Holy Days in the Twilight Zone

An Interfaith Exploration

A sermon offered December 22, 2002

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Submitted for your perusal…

A ground between all known ground.  A faith between between all religions.  Humans celebrate in the winter to dispel the ambiguity of this place – yet that is the zone where insight grows.  There is a sacred space in every heart not captured in any scripture – though glimmers can be found in all holy texts.  Our Zone.  Where the collected wisdom of all life is honored – a zone which – like our very universe – ever expands.  Often we enter it alone in the long nights of the soul.  Let us enter together: the ground of human searching, the zone of the ethical life.  There’s the signpost up ahead – it guides our way to -- the Unitarian Universalist Zone

Readings:

Hindu Tale

A disciple came to his teacher who told him,  "God has many names, and one of these is Rama. If you look for God in all things, you will find safety wherever you go."  The disciple departed, chanting, "Rama, Rama," wherever he went.

One day he came to a village where a wild elephant was on the loose.  As the disciple approached, the people of the village ran and warned him that the elephant had been heard nearby. "I am not worried," the disciple said.  "As long as I see God in all things, I will not be harmed." The villagers persisted with warnings, but he would not listen.  "The elephant is God, I am God, all about me is God-so why should I be frightened?"  He entered the village. Indeed, there was a mad elephant in the street and, when the elephant saw the man, he charged. "I am God and you are God," the disciple chanted.  Even as the villagers cried out to help the disciple, the elephant picked him up and threw him, nearly killing him.

Weeks later, after healing from his injuries, the disciple returned to his guru with this.  "You told me that if I saw God in all things I would be safe.  But look what has happened to me!"

"Oh, foolish disciple," the teacher replied.  "You were right to see God in yourself and in the elephant.  But how could you fail to hear the warning of God in the voice of the villagers?"

The Burden by the River (Zen Buddhist)

Two monks were walking along the bank of a swift river. They met a young woman who could not cross alone. One of the monks picked up the young woman and carried her to the other side.

Some time later, the other monk said to his companion, "Did you forget that it is forbidden to touch a woman? Have you forgotten the vows you have taken?"

The other monk answered, "Brother, I left the young woman on the bank of the river. Are you still carrying her?"

The Patience of a Friend (Jewish)

One day the patriarch Abraham saw a man walking through the desert. He invited the traveler into his tent to dine and spend the night. Of course, the fellow eagerly accepted the hospitality.

However, as Abraham was preparing the meal, he learned that his guest was a pagan. Abraham asked the man to leave without giving him so much as a fig to eat.

That night God appeared to Abraham in a dream and asked, "Why did you treat your guest so poorly?"

Abraham replied, "Because he did not worship you, the one true God. "

God said, "Abraham, I have put up with him for eighty years. Couldn't you have endured him for one night?"

Sleeping Cat:  Muslim

Muhammad was teaching in the desert, reciting from the Koran to a group of listeners.  As he was speaking, a sick cat meandered into the camp, sidled up to Muhammad, and went to sleep on the hem of his exquisite robe.

Muhammad continued to speak all day long and the cat slept on the hem of his robe, finding warmth and healing in the shadow of the prophet.

When the day came to an end, everyone returned to their tents. The prophet, seeing the cat asleep on his robe, took a sharp knife and cut off the hem of his robe where the cat was sleeping. In this way the prophet destroyed the most beautiful of garments, but left the cat undisturbed in its slumber.

A Piece of Truth (Buddhist)

Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance and evil, was passing through a village one day with his entourage when he saw a man walking down the road in deep meditation.  Suddenly the man's eyes lit up as he leaned over and picked up an object.

Mara's entourage asked, "What did the man find on the ground?"

" A piece of truth, " Mara explained.

"How awful!  Doesn't this bother you when people discover a piece of truth; O evil one?"

"No," Mara replied. "Soon after this they usually make a belief out of it."

Sermon:

Picture, if you will, a world grown rapidly dense.  A world in which humanity is forced to live so closely to one another that all illusions are fading – there are no truly private islands.  Picture a world in which people encounter one another and discover that we have much in common – we all want, need, all feel so many things, find that we all hunger for meaning, justice, and home. Yet in this world there are such gulfs of understanding that people seem to see with radically different eyes and cherish differences that they do not know how to reconcile.  Picture, if you will, a world grown so small that if a man were to throw a spear forward it could circle the whole of it and hit him in the back.  Picture it – but there will be no need to use your imagination – you only need to wake up.  You’ll find yourself in – the Twilight Zone -- the Land where the hard questions are asked – and where the hard questions live.

There is a twilight zone episode in which a cranky man who can’t stand other people with all their preferences, differences, and ideas, discovers how to make them all disappear and then finds the world strangely lonely.  He then discovers how to produce people just like himself and fills the world with them – but discovers he isn’t so happy with that either.   By the close of the episode he has returned the world to the way it was and just has to learn how to live with it all.  If only in thirty minutes to an hour we could learn so profound a lesson and find our lives transformed – but – we can explore that later.  The complicated, irritating, wondrous world is not just a figment of the Twilight Zone – it is our world now – filled with people who for countless generations lived in ignorance of one another and of one another’s gods – and yet still found enough to fight over with neighbor after neighbor.  Now the walls between the people and the cultures of the world are thinning and we find ourselves constantly challenged in so many ways – just like that cranky man in the Twilight Zone Episode. 

While some religions attempt to fashion a world of identical people they don’t succeed.  There are too many Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, Pagans, Bahais, Catholics who also find the encounter refreshing, who enjoy the experience of difference and can feel their way to something much deeper and more real.  The world’s religions are full of warnings to people to look beneath their own personalities for deeper truths – to listen beyond even the personalities of others and find the wisdoms of life.  Too often people turn to religions hoping to bypass the process of seeking answers, hoping to find answers without ambiguity.  Plus, it’s easy to get caught up in personality, opinion, text, my set of answers if I can find them.

But it is an ambiguous space in which the answers live.  The answers live in the difficult spaces between people, the spaces where original ideas live, shift, and are changed by time and circumstance, by science, by discovery, by art, insight – the answers live in a place that is dimly lit only by insight and courage – a place that we might call – the twilight zone.

For some reason, though, Unitarian Universalists seem determined to have these weird encounters – we seek them out – carrying in our principles, purposes, and living tradition, a commitment to finding the common path among the world’s religions.  However, just because it is a commitment does not make it easy – we are brave and squeamish at times.  Not because we want to be – narrow minded – but because there’s a shock to the system in encountering difference and in another way – our world turns slightly on edge and we can feel disoriented – we see ourselves more sharply, too. 

It reminds me of games that children sometimes like to play – of being surprised, of handling worms, beetles, spiders, snakes – of sometimes touching something so gross and squiggly you can hardly make it stay in your hand.  It is horrible and wonderful, too.  But that’s only amusement – when it’s a matter of moral life and death, of global peace, of consciousness or mindlessness – the need to pick up the worm or the beetle and see the value in it is far more pressing. 

Like any good science fiction story the real alien is our fear – not “the other” – but a part of us that fears – change, challenge.  Like any good science fiction story the alien is our own fear.  Diana Eck, Director of the Religious Pluralism Project, says religious pluralism here, in the US, particularly, is complete and irrevocable.  We have seen the other and it is us – we are, quite simply, quite complexly, diverse.  It is a challenge.  Eck says we’re afraid -- the irony is that we are afraid of ourselves – for we are the diversity.  In a nation and at time when we preach the value of freedom and diversity we encounter its sharp edge.  Eck says,  “we have to take seriously the religious freedom that is part of our constitution.  Religious freedom brings religious diversity.  Now we have it.  We have lots of it.  Yet, diversity itself is not pluralism.            Pluralism requires that we engage with that diversity – that we find ways to know one another because we can't live at such close quarters with one another without knowing more about one another than we do.  We are afraid not of some mythic distant nation but of our neighbor, ourselves.  And fear is the key.  Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myth, who mapped the archetypal journey of the hero, said that,  “The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure--fearlessness and achievement.”  In this thin skinned and scared world we need this heroism of the real courage of life – of fearlessness in the service of the achievements that we need so badly for the human race to succeed and survive.

So I celebrate our Unitarian Universalist courage – at the Season that bears Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Solstice, Christmas, Diwali, and the Christian New Year.  I celebrate our courage that we are willing as a religion to move into that Twilit Zone where the answers are not fed to us, where we will encounter difference – not for amusement, but to be changed, to learn, to connect more creatively with our brothers and sisters in this all too small world. 

That yearning for our courage in the eerie and uncertain places led me to the Twilight Zone with its moral lessons served with humor and insight.  Perhaps it was his birth on Christmas Eve that led Rod Serling into his own Twlight Zone.  Serling, the show’s creator, was direct in tackling issues like our alienation from the earth, from one another, religion, the state, from our moral compass, from our sense of purpose.  He chose the allegorical format of science fiction to do that – perhaps because it welds together two contrasting realities – science and fiction and stretches our minds in a multitude of directions.  Serling himself said "Things which couldn't be said by a Republican or Democrat could be said by a Martian."  He could have said – “Things which couldn't be said by a politician could be said by a Unitarian Universalist.”  For so he was – a Unitarian Universalist.  His writing of the Twilight Zone was a clear expression of the complexity and fruitful moral questioning of Unitarian Universalism.  For our post-modern world is one in which the old maps have been torn up and we have to navigate according to fresh views of reality or perish.  Perhaps it has been ever so.  The world has always been a place where the truth lives between ideas – not in them – because an idea can be frozen in time and frozen in space.  Perhaps we will not find the hope we long for as the winter carols sound out.  Perhaps it will be when more people are able to truly engage in diversity -- to live in it – to understand that there is no one text for the world, no one name for God, no detailed code – other than love one another, make that love active, alive, tender, and always strive to enlarge that love.  Confident in ourselves on the heroes journey of this life and odd place where differences meet.

Eck said, “It's made me much clearer about the humility that all of us need to comport ourselves with. We are not in the position of being the judges of others, nor in the position of being able to fully understand what, as we would put it, God is up to in the world.”

Rod Serling presented this humility in other language -- by placing humanity as a tiny emergence in a giant cosmos – a creature of question and puzzle, whose freedom and integrity are the key to any hope that the world, the future has.

Gene Roddenberry, creator of  Star Trek said about Serling: "No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves."

Serling died young, of a complications in surgery, in 1975. He left a legacy of incisive writing – including Film and radio scripts, plays, and serious drama – and surprised his creative peers when he began to work on The Twilight Zone in 1959.  He had a voice that could set an atmosphere, get your attention and drop you off the edge of the earth all at the same moment.

Joseph Campbell said: “Every religion is true one way or another, when understood metaphorically.  But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”

To be stuck in a metaphor sounds like science fiction.  If only in thirty minutes to an hour we could learn so profound a lesson and find our lives transformed – a lesson for our time – a lesson free of dogma – free of low rhetoric – free to range the world of human wisdom.  But perhaps it can happen – and does here – every week, every time we share and explore, and act from the heart in the present.  We have known we were here – quietly wrestling our questions, living in the spaces between – the fresh new places of the soul’s adventureRod Serling said – in the Episode the Obsolete Man, “That any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man that ideology is obsolete. A case to be filed under M for mankind … In the Twilight Zone.” Perhaps he could say this because he knew that the faith of the future is beyond the boundaries of one faith alone but mingles the many into the one.  Perhaps he could say this because he knew that his faith was equal to the challenge – if it could only hear the alarming cries of the times.  If you visit the Twilight Zone again you will notice – it raises questions – moral questions – questions that shape our response to the world and all its need.  And if you go back – as we go back now – you will find that it is seldom the answers that bear fruit – it is more often the questions – not the road markers – the free twist in the road that leads us to the truth larger than any one faith, that leads us into the Unitarian Universalist Zone.

A Sufi Tale of Nuts

A sad fellow sat down under a nut tree to contemplate his difficulties. As he brooded, he noticed a pumpkin vine with several large pumpkins near the base of the tree.

"See," the fellow said to himself, "Why, if God were clever, He would not only have created a world without misery but would have used His power more wisely. Here is a strong, vibrant tree capable of producing pumpkins, yet it is filled with tiny nuts that carry no weight at all.  And this weak little vine, which looks like it could die at any moment, is supporting several big pumpkins. If God were wise, those pumpkins would grow on the tree, and the nuts would grow on the vine."

As the fellow was pondering the weight of his wisdom, suddenly a nut fell from the tree and landed squarely atop his head.  The man looked upand then said, "Oh, God, forgive me.  If one of those pumpkins had fallen on my head, I'd be a dead man. Great is your wisdom."

A Circle of Light (Sufi)

One evening Nasrudin was seen outside his house, rummaging on his hands and knees by lantern light. A friend came by and asked what he was doing.

"I'm looking for a lost key," said Nasrudin.

The friend got down on his hands and knees to help with the search. After some time the friend asked, "Where, exactly did you lose this key? "

Nasrudin answered, "I lost it in the house. But there is more light out here."

Christian:

There was a monk who would never give advice-just questions. If anyone came to him for wisdom, he would always answer with a question. This style was often helpful.

One day Father Theophane approached the monk and said, "I'm here on retreat, and I was wondering: could you give me a question to ponder?"

The monk thought briefly and responded, "My question for you is this: what do they need?"

Father Theophane went away disappointed and a few hours later returned for clarification. "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear before, I'm here to work on my own spiritual life, not to reflect upon my calling.  Could you possibly give me a question to ponder along these lines?"

"In that case," the monk said, "the question would be: what do they really need?"