THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
NOTHING SPECIAL
Buddha's Birthday Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
April 11, 1999Just outside of Kyoto, Japan, there is a Unitarian Buddhist congregation. It is not an expatriate American community. It's a Japanese congregation that has arisen out of the Buddhist tradition, but after being much influenced by the Unitarian heritage. That is backward of my experience. I came at it from the other side. There are a number of Unitarian Universalist ministers who are under orders in one or another Buddhist tradition, and many more who have been influenced to one degree or another by Buddhism.
What's the connection here? In our religious education program we teach our kids about all of the religious heritages of the human experience. We try to help them identify with, to enter as far as they can into the universe of discourse of the various religious heritages that are ours. This is partly as a way of being able to live comfortably in a very diverse world.
One of the tragedies that's going on in our world right now in Kosovo has its roots in the inability of many there to make the leap of imagination that human beings from very differing heritages can share a community together.
Only a few hundred years ago, we took for granted that nation-states would be essentially homogenous. Indeed, the Unitarian heritage was born in exactly that experience over 400 years ago. If you recall the story, King John Sigismund had to decide what religion his country was going to declare itself to be. Under the influence of Unitarians he declared it to be Unitarian, which only worked because what he was declaring in the process was that each individual congregation got to decide for itself whether it was Protestant, and which brand, or Catholic. With our roots in that very first beginning attempt to take seriously the religious diversity of the human species, it is not surprising that certain pieces of other religious heritages might catch the imagination of Unitarian Universalists.
There is, however, more to our connection to Buddhism than interest in comparative religion, appropriate as that is in our pluralistic world.
My experience is that there is no inherent contradiction between the Buddhism that I have encountered and my Unitarian Universalism. Oh, there may be some conflict between specific cultural expressions of Buddhism. I do not find the assorted mythologies of the largely ethnic overlay particularly interesting or useful. But the teaching of the Buddha and of many of the Buddhist teachers I find very useful and instructive in my own path. In similar ways the Christian mythologies are, for most of us, of little interest except that they have so heavily shaped the very ways in which westerners raise and try to answer the questions of deep human meaning. Our interest as Unitarian Universalists most of the time is to understand that shaping by our Christian heritage, not to accept or reject it, but to understand and where necessary transcend it.
In some ways, however, it is easier to listen across the cultural barriers to Buddhism than to Christianity because we are not as emotionally involved with, nor have our imaginations been as steeped in, the Buddhist language and mythologies as they have the Christian ones.
One of the dirty tricks that I have occasionally attempted -- if I've done it here I'll never admit -- is to take an idea that strikes me as true out of the Christian heritage and cloak it in metaphors and language that are not particularly Christian. Buddhism often offers me the opportunity to do this. Then, somewhere two-thirds or three-quarters of the way into the sermon, I will make the connection that, "Well, of course, what we're actually talking about here also is the Christian doctrine of . . . ."
If our Universalist heritage is right that back of the symbols and images, the languages, the mythologies of the religions of the human experience are indeed the same human experiences talked about differently and symbolized differently; then it should come as no surprise to us that there is no inherent conflict between Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism.
The possible connection between Unitarian Universalists and Buddhism is even closer than that, however. In my experience, Buddhism speaks particularly to the contemporary Unitarian Universalist experience in a way that few other religious heritages can. The first is that, like Unitarian Universalism, Buddhism contains no required dogmas, ideologies, beliefs. There is nothing you are required to believe to be a Buddhist. Our Unitarian Universalist heritage has evolved out of and is in the process of leaving behind the notion that religion has to do with the intellectual propositions that you can manage to get yourself to affirm. Rather, authentic religion has to do with what your experience of being a human being feels like, what your own experience has to teach you when, in a disciplined way, you begin to pay attention to it.
The affirmation within Buddhism is that there is nothing that the Buddha taught, nor that the Buddhist teachers have taught since, that is not available to you out of your own experience. Nothing is revealed, there are no secrets. Oh, there are some shortcuts. There are some recommendations that this or that blind alley is usually pointless to go down. But sometimes it can be therapeutic to go down pointless blind alleys; if you remember to come back. But it is out of our own experience that the insights come that are likely to be transforming of our own lives, enriching of our own lives, emboldening of us to reach out to each other within our own lives, families and communities.
As I understand the term, "spirituality," these days, it does not have to do with rituals and pious sorts of things that we do to make ourselves "feel better." Those may or may not have their usefulness, partly depending upon what kinds of paths each of us happen to be on at a given period in our lives. But what spirituality does have to do with--that the old word "religion" often does not point to--is the deep importance of discovering, recognizing our own connectedness; what, in the Unitarian Universalist principles, is the inter-connectedness of all life, of which we are a part.
Only as we begin to understand who we are in that matrix of shared experience do we, in fact, begin to discover who we are. We walk along awash in unseen worlds and forces. We are constantly wrapped in a cocoon of sound waves, electromagnetic waves, the sub-atomic universe bouncing off and going through this artificial barrier called "skin" constantly. The human aura, that cloud of pheromones and gasses and odors and I-don't-know-what-all that each of us drags behind us through our lives, the whole quantum soup in which we swim. They are real things, not imaginary; not spiritual in the old spooky sense, but an incredibly complex web of reality that enfolds all of our being and doing, connecting us to each other. When paid attention to, they demonstrate just how deeply we do indeed affect and are affected by the behavior of one another that we may very well have thought was so purely our own individual private business. That wash of unseen worlds and forces continues to constantly impact and influence our lives. There is no escape from it.
It seems to me that one of the fraudulent promises of some of the evangelists of our different religious heritages has been that there was an escape from the implications of that imbeddedness in the universe. You could have your sins forgiven and washed away if you did the correct sacrifice or participated in the correct ritual. The implications and consequences of your own behavior somehow would be wiped clean. One of the deep messages of the experience of paying attention to how we really are interconnected is that there is no escape from that. However it is that we find ourselves connected, we will live our lives in that connectedness. The strands really can't be slipped finally.
And so, the experience of trying to be an aware, attentive spiritual person is the discovery of that connectedness and the rather demanding discipline of learning how to live out of that awareness. To a lesser extent at least than is usual, we stumble over the pieces we did not see, subject one another to the sharp, raw edges that we were unaware were there, sow less suffering in our wake than is necessary, reap less of each other's suffering, buying into it and making it our own. Only then are we able to reach out in understanding compassion to one another.
Thich Nhat Hanh has a little poem called "Interrelationship." He says:
You are me, and I am you
Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"?
You cultivate the flower in yourself,
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself,
so that you will not have to suffer.I support you;
you support me.
I am in this world to offer you peace;
you are in this world to bring me joy.For the last 2,500 years the experience of being seriously Buddhist has virtually always meant being a monk in a monastery. One of the things that is bearing fruit in the last few decades is that Buddhism has burst the boundaries of the monastic experience. It is not clear, as I listen to and read Buddhist teachers east and west, where that is going for Buddhism; but the monastery is virtually dead. Fewer and fewer of those who wish to try to take Buddhism seriously, to hear the Buddhist insights into their own lives and to pay attention to their own experience from that point of view are going into the monastery. It has become the place to go to get batteries recharged--the retreat phenomenon--but not a place to spend one's life.
That retiring from the community has been largely transformed as a consequence of Buddhism's encounter with its own dark side. Thich Nhat Hanh is a symbol of this. He was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He simply could not buy into any of the responses going on within his country, Viet Nam, during the Viet Nam War. The Vietnamese Buddhist monastic community tried a number of different ways to respond to the inability to embrace what the U.S. and its allies in the country were doing and its inability to embrace what the Viet Cong was doing. Its insistence that there was some other way to be human beings together than these wholly unacceptable alternative choices resulted in one phenomenon that is almost unheard of in Buddhism: the self-immolation of several Buddhist monks. That ritual act was so jarring precisely because of the high Buddhist value placed on reverence for life.
Thich Nhat Hanh has brought that wrestling with trying to find alternative ways, first to this country, now to the larger world. The community currently exists primarily in France, but its influence is spreading all over the place. Some of those places are in the hearts of Unitarian Universalist congregations all over the country. There are insidious spies amongst the Unitarian Universalists, including several UU ministers.
Read the opening four pieces of Thich Nhat Hanh's fourteen precepts of the Order of Inter-being in parallel with the first four pieces of the Unitarian Universalist principles. If you concealed or used synonyms for just enough words that it wouldn't be obvious by the language choice which was which, the themes, the ideas of those opening four pieces in the two respective traditions, are virtually identical.
There is a final similarity I want to point out and that is the similarity from which I've taken the title: Nothing Special. Enlightenment, religious insights, spiritual discipline and depth do not have to do with fireworks and glorious explosions and inspirational mystical experiences that light the horizon all around you, and alter permanently everything about your life. Those experiences rarely have that character. Tragically, we've been led to believe that the earth is supposed to shake or something. Whereas, in fact, the experience of discovering how you really are connected, the implications of what it means to live out of that awareness with some intentionality, is precisely nothing special. It has to do with what goes on day in, day out, moment by moment in families, in couples' relationships, in how we enter into in the most mundane ways of the shared world of the larger community out there. It has to do with how we function in the voluntary organizations that we find ourselves influenced by and involved with. It is finally nothing special; but the ordinary, very mundane, very human, moment to moment experiences of inter-being, of being together.
You are I and I am you.