I was just reading instructions for an upcoming training I will be attending, a condition of employment as an interim minister. The instructions included a requirement that we bring a Bible, or at the very least be prepared to grab a Gideon at the hotel. It will be used.
A principal aspect of my spiritual discipline is to watch my reactions. In that moment as I read about bringing a Bible I felt a small flare of annoyance. Now, for those unfamiliar, I am a minister within the Unitarian Universalist Association. I am also ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest. Modern Unitarian Universalism is not properly speaking a Christian denomination. As I like to frame it, by the time the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America consolidated in 1961, the new denomination had moved from being “liberal Christians” to being a “liberal church with Christians.”
Having no creedal assertion, the new Association welcome religious liberals that is people of a religious or in our current use, spiritual people without further expectation. The dominant current of this new community was humanism. Now there were and continues to be congregations that never saw themselves move from being Christian, although not many, and pretty much all of them in New England, the seed bed of both the Unitarian and Universalist traditions. But, that Bible that caused my negative reaction ceased to be the touchstone for UUs writ large.
And, it was because of this that I, as a liberal Buddhist was able to find a home within Unitarian Universalism. That word “liberal” is a technical theological term, meaning taking a broad and open approach. Generally it also means being suspicious of hard truth claims and particularly to arguments supported mainly by appeal to authority.
Of course the Bible is the great document of the Western world that has been most appealed to in this sense. Considering the document is filled with wildly disparate perspectives, folk tales, a blending of genuine history and wishful thinking, and contradictory ideas about what a god might be and what God is or is not, as well as head-jerkingly wildly conflicting ethical codes, it is a perfect document for special pleaders of all sorts.
Now, I have personal history with the Bible. I in fact learned to read at my grandmother’s knee using a large illustrated family Bible. In the King James version, of course. As we knew if the King James version was good enough for Jesus, well, you bet it was good enough for us. On the one hand I was given cadences of speech, as well as images and turns of phrase that have stood me in good stead. But. We weren’t at the more sophisticated nor nuanced end of that Christian spectrum. I’m not really sure we understood nuance at all. I didn’t learn about chiaroscuro until I wandered into an art class near the end of my High School days. I didn’t get that it might mean something about life in general until later yet. And, out of that, I found the Bible more wounding than healing, more about condemnation, and hate, and triumphalism, than about love, and transformation, and healing. All of it there, yes, absolutely, but with the preponderance going to the unhealthy over the healthy.
Bottom line, while I have an admiration for aspects of the Bible, particularly I love the King James version for its literary merit; but, I do not use it as a touchstone for science, nor history, nor even, and this is most important, not even for ethics, except when I want to find a colorful illustration for some point, one that might be subtly recognized as having roots deep in our culture, knowing whatever that point might be, there is an illustration for it. In fact I question the Bible’s utility for just about any important aspect of life. Yes, there is that chiaroscuro one could say exists right there in the Bible. But, I think the built in by about fifteen hundred years of dominance in Western culture makes finding it within the text alone problematic.
So, if I were king, is there anything I’d want instead? I thought briefly about that. The multitudnous writings of the Thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist theologian Eihei Dogen came to mind. The great koan collections, and my favorite among them, the Gateless Gate also popped up. But, then so did Don Quixote. And, for some reason, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which had a transformative effect on my heart in my late adolescence.
But, then I settled on, well, nothing.
For the particular task we’re being prepared for, interim ministry among Unitarian Universalist congregations, I would say either nothing, or bring a sacred text that moves the individual in some manner. The Bible, okay. But also, how about the Koran? Or, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Tao Te Ching, for instance. Or, that East of Eden. Or, Don Quixote. But don’t privilege a single text, particularly one that has been used to advocate such damage as the scriptures of the Western tradition have.
And then, if we’re going to weigh into the mysteries of the human heart, then perhaps we’ll be forced to start with confessing our own hearts, and then look to those ancient texts, and modern, knowing none of them has a monopoly on truth, and in fact holding any one of them too tightly will likely lead us like that little story in the Gospels, where blind people following blind people fall into pits. And using this as an example, there’s a great corrective to that image in some of the Zen literature, which explores many possible meanings to the metaphor of blindness, not all of them negative…
I’m not arguing we should throw the Bible away. (Although there are worse things we could do…) I am arguing, at least within the context I’m about to walk into, a bit more breadth of possibility, nuance, chiaroscuro…
Rant over. I’m not king. Bibles are required. And, I’ll bring a Bible. Even after a great move and my two stage purge of my theological library, there are still a couple of Bibles on my shelves. And, I know the secret to finding truth in a sacred text is with the guidance of a critical eye and the help of wise friends. Particularly, I feel, with those wise friends. These sacred texts are not sacred because some deity supposedly spoke them into the ear of some scribe, but because human beings seeking truth presented the best they could, and then what they found is corrected, and made truer each time a human or two engages with heart and friends. I sometimes suspect the holy spirit only rests when two or three are gathered…
And I will continue to watch my reactions, feelings, and thoughts as they arise. A discipline I commend to anyone and everyone…
And
And
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