I've always enjoyed inter-religious dialogue, interfaith exploration, and opportunities to take part in inter-religious activities. One of my favorite experiences while in seminary at Harvard Divinity School was the opportunity I had to represent HDS in an interfaith program called Seminarians Interacting. Over the course of an academic year, seminarians and rabbinical students visited each other's schools and attended each other's classes, we attended each others' places of worship, we ate meals with each other, we attended seminars and forums on spiritual and theological issues. I was made to feel welcome. I was enthralled. I soaked in the people, the worship, and the new ideas. I was also challenged -- sometimes directly and forcefully for my Christian-ness, my white-ness, my male-ness. And yet I loved it. Others did not. Some students involved with Seminarians Interacting had a difficult time encountering religious others.

I believe the reason I enjoyed Seminarians Interacting and am still drawn to inter-faith activity today, indeed one of the reasons I, like many others, find my spiritual home in the Unitarian Universalist Association, is that I am a translator.

I was raised Catholic and Christian was my first spiritual language. Other religions and spiritual traditions are like languages. The more we learn to speak, the more comfortable we'll be as we travel about in the world. As Diana Eck, professor of World Religions at Harvard says, "If you know one religion, you don't know any."

Just as English speakers can get by in our American culture knowing only English, so too is it easy sometimes to relax in the comfort of the spiritual tradition within which we were raised, be it Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or Humanist.

Just as I don't feel superior because I am native English speaker, I don't feel superior because I am a native Christian speaker. I sometimes feel ignorant that I am not fluent in Spanish or Vietnamese or French or Hungarian or all four. I feel the same about religious traditions, but the ability to translate helps, as it does with any language one doesn't understand.

The Koran, the Tao Te Ching, the Rig Vedas are all sacred texts. I grew up in a Christian setting reading the Bible, another sacred text. Other religions had their sacred texts and my religion had one as well. There were analogs. I could translate. I was baptized and had a confirmation in the Catholic Church. I learned about bar and bat mitzvahs and when I got to Harvard Divinity School, the coming of age ceremony for adolescent Mescalero Apache girls. More analogs, more translation.

When people spoke of their religious beliefs and practices, I understood. I had religious beliefs and practices of my own. I had analogues in my own religious world. I translated as best as I could what they were telling me from their religious world into mine. I never felt angry or superior. If anything I felt ignorant for not being able to better speak another person's religious language. I felt bad for having to translate at all, for not being able to truly understand their experience as a native speaker of their religious tongue, because the religious translation I would do matching the analogous pieces of someone else's tradition or practice to something in my own is an adequate practice of tolerance. It is only a first step on the road to a genuine understanding of who another is religiously. Translation is a complicated business and religion is not just a spiritual language, but the art of how we live, in a sacred manner, in this world.

The online Babel Fish Translation tool at www.altavista.com gives us some insight into just how difficult translation can be, both for language and religion. Babel Fish is a great tool for quick, brief translation, but Babel Fish is a computer program and it doesn't understand the nuances of language such as usage, context, idioms, and other things that make language art. For example, if one were to type the following sentence into Babel Fish for translation from English to Spanish:

"Do unto other as you would have them do to you"

Babel Fish gives you:

"Haga a otro pues usted hizo que hicieran a usted"

Translating back to English from Spanish Babel Fish gives you:

"Do to other because you caused that they did you."

Close, but not exactly a cigarette, as we almost say in English.

Babel Fish is doing Formal Correspondence translation, mechanically reproducing the vocabulary, features and form of the source language into the receptor language. As you can see, it sometimes misses the mark. It leaves out the art, the music -- the poetry of the language.

For poetry in translation you need Dynamic Equivalence Translation, where the meaning of the original language is carried over into the receptor language. Poetry is created from the rhythm and meter of words and language. Religion and spirituality is created from the rhythm and meter of human life. Inez Talamantez, my teacher in Native American Religious Traditions at Harvard, taught us that an Apache doesn't see Apache religion, an Apache sees life. You cannot directly translate a poem from one language to another. The rhythm and meter, the flow and music of the language that made the words poetry will be lost. The meaning may be retained, but the poem is gone. When you translate a poem, you must translate not only the meaning, but the music of the original language into the new language. When you do that, you create a new poem, a new work of art. Ultimately trying to understand other religions by matching analogs come up short. At some point you must find a way into the lived experience of a religious tradition to understand it.

Unitarian Universalism is faith of translators. Our faith is a faith forged by theological and spiritual innovators brave enough to create a new work of art out of old forms that no longer served. Ours is a history of people who received a message spoken in a spiritual language limited by social and historical location, and creeds of the past. They heard in it something others could not yet hear- the call of reason, tolerance, and freedom of belief -- to speak religiously as they felt moved not as they were commanded. They translated that message to the next generation. In each successive generation the translation became more clear- From Francis David telling us God is One and that we need not think alike to love alike, down through the years to our present day principles and purposes.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference says that in the spread of epidemics, fads and fashions, ideas, revolutions, and movements translators play a key role. How, Gladwell asks, does something idiosyncratic make a leap to a broad, mainstream audience? First there are Innovators and Early Adopters, two groups Gladwell calls visionaries. These are the people who want revolutionary change. Then people Gladwell calls Connectors and Mavens act as salespeople of the NEW. They use special social gifts to cause social and economic epidemics to tip. The task they perform according to Gladwell is Translation. "They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are the translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand." [1]

Francis David was such a person at the Diet of Torda in 1568 where his preaching converted a king and a people to Unitarianism and helped established the first religiously tolerant European state. Faustus Socinus was such a person when he wrote the Racovian Catechism in Poland, a statement of Unitarian belief published in 1605 and widely translated and distributed and that had a profound effect on the development of English Unitarianism. William Ellery Channing was such a person preaching Unitarian Christianity in Baltimore in 1819, making the liberals' case for the unity of God and the use of reason in interpretation of the scriptures. As the 18th century became the 19th, John Murray and Hosea Ballou served as translators, banishing Hell from the church, preaching universal salvation from New Jersey to Gloucester, MA, from Boston the New England interior. James Luther Adams was a translator when he wrote about the Free Church in 1975 saying, "I call that church free which in charity promotes freedom in fellowship, seeking unity in diversity...which responds in responsibility to the Spirit that bloweth where it listeth, ...that is open to insight and conscience from every source." [2]

Now it is our turn to be translators, carrying the living tradition forward. Did you ever see pictures from the United Nations where a person is speaking in their native language and the rest of the room is listening through earpieces, each in their own native tongue. Somewhere there is a translation center and when it comes to religious traditions, with our six sources of the living tradition, we Unitarian Universalists are it. The world needs us to be so. When war threatens constantly over the difference between the Hebrew shalom and the Arabic salaam, we are needed. When civil liberties are threatened over interpretations of Canon and Koran, we are needed. This is not the time to demean another's humanism or turn up one's nose at another's Christianity. Now more than ever we need to recognize our common Unitarian bonds of reason, freedom and tolerance. Now more than ever we need to keep our covenant to affirm and promote the inherent dignity and worth of every person within our congregations so we can promote peace, justice, equity and compassion in the world both within and beyond our church doors.