In Defense of Dogma

In Defense of Dogma

Frank Kaufmann June 29, 2024 Commencement Address 2024 Graduation and Ordination Ceremony All Faiths Seminary International

Rabbi Matous, Dr. Regan, Trustees, Graduates, Students, Friends, and Family.

It is my profound honor to receive this opportunity to offer thoughts on the occasion of today’s august yet joyful celebration.

We rejoice over the success and accomplishments of today’s graduates. You were called, you responded, and you labored and struggled to be worthy of this moment. And indeed you are. We call for saints and luminaries both in heaven and earth to welcome you as colleagues among them.

You have labored and prayed for the light of truth and the warmth of love to transform you into humble servants through whom the living God can live and breathe and show Her unbound love to each and all.

Your lives herald the end of aloneness, the end of separation, the end of up there, and down here. The end of yours and mine, not just in our world, but as importantly and magically between God and us. Through you, “yours and mine” instead become ours. No longer God’s will and mine, God’s standard and my standard, God’s love and my love, God’s hope and mine. These all become ours — our standard, our love, our hope.

Thank you.

Because you were able to hear God’s call, thank you. Because you were able to respond and embrace God’s call, thank you. Because you were able to remember this call when it seemed to not be there anymore. When it seemed too much, too hard, too lonely. Thank you.

Leonard Cohen wrote over 100 draft verses for the song “Hallelujah” over the course of five years, finally reaching the four verses of the song. During one writing session at New York’s Royalton Hotel, Cohen is said to have been reduced to sitting on the floor in his underwear, filling notebooks, and banging his head on the floor out of frustration.

I like to think that each person called to mediate God to the world has those same filled notebooks, those hundreds of hoped-for verses, and that same floor.

For your path, your study, your prayers, your battles, your days and nights in darkness, and your days and nights aglow in the radiance of God, we thank you. For what you’ve done to be here, we thank you. And for what you will do, we thank you.

Please try to stay together, if not all, at least in smaller select circles that match you. In the work you have prepared to do, you will have to bear some of what God bears. This is too difficult to try to do alone.

In my few remaining minutes, I want to offer thoughts about dogma and becoming truly interfaith people. I will explain this through two propositions:

The idea that there are ordained interfaith ministers and other types of ministers, in my view, reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of ministry.

In our lives as religious people, there are some things we believe and some things we know.

There is a reality in the world that even the most vaunted people have a realm in which they are insecure, unsure, and don’t really know how well they are doing. This is true for rich people (even extremely rich people), true for the world’s greatest athletes, greatest entertainers, surgeons, and every field of superiority and excellence.

This area where the top of the top are insecure, and still nervously want to know, “How did I do?” “Was I OK?” “Was it OK?” is in the presence of their peers.

Imagine being a great comedian, showing up for your performance, hundreds in the audience, paid a lot to see you, and as you take the spotlight, there in the front row sits one of the living legends of comedy? Imagine being a billionaire, and as you pull your yacht into the harbor, there unexpectedly sits the yacht of Mr. Bezos (not that I am a fan of Mr. Bezos, but even so, suddenly my yacht is not all that great).

This is why I think the name (or idea) “interfaith minister” should properly be considered something odd. Surely every minister on earth should be an interfaith minister above all. A Virashaivite priest should be an interfaith minister. A Congregational Methodist pastor should be an interfaith minister. How so?

Just as with the comedian, who do they really worry about if they’re funny or not? Other comedians. If you’re a minister, a guardian and representative of the sacred, a carrier of God’s balm into the lives of Her children, who’s really in a good position to know if you’re as good as you’re supposed to be? Like the comedian, it is the other ordained saints of the world’s traditions. A great Rabbi, a great Anglican archdeacon.

In this way, my religiosity, my spirituality, my evangelism, my cure of souls. In some ways, the real measure of my ordination is our peers. I’m such a great saint because I go clothe some homeless person, while at the same time, I disdain a minister in my town because she’s a Christian or a Jew?

Being an interfaith minister is the first, most challenging place of my claim to being any sort of minister at all. But people are not aware of this fact. So for now, thanks to the profound vision of Rabbi Gelberman, we have All Faiths Seminary. You are the tip of the spear for what all religious ordination should be at this time in history.

You who are graduating today have the good fortune to have jumped to the head of the line. A core training in your faith includes an aptitude that should be core to every cleric and spiritual leader alive.

Finally, Your life as a religious figure has two things: what you know and what you believe. These are different. For example, here are two things you might profess:

God is eternal and transcendent of time and space.

You should live sacrificially for others.

The first one is probably something you believe. It’s hard to actually know that God is transcendent of time and space in the same way you know not to hold your hand over a fire. You don’t really know God is infinite, transcending time and space, you just believe it. It makes sense to you. Someday, you might actually come to know this. That is a special kind of knowledge. If you ever get to the point where you actually know this, you will be able to tell when people say this if they know it or are just saying something they believe.

But take the second one: you should live sacrificially for others. For many, this too may be merely a belief. But if you act on that belief often and constantly enough, this will change into something you know. You will reach the point where you would no more live selfishly than you would hold your hand over a fire. It’s not that you’re such a great saint, but rather that you are simply not a fool.

And here is where I will introduce dogma for a moment and conclude. The path of faith and religious life is the path of transitioning from believing to knowing. The guidebook for successfully making that transition, and those thousands of transitions, is the world’s compendia of religious dogma. Each one is like the Ikea manual, which, if followed, will transform a cardboard box full of sticks into a beautiful bookshelf on which you can put your elegant statue of Parvati.

When your guests come, you will not tell them about the Ikea assembly instructions — you will tell them about Parvati. But without the assembly instructions, poor Parvati herself might still be sitting in a cardboard box.

There is an unspoken atmosphere in interfaith environments that carries antipathy toward dogma. But without dogma, you could never reach the cherished and sacred space of knowing. You’ll be just another clown running around telling people what you believe. Dogma is the compendia of wisdom that for thousands of years helped people just like us transition from believing to knowing. We follow the manual.

Here are some dogmatic claims:

Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. Christianity. Bible, Matthew 7.12 Dogma

Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself. Islam. Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi 13 Dogma

A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. Jainism. Sutrakritanga 1.11.33 Dogma

Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence. Confucianism. Mencius VII.A.4 Dogma

But here’s the word of caution, and here’s where things go wrong. In the examples I just gave, every article of faith, every authoritative religious injunction, every collection of words in a book all carried souls from rote obedience and merely believing to the radiant, ineffable space of knowing.

The problem is when we foolishly, mistakenly, and ignorantly believe that these paths to enlightenment exist only in the dogmas that God gave exactly to me. In that ignorance, because I may know that Christian dogma works, I will spend my days bothering non-Christians with Christian dogma. Because I know it works. But all other traditions have dogmas that work for the same ends.

“Do you have a manual that you use to help you transition from believing to knowing?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“OK. Here are some things.”

“Oh! Man! That’s excellent. Can I use that?”

“Yes, but you’re a Christian.”

“I know, but we don’t have that one?”

“Sure, go ahead, use it.” (That’s Rabbi Gelberman’s genius: never instead of, always in addition to.)

“But. Hey. By the way, can you tell me about your teachings that made it possible for you to know that earth is our mother? I mean, to really know that?”

“Sure.”

“Wow. Can I use that?”

“Sure. Go ahead and use it.”

This is interfaith.

Congratulations on your life ahead. May God take joy in all you do.

God bless you.