February 19, 2006
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, “The Sympathy of Religions;” [LINK].
Huston
Smith, THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS; page 221; “Islam.
The
text book for his course was then called THE RELIGIONS OF MAN, an early edition
of THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS. The chapter
on Islam begins, at least superficially, somewhat differently, but again sounding
the note of difficulty understanding Islam.
Misunderstandings begin with the very name of this
religion. It is often referred to in the West as Mohammedanism, after the
prophet who gave it definite form. From
the Muslim perspective, this is inaccurate and offensive. It is inaccurate, they say, because Muhammed
didn’t shape the religion. God did. Muhammed merely transmitted it… The title is
offensive because it gives the impression that Islam focuses around Muhammed
the man instead of God. (1958 ed.: p 201)
Thirty
years later, in the 1991 edition from which I read earlier, Smith indicates
Islam is still difficult to understand. If you look at the beginnings of other
chapters on different faiths: Buddhism, Confucianism, he begins them without
mentioning any trouble understanding them.
In class he gave some indication. In
one lecture he told us he personally had a trouble understanding Islam. Smith went on tell us one time he found himself
sitting next to the great scholar of Islam, William Cantwell Smith. The two scholars quickly struck up a conversation,
as Cantwell Smith confessed while he readily grasped Islam, he couldn’t make
heads or tails of Buddhism. Huston
Smith had a deep appreciation of Buddhism, but was at a loss with Islam.
The difficulties understanding Islam are long standing.
In 1893, the World Parliament of Religions was held in conjunction
with the World’s Columbian Exposition in
If a [Muslim], Turk,
Egyptian, Syrian or African commits a crime the newspaper reports do not tell
us that it was committed by a Turk, an Egyptian, a Syrian or an African, but
by a [Muslim]. If an Irishman, an Italian,
a Spaniard or a German commits a crime in the
Any
failure to appreciate or understand other faiths readily serves the purposes
of those who seek to divide humanity into two groups: us versus them. All too often it leads to demonization. We have seen this in the on-going protests and
arguments about the cartoon showing Muhammed with a bomb in his hat. Riots have broken out across the Muslim world.
On one hand, our values such as freedom of the press and speech are
misunderstood by many Muslims, and on the other, many Americans fail to appreciate
Muslim traditions of not depicting Muhammed in any form, let alone something
considered sacrilegious.
Cartoons
generally suggest to us something humorous. Recently in a tribute to outgoing
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Jon Stewart on the Daily show flashed a huge
headshot of Greenspan and said his JPSI (Jewiness Per Square Inch) was 59.
To provide context for the rating, he then flashed a shot of the late Lubavitcher
Rebbe Schneerson in full Orthodox regalia and said his JPSI was only a few
numbers higher. Stewart is himself Jewish. Nevertheless, mocking the “Jewiness”
of the country’s top banker and guardian of money lenders may, to some, be
as offensive as Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
But
Stewart’s audience laughed. It was funny.
The lack of humor in response to the cartoons Muslims find offensive
is telling. I doubt that Flemming Rose, cultural editor
of the Danish paper that printed the cartoons thought they were funny. Rose is a close confederate of neoconservative
Daniel Pipes. It is not surprising then that The Washington Post described
the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country
where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently
unacknowledged, problem.” [LINK]
Daniel Pipes’ position on Islam is extreme, apparently having “visions of
rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps.” [LINK]
Pipes serves on the federally funded United States Institute of Peace.
Fanning
the flames on the other side, a Pakistani cleric this week announced a $1-million
US bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew the Prophet Muhammad. [LINK]
Extremists
on both sides are fanning the flames, inciting people to riot and worse, all
in the name of religion. For some
it is not surprising that the cartoon riots are occurring, and the American
press is portraying Muslims as dangerous once again, during the debate about
An
attempt to accentuate differences between world faiths is not the Unitarian
Universalist way. The author of our reading “The Sympathy of Religions,” Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, was one of the most influential Unitarian leaders in
the 19the century, when a deeper appreciation of world faiths was beginning,
and which he did much to foster. Our
faith in world faiths is expressed in the Purposes and Principles of the Unitarian
Universalist Association. If you turn
to the gray hymnal, just before the first hymn you can read these. Among them it speaks for our “living tradition
we share, which “draws from many sources,” including “wisdom from the world’s
religions which inspires us.” (page x)
The
beginnings of our appreciation of world religions commences with one –time
Unitarian minister and American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1831 in his vast reading, Emerson began to
learn of the great Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. He was immediately taken with it. Emerson found
there the great doctrine that he spoke of so often, a belief in the fundamental
identity of all things, beyond and beneath appearances, and a profound conception
of universal justice and equilibrium. (Robert D. Richardson, EMERSON: THE
MIND ON FIRE, page 114f)
Previously,
Emerson had thought of Hinduism as mere superstition. But as he studied the Gita, he began to see
it as a scripture of equal standing with the Gospels. (Ibid., 115)
This
insight was so clear for Emerson, that even those who struggled against one
another he could see are one, as He expressed in what is one of my favorite
of Emerson’s poems:
Brahma
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
This
insight into the ultimate identity of all things was so strong, Emerson wrote
of courage,
Courage is grounded always on a belief in the identity
of the nature of my enemy with my own [nature], that he with whom you contend
is no more than you. If we believed in the existence of stick individuals,
natures, that is not radically identical but unknown, immeasurable, we should
never dare to fight.” (Ibid., 272)
Often
faulted for developing the American dogma of rugged individualism, it was
a doctrine he would have no part in. Self-
reliance he preached, not because we each contend with one another, but because
we are each an expression of the universal, of, in his words, ‘the over-soul.’ Elsewhere Emerson remarks, “Identity. Identity!
Friend and foe are one stuff, and the stuff is such and so much that the variations
of surface are unimportant.” (408)
Emerson’s
appreciation of non-Western religions expanded beyond Hinduism, including
Islam and Sufism. His biographer, Robert
Richardson writes:
The modern historian of orientalism, Edward Said,
has claimed that a politics of difference lay at the heart of the West’s imperial
cultural enterprise, “that politics needed to assume, indeed finally to believe,
that what was true about Orientals, or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans.”
The extreme version of this is the modern view that differences are all there
is: we are constituted by our differences. Emerson understood the vast consequences of
the difference-versus-identity dispute and he threw his whole weight on the
side of identity. (408)
To
be an authentic American religion these days, a faith must celebrate Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Unitarians, New Thought,
Christian Fundamentalists all claim Emerson.
Perhaps none took him up more completely than a younger Unitarian minister
Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Higginson
is one of the most fascinating figures in our history. Higginson was married
to a niece of William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism.
Besides being a Unitarian minister, as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, he
was the discoverer and publisher of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. He was the Colonel of the first regiment of
freed African Americans in the civil War to see battle. And as he camped with them during the nights
in
Not everyone when they come to write their personal
statement of faith will mention another person, but Higginson did.
In “My Creed So Far As I Have One,” he wrote:
When the devout emotions come, says Emerson in
substance – I have not the passage at hand – “yield to them; no matter what
you theory, leave it as Joseph left his coat in the hands of the harlot, and
flee.” In the life of every thoughtful [person], no
matter how sunny his temperament, there are moments of care, sorrow, depression,
perplexity when neither study nor action nor friends will clear the horizon:
the tenderest love, the most heroic self-devotion leave the cloud still resting,
the perplexity still there. It is at
such times that the thought of an Unseen Power comes to help him; but not
tradition of the churches, with no apparatus of mythology; but simply in the
form that the mystics call “the flight of the alone, to the Alone.”
It may be by the art of prayerbook; it may equally well be in the depth
of personal experience to which all prayerbooks seem an intrusion.
It may be in a church; it may equally well be inn a solitary room or
on a mountain’s height.” [Leigh E Schmidt,
RESTLESS SOULS, page 59.]
Through
out his life, Higginson visited not only churches and mountain heights. As we heard in our reading this morning, he
heard the cry from the minaret and the invocation “Oh!
the gem in the lotus - oh! the gem in the lotus,” No where did this vision
of the universal sympathy of all religions receive better expression than
in the World Parliament of Religions in
Higginson was one of the prime movers of the Free Religious Association. Emerson was a member and Charles Darwin a contributor. It was a collection of the more radical Unitarians
of the day, who sought to expand liberal religion beyond a narrow definition
of Christianity.
They conceived of the World Parliament of Religions, organized it,
and their were speakers: Zoroastrians, Buddhists African-American Christians,
Jains, a speaker on North American Indians, Christian Science, Theosophists,
and on and on.
Twenty
years earlier, in “The Sympathy of Religions,” Higginson gave voice vision:
Every race recognizes in its religious precepts
the brotherhood of man. … The Heetopades of Vishnu Sarman forbid caste. "Is
this one of our tribe or a stranger? is the calculation of the narrow-minded;
but, to those of a noble disposition, the earth itself is but one family."
"What is religion?" says elsewhere the same book, and answers, "Tenderness
toward all creatures."
This sympathy of religions extends even to the
loftiest virtues, - the forgiveness of injuries, the love of enemies and the
overcoming of evil with good. "The wise man," said the Chinese Lao-tse,
"avenges his injuries with benefits." "Hatred," says a
Buddhist sacred book, the Dhammapada, "does not cease by hatred at any
time; hatred ceases by love; this is the eternal rule." "To overcome
evil with good is good, and to resist evil by evil is evil," says a Mohammedan
manual of ethics. "Turn not away from a sinner, but look on him with
compassion," says Saadi's Gulistan. [LINK]
Karen
Armstrong lifts up what Higginson called the sympathy of religions as a primary
criterion of any religion:
All the great world religions insist that every
form of religiosity must lead to compassion. Fundamentalists often fail this
test: they are so gripped by their fears of destruction that they often downplay
those passages in their scriptures that speak of respect for the sacred rights
of others and emphasize the more belligerent strains in their respective traditions.
Hence, they fail religiously. [LINK]
Understanding
those of different faiths, appreciating their spiritual journeys is part of
what we are about. Different groups
who form our own diverse community of faith can testify to the demonization
of their own faith in the city: pagans, humanists.
We
must practice compassion and tolerance whether we are watching the news or
talking with a co-worker or neighbor. This
past week, several of us among the clergy here on
Where
ever we go, whomever we talked with, take the time to listen, share something
of your own faith, and promote interfaith understanding.