When I first started in television many years ago as a local news reporter, after a couple of days on the job, my news director called me into his office. He wondered if there were any religious reasons why I couldn’t work weekends. I said, “Well, you know, my mom is Jewish so I go to synagogue with her on Friday nights; and my father is Seventh Day Adventist, so I go to church with him on Saturday; and I’m a traditional Christian and I go to church on Sunday.” I laughed and he laughed and I said that I was just kidding and that no, there’s no religious reason why I couldn’t work weekends, because at that time I wasn’t religious. Or was I? I mean, I think we’re all spiritual people, whether we go to church or not.
When I was three, four, five years old, before I remember going to church, I saw the sacred in everything. I didn’t know to call it the sacred, but I saw the divine in everything; I saw the holy in everything. Later I learned that I was a Naturalist. I saw God, if you will, in all of nature. Later, I read folks like Henry Nelson Wieman - Henry Nelson Wieman was a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School - he was a Naturalist. Henry Nelson Wieman said, “Nothing can transform [humankind] unless it operates in human life.” It’s all part of nature. I think every child starts out as a natural-born Naturalist. Every child is filled with wonder and awe, as I was as a child, probably as you were as a child. So I was and I think I still remain, in part, a Naturalist.
On Sunday mornings when I was like, six, seven, eight years old, I would run to my grandma’s garage. My grandma lived next to us, and I would get into her bulky old blue Chevrolet Bel Air and I would get behind the wheel and pretend I was driving. She thought that was okay, as long as I didn’t press on the gas, because then I would flood the engine. So I would pretend to drive and she would come out in her blue flowered dress and her white hat and drive us to Sunday School and church. We went to this little chapel. They’ve since expanded to seat hundreds of people. The chapel sat probably seventy-five, eighty people. It was big to me, because I was little at the time.
I learned Christianity at that church. Not the dogmatic, doctrinal, creedal codes, you know, the rules and regulations of Christianity. But the kinds of hands-on Christianity, where I made a candle for my mom out of what looked like honeycomb and we rolled it up and put a wick in it and it was a candle. We had an Easter egg hunt there. We would play musical chairs and duck, duck, goose in the basement. And in church we would hear the words of Jesus, like “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and I probably also recited things like the Apostles Creed, but that never made much sense to me back then. And I haven’t progressed much since then, because it still doesn’t make sense to me.
I never have seen Jesus as God. Even when I went to a Christian seminary. I asked what I thought was a fellow liberal student, “You all don’t really believe Jesus is God, do you?” And he said, “Well, yes, we do,” and the implication was that I shouldn’t ask that again, because I might induce doubt in somebody’s mind. So I was a Christian, I think, because of that little church. And I remember my minister at the time, who is still a part-time minister there - he’s like ninety years old - he invited a Catholic priest to preach on Thanksgiving. I think he did that every Thanksgiving. That planted a seed in me about ecumenism and interfaith. So it was at that church where I learned about Christianity and I think that a part of that is still with me today.
When I was in college I remember hearing about transcendental meditation, TM. I heard that you needed to pay to go to a TM meeting and a guru would tell you a secret word or phrase that would help you to meditate. While I was tempted to do that, I think that part of me thought it was a scam, so I didn’t do it. Years later I would learn about meditation, mainly through Buddhism. I would learn that you didn’t really need a secret word or phrase, you could use “love” or “peace on earth” and just repeat that to yourself and meditate on it just by clearing your mind of all thoughts. I think people have a difficulty or anxiety over meditation. They think it’s this weird something. But meditation is really just relaxation. It’s “Don’t just do something; sit there,” for ten minutes or twenty minutes or two hours.
I remember reading a Mortimer Adler book. Mortimer Adler was one of the founders of The Great Books Program, a philosopher who said, “We all need to be idle sometime during the day.” He called it “idling” like a car does. Just sit there not moving any place while you meditate. That led to my study of Buddhism. I read several books about Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama; about happiness, compassion and ethics.
One book in particular which was very profound for me was “The Four Noble Truths.” The first noble truth almost made me stop reading the book because, as you may know, the first noble truth is “Life is suffering.” I thought: Had the Dalai Lama never heard of Norman Vincent Peale and “The Power of Positive Thinking”? Life is not suffering, as long as you’re thinking happy thoughts. Of course, the more I thought about what he wrote, the Dalai Lama not Norman Vincent Peale, the more I realized he was right. The Dalai Lama said that even little babies are suffering. A newborn baby is suffering because it has just come from the warmth of its mother’s womb into real life and one day, like all of us, even though it’s hard to think about, a little bitty baby will die. The Dalai Lama said that an eighteen year-old young woman and an eighteen year-old young man, even if the young woman is gorgeous and the young man is handsome and they have the world by the tail, the Dalai Lama said that they, too, are suffering because one day when they’re not eighteen, maybe when they’re eighty, they’ll have lost their looks, long ago. That hasn’t happened to me yet. [Laughter.] But I’m sure it’s happened to others. Anyway, we all suffer, we all will one day die, but we can look beyond that, we can detach ourselves from our worldly possessions, the Dalai Lama says, and we can help other sentient beings to have happiness in their lives.
I was so convinced by what the Dalai Lama said about kind of losing yourself and helping others, that I thought about going to the University of Michigan and saying I want to donate my organs. I imagined that somebody behind the counter would say, “OK, fine, just fill out this card and you’ll have a notation on your driver’s license that you want to donate your organs.” And I’d say, “No, no, you don’t understand, I want to do that now. I want to give up my heart and lungs and liver and kidneys and corneas so that somebody else can live.” I wanted to do this selfless act, but I figured if I did that, they would either send me to the psych ward or put me in a cell next to Jack Kevorkian for trying to commit assisted suicide. Well that feeling passed in a day or two and I realized that I do want to live, but I also want to help others.
The Buddha said, “Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.” And that’s what I hope to bring to the world is peace and love and justice and equality. That’s why I still consider myself, in part, a Buddhist and I think I always will.
I think the first time I visited Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids many years ago we sang a hymn called, “This is My Song,” and it blew me away. It’s found in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. Fountain Street Church isn’t Unitarian Universalist per se, but it’s had Unitarian Universalist ministers for the past 60 years or so. That song, “This is my song, O God of all the nations, a song of peace for lands afar and mine,” blew my mind. I thought: What do they mean by “God of all the nations”? You mean God isn’t just the God of America? It goes on to talk about how in other countries people have blue skies, just like we do and they love their homeland, just like we do. And I thought: Now wait a minute, you mean not everyone in the world wants to emigrate to America and become United States citizens and achieve happiness? At the time I thought that’s what everyone wanted to do. But, of course, I realized that wasn’t true. And that, I think, began my path to Unitarian Universalism.
As some of you know, a couple of years ago I joined the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship, the church without walls. I joined on Christmas Day, 2010. A couple months ago, I joined Harbor Unitarian Universalist Congregation, because I’m now on a path to hopefully being a Unitarian Universalist minister. I appreciate the Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes. The principals of seeing the dignity and worth of every human being, respecting all faiths, pursuing truth and meaning and purpose in our lives. It all makes so much sense to me, as I’m sure it does to you. One of the most famous Unitarians was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” So many people, so many churches, so many religious faiths, believe all you have to do is accept the truth of their faith at the age of 11 and then you don’t have to think about it again. But what I appreciate about Unitarian Universalism is we’re always thinking about the purpose of our lives and the meaning of our lives and we’re always on the spiritual journey that isn’t a destination, but is a journey. That’s why, while a part of me still is a Naturalist, a part of me still is a Christian - in a following Jesus who said, “love your neighbor” kind of way - and part of me still is a Buddhist, now I see myself as a Unitarian Universalist, which I believe embraces all those faiths.
Lately we’ve been seeing on the news all the death and destruction from all the tornados that have torn through much of the heartland. Dozens of people have been injured or died. But as usually happens with these kinds of tragedies, neighbor helps neighbor. Nobody goes to their neighbor and says, “Well you know, I’m a Naturalist and if you’re a Naturalist, too, I’ll help you.” Or “You know, I’m a Christian and if you’re a Christian, too, then I’ll help you.” Or “I’m a Buddhist and if you’re a Buddhist, too, I’ll help you.” Or “I’m a Unitarian Universalist and if you’re a Unitarian Universalist too then I’ll help you.” Nobody does that. In times of tragedy, we all see the common humanity of each one of us and we do whatever we can to help. And isn’t that what every group, whether secular or sacred does and teaches? That we help our neighbor, whoever they are, because we see the common humanity in each one of us, whether we consider ourselves Naturalists or Christians or Buddhists or Unitarian Universalists. Or none of the above. Or all of the above.
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