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Secular Religion: Its Power and Its Promise |
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To day’s Opening Words are attributed to Kalidasa, a third century C.E. Hindu poet. I started today’s service with them because there is nothing in all our literature that captures the secular spirit of free religion better than those words first spoken some 1700 years ago. They focus us on the present. “Look to this day!” they proclaim. This moves our focus from some long lost Eden or some distant eternity and calls us to involve ourselves with the fundamental concern of existence: life as we are living it. Kalidasa’s “Exhortation of the Dawn” states that concern which I believe makes us uniquely liberal and which makes us practitioners of an apparently paradoxical secular religion. The notion of a secular religion may seem strange to you. On one level, it is a contradiction in terms. Using secular to modify religion appears to stretch both words beyond their limits. But on another level, it is a most appropriate wedding of words. In some ways, the whole quality of our civilization seems to depend on keeping them in proper contact. Mahatma Gandhi once was asked what he thought about Western civilization. He said he thought it was a good “idea.” So do we; and, somehow, the religious and the secular need each other to make it work. Of course, religion is a hard word to define. It's meaning ordinarily is restricted to less than the word really means. Its root meaning comes from two Latin word elements, lig, to tie, and the prefix, re, which means again, or again and again. In ordinary usage it has come to mean being bound deeply to things of the spirit or of the supernatural. But, it also means devotion to that which is of ultimate importance. This is a larger category than only those things in life that strike us as spiritual or supernatural. This category, also, includes ideas, ethics, and aspirations. In this larger usage, to be religious is to pursue one’s ultimate concern, to be bound to one’s ultimate concern. By taking the word, religious, in this larger sense, we may define religion as “the way in which we singly and in community personally relate to, experience, symbolize, [and act on] that which gives meaning to our lives and that which is ultimately most significant for sustaining our being.” This definition, which was made by one of our denominational theological study commissions, makes the word, religion, directly applicable to us. We are a religious people. Perhaps we are even more religious than most since we don’t just say we believe in particular notions about life, God, and the universe and then let the matter drop. Rather, we actively pursue these notions. We are religious not just because we publicly say we have religion but because we participate in it. We do it. Although this understanding of religion widens the concept, it still does not remove the tension between it and the secular. But, here again, a word can mean something larger than it usually is taken to mean. Ordinarily, secular is taken to be the opposite of religious. “Of or relating to the worldly or temporal as distinguished from the spiritual or eternal … not overtly or specifically religious,” is the way my dictionary puts it. But it also means “rationally organized around impersonal and utilitarian values and patterns and receptive to new traits.” Even more to my point is a third meaning: “Living in the world.” This means living in the here and now, delving into life as it is being lived and not trying for some vicarious participation in a heaven or hell which may or may not come later. The root meaning of secular has to do with time, really. It derives from the Latin saeculum, the word for the temporal, for generation, for age. The secular person is, fundamentally, the person who finds his or her meaning either to be in this world, this place, this time, or who finds this world, this place, to be the crucial component of meaning and significance. The secular person looks to this day, “for it is the very life of life.” On this level the words secular and religious go together. Religion, taken as pursuit of one’s ultimate concern, is appropriately called secular if that ultimate concern relates to that which makes this life in this time and in this place meaningful and significant. This is of the essence of our liberal religion: Life (as we singly and collectively live it) is what we are primarily interested in. We are religious and we are secular. There are hardly any words that describe us better. There is, however, a distinction in the use of secular that we must keep in mind. It is the distinction between secularism and secularity. Which word you use makes a good deal of difference. It’s quite like the words “stern” and “sternly” that an English teacher was trying to get a teenage boy to use properly. “Don’t say, ‘I looked at you stern;’ say ‘I looked at you sternly,” said the teacher. “Why?” asked the boy. The teacher replied, “Imagine that you are upset with me. When I walk away, will you look at me sternly or only at my stern?” Depending on whether you approach religion with the word secularism or the word secularity in your mind, your religion will be narrow or wide in scope -- as are some people's sterns. Secularism is an ideology, whereas secularity is an attitude. The former relates to content; the latter to method. One who believes in secularism tends to say creedally that there is no God or that God does not matter. Secularism can itself become a religion that insists on the absence of the transcendent dimension in life. This limits the nature of religion in a thoroughgoing way. However, secularity describes a style of living. It is method not content, a process not a specific belief. We may exercise our secularity and believe or not believe in God or hold out for the existence of a sacred dimension or not hold out for it. The important ingredient is that we perceive the quality of human relationships now and the quality of living in this world to be of utmost importance. UUs may be secularists in the sense of either secularism or secularity. This distinction between secularism and secularity is important, also, because it is a reminder that even devout Christians and Jews, Moslems and Bahai’s, Hindus and Buddhists, etc. can be secular in their religion. To be seriously involved in the here and now does not foreclose the possibility of a holy or sacred dimension to existence. It does not necessarily reject either Jesus or Moses or Mohammed or Bahaullah or Krishna or Buddha. It does, however, require applying their teachings to this world. More specifically, it requires a deep valuing of the ethical. When you stop to think about it, any religion with an ethical emphasis must be secular insofar as it seriously tries to implement its ethics in this world. Yesterday is too late to be responsible to and for others; and tomorrow is forever not yet. The field of action is now. As religious ethical concerns increase, the secular nature of religion must increase, also. Perhaps the key to our own secular nature is the crucial role ethics plays in our liberal religion. As you could see from the skit that the young folks put on a while ago, a first rate example of this is the UU Service Committee. The ethical concern -- the concern that human beings be treated fairly and respectfully -- is what led UUs to create the UUSC in the first place. For more than 65 years the UUSC has brought aid and comfort to refugees and the oppressed and has sought to help them learn to stand on their own two feet and claim their human rights -- first in war torn Europe, then Vietnam, then Central America, and now in Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This congregation has been a substantial supporter of the Service Committee. In 2004 fifty-five members of this congregation were paid up members of the UUSC. At least half again as many were “expired” members. [How about you who have gone beyond your expiration date getting back on board?] If you really want Unitarian Universalism to make a concrete ethical difference in the world, the UUSC is an effective way to do that. It is our UU description of the ethical interdependence of the secular and the religious. In a fundamental way, the two concepts (secular and religious) need each other. When they do not accompany each other, the practice of both becomes distorted. The secular alone makes shallow our lives; religion alone drifts into fantasy and irrelevancy. Together they cover both ends of the existential spectrum, although, sometimes, with considerable confusion – somewhat like the notice that once appeared in a church bulletin. It read: “This afternoon there will be a meeting at the North and South ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends.” We would, however, hope that, if we “baptize” the melding of the secular and the religious, we really do mean for both ends to become one in our lives. Where religion refuses to stay in creative tension with the world, it loses its power to deal with reality. Alfred North Whitehead, as quoted in Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, recognized this early in the last century. He said, “For over two centuries religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive.... Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit, as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development…” [I would say, too, they require application in the here and now; they require secular application.] After making such remarks, Whitehead goes on to define religion in these words: “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things.” According to Whitehead, religion, in essence, encompasses more than the here and now but, without application in the here and now, is meaningless. He reminds us to acknowledge this and, while living in this world, to seek the ultimate ideal that religion represents. Sir Julian Huxley approached the matter from a slightly different perspective. Writing in The Crisis in Man’s Destiny, he observed that the modern human being’s “ultimate task will be to melt down the gods, and magic, and all supernatural entities, into their elements of transcendence and sacred power; and then, with the aid of our new knowledge, build up these raw materials into a new religious system that will help humanity to achieve the destiny that our new evolutionary vision has revealed.” Huxley, himself an epitome of the secular insistence on dealing with the here and now, recognized the reality of such things as transcendence and sacred power. He, like Whitehead, saw their value not in relation to some distant immortality but to the deeper, fuller response required to deal with this world as it actually is. If we listen to Whitehead and Huxley, we find that all this bears a useful and satisfying fruit, for it allows us to fix on our best apprehensions of that reality which produced us and sustains us in all dimensions of our being. We find that old answers give way to new ones, as old worlds give way to new, and as yesterday recedes before today. For instance, where once it was believed that a transcendental, perfect, and timeless god created the world, it now can be perceived that the cosmos evolves in time and that life is characterized by continuing creativity. If a person believes in God, it can be in God as process rather than in God as static. Or, again, where once it was believed that human beings were estranged from the source of their being (e.g. Christian doctrine holds that human beings are fundamentally alienated from God and can not redeem themselves by their own efforts), it now can be perceived that human beings can discover and cooperate with the creativity that runs through them and through all things and that sustains the universe. Or again, where once it was believed that religion's major function was to cultivate those values that lie outside the scope of the sciences, it now can be perceived that religion can help integrate human thinking and behaving with the ongoing creativity of the universe. Where once we were separate from the world, we now can be perceived to be of the world, participant in the world, and, perhaps, even a vehicle of what some call that transcendence and sacred power which undergirds the world. In a way, we can almost have our cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, we can say with the astronomer that a human being is nothing but an infinitesimal dot in an infinite universe. On the other hand, we can say with the mystic: "Yes, but that infinitesimal dot is still the astronomer” perceiving the universe with growing comprehension and perhaps with more creative participation. Such things as these could not become clear were we to keep the secular and the religious in separate pigeonholes. They do become clear as we bring our religion in more direct contact with the world we live in – as we secularize our religion. For, to link the secular context to the religious interest (this immediate world to our concern for ultimate understandings) opens up to us a larger reality than either alone can provide. This is the power and the promise of secular religion: the power to relate us to the ultimate questions by facing them openly and directly in the only world we have and the promise that such a confrontation will make this life meaningful and fulfilling because it exercises our lives in all their dimensions. This is of the essence to the liberal spirit in religion. We are here to melt down the old gods into their elements of transcendence and sacred power by submitting them to the furnace of the present and then to endeavor to build up a new religious system that applies to the here and now fully – applies fully because the higher realms of the spirit have not been omitted but are seen to be part of life. Here we are both secular and religious. Ours is secular religion. We endeavor to look to this day, and to look to the whole of it. |