The Encounter with the Other
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
January 9, 2011
Reading from Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, pp. 144-145
ATTENTION! It is a word I associated for many years with the barking command of a military officer, a sports coach, or a school principal coming on over the loudspeaker. Attention. Pay attention. May I have your attention please. Attention, class. On my grade school report cards under the heads "Desirable Habits and Attitudes" there was a box for "Pays Attention" in which I always got an S for "Satisfactory."
I was well into my twenties, however, before I paid any attention to attention. It was an itinerant Zen teacher who came to Cambridge in the early 1970s who told the tale of the Japanese Zen master Ikkyu, an eccentric teacher who was approached by a serious student and asked about the main teachings of Zen Buddhism. Ikkyu took a brush and wrote out the Japanese word for "attention" on a paper and handed it over to the student. Thinking this to be a little brief for a profound teaching, the student asked if Ikkyu would add something to it. Again Ikkyu took his brush and he wrote, "Attention, Attention." When pressed by the student for something additional, he wrote with his brush, "Attention, Attention, Attention."
The itinerant Zen master had us all sitting on pillows in the enormous wood-paneled room of Memorial Hall, with its stained-glass images of the saints of Harvard. We tried out Ikkyu's instruction. Just pay attention to the breath, in and out, counting each breath to ten, not losing track of the count by sailing into the reveries and imaginings of inattention. Sounded easy enough, but I never once made it to ten that day. My mind was off and running. Thinking, How am I doing? Thinking, What's the use of counting to ten? Thinking, The guy next to me is breathing too loud. I lost the count. After a while I improvised and tried paying attention to the Lord's Prayer instead of the counting. Surely something meaningful would be easier to stick with than counting to ten. I took it a phrase at a time. I never once made it all the way to "forever and ever" without my mind drifting from the familiar sacred words into the eddies of extraneous thoughts. If the report cards on desirable habits and attitudes had been sent home with us, I would never have gotten an S for paying attention. But from that day on, the importance of this word attention began to grow on me, or within me. Just being awake, alert, attentive is no easy matter. I think it is the greatest spiritual challenge we face. Finally, I think, it is the only one.
Sermon
I grew up in a family and in a church that believed deeply in foreign missions. My grandparents were very generous both with material support for our missionaries and with hospitality during the times when they came back to the States to raise funds and supplies and to share the stories of the mission work they were doing. I remember a number of visitors to our church and our house – there was Miss Fisher, who had been in China but had been forced to leave soon after the Chinese Communist Revolution; and a missionary from Borneo who told tales of exorcisms as part of his missionary work; but my favorite was our missionary to India, Miss Grieger, who made our house her home base in the States, and for whom I can recall my grandmother packing many barrels of clothes. Miss Grieger told wonderful stories about the exotic land where she served – the colors, the smells, the food, the people – and she wore a sari much of the time and cooked up delectable Indian concoctions. She talked about the incredible poverty of the people she served, about their lack of education, and especially about the false gods that they worshipped; hence the need to teach them about Jesus and convert them to Christianity. Miss Grieger always brought back carved elephants, often of delightfully scented sandalwood, but she never brought back images of Hindu gods – that would have amounted to idolatry.
I had and still have a great deal of respect for the important help that Miss Grieger and the others brought to they served, but within our close-knit religious community, these visits reassured us that we were in firm possession of the true meaning of life and death and of how best to live in this world. It was a particularly North American Christian view and did not contemplate that any other religion might be a path to salvation or even to wisdom. It was an example of an exclusivist approach to religion – we were in the right and had the answers, and anyone who did not believe like us was wrong, acting under a delusion, and condemned.
The problem with this perspective is that we live in a world in which we all occupy one earth and we are increasingly faced with the reality that in the United States alone there are followers of virtually every religion on earth, many of them living within a few miles of us. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of our living in a “World House,” about which he told this story:
Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: ‘A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.’ This is the great problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu – a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.[i]
The Holy Qur’an, scripture of Islam, puts it this way: “If God had so willed, He would have made all of you one community, but He has not done so that He may test you in what He has given you; so compete in goodness.[ii]
We are then left with two choices: either we adopt what we could term an ‘inclusivist’ posture which subsumes other religions to our own, speaking as Dietrich Bonheoffer did of “unconscious Christians,” perhaps regarding others religious understanding as included in but inferior to our own, or we can be pluralists and find ways from within our own traditions to reach out to the Other and to engage in dialogue in a way that expects we will learn from each other. There are among Unitarian Universalists those who hold the inclusivist persuasion and believe that we enlightened ones have transcended the less advanced notions of other religious people and are in possession of the highest truth, though others have merits as well. This position was staked out, for example, by one of the leading Boston Unitarian ministers of the 19th Century, James Freeman Clarke.
On the other had, in a world in which as many as 2.2 billion people may be at least loosely identified as Christians, 1.6 billion as Muslims, 1.5 billion as Buddhist, 1 billion as Hindu, 18 million as Jews, 600,000 as Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist, and so on, it is difficult to believe that any one religious persuasion can have all truth or an especially advanced and inclusive version of the truth. Even the Roman Catholic Church, which long held that there is no salvation outside the church, was forced to the realization –upon the encounter with indigenous peoples in the Americas during the great age of discovery – that there were peoples who had never been exposed to their Christian teachings. Theologians were forced to concede that all of those who had died before the ‘discovery’ of the Americas – more like an invasion from the indigenous perspective – could not possibly have been sent to hell because they had never been exposed to the truth of Catholicism.
Diana Eck’s journeys from her fervent Methodist roots in Bozeman, Montana to Benares on the Ganges – regarded by some Hindus as the most sacred city in India – led her to the realization that, as one Christian book expresses it, her God was too small. As she wrestled with the extraordinary number of gods among the Hindus she met first in India on her year abroad from Smith College, she came to realize that in some ways their conceptions of the divine enhanced her own grasp of the God she knew from her own Christian tradition. While the Hindu sages said there were as many as 330 million gods, they also said that the All, the One, the Brahman, encompassed the others. All of their descriptions of the Brahman were couched in terms of what the divine was not – not this, not that, not the other – neti, neti, neti – a negative theology which cautioned against the belief that any particular image of God in our human minds could possibly capture that transcendent reality known by many names. At the same time, their concept of the Atman– the divine breath in each of us – provides at the same time an insight into the notion of the Spirit in Christian theology, that spark within each of us which shares also in the divine, something that Genesis refers to as the “image of God.”
Her exposure to the worship of the many gods of Hinduism helped her to come to terms with a blind spot in the thinking of the great religious traditions of the West:
It might be called the ‘myth of monotheism”: that there is one and only one holy story to be told, to be reflected upon by theologians, and to be participated in by the faithful….” It is presupposed throughout our culture as only our deepest and most basic myths are presupposed. It is a myth in the sense that it is the powerful story we tell about reality, so powerful we do not recognize it as our story. It is not the world-shaping myth of religious people alone, but is a particular way of seeing and evaluating that has shaped equally the worldviews of Marxists, secularists, and atheists in the West…. [It affects] not only our way of thinking about God, but … our way of thinking about persons as “individuals,” our way of thinking about authority in the structures of family, church, and state, and our way of thinking about questions of truth.[iii]
Diana Eck discovered in the course of her many journeys to meet religious people as devoted to their own beliefs and customs as she was to hers that only through dialogue – listening carefully to others while holding firm to our own beliefs and understanding – is it possible for us to learn truths about ourselves and what we believe. Only by encountering the stranger, the Other, is it truly possible to understand ourselves.
Let’s bring these insights home to our own congregation. We have a substantial diversity of beliefs just among ourselves. There are those who identify as Christians, Unitarians, Hindus, humanists, agnostics, atheists, and followers of other religious and secular beliefs. We are sometimes hesitant –in our own New England way – to talk about our religious differences. We need to practice a kind of interfaith dialogue right here, opening ourselves to the deeply held commitments we share and those we don’t, willing to learn where our own blind spots are and where we, like Diana Eck, can come to a better understanding of who we are and what we believe by striving to understand each other even as we better understand and necessarily expose ourselves to change. As many of you are aware, one of the most fruitful interfaith dialogues I have been engaging in has been with my colleague Rabbi Shira Joseph of Temple Sha’aray Shalom. This encounter has immensely enriched my own understanding of my religious commitments, and I look forward to deepening and enriching that dialogue as we lead a trip to Israel together next year.
We as Unitarians Universalists come from a distinctively Christian tradition, though we have expanded our understanding to a more pluralist conception of religion. At the same time we here gather ‘in the spirit of Jesus’ and it is especially important that we teach our children from within that tradition, so that they will have a firm ground to stand on when they, too, mature and enter into dialogue with the Other.
Finally, it is a question of paying attention, of really being present for the other whether friend or relative or stranger. As part of her discussion of paying attention as reflected in our reading this morning, Diana Eck tells the story of Karen, a colleague who was dying of brain cancer as they were both working on their Ph.D.s. Karen’s friends gathered to stay with her during her last days and weeks in the hospital. Eck remembers that, over time, conversation became more and more one-sided until her friend could respond to their presence only by a squeeze of the hand. She goes on:
… In the last week of her life, there was no response at all. It was Wednesday night of Holy Week that she died. It was my night on in the hospital and I was supposed to be preparing a chapel talk for the next morning's prayers at Appleton Chapel in the university. Fighting sleep in the corridor, armed with a cup of coffee from the vending machine, my eyes fell upon the familiar Maundy Thursday story with a revelatory sense of comprehension.
"Wait here and watch with me," Jesus told his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane on the last night of his life…. In Gethsemane, we see Jesus in his most human hour—in anguish and probably afraid. When Jesus asked his disciples to keep watch, he was not asking them to stand guard in order to warn him when Judas came. He was not about to run away. He was asking them to watch with him—to wait and be awake with him in the hour of crisis…..
Keeping watch is one of the hardest things. Watching with someone who is troubled, grieving, or perhaps dying requires that we be wakeful, present, and engaged, but it does not permit us the exercise of our restless, goal-oriented instinct to do something….
There are, of course, times when we can and must act. But Gethsemane reminds us of those times when what we are asked to do is something more simple and more difficult than springing into action: keeping watch, staying awake. I knew from my taste of meditation practice that the ones who are really good at staying awake are the Buddhists.[iv]
Attention, attention, attention.
In closing, let us remember this prayer of the Upanishads, one Hindus and Christians and many others can share:
From untruth, lead me to truth.
From darkness, lead me to light.
From death, lead me to immortality.
Om, peace, peace, peace.[v]
Amen.