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On Faith Mike Young |
Faiths share similar
wisdom in different waysI was raised a Baptist, tried for heresy while I was in college and thrown out of the church. I then had almost as much difficulty hustling my way into Unitarian Universalism. So I have bounced around a bit. I went to an interdenominational theological school. I spent my early career in campus ministry at Denison University, Tabor Academy and Stanford University. I studied Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara.
It is no accident, then, that I have participated in interfaith activities throughout my ministry to Unitarian Universalist congregations in four states. I always found it interesting and curious that we all gave such differing reasons for holding the same commitments and doing basically the same things with such differing vocabularies. Same tune; different lyrics.
I know that liberals like to disparage the religious right, but, outside the short list of public policy issues we disagree on, it has largely been true of them as well. Our most reliable allies on the separation of church and state issue, for example, have always been the Seventh-day Adventists and American Baptists.
In my sabbatical travels to the Philippines and Transylvania in the past year, I was struck by the same phenomenon. Our partner church in Caican is Christian Theist Universalist. The Transylvanian Unitarian churches I visited are Christian Theist Unitarian. Their preferred religious vocabularies are as different from ours as Our Lady of the Mount Roman Catholic Church or the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Evangelical and Reformed Expiationists.
And yet, I felt right at home! What they did and what they were committed to were the same things that characterize our very liberal and (we insist) very different religious community here on Pali Highway.
So I find myself wondering if it is possible to find a vocabulary that transcends our differences yet is true to our differing symbols, images and stories. Is there a meta-theology of community that neither conflates nor trivializes our rich diversity but that can help us make those commitments we hold in common in fact count for a whole lot more in this larger community we share together?
In the Building Your Own Theology class that I am teaching this fall, I have been experimenting with a theology of the transformative community. The presumption is that when our differing theologies are effectively in the service of that transformative community, they have behind them the same human experiences. Talked about, en-symbolized, maybe even rationalized differently, they are the same human experiences. When it works, it's more similar than our stated beliefs would make it appear.
Maybe this religion thing is more about our similarities than our differences. What might happen if we could find persuasive and mutually agreeable ways to say that? Oh, my! We might have to get over our delicious fit of pique at those who've got their ideology wrong, or who we're deeply committed to being put out at for having wronged us.
Hmm. One religious community; different beliefs? In my travels I found it existed in 1568 in the little country of Transylvania under the protection of the Islamic sultan. (Google it: Edict of Torda.)
Talk about interfaith!
The Rev. Mike Young is pastor of First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.
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