Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: What Is Religion?

Dave Weber
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Today I am asking the question, “What is religion?” I believe the answer has many layers, like an onion. At its most basic level, religion is experience. I call those moments religious when we live in the present, experiencing life fully, and in so doing find utter amazement. You may think these experiences come but rarely, yet they are all around us and happen all the time. You just have to be awake and notice. An example came to me just last week when I listened to a segment of “This I believe” on NPR while driving home, and found myself taken out of my everyday existence. I heard a man speak of holding his dying father’s hand and feeling the last beat of his heart, and then later witnessing his own daughter’s birth and seeing her first breath. What more can there be to life than this? In this context, religion is intensely personal, an understanding at the deepest level of what it is to be alive, a stripping down to the blood and guts of existence. In such experiences, we find closure, achieve completion, and make connections. Jesus had religious awakenings, as did Buddha and Gandhi, Mohammed and Martin Luther King. But for them the experience burst out from within the personal, and became a passion to make connections between people, to share love, to give to the needy, and seek justice and righteousness. They formed movements, gathered disciples and moved religion out of the personal and into the world. In a sense, that was a good thing — religious communities, such as UUCPA, offer support and expanded opportunities for doing effective social justice work. But there are dangers here as well. Movements can be subverted. I’ll come back to that idea.

First, let’s peel away at the onion and find other definitions for religion. Here’s what I offered last winter to the first and second graders in the Yellow class. Religion is when people come together seeking answers to big questions like how did the world get started, why do good and bad things happen, what rules should we follow, and what will bring us happiness? People get together with others who agree with their answers to form groups of like-minded friends. Those groups represent a way to bring people together as communities who then share their stories and celebrate important moments of life together. Okay, simple stuff for 6-year olds, but the basics are there. We seek togetherness with others who share with us this journey through life. We look for direction on how to live and gravitate to others who hold our opinions. As UU’s, it’s the process we share. We may find different answers to the big questions, but that doesn’t keep us from sharing the journey with others. Last year some of us attended Ramadan meals with local Moslems and then hosted a thank you dinner for them here at the church. We made new connections. That too is religion.

I neglected somehow to mention to the kids the Crusades, the Inquisition, the intolerance toward non-believers, and the many wars fought for the glory of God. Where did religion go wrong? This is what I meant when I said movements can be subverted. Greed and arrogance invariably lead to dominance by the strong over the weak. Examples abound through the ages. Below Saint Peter’s cathedral in Rome is the simple grave of Peter himself, which I visited last month. He and his disciples were passionate believers in ideas which directed them to extend respect and acceptance to one another and to others who believed differently from them. In the centuries that followed, Christianity was carried off into the dark realm of power politics. Above Peter’s grave rose a giant basilica, a monument to the church as empire. Just beyond it are the opulent quarters occupied by Renaissance popes, kings of Christianity. That arrogance which led to inequity and intolerance, continues today, affecting many religious groups. This as well is another layer of the onion, one sadly predominant when I think of world religions.

So religion can be personal experience, a process toward finding answers to the big questions, and a way of coming together in community. It can form the framework for how to live one’s life fully and compassionately. Yet should they abandon reason, well-intentioned disciples moved by the words of the prophets can become pawns of empire. Taught blind faith, these innocents can become victims to tyrants who use religion as a tool for power. As Hitler controlled the minds of Germany’s youth, so Christian Bible camps dominate young minds in America and short circuit their independence and tolerance. As Napoleon’s solders marched to slaughter in Russia for the greater glory of France, so heroes of the jihad will sacrifice themselves today for Bin Laden. Millions of unfortunate young people will never hear the encouragement we give to our Unitarian Universalist youth to use their own intelligence and experiences to create a religion for themselves, to seek fellowship with those different from them, and to form a community where we use our seven principles to tell us how we can make the world a better place.

But there is hope. As all humans are capable of insight and change, we can use reason as our weapon and rely upon our faith in the human spirit, to cut through the hatred and intolerance of religious empires to what is truly divine, the richness of the human experience we share, and the inner decency, compassion, and commitment of people toward one another. In coming to know ourselves, in experiencing the moments of our lives in all their richness, in reaching out to help each other, and in fighting injustice and intolerance, we can redefine religion.

Sermon: A Distant Mirror: A Victorian’s Search for God While Looking for Love by Jonathan Harvey