Religion and Community

January 17, 1982
Lakeland

Two weeks ago I spoke of the inevitable tension that exists between individuality and dependence. Last week in his illuminating talk, Harold searched out the way to health – our inner selves provide the signposts, directing us to accept ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to project self-worth, not self-hatred. The poet said that which we project onto others comes back to our own. Today, I would have you consider that the balance between individuality and necessary dependence on social institutions is the healthy community. This is the Yang and Yin of the good life.

Free, unfettered individuality can be unhealthy. There is an old Hasidic tale where a pious man dies after a lifetime of losing interest in the people and life about him, all for the sake of God. A day or two after he reached Paradise, they threw him out. He could not understand or enjoy anything of what was going on (see CONTEXT, 3/1/81).

Or from the Christian tradition of the 4th century Simeon Stylites. He, allegedly for the sake of penitence and the glory of God, lived 37 years on top of a pillar. He became encrusted with filth and vermin, occasionally sending letters which were regarded as authoritative. “Kings and emperors crouched at the feet of the pillar, cherishing, as if precious pearls, ‘the worms that dropped from his body.’” (THE EVOLUTION OF MONASTICISM, p. 41ff). For his uncompromising, self-torturing individual piety, the Church called him a saint. Frankly I think he was a nut as well as a stunning example of perverted individuality.

In our times, Clarence Darrow, the nonconformist lawyer, defender of radical and unpopular causes, was possessed of considerable personal vanity and egotism. When asked by Lincoln Steffens how he (Darrow) was getting along with his wife, Ruby, Darrow answered, “Fine, because Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.”

But just as there can be distorted individuality, so can there be sick communities. The history of dictatorships, monarchies, monopolies, oppressive regimes of many varieties provides ample evidence.

The historian Hugh Thomas (HISTORY OF THE WORLD, p. 461), compared a concert by the Emperor Nero “to a public speech in the days of Stalin. ‘No one was allowed to leave the theatre,’ wrote Suetonius, ‘during the emperor’s recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored from the music that they shammed dead and were carried away for burial.’” Solzhenitsyn tells of a speech made by Stalin at which all the hearers are afraid to be the first to stop clapping. All looked around despairingly and clapped on, sweat standing out on their foreheads, exhaustion stealing over them.

Is it not also true (see HUMAN SCALE, p. 278) that “the larger the meeting, each person has smaller influence on it – fewer opportunities for participation and response except for a few, who for a variety of reasons, good and bad, exert a more dominating influence.”

Then, too, it is a commonplace that there is more violence, abuse, crimes of passion among relatives, that is, the family community.

Healthy community is achieved by a delicate balance between order and anarchy, between detachment and unquestioning loyalty.

There is dramatic illustration in the movie, REDS, which tells the intertwining stories of the hectic romance between Louise Bryant, the writer, and John Reed, the radical journalist, who became a thorough believer in the Bolshevik Revolution. The actor playing the role of Max Eastman, the radical editor, tells Louise that the difference between the couple is that for her the revolution is to be observed; for Reed it is a religion.

In that context, “religion” meant obedience without question. After some hesitancy, Reed went along; allowed his speeches and writings to be altered to conform to the party line. In his famed book, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, Reed wrote, “I have seen the future and it works.” He might have asked himself, “it works, how? By what means?”

The healthy community, family, religious national strives to achieve that delicate balance between freedom, community responsibility; between uninvolved detachment and blind loyalty; between cold reason and hot passion. The late Sam Levenson, wise, humorous writer and lecturer, once said, “You can’t sit at two weddings as the same time with one fanny.” [CJW note: Yet that is the posture we must seek.]

In the Torah (Deuteronomy 12), there is an ancient illustrative tale. As a prelude to the children of Israel occupying the land of Canaan, there is imposed upon the people a lengthy list of ordinances and laws to govern behavior, diet, ritual practice, human relations. According to the legend, when the people were nomads in the land of Moab, “each man did what was right in his own eyes.” However, in a new land, with large problems to be dealt with, hostile foes to be encountered, a more complex series of ordinances was instituted. It was a modified framework for the relationship of the individual and the community in a strikingly different social situation.

There is some analogy in that old story to the present-day Unitarian Universalist community. Conrad Wright of the Harvard faculty and historian of our Unitarian Universalist movement in his paper, “Individualism in Historical Perspective” discusses Jefferson and Emerson, in particular.

Jefferson was an outstanding example of those who believe religion to be a private affair. “I inquire after no man’s religious opinion and trouble none with mine.” As Wright pointed out, “... there was nothing in Jefferson’s understanding of religion that required people to form religious communities or explain by they persistently seek religious fellowship – nothing derived from the laws of human nature, let alone any commandment from God. ... for Jefferson, religion remains a private possession, because there was nothing in his understanding of it that suggests that religious fellowship has any value, or that there is anything in human nature that needs religious community.” (p. 5)

Emerson differs from Jefferson philosophically. For Emerson a full reliance on reason is a mistake. For Emerson, the intuition, the sense of the soul being an integral part of a greater whole, the Oversoul that is to be in touch with what is real. He contrasted the church, the religious community, with the soul. For him, “the life of the soul lived in all its fullness makes the Church unnecessary. (p. 7)

“The individual is the world,” wrote Emerson (p. 8). Without doubt, this individualism, this privatization of religion has marked our religious heritage.

Wright points out how social and economic conditions of Emerson’s time encouraged and stimulated the individual impulse. The frontiers of this continent were almost unlimited, there was bright opportunity for the confident individual, the optimistic individual, the individual who believed his efforts would bring abundant personal return and gain. This ebullience and individual pride – arrogance, really – is splendidly illustrated by a joke told 150 years or so ago by Fields, a Boston publisher, one of the many individuals who were part of the Flowering of New England as an intellectual, religious, literary peak that was compared to the great classical period of ancient Athens.

There was a Boston man who read Shakespeare late in life, was enthused and found Shakespeare’s poetry, wisdom, insights into human character far beyond expectations. Paying tribute to Shakespeare, or so he thought, [he opined,] “There are not twenty men in Boston who could have written these plays.”

But gone are the frontier opportunities that sparked and nurtured such confidence and the belief in unlimited growth under the leadership of reasonable persons. We believe in the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. Today such unfettered optimism seems strikingly naïve.

Conrad Wright makes a generalization (p. 14) that many of us will find disagreeable. Yet it is a formidable proposition: “Individualism thrives as one moves from a steady state into the period of growth; and that individualism becomes dysfunctional as limits to growth come into play. When one moves from an era of abundance to the threat of scarcity, individualism can no longer be the guiding principle in social relationships. ... If some sort of civilized existence is to survive, the individualism of the phase of growth will become vestigial. That a new doctrine of individualism may emerge, relevant to the new situation, is of course a possibility. But it will not be the Lockean, Jeffersonian, Emersonian kind.”

Wright suggests that given the situations, he outlines some suggestions for the Unitarian Universalist religious communities:

1)The religious community will require both commitment and discipline.
2)Rediscover worship as a corporate act ... one in which the liturgical preferences held individually by the members of the group can never be wholly accommodated.
3)Individualism is a critical principle [that] must be re-examined when the locus of constructive power has gone elsewhere.

Rather than criticizing or affirming those suggestions abstractly, today, I choose to hold before you more specific ways to achieve healthy community.

We can share our stories. Our lives are hectic and calendar-consumed and other cultures have wisdom to share. The Kalahari Bushmen, living in a difficult environment, worked 1 to 3 days a week for food. The rest of the time they spent talking and visiting relatives. Community was more important than luxury.

We can share our lives more than we do. A Christian chaplain assigned to Africa conducted a funeral service. The funeral service lasted for several hours and was attended by almost 1000 people. He writes, “noticing bedrolls, cots, mattresses, and blankets scattered around.” He inquired and found that “it is the tradition (there) when news of a death comes, for friends and relatives to stay overnight, sleeping about the compound on the ground, many staying for as long as a week after the funeral as an expression of solidarity with the family.”

The writer continues with other examples of this strong community spent among Africans. He says, “Africans know they belong to each other; they believe that life is not whole unless it is connected to the community, even in death.”

We cannot import such customs; they are not ours. Yet that sharing and solidarity are authentic expressions of religion in community.

We can share our lives in stories. The Rabbinic tradition is a splendid example. Some have said, “Ask a Rabbi a question, and he will not answer it; he will tell you a story.”

Truth and insight are contained in parable or metaphor. I like this Rabbinic story about the choice of site for the first temple:

“Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill, each night dividing evenly the grain they had ground together during the day. One brother lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family. Now, the single brother thought to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed.’ So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary to see that he was never without. But the married brother said to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one. What will he do when he’s old?’ So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

“Then one night they met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and embraced each other in love. The legend is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, ‘This is a holy place – a place of love – and here it is that my temple shall be built.’ And so it was. The First Temple is said to have been constructed on that very site. The holy place, where God is made known to his people, is the place where human beings discover each other in love. The absolute is known in the personal.”

Religion and community spirit? I have tried to balance the tension between the individual and the community. Sociologists have studies the subject and I could have quarried out their abstractions – primary and secondary relationships, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, etc. But the essence of community is not only the ways we develop free and open religious organization, but also, and at a level deeper than abstractions, how we share our stories; how we share our lives; our common efforts, our dreams, our disappointments, our hopes.

There is the focused place where the great temples are built – great not in soaring architecture, although that is sometimes the case, but great in the quality of relationship: self – others, self-esteem – respect for others.