Interfaith in the Family

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

December 11, 2011

Reading: Robbie Walsh, “At the Liberal Barbershop,” Stone Blessings, Boston: Skinner House, 2010, pp. 24-25.

I've heard about a beauty parlor where all the liberal customers made their appointments for Fridays, so they could talk about politics, religion, sex, and other topics without fear of hostile reactions. It reminded me of being young in the South in the early 1960s, when I had a recurring fantasy of the Liberal Barber Shop.

At Brooks' Barber Shop in my home town, when conversation moved beyond the local high school football and basketball teams, it tended to be about segregation and states' rights, and the possibility of dropping the bomb on the Russians. There was never a dissenting voice. Waiting my turn, I would bury my nose in an old Saturday Evening Post, keep my mouth shut, and imagine what Brooks might do to my hair if he suspected that I favored school desegregation or nuclear disarmament.

It wouldn't be like this at the Liberal Barber Shop. It's not that the barber and his customers would have "liberal" views on everything. They would be liberal. They would express their disagreements (about politics, religion, sex, etc.) respectfully, and treat each other with civility. Though they might believe passionately, they would speak with the understanding that they might be wrong. The customer would feel so safe at the Liberal Barber Shop that he could speak freely about abortion, free trade, the Iraq war, or same-sex marriage—even as the keen edge of the straight razor moved across his sideburns.

Maybe it's just a dream. People are people. And yet we are capable of overcoming our destructive impulses. We can build institutions that hold up respect and dignity, peace and reconciliation—institutions that keep calling on us, with all our brokenness, to live up to those values. I think we can even build a world like that, a little bit at a time.

Sermon “Interfaith in the Family” -Rev. Paul Sprecher

A little while ago, a young couple came to me to begin the process of preparing for their wedding. They had just become engaged and were still trying to nail down exactly when thee wedding would happen. She was Protestant, he was an avowed atheist who was hostile to any invocation of the concept of God. That difference was important enough to them that it had become one of those reliable hot-button that would guarantee a fight between them – every relationship has points of friction like this; theirs just happened to be about religion.

The groom was divorced and had children from his previous marriage, and one of the key concerns we discussed was what exactly it means to take a vow. For the bride-to-be, a belief in God was a key part of what it meant to make a vow; as we have put it in traditional weddings, the union is consecrated “in the sight of God and in the sight of man.” Since he had already repudiated his first wedding vow, she wanted some outside guarantor to ensure that the vows they were considering would last; for her, this required a belief in something beyond their promises to one another – in short, a belief in God. How, then, could their differences of belief be resolved in a way that would give her the assurance that their vows were sacred without forcing him to violate his own conscience by subscribing to a belief that he could not in all honesty agree with? Our covenant here at Second Parish says that we unite “with respect for each person’s search for truth,” but how could this couple unite themselves when their respective searches for truth had led them to this cul-de-sac? Perhaps some time in Robbie Walsh’s Liberal Barber Shop would help.

It’s not unusual for Unitarian Universalist ministers to be called upon to officiate at interfaith weddings. As clergy, we stand on the side of love, and we do not generally raise objections to life-long commitments because the bride and groom come from different religious backgrounds or none, or if the union is between partners of the same sex. We believe – sometimes naively – that love conquers all, and we are therefore committed to solemnizing all sincere commitments between two individuals. At the same time, we want to ensure that marriages over which we officiate will last; I like to tell couples who want me to perform their weddings that I’m in the marriage business, not the wedding business.

Some of you came to the one-man-show sponsored by our interfaith Religious Leaders Association earlier this year, In Between. Ibrahim Miari, the playwright/performer, is an Israeli whose father is Muslim and whose mother is Jewish. The play tells the story of what it means to live “in between” Jews and Muslims in Israel, containing within himself both sides of that difficult relationship. When he decides to marry a Jewish woman, the conflicts become more intense, especially for the parents of both bride and groom. There was the further difficulty that they were unable to find a rabbi or an imam who was willing to officiate at their wedding without imposing conditions on one or the other that were unacceptable to that party. In desperation, they sought out a Hindu priest, but he too imposed unacceptable requirements on them as a couple. I was sitting in the audience during this part of the show with one burning question: why didn’t they look for a Unitarian Universalist minister to officiate?

Many of our families include members of different faiths, usually as a result of intermarriage, sometimes as a result of conversion. A study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimated that 27% of marriages in the United States are interfaith – Catholic-Protestant, Protestant-Jewish, Protestant-Muslim and so on. If marriages between members of different Protestant denominations are included – Lutheran-Methodist, for example – about 37% of weddings are interfaith.[i] Chances are that most families include one or more interfaith marriages.

As Unitarian Universalists, we tend to have an easier time than many with interfaith marriage. We avow freedom of conscience and respect for each person’s quest for truth and we have been tolerant of religious diversity since King John Sigismund issued the Edict of Torda in 1568 guaranteeing religious tolerance for all. Freedom, reason and tolerance have been touchstones of our faith for generations. In a way, our agreement to accept disagreements over faith – our commitment not to require adherence to a specific creed – provides a pattern for harmonious relations among religious believers.

Of course, our congregations, too, vary in their actual willingness to tolerate a variety of religious commitments. The congregation in Ridgewood, NJ, where Deedee and I first became Unitarian Universalists occasionally fell into conflict over whether “God” ought to be mentioned in sermons at all. One Jewish couple objected to the Christmas Eve service as being too “Christian.” Others objected when a long-disused sign referring to the “Unitarian Church of Ridgewood” was displayed as part of a historical exhibit. We would undoubtedly find similar conflicts here at Second Parish if we looked hard enough; fortunately, they have not been a source of acute tension here.

I want to suggest two divergent ways of understanding and ameliorating some of the conflicts that can occur in interfaith families: first, that God is not one – that is, all religions really are not the same at heart; and second that each religion is also not one – that is, each religious tradition also contains diversity within itself.

Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University, argues in his book God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World that each of the major religions sets out to answer different questions and to offer different solutions. His perspective offers a contrast to Mahatma Gandhi, for example, who claimed that “all religions are true.” It is true that there are some common elements among different religions – the Golden Rule comes to mind – but religions really are different in both belief and in practice. All religions understand that something is wrong with the world that needs correcting, but each offers a different analysis of exactly what is wrong and how it can be fixed. Thus, for example, Christianity proposes that the problem to be addressed is sin; the solution is salvation; the technique for achieving salvation is faith and good works; and the exemplars – the models we should follow – are the saints. On the other hand, Buddhism identifies the problem as suffering; the solution as achieving Nirvana; the technique as following the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, and the exemplars as the Bodhisattvas. Each religion in turn has particular practices and particular holidays or festivals to reassert and reinforce their understanding of the problem and the solution to the fact that human beings are by their nature imperfect.

The question becomes acute once there are children. Which religious holidays ought to be celebrated in the home or with a congregation? Where will the children get their religious education? In what religious tradition should they seek a marriage partner for themselves? Some families try to resolve the potential conflict by conflating divergent holidays – Christmakkah – a combination of Christmas and Hanukkah – comes to mind. Children will not leave these concerns up to their parents, either. They learn about other religions from classmates and friends, and they want answers about how their religious traditions differ from others, and how they should navigate those differences. So religious traditions really do differ in significant ways, and those differences really do matter to families.

There is another truth, though, and that is the fact that religious traditions contain diversity within themselves. Every religious tradition, for example, includes individuals and sects with diverse stances toward their religious traditions. Differences among religious traditions cannot be simply reduced to a problem and a solution, as Prothero asserts. Each tradition includes some adherents who would identify as mystics, individuals who are more focused on the experience of the sacred than on particular doctrines – Sufis among Muslims, Hasidim in the Jewish tradition, contemplatives in the Christian tradition, and so on. Each religion has some adherents who are liberal and open to influences from outside their faith; and others who believe that their faith must be practiced rigorously in the manner of its founders. Each has legalists who apply a strict interpretation of religious law and deny legitimacy to members of their own faith who do not share those commitments; we have seen some of these conflicts among Muslims from different sects, for example in the violent conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. In Israel similar conflicts arise between highly observant and less observant Jews, most recently on the practices of segregating men and women on public busses.

It should not be surprising that there are differences within religions as well as among religions. After all, human beings are all individuals whatever their religious traditions, and different aspects of a particular religion affect individuals in different ways. Psychologists tell us that we exhibit different personality types – introverts and extraverts, an orientation to thinking or to feeling, a preference for careful planning or for spontaneity, just as examples. These characteristics define not only our everyday interactions with one another but also our understanding of our religious traditions as well.

There are also practices that are common across religions. Most include some form of prayer; many include sustained practices of meditation; and most incorporate one form or another of congregational worship. While the words that accompany these practices may vary significantly, the interior experience for the individual may be quite similar.

How, then, may we live in harmony when our religious traditions are not the same? How can there be peace in the family if beliefs are not held in common? Dialog is one key. Diana Eck speaks of the importance of listening as well as speaking in her account of her own religious journey in her book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares. She learned on that journey that understanding the beliefs and practices of Hinduism helped her to clarify and deepen her own Christian beliefs and practices. She argues that it is only by exposing our own faith to other faiths that we truly understand what we believe and how we should carry those beliefs into how we really live our lives.

Dialog is not easy; it has to be learned and practiced; it requires listening without talking – deep listening, we might call it; and speaking from the heart. We usually “listen” while composing our own response to what we are hearing; and we often speak from our pre-commitments rather than in response to what we have heard from the other person. This is the kind of dialog we practiced in our covenant groups a few years ago.

It’s easy to caricature adherents of another religion and to believe that its most intolerant and violent devotees are characteristic of the religion as a whole, while supposing that our own faith is manifested primarily in the character of our saints. It is a widespread misconception that Islam is a religion of violence and intolerance because some contend that the religion as a whole is “really” about what its most fanatical adherents claim it is about.

Above all, we need to remind ourselves over and over that all of us are human, all too human. Our first Unitarian Universalist principle commits us to affirm that every person has inherent worth and dignity. That has implications for how we conduct our lives in this one world, of which we are but a small part. As Robbie Walsh suggests, we can work hard to create a “Liberal Barbershop” in which even strongly held disagreements can be discussed with tolerance as well as passion. We can learn to practice dialog with one another – deep listening and speaking from the heart.

Richard Gilbert reminds us of what we share as against how we differ in his poem “We Are All More Human Than Otherwise:”

The human race is a vast rainbow,
white, black, red, yellow, and brown
bursting into view.
Yet for all,
blood is red,
the sky is blue,
the earth brown,
the night dark.

In size and shape we are a varied pattern of
tall and short,
slim and stout,
elegant and plain.
Yet for all there are
fingers to touch,
hearts to break,
eyes to cry,
ears to hear,
mouths to speak.

In tongue we are a tower of babel,
a great jumble of voices grasping for words,
groping for ways to say love, peace, pity, and hope.

Faiths compete, claiming the one way;
saviors abound, pointing to salvation.
Not all can be right, not one.
We are united only by our urge to search.

Boundaries divide us, lines drawn to mark our diversity,
maps charted to separate the human race from itself.
Yet a mother's grief,
a father's love,
a child's happy cry,
a musician's sound,
an artist's stroke,
batter the boundaries and shatter the walls.

Strength and weakness,
arrogance and humility,
confidence and fear
live together in each one,
reminding us that we share a common humanity.
We are all more human than otherwise.[ii]

May we apply this wisdom in our living, and Amen.