On Refusing Limitations of Heritage

Rabbi Rami Shapiro blogged today on his doubts concerning the ability of current interfaith movements to bear much fruit because such efforts too frequently keep each contingent in its own box, frequently not even sharing in prayer together in an aim to keep the religious genetics unmixed. Rabbi Rami wrote:

I love religion the way I love literature and music, but I refuse to be limited to one author, composer or genre. Humans create religion, art, literature, music, science, etc. I am human—it is all my heritage.

I posted that quote and a link to Rabbi Rami's blog post on my facebook wall, raising the issue of misappropriation for a UU friend, who expressed both discomfort and resonance with the rabbi's position. Instead of tracing it more completely in the FB medium, here is my fleshing out of the issue for today:

The uncomfortable part, for me, is tied up in the ways in which I am part of the currently dominant global culture. I'm white, male, American, well-traveled, and over-educated, with eclectic, international, transcultural tastes in food, the arts, and much more. As far as those parts of my identity go, I have the privilege that comes with being part of a dominant group that has historically taken what it wanted with no concern for what that meant to those dominated and using what it took as a tool of that domination. That's clear reason to be mindful of the way I approach the human heritage.

But human culture has always engaged in gene-splicing as well as mutation, if you will. Human cultures, both dominant and dominated always shape themselves in response to what they encounter of various Others. Sometimes drawing the other into the self, other times defining the self by what it rejects in the other. There is no changing that. Christmas is Christian and Pagan and Consumerist and Political and Public and deeply Personal all at the same time, for example. Whatever we encounter, no matter its source, participates in shaping us, and we it, whether we love that fact and use it as a badge and accept it as part of our identity or, alternatively, cringe in rejection of the implication that our lineage is not pure.

I celebrate the mingling of the human waters. If we would mix DNA and culture for a moment, my physical and cultural ancestors come from across the full spectra of Christian (non)belief and (im)piety, and before them my ancestors were Pagan in every stripe of local variety, and before them we were animists and pantheists, and before that we had no words with which to nail down our experience of ourselves in reality. We engaged in human sacrifice and animal sacrifice and vegetal sacrifice and economic sacrifice and personal sacrifice and refusal to sacrifice and irrelevance of sacrifice. We reverenced the heavenly bodies, the forces of nature, deities narrated in stories that were quickly misunderstood, our societies, and ourselves.

And at every stage along my personal ancestral timeline, the system of identity and belief and practice was shaped and reshaped by contact with those at the periphery of those identities and beyond. My European ancestors had several periods of geographic displacement and migration during which they came in comtact with each other and with other Others. The history of Europe includes the fraught interplay of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and others, and between perceived races and ethnicities. Many of the encounters were life-and-death matters for the groups with less power. Both the most benign and the most dangerous encounters all shaped my ancestors. Whether my ancestors were the winners or the losers in a given interchange, they were changed. There has never been such a thing as pure, unmixed culture, religion, spiritual perspective, or identity.

And in the modern era, many of the countries of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and so on, have experienced encounters on a massive scale between immigrant groups and native societies, much to the detriment of the indigenous peoples, as well as between immigrant groups of different cultures, and between those willing immigrants and unwilling immigrants. Where we used to be proud of separate cultures disappearing into the overcooked mass of the melting pot, we now use metaphors that allow separate identities to continue. Something common is still shaped by our common encounters, but religious and other identities persist, changed by their positive and negative relations with others.

In UU congregations, some identify as U, some as U, some as UU, and a great many hyphenate UU with some other spiritual and religious path, while some do not even think of their identity as UU anything, but only as the part that would come after the hyphen. Many of our congregations illustrate that hyphenation with symbols of world religions on display in the sanctuary or on the minister's stole. For all protestation about "misappropriation," we regularly celebrate our identity as inextricably mixed with identities that are not part of our genetic heritage or direct religious lineage but are part of our environmental encounter with the human world.

Rabbi Rami says, "I am human. It is all my heritage." I would argue that that is exactly what the UUA Bylaws say when they define our Sources as:

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
• Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
• Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
• Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

I am human. It is all my heritage. May I be mindful of how I impinge on the world, just as I become aware of how it impinges on me. May I celebrate it all, weigh it all, select what enhances who I am and grow from it, and bracket off what would bring me low or injure others, becoming a renewed me with each new encounter.