Many people today say they would like to be spiritual but not religious. Religion, they say, involves debatable ideas about doctrines and dogmas, while spirituality is about our inner relationship to God.  In other words, spirituality is less political. We had an air conditioner repairman who was into spirituality. He said it was putting him in touch with who he really was.  He felt more centered, more serene. He slept better at night. But his newfound spirituality didn’t seem to affect what he charged us. That’s the point I want to talk about––how our spirituality affects the way we treat others. How it translates into real life.

All the great religions say there is or should be a relationship between the way we are connected to God and our sense of compassion for the poor and disadvantaged. Buddhism exalts a man who left his position as the son of a wealthy ruler to identify with the poor and outcast. The Koran says it is all very well to bow to the East or the West in our worship of Allah, but woe to those who don’t share what they have with kindred and orphans and poor strangers. And Christianity, my own religion, says simply that faith without works is dead.

One of the key moments in the biography of Jesus, according to the Gospels, occurred when he took his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, up a mountain to pray.  While they were there, something happened to Jesus.  He became transfigured, as if his entire body were glowing with light, and they saw him talking with two of the greatest figures in Hebrew history, Moses and Elijah, who were both long dead. The disciples, stunned by this extraordinary experience, wanted to stay on that mountain forever. Peter said, “Lord, it’s good for us to be here. Let’s erect three temples, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah, and let’s never go back.” But Jesus reprimanded him. He said they had to go back down the mountain because of all the poor and sick and needy people below. It was his way of saying that spirituality––real spirituality–– must always be coupled with compassion for God’s little ones.

As a Christian pastor, I have to admit I was often disappointed by my parishioners when they forgot this. Many, even those who were quite spiritual or religious in a private kind of way, didn’t seem to understand the importance of a compassionate heart. I remember a Thanksgiving Day in Los Angeles. We had had a beautiful interfaith service at First Congregational Church.  Congregationalists, you know, often think they own Thanksgiving since they were there at the beginning. Mayor Tom Bradley had been our special guest.  Afterward, some of us were standing out in the late November sunlight recalling the high moments of the service.

Suddenly there appeared out of nowhere a homeless man with blood on his face and blood on his beard and his clothes.  His feet were wrapped in plastic bags. “I have AIDS,” he announced to us immediately.  He had been mugged in the park the night before. Somebody had beat him up and had stolen his shoes and his money. He said he was hungry.  We didn’t have any food at the church that day, but I went inside and got him a cup of coffee, and I poured a lot of cream and sugar in it. While I was doing this, I also phoned a nearby hospice and secured a room. And I called a taxi.

I took the coffee outside.  The man, in the meantime, had seen a beautiful broach my wife was wearing and he asked if he might touch it. She let him hold it. Then he said to her, “My parents won’t let me come home because they think they’ll get AIDS.  I haven’t had a hug for so long.  Would you give me a hug?” My wife held out her arms, and hugged him and kissed him as if he were a little child. The taxi came.  I put him in it, paid the fare, and sent him to the hospice, where I knew he would receive a hot meal and a clean bed.  He died a few days later.

Anne and I talked about this as we drove home. Meeting that poor man had greatly altered our day. We had barely got inside the house when I heard the phone ring, and a woman asked to speak to my wife. It was the vice-president of the church’s Women’s Association. She had seen my wife hugging the homeless man and she was outraged. “You have disgraced your husband,” she said, “and you have disgraced our church!”

Now, this woman wasn’t a bad person. She was very respectable, in fact. She was an officer in the women’s association. She taught Sunday school. I’m sure she thought of herself as being very religious, perhaps even spiritual. But obviously she didn’t understand much about it.  Spirituality isn’t something we have by ourselves, by spending time with God.  It isn’t found in attending church or synagogue or mosque.  In all our religions, it is something that sensitizes us to the plight of others and helps us to reach out to them in simple love and generosity.

When I think of somebody truly spiritual, I think about Toyohiko Kagawa, the great 20th century Japanese social worker. Kagawa learned about Jesus, and it changed his life. But he didn’t go to live in a monastery. Instead, he moved into the slums of Kobe, a great industrial city where he knew he would find God dwelling among some of the poorest and most desperate people in the world. Day after day, he roamed the streets, helping people.  He often brought them home with him if they were sick, brought them back to his little apartment and took care of them.  Frequently Kagawa caught diseases from these people. Once he even brought a murderer home, and for four years the murderer slept on Kagawa’s bed beside him, holding his hand to ward off whatever demons might be after him for the crime he had committed.

Don’t stay away from your church or your synagogue or your mosque. They have a lot to offer.  But remember that they are only the beginning, not the end of what you are seeking. You go up into the mountain to pray, but once you’ve prayed you must return to the valley to help others.

There is a little story that has always meant a lot to me. I heard it years and years ago from a short, swarthy little man from Sri Lanka named Daniel T. Niles. Niles worked for the World Council of Churches, and traveled everywhere talking about how people needed to help others.  There was a man in India, he said, who had just been saved at a Billy Graham Crusade and was rushing home to tell his family and his friends. As he ran along in the darkness, he stumbled over a blind man selling pencils.  He stopped long enough to help the man gather up the pencils.  Then he said to him, “I wish I could help you, my friend, but I have just found Christ at the Billy Graham Crusade and I am rushing home to tell the good news to my family.” Niles paused.  Then he said, with a wry little smile, “He just missed Christ where he might have found him, in the beggar!”

Don’t miss Christ, or Buddha or Allah. Remember, and mark it well, real spirituality, true spirituality, always, invariably, issues in love and compassion.

Conversation with John Killinger

Daniel Pawlus: John, always a joy to have you on the program and thank you for sharing that touching story about compassion with us today and the personal stories that you bring are always very moving. I want to start our discussion today with how you started your message. You talked about spirituality versus belonging to a religion. You’ve written about religion for many years in this country. What do you make of this trend of people wanting spiritual but not religious?

John Killinger:  I think part of it is just the desire to leave behind the baggage of religion. As people have become more widely educated about how their own religions came into existence, I think they realize that a lot of that was made by other persons like themselves and many of our churches—and I’m sure the same is true in other religions—have evolved through a series of committee meetings if nothing else. I think people look at the things that we do wrong in our various religious organizations and they think, I don’t want to be tarred with that brush. So if I could just be spiritual without that then that’s what I’d like to be.

Lillian Daniel: So John, if they choose that course and they said, alright I’m going to be spiritual and not religious, what do they miss out on by not being part of a community of faith? Do they miss out on anything?

Killinger: I think so, granted that this community of faith is available to them where they are and where they live and that they are people who are loving and kind. I think the nurturing of the community is extremely important in the life of religion. I’m sure the three of us would be able to testify that we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this today if it weren’t for some community that had helped us to find love and acceptance and made it possible for us to say to others, you need this, too. But, at the same time, we have to admit that all of our organizations are human and fallible, and that sometimes God gets obscured in the way we behave. Therefore, a lot of people say, well, I don’t want anything to do with that. I can be spiritual on my own. So there is a kind of a privacy that they seek in their religion.

Daniel: And yet I was so struck by the doctor in the earlier segment who would never have done what she did were it not for the Baha’i community that had supported her and taught here these lessons.

Pawlus: I wondered what you said about spirituality being shared and not owned. We could talk about that a little bit more because it’s a very compelling statement. Expand on that a little bit for us.

Killinger: I think, Daniel, that it’s very tempting to want to control our spirituality and do it only by ourselves. We can do that the way we do yoga or exercise or something else. Of course, for a lot of people that means you really don’t get around to doing it! But there is this temptation always to want to be alone with the Alone, as the mystics use to say. The problem with that is that our lives are lived in communication with others, even when we don’t want them to be. Even the loneliest curmudgeon is somehow connected to the rest of the world. We are more and more aware of those connections today than people ever were, and globalization. That old story about the butterfly that lands on a plant across the world somewhere and moving the world where we are, is very true. We are connected with one another and we ought to own that and, if possible, try to be spiritual together. There’s probably a lot more safety in our journey if we do that. That is, we’re not as likely to do something just silly or outlandish or that misses the mark completely if we share it with other people.

Daniel: You’ve spoken to us about the importance of compassion. I’d love to ask you to say a word about your new book. It sort of deals with the economic hard times that so many Americans are going through and one congregation’s response to that and that “butterfly effect.” Could you tell us something about it?

Killinger: The book is called, “The Zacchaeus Solution” and it’s a novel about a minister and his wife who sort of kick it off when they need to get rid of a couple of staff members because the church can’t afford them. They talk about it and decide to give half of all their savings to the church. It makes it possible to keep the staff members and not put them out of work. Some other people in the church learn about this and it provokes what they call the “Tuesday night meeting,” where people who want to come together and talk about what they have and what they could do for others. A whole series of reactions occurs then and eventually news of this spills out of the church into other churches in the community, out of the community. It becomes worldwide almost. In the end, President Obama even gives the minister, on behalf of all who have done this, a new medal that is been struck by the President and his office called the Lincoln Medal. He treasures Lincoln so much, you know. It is to thank all of these people who have started a movement to help others during a time when almost nothing else seems to help very much.

Pawlus: So this is one of the new books. We mentioned the other one earlier in the broadcast: “Hidden Mark: Exploring Christianity’s Heretical Gospel.” Let’s talk a little bit about that, as well, because you are a busy man, John. We’re always impressed every year.

Killinger: You’d like to know a little bit about “Hidden Mark?”

Pawlus: Absolutely.

Killinger: Well, the whole idea of “Hidden Mark” is that I think I’ve discovered some literary relationships among certain stories in the early chapters of Mark, those that encircle the two occasions when Jesus calms the sea. If you read them a certain way—and I try to help the reader to see this—then those two stories about calming the sea actually become post-resurrection stories. That is, they are stories of Jesus coming to the aid of his church, the people who are in a boat. The boat, of course, was one of the early symbols of the Christian church. They’re out in the storm and he comes to them. In one case, he’s in the boat with them and the other he comes walking across the water to them and he calms the sea. I think it was Mark’s way of saying to an imperiled early church, look, the master is here, we don’t need to be afraid. As Jesus says to them, “Take heart, it is I. Don’t be afraid.”

Daniel: John, I’m struck by we’re talking about one book which is a scholarly exposition about the Gospel of Mark and this one’s a novel. You’ve written over seventy books. What drives you to do that? What fuels you as a writer?

Killinger: That’s an interesting question. I love doing it and it’s an expression. I wanted to be an artist when I was a boy and express myself in visual images. I don’t know…I didn’t get to do that because I became a minister and didn’t have time to do that. But I guess I do have time to express it with words, which is maybe the answer.

Pawlus: Wonderful. We have a little bit of time left. What do you make of what’s going on in the country right now. I know you love the news and you follow it quite closely.

Killinger: I think we are in a terrible period right now. We’ve talked about compassion today and I think we’ve lost our sense of compassion for people who aren’t like us. This is true at the political level. It’s true at the interfaith level. We’ve just lost our bearings for a time. I have a lot of faith in human nature. I think eventually we’ll be led back to the way and I hope we will. But right now, I think all of us—all of us, people who may be watching this program and all of us who are involved in this together—need to think what we can do to be more generous to others and more giving and forgiving so that there can be more of a sense of unity in God’s world.

Daniel: Your message today on compassion couldn’t be more timely. Thank you so much for being with us.