At the risk of beating a dead horse

I have never once asked for responses to a blog post, mostly because it seems bossy and narcissistic, but also because it would certainly reveal the paltry number of people who actually read this blog. Which is no skin off my nose, but why go out of the way to point it out?

However, there's a piece on Slate that serves as a timely counterpoint to my recent longwinded post on religion, which moves me to encourage some responses from my few loyal readers. I suspect I am wedged between loyal readers who are more traditionally (in a Western sense) and monotheistically religious, who find my religious leanings so vague and watered down as to be virtually meaningless - a mile wide and an inch deep, so to speak; and those loyal readers who find the entire concept of religion useless and even dangerous, and fear that I've gone off the deep end every time I broach the subject, averting their eyes as if from an otherwise rational person who maintains an embarassing belief in fairies.

Certainly, the latter view is vigorously espoused by Christopher Hitchens in his upcoming book as excerpted on Slate, and it is a view that has seen increasingly aggressive articulation of late from thoughtful atheists who are - understandably - alarmed by what fundamentalist and oppressive religion seems to be doing to our world.

I will thus offer up Mr. Hitchens' piece, as well as a few other counter-arguments to my own position, and I would warmly invite non-abusive comment of any viewpoint on this subject.

Because I see a growing confrontation between two extremes - those who sincerely believe religion in a particular form must be imposed on everyone, and those who sincerely believe religion must be eradicated from human culture. I find this alarming because I think trying to eliminate the spiritual impulse is fruitless.

So - some final counterarguments heard from respected friends and family:

• Even if there is a natural human urge to explore questions of greater meaning, why can't that need be met through philosophy rather than religion? This is a good point, in my opinion. Especially if philosophy could be pursued in supportive communities, and you added a little music. I don't actually know where the line is between theology and philosophy. I'm sure there must be, oh, say, a classicist out there who could enlighten us on this one, at least from the etymological/historical perspective.
  
• How can you really have religion or even spirituality without God, and a soul? At some point, don't you get so far away from the world's generally accepted concept of religion that you make a mockery of it by trying to make it acceptable to everyone? Here I would go back to Buddhism without god, or for that matter Judaism without the immortal soul - our definition of religion exists soundly in the cultural lens of the so-called "Christian nation" that is the US. But, I think there's a fair point here. Who sets the boundaries of religious definition?

Talk amongst yourselves.

A truly pompous pondering that I'm wholly unqualified for, but who cares

Recently I've had a couple of conversations about religion with people whom I know very well, which have me thinking. I feel a need to compose my thoughts, so painfully and imperfectly articulated, into some kind of order. Before I launch into that bit, I should probably spend a moment on Unitarian Universalism, since I've found most people know little about it. This will seem like an essay but bear with me. It is in no way intended as evangelism for Unitarian Universalism - this essay will show that evangelism is contrary to the very nature of the beast - but it provides some legitimate context for the later bits.

Unitarianism and Universalism, which merged in the 1960s, started in the Protestant reformation. Unitarianism's particular heresy was anti-Trinitarian, that is, they rejected the Christian concept of Trinity as something that doesn't appear in scripture and was made up by men. This may not sound like a big-whoop now, but back then it got Unitarianism's founding theologian burned at the stake by a very cranky John Calvin. Universalists, somewhat like Quakers, believed in the universality of divine spirit - the divine in all of us - and universal salvation - no such thing as hell.

Both faiths moved away from Christianity in the 1800s, the Unitarians more so after the influence of the Transcendalists - the Alcotts, Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne - which emphasized divine revelation from the natural world (think of Thoreau), the relentless exploration of individual conscience (Emerson), and the mandate of reformist action in the world (Alcott).

What eventually emerged from all the evolutions and merging is a faith that has core principles*, but intentionally demands no creed. It draws on the Judeo-Christian traditions that gave it birth, but others as well. You can believe in god, broadly defined, but you don't have to. About 20% of UUs think of themselves as Christian, and 80% believe in God in some form. About 20% think of themselves as humanists, seeking revelation of truth primarily through the human intellect. What really ties everybody together is a passionate commitment to the individual pursuit of spiritual truth, and the call to put justice and compassion into practice in daily life. That, and the love of a good book - supposedly we buy more books per capita than any other religious group.

Ok, that was long, but here's the point. I keep having conversations with non-religious people who are stuck on the idea that religion requires God. They can't be religious because they don't believe in God. I think lots of monotheists have discarded the anthropomorphic, bearded, male deity, but God still seems pretty critical to the whole endeavor. Yet as the preceding essay indicates, I hang with a crowd who don't think that's true. But lest you dismiss us as marginal, bear in mind that Buddhism has no god concept - rather a universal divine force not unlike that of modern Universalists or even liberal Quakers.

So this got me thinking - what is religion? How is it different from faith, or the ubiquitously generic "spirituality?" Here's what I think.

It's a natural human urge to ask questions of meaning and purpose, and to explore the sense of awe that life sometimes brings. Every now and then we hear or read or experience something that makes us go, "Yes! That's what I feel!" It's not perfect, but it seems to approximate some bigger truth that we're grasping at, aiming for. Sometimes the moments of clarity seem to come more readily when we talk with other people who are thinking about the same kinds of questions.

When we achieve those rare moments of clarity, we want to capture them. It's hard work, thinking about The Meaning of Life or Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. It's elusive, that sense of wonder we feel when gazing at a beautiful mountain view, or grasping the tiny fingers of a baby. So when we get something that works for us, we write it down, or set it to music, or develop a ritual that seems to reliably recreate our satisfying sense of awe or peace or clarity. We get with our like-minded friends and we agree, yes, this is what we think. This is what works for us.

But then, because the words and the rituals are imperfect, and because we are constantly evolving as thinking, experiential beings - the written words and the rituals don't stay just right forever. Some of the people are more concerned about maintaining the purity of the words and the rituals, and seem less interested in the underlying truth, and that bothers us. Maybe our group of friends is able to keep evolving, but maybe they don't evolve well enough for us. Maybe we leave the group and start over someplace else.

The striving towards truth and meaning and awe - I think that is spirituality. I think nearly every human being has that, whether they think about it that way or not.

The urge to articulate it, and put it into durable form - that is faith. Not faith as in "have faith in God" but as in the concept of a faith tradition. A set of beliefs - however loose or specific - and ways to act on that belief. Not everybody feels the need for a faith.

The group of people who agree to get together and work those beliefs and actions together, that is religion. Religion is the institution or community of people that is created around beliefs, ideally to nourish its members' spirituality, to elicit each person's best self in community with others. Religion is tricky, because it suffers from the same foibles and inconstancies as any other human endeavor. It is often co-opted for societal purposes that have nothing to do with either spirituality or faith.

I further believe that as humans, we've gotten these concepts all confused. Many people are - understandably - repulsed by many things that have been done by religions, and can't see that sometimes those religions nonetheless have very lovely faiths underneath them. People see that most religions have a god concept, and think that spirituality requires God. There are too many people who think their particular faith and religion has the only right answer, which drives other people to run screaming from the whole concept. Religion is at its best when it understands these distinctions, and looks for the common themes of faith - the golden rule, peace, justice, human dignity, the interconnectedness of all life on earth - rather than the differences between religions.

That's what I think. At least as of today. Because I believe in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I reserve the right to think something different tomorrow - and because I believe in the right of conscience, I'm happy for anyone to argue something different.

The seven principles affirmed by Unitarian Universalists:

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person
  
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations
• Acceptance of one another and encouragement of spiritual growth in our congregations
  
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part

Apparently the Universe is a Buddhist

On Sunday, there was a fabulous sermon at church. Seriously, one of the best sermons I've ever heard. The preacher was working from some Buddhist writings by Pema Chodron, about the techniques that we use to avoid what scares us and therefore to avoid being fully present and awake for ourselves and others, and before she was done she'd managed to roll in a story about screaming kids on a plane and a wrap-up story about a family gathered around their dying father, which had half the congregation in tears.

It was a tour de force. I left feeling inspired and refreshed and centered and determined. All I had to do was hold on to that moment of insight, FOREVER, and I would be a perfectly enlightened human being.

Alas, I've realized I have to go to church every week because the centering and perspective and humility and whatever it is one gets from a good sermon does not last forever. It doesn't even last a week. By Sunday afternoon, I was trying to explain to Enrico about the great sermon - which he would have loved because he resonates with Buddhist thought - and I couldn't produce a remotely articulate summation of what I'd just heard. Oh well. I'll just have to wait for the podcast. (Just imagine what Ralph Waldo Emerson could have done with podcasts!)

Meanwhile, by Monday, I had worked myself into a snit about a board meeting that I was about to attend. My piece of business wasn't on the agenda the way I wanted it to be, this group moves too slowly, I end up doing too much of the work, wah wah WAH. We're always short on money, I'm the treasurer, nobody else worries about this as much as me, wah wah WAH. Even as I worked myself into said snit, there was a part of my brain that stood back and watched, saying, "You know, this isn't at all helpful. Or even accurate, for that matter. Why are you doing this?" That part of my brain apparently remembered about Buddhism and creating our own suffering. But, the rest of my brain didn't care. It barrelled merrily along creating this very satisfyingly self-righteous snit.

And then, two things happened in rapid succession. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say that money for this organization appeared from two unexpected places. Not one, but two. Just at that exact moment. It was like the Creative Force of the Universe saying "Ha! You think everything hinges on you, do you? Well, let me teach you a little lesson."

The moral of the story isn't so much that I think we're powerless in the events around us - on the contrary - but that we constantly, stubbornly, blindly misunderstand the nature of that power. That, and the fact that sometimes the Universe really knows how to rain on a good snit parade.

Maybe I was born in the wrong century

Thomas Jefferson is said to have predicted, in 1822, that "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian." He was wrong, of course.

This weekend my Unitarian Universalist church celebrated the 25th anniversary of our minister's ordination. Because he dislikes this sort of pomp and circumstance, he agreed to the festivities only on the condition that we use it as an impetus to dramatically ramp up our social justice commitment - specifically, the establishment of a Social Justice Fund and a staff person dedicated to social justice work. In one weekend, we raised $130,000, plus a challenge commitment from a single parishoner to fund a half-time staff position for four years.

I've only been a member of this church for about three years, but I'm proud to have joined a long line of illustrious Unitarians and Universalists who worked to make this country, and the world, a better and more just place. Including Thomas Jefferson, of course. But also:

• U.S. Founding fathers and mothers such as John, Abigail and John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.
• A slew of abolitionists, women's suffragists and humanitarians, including Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Dorothea Dix, Margaret Fuller, Mary Wollstonecraft, Julia Ward Howe and Adlai Stevenson.
• Famous scientists and healers such as Charles Darwin, Florence Nightengale, Buckminster Fuller, Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer
• Innumerable great writers, philosophers and artists, not least Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Horatio Alger, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, and my distant Boston cousins, Amy and Robert Lowell.
  

I'm sure the world would be a better place if Jefferson had been right. I don't mean that to denigrate anyone's theology, just a comment on how this country might look if this list of people had left the strongest lasting impact on our political life and social conscience today. But as as sideways as things got, every now and then I have a glimmer of hope that it just might not be too late to get back on track.

Heaven, no, we won't go!

Yesterday the auther Anne Lamott was speaking on the local public radio station. I've never read any of her fiction, but I absolutely loved two of her nonfiction works, Bird by Bird (ostensibly about writing, but really about life) and Travelling Mercies, a series of essays about her journey to religious faith. I've also heard rave reviews about Operating Instructions, a book about the first year of her son's life.

Yesterday she got a couple of calls from fundamentalist Christians taking issue with her statement that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality or abortion or, really, sex at all. "The Bible does say that God condemns homosexuality!" scolded one caller, but Lamott knew her Bible and held her ground. "In the Old Testament, yes, there are a few statements about homosexuality" she replied, "but Jesus never says anything about it at all. He just talks about love." The Bible was written by men, exclusively men, she pointed out, who lived in a primitive time. The myriad rules layed out in the Old Testament reflect their way of life, the importance of cohesive community for survival, and the many, many things they feared.

Anyway, she told a story that made me laugh, about how when her son was young, he heard from somewhere that Jews could not go to heaven. "Well," Lamott said, "I doubt that's true, but if it is, we won't go either. Or better yet - we'll organize, to open it up for everyone. Mommy's really good at organizing. So don't worry about it."

New life

I was feeling the easter vibe yesterday, let me tell you. Not in a savior-rises-from-the-dead kind of way, but in the more universal way - easter, pasqua, rebirth, new life. The universal celebration that humankind has always lifted up at this time of year, when green things burst forth and color blooms and birds build nests. Just as the Christmas season is another incarnation of the primal human urge to pray for, and then celebrate, the return of light after weeks of lengthening darkness, so Easter is another incarnation of the primal celebration of the return of life after a cold, dead winter.

To me, it's comforting in its universality. Supposedly Christians didn't start believing in the literal resurrection of Jesus until a couple centuries after his death, when - out of convenience, or nostalgia, or just the way beliefs evolve - the new religion began to be overlayed onto the old, lining up the major events of Christianity with the old, familiar pagan holidays. That concept freaks some people out, but not me. These holidays have resonance for me because they are so universal, so inescapable, so compelling, no matter how many new religions we humans invent.

I love that to this day, the major popular icons of Easter have nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with fertility and fecundity: eggs, bunnies, tulips. I also love that inventive Christians managed to embody this compelling concept in a man. Some feminists see that as an indictment of Christianity's misogyny and patriarchy, but I think the Goddess chuckles.

That's not to disrespect Jesus, by any means. Indeed, the universality of the spring fertility rite, in whatever form it may take, is what makes it True, with a capital T. Deep, intuitive, mythological Truth, which is so much greater than truth with a little t - factual, literal, narrow truth. The Truth of the Christian Easter is what makes it powerful, not the literal truth (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view) of the resurrection story.

It is Truth that will, I hope, unite us all some day, helping us to overcome our squabbling over truth.

Happy Easter, everybody. Whatever it means to you.

Dog is my co-pilot

It was bedtime, and as I sat in bed reading, Nelly paced at the foot, waiting for Enrico. She long ago took to sleeping on a little dog bed next to us, tucked away in the corner of the room. We stuck it there to get it out of the way one day, and she adopted it as her sleeping spot of choice.

"Hurry up," I called to Enrico. "You know Nelly can't settle on her bed until we're both here. It's not right."

"All right, I'm coming." Enrico climbed into bed and Nelly finally traipsed to her corner, circling the mandatory two times before lying down with a thunk.

"She is so weird, with all her random self-imposed rules. She's like her own little Book of Leviticus."

"The Book of Nelleviticus!"

Things I know for sure, Part One

This month in The New Yorker there's an article on scientific research and the ways that the Bush administration is undermining and contorting science for the sake of ideology, particularly religious ideology. There's even a quote in there from somebody suggesting they'd object to an HIV vaccine because to cure or prevent HIV would remove a disincentive for premarital sex. Excuse me? Let me get this straight. It's worth it for millions people and their children die a horrible, wasting death in order to try to control how and when people have sex? Where the frack in the Bible does Jesus suggest that would be his preferred trade-off? This just blows my mind. I don't even know how to formulate a response to this type of thinking, on any level. So you wish death by a horrible, wasting disease on other people - even children - at the same time that you're all fired up about the sanctity of a "life" the size of a dot on this i? By golly, the dot-sized life is invaluable, but once humans are out of the womb their life ain't worth shit. Excuse my language.

I just don't know what to say to that. But here are some things I know for sure.

The Golden Rule, for one. And a friendly amendment to the Golden Rule: If you wouldn't want something for the people you know and care about, you can't wish it for any human being. AIDS, prostitution, pornography, slavery, having your house bombed - it goes for all those things. And beyond that, if you don't wish it on other human beings, you need to do your best not be a part of perpetuating it. Which we all do, whether we like it or not, being part of a global economy. So first, if you don't want something for your loved ones, don't promote it directly. And second, although it's complicated, we all ought to at least think about what we can do to avoid promoting it indirectly.

I was just in Texas the last couple of days. On the way to the airport, as my colleagues were chatting away in mutal liberal understanding about gay rights, I fell into conversation with our linebacker-sized limo driver - a hard-drawlin' Baptist who'd never lived outside Texas except while in the military. A classic moment of red state meets blue state (or, as he cheerfully put it, "fruits and nuts"). Feeling brave, I asked him what he thought of my colleagues' discussion.

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "I figgur just because somebody wants to rent an apartment from me, or work for me, it ain't no business of mine who they love. If God cares about stuff like that, I suppose we'll all find out after we die, won't we? Until then, we'd all best just treat other people the way we want to be treated, rather than make judgments that ain't ours to make."

Amen. It gave me a little bit of hope.

The Hell Myth

This week I found myself in a conversation with a man of the cloth, and we got to talking about the fundamentalists and the mega-churches and the scary, scary versions of religion that seem to be so popular these days. I asked this gentlemen why he thinks the rule-obsessed, Rapture-fixated, fundamentalist versions of religion appeal to people, because myself, I just don't understand it. Why would anyone want to buy into that view of the universe? It's so dreary and disempowering.

"They've got hell," he answered. "It's a powerful motivator, hell-avoidance. Most of us don't believe in hell, which leaves us at a disadvantage in getting our message out. We've just got love and peace and justice. It's not as compelling as hell."

Ok, I guess I can understand that. Fear is a powerful motivator. However, I pointed out that my personal idea of hell is a world where you're bad, your body is bad, your sexuality is bad, and your brain is especially bad and NOT TO BE USED. Where people suffer horribly from poverty and war and the destruction of natural systems that sustain life. Isn't that hell on earth? Why can't the tolerant religious folk preach just as effectively using that as their foil?

In our city, five of the mainline Protestant churches in one part of town are considering selling most of their property and building one shared, ecumenical complex with multiple worship spaces, offices, classrooms, youth facilities - everything they all might want. They all currently have big, old church buildings that they struggle to maintain with small congregations (this being one of the most un-churched cities in the country). They figure, as progressive Protestants, they have more in common across their denominational lines than they do with the conservatives within their ranks. They can create their own little religious haven where gay people are welcome, women are equal to men, God isn't a vindictive old man, other religions are cool, war and oppression are bad, Mother Nature is our friend, and there IS NO HELL except that which we create here on earth. As far as they know, this is the first such effort in the country. Nobody knows if it will work out. I wish them luck, though.

Light and Darkness

Last night our power went out around 7:30, and was still out when we went to bed. I was returning home from class and drove through miles of eerie, inky darkness. We're having what passes for a cold snap here, so the house was getting pretty chilly when I got home. I found Enrico bundled up in fleece, extra blankets on the bed, in the dark, listening to the iPod. We lit some candles around the house and found a battery-powered radio. We went to bed knowing that we had a battery-powered alarm clock to get us up. It was cozy.

However, I must say, I learned a few things. One, I need to keep more batteries around the house. Two, I really hope the big earthquake comes during the summer months. It's partly the problem of the cold, but more importantly, having no power during the time of year when we get a mere 8 hours of sunlight would really suck on a long-term basis. Sitting there reading my book by candle lantern and battery-powered head lamp, I thought about the people living in dark, cold, northern climes before electricity. You'd probably develop highly evolved conversation and story-telling skills, and get lots of sleep, and become great at word games. But I have to believe there's just a lot of boredom involved in living with that much cold darkness.

It made me appreciate the Advent season - the Christian incarnation of this time of diminishing light. I'm sure that going back to the beginning of human time, people have marked this period, when the days get shorter and shorter, and the darkness seems to be winning the battle. What if the sun just kept disappearing, the days diminishing to nothing instead of getting longer again? At some point in human history, this must have genuinely seemed like a possibility. Hence all of the rituals around light - the Advent candles, the menora - that compensate for the diminishing sun, encourage it to come back. And meanwhile, you embrace the dark, the waiting, the introspection that inevitably comes from being stuck indoors with your own thoughts under a lot of blankets, with little to do.

And then, imperceptibly, the days get longer. The sun is returning, and has not abandoned its children on earth. So of course - you have a big honkin' holiday to celebrate. You create stories and metaphors about the coming of light, of new life, new beginnings. It all makes perfect sense.

The gaping chasm

"Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. We are called upon to look up from the quagmire of military programs and defense commitments and read the warnings on history's signposts. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."

- - Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

Today's sermon at church featured a guest - Jennifer Harbury, a lawyer and human rights activist who became famous when her husband was imprisoned, tortured and then extrajudicially executed by the Guatemalan government in the 1990s. Harbury conducted a lengthy hunger strike as part of her effort to find out what happened to her husband, and to shed light on the US government's complicity in his fate and that of thousands like him around the world who are imprisoned, tortured and killed with the resources, training, knowledge and often physical presence of US intelligence agencies. Harbury, the granddaughter of Jews who fled the Holocaust and found a home in a Unitarian congregation in upstate NY, now works for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, as the director of their STOP Torture program.

Harbury talked about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in other countries that conduct torture on behalf of, and on the payroll of, the US government. She talked about how this is not new, and the threads of such activities trace back through many decades despite numerous international treaties and US laws specifically prohibiting and criminalizing them. She talked about the effects of torture on our moral health as a people, our standing in the world community, and the safety of our citizens and soldiers abroad.

So, a couple things:

• There is an amendment to the current defense spending bill that would prohibit (again) U.S.-sponsored torture anywhere in the world. President Bush has threatened to veto the entire bill if it includes the anti-torture provisions, despite the fact that the Senate voted 90 to 9 in favor of the anti-torture amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). This overall spending bill is next headed to a conference committee, where representatives of the House and Senate will agree on its final form. You might feel moved to contact your members of Congress about that. Learn more here.
• I am about to start a 3-day-a-week interim director job. I hereby designate one of my two remaining weekdays as "Social Justice Day," wherein I will spend my time doing whatever I can think of to try to help make the world a more just place. One day a week. It may not do much, but it can't hurt to try. So there. I have a few ideas already, but suggestions are welcome.

By golly, I really DO belong among these people

Yesterday at church it was the first Sunday back for the "new church year." The church year follows the school year because they have simply accepted the fact that this is the Pacific Northwest and even the most spiritual of people are gonna pretty much spend their weekends hiking and kayaking. So they scale it way back for the summer. I went a few times during the summer, and it was nice - quiet, meditative. This week when I went back, I was almost put off by all the hustle and bustle in the place.

Now, this is only my second year as a Unitarian, so I was pretty pleased when the minister started his preachin' and informed us that he planned to expound on the principal principles of Unitarian Universalism, which he'd had a chance to revisit in a new way while off on a retreat at a Trappist monastary in rural Oregon (probably hiking and kayaking like the rest of us). I was pleased because Unitarian Universalism prides itself on being a tolerant faith, based on the belief that revelation of truth is continuous, and we all experience it uniquely. No creeds, no dogma. So even though it's a centuries-old faith tradition, it can seem pretty mushy, what with the Christians and the deists and the humanists and the naturalist-pantheists, all respecting each others' modes of revelation all the damn time.

I certainly didn't mind a little clarification to start out the new year. And lo and behold, if he didn't preach about the Creative Force of the Universe! There's a great creative force which is greater than us and precedes us, and we do not control it; we have free will only to try to obstruct it, or try to align ourselves with it.

Apparently in his opinion - which any Unitarian Universalist is free to disagree with, vehemently - belief in a Creative Force of the Universe is one of the principal priniples of Universalist Unitarianism. Who knew. I guess it makes sense, given that Darwin was a Unitarian.

Clearly, these dogs missed something in Sunday School

Have I mentioned that we live in the Jewish neighborhood in Seattle? There are two synagogues within a couple blocks from us, and another within walking distance. The two close ones are conservative and orthodox, so on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, there are many people walking by our house on their way to services.

Today is Sunday however, and as we sit here doing our own Sabbath thing, Enrico is reading a new translation and commentary of the Torah (yeah, he's as big a geek as I am). And he just came upon the following:

"But against the Israelites, no dog will snarl."(Exodus 11:7)

This is definitely news to our dogs, who look forward all week to positioning themselves at the window and giving the Israelites a vigorous barking. I guess they aren't snarling, they're just barking. And I'm confident this behavior doesn't imply any ill will towards the Jews,* because when we encounter them on the street during a walk, Nelly and Toby are just as polite as pie. In fact, once we were even invited into the home of some Orthodox neighbors, asked by these complete strangers to help with a Sabbath-related lightbulb crisis. (I'm told by a Jewish friend that this made me a Shabbas goy, one who helps observant Jews avoid the Sabbath work prohibition.) For weeks after that, the dogs wanted to charge up the steps of that house every time we passed it by, and visit our newfound Jewish friends again!

But nonetheless, from the distance of the window or the yard, these dogs definitely like to make some noise at the Israelites. Clearly, among the many sins we'll have to answer for come judgement day will be the unforgivable laxity of canine Biblical education in this house.

* (Ok, technically, Nelly dislikes the elderly Jewish gentlemen who lives two doors down. But as I've mentioned before, she was beaten with a stick by an older person before she came to live with us, so her wariness around the silver-haired is understandable, and definitely not a Jewish thing. And our neighbor is a Holocaust survivor, so I suspect he understands much about the lasting scars of cruel treatment, and bears Nelly no ill will for her rudeness.)

Bacteria's right to life!

In the car just now, I heard a report on NPR about how some states have laws pending in their legislatures (how seriously I'm not sure) to allow pharmacists to refuse to fill presciptions for which they have "moral objections." This is, of course, all about those pharmacists who think God intended women to have as many babies as they absolutely can until they die tryin' to have one more - so those pharmacists don't have to fill birth control prescriptions.

Now I think it goes without saying that this is about the stupidest thing anyone has ever ascribed to a higher power. (The final word on this subject was laid down in Monty Python's Meaning of Life, with their classic "Every Sperm is Sacred" song-and-dance number. 'Nuff said.) So I actually didn't bother with too much righteous indignation on this one. Rather, my mind went to all the other ways this law could be construed.

After all, if there are pharmacists ignorant enough to think that "when a sperm is wasted, God get quite irate!", the other "moral objections" lurking out there might be a real hoot. "I'm sorry sir, but I believe bacteria have a right to life, so I'm exercising my state-given right to refuse you the ciprofloxin your doctor prescribed for that oozing case of pink-eye." Or someone might withhold topical treatments for herpes or crabs or yeast infections because YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T TOUCH YOURSELF DOWN THERE you might go blind. Some pharmacist might have moral objections to antidepressants since angst is a gift from God to remind us about original sin and how crappy we are and all that.

It wouldn't just have to be fundamentalist religious objections. Perhaps a woman pharmacist will refuse to dispense Viagra until they take those goddam commercials off the TV. The pharamceutical companies themselves are not above criticism, we could have pharmacists boycotting certain companies, like in the South African divestiture battles of the 1980s, until they do right by the African AIDS crisis or are more honest about their risk research.

Sorry. I know I shouldn't be sneering about people's moral certainties or cavalier about batshit crazy laws, but I actually kind of hope this passes in a couple of places, for the pure entertainment value of seeing it challenged.

Ok, listen up all you happy-clappy-Jesus people

You know, I really believe the woman whose death got so much media attention this week deserves to be left in peace, and thus I have held back from touching on that topic, despite the frustration and anger and sadness that has bubbled up in me so many times, begging for expression. I have watched the death of somebody that I loved very much, and so I have my opinions on the universal aspects of death and dying, as well as the ways that each situation is unique and private. But now, I just can't stand it any more. My patience snapped the moment I read that Tom DeLay is calling for the judges in this high-profile case to be impeached. Now, I am just pissed.

Are we like lobsters in a pot, slowly being boiled as our country slides into theocracy? What are we going to do about it?

For one thing, the subject of spirituality and religion cannot be taboo in progressive circles. Exploration of the greater meaning of things, the wonder of existence, is a natural human desire. It's not clever or smart to deny that this is so, to avoid mention of it as embarassing or quaint or backwards, let alone to respond with ridicule. Why have we allowed public discussion of these profound questions to be hijacked by those who believe in such a fearful, joyless, controlling, and unimaginative set of answers? It's no longer ok for progressive people of faith to say, "but those people just make no sense."

I know there are people pushing back, but why are these questions not shouted from the rooftops: You who call yourselves Christians, where is your faith? You who choose to believe in the transactional Jesus, who traded his life for the keys to a literal heaven, where you'll get to lounge in deck chairs on fluffy clouds and commune in bliss with a bearded God and white-robed Jesus - why would you want to keep somebody from that paradise in which you place such unquestioning confidence? Why would you pin down their souls in a trap of tubes and machines?

Read some of these books. I was trying to be all subtle and polite when I posted them - like, hey, here are some books that, you know, somebody might be interested in. But even then I was thinking - Expand your minds, people! These are serious questions, and failing to fully apply the divine spark that is your mind - this is the greatest abomination of all against whatever God you believe in, whatever force created you. Even the Jesuits, with their love of education and learning, know that.

The Buddhists - as I understand it, though I'm hardly an expert - have a lovely concept of heaven, though that's not what they call it. The ground of being, the pool of all life and energy that co-mingles everything in blissful togetherness. As they see it, when we die, we strive to fully realize our connection that sublime pool of being. But fear and distraction and pain may cause us to hang on to the lesser, familiar existence that we know, condemming ourselves to repeated lifetimes. A dying person must be freed of distraction - noise, physical interference, fear - in order to concentrate on releasing their being to that Great All. That is the first vision of heaven that has ever made sense to me. And once you hear it, the idea of tubes and machines becomes horrific and cruel.

So who says that your vision of heaven gets to be legislated into law and mine doesn't? Who says you get to conduct a witch hunt of politicians and physicians and judges who don't accept your religious dogma? If that's what you want for our country, how will it be any different from the rule of the clerics in Iran?

And oh, Jesse Jackson - I'm so disappointed in you.

List: Books about religion and theology

Composing my little essay on the Creative Force of the Universe the other day - and reading with great sadness lately about bitter disputes over life and death, and what religions and God say about them - has me reflecting on the reading I've done on religion and theology. One of the ways that Flora keeps things tidy is lists - lists on paper and lists in my head that divide the world into categories, themes, whatever can help me manage information but also discern patterns and connections. The following is a list of books I've read, with the best reads highlighted in red. Some of these are more "mainstream" and some more "out there" - I'm not advocating any particular ideas contained within, though I will say I have found value in every single book. And I'm still reading - my public library informs me just today that A Quaker Reader awaits me. So, if anybody out there actually reads this and has other suggestions - they are welcome in the comments!

The Bible and the Gospels

• The Gnostic Gospels - Elaine Pagels. One of the first accessible books to describe and translate the long-lost Nag Hammadi texts. An important primer on what was excluded from the Bible that gets thumped today.
• Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas - Elaine Pagels. How the gnostic Gospel of Thomas contrasts with the Gospel of John to illustrate competing beliefs in early Christianity.
• Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally - Marcus Borg.
• The Book of J - Harold Bloom. Explores authorship and origin of Old Testament texts.
• God: A Biography - Jack Miles. Approaching the Hebrew Tanakh as literature.

Where are all the women?

• She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse - Elizabeth Johnson. A classic on feminist theology and feminine spiritual imagery within Christianity.
• Adam, Eve and the Serpent - Elaine Pagels. The Adam & Eve story, its variants, how it's been used to oppress women, and why it needn't be interpreted that way.
• Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother - Lesley Hazleton. What would the world and experience of the historic Maryam have been like?
• Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality - Carol Christ. Review of Goddess scholarship, with the author's personal story of finding a spiritual home there.
• The Woman with the Alabastar Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail - Margaret Starbird. Posits that Jesus and the Magdalene were married, but early church history buried this knowledge, to the woe of both genders thereafter. Whether you believe this theory or not, it's gaining visibility, and making the Catholic church hot under the collar, and I like the idea of it.
• The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine - Margaret Starbird. Follow-up to her first book, explaining her "trail of evidence" in scripture and Medieval art and history.

Buddhism

• Heart of a Buddha's Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh. Good explanation of Buddhism.
• The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying - Sogyal Rinpoche. An explanation of beliefs on life and death in Tibetan Buddhism, much-read in the hospice movement. Beautiful book, a must-read in my opinion.
• Stepping Into Freedom - Thich Nhat Hanh. Intended for students of Buddhist monastic training, but it includes wonderful meditations for different life situations.

Islam

• Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet - Karen Armstrong. The historian author of A History of God tackles Muhammad and illustrates Islam in the process. I love the way Armstrong writes, and this book is apparently well respected in Muslim circles.
• The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith - Irshad Manji. At turns angry and very funny, a controversial exploration of why Islam is the way it is in the world today.
• The Place of Tolerance in Islam - Khaled abou El Fadl. Haven't actually read this yet, but it was recommended and just arrived from the library!

Religious histories and comparisons

• A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - Karen Armstrong. Clear, thorough history of the three monotheistic religions, how they intertwined and have gone through cycles of dogmatism and mysticism over the centuries. Again, I love the way Armstrong writes.
• Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallels between the two religions.
• Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity - Bruce Bawer. Explains the surprising and recent history of American Christian fundamentalism - that it's not back-to-basics theology, but recent heresy.
• The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity - Martin Palmer. Texts discovered in China that show Christianity made it there by the 9th century and mingled with Buddhism and Taoism. Fascinating illustration of how all the major religions really can weave together.
• The Quakers in America - Thomas Hamm. History of Quakerism and its three main branches in the United States.
• A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism - John Buehrens. Primer on the history and beliefs of Unitarian Universalism.
• Out of the Flames - Lawrence & Nancy Goldstein. Biography of Michael Servetus, a heretic burned in the 1500s for his non-trinitarian beliefs, which later informed Unitarianism.
• Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths - Bruce Feiler. Explores the shared historical ancestor of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and what he means to each today.

Personal Stories
I like all of these, actually, because I've always loved memoires; it's hard to pick the red items.

• Meeting Faith: The Forrest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun - Faith Adiele. Adiele became a Buddhist nun in Thailand for a year. Amazing memoire.
• Seeking Enlightenment...Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Guide to Religion - Nevada Barr. Personal story and reflections on faith.
• Traveling Mercies - Some Thoughts on Faith - Anne Lamott. Personal story and reflections on faith.
• The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness - Karen Armstrong. Story of Armstrong's recovery from convent life and path back to physical health and the study of theology.
• Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith - Kathleen Norris. Each chapter is an essay built around a religious or theological word or phrase.

Fiction That Entertains and Makes You Think

• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore. Portrayal of Joshua's life which is very funny, if crude at times, but underneath it is some unexpected and well-researched depth.
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago. Cousin Flora hasn't read this, but Husband Enrico recommends it highly. Controversial take on the life of Jesus as man, prophet, and instrument of higher powers.
  

Useful Reference and Basics
I haven't read all these completely, some are more reference or classics.

• The Nag Hammadi Library - complete translation of the texts
• Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development - Helmut Koester
• The Qur'an
• The Dhammapada - classic text of Buddhist teachings
• The Upanishads - classic text of Vedic teachings that are part of the foundation of Hinduism and Buddhism
• The Tao Te Ching - Lao Tsu. Beautiful, poetic, classic text of Taoism
• The World's Religions - Huston Smith

The Creative Force of the Universe

I recently told somebody that I had a traditional, progressive, church upbringing, and from there I went to believing in God but not religion, to believing in religion but not God, to coming full circle and believing in both again, in a different sort of way.

I don't want to freak anyone out here - don't worry, I'm not going to evangelize, or bare my soul, or get all New Age-y. I haven't had any kind of born-again experience. I've just been thinking about writing this down in an orderly fashion, and this morning I decided to give it a go. Lucky you!

The path to a belief in God but not religion was a straightforward and, I think, common one: I still had faith in something greater than myself, but the college and young adult years exposed me to so much of the damage that organized religion has done - to entire cultures, to gender equity, to the whole concept of sexuality and reproduction, to the wrecked and extinguished lives of persecuted individuals, to those who simply believe differently - that I could not find a religious service that didn't fill me with the heebyjeebies halfway through. Just hearing the Nicene Creed reminded me that a bunch of men got together 400 years after Jesus died and adopted a slew of rigid rules based on absolutely nothing that Jesus of Nazareth seems to have said or done (before or after death), and selectively chose which writings about him would be permissible. For centuries, those rules have been used to impose norms that were cultural rather than spiritual, and to terrorize people who had the temerity to think differently. Don't get me wrong, the church I grew up in was lovely and liberal, devoid of fire-and-brimstone. Nonetheless, I figured that the real value in my church upbringing was learning (as I particularly did from the excellent example of my mother) that you have obligations to your fellow human and your planet. Through all the centuries of Christian misdirection and obfuscation, that seems to be one thing that Jesus was quite clear on, thank you very much.

And then, I pretty much lost any sense of God, too. This evolution had both an optimistic bent (isn't human reason too evolved to believe in such myths any more?) and a pessimistic one (if there is a higher power, how on earth could it be overseeing this mess?). Both filled with a certain arrogance, I'll admit. But also clouded by my inability to lose that deeply socialized, ingrained view of god as a sentient, parental being, distinct from the creations of the earth, but somehow watching over what's going down here. True, you can get around the whole problem of "why would God allow [fill in terrible thing here]?" by arguing that God just got things started, and does not actively intervene - after all, isn't creating the Big Bang miraculous enough? You can get around the gender discrimination by pointing out that God need not be male or female. But still, like the moment in the church service where we got to the Nicene Creed, there was something in the whole God concept that created an absolute mental block. It just wasn't credible. I can't say I felt much loss, though.

The next step - back to god but not religion - is a complicated one. Suffice to say that, still not craving any organized religion, I nonetheless began to read a lot about religious history, spirituality, quantum physics, and neurology. A weird combination, I know, but if you put them together they can add up to some startling things. And my life took some turns, including the death of a loved one, friendship with a clergywoman, discovery of yoga, and a few strange serendipities, all of which got me thinking.

Long story short, I've come to believe not in a sentient, parental god, but in a sort of Creative Force of the Universe. I believe that all the movement and activity of the universe is driven by an underlying force pushing to create. It may or may not be concious, but it is powerful, and nothing short of miraculous (again - the Big Bang? wow). It relentlessly drives the cycle of creation, death, and recreation, and impels the very universe itself to expand - in the immortal words of Monty Python:

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.

It's the spark that ignites all of life - as quantum physics and neurology increasingly tell us that there are, in fact, forces that literally connect all things. So I figure you can either try to flow in synch with the Creative Force, or buck it to your inevitable frustration. You can be an extension of the creative process, and life will flow with you - or you can pursue stagnation or destruction, which will bite you in the ass sooner or later.

I still can't bring myself to call this god, or even goddess - too much baggage there, even now - but I can acknowledge that this concept of the Creative Force of the Universe is in the same neighborhood as what other people and religions call god. Or don't call god - the Buddhists seem to have been onto this Creative Force thing for a long time, it turns out. Go figure.

Of course, I could have my relationship with the Creative Force of the Universe in the comfort of my own home - still no need for religion. But meanwhile, I was still reading. Society at large has seen a fair bit of religious re-examination in recent years - revisiting the history of the early Christian Church, for example, and a growing Western interest in Buddhism, and heck, The Da Vinci Code for that matter. I'd never been able to get away from the fact that despite the ill done by organized religion, individual human beings had been inspired to amazing things by their faith and, yes, even by their church. Take Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador - or my mother, whose quiet but persistent pursuit of social justice activities in my hometown church is probably the reason I've spent my entire professional life in the nonprofit sector. Nope, couldn't quite ignore that.

And in reading, I finally realized that underneath the thick cultural layers heaped on all of the world's great religions, they all come down to the same basic tenets in response to the question: "what's the bigger meaning?" We're all fundamentally connected (and we ignore that at our peril), we all have the spark of the divine within us (with all its amazing potential), and, you know, love thy neighbor as thyself. That's about it. Everything else - all of the dogma, philosophical exploration, ritual, poetry, iconography that every religion has created - is just the human way of further exploring and touching that fundamental nut. Or perhaps, for many of us flawed humans, rules and rituals have been a way to avoid a conclusion that's either too simple or too profound - you are divine, you are connected to everything else, so live a life that integrates those realities completely and constantly.

It also occurred to me that, having gone through this whole process "on my own" (in the sense that I didn't belong to any religious congregation - I gratefully and humbly acknowledge the many, many relatives, friends, acquaintances, thinkers and writers, living and dead, who have been teaching me, whether they knew it or not) - perhaps it might be more effective to continue the journey with other people of like mind and diverse experience. In fact, I began to think that this kind of fellowship, a community in which to explore whatever your spiritual beliefs might be, could be valuable regardless of whether or not you believe in a god concept. In other words - religion without god, in addition to god without religion.

Hence, I'm trying out being a Unitarian Universalist, or at least hanging with them for a while. We'll see how that goes. I'm also trying to reconnect with the Creative Force - it felt like I was really surfing the Force there for a while, but last year I let a demanding job get between us, and we seem to have fallen out of touch.

Yeah, turns out, I probably could've done all this in my church of origin. It's an intellectually curious and open-minded kind of place. When I mention my latest theological discovery to my clergywoman friend, or my dad, they kind of look at me like - well, duh. Dude, our church totally had an adult education group on that book two years ago. What can I say, apparently I have a thickheaded streak.

Meanwhile, I feel validated both in my experience, and in my choice to write about it, by other seemingly sane, modern, thoughtful, well-read women who have done the same, and who describe a path that is different, but similar at its core. I particularly recommend:

• Seeking Enlightenment...Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Guide to Religion by murder mystery writer and former park ranger Nevada Barr
• Traveling Mercies - Some Thoughts on Faith by writer Anne Lamott
• The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by historian Karen Armstrong
• Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by poet Kathleen Norris
• And, lastly, he's not a woman but you can't go wrong with a Nobel Peace Prize nominee: Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh

Peace, y'all.