The Trouble with Religion
A Sermon Given
by The Rev. Kenneth Torquil MacLean
on December 13, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
My job at the Unitarian Universalist Association is to work with our President, John Buehrens, on our international
relationships and often to represent him at meetings of such groups as the International Association for Religious
Freedom and the Partner Church Council and the Canadian Unitarian Council. Perhaps it is not surprising that many of
my stories these days come from experiences of travel, my own and that of the people with whom I work. Some
people have the idea that it is risky to travel with me because things always happen. I think that is ridiculous, and,
besides, it makes for a more interesting life. I remember a social worker from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was on her
very first airplane trip. As they were gaining their cruising altitude, she heard over the loudspeaker, "This is your
captain." That was all she remembered until she found the stewardess bending over her with a cold towel to revive
her. All it took was, "This is your captain," and she was out like a light!
Now I did not react that way two weeks ago, four hours out of London over the Atlantic, en-route to Boston, when we
heard, "This is your captain."
I felt a slight twinge when he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a little problem," but I did not pass out. It was not
until later that I knew that the little problem was the smell of something burning in the rear cabin. Just as well.
Anyway, the captain then confided in us that he had decided to put down in St. John's. I thought New Brunswick, but
it was Newfoundland.
The airport is small and not equipped to deal with 350 unexpected visitors, so I elected just to stay in my seat -- 36H
-- and see what would happen. After an hour or so the captain reported that he had been in communication with both
London and Boston. The passenger next to me said he should have been in communication with Seattle, but there was
no particular anger or complaining among the passengers; even the children were just great. In a few hours they
brought in some sandwiches. I was glad I had a book to read, though I wished it were a better one than Malachy
McCourt's a Monk Swimming, but it lasted right to the end of our trip. After just twelve hours they sent a plane in
from Air Canada, and we shifted to that craft after just twelve hours in St. John's, Newfoundland. I kept thinking of
my friend, Mary Aymar Hobart, whose husband retired some years ago as UU minister in Ft. Myers, Florida. They
took a trip from Miami to London, and they also landed unexpectedly in Newfoundland. In their case it was because
someone called the airport in Miami and said that there was a bomb on the plane. Of course they had to evacuate the
plane, slide down the chutes and that sort of thing. They found themselves in a daisy field a mile from the terminal. A
bus came our for them, and the bus driver leaned out and said, "Children and elderly people into the bus first." Mary
Aymar asked him what constituted elderly, and he said, "Get into the bus, lady."
When John Buehrens and his wife, Gwen, were in Edinburgh this summer they went to a restaurant, and as they looked
over the menu, Gwen said, "Now, this is the answer; what is the question?" Then she read, "Herring in oat meal with
mustard sauce." What is the question? John was stumped, so Gwen had to tell him: "Why are there no Scottish
restaurants in the United States?"
John and I will be going to India in February, and I prepared a tentative outline of our travels for our travel agent.
When the itinerary came back I looked it over: London to Calcutta, to Guwahati; then Guwahati to Delhi and
Ahmedabad, and then to Katmandu. Katmandu!! Where did that come from?
I called the travel agent and asked her. She looked at the paper I had sent her and responded, "It says KTM to Madras.
What is KTM?" When I told her it was Kenneth Torquil MacLean, she almost fell off her chair. Some people have
suggested that it was a mistake to change it, but others have said that Westerners sometimes get kidnapped there, so
perhaps it is just as well.
When we go to Ahmedabad, I hope that we will have time to visit the Gandhi Ashram again. This is the place where
Gandhi lived for some years beside one of the great rivers of India. It was a stirring experience to stand there outside
the buildings and look across the river, as Gandhi must have done many times. It made me think of the curious
connection of Gandhi with another person who lived near a body of water for a time: Henry David Thoreau. I
remembered that Thoreau voluntarily submitted to a sentence in jail rather than comply with a law that he thought was
unjust. He may have been in jail for just one night, but Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him. When Emerson asked,
"Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau made his famous response: "Waldo, what are you doing out there?" I
believe that from that brief experience came Thoreau's writing on civil disobedience.
Somehow it reached Gandhi a couple of generations later, and it became a significant part of the thinking which turned
thousands of people to non-violent civil disobedience and which ultimately freed millions of people from British rule
from afar and laid the basis for modern Indian democracy.
Gandhi's views came from many sources, including Thoreau, and they in turn influenced an American who went to
India to study non-violence: Martin Luther King, Jr. Basically, they were religious ideas, going to the heart of spiritual
beliefs about our relation to each other and to the world.
Religious ideas and the uses to which they are put was one of the things we talked about at Kathy Sreedhar's house in
Northwest Washington, when my friend Terry and my son Derry and I had dinner with her on Thursday evening.
Kathy has been going to India regularly and often since 1962, when she was there in the Peace Corps. Now she directs
our Holdeen India Program and she identifies leaders of organizations which are making a real difference in the lives of
the poorest of the poor, the bonded laborers, the dalits, who were formerly called untouchables, and the scheduled
castes, and especially women in all these groups. Kathy has brought many leaders of these groups to Washington for
training in the Advocacy Institute. She visits their programs, consults with the leaders, and gives grants from the
Holdeen Fund to help the organizations to grow and become more effective. This year she is giving $500,000 in grants
to make a difference. In February I will join her once again in India to meet with some of the partners in this amazing
program.
Kathy spoke the other evening of some of the ways in which religion is used to oppress people, especially women. She
spoke of the practice of "honor killing" among some Muslim groups in India, with religious sanction.
This is when a woman of a family is raped and then they kill her because she has brought dishonor to the family! She
spoke of the commonplace reality in India that when a girl is born, the response is mourning; when a boy is born, there
is celebration. One can say that it is part of the religion or one can say that it is part of the culture; it is very difficult
to separate them. It is also very difficult to change cultural patterns which are deeply ingrained, especially when they
are sanctioned by religion. It is difficult to deal with family violence in a culture in which the religious ceremony of
marriage tells a wife to obey her husband. And that is as true in the United States as it is in India.
That brings me to the point of my title: The Trouble with Religion is that there is no quality control. The past four
years have exposed me to a much broader range of religious symbols and practices and customs than I had ever known
before. In October I bowed to a Buddha at the Rissho Kosei Kai new headquarters in New York, before making a
short speech in Japanese to help dedicate their building. Next April I will go with our Moderator, Denny Davidoff, to
Japan, and I expect that we will take part in the ritual called misogi at the Shinto Tsubaki Grand Shrine. She will wear
a kimono, and I will wear a brief loincloth and we will successively step into a very cold waterfall, accompanied by the
incantations of a priest.
In India I have taken off my shoes and bowed before sacred figures, just as I have knelt in Episcopal services or
Catholic services in the United States and in England. I will confess to you that while I think that such rituals are very
important in the lives of many people, I am not very much interested in the rituals, per se. I am very much interested
in how they impact the lives of those who participate in them. I value the variety of religious expressions because I
know that people and their needs are different. I judge those practices and the religious frameworks behind them
according to what difference they make in the lives of people when they leave the temple or church or waterfall and
return home or to the job.
I think of a woman who was an active part of this church, who used to write me a note once in a while to say that the
service had been particularly meaningful to her. Then a great tragedy came into her life, the sudden and unexpected
death of a dearly beloved son. We helped in all the ways we knew how, and she appreciated our help. But she began
going to a Catholic Church to pray, and then she told me that she had decided to join that Catholic church, and I was
glad that the church was there to respond to her terribly great need at that crucial time in her life. Cedar Lane to me
represents good religion, as our denomination does in general, but neither can be all things to all people.
The long struggle for tolerance in a democratic society and the progress we have made in acceptance of differences
make it difficult for us to say that there is good religion and there is bad religion. Most religious groups end up being
some sort of mixture of the good and the bad manifestations of the power of religion. But we need to recognize both
the good and the bad if we are to live up to our professions of being rational in our religion. Sophie Fahs, the great
religious educator who was the first minister ordained by this church pointed the way in a familiar reading that is in our
hymnal:
"Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies . . .
Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness;
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world . . . "
I would suggest that some religion protects longstanding injustices, in the name of tradition; some religion encourages
the oppression of women; and some religions draw artificial lines of the saved and the damned and then uses these as a
license for abuse. Most gay men and lesbian women see a clear line between the harsh rhetoric of many politicians
and religious leaders about homosexuality and the fate of Matthew Shepard, who was brutally beaten and left hanging
on a fence in a country field.
There is no quality control in religion, and when we realize this, we confront a difficult problem for a democratic
society: how do we preserve our religious freedom and acceptance of wide differences and yet purge our culture of the
oppression and violence which is spawned by bigotry and hatred wearing the mask of religion? There are no easy
answers to this dilemma, but it seems to me that there are some constructive approaches to it.
One of them is to support good religion, its communities and its institutions.
That means that the question is not just: does this religious approach answer all my spiritual needs? But, is this the
kind of religion that can make a difference in our society? It is not just do I need this kind of religion, but also do our
society and our world need this kind of religion?
Religion that is good has to stand for something beyond the individual salvation of its own members.
Let me suggest briefly a few of the ways in which I see what this denomination stands for and what this particular
church stands for as good religion. There are seven or eight thousand Unitarians in the Khasi Hills of India, in the state
of Meghalaya, up in the northeast between Nepal and Bangladesh. These people are very poor; their churches are
mostly quite small primitive buildings, and their livelihood is farming or providing services like driving a taxi. But, for
over one hundred years, ever since a young man named Hajom Kissor Singh met an American Unitarian minister and
went back to his small city and started a Unitarian church, there has been Unitarianism in the Khasi Hills. We help to
support their organization and the schools that they have started in their churches, and we struggle with the question of
how to help to make their lives better without simply making them dependent on us. We have a minister living among
these people for six months now to help us to know them better and to help guide our future relationship with them. I
go once a year and take part in their annual meeting. I have formed some good friendships with these beautiful people,
and I look forward to my visits with them. I dream of our fashioning a ministry with proper training to work in such a
situation, building the community of faith and also using Kathy Sreedhar's techniques to empower them and give them
more control over their own lives. I think that we have some things to learn from some of the religious groups who
never stopped sending out their missionaries to live and work in settings around the world. I think such groups as the
Maryknoll Fathers and Sisters have a lot to teach us, not about saving souls or making converts, but about living among
such people and helping them to express what they already believe and to connect their religion with the often grim
realities which many of them daily confront.
That is one in which we as Unitarian Universalists are reaching out beyond ourselves. I think that is good religion.
Here at home, for many people the greatest struggles of their lives, the most difficult issues of living, are confronted,
not in school or work or on a battlefield, but at home in the family. When people who love each other get locked into
patterns that hurt, that destroy self-esteem, that grind away until wounds become open sores, they need help of a very
sensitive kind. Then it becomes important to have a place to turn to, to be able to talk with a minister or a therapist
who can help. For many years Cedar Lane has housed the Pastoral Counseling and Consultation Center -- an
emergency room for the emotional life of the family. How many thousands of bruised spirits over the years found a
listening ear and wise counsel that proved healing. The consensus that provides that steady support is evidence of
good religion.
Cedar Lane supports family values through the many things that happen here that make a difference in how people
relate to each other when
they go home. I think of the ways in which this church celebrates Christmas, and I see impulses that are not simply
contained within these walls. I think of the Christmas Craft Day; of the Flower Committee decorating the church with
greens and poinsettias, of the choir working on Christmas music, the ministers working on Christmas sermons and
letters; I think of what my son said at the Women's Club in my last service as your Senior Minister about how the
Christmas Eve service made him feel most Unitarian. I believe that the problem of Christmas, the celebration of the
birth of Jesus, is not the commercialism of the season -- that can help us or we can ignore it. I believe that the
problem is how we can break through all the guilt, fear, and hatred and become loving persons, caring and supportive
to those who are closest to us and responsive in ways that matter to those who suffer in a difficult dangerous world.
Good religion helps us to do that.
Our religion is good if it gives us intense experiences of feeling together in community -- that feeling that this is where
I belong.
Our religion is good if it helps us to go deeply within ourselves, with a gentle or ruthless honesty and know -- this is
who I really am.
Our religion is good if it sends us out into some area of the human struggle for justice and the relief of suffering ready
to face the lions of prejudice and outright evil and take some risks for what we believe.
Our religion is good if it helps us to say to someone, "I really love you.
You make my life better, and I am grateful." Merry Christmas.
PRAYER
Eternal God, in song and myth and symbol we are brought again to the old stories of Christmas. We give thanks for
the heritage of music and for the time and talent and dedication of those who add beauty and glory to our worship
through music. We give thanks for the gifts of the past and the present which enable us to worship together in the
beauty and comfort of this church.
We seek here calmness, quiet moments of lovely peace to still the clamor of worlds of tension and responsibility and
relentless demand. We are glad for the strong inner sense that tells us these are precious moments of fleeting time; that
bids us look about us and see our loved ones as they really are; that bids us make these moments sharp and clear for
the memories they so quickly become. We pause at thoughts of other Christmases and those with whom we shared and
laughed and sang, whom we continue to cherish in our inmost hearts.
Our thoughts are with those who face great tests of body and spirit today, whether here in our community or in faraway
lands. May we ever be strong and alert for those who need our love and support.
We have the Christmas of the past; we grasp the Christmas of the present.
Our prayer is for the hope and cheer and brightness of the future that Christmas may bring to our hearts. For once
again we come -- as children -- to the time of hope and joy, of goodwill and peace. Amen
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