I was in Israel and the West Bank in early June -
it was the highlight of my sabbatical, a trip I have been wanting to take
for 20 years.
Some of the memories I made there will stay with me for my whole life:
seeing the sea of Galilee for the first time,
halfway through my three-day walk from Nazareth or Capernum.
My morning at YadVashem, the Holocaust Museum and Memorial,
walking on the beach in Tel Aviv,
the view from Masada, the ancient Roman fortress,
and the chicken schwarma at a roadside dive in Magda,
which I still salivate over.
I’m glad that I started with the solo walk —
it game me a chance to be on an individual pilgrimage,
and not have to fight the crowds of tourists and onlookers;
once I arrived in Jerusalem, however, that all changed.
It is a vibrant and alive place,
and a place where five different groups jostle for position and a place in line.
There are secular or liberally religious Jews, who live, work, and have their lives in this modern city.
Though many, actually, leave Jerusalem, and live in Tel Aviv.
There are orthodox, observant, and conservative Jews - a whole variety of types,
of course,
in distinctive dress and manner, living according to rules established,
depending on the rule, 3000 or 200 years ago.
There are Palestinians, mostly muslims but some Christians,
trying to find a way to earn a living, negotiating check-points and selling goods in the market.
Then there are the visitors: [slide]
and they come in two very different forms:
tourists and pilgrims.
The tourists are from Germany, China, Japan, Australia, the United States.
They mostly travel in large groups.
They take many pictures.
They are loud in sacred spaces, and oblivious to most cultural clues.
I was not a fan.
The pilgrims are very different - they also travel in large groups,
mostly, but they come with reverence.
Before they get their cameras out, they sing -
I heard hymns sung in English, Mandarin, Latin,
and a few African languages.
Sometimes, though, the pilgrims would not obey the rules.
At the tomb of the holy sepulcher, [slide - this is just part of it]
the enormous ancient church where, it is said that Jesus laid in a tomb for three days,
you are only allowed to go in the small crypt
for seconds - the monks had to yell at the pilgrims to get them to move along -
the line was long, people were waiting.
And the pilgrims could be quite demonstrative.
They’d break down in tears, and they’d shout and wail and be visibly moved.
I found myself torn about how I felt about that.
On one hand, the devotion of the pilgrims was inspiring.
Had I not, too, made a pilgrimage of sorts?
Had I not, too, wept, out on the plains of Galilee?
On the other hand . . .
well, take the church of the holy sepulcher for example.
Is it where Jesus laid, entombed?
I mean, who know?
But probably not.
You see, here’s what happened:
Jesus is born in a small town, Nazareth,
he becomes a disciple of John, the Baptizer,
and then travels the country, preaching and teaching,
until he is executed in Jerusalem in his early 30’s.
There are followers who carry his message and believe him to be God incarnate, or the promised Messiah, or a human messenger of God - his followers don’t agree on this point.
But the movement is small.
It isn’t until 325, when the Roman Emperor Constantine makes Christianity the state religion,
that Christians have any power to protect holy sites.
And nobody knows where Jesus died - I mean, on what block of Jerusalem, now a much larger city, was the hill of execution?
Constantine’s mother, Helena, travels to the Holy Land in 326,
and finds in Jerusalem a temple to Aphrodite, a magnificent temple.
So she says, this is the site of Calvary and the tomb
- the temple is torn down and the church is built on its spot.
I knew this.
The monks, I assume knew it.
But the pilgrims? I wonder.
Did they know that they were not on their knees praying at the site of Jesus’ death,
but at the site that the Emperor’s mother decided to build a church?
Yes, there is 1700 years of tradition in that place.
But the exact location . . . is guess work.
I was even more struck in Bethlehem.
At the church of the nativity, women brought their infants,
they went down into the grotto, [slide - that’s the doorway down into the grotto]
weeping and praying - this group was speaking, I think, Portuguese, but I’m not sure,
and with their babies,
they got on the ground in the spot where Jesus was born,
and gave glory to God, Mary, Jesus, and so forth.
I say “the spot where Jesus was born”
but of course it wasn’t.
First of all, Helena decided on that spot because there was a small cave
underneath a temple to Adonis —
even though the account says a manger, a barn, not a cave -
so, even you say Bethlehem, it surely wasn’t there.
But also, Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem.
That tradition was invented a few generations after Jesus’ death
in order to make him descendent of King David,
who was from that town,
although on his dad’s side - Joseph’s side -
but the virgin birth means that . . . wait . . . .
if you think too hard about these stories your head will hurt.
Jesus was born in Nazareth, surely.
And I had a mixed feeling, watching the women with their babies weep and pray
on that spot, in that cave.
I did not dare say, “this is not the place.”
I was moved by their devotion but troubled.
Because to get to the Church of the Nativity,
we had crossed checkpoints, [slide]
we had toured a Palestinian Refugee camp,
we had seen Jewish Settlements behind 40 foot walls,
we had seen grinding poverty,
I had seen boys with machine guns guard . . . everything
and, the night before, two Palestinian terrorists had dressed up like Orthodox Jews,
and opened fire at a cafe in Tel Aviv, killing four,
including the father of two and the mother of four.
So I was moved by their devotion but troubled.
It is such a short step.
From devotion to extremism.
From belief to ideology.
From clarity to certainty.
It is a short step.
A little nudge, a little fear, a little excitement,
and you’re there:
the anti-abortion protestor bombs a clinic
the communist meets the Stasi recruiter and gets a list of bankers to kill
the middle-class muslim slips away to join ISIS,
the Ugandan evangelical murders his lesbian sister,
the Jewish nationalism in Israel,
the Christian nationalist in the United States,
the Hindu nationalist in India,
each of them decide that only they should get to vote, to hold power, to be treated like a human being.
It is a short step.
From devotion to extremism.
It is a short step from being willing to give up your own life
for the sake of your love for others
to being willing to take the lives of others for the sake of your beliefs.
So I was troubled.
I didn’t know what to think about the women and their babies in Bethlehem,
and I still don’t.
Devotion, faithfulness, can be good.
It can motivate people to do extraordinary things:
to work for justice,
to raise their children with love,
to be humane and decent
to make art.
But it is a short step.
A few days later, I made that trip to YadVashem, [slide]
the holocaust memorial,
where I wept and wept and wept.
From devotion - to the German state, to one’s race -
to power, mix in some fear, some resentment against the supposed elites,
a populist, authoritarian, movement,
led by a man many dismissed as a backwater entertainer,
from devotion to death.
Horrific, mechanical, murder of six million souls.
It is a short step.
When you believe the story that you are telling yourself
so firmly
that you can admit no room for doubt -
you can admit no empathy -
no capacity to say, “huh, I wonder if this is true”
only the capacity to say “everyone who disagrees is wrong”
“it’s all part of a conspiracy”
“I don’t believe the -fill-in-the-blank- media”
when you believe the story that you are telling yourself
so firmly
that you admit no possibility of a larger story,
this is a grave and serious danger
to democracy, to peace, and to the lives of innocents.
So what shall we do?
Shall we throw out our stories?
Say, nothing is true but cold hard facts?
Deny all meta-narratives, all myths, all legends,
refuse to believe anything we can’t prove?
People have tried.
It doesn’t go well.
We are story-telling animals.
We cannot but tell stories, to make sense of the world
and our own lives.
Around a campfire, in a cave and a movie-theater,
in novels and from parent to child,
we tell stories.
It is what we do.
It is how we understand ourselves.
How we decide what’s right and wrong,
what we remember and how we plan for the future.
So is it hopeless?
Are we condemned to slip from story to devotion to extremism?
No.
There’s another way.
Many windows, one light.
The heart of the person before you is a mirror.
See there your own form.
What is hateful to you, do not do to others.
This is the whole of the Law.
Many windows one light.
There is truth.
But we see through windows and we live through stories.
Each a stained glass story, a story about the world and ourselves.
The stories are beautiful and interesting.
But they are not the factual truth.
The windows are lovely. They are not the light.
Take stories lightly.
Playfully.
With tender hands.
Tell them not because they are true or false
but because they speak to your heart.
Tell different versions, and don’t fight over which one is best.
I grew up hearing stories of the Pacific Northwest Native Americans -
I’m not native american, but we were close enough to the culture that I picked up stories -
raven, creating the world out of mud,
the tribe that decided, meh, the land is not for us,
and climbed back in the river, to become salmon.
These folktales don’t have clear answers,
they are suggestive, not determinative.
Like the greedy beavers and the fox -
the fox destroys their dam. Is that good or bad?
Well, it depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
My favorite divinity is Kokopelli. He plays tricks.
He gets people dancing.
When people think they know all the answers,
he mixes everything up.
His goal is to keep you humble,
so that instead of controlling life, you live it.
So I think you should play with stories.
Hear them, enjoy them, but don’t believe them as if they were facts,
as if Jesus turning water into wine
or Muhammad ascending to Heaven on a magical horse
was like arithmetic, as if it belonged in a peer-reviewed journal.
Religion is poetry, not prose.
Metaphor, not physics.
Guess what?
The original authors of these stories -
the Hebrew Bible, the Christian scriptures,
the Vedas and the Upisandids, the Qur’an, the Tao Te Ching,
the folktales and legends of the Norse, the Iroquois, the Yoruba, the Aborigine,
the Aztec and the Roma,
all these stories were written as metaphors,
as figurative and suggestive,
neither fact nor fiction but something more:
stories of the heart.
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.
When you take these religious stories lightly,
with respectful curiosity, as metaphors admitting of many possibilities,
then a whole hallway of doors opens -
to explore,
to see how all lifted hearts of one,
to find the thread, the common love,
that sounds along the ages,
to bring many names, for no one name is sufficient -
no one name is enough!
no one story is enough!
The universe is bigger than that!
The early Christians believed that Jesus was such an important force in their lives
that they included in their holy book four different — contradictory! - versions of his life.
Which one is “right” is the wrong question.
How does the spirit of love and truth speak through these stories to your heart?
That’s the right question.
My question: do these women know that this isn’t the place?
Is not a helpful question.
If I spoke their language, and we could sit down together, I would ask something else:
tell me about you baby. She’s precious.
That’s a story I’d like to hear.
Who owns this land, this holy land?
That is the question that some Palestinians and some Israelis keep arguing about.
That they kill each other over.
Whose ambushed past is true?
Who is suffocating who?
These are the wrong questions.
We both live here now. How shall we each be free and raise our children in peace?
That’s the question that requires a deeper and better story.
Is my story of American right or is yours?
Are we getting better or worse?
That’s a story we’ve been arguing over pretty loudly.
What about the quieter stories?
How shall we learn to love each other?
Who is my neighbor?
Let’s start telling those stories.
All lifted hearts can be one.
Who is right?
is not a very interesting question.
Will you tell me your story?
That’s a better question.
Will you listen to mine, too?
That’s good.
Human beings will always argue about whose story is right.
We always have, and we will.
But it only takes a few of us to show another way.
To live by our example a different way of hearing and telling stories,
to be the yeast in the bread,
and help us do better.
We’re all sometimes tempted to believe our own stories, without room for error -
Christians, atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans,
we’re all tempted to believe our own stories,
liberals, conservatives, moderates, we’re all tempted to do so.
Even well-educated Unitarian Universalists.
We think everything we think is true. Because we thought it.
But we should know better. Open hearts, open minds.
In the early Christian church, a group of believers argued a lot about which of their stories were true.
What interpretation of the story was right?
Which gifts of the spirit were important?
What really mattered?
they fought, they argued, people started to leave the church.
One Sunday, their leader read aloud a letter from a distant but beloved church official:
look, he said.
None of those arguments matter.
It isn’t about being right, or about being great.
It isn’t about being great.
It is about love.
And if you don’t love each other -
all lifted hearts can be one -
if you don’t love each other,
well, then you’ve lost the thread.
Though you may speak with fire,
if you have not love,
you have lost the message.
Tell the story of love. Tell it lightly, listen, and keep listening.
So it was. And so it is. Always, now, and forever more.