Theology

The last time I was in DC, my friend Michael Roehm observed to me that UUs spend a lot of time talking about interdependency, but we don't spend much time thinking about emptiness (both are concepts in Buddhism, and related to each other, kinda like infinity and zero). I have been reminded repeatedly of the truth of his words ever since then, including today. 

This afternoon I was listening to NPR about the disproportionate expulsions of Black and Latino students from schools, and the (misguided) reasoning behind it being that if you remove the "bad" kids, that will make it easier for the "good" kids to learn.  (The article used those words, "bad" and "good," so I am using them too.)  Obviously racism is the primary driving force; how else to explain why black and brown students are thought of as "bad" for committing the same kind of infractions as white students.  But in along side the racism is this belief that people are inherently something.  Inherently good.  Inherently bad... Our social policies are based on this belief.  Hence, we focus on getting rid of the "bad" people, whether by expelling students or locking up prisoners with no attempt at rehabilitation.  (And we let "good" people off the hook with no accountability even when they do decidedly bad things, because, well, they are inherently "good" so the fact that they did something bad was just a temporary glitch, an exceptional circumstance.)  If, instead of thinking of people as inherently "good" or "bad," we focused on emptiness, then we'd see that people reflect back what they experience.  In that case, our social policy would change from that of trying to separate out and eliminate the "bad" to that of trying to create the conditions and causes that lead people to behave in more beneficial ways. 

Like Adam, I am lucky enough to be able to attend the Convocation on Theology of Justice and Ministry currently being held just outside of Baltimore. It is late Wednesday night, almost Thursday morning, but I am just posting about Tuesday because it’s taking me that long to digest the rich diet of ideas being offered.

We started the Convocation by devoting the first session to our UU theological and historical background in social justice – our religious grounding. We heard from three provocative panelists – Rebbecca Parker, Dan McKannan, and Jill Schwendemn. One theme that emerged was to recognize the rich history that we have coming out of two liberal Christian traditions – the Unitarians and the Universalists, and the importance to ritual to reaffirm our values. This being a UU convocation, those of us in the audience were asked to engage in these questions for ourselves – to think about how our own faith impacts our social justice work. I thought about how both the Christian tradition of the culture in which I grew up and the Buddhist tradition of my ancestral culture were equally important to me. The Judeo-Christian stories are so familiar and emotionally powerful. Yet at the same time, I do not want those traditions to be privileged over others such as Buddhism and Hinduism. The need to recognize the religious pluralism within our UU congregations mirrors the need to recognize and celebrate diversity in all its forms in our society.

The second session took up the problem of suffering, brokenness, and evil in the world, and our appropriate response. If the earlier session celebrated our UU and American heritage, then the evening’s panelists – Taquiena Boston, Victoria Safford, and Sharon Welch – all gave beautiful, painful testimonies as to where we have been unable to fully address the challenges that arise in an imperfect world. The room struggled with the concept of evil and wondered whether it was necessary to confess complicity by making the statement “I am evil.” Dr. Welch stressed a non-dualistic approach, recognizing and addressing acts of oppression while at the same time not labeling others as “evil” in a way that evokes animosity towards them and thus perpetuates the cycle. And Rev. Safford talked about how the choices that we make to no longer do harm are not one-time events. The choice must be made over and over again. What I understood from her was that we have been conditioned to be inclined to make the choices that we make. That doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for our choices but it recognizes that simply choosing once would not be enough.

As I listened to the conversations from both the afternoon and evening – discussions of “sin” and the means to “reconciliation” – I felt that it would be helpful if we UUs became conversant in other faith traditions – if we truly understood the concept of karma.

I do not mean the Westernized understanding of karma as a punishment and reward system. That comes from imposing the concepts of “good” and “evil” and a “divine judge” on an Eastern concept. Karma is not based on judgment. It is merely the consequences of one’s actions. Harmful acts have harmful consequences. Understanding this allows us to name and admit to oppressive acts without the debilitating judgment of “evil doer.” It tells us that the need to choose to end oppression is urgent for every moment that we allow it to continue (which is a choice), we generate more bad karma, the consequences of our actions (or inaction). What’s more karma reminds us that even when we choose the loving act, our work is not done. We will have to choose over and over again because the consequences of past harmful choices are still with us. It reminds us that there are no easy fixes to repair the world and build Beloved Community. But it also follows that if we act in love, steadily, that reconciliation and wholeness are inevitable.

An interesting discussion came up on one of the online discussion forums. Someone posted the results of an fMRI study where researchers found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. The poster then asked the question whether this was the end of the belief in free will.

The study itself does prove there's no free will. But it does highlight how disassociated our "consciousnesses" are. We perceive ourselves as an integrated whole when in reality, different parts of the brain attend to different things. We are, as Buddhism teaches us, collections of aggregates.

But even tho this study doesn't disprove free will, if one understands the nature of science, one understands that there is no room for the concept of free will within science, just as there is no room for the concept of God. Let's be clear here. This isn't to say that science says there is no God/free will. Science doesn't say anything about either; it can't by its very nature. 

And so, even if/when in the future neuroscientists map out our entire complex brains and find predictive correlations between neural activity patterns and what we perceive as our "decisions," even when science gets to the point where it says it can explain "choice," there will be no room for free will in there.  Any scientific explanation of "choice" has to be a reductionist, materialist explanation.  The only reason why we can hold onto the illusion of free will is because the decision making process is as of yet unexplained.  When it is explained, it will be in terms of synaptic weights and stimulus strengths - wiring, environment, and chance.

It was this realization that caused me to leave science. Not because I was disillusioned - I still love science - but because I realized that I most wanted was not to be found there.  I want meaning, which for me necessitates free will.  I need to believe that I have a choice (even if highly constrained) and that my choices matter.

My theology is that God and creation work together in partnership to co-create creation. (I am that I am. I am becoming that I am becoming.) In my theology, which is a process theology, free will is that which allows co-creation by us having the ability to choose differently. To create the new, the surprise. Without it, there is no "creation." Just... randomness constrained by patterns playing itself out.

What's more, I can't make sense of ethics/morality without a concept of free will. What does it mean for someone's actions to be moral or immoral if there is no choice? What would it mean to try to cultivate moral character as Aristotle encouraged us to do?  Ethics and morality are based on the assumption that we have a choice in the actions we take. There is no point in delineating what is a moral action and what is an immoral action if, in the end, we have no choice in what we do anyway.

Back in October, I participated in an Interfaith Dialogue facilitator training.  Tonight, a few of us finally got around to going to the next level - engaging in Dialogue amongst ourselves and practicing facilitation.  Our group consisted of ten participants, 2 Christians, 3 Jews, 2 Baha'i, 1 Muslim and 1 Unitarian Universalist (me).

During the course of getting to know each other, I got to explain how Unitarian Universalism comes from the joining of two traditions that both came out of Protestant Christianity - how Unitarianism rejected the trinity and the Calvinist notion that we are "totally depraved," and how Universalism rejected the Calvinist notion of "limited atonement."  Only a few are going to heaven.

Granted that everyone in the room was there for the purpose of interfaith dialogue, so we have a self-selected group of people who are more likely to be accepting of differing beliefs.  So it was perhaps not surprising that as I explained how UUs don't believe that Jesus is God, everyone in the room nodded politely, even the Christians.

But when I got to Universalism, and explained how it meant that no one was going to hell, there was a minor uproar in the room.  "No one goes to hell?" someone asked, "But what about people like Jeffrey Dahmer?"  Technically, this kind of response is against the rules of interfaith dialogue, but I understood their shock.  I sat there and remarked, "Yes, I guess it is a very radical concept."

It is an amazingly radical concept, much more so than rejecting the trinity.  The participants in the room soon caught themselves and we went on in polite exchange.  But I have heard from other people who tell me that the idea of universal salvation offends their notion of justice.  "If God is just," they tell me, "then there has to be a hell."  Oddly, they seem to put conditions on God, that this particular thing has to be true, regardless of God's omnipotence, because their sense of justice demands it.  

What about the sense of mystery?  What about, "I don't know how it works but God's love is powerful enough that God can bring everyone back into right relations." Everyone.  Anything less is failure.

I don't know how it works.  But I do agree with Hosea Ballou, who argued that we human beings, being finite creatures, are incapable of committing infinite sin.  And that being the case, infinite punishment is not justice.

I don't know how it works.  These days I do not think much of the afterlife, if there is one.  In this life and in this divided world, the way that I interpret universal salvation is thus: No one is saved unless everyone is saved.  Salvation, whatever that means, is communal, not individual.  And we cannot create God's Kingdom on earth so long as we see only some of us as saved, and some of us as damned.  

I don't know how it works.  But I know that we have to start with the assumption that everyone is saved.