The Master is a tree of contentment and forbearance;
Righteousness its flower, enlightenment the fruit."
-- Adi Granth
Reading: by Stephen Prothero from Religious Literacy – What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (2007, p. 9)
From the time of the nation’s founding, the success of the American experiment in republican government was rightly understood to rest on an educated citizenry. If suffrage was to be extended first to white males with property and eventually to men and women of all races, then it would be essential for all Americans to understand the issues on which they were voting. How could we act responsibly as citizens if we did not know how to read, if we did not know something about politics and history and science and economics?
Today, when religion is implicated in virtually every issue of national and international import, US citizens need to know something about religion, too... Unfortunately, US citizens today lack this religious literacy.
Reading: by Jaswinder Bolina from an essay entitled “Writing Like a White Guy – On Language, Race and Poetry”
Recently, I was invited to give a few poetry readings as part of a literary festival taking place in a rural part of the country… The audiences are largely made up of kind, white-haired, white-skinned locals enthusiastic to hear us read from and speak about our work, even when they’ve never heard of most of us. They at least appreciate poetry, a rarity I’m grateful for. During the introductions that preface each event, even the organizers who’ve invited me have difficulty getting my name right, and in one school library, I enunciate it over and over again. I say, “Jas as in the first part of justice; win as in the opposite of defeat; der, which rhymes with err, meaning to be mistaken.” I say, “JasWINder,” lilting the second syllable, and smile as about a dozen audience members mouth each syllable along with me until they feel they have it right. When they do, they grin broadly. After each event, I chat with them one or two at a time, and I do my best to reflect their warmth. They’re complimentary about the work, and though I don’t expect they’re a demographic that’ll especially like my poems—even when you write poems like a white guy, you might not be writing poems everyone will like—the compliments are earnest.
Still, in all this pleasantness, the awkward moment occurs more than once. It’s some variation on a recurring question I get in town after town. The question usually comes up as a matter of small talk while I’m signing a book or shaking someone’s hand. No one delivers it better, with so much beaming warmth and unwitting irony, than the woman who says she enjoyed my poems very much and follows this quickly with an admiring “You’re so Americanized, what nationality are you?” She doesn’t pick up on the oxymoron in her question. She doesn’t hear the hint of tiredness in my reply. “I was born and raised in Chicago, but my parents are from northern India.” Once more, I ought to be offended, but I’m not really. Hers is an expression of curiosity that’s born of genuine interest rather than of sideshow spectacle. I’m the only nonwhite writer at the events I participate in. I’m the only one who gets this question. It makes me bristle, but I understand where it comes from.
Reading: by Kabir, a 15th century Indian mystic poet honored in both Hindu and Muslim traditions
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly -
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
[God] is the breath inside the breath.
A Guru’s God
A Sermon Delivered on November 11, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Stephen Prothero wrote the book Religious Literacy because he had the clear sense that, even though most Americans consider themselves religious, we are remarkably uninformed about religion. So, for instance, most Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible. Only one-third know that it was Jesus – and not Billy Graham – who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. And ten percent of Americans believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
As Unitarian Universalists we like to think of ourselves as more educated than most. My guess is we all know perfectly well that the Bible begins with the book of Genesis, that it was Jesus who sermonized on the mount, and that Joan of Arc had nothing to do with floods.
We say we draw inspiration not only from Jewish and Christian teachings, but from all the world’s great religions. That’s why we have these wall-hangings (which depict symbols of the world’s religions) displayed so prominently in our place of worship. But one religious tradition conspicuously absent is Sikhism.
* * *
Sikhs were in the news this summer, following a tragedy at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A white-supremacist gunman opened fire there, killing six worshippers and wounding three others, before turning his weapon on himself.
In the days following the tragedy, commentators wondered aloud whether the Sikhs were victims of mistaken identity – that the gunman had intended to kill Muslims. But others made the case that that is surely beside the point. The point is the attack was fueled by racism, ignorance, and hate.
For decades Sikhs have been singled out as targets for discrimination and abuse. The turban worn by many Sikh men makes a convenient target. Ninety-nine percent of people wearing turbans in the United States are Sikhs from India (according to the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, SALDEF). The turban seems to be a lightening rod for surprisingly visceral hostility.
Amardeep Singh, an English professor from Bethlehem, PA, writes, “I am not sure why the reaction can be so visceral — perhaps because wearing a turban is at once so intimately personal and so public? Walking around Philadelphia waving, say, an Iranian flag probably wouldn’t provoke quite the same reaction. A flag is abstract — a turban, as something worn on the body, is much more concrete and it therefore poses a more palpable symbol for angry young men looking for someone to target.” (“Being Sikh in America,” New York Times, 8/1/12)
* * *
According to religious scholars, there are over twenty million Sikhs in the world today. That makes Sikhism the fifth largest religion, right after Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Most of today’s Sikhs live in northern India. But several hundred thousand Sikhs live in the United States. There are more Sikhs in this country than Unitarian Universalists.
The story of the Sikh faith reaches back to 15th century India, and the life of a man named Guru Nanak. Nanak was born in the small village of Talwandi, located in Punjab, a region in northern India right on today’s border between India and Pakistan.
The name “Punjab” means “five rivers.” The region is made up of several vast, fertile river valleys, and is marked by a long history and a rich cultural heritage. Since ancient times Punjab was shaped by Indian Hindu culture. But over the centuries, a succession of powerful rulers took control of the prosperous land: beginning with Alexander the Great, in the 4th century BCE, the Greeks, then Persians, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, and finally the British invaded Punjab.
When Nanak was born in 1469, Punjab had been under the control of Muslim rulers for centuries. The village in which he was born lay right in the path traveled by invading armies, warring Hindu kingdoms and clans, as well as Muslim rulers.
In the 15th century Hindus and Muslims lived side by side. Conflicts between factions within and between both of these powerful traditions were a defining feature of the world in which Nanak grew up.
* * *
It is interesting to remember that in the same period that Hindus and Muslims were struggling for dominance in Punjab, religious strife was consuming Europe as well. Guru Nanak lived during the same period as the Christian reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. The Sikh faith developed amidst the tensions between Muslims and Hindus in northern India, just as our Unitarian forebears were developing their own religious identity in the midst of a battle being waged between Catholic and the Reformed Christianity in Europe.
Sikhs promoted religious tolerance, but were at times persecuted by both Muslims and Hindu rulers. Similarly, both Catholics and Reformers declared the first Unitarians heretics. And as Punjab was located between two religious empires, the historical home of Unitarianism in Transylvania was located on the boundary between two empires: Muslim Ottomans to the East and Christian Habsburg to the West.
* * *
Nanak was born into a Hindu family, but the midwife who delivered him was Muslim. Nanak’s father was a Hindu businessman, but he worked for a prosperous Muslim landowner.
Nanak’s father hoped he would follow in his footsteps and have a prosperous career in business. But from an early age Nanak showed other interests. When he was seven, his teachers were surprised that he was already showing promise as a gifted poet. He was contemplative in nature, but had a penetrating mind. A bright student, he was instructed in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. As one of his teachers put it, “He is a blessed one… he grasps instantly what he hears.”
But beyond his quick grasp of language, scholarship and spiritual teachings – he also had a habit of questioning the logic of traditional teachings.
A story is told, that when Nanak was eleven years old, he was encouraged to wear a janeu, a symbolic garment – a sacred thread – worn by Hindu Brahmin, a sign of their privileged caste, but Nanak refused. Instead he challenged the Brahmin priest who was conducting the initiation ceremony, and asked him what difference it makes whether or not he wear a janeu. Shouldn’t people be differentiated based on their actions and merits, rather than whether or not they wear a janeu? Nanak asked. Nanak had friends who were of lower caste, and he had no interest in setting himself apart from them. And he was also critical of the fact that only Brahmin boys, but not girls, were entitled to wear a janeu.
Nanak was known for an analytical mind and a sharp eye for empty rituals and customs. Whereas most of his Hindu and Muslim contemporaries defended their own faith, and criticized the faith of others, Nanak challenged both Hindu and Muslim convention, and lifted up what he considered the heart of both teachings, which were in fact very compatible.
As the Sikh author Patwant Singh puts it, Nanak was “impressed by the basic compassion of Hinduism and the essential brotherhood of Islam which looked upon the faithful as equals in the sight of God, Nanak emphasized the inconsistencies that detracted from these inspired origins and set the two religions on a course of hatred and intolerance.” (The Sikhs, p. 27)
When Nanak was thirty years old, he had a profound spiritual and mystical experience. At that point in his life, Nanak had a daily ritual of bathing in a river before sunrise. One morning while bathing, he suddenly disappeared. He vanished. His friends thought he had drowned. But after three days he returned, inspired by a religious vision. He had been taken up into the presence of God, and been charged by God to become a religious teacher, a guru. He told his friends the essence of his teaching was this: “There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim.” This statement is among the earliest of the sayings, songs, and poems of Nanak recorded by his followers. It was understood as a rejection of all sectarian and religious divisiveness.
Nanak believed the God of Hindu faith and Muslims’ Allah are one and the same. He imagined God similar to the Eternal Truth of Hindus, an ultimate, supreme and formless God beyond human understanding. But God is also similar to the deity imagined by Muslims, who – because of God’s mystery – cannot be portrayed in pictures. And so Nanak rejected the colorful statues and shrines of the Hindu pantheon with Rama, Krishna, Kali, and the thousands of other Hindu gods. Nanak embraced the idea of reincarnation, but rejected caste distinctions.
In the course of the next several years, Nanak traveled widely all over India, and some say as far Mecca, preaching and teaching. Nanak conveyed his inclusive religious message not only in his words, but also in his choice of clothing. His lower dress, below the waist, was of Hindu style. His upper torso was dressed in Muslim style. After completing his travels, he returned to Punjab where he founded a city of Sikhs. Among Sikhs there were no caste distinctions. They established community kitchens, where people of all walks of life would join together for their meals. They were big believers in community service.
Guru Nanak attracted a large group of followers in his lifetime. Before he died, he passed the leadership of the Sikh movement to one of his disciples, who was then appointed Guru. The leadership of the movement was passed on from Guru to Guru for over a century. There were ten Gurus. Each of them made particular contributions to the growing tradition. They also composed devotional poems and hymns that described the wonders and blessings of the one god. These writings, along with works from other saints and sages were compiled in one book, called the Adi Granth. After the death of the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh in 1708 (130 years after the death of Guru Nanak), this sacred book itself was understood as an abiding teacher. It is called the Guru Granth Sahib.
This sacred book is the central object in Sikh temples and worship. The essence of the Sikh faith is the belief in one God, the True Guru. “One” is the word with which worship is begun, before moving on to read from the sacred book.
As a outward expression of their faith, many Sikh men wear five pieces of symbolic dress: a comb that represents order, a dagger or small sword that indicates a commitment to justice, a steel bracelet that symbolizes the Unity of God, with no beginning and no end, baggy shorts that represent a readiness for action and spiritual freedom, and finally uncut hair, a symbol of vitality, which is kept in place with a turban.
* * *
Throughout their history, Sikhs have struggled to maintain their faith and identity, through centuries of religious and political turmoil and strife. The choice to wear a turban, as an expression of faith, even in the face of religious persecution, political domination, and racial profiling, is a courageous act.
But our heritage, our identity runs much deeper than any piece of clothing. The poet Jaswinder Bolina doesn’t wear a turban. Like his father before him, he cuts his hair short and shaves his beard. Bolina is the name of the family’s town in Punjab. Jaswinder’s father told him, if he wants to get published in America, he should change his name. “They won’t publish you if they see your name. They’ll know you’re not one of them. They’ll know your one of us.” But Jaswinder refuses. He will not hide who he is.
* * *
The Sikh believes in one God, who can be directly experienced in the human soul. As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm the direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces that create and uphold life. This mystery and wonder some of us call God.
We each have our own precious identity, whether we come from the river valleys of Punjab, or the rolling hills of Transylvania, whether come from faraway cities or the prairies of the Midwest.
Whether we worship in churches or Sikh temples, in stupas, Indian shrine rooms, synagogues or cathedrals, Kabir says, we are all searching for the same God. All the while, Kabir says, God is right here. In the next seat. God’s shoulder is right there against yours. If we really look, we will see God instantly.
May we have the wisdom to really look.
May we see God in both stranger and friend.
With this vision firmly in our mind,
May we have the courage to live our faith,
By building a world of justice and love.
Amen.
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