Many Windows, One Light
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, April 18, 2010

Reflection: A Place in the Family of Things

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely.
No matter.
Whoever you are –
No matter how many years you have walked this earth,
No matter the color of your skin or the language your ancestors spoke,
no matter the language of your dreams,
whoever you are –
no matter if you’ve fallen in love with women or men or both or neither,
no matter the money that is or isn’t in your pocket or your bank account or your coffee tin
no matter the school you went to, and for how long you went,
whoever you are,
no matter if you believe, or don’t, or sometimes do, or doubt, or bow in awe,
whoever you are,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese
announcing your place in the family of things.

The great Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing put it this way:
“I am a living member of the great family of all souls.”
A place in the family of things,
the great family of all souls.

This is the fundamental proposition of both Unitarianism and Universalism:
that we are family first.
That we are brothers and sisters and cousins,
that there is wisdom in each of us,
every color, every creed and kind,
that we see our faces in each other’s eyes,
and then our heart is in a holy place.

Solidarity, we call it. Communion.
We belong to the family of all things,
and all things and all souls are part of our family,
in fact,
part of ourselves.

Our faith is about the open embrace.
It is about saying, yes, I can learn and grow.

Some folks talk about how when you see someone who is different from you –
and everyone, after all, is different from everyone else,
at least in some way –
when you see someone else,
you note first their “otherness.”
We see them as the “stranger.”
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas famously described how
when he looked into the face of the radically other –
a person who was not himself and over whom he had no control,
his first instinct was to kill that person.
Levinas actually argues that this is everyone’s first instinct.
He says that we are frightened by the other,
because we do not own them,
because they remind us of our own limited nature.
But then, Levinas says, you move from fear to responsibility.
You care for this person, because they are different.

I think Levinas has it all wrong.
Others – people like Unitarian Universalist philosopher Sharon Welch –
and I agree with her --
say that when you look into the face of the other,
you see the common subjectivity of another,
you recognize that although they are not you,

you both have hopes and joys and bodies,
fears and desires and wounds,
and you can laugh together and dream together and dance together.

That sounds better, doesn’t it?

The family of things, the family of all souls.
The world offers itself to your imagination.
We see the similarities between all people.
We express our solidarity.
We listen with a loving mind.

This is Unitarian Universalism.
Take a look at the front of your order of service, will you?
You see there the Rehnberg Window,
which hangs in our narthex.
This is the visual map of our faith and of today’s service of worship.
And we are starting in the center,
with the chalice.
The flaming chalice, a symbol of Unitarian Universalism.
The chalice is open –
it takes in the spirits and influences of others.
the flames represents the fire of thought,
the clarifying energy that boils things down to their essentials:

and the essential element of every religious faith is this:
we are family.
We are not strangers, but neighbors and friends.
Created of the same cloth,
animated by the same spirit,
whoever you are, whoever you are,
vibrating with the sound of the universe itself,
part of the whole,
we are family.

So, today, we will journey around the circle.
The times listed in your order of service refer to the position
on a clock for each of the religious symbols
in the Rehnberg window.
We could start with any of them,
but we’ll start in the twelve o’clock position,
with the Christian cross.
Unitarian Universalism comes out of, and still participates in, the Christian faith.
It is our heritage and our context.
So we begin there.
Then we’ll move clockwise.

At two o’clock, the crescent moon and star of Islam.
If you remember from my sermon on Muhammad,
this is the symbol of Islam because Muhammad
received the first portion of the Qur’an on a night when the moon was in crescent.
At four o’clock, the Sanskrit letters for the word OM.
OM is the sound of the universe itself,
according to Hindu traditions.
At six o’clock, the six-pointed star of David,
the symbol of Judaism,
a symbol of ancient power and,
in the 20th century,
a reclaimed symbol for survivors of attempted genocide,
a symbol of perseverance and commitment.
In the eight o-clock position,
the yin and yang of Taoism,
a symbol of balance –
dark / light, male / female, forward / backward, present/absent.
When you stay balanced,
you can stay with the Tao.
Words of wisdom in our unbalanced age.

At the ten-o-clock position,
the wheel of Samsara, a symbol of Buddhism.
So long as we are dominated by our desires,
we remain forever trapped by the wheel,
going around and around,
suffering.
But all beings suffer,
so we reach out in loving kindness to each other,
and by so doing,
learn to step outside the wheel and become enlightened.

After we go around the wheel,
I have a few thoughts to share with you
about what it all means.
So let’s get started.

Message: Many Windows, One Light

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Many Windows
Many Waters

You know, it’s always been that way.
People talk about the “encounter with difference”
as if it were a modern thing,
but it has always been this way.

Two thousand years ago,
in the Indus Valley,
and along the south edge of the Himalayas,
a young man might bring flowers to the temple,
to honor an ancient God of his people,
and pass, along the road,
a Buddhist monk in his saffron-colored robe,
holding out a wooden bowl for alms.
On the way home from the temple,
this young man passes another Temple,
one where the Jain’s gather and say their prayers.
The young man – he follows the Vedic tradition,
it is the British who, centuries later,
will call this religion Hinduism –

the young man admires the Buddhists for their kindness and simplicity,
and he respects the Jain’s for their commitment to pacifism and non-violence.
But he likes his Vedic traditions for their spiritual power
and ancient teachings.

At about the same time,
somewhere not to far from here,
an old woman puts on her best outfit
and sets out for the dance.
Her people know many spirits,
the spirits of all the animals,
birds, frogs, foxes, deer, the buffalo,
and the spirits of all the places:
the east, the south, the west, the north,
wind, fire, water, and earth.
And at the dance, all these spirits are honored.
The old woman would not even comprehend the idea
that some of these spirits are false,
or that only one could be real.

In China,
Taoists, Buddhists, and those who,
like Confucius,
honor their ancestors in ritual,
live side by side.

In Japan,
Buddhism lives side by side with the Shinto tradition
and the ancient animistic traditions of the islands.

In the near east,
Zoroastrians, Jews, and polytheistic pagans
borrow each others myths and legends,
and their moral codes.

It was always like this:
the world has always been full of great variety.
Many windows.
Many waters.

Oh, sometimes they would fight.
It doesn’t take much of an excuse
for people to start fighting, does it?

And tribes would fight tribes,
families against families,
and since each religious path usually belonged to a tribe,
sometimes people would make their fights about religion.
But the fights weren’t about religion,
they just used that as an excuse.

In Jerusalem, in the 8th and 9th century,
before the Crusades really got going,
Jews and Christians and Muslims all lived together in peace.

In Spain, in most of the 15th century,
before the Inquisition,
the same was true:
people of different faiths respecting and honoring each other.

What happened?
What happened?

Well, you know that old saw right?
The one by Lord Acton?
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That was part of it.
The kings and princes of Europe wanted more stuff,
they needed more land,
they wanted to cement their authority –
and there is no better way to gain power
than by rallying your people behind a war,
and a holy war, even better.
Things changed.
At the behest of these kings,
religious figures started emphasizing how Jesus suffered,
instead of how he liberated,
and they told their young men to go to war,
and suffer like Jesus suffered,
so they could be holy.

The other part of it happened a little later,
and it was less violent but still trouble:
the new sciences, the modern ideas about reason and truth
instructed people that there could only be one right answer.
Only one right answer.
Which might be true, you know, for 2+2.

The folly – and it was folly of a great and terrible nature –
the folly was to think there was only one right answer to other questions
what is the name of God?
what book is Holy?
how should we pray?

But this is what people thought.
And so we got this notion –
it builds slowly from about the 9th century until
1492, the start of the inquisition
and the genocide of the native people of this continent,
when it explodes into the imperial colonial system
from 1492 right down to today,
we got this idea that there could only be one true religion.

And this is where I want to pause in this story.
I want to stop here,
and weep.
For this part of our story comes with a heavy heart.
A heavy, heavy heart.
The young men sent off to war
by the princes and kings and popes of Europe
they were only the beginning.

So many of our brothers and sisters and cousins,
murdered, burned alive,
flayed, shot through with balls of iron,
split asunder with sharp steel,
whole towns burned to the ground,
the men dead in the dirt,
the women and children marched away in chains:
in Europe and the Americas, in Africa, in Asia –
so many dead.

This is where, in our story,
we stop and weep.

Let us not hurry on.
Let us not avert our eyes.
We, whose ancestors survived the terror,
and we, whose ancestors committed the terror,
we live with this memory.

An idea, used to destroy and maim.

Some ideas are wrong,
not because they are false but because they are evil.

The idea that
there way only one name for God,
only one holy book,
only one way to pray,
this idea is evil.

And it is false.

There is another road.
There is another way,
and there always has been.
That road exists in many traditions,
all around the globe:
the mystic, the whirling sufi, the sage,
the one who teaches that all is beyond naming,
that what is holy cannot be held tightly,
but only loosely,
that all paths are worthy of respect,
that every person is part of the family of all souls,
that whoever you are,
you have a place in the family of things.


In Western Christianity,
the path of inclusion,
the path that says there are many ways toward the holy life,
the path of what we call religious pluralism,
that path was cleared by Unitarians and Universalists.

Miguel Servetus lived through the inquisition.
A Christian, he was horrified by the violence.
He wept.
And he challenged the authorities,
he challenged the Trinity,
and said that Christians had more in common with Jews and Muslims.
And he was burned at the stake for his heresy.
The first Unitarian.

Francis David, Unitarian
a generation later,
proclaimed we need not think alike to love alike.
Jailed by the Jesuits, he died in prison in Transylvania.

The English Dissenters – John Biddle and Theopholis Lindsey and the rest,
teaching each person to listen to their own conscience
and not the voice of some official.

The early Universalists,
so sure of God’s love for all creatures
that they proclaimed universal salvation,
not just for Christians, but for everyone of every religion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
incorporating the insights of Hinduism
into his new American philosophy of Transcendentalism.

The key moment for us comes in 1893, just down the road in Chicago –
religious leaders from all over the world come to the world’s fair
and our eyes are truly opened:
all religions have something to teach us,
all paths lead up the same mountain of truth and understanding,
there are many windows, many waters.

We stayed true to our Unitarianism,
our commitment to the oneness of divinity.

We said then and we say now,
there is one reality, interconnected,
one divinity,
but many many names
many ways of knowing,
religions of many kinds, and non-religious ways too,
and every way is potentially worthy –
every way can be fruitful.
Many windows, one light.
Many waters, one ocean.

And what we saw in all these various religious paths,
was one essential truth:
the meaning of our lives, the test of righteousness,
the instruction of the sacred way,
was always the same:
treat your brother, your sister, every human being
with the kind of respect and love
that you, at your best, wish for yourself.
Be a living member of the great family of all souls.
That was it.

There’s a reason we call it golden –
for no treasure is as valuable as this rule.

It is embedded into each religion of the world
because it is embedded into the hearts of every human being:
that when we look into the eyes of another,
we see there our own faces,
we see the joy and the hope and the sorrow,
the laughter and tears,
and we feel, deep down, solidarity and communion:
the family of all souls.

In a moment, we are going to close with a great Unitarian song,
it sounds along the ages.
This song was written by William Channing Gannett,
who was named after and christened by William Ellery Channing,
who was a friend and colleague of Ezra Stiles Gannett, his father.
William Channing Gannett,
after graduating from seminary,
spent four years working with former slaves,
right after the civil war,
teaching them to read and run their own lives,
helping them really live their new freedom.

Channing served in Milwaukee and St. Paul,
and in Hindsdale, IL and Rochester, NY.
He embraced all the religions of the world,
he had his congregation celebrate Thanksgiving
with the local Jewish synagogue.
And here is the Unitarian vision,
embodied in our own Rehnberg window,
and in the bones of our faith,
that, as Gannett puts it,
“it kindles on the pages of every Bible scroll”
and “it breathed from Buddha’s tree,
it charmed in Athens’ market.”

There’s a joke among us ministers about this song:
that Gannett never says what the “it” is,
the “it” that “sounds along the ages.”

But that’s as it should be, I think.
If, for you, that it is God, that’s great.
If it is the spirit of humanity at its best, wonderful.
If it is the Tao, the Great Spirit, cool.
Maybe it is the evolutionary impulse towards cooperation and insight.
Awesome.

It doesn’t matter what “it” is.
Not one lick.

What matters is whether you hear the call,
whether you are moved to justice, compassion,
whether it brings you closer to the family of all things,
the family of all souls,
that is our true and blessed home.

No matter who you are,
where you come from,
how you speak or pray or think,
no matter any of that:
we are family.
All are worthy.
All need love and can give love.

That’s it.
That’s what matters.

All the rest – it is adornment.
It might be beautiful or distracting,
wise or foolish.

But the essential is simple:
love one another.
We are all bound together,
so it’s time for us to enjoy each other’s company.
It is time to sing together.