David Miller Kohlmeier Readings from the Holy Qur'an In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful By the Dawn, by the ten nights, by the Even and the Odd, and by the passing night, is there not in this strong evidence for one who has sense? (89:1-4) By the sun and her forenoon splendor, by the moon when he follows her, by the day when it reveals her, by the night when it covers her, by the sky, and the earth, and the soul, one who purifies themself will succeed, and the one who betrays their fellows will fail. (91:1-8) There are signs in the heaven and the earth, in the alternation of day and night, for those who remember. (3:190) Why do humans seek some other way, when everything in the heavens and on the earth is muslim? (3:83) So what is the upright path? It is the freeing of the slave, feeding the needy on the day of starvation, or helping an orphan, or a needy person, and enjoining one another to compassion (90:12-17) Never forget that the life of this world is only a game, a show, and mutual boasting and trying to outrival each other in riches. It is like the growth of vegetation after rain, which delights the planter, but which then withers away and becomes worthless. (57:20) Woe to every fault-finding back-biter, and those who think their wealth will make them live forever. (104:1,2); I swear by the passage of time that humans are always in a state of loss, except for those with faith, and who live an upright life, those who exhort one another to hold fast to the truth (103) Certainly We have created you, and We know what tempts you, and We are nearer to you than your jugular vein (50:16). -------- Freedom to Submit Faith has always been a major part of my life. I grew up in a very religious family, and chose to be baptized in that faith when I was 16. Most of my 20s were spent devoted to that faith. Faith to me at that time was trusting the teachings of the Bible, even at the cost of my own life. It meant seeing God as my Lord and myself as God's servant. My will and my own wants didn't matter. Now, of course, I'm not that religion anymore. I stopped identifying as one of Jehovah's Witnesses about 11 years ago. I've moved on, and evolved, but I still consider myself a person of faith, even though I define faith a little different.
I'm about to enter my 3 rd year of seminary at Andover Newton Theological School. Preparing for ordained ministry, there are a lot of heavy topics and challenging subjects you have to wrestle with. But the biggest challenge is yourself; allowing yourself to be changed; to find your ideas and beliefs deconstructed, and in some cases shattered. I once again find my ideas of faith broken apart, and once again I have to put them back together. I've come to realize something about faith for me, that I want to share with you today. It involves two pieces that I feel are essential to mature, grown up faith; and what makes it challenging is that these two pieces, on the surface, seem to totally contradict each other. There are a lot of ways to articulate these two ideas, but today I'm going to call them freedom and submission. There are a lot of ways I could illustrate this, but I'm going to use two sacred texts that have been very important and life-changing to me in this past year to do so: Henry David Thoreau's Walden and the Holy Qur'an: the sacred text of Islam. I first discovered Walden when I was 15, in a high school English class. I was immediately captivated by the story; it spoke so much to where I was and what I was wrestling with at that time in my life. Walden is taken from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, who on July 4 th, 1845 left behind the bustling life of Boston and Concord, MA to live for two years in a cabin in the woods, near Walden Pond, that he built with his own hands. When he did this, he was 28 years old. Thoreau s' record of his two-year experiment in simple living has become one of the great classics of American literature, and it has always struck me as a profoundly religious text; I think this is a text with a lot to say about what it means to be human, and about what it means to find meaning and purpose in life. This is a book about faith. Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? he writes; We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Thoreau looked around him at the frantic life of his neighbors, at how constantly busy they were, and it seemed to him a horrible waste of time. He wondered, 'Why do people spend all day in jobs they hate, go into debt to buy things they don't need, such as houses too big for them, just because they feel they have to? Why do people fill their few precious moments of freedom with shallow drivel, with gossip, or with trivia? How could this possibly be what life is supposed to be?' He wrote, I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived... I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. Here's the point: what are the things that shape us? What sets our goals, our values? What are the ideals which we pursue and to which we give our bodies, minds, hearts, and, ultimately, our lives?
Thoreau heard the messages of his culture, what they said he had to do and had to be, and he rejected it. One of the reasons his text has endured the test of time is because we, all of us, even now are told from an early age what it is be good, successful, and happy, and we are shamed if we try some other way. We see people buy into the story even now; 'go to this school and study something practical; get a real job. Save your money to buy a real house and start a real family so you can enjoy life when you retire.' Today we have more stuff we're expected to buy, and if Thoreau was worried that newspapers and telegraphs filled too much free time with meaningless news what would he think about cable TV and Facebook? I think he would call them what he called most technology of his time: improved means to an unimproved end. What good is more information if we stay small, ignorant, and distracted? What's the point to having better stuff if we haven't grown or evolved in our character? Why, Thoreau wondered, do we care more about wearing the latest fashions than we do about improving the fashion of our hearts, our souls? Thoreau didn t go to church much, but he was a big believer in the Unitarian concept of selfculture. Just like agri-culture is the careful cultivation of the soil, so self-culture is the cultivation of the soul, the true self. What Unitarians, drawing from the Bible, called the inner image of God which contains, like little seeds, the potential for compassion, justice, courage, and all the other things we admire in great human beings. Unitarians believed, and Thoreau believed, that salvation isn't a onetime conversion experience, but the lifetime work of cultivating these seeds in our soul; weeding out false influences and ideas and nurturing our best potential. Most Unitarians back in those days saw this as the work of being a good citizen and Christian, but Thoreau saw it almost as a mystical exercise; we have to get back to who we truly are, and to him much of what we call good ends up being some of the most noxious weeds in the inner garden. For Thoreau the reason we must throw off conformity and start living our own lives isn't just to be wild carefree selfish individuals; he felt that only by getting back to nature, only by stripping off all this unnecessary clutter, could we hear the call of our true selves. This is spiritual work, and it's hard. This is the work of faith. My new favorite definition of faith comes from Unitarian minister James Luther Adams: Faith is, in the end, not a matter of our beliefs, but of our commitments. Thoreau's work was a work of faith; a commitment that there was more to life than conformity and submission to dominant culture. And I find that as I've matured faith is no longer for me about loyalty to something passed down simply because it's passed down; faith for me now is about a commitment to seeking truth wherever I find it, be it in an old holy book, or in my own soul.
For our faith to not just be habit, or family tradition, each of us has to do the hard work of knowing where our ideas of good come from, and being brave enough to challenge those ideas that restrict the self we know we are. This is the work of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons daring to be themselves, of women resisting the patriarchy, of people of color fighting white supremacy. This is a work I know many of you are engaged in. To be who we truly are, we have to be answering the call of our own souls, and not allowing our soul to be crushed into the mold of an anxious, miserable, evil world. But how do we keep our pursuit of freedom from just turning into selfishness and entitlement? Thoreau turned to Nature, and, interestingly enough, so did Muhammad. Muhammad was a merchant in 7 th century Arabia; the book we now call the Qur'an was delivered orally by Muhammad over a period of 20 years. He recited, sang in haunting poetry, these words to his culture; he saw that his culture put clan loyalty and money over the needs of the poor and over personal accountability, and he heard, like Thoreau, something calling to his soul, something he then sang aloud: a call for his people to turn their hearts toward nature. In the Qur'an it says - everything in heaven and on the earth is muslim. Muslim in Arabic is someone or something that has submitted. How is it that everything in nature submits? That's because everything in nature is true to its own soul automatically: birds don't obsess over how to be better birds, trees don't take meds because they're ashamed of not being better trees. All things in nature simply are what they are, and so, by being true to their nature, they are said to be muslim; they are seen as being fully in submission to the Will of the Creator. Muhammad's call for his audience to be muslim was a call for them to join their place in the family of things, by being true to their real nature and not artificial delusions of wealth and success. Islam means submission, and submission is not a concept those of us in liberal religious circles have much use for, and understandably so. Most of us have fought hard, and are fighting now, to throw off those forces trying to pummel us into submission against our wills. But, in the end, we do have to find something greater than our own egos to follow. Thoreau went into the woods not to be selfish, but to cultivate his soul. And he knew that in being present to the natural world he would discover the higher laws (as he put it) waiting within himself. I believe the Qur'an is saying the same thing. In the Qur'an, there are repeated calls to look to nature, and remember. Remember what? That only humans fail to be, automatically, in harmony with our soul. We must choose, this text says, to submit; to give our egos over willingly to higher laws. This is never to be oppressive: There is no
compulsion in religion the Qur'an says. Nowhere does Muhammad say that anyone is to be forced by the sword or by some human authority into obedience. Instead, the Qur'an teaches, like Unitarianism in Thoreau's day did, that in a sense the answers we long for are lying buried within us, just waiting for us to wake up and remember them. But whereas Unitarians tended to see this inner voice as calling us primarily to freedom, the Qur'an sees it instead as a call primarily to serve each other towards the creation of a just society in harmony with nature, what the Qur'an calls The Trust. I don't think the two are contradictory. When I let the man I love put this ring on my finger this wasn't me being pressured to give up my hard-won freedom. I choose willingly to give up some of my freedom to the most important human relationship in my life. I freely submit. So I think the Qur'an and Thoreau are both telling us that true mature freedom in the end always results in a voluntary submission to what we truly value. My favorite of our 7 UU principles is probably #4- We affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The free part is easy. We love our free search of truth. I love that in Unitarian Universalism I've been free to openly study the Bible and practice Paganism; hear the insights of both Buddha and Darwin; but how do I keep this freedom from just turning into spiritual shallowness? The key is the second part: responsible. Thoreau may have run off into the woods for two years but look closer and see that while he was there he went to jail for refusing to financially support a war, and after leaving Walden he became an outspoken abolitionist. Thoreau's spiritual journey was free, but it was also responsible. And I experience the Qur'an's call for my submission not as a return to the religion I've left behind but as a mature call to personal responsibility. And a call to humility. Even if I could survive all alone in the woods I'd die quick if the soil stopped producing food, or if all oxygen left the air. I am radically dependent every moment on everything else that exists. Once we throw off the shackles of conformity to the world, once we reject being a servant of dominant culture, we discover that we are bound by shackles we can never be rid of; we are bound to a wider universe. When I left the Witnesses I vowed to never again accept a religion where I was a slave to some Lord in the sky. But much to my surprise I've found that it's impossible to not be a slave in a way, for I am totally dependent on the rest of the Universe for my survival. Will I ignore this truth or be grateful? The Arabic word usually translated unbeliever or infidel in English translations actually refers to a person who hides the truth and is intentionally ungrateful. This makes sense to me. If being a person of faith means freely choosing to live in gratitude and committing to something greater than myself, then being an infidel is selfishly choosing to ignore my dependence and being ungrateful; hiding the truth of
who I am from myself and living a shallow selfish life instead. This has been my big discovery about my own faith in the past year. I have worked so hard to be free, and I still, honestly, find myself constantly wrestling with external and internal forces trying to shape me into someone I'm not. I still find Thoreau an ally, a friend, reminding me to turn off the news, stop worrying about my next evaluation, and just listen. Listen to the birds, the air, the waves, my own beating heart, my own wildness. He still calls to me like he did when I was 15. But I'm now learning that he's not calling me only to be a rebellious non-conforming hippie. Strangely, when I first began to listen to the Qur'an I found it echoing Thoreau in ways I didn't expect. This text too wants me to listen to nature in order to find who I am. It's filled with calls to observe what it calls the signs of God in the natural world, and it calls me to remember something I've forgotten. Like Thoreau the Qur'an is unflinching in its condemnation of cowardly conformity to unjust social norms. And like Thoreau the Qur'an is a call to submit; to yield, willingly, to the quiet call of the true self deep within. Like it or not, grown up faith means taking responsibility for your own free search for truth. It's a commitment to self-culture; to the cultivation of the best you can be. But grown up faith also means accepting that you are not as individual as you like to think and there must be something greater than you that you are willing to serve. Not out of compulsion, but because in your heart you remember that this is true. Thoreau by the waters of Walden, and Muhammad (peace and blessings upon him) singing to the greedy merchants of Mecca; they both tell me of freedom: the freedom to finally submit of my own free will to what really matters. And in this submission I won't lose myself. I will mysteriously, in choosing to give myself away, finally find the freedom I've always been searching for.