HomeCHALICE LIGHTING
There is a faith that transcends time and place, transcends culture and rises up in the religions of the world. We celebrate that faith today.
READING
Lord Krishna said: You grieve for those who are not worthy of grief, and yet speak words of wisdom. The wise grieves neither for the living nor for the dead. (2.11)
Just as the soul acquires a childhood body, a youth body, and an old age body during this life; similarly, the soul acquires another body after death. This should not delude the wise. (See also 15.08) (2.13)
The one who thinks that the Spirit is a slayer, and the one who thinks the Spirit is slain, both are ignorant. Because the Spirit neither slays nor is slain. (2.19)
Just as a person puts on new garments after discarding the old ones; similarly, the living entity or the individual soul acquires new bodies after casting away the old
All beings are unmanifest, or invisible to our physical eyes before birth and after death. They manifest between the birth and the death only. What is there to grieve about? (2.28)
Treating pleasure and pain, gain and loss, and victory and defeat alike, engage yourself in your duty. By doing your duty this way you will not incur sin. (2.38)
SERMON
Mohandas Gandhi was a deeply religious person. His Hindu religion formed the basis of his life’s work. Drawing upon this faith, he found insight into the human condition, and he found meaning and truth to sustain him through many years of non-violent struggle for justice, equality and freedom.
At the same time, he was willing to draw insight from other religious traditions, and stated openly that Hinduism, like any other religion, must adapt and change in order to remain relevant to people’s lives and to ever-changing circumstances. That is to say, he was, within Hinduism, a kind of religious liberal.
One of the religious movements in India that arose in the 1800’s was the Brahmo Samaj. This was a religious movement partly inspired by the changes then taking place in Christianity. Much of Christian scholarship was then focused on historical critical analysis of the bible and on ideas such as separating the religion about Jesus from the religion of Jesus. Many of these scholars were inviting Christians to read the Bible with a somewhat skeptical eye and to winnow out what was genuine from what was later interpolation or imposition.
Brahmo Samaj was founded in 1828 by Rammohun Roy, a great Indian thinker, and his approach to religion was to say that Hinduism’s great religious texts were the Upanishads. He read these as Unitarians read the Bible. I specifically said Unitarians because for a number of years before 1828, Roy attended Unitarian services in India, calling himself a Unitarian Hindu, and he maintained warm connections with Unitarianism until he died in 1833. In fact, his services were modeled on the Unitarian services he had attended.
Among the more famous Brahmos was Rabindranath Tagore.
We Unitarian Universalists are today affiliated with the Brahmo Samaj through the International Association for Religious Freedom. Brahmo Samaj is not and never was a large movement, but it has had an influence greater than it numbers.
That approach to Hinduism, read through a limited number of texts (specifically the Upanishads), and read with a particular liberal perspective--seeking spiritual meaning not the literal meaning--spread throughout much of the intellectual society of India and was the general approach that Gandhi took though he was never a Brahmo or a Unitarian. Gandhi focused on the Upanishads and added the Bhagavad-Gita, which he believed was the most valuable religious text. He read it not as a literal command to kill others, but as a call to each of us to be a warrior who battles the darkness within our own heart, the darkness within the hearts of others, and the darkness within the heart of society that leads to social injustice.
From this living liberal faith, Gandhi’s attachment to ahimsa—non-violence—and his theory of Satyagraha—non-violent engagement, were grounded and developed.
This faith gave Gandhi and those who followed him the strength to face beatings and possible death while still holding on to the belief that people were inherently good and that their souls could be reached and changed by the transforming power of love. The enemy is not the person standing in front of you; the enemy is the hatred in the person’s heart. Defeat that, and the person standing in front of you may become your friend.
That is really an astonishing belief.
Last week I watched the rebroadcast of an episode of Eyes On The Prize, the award winning documentary about the civil rights movement of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. An aside here, the producer of that program, Henry Hampton, was at one time a Unitarian Universalist. He was part of the Black Empowerment movement that divided Unitarian Universalism in the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, and was a member of the Black Affairs Council. I won’t go into all of that now, but he and others left Unitarian Universalism following the controversy. That, I believe, was our loss.
The documentary describes the circumstances people lived in and the dangers they faced in standing up for their rights. My wife is a visiting nurse and she spoke to one of her patients who grew up in South Carolina and was there during the movement whether she took part in it. The patient’s response was, “No, I didn’t. Those people were brave. They risked everything. They were really brave.”
That is something we can easily forget. Each person in that movement, each person who said no, each person who held a placard or marched in the street or sang “We Shall Overcome”, each and every one of them was risking everything including their lives.
In fact, many did die.
The Hindu faith of Gandhi, the Christian faith of the Civil Rights marchers, this was powerful faith and it allowed people to stand and accept the possibility that in standing they would suffer or die.
It allowed them to persevere even when it seemed that their movements were achieving nothing but greater pain and sorrow.
It also was faith that gave them comfort when they were beaten, and when people did die.
I seek that kind of power in my life.
The faith of Gandhi and his followers and the faith of Dr. Martin Luther King and many of the civil rights marchers was one in which this life is not the only life there is. That is, the self does not die with death. In Christianity there is eternal life in heaven, in Vedanta Hinduism, and in the Hinduism of the Brahmo Samaj and Gandhi, there is the cycle of life and one is reborn until one escapes from that cycle and merges into Brahman, the one God, also called the Self (capital “S”).
But their faith was deeper than this. Their faith called them to love even their oppressor. Mahatma Gandhi the Hindu, Dr. martin Luther King the Baptist, Archbishop Desmond Tutu the Episcopalian, the Dalai Lama the Tibetan Buddhist, and more recently the faith and power of the Amish whose religion calls upon them to forgive and love the person who killed their five children: their faith touches me deeply, inspires me and also gives me a feeling of shame. Their faith is so much stronger and deeper than mine. They live the words of Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do”.
A belief in that ongoing life shared by each of these can also lend strength to one’s daily life struggles. If I believe in the afterlife, if I believe that death is merely shedding one garment for another then the idea of death for myself may become less frightening, and the loss of a loved one to death may become less awful, though still deeply grieved.
One can hold that belief in a general sense, and still fear death or deeply grieve loss. It is the rare person who holds to that belief so surely and so completely that they are untouched by the pain and suffering of death and loss.
For those of us here who do believe that there is a soul and that the soul lives on after death, part of our quest is to deepen and strengthen that belief.
For those of us who do not so believe, who hold instead that death is the end, there is an additional element of struggle when grappling with these issues. If death is the end, then how do I find the courage to face death’s possibility? And if death is the end, how do I find the strength to face the loss to death of a loved one?
What is my faith, my personal faith, and how do I find within it the kind of power, the kind of sustenance, the kind of comfort and hope that gives rise to the heroes of freedom and the human struggle for good and right? How do I find the kind of power, sustenance, comfort and hope that gives rise to the heroic struggle with death in our personal lives?
I believe--I know--that the power is within or around me. I know because so many of so many different faiths exhibit it. Whether it is the power of my own might and will, or is a power granted to me and instilled in me by divinity or community, I know that such strength exists.
Whether I reach out to God for that strength, and pray to God and turn my life over to Him, or whether I reach within for the power of human will and dignity, or whether others reach to me with the power of human love and presence, the power of faith exists for me, though it may sometimes feel out of reach.
After death, do we spend eternity in blissful praise of God?
Do we merge back into the godhead, each yielding our individual self to the Great Self?
Do we merge back into the unthinking, material Cosmos from which we arose with the great gift of consciousness and understanding, and once again become part of the All?
What is there in my personal faith that, if I reached for it, if I deepened it, could so imbue me with strength that I could not only face the inevitability of death, but could offer my life?
That is the strength I want, not just because it is the strength to die. I want that because it is the strength to live, and to live fully.
If I am reconciled to death, then death is defeated, it holds no more fear, and then nothing can keep me from fully living.
If I am reconciled to death, then the loss of a loved one is still painful, but I can go on and live the life they would wish me to live.
That is the real goal for me, to fully live, and to have others do so as well, even and maybe especially those who call me their enemy.
I believe there is strength. And I believe there is relief and release and joy in that strength.
Oh God, Oh Goddess, Oh Cosmos: Give me such power of faith that I can love those who hate me; forgive those who hurt me, and transform their hearts so that we are both saved from the madness of fear, vengeance and retaliation.
Give me peace within that I may give peace to others, give me life within that I may show life to others, give me joy within that others may see within me the greatness that you are and that you offer.
And with that, let us all truly live.
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