Confessions of a Commandment Breaker

One October evening during the 80’s, I told my friend Worley that I’d just come back from a worship service at a Nazarene Church.

Worley was not pleased. He was an Episcopalian. “Ray, you have a problem,” he said. “I’ve known you to attend services at Presbyterian and Lutheran churches, but you don’t seem to stop there. You’re like having affairs with religions. You don’t care what a church believes in as long as the music has some melody and rhythm and the people there don’t think you’re an alien from another planet.”

“What’s wrong with enjoying all religions and denominations?” I asked.

“Plenty. When you worship in a church, it’s like signing a contract saying that you believe in the same things as they do.”

“True,” I said. “But I don’t sign exclusive contracts.”

Several years later, I’m even more guilty of the sin Worley accused me of. I’ve been a long-term member of a UU church, but I have paid an occasional visit to a Lutheran church that I like in inner-city Cincinnati, a couple of Hindu temples, a Buddhist meditation group, and so on. My children have attended a Jewish pre-school, a Baptist Summer School, and a UU Sunday School.

Some of my Christian friends, including Worley, may accuse me of breaking the first commandment, “thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In that case, they might as well know that this sinner has had a long history. I was born and raised a Hindu and a polytheist. As a child, I used to go with my family to temples of various gods and goddesses and even a few Christian and Muslim prayer services. My mother prayed to any god who would answer her prayers. And she had a lot to pray about, with the early death of my father and the raising of ten children, one with polio and one or two with behavioral problems. Because of my mother’s open-mindedness, people of different races and faiths were always welcome at our house.

Longing for a moral compass, I found Hinduism too complicated and at the age of sixteen, encouraged by a Jesuit priest, I fell in love with Jesus. But it took me a decade to admit to myself that the gap between Jesus and Christianity was at least as wide as the one between Gandhi and Hinduism. So I became a Unitarian Universalist.

Being a UU allows me to be open to all spiritual experiences. Now I could attend a Christian church on Good Friday and listen to the most moving passage I’ve ever found in any text, religious or secular, where Jesus, after being whipped, spit upon and crucified, still says, “father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” That instant in my mind, Jesus seems to share the cross with Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Matthew Sheppard, and others in whom I see the triumph of love and forgiveness over hate.

On another day, I could see myself at a temple to Goddess Durga in Vijayawada, my birthplace where goddess worship is more popular than “god worship.” Partly because I grew up not knowing a father, I am quite comfortable with God as a mother. Besides, it’s cool being part of the one-sixth of humanity who have no trouble thinking of God as a woman.

Belief in a God or Goddess to me is a humble acknowledgment of the Great Mystery that is the universe, the metaphor that represents among other things boundless Space and endless Time which I will never fathom. A religion is like a poem full of imagination that revolves around this Great Mystery. Anyone who believes in only one religion to me is like someone who only appreciates one poem. A humanist friend of mine thinks there’s another reason why I’m a polytheist. He said, “what better way is there to oppose religious fanaticism than to believe in all religions?” I hope to Goddess he’s right.

(Oct 2002; revised 2013)