“The Lesson of the Blind Ones”
Keynote address for the
Rockford Interfaith Council
delivered by
The Rev. Dave Weissbard
April 23, 2006
Those who read the Rockford Register-Star already have the summary of what I want to “spout off” about today. I’m sure it came as no surprise since at an event like this one involves “preaching to the choir.” You have not come here needing to be persuaded that interfaith “understanding, amity, and respect” are important – if you didn’t already believe that, you would not have come. The purpose of an event like this is to celebrate and reinforce the perspective which we already share. I do want to “address the reality of 21st century Rockford in which, like modern America, there is true religious diversioty of a degree that some people find hard to comprehend. Ther world has truly shrunk and I believe it is imperative thjat we learnt o live together with respect, rather thantrying to force our beliefs down the throats of others.”
I took as my text for this occasion a familiar story from the ancient Buddhist scriptures which has been a central metaphor for me for the forty-one years of my ministry:
A number of disciples went to the Buddha and said, "Sir, there are living here in Savatthi many wandering hermits and scholars who indulge in constant dispute, some saying that the world is infinite and eternal and others that it is finite and not eternal, some saying that the soul dies with the body and others that it lives on forever, and so forth. What, Sir, would you say concerning them?"
The Buddha answered, "Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, 'Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all those of Savatthi who were born blind... and show them an elephant.' 'Very good, sire,' replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind ones assembled there, 'Here is an elephant,' and to one he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.
"When the blind ones had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind one, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'
"Thereupon the ones who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And those who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.
"Then they began to quarrel, shouting, 'Yes it is!' 'No, it is not!' 'An elephant is not that!' 'Yes, it's like that!' and so on, till they came to blows over the matter. . . .
"Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing.... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus."
Then the Exalted One rendered this meaning by uttering this verse of uplift:
O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.
The Rev. Forrester Church, a contemporary Unitarian Universalist minister, suggests a different metaphor for our purposes. He proposes that we are looking at the same light through different colored stained glass windows. The light is one, but our perceptions of it are colored by the glass through which we view it.
In his book, Bringing God Home, Forrester writes:
Truth in religion is like truth in poetry, our common text being the creation. Though limited by the depth and field of our vision, we are driven to interpret this text as best we can. So we tell stories, formulate hypotheses, develop schools of thought and worship, and pass our partial wisdom down from generation to generation. Not only every faith but every philosophy, ideology and scientific worldview uses the creation as its text. . . .
With differing approaches, methodologies and tools, each of us struggles to discover who we are, where we have come from, how we got here, where we are heading, and why and how.
136 years ago, in August of 1870, Dr. Thomas Kerr, a Scot who had immigrated to America and became first a physician and then a Baptist minister, and was then serving the First Baptist Church in Rockford, stood in his pulpit and delivered a sermon he called “Religious Discrimination” - using the term discrimination in the sense of discernment, not prejudice. During that sermon he told his congregation that he had:
companied with Jews, Jesuits, Mohammendans [the misnomer at the time for Muslims], men of the Greek Church, and very many of the members of what we Protestants represent by our different sects as the Christian church; I have found in each, the one, identical love, supreme toward God, and unselfish toward [people]! . . . Many an evening upon the sea, and many an hour upon the land, friends and home left far behind toward the setting sun; amid what we call “alien and outcast faiths,” where, as we have been educated there can only be unbelief, fanaticism, and superstitious forms; ‘twas under such circumstances that I was taught that external names and forms in the religious are but local and fortuitous!
Dr. Kerr revealed that he had discovered that in spite of the things that made them different from each other, what he found most important was that common among them there was a commitment to values that transcended the differences. It is that understanding of religion which brings us together today.
(I must note that following the delivery of that sermon, Dr. Kerr resigned his Baptist pulpit because that was not good Baptist doctrine and he and two score of his members united with the currently unministered-to members of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Rockford to form a new church which was called “The Church of the Christian Union.” It was, in truth, a continuation of the Unitarian Universalist church.)
This all sounds so reasonable and friendly that it is important that in our revery we step back and consider some dimensions of the real world in which we are living. It is a world wracked with fundamentalisms and religious extremism. Active today there are Christian extremists, Jewish extremists, Muslim extremists, Hindu extremists, and Buddhist extremists. Each of these factions within mainstream religions is convinced that it, and it alone, knows the nature of the Holy, and each believes it has a responsibility to rid the world of error – which is to say, of those who believe differently.
It reminds me of the very old story, told in various iterations, about the person being taken on a tour of heaven. As they approach a walled section, the guide, usually St. Peter, instructs them to be quiet. “Why?” they ask. “Because that is where the [depending on the version, the Catholics or the Baptists or the Adventists or the Lutherans or the Evangelicals or Christians] are. They think they are the only ones here and we just don’t bother them.”
It is interesting, when you Google that story, to see how many ministers tell that story with their faith as the deluded exclusivist ones, the butt of the joke.
That story makes light of what is a very deadly reality. I sometimes wonder whether religion is ultimately more creative or destructive. The number of wars in human history in which religion has served as, at least, the rationale if not the cause, is appalling. While history is full of bloody examples, you only need to look around today. President Bush initially referred to our war against the Iraqi people as a “Crusade,” which is how many Muslims view it. And there is the escalating struggle between Shiite and Suni Muslims in Iraq. And the ongoing battle between Jews and Muslims in Israel, which many Christian Evangelicals support as necessary to usher in the Second Coming. And the mutual terrorist bombings of Muslim and Hindu holy sites in India.
In his recent book, The End of Faith, which I highly recommend, Sam Harris lists all the contemporary religious struggles and concludes:
Religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years. These events should strike us like psychological experiments run amok, for that is what they are. Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire.
It is Harris belief that true peace will only come with the elimination of religion. While he makes many important points, I do not agree with his conclusion although it is very persuasive.
The founders of this nation knew what havoc religion had wreaked in Europe. That is why, when they created a constitution for this new nation, they decided that it was essential that religion not even be mentioned. Others were insistent that not mentioning it was not sufficient protection, so the first amendment was drafted to make explicit the commitment that “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . .” There are, of course, those who insist that this only means that no one religion should be preferred above others, but if you read the debate, precisely such a concept was offered as an amendment and was soundly rejected because to our founders, “no law” meant precisely “no law.”
Lest there be any doubt about the founders intent, the Senate, in 1797, unanimously approved a treaty with Tripoli which explicitly stated:
As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen [which was the contemporary term for Muslims]; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation [sic.], it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
President John Adams saw to it that the text of that treaty was circulated among the major newspapers and endorsed its message.
In spite of the clear statements of our founders, there are still some today who insist that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that all the ills we experience today are God’s punishment for our having renounced that tradition.
It was not all that long ago in Rockford when there was a controversy caused by the delivery of a sermon at First Assembly in which an assistant minister declared that the Holocaust was God’s punishment on the Jews for not having accepted Jesus. Many members of that congregation were offended by the sermon and copies were provided to the Rabbi at Temple Beth El, and to the Rockford Register Star. The minister of First Assembly took out a full page ad in the paper to respond to the controversy and in that ad he condescendingly assured the Jews that they were welcome in our Christian neighborhoods. To make it better, Sam Mayo, the minister, agreed to preach at Temple Beth El, and it got worse. In his sermon he told a lengthy story, the essence of which was, “When you’ve got a new improved version, you can’t be satisfied with the old.” In other words, Judaism has been superceded by Christianity and the Jews would just have to live with it. Sam just didn’t get it.
Subsequently we had a small controversy when a group of Evangelicals decided to have a revival at the Coronado in which they would crown Jesus as “Lord over Rockford.” The presence of Jews, Unitarian Universalists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Baha’is, pagans, humanists, atheists and others in the community was of no concern because their Evangelical fervor and triumphalism made irrelevant any offense we might take at their claim of hegemony.
This is the stuff of which religious tyranny is made. There are people who do not understand how diverse the world is and what is required to live in harmony in such a world. Here we sit in Rockford, Illinois, in the heartland of America. Who would have thought that Rockford would have a Muslim center and school with a full time Imam, three Buddhist temples with saffron robed monks, a Baha’i center, a Hindu Satsang, as well as Jews and Unitarian Universalists, and all the others giving lie to the assertion that this is a Christian community?
The real question is how to relate to this diversity. Is it to be feared, combatted, or embraced?
There are some in our community who devoutly believe that they have been entrusted with the truth and that any who believe differently from them are the tools of Satan and must be converted or otherwise prevented from spreading their error. I remember the shock of some of the Hindus in the community who attended a lecture on Hinduism held at a large church, only to hear themselves described as satanic.
There are Christian clergy in the community who will no longer participate in the Greater Rockford Clergy Association because Rabbi Wing and I are there – they don’t even know the Imam sometimes participates.
There is another approach which is to focus on the commonality of the religions, as Dr. Kerr did in his 1870 sermon, and take an ecclectic approach to religion, drawing upon the wisdom of many traditions. That is, in theory at least, the approach of the Unitarian Universalist church, as expressed in our Rehnberg Window. Most of our members do not define themselves as Christians, although some do. We believe that we should be open to learning from every tradition. Thomas Jefferson asserted that within one generation, everyone in America would be a Unitarian. That, of course, never happened. Such an approach works for some of us, but it demonstrably does not for all of us.
The recognition that eclecticism does not work for everyone is essential, and leads to a third option following triumphalism and eclecticism. We affirm the existence of religious diversity, which means that some people find that being Roman Catholic, or Episcopal, or Lutheran, or Morman, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Baha’i, or Wiccan, makes them better people. From our perspective, whatever works to make anyone a better person is what they should be. As Jesus of Nazareth said, “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
I have had the same experience as Dr Kerr had, which is to observe that while there are differences between my beliefs and those of Imam Nadzaku, and Rabbi Wing, and Pastor Bittner, and Reverend Ohe, and Bishop Spong, and Sister Joan Chittister, and the recently deceased Rev. William Sloan Coffin; those differences are less important than those things on which we agree.
But here is the crucial point: the differences are not irrelevant! The differences are part of what make us who we are. If I want to know and understand these people, and many others like them, then it is important for me to try to understand what makes them tick. It is important to explore the differences as well as the commonalities without allowing those differences to divide us.
The great Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has written:
I believe it is extremely important that we extend our understanding of each other’s spiritual practices and traditions. That is not necessarily done in order to adopt them ourselves, but to increase our opportunities for mutual respect. Sometimes, too, we encounter something in another tradition that helps us better appreciate something in our own.
I want to be clear that I am not saying, “It doesn’t matter what someone believes.” What I am saying is that the test of what people believe is the life that they lead, because I believe that genuine religion is translated into action.
The world has shrunk. My first wife had a Roman Catholic friend who had grown up believing that there were two kinds of people in the world, “Catholics” and “Publics,” which is to say, those who went to Catholic schools and those who went to Public schools.
When I began in ministry 41 years ago, when a young woman in the church I first served married a Roman Catholic, they had what his church considered the “real” wedding in the Catholic church, and then came to the Unitarian church for the bride’s wedding. Just a few years later, when another young woman married a Roman Catholic, I was invited to participate in the ceremony in his church in some peripheral ways. The next such occasion saw a priest come to the Unitarian Church to participate in the ceremony in our sanctuary, but in limited ways. The ultimate story is when I was invited to return to Massachusetts for the marriage of a young Unitarian man to a Catholic young woman. When I arrived for the rehearsal at the Catholic Church, Father Andy said to me, “Well, Dave, what would you like to do?” It was a ceremony in which we both fully participated. What he stressed throughout was that neither of us was going to water down our portion. This was the union of two people with different religious backgrounds and we wanted to honor both, not neither.
That is what interfaith understanding is about. It is not blandness; it is not seeking a “lowest common denominator.” It is celebrating diversity, not denying it. And it is developing all over our country. And Rockford is a part of the process.
Sixteen years ago, Mayor Charles Box decided that the traditional Christian Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast was no longer befitting. He gathered a group to plan a true interfaith Thanksgiving Service which would honor Rockford’s religious diversity. The Rockford Interfaith Council emerged from this first step, and it has had the support of Mayor Scott and now of Mayor Morrisey.
We gather:
♦ To promote understanding, amity, and respect among various faith communities in the area.
♦ To embody the democratic principles of religious freedom.
♦ To honor diversity of heritage and personal practice of belief.
♦ To act on behalf of justice, dignity, peace, and freedom, locally and globally.
♦ To coordinate civic opportunities for prayer and worship, dialog and collaboration.
Look around you. It is clear that this is not yet a mass movement. There are people who do not understand, and I daresay, many who vehemently disagree with our goals. But each conversation we help to promote, each opportunity we provide for people of one faith to encounter people of another, each time we can speak up for diversity, is a step forward.
Every religion ever known is a human attempt to understand that which is beyond our understanding. Those which have endured have done so because people found truth within those religions that illuminated their lives. But I would maintain, and this is controversial, that none of them has ever contained all of the truth – they are all more or less successful approximations of the truth. In order to live in a world of diversity, we are required to have some humility, some recognition of our limitations and the limitations of the religion we may cherish.
I remember the powerful moment when the brilliant and charming Roman Catholic Bible Scholar, John Dominick Crossan, told an audience of which I was a part that he was certain that his Roman Catholic Church was the best church in the whole world -- in the very same way that he knew that his grandchildren were the best grandchildren in the whole world. May we become increasingly open to such an understanding of the religions to which we are committed – not to love them less, but to be able to appreciate that the love others have for their faiths is not a threat to our own.
It has been an honor and a pleasure to be a part of the first sixteen years of the Rockford Interfaith Council. It is my hope and prayer that, in the years to come, the value of this council and its work will become increasingly recognized in this community, that new ways of co-operating among our faiths will be discovered and implemented, and that Rockford will come to be known as a city in which religious diversity is truly celebrated. May it be so.