“God is too big for just one religion” Nov. 4, 2018 Roger Ray and David Ketchum
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. Joseph Campbell
In my family home, the staple food that my mother cooked whether it was Christmas dinner or left overs on a Monday night, was a kind of fried corn bread. She made it every day. I grew up watching her make it from the time I was old enough to stand until I left for college. She poured a generous amount of course ground corn meal into a large mixing bowl and added baking powder and salt. She then scalded the mixture with boiling water and then vigorously stirred in some butter milk. This thick mixture was then fried on both sides in bacon fat into an oblong cake that looked something like a grainy pancake.
Stacks of this corn bread sat by the stove all day and if any of us were hungry we could get a piece, cover it in butter and jam or peanut butter to hold us until the next meal. When I moved away and was cooking my own meals, I, of course, tried to make corn bread the way she did and could never get it right. I have, in my folder of family recipes, my mother’s hand-written formula for making fried corn bread. Frankly, I could come closer to reality by asking Siri for directions and Siri wasn’t even born when my mother was alive.
My mother’s conscious effort to document the familiar ritual of making corn bread is nothing short of ridiculous, the proportions she listed wouldn’t have been enough to make even one piece of corn bread. Cooking, for my mother, was a matter of practice that happened nearly unconsciously and could not be documented, at least not by her.
I’m not saying that mom’s cornbread was health-food, but I am saying that it tasted good and it kept a houseful of perpetually hungry adolescent boys from starving to death before dinner time. And, so far as religion is concerned, if Jesus had grown up in my house, communion would be buttered corn bread and a chalice of whole milk. And, “no,” I’m not going to make corn bread for everyone every week.
My point in all of this is to say that, like cooking, the origins of most religions were something done by feel. Moses, as we take the Exodus account, had empathy for the enslaved Hebrews and led them to freedom and self-determination. Jesus, brought up in occupied Judah, became a religious and social reformer who elevated the outcast and abused through a ministry of radical compassion. Mohamed was a caravan pirate who sought to unite and civilize the warring tribes of the Arabic peninsula.
One cannot really know anything about the historical Moses and relatively little about the historical Jesus and maybe we can know a little too much about the historical Mohamed. But from what we can reasonably assemble around the first two, we know that Judaism as practiced both as a temple sacrifice cult and later as a rabbinic text-based faith bears very little resemblance to the ancient liberator of slaves and his spiritual beliefs.
My good friend and founding member of the Jesus seminar, Dr. Charles Hedrick, is fond of reminding me that Jesus was probably not very religious.
Hardly a decade after Jesus was executed by the state, Paul stole his name and reputation and invented a religion that had almost nothing to do with Jesus, and a generation after Paul had been executed by the same state, the Roman church turned Christianity into something Paul would not have recognized, and Jesus would have hated.
Most of you know all of this very well but let me plainly spell it out: none of the New Testament was written during the lifetime of Jesus. Paul’s letters are the oldest part of the New Testament. It is almost impossible to believe that the gospels were not written, at least partially, accepting Paul’s entirely uninformed religious prejudices. So we read the gospels looking for hints and echoes of what the historical Jesus may have said and believed and what we find there was a very controversial teacher who challenged the prejudices of his culture regarding the role of women, and of the second class nature of gentiles, prostitutes, and lepers. He evidently was defiant towards the authority of the occupying government and that got him killed, probably with the consent and help of the indigenous religious authorities.
But, like trying to duplicate mom’s corn bread, you can’t reduce who Jesus was and what he was trying to accomplish into a creedal statement and then try to express it in rituals and dogmas. What he was, in essence, was good. . . so good that people who knew him thought of him as being holy. The religion that evolved in his name over the next century was, in many ways, the antithesis of good and people like me have been fighting that battle for centuries, asking churches to imitate the goodness of Jesus but don’t try to codify and worship Jesus.
What happened to Muhammed was similar to what happened to Jesus. Once he was dead, his story was hijacked by people who needed for him to be more than he was in life and traditions grew up around his birth and childhood to make him seem like more of a Biblical figure. But the truth is that he was largely a product of his culture. He had several mystical experiences before his famously described “first vision” which he initially interpreted as being an encounter with an evil genie that he feared may have possessed him. His first impulse was to commit suicide, not to sit down and dictate the Quran . . . I say “dictate,” because he was illiterate, and Jesus probably was too, but Muhammed’s wife, Khadijacould read and write.
His wife sent him away to visit her cousin, Waraka,who was a Christian mystic and it was Waraka who insisted that it was not an evil jin who had spoken to Muhammad but the Archangel Gabriel. Massaging his mystical experiences into the language of the Judeo-Christian theological narrative, Muhammed, Khadija, and Waraka shaped the early version of the poetry of the Quran. Later generations would make the whole thing out to be a miraculous composition dictated to the prophet from God through the Archangel but, as I have said before, God doesn’t write books and angels don’t exist. This is just the way that ancient people talked.
Muslims claim that the Quran is God’s one and only perfect miracle but there is not much in it that you would find to be all that memorable, although some common sayings that many Christians think are in the Bible are actually just in the Quran. My mother would stop making cornbread altogether if she had known all the times that she told us that “God will never give you more than you can bear,” that she was quoting Muhammad and not Jesus . . . but I never told her and now you can’t! Some religious mythology is best left alone.
But I say all of this by way of echoing what Joseph Campbell said, which is that all religions are true as long as you take them poetically, metaphorically, or existentially, but as soon as you try to distill that experience down into creeds, dogma, and sacraments, you kill the whole thing. The larger truth, is that there is no authoritative book to tell us how to live or how to think. There is no one true religion that trumps all of the others. We are all just mortals trying to figure out how to be good people. Some ways of being religious seem to help out in that process and others seem to hurt and we have to navigate between the lies to find the truth.
David Ketchum, part 2
As long as I can remember, I’ve been less interested in teasing out the verifiable details about the historical Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, or Buddha, and much more interested in exploring how communities related to their stories and teachings. Who was thinking about and remembering these things? Why were these ideas remembered and repeated? How were they understood and applied? How did different communities in different cultures and over different times interact with these stories and teachings? As I’ve mentioned before, what I find most compelling is the potential of religious traditions and communities to either hinder or liberate our humanity.
So it isn’t a problem to me that the New Testament was written after Jesus’ lifetime, or that the earliest Buddhist scriptures were preserved orally and not written down for nearly 500 years. If we really believe what Roger said, that “We are all just mortals trying to figure out how to be good people;” if we really believe that “Some ways of being religious seem to help out in that process and others seem to hurt and we have to navigate between the lies to find the truth,” then we realize that this process of discernment is what’s been going on all along, probably mostly in haphazard ways, as scriptures were written and preserved, and as traditions were created, adapted, and tossed out. We also realize that this discernment is the most important and urgent task for religious folks today, and that we can do it intentionally, with the goal of giving humans the best chance possible to live in wise and kind ways.
I stress that the task is urgent and that our efforts need to be intentional, because religion’s track record is mixed at best. It’s certainly historically true that religious folks have spilled a lot of ink and a lot of blood while arguing over the truth of their religious claims, while using religion as a weapon to marginalize, exploit, and oppress folks they labeled as different. Buddhism, which has a reputation for being among the more peace-loving religious systems around, has not been immune, because Buddhism, like all religions, has been created, maintained, and adapted by human beings.
Approximately 535 million people in the world identify as Buddhists, almost 8% of the world’s population. Within Asia, about 67% of those practice in one of the Mahayana traditions; another 28% practice in one of the Theravada traditions; and about 3% practice in one of the Vajrayana traditions. Only about 7 million Buddhists live outside of Asia. (https://books.google.com/books?id=u0sg9LV_rEgC&lpg=PP1&dq=buddhism%20introduction&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false ) So for anyone unfamiliar with Buddhist cosmology, encountering that world can be bewildering, to say the least. This is especially the case if you have a notion that Buddhism is a philosophy, and not a religion. And it is also the case if you are unaware that there are thousands of Buddhist sects that have arisen over the last 2,500 years. The Buddhism that exists in the minds of many in the West often has very little to do with the actual histories, cultures, geographies, and practices of Buddhists in Asia. Buddhism, like other cultural and religious systems, is more easily romanticized than understood.
So I want to be honest about the very human limitations that Buddhist individuals and societies have experienced. For example, two weeks ago, I helped provide a tour at the local Buddhist temple to a large group of university students. After we had finished up, one approached me to ask what I thought about the situation in Myanmar. There’s not much good to say about a nation engaging in ethnic cleansing; in the newest wave of violence against the Rohingya, beginning in August 2017, almost 700,000 more people have fled Myanmar to escape state-sanctioned violence. The ongoing repression of this vulnerable people has been made even more bewildering by the inaction of a Nobel laureate and current State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, who was formerly an icon of engaged Buddhism. Instead of speaking out and acting on their behalf, she has justified the atrocities and persecuted journalists. Suu Kyi and about 90% of Myanmar’s population are Buddhists; the beleaguered Rohingya are Muslims.
Similarly, one of my own past Buddhist mentors was formerly a human rights worker in Sri Lanka, providing mediation and protective accompaniment for high ranking officials and diplomats involved in trying to bring an end to the civil war. That war lasted over 25 years and killed nearly 100,000 people. About 70% of Sri Lankans are Buddhist.
In all of these kinds of cases, there are contributing circumstances requiring thoughtful analysis. But some of these horrible acts of oppression and violence were justified in the minds of their perpetrators as a defense of Buddhist identity. And in all of these kinds of cases, a Buddhist identity and culture was not enough to prevent them from happening.
So is it inevitable that human beings will get lost, confusing the metaphors with dogma? And is there any hope at all? There is, and one example of it is found in the aptly named “Amazing & Astounding Qualities” sutta. It starts off with poetry and metaphor; you really get a sense of how the miraculous stories were remembered and handed down in the Buddhist tradition. After an alms round and meal, the monks are gathered together and chatting away, talking about the miraculous qualities of the Buddha Gotama. And just then, as is often the case in the suttas, the Buddha walks in. Everyone gets really quiet, like you do when the person you are talking about is suddenly present. The Buddha sits down and asks, “so, what have you all been talking about?” Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant, tells him, and the Buddha urges him on, “That being the case, Ānanda, elaborate to a greater extent on the Tathāgata’s amazing & astounding qualities.” (By the way, Tathāgata is the title the Buddha often uses for himself.)
And Ananda does. It is quite the list, from the Blessed One’s mindful and alert lifespan in the Tusita heaven before his final rebirth, to the “measureless radiance” that pierced the entire cosmos when he “alighted in his mother’s womb,” to his miraculous birth. I’ll read you the account, from the translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
“When the bodhisatta left his mother’s womb, he left it immaculate, unsullied by fluid, unsullied by mucus, unsullied by blood, unsullied by lymph: pure, very pure. … , two streams of water appeared from the sky—one cool, the other warm—to wash the bodhisatta and his mother. … As soon as the bodhisatta was born, he stood steadily with his feet on the ground and, facing north, took seven steps while a white parasol was held over him. Surveying all the directions, he made a bellowing statement: ‘I am the foremost of the world. I am chief of the world. I am the best of the world.’ … And the fact that when the bodhisatta left his mother’s womb… this ten-thousand-fold cosmos shivered & quivered & quaked, while the great, measureless radiance appeared in the cosmos, surpassing the effulgence of the devas: I hold this, too, to be an amazing & astounding quality of the Blessed One.” (https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN123.html )
For any student of ancient religions and ancient texts, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The remarkable features are, so to speak, unremarkable. But I wouldn’t be reciting this text if this is where it ended. The Buddha, having listened to the litany of praise, replied:
“That being the case, Ānanda, you can hold this, too, to be an amazing & astounding quality of the Tathāgata: There is the case where feelings are known to the Tathāgata when they arise, known when they remain, known when they go to their end. Perceptions are known to the Tathāgata when they arise, … remain, ... go to their end. Thoughts are known to the Tathāgata when they arise, ... remain, ... go to their end. You can hold this, too, Ānanda, to be an amazing & astounding quality of the Tathāgata.” (ibid)
This reply is remarkable. Here we have the preservation of a tradition that insists that what is “amazing and astounding” is the human capacity to reflect on our experience and consciously, intentionally choose to cultivate what is wise, kind, and just. The tradition also holds that the Buddha said he taught only two things: suffering and the end of suffering. And that seems like a practical way to measure whether our religious opinions and practices amount to anything good. We can know our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. In that knowing, we can choose what is good. We can create lives and communities that bring life and freedom and minimize suffering. It’s not automatic, and we can lose our way. But the possibility lies open, and we can continually embrace it, and we can celebrate how amazing and astounding that is.
