A Call for Heresy, by Anouar Majid, our last book exploring the 21^{st century world we face, chronicles the modern evidences of this painful terror that forms our fear that the world as we know it is coming to an end. A new world is emerging. Majid constructs a compelling argument that Islam and the American nation are facing the same challenge as this new world emerges, and it is not the “clash of civilizations” between the two as other have said it is. Rather, it is than in both instances, religion and nation – Islam and Arab countries, Christianity and our American government – are both “in peril because they preempted the progressive renewal of their cultures by silencing their heretics…, and by allowing the tsunamic power of the market to assert itself as the indomitable deity of our age.” (18) By the way, the Unitarian and Universalist faith traditions are rightly known in some quarters as heretical faiths.}

    Our nation is the twin of the Islamic Middle East, not its “opposite.” We suppress the prospect that freedom and faith are the pillars holding up human existence. We shun the practice of cultivating reason and the religious together. We do this in the quarters of religion and irreligion. We didn’t always do this, as in the time of our founding as a nation, under the guidance of Unitarians like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who both lived both. Maybe I should remain reading those late 18th and early 19th century thinkers. They knew that cultivating the “liberal habits of the mind,” freedom and faith, reason and the religious, walking together yields a creative renewal of the Spirit that is hope even in the darkest and direst of times. In their time an old world order was crumbling, too, and a new world was emerging!

    America and Islam today are siblings, twin sons of a different mother. They both hold religion as orthodox certainty. But this is assured. Our world will not be saved from calamity by a market rally, but a deeper reality after the stone of our denial is rolled away and we are peering into a tomb emptied of freedom, reason, and the religious.

    Our epoch and culture have developed both time worn and new ways to repress the fear that frames all this. We create new weapons and build armies, and attack adversaries to defend ourselves against our fear, denying what history has taught again and again about how no to deal with the fear of non-being. We manufacture new technological entertainments and make them essential, stock up with an inconceivable abundance of food, concern ourselves with the intimate lives of celebrities from Hollywood to Washington, in a way unique to our time and culture. All in order to flee from this fear.

    But what future generations will identify as the chief form of how our world engages the fear of non-being, and the pain and terror it elicits, is religion and its twin, irreligion, secularism. Religion is such an integral part of modern life that even irreligion is held to religiously in the same orthodox, prohibitive, and apocalyptic way! How ironic, but that is the symbol that all of us everywhere are engaging the same thing in different ways. It’s what unites the people of the globe: Fear. Fear not having religion, and fear having it. Fear not having reason and fear having it. The religious in our time repudiate reason, while the reasonable repudiate the religious. It is the curious way moderns deal with the terror and pain of fear. Fundamentalisms all!

    The book, A Call for Heresy, by Anouar Majid, is a book describing the end of the former world. But unlike most soothsayers, living as we do in the time of soothsayers, Majid does not find hope amongst the usual suspects: Not in a religion that is certain because its beliefs are true, nor a secular irreligion that elevates reason by eliminating faith.

    Today’s more visible forms of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity offer various views, though their difference in faith tradition masks the similarities they contain. Against the dislocations of modern life, which are many and deep and chaotic and painful, rendering a helplessness that is real, the world’s religions have responded with a declaration of the fundamentals of belief they claim do not pass away. These are enclosed in a set of beliefs which religious persons trumpet as being pure since the time of their particular faith’s founding. Moslem fundamentalists claim they represent the inspiration of Mohammed untainted by time and culture. Jewish fundamentalists claim they represent the inspiration of God’s unique covenant with Abraham untainted by time and culture. Christian fundamentalists claim they represent the revelation of God through Jesus the Christ, untainted by time and culture. These have become the walls of a castle to keep modern life at bay, and the base camp from which to launch attacks upon a world that to them has become blasphemous and defiled by modernism. The depth and extent of the dislocations are evident by the violence the religious perpetuate in the name of love and justice and peace!.

    But there is in this view of religion conceived of as belief, a remarkable lack of faith; an absence of trust, that human beings possess have been created with the mind and heart to address their meaninglessness, and that creation has within it a goodness, a direction that assists us rather than seeking to destroy us. This predominance of belief within a remarkable lack of faith, of trust in what God has created, yields the pathological desire by religionists to destroy this life for their certainty of a glory in the next. It is ironic, and the irrational yield of a sickness. That God’s mercy and affection would be only as wide as that needed to provide the pure in belief an unimpeded path out of this life. God’s love extends only as far as a reward for escaping here to a greater life, whether inhabited by virgins or streets paved in gold.

    Some modernists have responded by declaring themselves devotees of freedom and reason, over religion. If people would just abandon religion as the superstition that it is, and the harmful effects it produces, and embrace secularism, then the dislocations would dissolve we could take reason and freedom in an untainted, immaculate form. Men like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris list the endless abuses brought about by religion, of which there are many, as if to assault religion proves the veracity of their own position. Surprisingly enough this is the strategy of some religious orthodoxies: To attack the beliefs of others as incomprehensibly unreasonable in the service of binding the mind to narrow thought. To hail a belief in reason and secular freedom as a defense against the orthodox fundamentals as espoused by radical Islamists, Jews, or Christians, various as their espousals are, is a unique and powerful way to deny the depth of the terror of fear. For modern life has been shaped most by the very fundamentals the irreligious claim need ascendancy to solve the dislocation. The irony of the fundamentalist belief of the irreligious is that the reason they declare is absent, and the secularist freedom they declare as needing to be made untainted by religion, have been on the throne the past century!

    Our form of government is the pinnacle of reason. Each individual has an opinion, a vote, and can cast that opinion where he or she may. And the orderliness of this product of reason is that regime change here happens peacefully, and that our officials represent the opinions of the electorate. But, the reasonableness of the majority stifles creativity and dissent, and an individuality that deviates from established norms and makes life new. “The unfettered and total power of the majority stifles independent thought, censors speech, and dampens creativity.” (p 140) If you will recall, a USA Today/Gallup Poll taken in March of 2003 indicated that 75% of Americans felt the U.S. did not make a mistake in sending troops to Iraq. And long ago Pilate appealed to the freely expressed and reasoned opinion of people as to whether to set career criminal and serial murderer Barabaras, or innocent Jesus, free. The poll taken favored not the Nazarene!

    The two greatest wars in human history were fought in the last century, and not over religion. Stalin repudiated religion for reasoned Socialism, and Pol Pot’s Kymer Rouge was an secular, egalitarian “people’s party.” It is not religion, nor secularism, the absence of religion, that is the source of our modern brokenness. Freedom and reason are today found in neither.

    Humanity is broken because existence is broken, and cannot be fixed like a sinner who only needs give his life over to Christ to gain salvation or a machine that needs only a single part replaced. The pain and the terror is evidence of this, and the fear we live in is palpable. So, in our time the religious say abandon existence and aim towards a heavenly reward, in Arabic or in the King James’ version. And the secularist elevates reason as alone sufficient to free the mind, and disregards the bloody gloves of the 20th century where freedom was seen to originate in human effort and self-interest alone.

    It feels like we’ve just seen an innocent executed and are sitting in an empty tomb. What better time, then, to consider Easter, and discern what meanings it might hold? What better time than this to ask the questions that form the meaning of this story: “What lasts after what exists passes away?” “What rises because it is stronger than death and fear?”

    Not belief, however deep the certainty might be. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus tried to understand what beliefs were the correct ones to hold about the events everyone could see unfolding. Was there any doubt amongst any that he would be arrested by the government, condemned by the leaders of his faith, and by the tide of public opinion when the majority crowd spoke up and chose Barabas to spare. There were beliefs galore, but a remarkable absence of faith. There was nothing about God’s plan being made apparent to him, least of all by the leaders of his religion. And there was nothing to expect from the Roman authorities. The leaders of religion and government would conspire together. It was reasonable they would, and that the majority would freely give their consent the to execution.

    Wherein doth one put one’s faith, one’s trust, without treating reason as if it were silver coins to be bargained away? Where does the spirit of the religious, the sacred, the holy, and the spirit of freedom walk hand in hand in creating the new day?

    Easter is about the brokenness of existence. The greatest construction of political humanity - symbolized by the government of Rome - and the greatest construction of human religion - symbolized by the Judaism of the day – conspired together, government and religion, twin orthodoxies of different parents, to execute an innocent. This story is a symbol that the good we can bring about without freedom has limits. This story is a symbol that the good we can bring about without the religious has limits. This story is about how an Affection that is sacred will liberate. Religion that shuts out freedom rolls the rock back over its own tomb, sealing in its own avowed correctness and choking off the new life hope and the renewal of the spirit can bring. The people of a nation who elevate reason without the religious, condemn the human spirit to the tyranny of the majority, who might just as easily choose to free the criminal Barabas and condemn the innocent Jesus, as favor the invasion of Iraq.

    Easter is about the brokenness of existence, and how when we see and live in that brokenness, it can break the bonds of our littleness. Our brokenness can open up the prospect of a good we cannot imagine and cannot discern without spiritual freedom. Our brokenness can uncover the promise of a goodness which in depth and height and scope is far beyond the reach of a plan our government may devise or a plan we ascribe to God. Religion’s beliefs reward the righteous and punish the transgressor. Government does what is reasonable in its own self-interest. But there is something more. The critical mind can discern it, and the heart feel it as holy. When we think hope is convicted and the human prospect is passing away, from the cross, which we think destroys both, comes an Affection delivered by a man, which redeems all because it frees all and makes life new: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

    From Affection comes liberation. From love comes freedom, and hope is reborn and trust, faith, in what creation can become, is rekindled anew. Then, not even the bondage of death has any dominion, let alone any of the brokenness we experience or bring about in life. Then, with the power of Love to Liberate, all creation begins to rise to its proper height. Like dead bones in a valley of despair and brokenness, the human spirit begins to rise. In a unity and freedom of the Spirit, rise up and sing out to all creation of a life that maketh all things new through a love for all souls.

AMEN.

BENEDICTION

Be not afraid. And seeing there is naught to fear, and bearing witness to what can never die, go forth into the world in peace.

Be of good courage.

Search all things

And hold fast to that which is good.

Render unto no one evil for evil.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Help the afflicted.

Love all men, love all women, love all children,

Love all souls.

Serving the Most High.

And rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

Amen.