Do we need religion?  In a word no -- If by religion you mean going to church every Sunday or to another place of worship periodically, or believing a certain dogma or practicing certain rituals.  Then no, we really don't need religion if by need you mean that which we cannot live without as in we need air, water, food and shelter.  Indeed, if we do not need religion to live a particularly good and happy life.

Now I know that sounds a bit strange coming from a minister preaching on a Sunday morning.  I doubt that there are many colleagues this morning saying anything similar.  But it is the truth.  We don't need religion.

But I do believe that if we are to have a good life then it is important that we know our beliefs about the important questions of our lives, such as -- how should we live?  Why does evil exist and what should we do about it?  What should we think and do about our own mortality?  We would do well, I believe, to consider and explore our beliefs because if we can clearly know them, then we can know what is important to us and how the better to live life with a sense of meaning and joy.  We can then awaken each morning with a prayer of gratitude on our lips. 

But sometimes it takes a tragic event to help us to see clearly. The actor Alan Alda in interviewed by Wendy Schuman on the web site called beliefnet.com shared his story about a near-death experience and how that experience informed his thinking about living a good life.  This is his story:

I was about two hours away from dying, they tell me. I was on a mountaintop in Chile and I had these horrible pains. And it turned out that about a yard of my intestine was dead and more of it was dying every minute.
 
And a surgeon who was in the ER that night in this little town in Chile was an expert in intestinal surgery. And he therefore knew how to diagnose it within a very short time and opened me up and saved my life. A couple of hours later I might not have made it.
 
I woke up so glad to be alive that I was kind of surprised to see how long it’s lasted. I think maybe I was so glad that I wanted to make it last every way I could….

[Writing my] second book has been an attempt to deepen it, to see--as long as I’m alive, what am I going to do with this life? How can I make it count the most? How can I get that feeling that I’m not wasting my time? Because time is all I have, and I have now been given this extra time on the clock that I’m very much aware is a great gift, and I really don’t want to waste it.

We can see that Alan Alda had changed.  Something in his thinking had changed and that changed his life.  But it's not as if he didn't know that life was worth living.  It's just that he discussed that which he knew all along, but he knew clearly and intimately.

I see my purpose here as a preacher is to involve us in the process of recognition.  That is I'm here to help us to recognize that which we know already.  Their word “recognition” is divided up into the prefix “re-“ meaning again and the suffix “cognition” meaning thought or what know, so that re-cognition means the process of knowing again. 

So I'm here to share with you that which we all know but it is important for us to know it again.  I am not here as an expert sharing my knowledge about some esoteric subject with you.  What I'm sharing with you, I believe, is simply common sense and common knowledge.  But like Alan Alda we often don't know it well enough and it sometimes takes an event like a near-death experience to help us to see things clearly.

Alan Alda was fortunate to be in a place in Chile where a doctor who knew how to help was there for him.  One could say it was a miracle.  But we could all say with certainty that Alan Alda was blessed.

He was given this “great gift” as he called it of time.  And it's interesting how he thinks about things now about what he values.  The experience made him think much about what it all meant and he came to this conclusion as he said

I’ve looked back over my whole life. And as I go back and listen to the things I said, I come up with a surprising realization that nothing I’ve accomplished really means all that much to me now, having accomplished it.
 
In the process of accomplishing it, there’s a wonderful feeling of--it must be the feeling I’m looking for when I talk about meaning. There’s this tremendous feeling of being okay. That you’re here, you’re really here and you’re really doing something and it counts.
 
Nothing really matches that except simple awareness, simply being aware of my life and welcoming life. And being grateful for life because it’s time limited. It has a short shelf-life, this experience we have of being here. And I look for ways now to notice what I’m doing every second that I’m doing it.

Alan Alda here has taught me a lesson about what is important in life, that it is the journey not the destination that matters, and it is my moments of being aware of being with loved ones, with my daughter Sarah and Feyza our lovely guest, and my wife, Julie and her children Kevin and Kathryn, and my friends, including all of you, that makes life precious.  Just being together and laughing and sharing our thoughts and stories, of supporting each other in our times of trouble that makes life worth living.  It has informed my own religion and I want to thank Jim Bilen for drawing my attention to the Alan Alda interview.

And I also want to thank all the members of the Holocaust discussion group as we share our thoughts about Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.  I have talked about Frankl’s ideas here with you before, about how he survived in concentration camps and about he had become an existentialist psychiatrist who developed a therapy called Logotherapy.  Logotherapy, as Frankl puts it is a meaning-centered therapy.  For he believes as did Nietzsche “He who has a why can endure any how”.

Our discussion focused much on the idea of what is the difference between philosophy and religion. Bill Steffy pointed out that when we talk about religion we are talking about matters of the heart, those things that are felt and not totally understood, at times irrational, perhaps better said, non-rational.  After all, religion refers to that which we call faith not knowledge.

Philosophy, on the other hand, refers to matters of the mind.  In philosophy, we speculate, cogitate and think on things.  We explore meanings of words and by extension the meaning of life itself.  We can focus on the meaning of the good life or of existence itself.  It is the process of examining our assumptions, which Socrates tells us, is necessary in order to have a life worth living.

But philosophy and religion intersect at the point of our finding a truth that helps us to make sense of world and both can help us as Shakespeare tells us, to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  I do believe that we need something, be it religion or philosophy to help us in our times of trouble.  Frankl suggests the same in this following passage:

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental of primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for the spiritual life to deepen.  Since of the people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less.  They were able to retreat from their terrible surrounding still life with inner riches and spiritual freedom.  Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.  In order to make myself clear, I'm forced to fall back on personal experience.

Frankl then tells of a time on a work detail in the winter where the prisoners have little protection from the bitter cold with no coat or gloves and the guards yelling and kicking and hitting the prisoners with the butts of their rifles if they fell to the ground.  One of the prisoners next to Frankl whispered suddenly, if our wives could see us now!  I do hope they are better off in their camps don't know what is happening to us.”
Frankl continues

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind and as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, though we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife.  Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading in the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds.  But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness.  I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look.  Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.  The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.  I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss be it only for a brief moment in the contemplation of his beloved.

Frankl here teaches us about the importance of having a rich inner spiritual life.  In this personal sense, we do need something, be it a religion or philosophy that helps to find our own salvation.  But do we need religion as an institution and not just a personal discipline?  For example, do we need this church?

That is a question that I, of course, cannot answer for you.  But I will tell you that I do believe

I read some years ago during the time of Mississippi flooding people in the state of Iowa that it was observed that even the most unrepentant recluse sought out other human beings when he is being threatened by the catastrophe.  This suggests to me that first we human beings are basically insecure beings and second that we need each other. 
In a way, our being here is a reflection of our need for each other, to support each other in times of trouble, to share ourselves – our thoughts and stories, and to affirm our beliefs in the principles of our liberal religion.  We are truly interdependent, even though we may resist understanding that, let alone acknowledging that.

Howard Cutler is a psychiatrist who wrote a book with the Dalai Lama called The Art of Happiness.  In it, he describes his encounters with the Dalai Lama that have transformed his life.  On one occasion he was at a gathering of Buddhists who had come to hear the Dalai Lama, and Howard notices his attention begins to wander.  He looks around the room at the crowd of people to see if he can see any famous people, perhaps Richard Gere, I suppose or someone like that.  But then his attention turns to the Dalai Lama as he speaks these words:

“… the other day I spoke about the factors necessary to enjoy happy and joyful life.  Factors such as good health, material goods, friends, and so on.  If you closely investigate, you will find that all of these depend on the other people.  To maintain good health, you rely on medicines made by others and health care provided by others.  If you examine all of the material facilities that you use for the enjoyment of life, you find that there are hardly any of these material objects that have had no connection with other people.  If you think carefully, you see that all of these goods come into being as a result of the efforts of many people, either directly or indirectly.  Many people involved in making those things possible.  Needless to say, when we’re talking about good friends and companions as being another necessary factor for happy life, we’re talking about interaction with other sentient beings, other human beings.

So you can see that all these factors are inextricably linked with other people's efforts and cooperation.  Others are indispensable.  So, despite the fact that the process of relating to others might involve hardships, quarrels, and cursing, we have to try to maintain an attitude of friendship and warmth in order to lead a way of life in which there is enough interaction with other people to enjoy a happy life.

Now as the Dalai Lama spoke, Howard Cutler felt an instinctive resistance.  He did not want to acknowledge his own dependency.  As he put it:

Although I've always valued and enjoy my friends and family, I consider myself to be an independent person.  Self-reliant.  Prided myself on this quality in fact.  Secretly, I tended to regard overly dependent people with a kind of contempt -- a sign of weakness.
But something happened for Howard Cutler.  The Dalai Lama’s words touched him.  He noticed a loose string on his shirt and he started to think about all the people who were involved in making it possible for him to have that shirt, the salesperson, the manufacturer of the tractor that farmed the cotton and of the metal that made the tractor, the people who weave, dye, and sew the cloth, the cargo workers, truck drivers, and so on.

He continues:

It occurred to me that virtually every aspect of my life came about as a result of others' efforts.  My precious self-reliance is a complete illusion, a fantasy. As this realization dawned on me, I was overcome with a profound sense of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings.  I felt a softening.  Something.  I don't know.  It made me want to cry.

We do belong together, whether we know it or not.  Being here in this church, now, allows us to know that and experience that.  Our presence here also helps us to find our own way to the truth of our existence.  In thinking about Alan Alda’s near-death experience in Chile, Viktor Frankl’s vision of his wife while suffering extreme deprivation and Howard Cutler’s musing on a loose string on his coat, I come to the conclusion that there is something marvelous and mysterious about life.  And every now and then, I find myself in the presence of, for the lack of a better word, the sacredness, the sacredness of each person here and of each moment – a presence that can fill a life with meaning and joy. 

Emerson Church Unitarian Universalist is community of the Unitarian Universalist religious faith.  Founded in 1962 and located in Troy, Michigan since 1971 we hold our services in a former dairy barn and is a state historic landmark.  For information contact the church or send a e-mail to info@ecuu.org

http://www.ecuu.org/ 

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