our questions. But this purpose is different than engaging with depth in interfaith conversation or spiritual direction for our people.

I have lots more to say about theological depth, but this is enough for now.