Why Religion Matters

Richard Venus (MVUUF Minister 1991-2005) - 2005-05-22

The painter, philosopher and writer John Ruskin lived in the middle 1800's, with a mind that would not stop. An intellectual whose last years were troubled with madness, he struggled throughout his life with the ultimate questions of life. "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what he or she saw in a plain way," he wrote. "To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one."

Ruskin's troubled life led him from a fundamental belief in God as creator to an understanding of God growing from our knowledge of ourselves. In his early writing, he considered humanity as primarily related to its Maker and therefore those spiritual aspects which ready us for a future existence with God are most important. His later writings, however, focus not upon humanity's relation to God, but to the needs of life in this world. The knowledge most important to humanity no longer comes from the word of God in the Bible, but rather all knowledge, including that of God, comes from humanity's knowledge of itself.

He wrote in 1875, "It is very strange to me…to be now merely like a shipwrecked sailor, picking up the pieces of his ship on the beach." Ruskin sees himself a Robinson Crusoe of the spirit, trying to sustain his present life with the wreckage of his past. After his loss of faith and even after he returned to Christianity, he reveals a continuing attempt to salvage fragments of his old religion for use in a changed existence.

I speak of John Ruskin because I sometimes struggle as he did with the question, what is this religious language about anyway? And also because I find it fascinating and somewhat consoling that this intellectual, who wrote before Darwin's Origins of the Species was published, struggled with the same questions you and I do as we reflect on religion's place in our lives. The old joke about how the Klan burned not a cross but a question mark on the lawn of the local Unitarian Universalist holds some truth. We do not accept religious ideas and beliefs without debate, without seeing them in the context of the whole of life.

At one point Ruskin wrote, "You speak of the Flimsiness of your own faith. Mine, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms; but the only letters it can hold by at all are the old Evangelical formulae. If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

Ruskin is most likely responding to the three volumes of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, published 35 years before Darwin, which were regarded as the foundational writings of modern geology. Lyell's work is credited with elevating the subject to a respectable scientific discipline. He argued that ordinary geologic forces, operating over long expanses of time, could utterly transform the earth's surface. He showed that the earth was not created in seven days. Rather, fossil remains were evidence of a gradual creation over millions of years. Like Ruskin, who was confounded by Lylle's theories, we are also confronted with what that knowledge means for religious truth. A belief in the word-for-word Biblical record no longer rings true and we are left with a search for answers to the meaning of life with no one source for uncovering the truth. 1

In her book Plain and Simple, Sue Bender writes: "Perhaps each of us has a starved place, and each of us knows deep down what we need to fill that place. To find the courage to trust and honor the search, to follow the voice that tells us what we need to do, even when it doesn't seem to make sense, is a worthy pursuit." 2

I am not sure each of us has the same kind of starved place, or that our search is the same, but for me, and I suspect for many of you, we find ourselves searching; searching for ways to make sense of what has happed to us throughout history and what is happening to us, in us and around us now. Most of us are searching through a variety of windows, windows that shape our vision as to how we understand the truth we seek. Religious language and experience is a window for that search.

As we Unitarian Universalists put it in our Principles and Purposes, ours is a search for truth and meaning. Religion for us is not understood easily, yet I argue that we are religious people, even though we debate long and hard about just what that means. And as Ms. Bender puts it, even when it doesn't make sense it is a worthy pursuit.

The pursuit of religious truth is the search for meaning in our lives. It is an on-going journey that evolves and changes as we have new experiences of joys and sorrows, and as new evidence about our very existence continues to be uncovered.

Audre Lorde, in her somewhat obscure responsive reading, We Were Never Meant To Survive, that we read earlier is describing something of the human condition. "For those of us who live at the shoreline," she begins, "standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone...For all of us this instant and this triumph--we were never meant to survive." We are afraid, she says, afraid of not being known, of not being heard or welcomed. "Even when we are silent we are still afraid. So," she concludes, "it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive."

While not meant to survive, that we do survive is the conclusion we draw from her. And we are afraid of what survival means. I believe that religion speaks to that fear, that puzzlement, if you will, of what life is meant to be.

A lead story in the New York Times this week was of South Korean researchers who produced human stem cells that were genetic matches of their patients. These stem cells can be directed to grow into any of the body's cell types and because they are cloned cells they are exact genetic matches of the patient being treated. 3

The conclusions and decision made from this discovery will be terribly important for the evolution of human beings. While these researchers have pledged not to use their findings to create identical human beings, certainly the possibility is there and often science pursues the path that new information takes. We may be faced with a kind of human evolution that is a radical departure from how we have emerged up to this point in time.

What these scientists have created confronts us with a fundamental religious question, what is life? And as we struggle to find answers I suggest we are informed by the religious tendency toward ultimate truth.

Religion is a way to tell our story and to understand our lives. One way is to call our journey a search for God, whether it be the One God above all Gods, or the ultimate reality, a higher power, the ground of our being, the Godess, or Vishnu, the god of many names, or the many gods of many names. Or perhaps it is a journey with no gods at all. In many languages, in many faiths, the religious journey is about making sense of life. Each of us brings religion or ethical criteria to our understanding of the new worlds we encounter. The words we use are different, but the search is common to all of us.

As the three wise men say in chorus in W.H. Auden's For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 'To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.' And perhaps it is in the mythical religious stories where we find the greatest truth; in the tales of what ought to be, or what we most hope for. There we find the pointers to the human condition as we want it to be. As Joseph Campbell reminds us, myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. In each of our common religious stories we find human life dignified and defined.

There is no one way to understand this religious journey. Our voyage, our experiences, our pain and our joy guide us toward different gods and different answers, but our search seeks the same basic values. Psychoanalyst Eric Erikson suggests that the ultimate questions human beings ask grow out of what he calls our innate "religious sense." Those questions include "What is the meaning of life?" Why are there pain and death? Why, in the end, is life worth living? What does reality consist of and what is its object?" These, he suggests, are the defining essence of our humanity, and they are religious questions whose answers are myriad and change as we change and grow. "These questions," Erikson says, "are not just speculative imponderables that certain people of inquisitive bent get around to asking after they have attended to the serious business of working out strategies for survival. They are the determining substance of what makes human beings human." 4

Human beings rationality leads them to ask ultimate questions and it is the intrusion of these questions into our consciousness that tells us most precisely and definitively the kind of creature we are, and that is a way to understand our religious journey. As Dr. Erikson puts it, "Our humanness flourishes to the extent that we steep ourselves in these [ultimate] questions--ponder them, circle them, obsess over them, and in the end allow the obsession to consume us." 5

He then adds an affirmation of the religious quest: "There is a grand distance between the questions and answers, but the conviction that the questions have answers never wavers, and this keeps us from giving up on them. Final answers are unattainable, but we can advance toward them as we advance toward horizons that recede with our every step." The search for the answers is a collective one, a journey with scientists, and philosophers, and teachers and fellow seekers after the truth that requires a dialogue with our past as well as a search for tomorrow's solutions.

Our world has become more interrelated: currencies are linked, commerce has become international, political fortunes are interdependent. Any part of the planet is affected by every other, yet as UU minister George Beach reminds us, "the values of justice, faithfulness, steadfast love, truthfulness, good will, peace are expressed in every age, in every religious tradition. These are values we did not choose, but they chose us. They are essential to us as UU's and to people around the globe, in all ages, in all religions."

These are the values that form the meaning of our life together. Deepest values do not have to be modified until they all converge; all the bumps in the road do not have to be flattened. What we must be able to do, however, is to recognize and clearly articulate our deep guiding values and place them in clear, critical conversation with others.

The religious meaning of our lives is found not in alikeness, or similar ideology, but is discovered in an interconnected world where we cannot solve the ecological crises without one another, cannot raise the literacy rate alone, cannot stop the destruction of rain forests and the loss of essential organisms in the food chain without cooperation of the highest order. Religion that matters speaks of and to the pain, the sorrow, the injustice of life. It speaks of collective, communal ways of living. Religion that matters guides us in the spirit of love and compassion of Gandhi, and Jesus, and the Buddha, and Nelson Mandela, and of Unitarian and Universalist women like Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony and Florence Nightingale. And through the likes of you and me, for we are keepers of the light of religious truth.

It was the Psalmist who asked the ultimate questions that religion seeks to answer when he or she wrote so many, many years ago: "O Lord, our Sovereign…When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?".6

His is our question and in moments of doubt and questioning I remember that religion matters because it is the way of discovering who human beings are and what gives meaning to our lives.

UU minister Jane Rzepka notes: "Religion is a big deal. Religion is for comfort in times of despair; religion is for help in ethical decision-making, religion is for connection with the ultimate; religion is for improving the world. Religion is where we inquire about the meaning of life.".7 And so my wish is for peace and direction as we journey on our religious quest together

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Notes

1. Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Chapter 4: Ruskin's Religious Belief. The University Scholars Programme Project website.
2. Sue Bender. Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish. HarperSanFranciso, 1989. P. xii.
3. "Koreans Report Ease in Cloning for Stem Cells." New York Times, Friday, May 20, 2005. P. 1
4. Huston Smith. Why Religion Matters. HarperCollins, 2001. P. 274f.
5. ibid. Pp. 274-5.
6. ibid. P. 275
7. Jane Rzepka, "What's the Big Deal About Prayer in School?" Quest. June 1995. P.1.

©2005 Richard Venus