Theological Distractions Address delivered at Maud Robinson’s Valedictory Service 26th June 2007 Concentration and Compassion. A Story from the Buddhist Tradition A young man who had a bitter disappointment in life went to a remote monastery and said to the abbot, ‘I am disillusioned with life and wish to attain enlightenment to be freed from these sufferings. But I have no capacity for sticking long at anything. I could never do long years of meditation and study and austerity; I should relapse and be drawn back to the world again, painful though I know it to be. Is there any short way for people like me?’ ‘There is,’ said the abbot, ‘if you are really determined. Tell me, what have you studied, what have you concentrated on most in your life?’ ‘Why, nothing really. We were rich, and I did not have to work. I suppose the thing I was really interested in was chess. I spent most of my time at that.’ The abbot thought for a moment, and then said to his attendant: ‘Call such-and-such a monk, and tell him to bring a chessboard and men.’ The monk came with the board and the abbot set up the men. He sent for a sword and showed it to the two. ‘O monk,’ he said, ‘you have vowed obedience to me as your abbot, and now I require it of you. You will play a game of chess with this youth, and if you lose I shall cut off your head with this sword. But I promise you that you will be reborn in paradise. If you win, I shall cut off the head of this man: chess is the only thing he has ever tried hard at, and if he loses he deserves to lose his head also.’ They looked at the abbot’s face and saw that he meant it: he would cut off the head of the loser. They began to play. With the opening moves the youth felt the sweat trickling down to his heels as he played for his life. The chessboard became his whole world; he was entirely concentrated on it. At first he had somewhat the worst of it, but then the other made an inferior move and he seized his chance to launch a strong attack. As his opponent’s position crumbled, he looked covertly at him. He saw the face of intelligence and sincerity, worn with years of austerity and effort. He thought of his own worthless life, and a wave compassion came over him. He deliberately made a blunder and then another blunder, ruining his position and leaving himself defenceless. The abbot suddenly leant forward and upset the board. The two contestants sat stupefied. ‘There is no winner and no loser,’ said the abbot slowly, ‘there is no head to fall here. Only two things are required,’ and he turned to the young man, ‘complete concentration and compassion. You have today learnt them both. You were completely concentrated on the game, but then in that concentration you could feel compassion and sacrifice your life for it. Now stay here a few months and pursue our training in this spirit and your enlightenment is sure.’ He did so and got it. From Soul Food (1996), Edited by Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman, Harper, San Francisco I am watching the current series of Celebrity Big Brother with great interest. I freely admit to having quite lowbrow tastes in television – although they’re not as low as Rev. Cathal Courtney’s, who has been known to enjoy The Price is Right! Big Brother may be lowbrow, it may even, as I’m coming to suspect, be cruel, but to anyone interested in human behaviour it offers an insight into our more primitive selves, what we are when some of our normal cultural supports are removed. Perhaps it is the voyeur in me, perhaps it’s the fact that I consider myself a student of human nature, but I always find it interesting to see what will happen when people are shut up together for a few months, with no books, television, or newspapers to entertain them; to witness the alliances, the tensions, and the strategies which individuals use to cope with the unfamiliarity of their situation. And while the current series is fascinating enough, the one before this, Celebrity Big Brother 2007 really engaged the popular imagination because it raised issues which transcended the normal areas of psychological and sociological interest: for the first time certain contestants were accused of racist bullying, and this provoked extensive comment in the broadsheet press, even led to questions in the House of Commons, and almost caused a diplomatic incident during Gordon Brown’s visit to India. Whether or not the three young women accused of racism are actually racist is difficult to judge, and it is not my concern today. I am more interested in their horrified response to the footage of their actions which was shown to each of them immediately upon their exit from the house. The principal culprit, Jade Goody, justified her obnoxious behaviour with such excuses as, ‘I didn’t realise what I was saying,’ ‘I got carried away,’ ‘My anger got the better of me,’ and while we might be tempted to respond to this with, ‘Well, that’s what she would say; she’s got a lucrative career to salvage’, I am genuinely inclined to believe her. She really wasn’t paying any attention to her words or her actions; she was simply responding, viscerally, to a situation in which she was totally out of her depth: her status as number one female contestant was being threatened by someone of astonishing beauty and considerable talent, and Jade was lashing out with unconsidered verbal attacks of frightening aggression and intensity. Only when she saw it for herself did she realise the scale of her attack. Had she not seen the video footage, she would probably have considered the incident - and honestly considered it – little more than an unfortunate tiff. The reason why I’m inclined to believe Jade’s incredulous response, is that the spiritual traditions tell us that such behaviour, far from being aberrant or strange, is, in fact, the norm. This is how we all are; for the most part we simply respond to circumstances, thoughtlessly, acting on our instincts, defending our egos, seeking to maintain what we consider to be our status. If any of us were to see a recording of our actions – particularly when we have felt threatened, but not exclusively in such extreme situations – we would be as horrified as Jade. The Sufis tell the story of a wise teacher who is one day surrounded by a crowd of people eager to hear his message. ‘Tell us, teacher, what is good?’ shouts a member of the crowd. ‘Whatever contributes to my pleasure and happiness is good,’ replies the teacher. ‘What is bad, then?’ asks another. ‘Whatever causes me pain or unhappiness is bad.’ The people are so angry at his lame replies that they chase him out of their village, throwing stones at him as he runs away. ‘You fools,’ says a bystander, when they return. ‘He was just articulating your own unspoken attitude, what all of you practise every single day of your lives.’ What gives me pleasure is good; what causes me pain is bad. Whatever problems there may be in the world, they are not of my making. I am an enlightened individual, a good liberal, and if everyone thought like me we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in. This, however we dress it up, however we try to hide it behind our religious and moral rhetoric, is, for the most part, just how we are. ‘Ordinary people repent their sins: the elect repent their heedlessness,’ says the Sufi sage Dhu’L-Nun Misri. Jesus says on the cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ These words of Jesus are usually – and erroneously – thought to be his verdict on his executioners. But they are his verdict on us all. We don’t know what we are doing, and the object of the spiritual life is to help us move out of this state of ignorance, to move away from visceral reaction, into thoughtful action. This is such an imperative that everything else can be considered secondary, if not irrelevant. But most religion, sadly, although theoretically committed to the nurturing of a spiritual life, concerns itself with irrelevance. That is, with metaphysics, spending its time and energy concocting, proclaiming, and justifying, statements, which, by their very nature, cannot be satisfactorily proved, and so become, and remain, sources of conflict and division. The American comedian Emo Phillips summed this up in what has been voted the best religious joke of all time: Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He said, ‘Nobody loves me.’ I said, ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are you a Christian or a Jew?’ He said, ‘A Christian.’ I said, ‘Me too! Protestant or Catholic?’ He said, ‘Protestant.’ I said, ‘Me too! What franchise?’ He said, ‘Baptist.’ I said, ‘Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?’ He said, ‘Northern Baptist.’ I said, ‘Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?’ He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist.’ I said, ‘Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?’ He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.’ I said, ‘Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?’ He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.’ I said, ‘Die heretic!’ and I pushed him over. Even Unitarians are not free of this desire to pin things down theologically. For example, there is the ongoing, energy sapping debate about our relationship with Christianity. Are we Christian? Or are we more Humanist than Christian? Should we celebrate the Christian festivals? What is the status of Jesus? Do we need to believe in God? Should we use male or female pronouns when referring to God. Such questions are guaranteed to get the blood boiling, to provoke lively, sometimes acrimonious debate. And it’s been going on a long time. Recently, our Sunday Club organiser, was sorting through some old books in the vestry, when she came across Our Unitarian Faith for Young People, by Rev. J. T. Marriott, published in 1883. Its subtitle is Six Sunday Morning Discourses, and the first three concern the Trinity, and the relationship of Jesus to God the Father. I’ve steadfastly refused to enter into the debate, because, in the words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, it’s all an empty striving after wind. In a sermon some years ago, I quoted the singer Leonard Cohen, who said, ‘We’re in the middle of a flood; and this flood is of such Biblical proportions that I see everyone holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood......And people insist under these circumstances, on describing themselves as liberal or conservative. It seems to me completely mad.’ (The Observer, 27th September, 1998) Nearly ten years on and we’re still at it. Around the world we observe religious wars, and even in those places where actual bloodshed has temporarily ceased there are still ongoing religious squabbles, many of them over definitions of terms, interpretation of words in documents that are thousands of years old and which are by their very nature full of ambiguity and potential for disagreement. Can you believe that the theological reason for the split between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Church in the 11th century, concerned one Latin word: filioque, which means ‘and the son’? It was a dispute over whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father alone, as the Orthodox maintained, or from the Father and the Son, which was, and remains, the position of the Roman Catholics. And we Unitarians are excluded from certain interfaith bodies because we refuse to affirm belief that God is three in one! No wonder Dublin’s own Dean Swift satirised such religious idiocy with his tale of the Big Endians and the Little Endians in Gulliver’s Travels. The Big Endians, you remember, believed that one should always knock off the fat end of a boiled egg, and the Little Endians believed the opposite. Needless to say, they were constantly at war with each other. The floodwaters are rising around us, the world is warming up, the Middle East is in meltdown, Iran is developing atomic weapons, prosperous people are desperately unfulfilled, and yet massively powerful religious organisations, with enormous potential for the encouragement of spiritual growth, are busy excluding and anathematizing with what Voltaire in Candide called ‘philosophico-theologico-nigology’! What are the major concerns of the world-wide Anglican communion at the moment? Women bishops and homosexuality! ‘Theology,’ said Carl Jung, is humankind’s way of protecting itself from the experience of God.’ It’s a delaying tactic. What the psychologists call ‘displacement activity’. While we are arguing with each other about words we don’t have to bother too much about the serious business of self transformation. ‘While we’re marching we’re not fighting,’ the soldiers used to say in the war. We can be just like everyone else with a little bit of sanctimonious, unproveable metaphysics thrown in. The Buddha observed the same phenomenon in his own day – 500 years before the time of Jesus. Everybody wants to know the answers to irrelevant questions before they start to deal with their life and its problems. He compared it to a man who has been shot by an arrow, but who won’t let the doctors pull the arrow out until they have told him whether the person who fired it was male or female, young or old, black or white, tall or short, Buddhist or Hindu. He’s getting things in the wrong order, says the Buddha. Pull the arrow out, deal with the wound, and then you can begin to ask the questions – if they still have any relevance. Jesus put it another way: ‘Seek the kingdom of God first, and then everything else will fall into place,’ by which he most certainly did not mean, ‘join a Christian church’, or ‘get involved in political action’. He meant: seek the deepest core of yourself, that place where awareness of your real needs as a child of God may be found, and cease dwelling on the surface of things where you are constantly assailed by manufactured appetites, petty jealousies, conflicting opinions. Seek that sense of identity with others which prompts you to feel a genuine empathy for their struggles, and a genuine pleasure in their triumphs. In short, as we heard in our children’s story today: cultivate the twin virtues of concentration and compassion. These things are far more important than denominational labels. Celebrity Big Brother demonstrated that too. One of the contestants was Jermaine Jackson, brother of Michael Jackson. Jermaine was calm when everyone else was angry; he refused to join in any backbiting; he rescued Shilpa Shetty from attack by the others; he always seemed good humoured, never sulked, never entered into arguments about food, ate only vegetables, worked hard at the group tasks, was always available to give advice and consolation to the others. He seemed like a man who was in control of himself, and not at the mercy of shifting moods. Jermaine had been brought up a Jehovah’s Witness, but he is a Muslim now. How strange! Two of the most vilified religious groups in the world have been responsible for producing this man who stood head and shoulders above all the rest. This should make us think. The transformation of the self, which is the one goal of all spiritual practice can be achieved within any system – and none. The Unitarian movement does not exist so that I, or anyone else, can teach the intricacies of anti-Trinitarian theology. The genius and the uniqueness of Unitarianism do not lie in its liberal theology, or its rational theology, or even its ecumenical theology, but in its willingness to remove theology from the top of the religious agenda and relegate it to a pretty lowly place somewhere near the bottom, where it ceases to have power to distract us from more pressing matters. Our movement will not grow because we decide to clarify our theology, because, with the best will in the world, such clarification will mean that ultimately we’ll be pushing people off the bridge. The push will be gentle, and it will no doubt be accompanied by expressions of regret, but it will be real nevertheless. Unitarianism will grow and prosper when we realise that our primary duty is to help each other to become more self-aware and more aware of those who share this fragile earth with us. In striving to achieve this difficult but essential state of awareness, we will no doubt continue to use the Christian stories along with stories and insights from other traditions. Does this make us Christian? I don’t know, and what’s more I don’t have the time, the patience, or the need to define things any more closely. There are more important things to do. Rev.Bill Darlison Oxford, 26thJune 2007 Cover