We’re Really Not That Different
by Olivia Chorlian
February 21, 2016
[Before I begin, a few disclaimers: I’ve adopted the Jewish way of referring to my higher power as “HaShem” which in Hebrew means The Name, the belief behind this practice being that the name of G-d is too holy to be spoken or written down. However, for the sake of familiarity, I will refer to “G-d” in my sermon. And when I say “he” it is more a reflection of my Judeo-Christian faith heritage than an indicator of gender. The Bible itself states quite blatantly that “G-d is not a man,” and he is no woman either because G-d is not human. You are also welcome to substitute “G-d” with “the universe,” “the great spirit,” “the greater good,” “community,” et cetera if it helps you connect better with my story. Also, if you find me too loud, Terry said it was OK.]
Today is a big deal. A milestone to at last confirm the chicken and I have made it to the other side of a difficult road.
So, how does the mysterious curly-haired girl with commitment issues go from showing up when she feels like it, perpetually refusing to wear a nametag and skipping out on coffee hour to pet the dog outside, to standing before you dictating the order of service?
A better question would be: how does the spitfire preacher girl go from pacing around the altar, speaking in tongues and getting her Pentecostal praise on to being a phantom friend of the UU? To having borderline panic attacks when stepping into a religious service of any kind? To struggling to know how to pray or what prayer really is?
There are many layers of answers to these questions, intricacies too plentiful and nuanced to cover in my allotted “eighteen minutes” or maybe even in a lifetime of talking. But as I am still relatively unknown to your congregation, I feel it’s important to share a bit of the spiritual journey that has brought me to your doors and what I’ve discovered inside them.
My UU story begins back in June of 2010 as I sat alone in Beverly’s Atomic Café waiting for Kate who was suffering from lateness. It was in this span of time, when I could have been indulging in a cranberry walnut chicken salad sandwich, that I met Hannah, whose Sioux name, if she had one, would be Talking Too Much to Strangers. (I just watched Dances with Wolves.)
[Hindsight: It should be noted that at this time an unrehearsed spectacle occurred in that Hannah, who was actually sitting in the audience, raised her hand and waved to everyone shouting, “That’s me!” This rather bolstered the amusement of our already laughing congregation. Thank you, Hannah.]
We quickly bonded over a shared religious past and poetry readings. Fast forward two years and Our Lady of Perpetual Invitation, my other name for Hannah, has roped me in to a community production of The Sound of Music, and I find myself on orientation night sitting beside a pretty soprano in a dusty blue fleece. Her name was Lisa. She was without a doubt a kindred spirit. I came to know and love her and was touched by the tender, vulnerable way she extended her friendship and shared her own journey of faith. Lisa would often remark, “Oh, you’ve got to meet my friend Susan. You’ll just love my friend Susan! Have I mentioned I have a friend named Susan?” Being the rebellious and wicked-hearted person I am, I nodded and thought, Nope! Not gonna meet Susan!
And then I met Susan.
I shared a bit of my backstory with her: how I was raised in a very old-fashioned, conservative Christian home and had spent much of my life within the walls of various charismatic Evangelical churches.
I once fasted solid food for fifty days because I wanted a closer walk with HaShem, and as that intense commitment to prayer came to a close, I had the most brilliant revelation. There I was asking G-d to fill me, and G-d said I am an ocean. Why limit me to one small uplifted cup when I have set you free to dive into my endlessness?
I told Susan of the many places I had traveled and the dreams I had once had for my life, and true to character, she said, “You do realize that you joining my church would be equivalent to a nun becoming a prostitute, right?”
I laughed, mainly because her choice of words was comic gold, but also because she was right-ish, though we were getting along too splendidly for her punchy comment to be altogether true.
At the ripe old age of 32, I find myself in a fascinating position in that I have become a temple, a dwelling place to two seemingly opposing realities. I am the tension between here and there, Right and Left, “heaven” and “hell.”
I see my very life as a microcosm of yin and yang, and in fact I believe every life is regardless of whether and to what degree we choose to live in that awareness.
It is in the earliest collection of Chinese poetry, the Shijing (or Book of Odes), that we first see yin and yang written together, painting a picture of the phenomenon of sunshine and shadow existing simultaneously on different sides of a hill. The correlating yinyang symbol has come to represent the interrelatedness of opposites, their harmony with and reliance upon one another, the yin in itself possessing a portion of yang and vice versa.
In Exploring Our Hebraic Heritage, my cousin Theologian Marvin Wilson writes, “The ancient Greeks had tidy minds. Everything was reasoned out and had its place…. The Hebrew Bible and Jewish mindset, however, tended to take a different approach. Martin Stohr comments on what he describes as “the Jewish way of doing theology” by noting “its constant questioning and counter-questioning, its emphasis on the whole, its inclusion of contradictory traditions, its rejection of schematization.… One position is… held in dynamic tension with the other(s). Theologically speaking, matters are seldom reduced to an either/or alternative.”
“To the Semitic mind, knowledge of something was not (like the Greeks) primarily reserved to the intellect in a theoretical way, but the reality of something was often interwoven in the experience of life. To know was to understand personally, existentially, or practically.”
Both Hebrew and Chinese ways of thinking are foreign to us, as our western brains have been molded and beaten into submission by Greek linear logic. This, therefore this… One truth supports another, supports another, supports another in stepwise form. Within these parameters, one truth cannot by definition contradict another without the stairway collapsing. Two seemingly opposing truths cannot be held in the dynamic tension previously mentioned.
It is for this reason, among others of course, that our society in every sphere has become so nastily polarized. Shamefully negative us versus them rhetoric plagues our media and pollutes our living rooms. Whether or not we have contributed to it, we have a responsibility, an opportunity, to be a small part of the change we wish to see in the world by taking a closer look at the contents of our hearts and finding a space within them for those with whom we disagree, finding a place for the yin in yang.
I smiled to read these words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Supreme Court’s most outspoken liberal, commemorating Justice Anton Scalia, the Supreme Court’s most outspoken conservative: “…’We are different, we are one,’ different in our interpretation of written texts, one in our reverence for the Constitution and the institution we serve. From our years together at the D.C. Circuit, we were best buddies. We disagreed now and then, but when I wrote for the Court and received a Scalia dissent, the opinion ultimately released was notably better than my initial circulation. Justice Scalia nailed all the weak spots—the ‘applesauce’ and ‘argle bargle’—and gave me just what I needed to strengthen the majority opinion. …”
In spite of what is printed in the bulletin, the title of my sermon is “We’re Really Not That Different.” The “we” of that sentence is personal. It is you and whomever you are against, whether offensively or defensively, whether socially, politically, religiously… the list goes on.
As for me, the Jesus I follow, for starters, was Jewish. He lived and moved and had his being within the abundant tensions that exist for any soul attempting to live out heaven on earth.
He believed in “the inherent worth and dignity of every person”; “justice, equity and compassion in human relations”; “acceptance of one another” and the encouragement of communal spiritual growth. He called people to wholeness exhorting them to full lives of responsibility and meaning; He forced his teachings upon no one, always giving his followers the right to choose their own path; Jesus stated his mission clearly: that he had come to bring peace, not a sword; He exemplified respect for the interdependent web of existence spun with sparrows, lilies, small children, beggars and crooks.
In short, within the Christianity I know and love, I find the affirmation of every Unitarian Universalist principle. I can participate in this fellowship and still “love the Lord” in spite of my aunt’s concerns and my former pastor’s fascination with my decisions.
Within the Christianity I know and love, I find the promise of Yahweh to Hagar that from her son Ishmael would come a great nation, and so I can extend joyful acceptance to my Muslim brothers and sisters regardless of what I understand about their religion, acknowledging that extremists come in every creed, skin tone and hat preference.
My cousin Polly once gave me the dating advice: “If you both agree on everything, one of you is not necessary.”
Can you make room in your heart for the individuals and people groups that unsettle you? Can we find a place in our inclusive congregations for those with exclusive beliefs?
I once was afraid to delve so deeply, to open my heart so vulnerably within relationships with those who did not share my spirituality and religious practices. But I didn’t recognize it as fear; I thought I was abiding by the rules of my holy book: “bad company corrupts good character.” “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership can righteousness have with wickedness? Or what fellowship does light have with darkness?” “Friendship with the world is enmity with G-d.” I could recite these verses in my sleep. Maybe I have. There’s no one at home to tell me.
It is not that I believe these scriptures to be false or without merit. Bad company very often does corrupt good character. But what is “bad company”? Who are the “unbelievers”? How do I define “the world”?
For a significant portion of my life, “the world” as I understood it was anyone who did not believe as my church believed. We somehow glossed over the parts about Jesus being willing to invest in everyone: the rich and the poor, the abused and the abusers, those shunned by members of his own religious establishment.
Let me rephrase: every soul in the world was welcome at my church. It’s just that it was more of a “come as you are, and eventually you will agree with us” invitation.
Though their strive for Christian conversions is out of genuine compassion.
I have enduring love and respect for my former minister and his wife. They have given thirty years of their lives to thousands of north shore families, including mine – walking them through crises, recoveries and life’s many precious moments. Their church gives bountifully to humanitarian efforts all around the globe. In their desire to redeem and heal the world, they are no different than Unitarians. In the words of my twelve step program, our definitions matter less than our willingness to do the work.
In our own way each of us has echoed the conditional invite. Because disagreement isn’t warm and fuzzy. No one plans for it on a Sunday afternoon. “Hey, I have no plans after church. Do you want to debate the defunding of Planned Parenthood?”
Our western mindset informs us that either someone is for us or they are against us, you are either right or you are wrong, while Talmudic study emphasizes the value of a good question over dogma and an openness to all possibilities. This is why the saying goes, “Ask two Jews, get three opinions.”
I began professionally breaking away from my church because I felt suffocated by our insular environment. I frantically searched for jobs in human services, from caring for abused and traumatized children to mentally and physically disabled adults. I thirsted for interaction with every kind of person. And as I found a sense of self-worth and accomplishment in secular environments, and as I sifted through the positive and negative of all I had experienced, my heart was able to slowly open to the possibility of emotional intimacy and deep spiritual connection that transcends all of our arbitrary dividing lines, even the label “Christian.” My heart opened so wide I discovered I had not wandered in the slightest, but all along I had been swimming in a sea of G-d thinking I had forsaken his faith, hope and love, when in reality I was finding him everywhere.