This series has attempted to honor the tradition and adherents of seven great world religions. I've promoted respect for each tradition by highlighting what I understand as an essential spiritual truth of that tradition. As I isolated each truth, I've done so with an overall perspective that, when linked to one another, these truths provide an outstanding framework for guiding a human life—specifically, your life.
The essential truths I selected are: Judaism and Justice, Islam and Surrender, Christianity and Love, Confucianism and Right Order, Hinduism and Acceptance, Buddhism and Compassion, Taoism and the Way.
A "New" World Religion
I'm a third millennium Unitarian Universalist—a convert, or as we UUs customarily have described it—a "come outer." I came out of Roman Catholicism, in as much as I was born to it, though never really engaged by it. I've generally seen UUism at the most liberal end of the Protestant tradition. But I've also thought UUism to be trans-Christian, that is, it's moved beyond Christianity. But I never thought of UUism as a separate, distinct world religion not until a few days ago. But now I do!
As I was navigating the Internet seeking current statistics for the great world religions, I came across one site that listed the top twenty-two world religions by number of adherents. One criteria or inclusion was being larger that Zoroastrianism, #22, with 150,000 adherents. I was surprised to find UUs at 800,000 sitting at 19th, a little smaller than Neo-paganism but a little larger than Rastafarianism. I'd never thought of UUism as a religion outside the Christian tradition from which it has emerged—a distinct world religion.
This epiphany made me conscious of what I already knew, but hadn't said aloud. In this series I've been approaching world religions from a particularly UUist outlook. Unitarianism has as one of its outlooks the notion of the "Unity of All Things." In fact, this church was founded in 1886 as the Unity Church of Hinsdale by the radical Unity Men of the Midwest, led by Jenkin Lloyd Jones. You might remember that Jenkin Lloyd Jones was a major influence in the Parliament of World Religions of 1893. The motto of the "Unity of All Things," as explained by Jones' nephew Frank Lloyd Wright carries with it not only the concept that all things are joined together, but more, when in right relationships all things create a harmonious whole. Universalism, our second tradition, proposes the oneness of humanity - brothers and sisters - as well as the diversity of
religious expression through world religions.
If I were to extract one essential spiritual truth from the world religion of Unitarian Universalism to contribute to this series, I'd choose Eclecticism. (I shouldn't assume that everyone knows what eclecticism means. My 87-year-old father recently asked me what eclecticism means. He'd been hearing it a lot on television - my parents only recently acquired cable and Dad's been watching a lot of the Home and Garden cable network. Eclectic is used a lot in home decor.)
Eclectic means choosing the best from many and diverse sources. Its Greek roots have connotations of selecting and singling out. Now this definition fits nicely with the verse attached to the sermon that announced Unitarianism in 1819, 1 Thessalonians: "Prove all things, hold fast to that which is good."
I've long been fond of a quotation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "I make my soul from all the elements of the earth." This has inspired me to believe that nothing that is human is alien to me, especially when it comes to religion, because I know that religion is not a matter of revelation from above or outside the human experience, rather the religious impulse relates to the human mind—an instinct we all share. The world religions are the result of that common instinct and the resulting religious experiences annealed and systematized in various cultures.
In this series, as time permitted, I sketched the cultural influences that shaped the essential spiritual truth of each particular religious tradition. From the structure and continuity, that culture creates comes a religious tradition that is rich and complex, formed and reformed through centuries, indeed millennia. So when we take what we perceive to be the best of world religion—what I call the essential truth—we are drinking a distilled liquor, like grapes to wine to brandy. And when we lift our cup and drink, we drink of the ages and yeasty processes.
Spiritual Essences of Seven World Religions
Let's lift the cup again and sip the essences:
Judaism gives us Justice as a basis for living together in society. Jewish Justice is grounded not in power or privilege, rather it is centered in the transcendental notion that we are in relationship with one another through our fundamental relationship with God, or in a more secular understanding, in transcendental ideals such as our American ideals of life, liberty, and property or pursuit of happiness.
Islam gives us Surrender as a personal pathway to peace. Islam calls for our surrender to the will and way of Allah as the means for solving the existential conflicts of the human condition. We can use the spiritual notion of Surrender to counter the perverse tendencies to hold back our goodness, including our compassion and love, from one another.
Christianity gives us Love. It tells us that we are ultimately loved by God, who is the convergence and paragon of Love. We love one another because we can—we are made in God or Love's image. We love one another because we see the Divine Image in the other person.
Confucianism gives us Right Relationships—the orderliness of Nature and Society through the teaching of character, the "second nature" of habit, we develop Right Relationships that create a harmonious society and developed a rich culture where humanity had its most congenial environment.
Hinduism gives us Acceptance of the variety of human personalities and predilections throughout the stages of life, as well as of the diversity of human expressions. Hinduism maintains that there is not one path to the Ultimate but there are many paths. Follow, even revere, your path; but also let others follow their path, and perhaps you can revere those paths, too.
Buddhism gives us Compassion in recognition of the suffering and loss that hedge upon the human condition. This most psychological of the world religions engenders incredible empathy. Though we may not have love for another person, we can yet meet them with compassion. Buddhism enjoins us to work to reduce suffering in our world.
Taoism gives us the Way, acknowledging that in the world of cause and effect actions matter and there is a way that leads to a state of freedom from fear and a certain contentedness. The Way of Nature can be our way, too. If we follow the Tao (or Way) we repose in a sort of quiet beauty—not bliss, but a sense that we are of and in the world as we should be.
In my UU Eclecticism, there is a dynamic synergy among these seven essential truths. Their sum is exponentially greater than the arithmetic parts. These seven essential spiritual truths blend together harmoniously for sure. However, they also enhance one another and tease out deeper understandings and meanings through the ever present possibility of dialogue.
Justice is enhanced by Compassion and Love. Compassion and Love are in dialogue: though they're related, they're not the same. Right Relationships have resonance with the Way, yet the Way is much more intuitive and spontaneous (first nature), while Right Relationships are much learned and traditional (second nature). Surrender always reminds me of the Way—a yielding to the natural order, where peace and happiness await. Earlier in this series, in talking about Judaism, I related an ancient Jewish teaching story that teased out a universal meaning about the creation of humankind. "When God created Adam from clay, God gathered that clay from every part of the world and of every color of earth to signify the oneness of humanity."
To conclude our exploration of world religion's and essential spiritual truths they contain, I offer a teaching story from our own Unitarian Universalist Eclectic tradition. (It's not so ancient, since I made it up this week.)
When God, using the slow but sure means evolution, created and then sent our human ancestors across the face of the earth to inhabit it, she did so with great expectations: First, that through the millennia women and men would have many and diverse experiences, thereby teasing out and embodying the vast possibilities of the human condition in varying climates and cultures. And second, that someday, when the world seemed to grow much smaller, as it has in our times, we might gather together the many people of the earth and learn of the experiences and discover how the various cultures not only evolved but also found and lived the meaning of their lives.
Why did she do so? She did so because she is a bountiful and generous God. She made the human condition virtually boundless that we might live discover the many meanings that may be lived and discovered, not just in our own life but through many, many lives. For she is a wise and Loving God, who delights as much in her multitudinous Illusions as she unconditionally loves all her progeny in its diversity.
