Hindu Nation?

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, October 4, 2009

Driving along Weidman north of Manchester Road out in West St. Louis County, looking for something, searching without yet knowing for what.  After a minute or two on the winding road up and down forested hills, you begin to see, above the tall trees, the tiptop of what appears to be a church building in one of the valleys off to the west.  As you get closer, you can tell something isn’t quite right – it’s not stone but alabaster, the surface too polished, the shape too fluid, the color too white.  Curious, you turn into the parking lot and drive down the hill toward the slightly conical edifice, and you realize this can’t be a church – the carvings on the exterior are too ornate, the iconography all wrong.  When you park and get out and go up to the front doors, you feel an invitation to pull them open and step inside and cross the boundary into another world.  Come on, the energy says, it’ll be an adventure.

One thing you notice is the smell – is it incense?  Yes, that, and someone in a room down below is cooking vast quantities of food using spices your family didn’t know about when you were coming up, the pungent aromas at once succulent and very nearly overpowering.

When your eyes adjust to the dark of the low-ceilinged foyer, you see a sign asking you to remove your shoes;  you quickly decide that either someone in authority here has a bent for cleanliness, or this is a sacred space of some sort.  Up the stairs, through the double doors, you pad in your socked feet into a huge room of light and sound and smell that all seems vaguely foreign but yet welcoming even in its unusualness.

Around the perimeter of this bright room you see several display cases that house what look like statuary, about the size of small children.  Look closely and you see the statues are labeled with the names of deities.  They look very well cared for, and they seem to invite you to stay for awhile.  Wander around the room, linger with the deities, take all the time you want.

As you linger, you notice two smaller rooms that open off the main room to the north and south where other statues stand sheltered in their own display cases.  You notice now, too, a few people apparently praying in front of the statues in the side rooms, bowing, making signs of submission, rocking back and forth, and you wonder if you should join in somehow.  But don’t – not yet, anyway.

After watching the faithful for a minute, you are drawn back to sounds of activity in the big room, where up at the front on a raised platform one man sits rocking back and forth as he rhythmically chants in a not-quite-monotone some unintelligible (to you) words from a big book as a growing crowd of devotees gathers to sit cross-legged on the floor and watch and listen.  Behind the seated singer, you see another man performing what looks like a rite of homage to a tall, nearly-nude statue with gleaming black skin and porcelain-smooth features.  He’s polishing the deity – no, he’s pouring milk over it, the white milk cascading over the black skin like the Sanskrit of the chant ebbs and flows over the silence underneath.

As the singer settles into a groove, the man doing the pouring runs out of liquid and goes behind the statue to retrieve, from a refrigerator, two more plastic gallon jugs of whole milk – which is just jarring enough to break the spell and return you to the present… 

 

The Hindu Temple of Saint Louis on Weidman Road in Manchester, Missouri, welcomes visitors, especially during poojas, their worship services.  If this doesn’t sound like a culture you’ve grown up in, it is yet identifiable as a religious practice – people acting in ways they might not act on the street, people using words they might not use in everyday life, people submitting themselves in ways others might see as vulnerable and weak.

For those of us who grew up in the three Abrahamic traditions of monotheism – Jews, Christians, or Muslims – all those deities hanging around might smack of the supposed evils of polytheism.  But you have to look deeper and ask more questions to find out that all those statues, all those deities, are just physical representations of various aspects of the one true reality.  It’s not that there are 330 million individual gods, it’s that there are countless manifestations of the one infinite spirit, and all those multiple representations are meant to help our limited human consciousnesses remember and honor and worship that one reality which is larger than ourselves but which we know by many names and in many aspects.

One of the basics of Hinduism is that God can be realized through different paths. One pathway of devotion is to portray that ultimately formless god-reality as a physical form with whom a human worshipper or devotee can establish a one-to-one relationship wherein communication with Divinity becomes direct and intimate.  This can seem very strange, admittedly, in this tradition of ours that flows out of and through the Puritan experience in America – where idolatry was and still is seen as one of the most monstrous of sins.  Look around our sanctuary, notice the lack of iconography.  We are still concerned not to be taken in by idols and rightly so, in my opinion.

As an outsider to Hinduism myself, Hindu practice looks as if it’s polytheistic idol worship.  But for those on the inside, I am told, Hindu practice is about remembering and honoring the one true reality;  the path is simply through an artistic representation.

 

Stephen Prothero of Boston University says that this country is becoming Hindu.  More precisely, he says more and more of us are practicing a sort of “divine-deli-cafeteria” form of religion, which is very much in the spirit of Hinduism and its “many paths to God.”  Prothero says the majority of us in America act like we believe that, since all religions are the same, we can pick and choose the pieces we want from different places.  The epigraph at the top of your order of service say it well enough: “It isn’t about orthodoxy.  It’s about whatever works.  If going to yoga works, great, and if going to Catholic mass works, great.  And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that’s great, too.”

We all know people who’ve told us that they know the one true path to salvation, whether it’s through Jesus or Christ or Buddha or atheism or politics.  And we know how hollow such a thing can ring in what is now a much smaller world than ever before.

Prothero, though, chalks up all this divine-deli behavior to our being blessed to have multiple choices.  It is this idea of choice with which I want to quibble today.  You see, I think it looks like choice from the outside, but from the inside it feels very much like something else.

 

As you drive along Manchester Road and then north along Weidman toward the Hindu Temple, you pass a plethora of places of religious practice:  Roman Catholic churches, Protestant churches of several denominations, there’s an Islamic Foundation community center and madrassa across the street from Queeny Municipal Park where I know nature-lovers must practice a form of trancendentalist worship.  And if you can’t see a fitness center from where you are, keep driving ‘cause they’re all over the place out there – if you’re not worshipping anything else, you can at least worship the temple that is your body. 

In this country in this day and age, you have a religious choice to make, there’s no doubt about that.  But is it only about choice, or is it something larger?

 

I made the choice, many years ago now, to sign up for a class that was offered at another UU church in this area.  The class was advertised as Feminist Theology.  I thought, you know, I like discussing religious stuff, and I think feminists are interesting, so maybe I can go learn something very intellectual about feminist alternatives to religion, because you know no self-respecting feminist would believe in God or anything that silly.

When the appointed evening came, I entered the old stone church and found a few people seated in about a dozen chairs arranged in a small circle in the middle of the unlit sanctuary.  I remember it being dark, I remember not knowing anyone but the only other man who’d signed up, I remember it feeling like I had crossed a boundary into another world. 

We sat in silence for a few minutes before the leader stood, lit a handful of sage, and walked around the outside of the circle of chairs, stopping at four particular places to whisper short prayers of invocation to the four directions.  After forming the circle and invoking the spirits, she told a story about goddess worship in the time before the patriarchy took hold.  She talked about practices that had gone underground for fear the authorities would root out and destroy the practitioners and their communities.  She talked about how these practices still spoke deeply to some and how these communities still existed.

In subsequent weeks, I learned about reading the old texts in new ways, deciphering the messages that are written between the lines, marveling at the questions that weren’t asked, and at the number of people who were left out of those ancient narratives by virtue of their gender or race or ethnicity or orientation.  Stephen Prothero is right – I was given the choice to attend and I will be eternally grateful for that gift.  But he is also wrong - I had made the choice to sign up, but it wasn’t choice that kept me coming back: 

It was that something took hold of me.  It was that something I’d never heard of before was calling to me.  It was that something I’d been looking for but couldn’t name finally appeared before my eyes and flooded into my heart.  Maybe it was just the tiptop of a larger whole, but there it was, those nights in that darkened sanctuary, in a circle of seekers.  I can’t tell you about the others, maybe it was a choice for them.  But for me, it no longer seemed a choice.  For me, it seemed now a command:  “Follow me.”  “This way.”  “Time for an adventure.”

 

It was in the UU&You! orientation class last Thursday that we read Channing’s statement, “I call that mind free…”  We also talked some about the fourth of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Principles and Purposes, the one about a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Freedom is a big deal for us, but so is responsibility.

Whatever choices you’ve been presented with in your life, whatever choices you’ve made thus far, in this faith we say that you have the freedom to conduct your own search for truth and meaning.  But that’s just the beginning:  not only do we affirm you have the freedom, we insist you have the responsibility to carry out such a search.

It’s your search, at life’s invitation.  You have the freedom and the responsibility, whether you’re sitting in church or standing on a street corner or driving up and down a winding road through forested hills and valleys, to see what you see, to hear what you hear, to feel what you feel.  It’s not enough in this tradition to blindly accept a passive or hereditary faith.  You are to seriously seek, to find what you find, and then to test whether it’s true or not everyday.

If that sounds like hard work to you, you’re right, it is.  If that sounds like you have a choice, in some ways you do, at least until something somewhere takes hold of you, calls to you, appears before your eyes and floods your heart, grabs you and shakes you and commands you, “Follow me.”  Then it’s no longer a choice;  it’s something much larger. 

So, welcome to church today.  Welcome to this faith.  Welcome to the adventure that is your life.

So may it be.