SERMONS 

Engaged Pluralism: Exploring Our Third Principle

The past few days I’ve been trying to figure out how to get this sermon started. I’ve had five or six more or less brilliant ideas for how to begin, but none of them were working for me. Then Friday morning I was talking with my friend and classmate, William Young. We were talking about grief and loss in general, and specifically about my grandfather, who died last Thursday. Then I mentioned that I was preaching this weekend, and William said, “Oh, then it’ll be a good one. You’ve got to preach from your pain.”

At first I didn’t know what to do with his statement. After all, I didn’t see much connection between my grandfather’s death and our sense of religious pluralism or the way we encourage each other’s spiritual growth. But the more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me.

I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist for almost five years now, but on Thursday my grandfather died believing that I was catholic. I never intentionally deceived him about my newfound religious home, I just never mentioned it. When asked about my work I said that I was the music director for my church. That answered the question to his satisfaction, and it kept me out of what I am sure would have been an awkward situation.

My grandparents were the ones who took it hardest when I decided to leave the Franciscans and not become a priest. I didn’t know this at first. They were very supportive of me at the time, both emotionally and financially. But a few years later, when Mary and I were newly married, we called my grandparents so that Mary could meet them. Now my grandmother was in the early stages of dementia, so I’m sure she didn’t know what she was saying, but when she got on the phone with Mary she said, “We’re just so disappointed that Jason didn’t become a priest.” Mary was quick to respond, “Well, I’m not!”

I’m sure that many of us find it difficult to talk with our families about our faith, especially here in the south where lifelong Unitarian Universalist families are quite rare. In my family, as in many others, there is an implicit value placed on being like everyone else. “We’re all the same,” we want to say, and our sameness solidifies our familial bonds. We try to minimize our differences, or we simply ignore them and choose not to talk about them. “It’s just easier this way,” we might tell ourselves. “It’s not really worth the fight.”

When my grandparents were children, I imagine they heard the same kinds of messages from their family, but in a different context. My grandfather was a first generation Irish American, and my grandmother was born in Italy and came to this country when she was a young girl. I have heard them talk about their early years when my grandmother struggled to learn English and my grandfather looked for work. In those days there was a great deal of discrimination against people whom today we might simply say are “white.” It was not so clear then, and there was considerable value placed on being able to assimilate into the larger culture.

Of course, assimilation is much easier when differences are not so obvious. My grandparents had a considerable advantage when it came to fitting in, because they didn’t look too different from anyone else. But in the process of fitting in, I’m afraid our family suffered in ways that we are just beginning to understand. I, for one, have very little connection to my own cultural heritage. Now I’ll admit that I do enjoy a green beer or two on St. Patrick’s Day, and watching the Soprano’s can make me nostalgic for the “old country” (that would be New Jersey), but I have very little sense of any particular heritage that I am a part of or which I am to hand down to successive generations. I’m afraid that the melting pot, once celebrated as the great equalizer for all Americans, has taken quite a toll on my sense of familial identity.

When I was a very young boy, my family lived in base housing on an Air Force base in Northern California. Living next door to us were Stephe Williams and his mother, whom everyone just called “Mom.” I remember many things about the Williams’. Stephe had an electric organ in his living room and loved to play gospel music on it. And Mom had an intense fear of snakes. I remember watching TV with her one day when a snake came on the screen. Mom let out a blood-curdling scream and ran upstairs. She refused to come down until I had turned the TV off!

But what I remember most about Mom was a simple lesson that she taught me. One day, when we had been playing in the yard and I was about to go inside, she bent down and kissed me on the cheek. I stopped, looked at her quizzically, wiped my cheek and looked at my hand, expecting to find smudges from her rich, chocolate colored face on my fair skin. Mom said, “Oh, honey, it don’t come off!” That day Mom taught me that people were different, and that difference was just a part of life. It’s a lesson I’ve always treasured.

The readings I shared earlier from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sacred traditions make it clear that we are not the first to explore questions of difference among humankind. People have tried to understand difference for as long as there have been people. What I find amazing in these particular stories is that they seem to claim difference as divinely instituted. The most striking of the stories for me is the one from the Qur’an. It claims that Allah has made us different as a way to test us, to see of we will waste our time trying to convert everyone to one faith or if we will instead compete with one another in good works. Our difference then becomes our inspiration for building up humanity as a whole.

Challenging humankind to allow and perhaps even celebrate our differences cautions us against turning our pluralism – our “more than one-ness” – into relativism, or the idea that the many are essentially the same. A classic example of this is seen in many weddings, when the couple lights their unity candle. Now I’m not opposed to the idea of the candle itself, but I always cringe when I see the people blow out their individual candles after lighting the one central candle. Yes, there is a new oneness which is created in the bonds of the couple’s relationship, but that oneness only exists because of the uniqueness of the two individuals who create it. Perhaps it is paradoxical, but it seems to me that the two are one because they are two.

And so when we look at the ways pluralism affects our community, I would say that the same paradox holds true. We are bonded to one another as a community not because of our sameness, but because of our difference. We are one because we are many. The danger of pluralistic relativism is that it wants to obscure our differences and say that we are all basically the same. It wants to place equal value on every possible “truth” without being able to make any judgments about them. It is part of the reason why liberalism, which had been gaining in popularity through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, took a nose-dive mid-century – its tendency toward relativism couldn’t cope with the enormity of the atrocities surrounding the Second World War. In the face of what most of the world called overwhelming evil, many liberals in that day were unable to reconcile what was clearly wrong with their “let individuals decide for themselves” ideology. It is a struggle many of us still share.

But we might argue that even pluralistic relativism, with all of its pitfalls, is certainly preferable to an exclusivist, “we’re right and everyone else must be wrong” approach to theology or community. And I would certainly agree. However, I would first argue that we need to reconceptualize the way we understand these categories.

I find the work of American philosopher Ken Wilber most helpful in this area. In his book, A Theory of Everything, Wilber puts forward an integrated model of developmental psychology, spirituality, and scientific development. He says that we traditionally think of categories like exclusivist, or rationalist, or pluralist in terms of a vertical hierarchy – each one better than the other. This is, of course, only true if you happen to be looking at the issue from the pluralist’s perspective. Wilber, however, argues for a nested hierarchy, or that each can been seen as successive, outward-moving developmental waves in which each category is a level that transcends and includes the others.

The key to this model is inclusion. I won’t be so bold as to speak for anyone else in this room, but will admit that I sometimes think that “my” pluralism is better than “their” exclusivism, which is often also called fundamentalism. After all, I am more enlightened, or further evolved in my understanding of the way the world is than they are! Basically, I get it, and they don’t. But Wilber’s model demands that the pluralist to move beyond their own narrow limitations into a more holistic understanding. He calls this post-pluralistic level “integralism.”

The non-integrated approach claims that where I am is where everyone should be. But the integrated, holistic model sees the narrow, pre-integral levels as necessary to the overall development process. That is, without exclusivism, rationalism, or pluralism as formative elements, we would never be able to reach an integrated level of consciousness.

Let me try to frame it another way. If we were to trace our own spiritual development over our lifetime, I bet that for many of us it would look something like this: As young children, we believed what our parents told us. Everything they said was literally true, and we could not even begin to challenge their notions of reality. But somewhere along the line, perhaps in our teenage years, we started to notice that their picture of the world didn’t always make sense. It didn’t hold up to scientific inquiry. For many people, this is stage at which they abandoned religion altogether.

Sometime later we came to see that the issue of religion might just be worth another look. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be here right now. Maybe there is something to this religion thing, and maybe I could benefit from learning about it and being with others who want to learn about it, too. And so we began again our lifelong spiritual journey.

The integral model recognizes that each wave of development is a necessary part of our becoming. But it also recognizes that we can never really leave any stage behind – they are always part of who we are. We must transcend and include.

I want to try and apply this framework to our third principle – encouragement to spiritual growth. The point of Wilber’s model is that our spiritual development, our very consciousness itself, is always in a state of flux. We know from Buddhist teachings that there is no such thing as permanence, or of standing still, or of reaching enlightenment and staying there as though it were a place where we could camp for the night. With this is mind, I would say that encouragement to spiritual growth means recognizing our personal and communal responsibility to keep expanding our own circles of consciousness and understanding.

I have heard it said many times that as Unitarian Universalists it is OK for us to believe anything we want. I certainly don’t believe this is true. There are political and religious ideologies that run contrary to our commonly affirmed principles, and we cannot very well claim them both. It is also not OK for us to become stagnant in our own spiritual growth. Where I am today is not where I was previously, nor is it where I will be if I choose to continue growing. Our responsibility is not to stand our spiritual ground, but to open ourselves to continued growth and to expect others in our community to do the same.

When we do this, we will find that not only are we on many different paths of spiritual growth and development, but that we are also in many different places along those paths. So often I hear Unitarian Universalists talking about wanting more diversity in our congregations, and we unthinkingly lament how many of us seem to be the same in certain racial, economic or educational areas. Well, I can look around the room right now and tell you that this is simply not true. Further, when we fall into this way of thinking we fail to recognize the diversity that abounds in every facet of our life in this community. We must assume difference as a starting point in our relationships, and if we want our community to grow and flourish we have a responsibility to discover what those differences are. Just as I have a familial, cultural, educational and experiential background unlike any other in this room, so do we all. When we get to the point of sharing at this level, I believe we can find the diversity we value so highly right here, right now.

We also have a responsibility to each other to find and engage in a spiritual practice that both fosters our own growth and allows us to contribute to the overall growth of the community. I don’t think of Unitarian Universalism itself as a spiritual path, but rather as a way of being in community with persons who are on many different spiritual paths. For me, composing and making music is a path to spiritual growth. I have found it fascinating to see how my musical development has so closely mirrored my spiritual development over the years. Encouraging spiritual growth in our congregation means sharing our insights and experiences with one another, whether at coffee hour or in small groups like dinners for nine or chalice circles. And we won’t have much to share if we’re not true to our own practice.

We cannot allow ourselves to become a spiritual melting pot. The integrated worldview, should we choose to embrace it, tells us that the parts that make up the whole are also whole in themselves. This is what Paul was trying to explain to the Corinthians when he wrote about the many parts of the one body. Each plays a significant role in our own personal and communal development, and we cannot afford to dismiss or abandon any of them. Getting to this integral level will require us to take on an engaged pluralism, one that seeks to embrace difference through leaving our assumptions of sameness behind.

We may never feel comfortable being different in places where our differences are not likely to be appreciated. This is not something I would recommend trying out at the next family reunion. But we can create such a space here in this community. May we all find within us the courage to be different, and may we find here a compassionate community that celebrates who we are and pushes us to become ever more. Blessed be.