When the Old Tracks are Lost: A Sermon for Divali
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 18 October 2009 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2009-10-18-9am-sermon.mp3}
Rabrindrinath Tagore was a Hindu poet whose words are entwined through our worship today. Born in 1861, near Calcutta, he became—like his father and grandfather before him-- a leader in the Hindu reform movement called the Brahmo Samaj and part of what has been called the Indian renaissance.
Tagore hated school as a child and was a poor student
So much so that he quit formal schooling at age 14,
But when his father took him out to the countryside and gave him lessons--Sanskrit, astronomy, religion—and then afterwards,
Then two of them would roam the forests and fields together,
He loved it.
Being so close to nature and learning from a close and affectionate teacher.
He grew up to found colleges and schools, convinced that education could change life for the poor in his country.
Albert Schweitzer called him the “Goethe” of India and in 1913,
When the Nobel Prize committee met, they considered Tolstoy, Ibsen, Strindberg, Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, but in the end,
They gave the Nobel Prize for literature to Tagore, the first person from Asia ever to win it
“I thought that my voyage had come to its end,
At the last limit of my power,
That the path before me was closed,
That provisions were exhausted….
But I find that your Will knows no end in me . . . .
And where the old tracks are lost,
New country is revealed with its wonders.”
“Where the old tracks are lost… “
I love that turn of phrase.
How well it expresses that sense of dislocation we can feel as the wheel of life turns, turns, and we are faced with changes that are inevitable.
A couple of weeks ago, Gary’s brother Earl Smith spoke hereabout retirement after 40 years at Colby College. He said he knew he was feeling kind of at sea but couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
And then he found the words. “I realized,” he said, “that I had lost my place,” I had lost my place in life and needed to find a new one. And so he did.
This sense of disorientation can happen to us when a child goes off to school; a change happens at work, an illness comes into our family’s life.
Or even with something as ordinary as the darkness coming earlier and earlier as the autumn deepens into winter.
It’s part of life, we know.
There is a part of us that resists change, that fights it, thinks we aren’t up to the task.
“When the old tracks are lost. . . . .”
It is late October
Twilight comes earlier; it is chilly.
I’m fighting the early cold and dark with all that is in me, I realize.
I’m a born and bred New Englander, I love all the seasons, or so I thought.
Where did my equanimity go to?
We draw the curtains,
Put another candle on the kitchen table, and
Set a pot of soup on the stove.
And on Sunday we come here
To join with friends from the Hindu community
To hear Radha’s voice again in our worship
To hear the stories and music of this ancient festival of India,
Divali, marked by many things
For me, it couldn’t come at a better time.
It is Diwali and I confess each year I approach this day with a bit of trepidation, a butterfly or two in my stomach.
Hinduism is an ancient religious tradition, with hundreds of gods and goddesses, different scriptures, legends and folk tales, community traditions and home devotional practice. How can I possibly do it justice?
It is not the religious tradition in which I was raised. I studied it in divinity school with Hindu scholar Diana Eck, but one class can only scratch the surface.
I have travelled in India but that was years ago.
I approach Diwali with a very real sense of all I don’t know.
As Unitarian Universalists, we say we draw wisdom from other religious traditions. It is a noble goal, and a tremendous strength of who we are as a people of faith. But it is also a delicate dance that we do, and there are dangers we don’t always mention.
Do we lift up one aspect of a tradition at the expense of another?
If this isn’t our language or culture or religion, is there a risk of taking things out of context, misinterpreting, misunderstanding, simply getting it wrong?
The religious traditions of the world are old, vast, deep, and mysterious
They are the accumulation of hundreds of years of religious practice, ritual, tradition,
Hundreds of years of thinking, study, worship.
They are holy things, handed down from generation to generation.
And, As Diana Eck writes, they are not static, fixed.
“Our religious traditions are more like rivers than monuments.
They are not static and they are not over.
They are still rolling-with forks and confluences, rapids and waterfalls.”
Thankfully, now, there is a conversation among Unitarian Universalists about this topic, cultural misappropriation
Beth Norton serves on the national task force and I am grateful to her for giving me a window into that dialogue. This group is helping us think consciously about how we approach another tradition. The key, as Beth said to me this week, is humility. The sense that we take off our shoes for now we are standing on (someone else’s) holy ground.
This week I delved more deeply into the story of our Unitarian encounter with Hinduism.
There are really two stories.
One, the story of how Unitarian congregations started in India, is a fascinating one that I don’t have time to tell today. Except to say, as some of you know, that the oldest Unitarian congregation in India began in 1812 in Madras, or Chennai, in Southern India.
And that there are 10,000 Unitarians or more in the Khasi Hills, the northeast corner of India. A movement that began in 1880s.
Today, about 12 of these Unitarian congregations have partner churches in the U.S.; others are looking for partners.
The second story is what happened here in America, how we American Unitarians encountered Hinduism on our own soil.
I am indebted to Chris Walton, one time youth director here and now editor of the UU World magazine, for teaching me about this.
It’s a story that begins in the 1720s here in New England
When Cotton Mather, the Boston Puritan minister, wrote letters back and forth to missionaries in southern India.
In 1721, when they mailed him a copy of the New Testament, translated into Tamil, the Indian language, it is believed to be the first book, published in Asia, ever to arrive on American shores.
The next chapter is the ships that sailed in 1787 from places like Salem on the north Shore of Boston, ships that sailed to China and India and brought back trinkets, artifacts, curios.
People here at home were intrigued and wanted to learn more.
One Salem minister learned 12 languages including Sanskrit to pursue his love of this ancient Indian civilization.
But really the important chapter for us Unitarian Universalists would be in 1795 when Joseph Priestley emigrated to America
(Priestley was a British Unitarian minister and scientist; he discovered the chemical element oxygen).
In 1799 he published the first scholarly book in America about Hinduism
A few years later, when former president John Adams got interested in India, Thomas Jefferson told him to read Priestley’s book.
And so Adams did. He discovered errors and omissions in the book but he was hooked.
For the next 5 years, Adams read widely and deeply in Hinduism, confessing to Jefferson that if he’d been a little younger, he’d have become a scholar.
Twenty years later, it was our very own Emerson and Thoreau here in Concord who were reading the Hindu scriptures and probably doing more to make them widely known in America than anyone before them.
Out at Walden Pond, Thoreau would read the Bhagavad-Gita in the morning. and then he’d watch the ice cutters at their work on Walden Pond and think of that ice being packed in sawdust and loaded onto ships and travelling across the ocean to India.
How curious it is, he thought, that I am sitting here at Walden reading the Gita and soon, this water before me will appear in the India, the land where the Gita was written.
“I lay down the book and go to my well for water and lo there I meet the servant of the Brahmin . . . . Who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas….
I meet his servant come to draw water for his master,
And our buckets as it were grate together in the same well.
The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
Emerson, too, was reading Hinduism. By 1830s he owned his own copy of the Bhagavad-Gita and by the 1840s was publishing excerpts in the transcendentalist journal, The Dial. Some scholars think there is more than a hint of Hinduism in Emerson’s concept of the Oversoul.
They were far ahead of their time in bringing other world religions to the broader public’s attention. But as Chris Walton points out, there were dangers here too.
When Emerson chose to focus mainly on the texts of Hinduism, rather than the religion as it was practiced by Hindus, he was leaving something out. Walton writes, “The Unitarian emphasis on the intellectual and ethical dimensions of religion continues today, leading its critics to observe an ongoing blindness to the ritual, communal and visceral dimensions of religion.”
The Transcendentalists, much like John Adams, were swept up in their enthusiasm about Hinduism but they didn’t have much sense of their own limitations in approaching this religion.
* * * * * *
It is Divali. Wherever we are on our journeys this year,
There are times we may think with the poet Tagore that the path before us is closed,
Or at least complicated in some way,
Full of twists and turns,
Strewn with obstacles, or perhaps,
Simply, hidden to our eye.
There are times when, with the poet, we can think that our provisions are exhausted,
Our material provisions. . . .
Our spiritual provisions: will we find the strength we need, the tenacity, the emotional reserves, the steadiness, the calm.
When the old tracks are lost, Rabrindrinath Tagore tells us,
And surely we can trust his voice
This man who saw so much poverty and suffering in Calcutta at first hand
This man who lost his mother as a boy, who lost his wife, his young daughter and son too soon
Surely we can trust his voice
This man who travelled the world bringing his life-affirming vision
His vision of joy in spite of loss
His vision of beauty in spite of pain.
“When the old tracks are lost. . . ..
I find that Your will knows no end in me
And when old words die out on the tongue
New melodies break out in the heart.”
Something lies on the other side of this being lost,
But we aren’t there yet.
We can’t know, and we want to know.
We can’t see, and we want to see.
We don’t dare hope, and we need to hope so badly.
But we are assured, something new WILL be revealed.
It is as if we are travelers in a new land.
The morning will come
The mist will rise
And we will set out on a road we think we do not know,
Only to find that we have known it all along,
That it is a road we know by feel and by heart.
It is morning
We are travelers
Strong, ready, moving forward,
Finding our own place in the world again
One step at a time,
One day by precious day.
May it be so, in your life, and in mine.
Amen.
Reading
“My Voyage” by Rabrindrinath Tagore
I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time had come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.
But I find that your will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares, p. ix.
Chris Walton, “Unitarianism and Early American Interest in Hinduism,” paper written for Introduction to Hinduism class at Harvard Divinity School, located on Walton’s blog, http://www.philocrites.org