"Don't Take Religion Seriously!"
Have you ever heard the assertion, “The Bible does not have to be taken literally, but it has to be taken seriously”?
For some years, assuming that way of looking at scriptures squared with what I believed, it seemed to me a proper and fruitful attitude. Nowadays I think it is not so hot. Rather I would say today, “The Bible must not be taken literally, it need not be taken so seriously; rather, it is better taken religiously.”
Further, it seems to me the same may be said of religion itself. One must not take it literally; it need not be taken with deadly seriousness; it is best when it is taken religiously as a whole and wholesome approach to living which binds thinking, feeling, and acting together in health, and expresses stuff in poetic symbols.
Take religion religiously. It puts you together. That’s what the word means. Don’t take it literally as though it were merely a compendium of stale facts. Don’t take it seriously as though it would get you if you did not bow at its altar.
When religion is good, it’s good; when it’s bad, it’s bad; and it is almost always bad when taken too seriously. It tends to hurt people when they take it in overdoses, and it seems to me it is at that level when it is sustained too long as tight-lipped, wrinkle-browed, and self-righteous or claims too much of itself.
When it’s bad, it’s bad. Let me give some examples. One tends to forget what the effects of overly serious approaches to religion are like out there in the world beyond the paradoxical confines of freedom in religion.
I forget that there are people out there who want to save me whether I wish to be saved their way or not. One forgets that light-heartedness with respect to religion is blasphemy to some people. One forgets that some dead serious people in religion play with deadly snakes and are sometimes killed by them.
Make a list—your own list—of how it’s bad when it’s bad and the things on that list might well be seen as the result of taking religion too seriously. People take religion so seriously to their detriment. I have begun a list. It includes anti-contraception, anti-abortion, anti-death-with-dignity, religious violence, and religious exclusiveness so, for example, parents, some of them, will not attend the weddings of their offspring who are marrying outside of their faith. The list also includes harsh strictures against divorce.
Ultra serious religion can be used to indoctrinate, for example, that sex is bad. It can be used by its leaders to preach, “Thou shalt not do what I do not like to do!”
It can be used, like drugs, as an incomplete escape from reality, and, therefore, a threat to mental well-being.
Early religious training can so program the later adult that he finds himself in unresolvable dilemmas that keeps him in a permanent state of unhappiness. Despite that, a great many people, perhaps most people, because so many without question inherit their religion, take more care in choosing skin cream or lawnmowers than they do in selecting their religion. When it is bad, it is sad.
A case in point: Fifty-one year old Angela was admitted to the mental health unit of a hospital complaining of a non-existent bulge on her right arm. Her imaged physical defect, apparently the result of displaced anxieties over current problems.
She had, all her life, lived rigidly by her church’s rather strict moralistic rules. She had attended church always, read her Bible, had been a compulsive good person, compulsive housekeeper, at work, a compulsive bookkeeper, and cleaner-upper of the office besides, though there were others to do that. She would not take coffee breaks; she was going to be perfect in the eyes of the Lord.
Her trouble started when her son went off to college. She could not handle the separation. Then, unexpectedly, her brother died. Nothing in church or religion seemed true anymore. She had tried to live up to all of the preachments, the Ten Commandments, the rules of the church. She had taken religion with utter seriousness but now her son was gone and her brother was dead and though she had been “good” the rewards of all this goodness were not there or so it appears.
She came down off the religious habit like a drug addict kicking addiction cold turkey. And the withdrawal symptoms were devastating. She started to frequent bars, drinking too much, going to bed with any man who wished to. She went on a binge, since virtue was not rewarded, a binge of all the “badness” she could imagine. Her wall of serious religion crumbled with her son’s departure. She came apart over that while most mothers would have released their sons with a few tears.
The universe and God were against her or God was non-existent, because she thought He let her brother die and the universe was vicious!
She had been living a “none” life, none of this, none of that, do not let go, be perfect, always work, go to church, read your Bible, stay in line, don’t feel anything unacceptable, don’t feel anything sensuous, don’t feel much of anything at all except right and what did it get her? Now, she can live an “all” life, let it all hang out, anything goes, let-er-rip and that was destructive, too, tore her apart. She fell to pieces emotionally and completely. She would have to begin the hard business of putting life together again and with a new approach to religion. Religion, like life, was not open to question. She was going to have to substitute something new but not destructive for the old religious approach.
Poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, “It is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion. I don’t necessarily mean some substitute for the church, because no one believes in the church as an institution more than I do. My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in whom we were all brought up to believe.”
For Unitarians, that becomes less of a problem when we accept gladly that we are heretics.
Heresy coming from the word “heiresis” which means a choosing, a choosing of our own way. We are religious heretics.
Good, and still religious!
I believe human beings can’t help being religious, but that is irreligious to allow religion to ruin them. To take religion destructively is like taking oneself too seriously. Just as that pulls a person apart, so it pulls religion apart, religion that, by nature and definition, is supposed to bind together. We do what we can do, as best we can and with serious purpose, then we have to let go of trying to control everything in order to keep the soul together.
The Bhagavad Gita says, “Do your duty, without attachment!” Ancient wisdom, ever modern. Do what you must—then, having done it, don’t take the outcome so seriously it tears you apart. If you tighten up from apartness, you have lost your religion.
A Buddhist story conveys the idea: A man falls from a cliff and catches hold of a small root on the cliffside and holds on for dear life. There is a Unitarianized version of that story where he calls, “Is anybody up there?” And from above he hears a great voice, “I AM.” Then the man asks, his arms growing tired, “What shall I do?” “Do you have faith in me?” asks the Great Voice. “Yes” says the man. The Great Voice says then, “Let go!” And the man asks, “Is anybody else up there?”
That’s a good story for the strictly rational part of our being but it misses a ludicrous “but,” for its seeming foolishness, deeper point.
In the Buddhist story the man hangs on until exhausted. There is no help available. No way of saving himself. No one above. And at that moment, the man sees just next to the root to which he clings a beautiful red wild strawberry.
He takes the strawberry in both hands, puts it in his mouth and breathes his last ah! The idea is that eternity is in the now—eternal life not time duration but a quality of being. To take religion religiously, totally, deeply, we have to do more than merely take it rationally, we have to take it with trust, take it lovingly, in the face even of such ultimates as are beyond us to change. That’s a hard one for rationalists as we tend to be.
Doubt, skepticism, denial—they render old beliefs invalid. One looks, in the face of a life that is still fragile and finite, for something to cheer him up. Humor perhaps.
An old story has three men dying in a hospital ward. Their doctor, making rounds, went up to the first and asked him his last wish. The patient happened to be a Catholic, “My last wish, he murmured, “is to see a priest and make confession.” The doctor assured him he would arrange it and moved on. The second patient was a Protestant. When asked his last wish he replied, “My last wish is to see my family and say goodbye.” The doctor promised he would have them brought in and moved on again. The third patient was, of course, a Unitarian. “And what is your last wish?” the doctor asked. “My last wish,” came the feeble hoarse reply, “is to see another doctor!”
The humor is good for religions, keeps it honest, but acceptance is missing, trust is missing, the poetry of life is missing something deeper.
Let me come at religion with some different words. These are the words of one who talks of the religious phenomenon in ways many of us may hear, one of that group of professionals, the psychiatrists, who talk more of religion these days.
Dr. David Viscott, “We know of nothing of God.” He starts with that and that is a nice, clear, honest enough beginning. Nevertheless, he thinks he’ll take a plunge.
“Perhaps God,” he says, “is the life force which exists inside each of us, the capacity for both good and evil. Each of us must come to terms with the god within ourselves and serve it as we see it demands to be served. For some it is a life of religious ritual and for them that is good. For others it is a life of devotion to principles of love for all mankind, and that too is good. We are here largely on our own, it seems, to make the best of what we are and have been given, to try to come to terms with the mystery of our origin and to face an uncertain date in the future when the life force passes from us and to speculate on where it will go. Each person’s construction of God is a manifestation of his needs,” he says.
Why should one reject another because he does not believe in the same way? Belief, like hunger, is a matter of need. Seeking God is only one alternative to being alone and there are no conversions except as one person saves himself. The rest is ritual, warm and beautiful as it may be. Ritual takes its meaning from the communion of people participating in it. Keeping them as people but leaving each person to establish a dialogue between himself and the life force within him and to devote his life to allowing what is special within to find expression outside himself.
“The human being,” says Dr. Viscott, “without a sense of God is only an animal. God without the human being is a force without poetry.”
So Viscott takes religion as a function of the need and the meeting of need on the part of his whole life force in each one of us. He values the communion of people, like the communion that a church is.
Poet Wallace Stevens would agree with him. To both of them the expression of religion is a form of poetry but that does not mean it is not meaningful or that it is not true. It is just that it is more than factual—it is total, includes thought and feeling, it is existential.
If religion is an expression of need on the part of the life force, the god within us, so to speak, seeking to grow and express itself and come into relation to others, why not take religion religiously? Why not take ourselves holistically? Why not become aware of the life force within—all that it feels like, all that it desires, all that it fears—dealing with the whole “isness” that we are, but not take religion repressively, rigidly, narrowly, guiltily. And keep some loving laughter in it.
Never fear. Religion will not die. Always, there are those who will poetize it, embrace it, and laugh it back to life.
Professor Frederic Spiegelberg, philosopher and Orientalist, a few years ago visited a Taoist hermit on an island near Hong Kong. When he was introduced as an American university professor traveling under a Rockefeller grant to find out whether Asian spirituality was still vital, the hermit began to chuckle very gently, and this gradually developed into uproarious laughter at which his whole glutinous mass shook like jelly. That was the end of the interview.
Religion is marvelous enough to include uproarious laughter. Let religion live. See it as a marvel, from the life energy of the universe that makes us human as we live and be. For it is marvelous—religion—funny and wholesome, angry and crazy, true, way-out and way-in, paradoxical, fun, scary and ludicrous, dignified, ritualistic, and sometimes even it’s the “ham-what-am,” like us.
It is my closing joy to retell the religious parable of the wise master, since I am, not seriously but religiously, convinced that God, men, women, and children love stories, especially the good ones, and they bear repeating. That has always been what put Bibles together, the repetition of a group’s stories.
You may have heard that the wise old Master lay dying, so his disciples lined up next to his deathbed to catch his final words. They arranged themselves in order from the most brilliant pupil to the most obtuse. The brilliant one bent over the prostrate form and whispered, “Master, Teacher, what are your final words?” “My final words,” murmured the ancient, “are ‘life is a river.’” The disciple passed it on to the fellow next to him and the phrase traveled like wildfire down the line. “The Master says life is a river. The Master says life is a river. The Master says life is a river.” When it reached the oaf at the end, however, he scratched his head in perplexity. “What does the Master mean, life is a river?” he asked. The question, of course, traveled back up the line, “What does the Master mean, life is like a river? What does the Master mean, life is like a river?” When the star pupil heard it, he leaned over again, “Master, Teacher,” he implored, for the old man was breathing his last, “what do you mean, life is a river?” And the wise one, shrugging, croaked, “So it’s not a river?”
It is hard to tell you how much religion means to me without getting a long face. I don’t want to do that. But it’s true, my whole life is bound up in religion and religion will touch your lives as long as you live. Some of it will be fun and funny and you may tell stories about how life is not a river, but when you need it, when you would put life together in coherent meaning, when you would devote yourself to something bigger than yourself, when you need help, you will want to have thought about religion before driven to do so.
Some closing words I often use in church:
For all who see God,
may God go with you.
For all who embrace life,
may life return your efforts.
For all who seek a right path,
may a way be found
and the courage to take it,
step by step.
