The Details Don't Matter

We found the heart of the forest

During the church service yesterday our priest announced that a modified version of the communion wine would be coming back soon. Everything went away when the pandemic started, all gathering together in person for any kind of worship or activities. It all went online and remote. Gradually, with the widespread use of masks and vaccines, things have trickled back. Outside gatherings at first. Then inside by reservation. Now we have masked indoor services and gatherings--though less socializing and eating than normal--and communion with the bread only. Individual little pieces. The father explained that theologically it's important for the denomination to all take pieces from the same loaf and drink from the same cup. Some denominations have used individual little cups of wine (or juice), but this one doesn't want to lose the symbolism of unity communicated by shared wine, and has finally solved the quandary by finding chalices that also pour into individual serving cups. They have been ordered, and the wine will return soon.

I spent three years in seminary after college earning my Master of Divinity degree, but I chose not to pursue ordination or a career with a church. My middle year I earned the scholarship for top student of theology in my class, so I understand all the nuances behind decisions about how to present the communion wine. I grew up in the Mennonite tradition, which is very iconoclastic and "low church," then joined a Presbyterian congregation in high school with my family when we moved too far away from any Mennonite options. I attended a Methodist seminary while a Presbyterian. My wife prefers Episcopalian traditions, very "high church," and we've been attending this one for about eight years. And I've visited and observed more widely. I've been exposed to many different ways of expressing faith and can argue what theological details those different expressions communicate/teach and why it theoretically matters. Yet, ultimately, it doesn't really matter to me.

I don't remember ever hearing of "creeds" growing up Mennonite; in our Episcopalian church we say this or one like it every worship service to teach us the theological details of our beliefs.

The biggest thing I took away from my seminary experience is that we spend far too much time and energy arguing about details that ultimately distract us from what's important. I studied two thousand years of church history, and what I saw was pointless division and strife that should have been avoided, division caused by people fighting over their personal preferences instead of the underlying message. What should be a teaching of uplift and unity and love becomes one of judgment and labels about who is right and who is wrong. I found I couldn't see myself leading within the confines of any specific church because, ultimately, I don't fully believe in any of the official dogma enough to teach it. (And going outside the confines to start something new is just another divided effort.) I understand why the dogma exists, but I don't believe in it. Even such basic, foundational ideas like Jesus was divine, rose again in the flesh, and saved everyone through his sacrifice; it doesn't really matter to me whether those are literal or merely symbolic ideas. Those are just details we shouldn't get hung up on.

And yet I attend and profess belief. I take my kids and want them to learn. That's because I do believe in the underlying idea of humans and creation being united by a Divinity. And I believe people need community. Churches bring people together, build love and unity, impart morality, and fulfill an essential human need. At the same time, I believe finite, limited humans are only able to grasp such big, mysterious ideas in a filtered way, so they will always, by necessity, be experienced and expressed in grounded, human terms. Read the metaphor at the top of this page, but swap in the word "God."

After passing through the prism, each refraction contains some pure essence of God, but only an incomplete part. We will always experience some aspect of divinity, of the Truth of God, but only from our perspectives as they are colored by who and where we are. Others will know a different color and none will see the whole, complete God. These are my musings from my particular refraction.

That is how I see religion. There is a tension, a paradox, at the heart of each religion that seems to understand this. The story of religion is a repeated cycle of embracing and sharing the light for good, then gradually losing the idea that all light is good and getting stuck fighting about whether blue is better or red or green. Then someone else comes along and says stop nitpicking and get back to trying to understand that it all starts the same before it refracts, embracing and sharing the light for good, then sliding back into the details.

But, even as I want to know the whole, complete God without my filters, I know that can never happen. A couple of posts ago, in Imagination Is the Essence of Humankind, I shared an article from Aeon titled Homo Imaginatus. It makes the case that our minds are designed to co-create the realities we experience, that we can only process a small part of the sensory input we perceive and that we use our imaginations to put those pieces together and make sense of them as narratives.

What we hold in mind are necessarily patchy, sketchy and wonky versions of ‘reality’ – good enough for most purposes, but full of gaps, false assumptions and recollections. What’s surprising is not the imperfections, but how little we notice them. That’s precisely because we are Homo imaginatus, the master fabulators. Craving narratives that help us make sense of the world, we unconsciously and effortlessly fill in or revise the details until the story works. In this sense, imagination is a normal part of what we do all the time. . . . 

Imagined and remembered events both arise by the brain doing the same thing: what Addis calls ‘the mental rendering of experience’. Imagination and memory use a cognitive network for ‘simulation’ that turns the raw ingredients of sensory experience into a kind of internal movie, filled not just with sound and action but with emotional responses, interpretation and evaluation. Not only is that happening when we think about yesterday or tomorrow, says Addis – it’s what we’re doing right now as we experience the present. This simply is the world of the mind. The imaginative capacity, she says, is the key to the fluidity with which we turn threads of experience into a tapestry. . . . 

Imagination is the essence of humankind. It’s what our brains do, and in large part it may be what they are for.

Everything we experience as coming from outside of ourselves is instantly and automatically colored by who we are. We refract the light ourselves. It's how we are made and we can't not do it.

Even if we could perceive and understand Divinity completely and truly--which we can't--we would still only be able to express the ideas to others in ways we know. Different languages and metaphors communicate things differently. We necessarily make use of what we know and can't reference things we've never experienced (that others have). Much of the bible makes reference to sacrifices. When the bible was written, than meant the actual, literal killing of animals. Today we interpret that to mean giving up one thing for the sake of another in a much more metaphorical sense. Christian dogma still relies on the phrase "personal lord and savior" to reference Jesus; there was a time in Western history when actual, literal, human "lords" were a very real thing, so that phrasing meant something different. The phrase has never resonated with me because I don't have any "lords" in my life to give that word context and connotations. Everything anyone has ever said about the idea of God has been filtered by their specific, situated experiences and their limited ability to understand the idea.

So I may not want to be part of further entrenching divisions about details by leading a church, yet I still find enough value in the underlying beliefs that I want to be part of it, which means I must accept some version of God's partial and limited human expression. So I am part of a church community and participate in practices that don't really mean much to me as my way of reaching for what lies behind them.

I don't stop with Christianity. To use my color metaphor, Christians have spent millennia arguing about which shade of blue is best while rejecting all other colors, but I see all colors as valid and important. They all spring from the same source. Each is right in some ways for its place and time. And each is wrong in some ways for being tied to a place and time. I think I'm probably a Unitarian Universalist in some sense, but I've never explored that tradition to find out for sure.

My point in all this is we need--as with diversity of all types--to focus our energy on finding our commonalities and appreciating the truth of other colors, no matter how strange and hard to see, because the more colors we see and understand, the fuller our understanding of true Divinity will be. As long as they're not destructive or harmful, don't judge or belittle or try to change the way others experience the Divine, because being human means their experience will always, by default, be different than yours. Different is no better or worse, merely different. Allow them to know God in their way just as you know God in yours, and do your best to see that you are both experiencing a part of the same Divinity.

I want to go back to a post from twelve years ago, "Principle absent human compassion is just intellectual masturbation." It's about a section of the book of Romans from the New Testament of the Bible. An excerpt:

The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet"; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbour as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

--Romans 13:9-10

Romans is Paul's letter during his ongoing travels to a church in turmoil, advising them on how to proceed. The church is split into factions over the right ways to practice their new faith, judging each other right and wrong and arguing over how to identify the true believers and who to exclude from membership based on their practices. The verses above from Romans 13 are his introduction to talking about the specific issues he delves into in chapter 14. Some in the church feel they need to follow the traditional Hebrew food purity laws, others--including Paul--believe Jesus has redefined the laws and all foods are now to be considered clean. Similarly, some feel it is still necessary to observe the traditional Sabbath and others don't. Paul says don't worry about it, practice what works for you and let others practice what works for them: "Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgement on those who eat; for God has welcomed them" (14:3); "Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds" (14:5). And the most important thing, he goes on to say, is don't do anything that will create problems for someone who believes otherwise:

Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling-block or hindrance in the way of another. . . . If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died. . . . Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual edification. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat; it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother or sister stumble. (14:13-21)

Paul concludes in the 15th chapter by revisiting his argument from earlier in Romans, that God's love is for everyone and not just some select group of righteous few who think they know God's will better than everyone else.

Don't be a stumbling block for others. That's the metaphor Paul uses, along with the specific issues of his time and place, to say don't get caught up fighting about details, instead help each other find God in whatever way works best for one another. There is no one best way. Just as I'm using Paul from my experience to express I need to be bigger than my experiences.

Over the summer I shared Valerie Kaur's book See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love in the post You Are a Part of Me I Do Not Yet Know. It really spoke to me. I wrote: I just found a book I've been searching for for 30 years. Or maybe waiting for, since it wasn't written until last year. But it responds to thoughts I've had for at least that long.

As a Sikh, she has particularly focused on her religious community, while at the same time spreading her net wide to include everyone. This book tells her journey and uses it to illustrate the beliefs that have prompted her actions. She describes her system of revolutionary love, and invites the rest of us to join her. This book speaks to my deepest values, and I must give it the highest rating possible to match what it means to me.

It just so happens that another article about the Sikh faith crossed my feed recently. It also resonates strongly.

Sikh Ethics Sees Self-Centredness as the Source of Human Evil

Like many people, I grew up in a religious household, and what I was taught about ethics came from the religious tradition I was raised in.

I’m a Sikh, and I was raised in the Sikh religious tradition. Long before I was exposed to the works of any Western philosophers, I looked to the teachings of the Sikh gurus, enshrined in our scripture, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, for moral guidance. This has recently got me thinking: how does Sikhism approach the ‘big questions’ of Western moral philosophy? . . . 

Sikhs believe that the Divine is a fundamental unity underlying all of reality, and that, as manifestations of that Divine unity, all people are equal. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji tells us: ‘Look upon all with equality, for the Divine Light resides in everyone.’

According to the Sikh worldview, the whole is prior to its parts. The level of reality at which we are all individuals is a less fundamental reality than the level at which we are all One. This is a different worldview from that of most philosophers in the Western canon, who have usually posited the individual as fundamental. Western philosophers tend to think of the parts (us) as prior to the whole (if any whole even exists).

Correspondingly, the Sikh tradition ends up giving a different story about morality from most of Western philosophy, one that’s grounded in a belief in the fundamental unity of all things. Central in that story is the concept of haumai, which literally translates as ‘I am’. Haumai is a person’s false sense of themselves as singularly important, that the world revolves around them, and that the experiences, wants and needs of others are somehow less real or significant than their own.

According to Sikh scripture, haumai is the source of all injustice and human evil. It leads us to fail to recognise that other people share the very same ethical significance we have. . . . 

Haumai is also the main obstacle to achieving spiritual enlightenment, which is a matter of apprehending and connecting with the Divine. And we connect with the Divine by recognising the sense in which we are fundamentally all One. Haumai, then, is essentially an excessive sense of individuality that leads us to misperceive reality. And this leads to an important insight: failing to care for others and treat them well quite literally gets things wrong, by manifesting the false view that we are all disconnected individuals, and that one person’s wants and needs can have a significance that others’ wants and needs don’t. . . . 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Sikhism eschews individuality altogether. In fact, the Sikh gurus were highly critical of religious practices of the time that involved trying to somehow negate the self and destroy one’s individuality. . . . 

Instead of trying to negate the self, Sikh scripture preaches recognising oneself as part of a unified whole through the practice of treating all as One. We can’t make ourselves good people simply by training ourselves to think pure thoughts. We have to go out in the world and do good for others. Only through this practice can we come to truly apprehend the fundamental unity behind everyone and everything. . . . 

One thing that is very clear is that our seva, our undertaking of good deeds for the sake of others, can’t be parochial. To rid ourselves of haumai, we can’t focus solely on doing good for people of the same race, religion or social class. Sikh scripture enjoins us to ‘look upon all with equality, for the Divine Light resides in everyone’. This means we must recognise the equal moral standing of everyone. It’s not enough for our deeds to be benevolent; they also must be egalitarian. . . . 

Of course, the moral ideals of eradicating haumai are not easy to embody, as the Sikh gurus recognised: as conscious beings with our own first-personal subjectivity, we are psychologically disposed to see the world from our own perspective, through the lens of our own wants and needs. . . . 

In this way, leading an ethical life is a constant struggle against our own self-centred tendencies, and we should expect ourselves to regularly fall short. I know I certainly do. . . . Despite this, Sikhs are exhorted to maintain a spirit of chardi kala – eternal optimism.

Specific trappings of the religion, such as turbans, feel so far out of my experience I'm not sure I would ever look into it with serious conversion thoughts, but the underlying morality is mine entirely. I'd been saving the article to read when I had time, so I only just read it after writing everything above that proceeds it in this post, yet I find it says almost exactly what I've been trying to say.

The Divine is a fundamental unity underlying all of reality, and that, as manifestations of that Divine unity, all people are equal. The level of reality at which we are all individuals is a less fundamental reality than the level at which we are all One. [Self-centeredness] is the main obstacle to achieving spiritual enlightenment, which is a matter of apprehending and connecting with the Divine.

Embrace who you are, knowing your understanding of Divinity has truth and your expressions of faith are valid, and at the same time embrace everyone else, knowing their understanding of Divinity has truth and their expressions of faith are valid. The details don't matter.