Reading: Today’s reading is from page 22 of The End of Faith, by Sam Harris

 

If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world.

I would like to thank you, Alison for giving me the opportunity to preach today. It is an honor that I hope I can live up to. Thanks also to Leo Hourihan, who had the good sense to introduce me to my new friend, Alison. I count myself lucky to have such advocates and mentors. I am young enough to need you, and old enough to really value you.

 

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I know that Alison & Leo are familiar with Sam Harris – the fellow who wrote the snippet I read earlier. I suspect many of you out there have got his number.   If you haven’t heard him, the quick-and-dirty introduction of him is that he is a very smart atheist. The words “smart atheist” remind me of when the weatherman utters the dreaded words “wintery mix.”   You know what I mean? “Wintery-mix?” You hear those words, and your heart sinks. The words “smart atheist” have a similar ring to them. You know it’s going to be cold and you’re going to slide around, but if you want to get anywhere you’ll have to brave it. 

 

When I read Harris’ work my neck gets sore. It’s because I can’t decide whether to nod my head or shake it. I end up doing both. Very confusing.

 

Maybe this is where the term “pain in the neck” comes from. Something that you agree with and disagree with at the same time is bound to give you a pain in the neck.

 

Can I refresh your memory on that reading? Harris questions whether we can regard religion to be “a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity.” If it is to be so, he says, it must be “a matter of present inquiry”—which I take to mean that it must relate directly to the urgent needs of the moment. I’m nodding my head.

 

He concludes, though, that religion is a dismal failure on all these measures. My head is shaking. It keeps shaking for a while, but I have to figure out why. And that is how I ended up with this sermon.

 

But first, a pop quiz. Don’t worry its not hard. As I used to say to encourage my UMass students, “When I ask a frighteningly obvious question, it’s your cue to give me the frighteningly obvious answer.” OK, so here is the question: What is one plus one?

 

Two. Right? 

 

One plus one equals two.

 

If there is a God of present age, this is it. Where would be without the bountiful gifts made possible by this truth? Every field of inquiry, bar none, finds its structural foundation on this premise. The infallibility of the Pope may be a matter of some debate, but the infallibility of one-plus-one-equals-two goes without saying. If this equation was not absolutely dependable, our bridges would teeter and collapse, our Internet would blink and go offline, food distribution would grind to a halt, our economy would collapse, society would sink into chaos. 

 

And yet,

 

Is it only arithmetic out there? Is the elegant, reasonable logic of quantifiable facts enough, by itself, to explain all there is to know about human life?

 

If the one-plus-one-equals-two world is all there is out there, then I’ll concede the point. Old Sam can come over, and we’ll toss all the religions of the world into the bed of the pickup with the dead leaves and the yard waste and take it up to the Montague transfer station. 

 

But wait. Not so fast. Maybe there’s another way of looking at this thing. 

 

Let me begin with a story.

 

* *

Just before I left New York City, I lived in an apartment on Broadway and 123^rd street. The influence of Columbia University trailed off somewhere in the middle of our block and Harlem took over, with the flashing awnings of its bodegas and the stoops where old Latino men play dominoes in the summertime. Late at night I walked out through the small courtyard at the bottom of the airshaft and down a passage leading to the building’s service entrance with its locked wrought iron gate. This was my spot—the place I frequented at all hours of the night when I needed a cigarette.

 

One winter night as I stood at this accustomed spot finishing a Camel Light, a homeless woman approached me. It was quite late, and a moment before the street had been deserted, so her appearance gave me a bit of a fright. She was not old, but there was a resignation in her gaunt expression that made her seem more a ghost than a living person. She was terribly frail, and she wore a thin shirt that was wet through. A cold front had come in off the Hudson, and with it, ragged flurries of snow. The homeless stranger did not ask me for money. She didn’t even ask me for a cigarette. She asked me if I would give her a blanket or a sweater. She was cold. That's all.

 

And yet…

 

I didn’t say anything to her. I just turned away, and the homeless stranger faded back into the night from whence she’d come.

 

Why didn’t I give the woman a blanket?

 

Was it because it would have been too much trouble to go upstairs and get one for her? Was it because blankets are expensive? Was it because I just didn’t want to get involved? No. None of these lame reasons explains why I didn’t help her. It’s worse then that. I basically didn’t think about it at all. I didn’t make any decision at all. My response was more akin to a reflex, like applying the brakes in a car. Or maybe it was kind of like a social convention, like tipping a waiter.

 

Homelessness in America is a problem of staggering proportions. Though I didn’t know the numbers, I had a New Yorker’s jaded knowledge of it. They were everywhere – flopped on cardboard boxes in alleys and in the vestibules of churches, lined up in soup kitchens, asking for change on the sidewalks and in the subways. Trying to avoid them was just part of the drudgery of urban life.  

 

Still, I can’t help thinking about the instant after the homeless stranger asked me for the blanket, right before I turned away. That instant was a barely perceptible amount of time—less time then it takes to inhale and exhale once, and yet what happened within that small frame of time continues to haunt me, more then a dozen years later. Could something, some elusive spark, have ignited that instant, changing the course of events so that I did give her the blanket?

 

Maybe it would have helped if I’d been informed—if I’d known the facts.

 

The Coalition for the Homeless is the best online source of data regarding New York’s homelessness problem. The downloadable fact sheet they provide is sobering—especially considered in light of the current economic climate. “Homelessness in New York City” it says “has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” In February 2011, there were about 39,500 homeless people sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. This number represents a 37 percent increase from 2002. Of the 39,500 homeless people, 15,700 of them (almost half) were children. 

 

This data articulates the problem through the “one-plus-one-equals two” mindset. I do not begrudge the critical strategic importance of this approach for advocacy groups and policy makers, but for you and me, this assessment of the problem has its faults. For one thing, it’s abstract because it turns real suffering people into numbers, and in this way sanitizes the picture. If I actually managed to recognize the human reality behind the data, the overwhelming numbers might paralyze me. After all, I am just one person. What can one person do to help 39,500 people? If 39,500 gathered at Gillette stadium, it would be more than half full! One person’s capacity for compassionate service cannot meaningfully react to half-of-Gillette-stadium of human suffering. 

 

No. The grant writers and advocates may put the numbers to good use in their efforts to find funding or make policy makers squirm, but for the guy standing outside on Broadway, the data was insufficient to change the outcome of the story. In fact, a consciousness of the numbers might’ve made matters worse.

 

The cover story of a recent TIME Magazine suggests that even within the intimate circle of the family, parents instinctively favor the child most likely to survive. The article tells of a species of crested penguin that kicks the smallest egg from the nest, insuring, in this way, the perpetuation of the genetic line. In other words, animals are hard-wired to limit our concern to those most important to us – our mate and our progeny. We have a kind of built in “empathy kill-switch” that excludes everyone else. The homeless stranger should look out for herself. I’m busy taking care of me and mine. Survival is a self-centered affair that doesn’t pretend to be pretty. 

 

Is this true? Is my indifference to the pain of others a natural inheritance? Must I, in order to remain sane, turn away from my brothers and sisters in need? Must I, in my desire to survive, deny the humanity of those less fortunate then myself? 

 

These are appalling conclusions. But what’s the alternative? Facing the suffering of the world without a filter would be like trying to sip water from a fire hose. It’s an unreasonable expectation. Let the 39,500 people go to someone else’s football stadium. My small mind can’t handle all this trouble…

 

Still…

 

That homeless woman might have died that night.

 

And I know that I could have easily saved her life.

 

But I didn’t.

 

I did what was expected of me. I turned away.

 

It was the reasonable thing to do.

 

And yet…

 

This “reasonableness” comes at a profound cost. 

 

In a 1999 speech entitled “The Perils of Indifference” Nobel Laureate and holocaust survivor Elie Weisel said that

 

“indifference is the part of us that makes the human being in-human.”

 

“Indifference” he went on, “is not a response.  It is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees—not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”

 

Weisel, with his prophetic warning, given at the brink of the new millennia, gives us a new equation to work with.

 

“In denying their humanity, we betray our own”

 

One minus one equals one.

 

This is unfamiliar math and yet there is a truth available here that I can attest to. The homeless stranger may have died that night or she may have survived. In either case, her humanity remained intact. I was given the opportunity to save her life, but I did not, choosing, instead to deny her humanity. Because of this, it is not she, but I, who was diminished.

 

I feel this truth as acutely. It is not a data driven truth, yet it has the power to alter the way I live my life. The human spirit can be unreasonable – it gathers truth where it finds it – it does not willingly submit to being fenced in. Like my dog, it likes to wander around the neighborhood.

 

Regarding compassion, the religious impulse can be extravagant, unreasonable. In the Islamic tradition, for example, compassion is proclaimed in a peculiarly hierarchical fashion. In a popularly known hadith (saying of the prophet Mohammed) God’s throne is said to be inscribed with the words: “My Mercy and my Compassion precede my Wrath.” The sense of this hadith is confirmed by the first three of the ninety-nine names of God: Ar-Raḥmān (the all-compassionate) is the first name, Ar-Raḥīm (the all-merciful) comes second, and only then, Al-Malik (the King). Compassion is consistently presented as the first divine attribute. Indeed, the name Ar-Raḥmān (the all-compassionate) is invoked at the beginning of 113 of the 114 chapters of the Quran, thus insuring, in this text-centric faith, that the principle of compassion is invoked daily on every Muslim’s lips.

 

In Theravada Buddhist societies like Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Sri Lanka, it is not uncommon to see saffron-robed monks in the streets and the marketplaces in the early morning walking with their bowls in their hands. They are not begging, as such, but as they proceed people place food in their bowls. This ritual practice, known as TakBat is the enactment of the first of the six Buddhist perfections – dāna-pāramitā, the perfection of giving. Since the Sangha, or monastic community, must be fed everyday, this ritual repeats daily. Give us this day our daily bread. The monks are supposed to avert their eyes and silently bless the giver, but do they? There does not appear to be undue ceremony to this practice –perhaps because it is so routine—so much a part of the daily life of both the monks and the lay people. But in this lack of ceremony, I find evidence that this religious practice has successfully addressed a problem that empirical reasoning could do little to touch. On Broadway, the reflex that was expected of me was the “turn away” reflex. In the context of this religious practice, the “turn away” reflex is rejected. The “empathy kill-switch” is replaced by the give reflex. 

 

In his 1961 Essay Fifth Avenue, Uptown James Baldwin wrote: “…one cannot deny the humanity of another, without diminishing one's own.” Baldwin concludes the essay by entirely breaking down the distinction between self and other: “in the face of one's victim,” he says, “one sees oneself.''

 

There was a Palestinian wisdom teacher who walked the earth a little over two thousand years ago who is reported to have made a similar point. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

 

The prophetic voices of twentieth century Harlem and 1^st century Palestine rise together to introduce a new refrain. A new equation:

 

One plus one equals one.

 

It is not through empirical reasoning, but through the messy pathos of the religious impulse that we arrive at this illogical, but undeniably true statement. There is no difference between self and the other. Two equals one. The act of giving is the enactment of this truth, affirming that we all suffer, and that there is time, for each of us, when need to be given a blanket. 

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“All the misery the world contains

has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.

All the joy the world contains

has come through wishing happiness for others.”

 

One plus one equals one.

 

Thank you.