First Reading: The Treasure by Uri Shulevitz

There once was [a Rabbi] and his name was Isaac. He lived in such poverty that again and again he went to bed hungry. One night, he had a dream. In his dream, a voice told him to go to the capital city and look for a treasure under the bridge by the Royal Palace. "It is only a dream," he thought when he woke up, and he paid no attention to it.

The dream came back a second time. And Isaac still paid no attention to it.

When the dream came back a third time, he said, "Maybe it's true," and so he set out on his journey. Now and then, someone gave him a ride, but most of the way he walked. He walked through forests. He crossed over mountains.

Finally he reached the capital city. But when he came to the bridge by the Royal Palace, he found that it was guarded day and night. He did not dare to search for the treasure. Yet he returned to the bridge every morning and wandered around it until dark.

One day, the captain of the guards asked him, "Why are you here?"

Isaac told him the dream. The captain laughed.

"You poor fellow," he said, what a pity you wore your shoes out for a dream! Listen, if I believed a dream I once had, I would go right now to the city you came from, and I'd look for a treasure under the stove in the house of a [rabbi] named Isaac." And he laughed again.

Isaac bowed to the captain and started on his long way home. He crossed over mountains. He walked through forests. Now and then, someone gave him a ride, but most of the way he walked.

At last, he reached his own town. When he got home, he dug under his stove, and there found the treasure. In thanksgiving, he built a house of prayer, and in one of its corners he put an inscription: Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near.

Isaac sent the captain of the guards a priceless ruby. And for the rest of his days, he lived in contentment and he never was poor again.[1]

Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground. "What have you lost, Mulla?" He asked.
"My key," said the Mulla.
So the other man asked: "Where exactly did you drop it?"
"In my house."
"Then why are you looking here?"
"There is more light here than inside my own house."

Wendy O'Flaherty writes about this story: "An eclectic who searches outside his own house has many lights with which to search, and finds many keys (not only his own) to many enigmas" and mysteries.[2]

My favorite kids' movie is the Warner Brothers version of A Little Princess[3] that came out a few years ago. One of my favorite things about the movie is the role India plays in it--a role this version emphasizes even more than either the earlier Shirley Temple movie or the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett on which the movie is based.[4]

The movie's young heroine is named Sara Crewe. Sara lives in India and then moves to New York City to enroll in a private girl's school while her father goes off to fight in World War One. When Sara's father, Captain Crewe, apparently dies at the front line, she has no family left. Miss Minchin, the mean woman who runs the exclusive school Sara attends, takes all of Sara's possessions, makes her a servant to pay off her unpaid school fees, and banishes her to a miserable attic room next to another servant girl's room. In a flash, Sara loses everything. Desolate, alone and utterly dejected, she assumes her role as a poor servant girl.

Then one day, as Sara goes to the city market to fetch food for the school, a gust of wind blows off her shawl. Sara chases the shawl as it blows across the market square until it gets caught on the legs of a man. She bends down and picks up the shawl, then looks up at the man. She sees a tall Indian man standing there, looking down at her kindly. He is wearing traditional Indian dress, his head wrapped in a turban. We later learn that his name is Ram Dass. Sara and Ram look at one another for a moment without speaking.

A short while later, Sara wakes up one morning after a gust of wind in a snowstorm blows opens the window in her attic room. As she gets up to close the window, she looks across to the building next door and sees Ram Dass standing on a balcony. He greets her with is arms raised in the air. Then, as she dances in this magical moment, snow swirling around her, he slowly lowers his arms to a gesture of worship.

This is the pivotal moment in the movie. With Ram's gesture, Sara remembers her kinship with India. And she remembers who she really is, deep down. On the inside, she is not a servant girl. She is a princess, just as her Indian friends and her father always told her. She will always be a princess no matter what form her exterior life takes. She remembers what her father told her: every girl is a little princess--"even if," as Sara later tells Miss Minchin, "they live in tiny old attics or dress in rags; even if they aren't pretty or smart or young. We're still princesses, all of us." Somewhere inside, even Miss Minchin is a princess, if she could only see it in herself. Rediscovering this truth about herself transforms Sara, even though her outer life as a mistreated servant girl doesn't change one bit. She knows again in her heart that she is a princess.

It turns out that Sara's father didn't die in the war after all, but has a profound case of amnesia. As fate would have it, he ends up next door to Sara's school, living with the Indian Ram Dass. But because of the amnesia, Captain Crewe can't remember who he is, let alone who Sara is. One rainy evening, Sara at last meets her father while trying to escape from Miss Minchin and the police. Sara desperately tries to help her father remember who he is by reminding him of the their life in India. As the police haul Sara off, Ram Dass stands right next to Captain Crewe and stares intensely at him. As if by magic, Captain Crewe suddenly remembers who he is and who Sara is. He runs outside and is reunited with his daughter.

The figure of Ram Dass represents the magic in the story. The magic is India. At the beginning of this sermon series I talked about what happens when we metaphorically look into the shop window that is another religion or culture. As Wendy O'Flaherty writes:

We see the faces of the strange figures posed inside, superimposed on their faces we see the reflections of our own faces looking at them. The myth [or religion] we thought was just a window turns out to be a mirror, too.[5]

When Sara and Captain Crewe look into the window that is India--here represented by Ram Dass--they see not just Ram and all the people and things they knew and loved in India; they also see a mirror. They see themselves. In looking at the magical foreignness of India, they know who they really are. The shop window becomes a mirror, revealing their true identities.

It's just like the Rabbi in the story I shared. He travels far to discover the truth that is as close as his own stove--or his own soul. Sara and her father travel far--to the India of their memories--and find themselves. That's their Treasure. Each one of us has such a Treasure within us: the Treasure of our real selves. And when we find that Treasure, our lives are transformed--just as the rediscovery of Sara's and her father's identity transforms their lives.

For many Westerners--including me--India is a most profound mirror. You may recall in the first sermon of this series I talked about a line from the movie A Passage to India: "In India, one comes face to face with oneself." Of course not everyone finds their identity by looking in the window of India, just as the Captain of the guards in the story doesn't see any value at all in the very dream that turns out to be the key to the Rabbi's Treasure. But many of us in the West do get a glimpse of our Treasure through encountering India.

In the first sermon, I also shared some of the possible reasons why India seems to hold up such a powerful mirror to many Westerners. I have one more to add. When we Westerners look into India's window, we find not just a foreign otherness in the figures we see, but also a kinship. As Wendy O'Flaherty points out, Indians are related to Europeans. Four thousand years ago, Indo-Europeans first migrated into India. These Indo-Europeans are part of the same ethnic group that comprises the white populations of Europe and, after Christopher Columbus, America. The Indo-Europeans who moved into India 4000 years ago were the brothers and sisters of us white Europeans and European Americans. Their languages and their world-views are intimately related to our languages and world-views.

However, these Indo-Europeans were not the first people in India. Indigenous peoples have lived in India for more than 30,000 years. Their cultures, world-views and languages are far different from ours--and from our Indo-European brothers and sisters. During these past 4000 years, as these two incredibly distinct cultures met and mixed, a new reality that we call India emerged. It is a hybrid of the two. And so when we look into the window that is India, we are startled simultaneously by that which is totally different and Other, and that which we recognize as very much like ourselves. There is both the shock of Otherness and the shock of recognition. If we are open to the experience, this powerful mixture seems to illuminate within many of us Westerners our own true natures and identities. The window turns into a mirror. This is the magic of India.[6]

India has had a profound influence on my journey. Though I have never stepped foot in India, my four months' stay in the Indic culture of nearby Sri Lanka is one of my most formative experiences. That, along with the reading I have done about India and Hinduism in particular as well as conversations with Indians, has changed my life. I have found my Treasures in India more than in any other place.

A couple sermons ago I talked about the 1950s white America parodied in the movie Pleasantville. That is a powerful movie for me because I grew up in a 1960s and 70's version of Pleasantville. My Pleasantville--a well-to-do suburb of a medium-sized city--wasn't so much black and white as bland vanilla. At my high school, for example, we all looked alike. Almost all anyway--there was an African American or two. And 1000 white Americans. Other than these couple exceptions, African Americans lived in another part of the city: a place we tried to avoid even driving through if at all possible. We all dressed alike at my school, too: the preppy style was king! I had my top-siders and alligator shirts just like everyone else. Diversity was something we read about and saw on public television--never something we lived. Diversity was something my family and my church valued in theory, but something I seldom encountered in reality. As I have confessed before to you, I am a racist. How could I not be growing up in Pleasantville?

Then I went to college in small town, coastal Maine. The percentage of non-white students was not much higher than in high school, and the town had even fewer non-whites.

And then I went to Sri Lanka. Talk about an eye-opening experience! For the first time in my life, I was aware--painfully and constantly aware--of the color of my skin. I found myself immersed in a culture in which everyone looked very different from me. I could never escape standing out because of my skin color. It was an ever-present reality. I also found myself in a colorful culture far different from mine. I wasn't in Pleasantville anymore!

But it wasn't just shocking difference I discovered in the diversity of Sri Lanka. I also discovered in myself a deep yearning and love for the beautiful variety that thrives in diversity. The mirror of Sri Lanka revealed not just the narrowness of my upbringing, but something else in my soul I had not recognized before: a passion for diversity. I would not have discovered this Treasure within me but for Sri Lanka. My Sri Lankan experience is a little like a drunk's discovery of AA: it started me on the road to recovering from racism. This road from Pleasantville is a long, long road, just as recovery from alcoholism is a long road. Indeed, like the alcoholic, I know I will never really be able to say that I'm a recovered racist. But I think I'm on the right road, and that means everything. Slowly but surely, I am learning to find and appreciate the abundant richness of human diversity.

This growing appreciation also helped guide me to Unitarian Universalism: for me, a religious tradition grounded in freedom of personal conscience is the perfect place to build a diverse community. If I had to pick one thing my ministry is most about, it would be diversity. My mission here has been to increase the diversity of our Fellowship in a multitude of ways--in terms of theology, ethnicity and race, economic class and sexual orientation, to name just a few ways. On this, too, we have a long way to go. But we have started and I believe we are on the right road.

I discovered another Treasure in Sri Lanka that has also guided my life ever since. During the first few years of college, I sporadically attended a small Unitarian Universalist congregation. The flavor of the services struck me as dry and intellectual--stark even--without a lot of spiritual depth or ritual. My spiritual life evaporated in this church and the academic and social rigors of my new college environment. Becoming a minister was about the furthest thing from my mind.

And then I went to Sri Lanka. A day after arriving, my group visited a Hindu temple and attended a worship service, or puja. The bells and bright colors and smell of incense and the wild, passionate trance one of the worshipers went into told me I wasn't in my dry UU church anymore. I found myself immersed in a culture with two religions--Hinduism and Buddhism--more different from mine than I could have ever imagined possible.

As I processed that experience in the temple and many more like it, I began to see in the radical Otherness of these two traditions something I vaguely recognized. Gradually, another mirror popped up. I recognized deep within my soul a yearning for a religion that not only incorporates my brain, but also welcomes my emotions and my passions. I recognized within me a desire to have a faith to which I could give not just my brain but my heart, too. And I recognized within me the need to have a spiritual life that incorporates ritual.

The Otherness and the experience of recognition shocked alive my spiritual life. I suppose at first I had what Krister Stendahl calls "holy envy."[7] My path meandered like a Wisconsin stream, leading ultimately away from this "holy envy" and back to Unitarian Universalism and the more balanced liberal religion of my childhood. Fueled by a desire to return some emotion and passion and ritual to this faith of ours, it was a transformed me who returned to Unitarian Universalism. I am the minister and spiritually the person I am today because of the revealing mirror I discovered in Sri Lanka.

There is one more Treasure I have discovered in my encounter with Sri Lanka and India. I have found an understanding of God that makes sense to me. Again, this self discovery began with the experience of radical otherness in Sri Lanka. At that first Hindu puja I witnessed, I saw what I had read about: devotees worshipping an image of a particular Hindu god--one of millions of gods and goddesses--as if the god was actually embodied and alive in the image. What could be more different from our traditional Western notion of a monotheistic, monolithic, unchanging, utterly transcendent God? And how much further could you get from the vague, agnostic notions of my college Unitarian Universalism. All of God--the infinite--is in this particular image, the Hindu claims. God is not some distant figure up in the heavens, but is as close as a holy person or the picture of a god or goddess on the family altar. And God is alive not just within gurus and swamis and images, but within each soul. Even mine!

Over time I recognized some truth about my own understanding of God in Hinduism's foreign polytheism. During the seventeen years since my visit to Sri Lanka, the Hindu view has begun to make more and more sense to me. God is ultimately a symbol for the mystery that lies at the heart of the universe. How can one, monolithic view ever capture this infinite mystery? I need more than one or even three different pictures of this mystery in order to make any sense out of it. Though I can't take in 330 million Hindu divinities, lots of different pictures help me better understand the mystery that I call God. Hinduism's relentless polytheism unlocked my understanding of the mystery at the heart of the universe.

My emerging view of God came into even greater focus last fall when I contemplated the Transcendentalist theology of the Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson believed that our search for God ultimately leads to our own souls and the great web of relationships that connects us to one another and the world around us. That's where God is: in our souls and in our relationships. Want to get a glimpse God? Go within. Go out in nature. Connect deeply with another soul. That's where God lives and breathes.
Well, it seems to me this is the point of Hinduism's polytheism. Perhaps it isn't surprising Emerson came to this same belief, for his reading of Hindu scriptures profoundly impacted him. The ideas about God I encountered in India aren't as foreign as they first seemed: they've been influencing our liberal religion for two hundred years!

It would not be an exaggeration to say this: my personal passage to India has been the heart of my spiritual journey. "Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near," the Rabbi's inscription reads. India has transformed me--and undoubtedly will continue to transform me--by showing me a mirror that reveals deep truths within my soul. For this I am deeply grateful. In the words from a hit song by my favorite popular singer, Alanis Morisette, "Thank you, India!"

Copyright 2000 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]Uri Shulevitz, The Treasure (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978. This children's story is based on a Hasidic tale told by Martin Buber and the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, among others.
[2]Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Other People's Myths (New York: MacMillan, 1988), p. 146.
[3]A Little Princess (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1995).
[4]Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (New York: HarperTrophy, 1987).
[5]O'Flaherty, pp. 140-141.
[6]O'Flaherty, pp. 140-141.
[7]Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 85.