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It is understandable that many in our day use the word “religion” as a synonym for patriarchy, superstition and moralizing. Many religions have been guilty of all that evil and more. Some people consider themselves “spiritual, not religious,” but can any of us be purely spiritual beings? Against our best intentions, we who would be purely spiritual fall into some of the age old traps of religion. My question is, “Can religion ever be a gift to humankind?”

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must be universal. That is, religion must consider the good of all. It must purge itself of nationalism and merely sectarian loyalties. It must see itself as a servant of all, not as some heavenly appointed bouncer.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must align itself to nature not just to some invisible being it is calling “God.” Religion must learn to love real people in the real world and to find the sacred in the ordinary. Religion must learn to be kind to animals as well as people. It must limit its wants to those that are sustainable ecologically.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must completely purge its language of sexism. When religion uses exclusively masculine language for what it considers holy, it is actually worshipping patriarchy. Such patriarchal religion becomes an accomplice to every act of violence against women and LGBTQIA+ members of our human family.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must not use its own creeds to replace reason and science. Religion must cease speaking its own special jargon and learn to communicate humbly with its neighbors.

If religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must stop making its own moral code a substitute for universal human rights. Religion must not shame people for having bodies and for having physical needs. It must stop teaching ethics as obedience to its own authority and begin to call people to their own prophetic responsibility.

In other words, if religion is to be a gift to all humankind it must see itself as a means, not an end; an example, not an exception and a servant, not a master.

There was once a preacher who owned a parrot he named “Pierre.”

The old man loved Pierre so much that he taught the bird to recite the Apostle’s Creed so the bird could go to heaven with him when it died.

Eventually, the bird died. The preacher followed him in death a few years later. Arriving in heaven, the preacher did not see Pierre anywhere. The preacher was terribly disappointed to see Jesus and Buddha playing badminton. The preacher’s worst enemy, a man he knew to be a hardcore Atheist, was keeping score.

Seeing the preacher’s disillusionment, Jesus and Buddha smiled at each other for a moment. Then Jesus said, “All of this is happening in your mind. Eternity doesn’t have a shape. Heaven is actually our experience of the essential unity of all being.”

Buddha nodded, “You could have been here all along.”

Jesus continued, “I’m afraid to say you’ve always misunderstood what I was trying to teach you. I did not want ANYONE to sing the parrot’s song of conventional religion. I wanted everyone to sing the song of their own heart, and to sing it in harmony with everyone else’s heart song.”

The preacher lamented, “But I spent all that time teaching my parrot to recite the Apostle’s Creed so he could be with me forever.”

Jesus replied, “Pierre is here, but he could never be in heaven as a captive within your cage. And you could never be with him in heaven so long as you think of him as your possession. Pierre is flying free just above you. He didn’t go to YOUR heaven, he went to HIS.”

Many MAGA Republicans are insistent about placing the 10 Commandments in public schools. Apparently MAGA Republicans are not so concerned the commandments actually be obeyed, especially by Donald Trump himself.

In Tuesday’s debate, seen by 67 million people, Donald Trump made the claim that Haitians in Ohio are eating peoples’ pets. He said, “In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

When one of the moderators pointed out that the Springfield police stated they had received no such reports, Trump responded he had seen some people on television saying it.

The Associated Press tried to figure out how the original rumor got started:

“On Sept. 6, a post surfaced on X that shared what looked like a screen grab of a social media post apparently out of Springfield. The retweeted post talked about the person’s “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” seeing a cat hanging from a tree to be butchered and eaten, claiming without evidence that Haitians lived at the house. The accompanying photo showed a Black man carrying what appeared to be a Canada goose by its feet. That post continued to get shared on social media.”

That’s right, the “proof” for this rumor comes from a “neighbor’s daughter’s friend.” It seems to me such a low standard of verification should disqualify an applicate for the lowest law enforcement office in the land, much less the highest.

And, since the MAGA movement considers the 10 Commandments so foundational, let’s think about what their presidential candidate’s false witness might mean to some of the people he is putting in harm’s way.

The Haitian Times interviewed Haitian Americans in the aftermath of Trump’s claims that Haitians are eating the pets of people in Springfield:

“We’re all victims this morning,” said (one) woman, who moved to Springfield six years ago. “They’re attacking us in every way.”

Aside from the anxiety caused by Tuesday night’s debate, the woman also said her cars have been vandalized twice in the middle of the night. She woke up one morning to broken windows and another to acid thrown on the vehicle. She’s added cameras to her driveway and tried to report the incidents to the police to no avail.

“I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me,” she said. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”

Trump supporters have sent out a flood of cat memes to fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. In many ways memes are the perfect replacement for reason and science in propagandized minds. Memes are powerful images that require little or no actual thought. They just feel true.

When Donald Trump said any journalist criticizing him was guilty of printing “fake news” he brought America to a crisis point. Democracy cannot stand if people refuse to test their truth claims by some objective measure. The commitment not to bear false witness is a commitment to test our assumptions, not by whether they make us feel comfortable, but whether they stand in the harsh light of other vantage points.

Being honest witnesses means not presenting as personal knowledge that which we only know secondhand. Being honest witnesses does not mean always defending our beliefs from criticism. It means ruthlessly testing such reports before we share them as facts.

Being good witnesses means remembering that all human knowledge is perspectival. In Gandhi’s imagery, each of us looks through one facet of a great diamond. We must be ruthlessly honest about what we know AND what we do NOT know. Only by each of us honestly playing out our role as faithful witnesses can we together find glimmers of that truth obtainable to we quivering primates who call ourselves “humankind.”

As a minister It is always a bit strange to receive veiled threats of damnation because I am not orthodox enough.

I don’t know a lot of things about the afterlife, but I do know with every cell of my being that, if heaven is really a gated community, I would be compelled by the teachings of Jesus to refuse heaven and minister to the suffering souls in hell.

How could I digest, much less enjoy, a heavenly banquet while tortured members of my human family were screaming in pain just beneath my feet down in hell?

And why would Jesus have taught the path of love if the wisest course were a cowardly indifference to the damned just to save our own skin?

People sometimes mistakenly believe that I have entered the ministry to shake their faith and to destroy religion. I say “mistakenly” because I believe that true faith is what emerges only after we have been radically honest about our lives.

Religion can be a helpful scaffold for nurturing the human spirit, but it can even more easily become a prison for hearts and minds. No one can honestly deny the atrocities and failures of religion. Most traditional religion does not answer the great questions of life. Still, I believe the answer to bad religion does not lay in spending our lives laughing at the people groping for light. I believe we need to re-connect with the deep human aspirations that originally gave birth to religion. Then we need to free those aspirations from the fossilized forms of religion that remain.

To believe in a religious symbol or to disbelieve in a religious symbol are both ways to miss the point. Living symbols are not superficial beliefs but beacons reminding us there is something more profound than our deepest values, something more expansive than our widest truths and something more creative than our highest purpose.

To me, “faith” is a trust in the life process, not in religion. But it is hard to sustain that trust without symbols that remind us of wider truths, rituals that awaken us to deeper qualities and practices that remind us of our shared life.

Healthy religion ALWAYS calls us beyond itself and into the shared living some call “love.” We do not need to call it “religion.” We do not even need to use the symbol “God.” Call it what you will, but do not let yourself go numb to your own aspiration to give yourself to moments of wonderment, to the aspiration to live your life as an art, and to give yourself away in compassionate service to our one common life.

Authentic faith can only emerge after our comfortable truths have died. I am not attacking religion to destroy it, but to seek out its deeper roots. The phoenix of love cannot be born if it has not passed through a terrible flame.

I love to study world religions because I love my species. I love to listen to ancient sages struggling to make sense of their world without adequate information. I have no wish to reduce my vision to their groping efforts, but I see my own world more fully when I look through their eyes, even for a moment.

It seems to me the ancients were feeling a tie that bound them to other species. They sometimes felt themselves to be a manifestation of some deeper source. Some cultures imagined the “tie that binds” to be a god or to be gods and goddesses. Even if one leaves what is being called religion today, our species is in deep need for revelations of interconnectedness.

Religion is always but the husk of a deeper intuition of wonderment and interconnection. We can easily become lost in religion’s husks and lose the experience that underlies the religious sentiment. Thich Nhat Hanh, the brilliant Buddhist priest, warned, “Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.”

Religion is a tragic mistake when we take our beliefs to be truth and our practices to be ethical by definition. But I believe the ancients were haunted by an experience that can be very real. There IS a tie that binds us to each other. The species ARE our extended family. We ARE the offspring of cosmic sources. In a very real sense we are one.

We in the States have been taught to believe freedom as a kind of detachment. Because we have suckled at the cold empty breast of Ayn Rand, many of us believe ourselves to be independent and detached. If COVID should teach us anything it would be the interdependency of all life. A sick child far away IS our business. That means a child working in a sweat shop to make our American products more cheaply will come back to affect us. There may or may not be a heaven to reward the good and a hell to punish the evil. Karma may or may not be real. Still, in a very real sense because we are interconnected, what goes around eventually comes around.

The historic forms of religion can be bewitching and oppressive. No one is poorer for throwing away the empty husks of religion, but we CAN be poorer if we never have an experience of our intimate interwoveness with nature and with humankind. Our lives CAN be smaller if we do not realize we are children of the stars.

Environmentalist Wendell Berry expresses what some mystics were possibly trying to say in a way that is only enriched by his scientific understanding: “I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and its environment. The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.”

Hope often comes easy when we are young, As young seekers, we often believe we will someday discover unalloyed truth. As young artists, we often trust we will someday give birth to fully blossomed beauty.

After drinking from the bitter cup of experience it is understandable we would question the maturity of our earlier hopes. It is understandable we would question hope itself. But hope is not some wispy dream that may or may not be realized. Hope is our sense of the creative energy of life itself being expressed through our very being.

Hope cannot be defeated by any roll of fortune’s dice because it is not directed toward any one fate. Hope is an expression of the vitality of life itself. Hope beats silently behind the ebb and flow of events. Buried beneath a sea of ashes the hope cannot but dream of beauty. Chained to the withered tree of sorrow, hope whispers to give ourselves to each moment for the sake of something yet to be.

Hope is our trust in the creative unfolding of the universe even amid our own destruction. Hope is not some childish wish for a particular outcome in life. Hope is the assurance that the same creative energy driving the stars is ever to be found in our hearts as well.

Hope is living in the energy more profoundly within us than the temporary life we mistakenly call our own.

The Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism is one of the world’s great spiritual treasures. Gandhi often quoted the following verse of that great classic: “You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.” (Bhagavad Gita 2:47, translation by Stephen Mitchell)

The Gita says somewhere else: “Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.” As I understand it, the Gita’s suggestion is for us to focus on what we can control and let go of results that are beyond our control. In other words, we are to do our duty without fretting about setbacks and failures. Over time, this practice is a recipe for a life of activism that also allows us to live in peace and joy.

I met someone who embodied this wisdom. Architect, Tom Shefelman had stepped down from his major projects to help our little church build a new building. We had very little money and our budget would sometimes mean cutting back on the original plan. Tom would draw up wonderful designs only to be met with setbacks and delays. It was amazing to watch him delight in every challenge even if it meant going back to square one. Tom seemed to treat our project like a Tibetan sand painting. He did his best at all times, but, when fate would throw us a curveball, he did not waste a second in lament. Instead, Tom would smile whimsically and say something like, “Well, we could put a little window up high so the light will make the space more interesting.”

Tom is gone now, but I think of him often. Tom embodied for me the truth of the old Hindu maxim. By letting go of what we cannot control we can be fully creative in the present moment. Of course, we need to learn what we can from our failures, but we need never surrender to despair because our joy lies in doing our duty to love no matter what.

When we were designing our new church building, I wanted for us to come up with symbols that would represent the new understanding of Christianity for which we are seeking.

The stained glass window on our church’s steeple is a small wooden cross surrounded by a large colorful pattern known as a “mandala.” The cross is intended to represent our particular history, culture and vocabulary as Christians, and the mandala represents the insight that we are but one element in a beautiful pattern that should include us all.

The cross within a mandala is symbol that contextualizes our church within the common life of all. While our community is organized within a specific denomination, we realize we are called to blossom into a gift serving the whole world.

It is possible for one’s understanding of love to be selfish or sectarian, but it is also possible for one’s definition of love to be so abstract and universal that it is, for all practical purposes, inapplicable.

Unless we remember our own limited particularity, it can be a temptation to believe our group has copyrighted universality and to fight with each other over our various ideas of unity. The safest road is to recognize both our particularity AND our interconnectedness with the whole. We sing a very specific part in the song of life but we must sing in harmony with the whole.

The best statement I know of this principle of realizing our particularity within the larger unity is Diego Rivera’s description of his art: “I know now that those who hope to be universal in their art must plant in their own soil. Great art is like a tree, which grows in a particular place and has a trunk, leaves, blossoms, boughs, fruit, and roots of its own. The more native art is, the more it belongs to the entire world, because taste is rooted in nature. When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters Michelangelo, Czanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican.”

The cross within a mandala is a reminder that it is an accident of history whether we begin as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu or any other worldview. The important thing is to be rooted in the particularities of our own story in a way that blossoms as unique and beautiful flowers in service to the one tree of life.

Forget the word “religion” for a moment.

I want to know what rituals hold your life together? Do you light a candle when dining with a special person? Is there a song you turn to at times that are joyful or sad?

Does anything in your life fill you with so much reverence that you set it aside and refuse to use it for mundane purposes? Is there an ultimate value you are giving your life to?

Do you ever find yourself muttering a silent “thank you” to whatever it is that brings us all into being?

Do you ever feel yourself to be a wave in a lager ocean? Do you sometimes experience animals and plants as your extended family? Do you have a desire to share your life with others as an art form? Do you find yourself wanting to celebrate with the parents of a baby that has just been born or to sit with the bereaved at times of death? Does any part of you feel called to sit with the children and help them find their way as they begin their life’s journey?

It is not necessary to use the word “religion,” but how are you celebrating your life as an art? It is not necessary to use the word “God” but are you aware and grateful for the gift of being? It is not necessary to go to church or temple, but how do we share life’s journey with others so that none of us has to walk through life alone?