A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
May 11, 2003
Two summers ago, in a used bookstore in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, this little volume presented itself to me — the lectures of Rabindranath Tagore at the Unitarian Manchester College in Oxford, England in May 1930. Opening the cover, I found this: "Carl Seaburg, 1944." The book had come from the library of a dear friend, Carl Seaburg, who had recently died, so I knew this book was to go home with me. It got me thinking about Tagore.
At a time of change, a time of moving when old papers and memories are gone through, there are reminders of the trajectory of one's life, of roads taken and not taken and how great a difference it made.
And then I wonder which is the greatest religious value and prize: peace, or unrest?
You can think back across the tracks of your own lifetime to times of violent clashes when continents seem to collide in your head, from which there arose, or around which there seemed to glow, a kind of tranquillity you couldn't account for.
Last Wednesday was the 142nd birthday of Rabindranath Tagore. He was acclaimed as India's greatest poet. He loved Gandhi and argued ferociously with him because both were trying to get the relation of East and West, of India and Britain and America and the World, of Hindu and Muslim and Jew and Christian and Buddhist — to get the convergence, the intersection, right. He'd seen a bigger universe and had to make all its parts one.
He grew up in a universe, as I did, a particular universe with its assumptions and truths and values. His was a Hindu universe. He had found his life in its strengths and he had felt the suffocation of its limitations. For one thing, he had been made to marry a ten-year-old girl he had never met. He watched the violence born of fear and resentment between Muslims and Hindus.
He was not the first in his family to feel the limitations and contradictions. His father had been the greatest figure in the history of the Brahmo Samaj — a new progressive religious movement in India that was then and is now affiliated with American Unitarianism. Tagore himself was a Brahmo and a leader of the Brahmos. But even his progressive father had reverted to the old and outworn custom of arranging marriages for his sons with very young girls. Tagore was very vocal in condemning the practice, virtually making a campaign out of it.
He was an artist. He saw and heard what others do not, and lived out of a vision of beauty. In the Unitarian Manchester College chapel in Oxford, he said
. . . my religion is a poet's religion . . . Its touch comes to me through the same unseen and trackless channel as does the inspiration of my songs.1
In his many conversations with Einstein, with whom he fundamentally disagreed, he reached the conclusion that truth is a subtler concept than Einstein realized, and in this, he sided with the quantum theorists Heisenberg and Bohr.
His vision of beauty led him to contradictory places. He lived in a country that the British had colonized; Britain, and Europe, then so confident of their own cultural and racial superiority, so sure of the rightness of centuries of colonizing the lands of darker peoples, so incapable of seeing India and its people, and therefore so thoroughly racist. Britain honoured Tagore with knighthood, but within a few years he had repudiated the knighthood to protest Britain's imperialism. And yet Tagore pleaded with India, and with Gandhi, not to sever India's connections with Britain and the world, because he believed each had some essential contribution to make to the divine fulness of the world. Yet he didn't mind declaring at a dinner in his honour in New York, in front of Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau,
The age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science. But you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortune with this gift. A great portion of the world suffers from your civilization.
In 1930 he supported Zionism as a necessary "effort to preserve and enrich Jewish culture and tradition" but he warned that its success depended on Arab-Israeli cooperation, and he added,
If the Zionist leadership will insist on separating Jewish political and economic interests in Palestine from those of the Arabs ugly eruptions will occur in the Holy Land.
He lived every moment, even the painful ones, and dared to learn the truth that every moment might teach; and from the moments lived with full attention he learned that the nationalism he once championed was a deadly curse, and it was then that he turned to the vision of one world-soul and came to a new life that led Yeats to say of him:
A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image . . .2
In his poetry and his songs, and in his essays and speeches, he pleaded for the renunciation of nationalism, and for the marriage of East and West. He lectured, read poetry, and sang his songs at Harvard and Urbana, Illinois, and in Japan and Russia, in Calcutta and London, and at the British Unitarian institution Manchester College, Oxford — in the same pulpit of the chapel where I, too, lectured, though it must be said that Tagore packed the chapel and I got twelve.
Once, the emperor of China invited him to come, and the trip to China was made into a very grand ceremonial reënactment of the time, centuries earlier, when Buddhism had been carried from its birthplace India to China. Tagore was carried about on a sedan-chair and in one grand event he was to speak before a crowd of 3,000. Processions of people representing nine great world religions marched into the great hall, and just to add an international feel to it all, a band played an American tune, a song just then popular in America. So as the processions representing the nine great religions processed in, the band played "Yes, We Have No Bananas."
And then he felt the call to open a college in India based upon ancient Bengali modes of learning, but drawing in an international faculty representing many faiths. It was a great enterprise but it meant leaving his old home and relocating to the Bengali wilderness. But he had two young daughters whose lives were rooted in that old hometown. What to do? Tagore reverted to the old Indian customs, rationalizing all the way, and married off his 10-year-old and his 15-year-old daughter so he could do it, a breathtaking act of hypocrisy.
Once, he said of a British artist friend that he had "the vision to see truth and the heart to love it." But this time Tagore had neither the vision to see the truth about himself nor the heart to love it. So he simply denied the inner contradiction, and rolled on, justifying himself on the basis of the worst, the most outworn features of his religious tradition.
Where have we seen that?
Had he, in that moment, lived according to the truth of his own life, he would have had to face the contradictions between his duty to follow his calling to open that school, and his duty to his daughters. He might have found a more enlightened path.
He had his contradictions, his failures of vision and courage. But that is not what stands out about the life of Tagore. We remember him because in so many ways over the course of his life, he had the vision to see the truth and the heart to love it. He saw beyond and through what everybody else was so sure of.
After Gandhi was arrested yet another time, Tagore gave vent to the questions he felt deeply, agonized questions others somehow swept under their dogmatic rugs, but an anguished Tagore had to ask:
God, you have sent messengers, life after life,
To this callous earth;
They have said `Forgive all sins,' they have told us `Love —
From your heart all malice remove.'
They are venerable men, worthy of reverence, but we
In these dark days reject them with ritual futility.
I see secret violence under cover of darkness
Slaughtering the helpless,
I see the just weeping in solitary silence,
Now power to protest, their only offence;
I see tender youths hitting out blindly
Cracking their heads against stones in their agony.
Today my voice is choked, my flute is without note,
The prison of the no-moon night
Has extinguished my world, given me nightmares;
And this is why I ask, through my tears —
Those who poison your air and blot out the sun,
Do you truly forgive them, do you truly love them?
And then, though he was quite ill, he set out across India to Poona, where Gandhi lay in prison fasting, very weak, in the midst of a "fast unto death" until Britain revoked a new policy separating the Untouchables from the rest of the Indian people. The British were moved. They revoked the policy, and Gandhi agreed to take food, but not until Rabindranath sang one of his Bengali songs, the Mahatma's favourite.
Tagore remained critical of Gandhi's ascetic practices and the frequent fasts that weakened him and endangered his life: to Tagore, there was nothing life-affirming about ascetic practices; they were life-denying. The two of them continued to argue, but Gandhi called Tagore "The Great Sentinel," because, he said, his own judgment was not infallible and he needed Tagore's warnings. And Tagore, in joining Gandhi in denouncing Untouchability, said
Everlasting shame an ignominy will be our deserved fate if we fail . . . to uphold all that is pure and just in the great religious traditions of our country . . . We must not, we cannot fail to establish our spiritual integrity before the tribunal of world conscience.
And he kept up his argument with Einstein, saying that humanity is morally superior to nature, and that our humanity grows as we learn and find our way, even in our sins and errors.
The vision to see truth and the heart to love it. Emerson wrote — more than once used this phrase, which was his own translation from the German of something Goethe wrote — "Every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul." There are those experiences that alter and extend our perceptions and then startle us further by provoking, evoking, summoning powers and capacities we never knew.
In India and Pakistan, they are still fighting, and in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and in places too tragically many to name, they are still murdering each other in the name of religion, worshipping the god of force, a god who plays favorites and sends forth his chosen in bloody conquest. They cannot see the whole, dare not question the old truths, have not the vision to see the truth and love it and so unlock new faculties of the soul. But to see the truth can mean . . . the shattering of our calm, the disturbing of our peace.
Yet that is sometimes the way to peace — a breaking open that reveals the calm at the heart of all things — a disturbing calm, an unresting peace. From that breaking open there comes new capacities of soul.
This peace is hardly the absence of tension, a place without the world's contradictions, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and skies are not cloudy all day. This peace is a creative force, a kind of artistry, that sees truth and loves it and so unlocks a new faculty of the soul — this creative force and, with it, the peace that passes all understanding.
How do we find our way through our lives, with all the tangle and contradiction? How do we know what to do?
I think some important part of the answer is, Pay attention. Once, Tagore said:
Whoever wishes to,
May sit in meditation
With eyes closed
To know if the world be true or false.
I, meanwhile,
Shall sit with hungry eyes,
To see the world
While the light lasts.3
Take it all in. Let the artistry within you find the color and meaning and relation and place and essential significance of everything.
The poet Rilke said — you have heard this in my bit of the new member classes when I do the story of Unitarian Universalism, but here is a fuller quote —
be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it—but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.
Very often our approach to life, expressed in the religious paths many of us had taken earlier in life, was denial, staying a mistaken course and not learning from the journey.
The shaking of old systems, the insights and the experiences that shake our own inner universes — shaking the foundations, upheaval and the jolt of a new question — we don't like these things. We figure religion must be about finding peace, so in the name of tranquillity and spiritual peace we might just shut out the annoying question, nail down the furniture so the shaking won't move anything, pull the shades against alien light.
But that is not how anyone ever found the great peace at the heart of all things. How is this churning, rocking thunder in any sense peace? How do we love hard truth?
The beauty and the harmony are in our own eyes.
And that peace is the harmony of all things, the artistry that filters out no colour, but weaves a gorgeous mosaic, hears in the howl and roar the elements of a symphony.
It is the calm soul of all things that made worlds of life and beauty out of exploding stars. The storm and the calm are one. And, said Emerson, "the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in" us.
In the book of Tagore's lectures at Manchester College Oxford I found this:
In the very beginning of his career Man asserted in his bodily structure his first proclamation of freedom against the established rule of Nature. At a certain bend in the path of evolution he refused to remain a four-footed creature, and the position which he made his body to assume carried with it a permanent gesture of insubordination. For there could be no question that it was Nature's own plan to provide all land-walking mammals with two pairs of legs, evenly distributed along their lengthy trunk heavily weighted with a head at one end. . . .This was his great venture, the relinquishment of a secure position of his limbs, which he could comfortably have retained . . .
This freedom of view and freedom of action have been accompanied by an analogous mental freedom in Man through his imagination, which is the most distinctly human of all our faculties. It is there to help a creature who has been left unfinished by his designer . . . Like all artists he has the freedom to make mistakes, to launch into desperate adventures contradicting and torturing his psychology or physiological normality. This freedom is a divine gift lent to mortals who are untutored and undisciplined; and therefore the path of their creative progress is strewn with debris of devastation . . .
Every true freedom that we may attain in any direction broadens our path of self-realization, which is the superseding of the self. The unimaginative repetition of life within a safe restriction imposed by Nature may be good for the animal, but never for [the Human], who has the responsibility to outlive his life in order to live in truth.
And finally, this. As he lay dying, his final testament was read. It said:
And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage.
May we be together in silence.
Rabindranath Tagore:
I sometimes detect within myself a battle-ground where two opposing forces are constantly in action, one beckoning me to peace and cessation of all strife, the other egging me on to battle. It is as though the restless energy and the will to action of the West were perpetually assaulting the citadel of my Indian placidity. Hence this swing of the pendulum between passionate pain and calm detachment, between lyrical abandon and philosophizing, between love of my country and mockery of patriotism, between an itch to enter the lists and a longing to remain wrapt in thought. This continual struggle brings in its train a mood compounded of frustration and resignation.4
And in June 1894:
It is as if I am now standing in a place outside the current of time, unconscious of the gradually altering set of the world. The fact is that here, away from Calcutta in my inner world, time may be stretched or compressed and clocks do not work in the usual way. Duration is measured by intensity of feeling; the emotions of the moment seem endless. Where the outside world with its flow of incident is not constantly employed in checking on my daily activities, moments become hours and hours moments, as in a dream. And then it seems to me that the subdivisions of time and space are figments of my mind. Each atom is immeasurable and each moment infinite.6
[A month or so later:]
The day-world calls to mind European music with its various concords and discords, orchestrated into a great, purposeful ensemble. And the night-world is like the sphere of Indian music with its unadulterated melody, sombre and poignant. Both move us, though they are in striking contrast. But why should that disturb us? Pairs of opposites lie at the very root of creation: king and queen, night and day, unity and diversity, the eternal and the evolving.
We Indians are under the rule of night; we are besotted with the eternal, the One. Our melodies are intended for the solitary individual; European music is for the multitude. Our music removes us from the domain of everyday joys and sorrows to a region devoid of company, as aloof as the universe; the music of Europe revels in the perpetual oscillations of the human condition.7
And here are a couple of his well-known epigrams:
Faith is the bird that feels the light
and sings when the dawn is still dark.
In a crack in the garden wall a flower
Blooms, nameless, lowly and obscure.
`Shame on this weed!' the plants tell each other;
The sun rises and calls, `Are you well, brother?'
Today's service is not about Mothers Day, but about another great figure from our Unitarian spiritual tradition, Rabindranath Tagore.
But let not this day go by without mention of Julia Ward Howe, who first proposed Mothers Day in 1870, Julia Ward Howe, part of the circle of Transcendentalists, friend of Emerson and Parker, member of the Unitarian Church of the Disciples in Boston. A decade after she wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic to honor the Civil War, the heroism of John Brown, and the ending of slavery, she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines,, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration, hoping to gather together women in a congress of action. She failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. It took the work of two generations of women named Anna Jarvis finally to win from President Woodrow Wilson the first declaration of Mothers Day in 1914.
Here, in part, is what Julia Ward Howe said in her proclamation of 1870:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
Every time we gather here, we do so in the name and by the grace of the souls who preceded us in this great spiritual movement. Julia Ward Howe, Samuel Gridley Howe — the great abolitionist lawyer — Rabindranath Tagore, Lydia Maria Child — when we bring our whole selves into this place, they are not far away from us; they are part of us, and we may gather in humble reverence, gather by the light of their lives, and for the sake of those who will come after us, some, no doubt, from this Society, some who gather in this Great Hall, to lift the burdens from many, to bring light in times of confusion and thick gloom, to change the tide, move the center of gravity, enlarge the scope of human possibility, kindle new hope, open hearts to a greater Love.
In reverence, in gratitude, in hope, in the presence of all those who went before us and will go after us: — Let us be together in Silence.