The need for a 40°C free-religion
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| The nighttime temperature in my bedroom in Cambridge |
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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The current, truly punishing heatwave prompted me to consider a religious response to our predicament. I initially thought of revisiting my words from the 2022 heatwave, but decided against it; I have no need to persuade you that the climate emergency is real. But the truth is that those who actually need to change—governments, corporations, and the insane ‘tech-bro’ sovereign individuals—remain stubbornly in denial. Given this incredibly distressing and anger-making truth, we must find a constructive way to live, whether we are headed towards mutual destruction or a long-overdue mutual awakening.
This past week’s heat forced a specific question upon me. Lying in bed near midnight, with the temperature hovering at 29°C and with not a breath of air moving, I recalled a book by the late Klaus K. Klostermaier (1933–2024), a German-Canadian scholar and former Pallottine monk who insisted that authentic theology must be rooted in the visceral reality of the human condition. Attempting to defeat sleeplessness via archive.org, I re-read a chapter from his 1969 book Hindu and Christian in Vrindaban, titled ‘Theology at 120°F’—or 49°C. And it was there that I found a profound reminder of what I think is the basic religious way forward.
In northern India, Klostermaier found the weather unbearable. Walls radiated like central heating, and the sun became a ‘murderer’, turning existence into an exhausting struggle for survival. Yet, as a Catholic priest, his duty was to celebrate Mass each morning in a fanless room, at 45°C, swarmed by flies. As a conventional, loyal priest at the time, he noted that removing his six mandatory vestments—amice, alb, cincture, maniple, stole, and chasuble—would mean committing a dozen mortal sins all at once. He persisted because it seemed to him impossible to survive, physically or spiritually, without the Mass.
But this awful experience triggered a reflection on the difference between what he called the 21°C (70°F) ‘library theologian’ and the 49°C (120°F) ‘desert theologian’. The library theologian operates in sedentary comfort, imagining a content, well-fed God within a harmoniously ordered world, relying on heavily footnoted systems that treat grace like managed development aid to maintain a polite coexistence. Conversely, the desert theologian is plunged into a brutal struggle where faith must become unobstructed and visceral, because it is being born in a fractured and highly challenging landscape. In the intense heat of such a landscape, Klostermaier found that God is no longer experienced as a detached observer, but as an immanent presence acquainted with hunger, thirst, and despair. This raw experience served for him to unmask hypocrisy, compelling Klostermaier to find meaning within a vulnerable existence where suffering and death are accepted as inevitable aspects of life.
In this super-heated melting pot, Klostermaier’s rigid 21°C Christian theology simply dissolved. He shifted from a structured view of a God who creates perfect order to a Hindu concept of lila—the divine play of the universe—in which the whole cycle of life and death became a singular manifestation of the divine. He recognised that there is ‘one Atman’ in all things, in the dead and dying goats around him, and in the vultures, jackals, and dogs feeding upon them. In this essentially Vedantic realisation, Klostermaier came to feel that the divine Self permeates everything: including the heat, the filth, the madness, and the horror.
This, in turn, also forced him to reject an easy, final distinction between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’. For example, witnessing a naked man who in his devotions is drinking stinking gutter water, Klostermaier is confronted by a completely unobstructed faith: if God is everywhere, then the boundary between the celebration of the holy Eucharist and the man’s devotions in the profane gutter is clearly seen as a human construct. Klostermaier began to see God as both ‘the sacrificer and the sacrifice’—a direct echo of the Rig Veda—moving him away from belief in a transcendent deity to a belief in an immanent God who is the very substance of suffering, just as much as the very substance of love.
In all this Klostermaier came to see Jesus as the bridge between these apparent distinctions. He saw that the 21°C Church had reduced Jesus to a safe, sanitised statue or book. But the 49°C God behind Jesus who suffers in the dust and dirty water is entirely compatible with Hindu bhakti—a devotional tradition seeking a direct, often messy and extrmely complex relationship with the divine. Ultimately, Klostermaier reveals that for him the provoking God of the Gospels was a ‘hinduistic’ kind of God who refuses the air-conditioned logic of the library. But it’s important to realise that he did not become a Hindu convert; rather, he allowed his environment to strip away his inherited European constructs, helping him to discover a raw, immanent, and unobstructed Christ that the Indian devotional tradition had understood all along.
Now, this is what happened to a Catholic priest when he was plunged into extreme heat. For me, a liberal Protestant, free-religious minister from the northern climes, the intense heat of 2022 and this past week has served to reinforce similar theological conclusions—conclusions framed for me most clearly by the language of the free-religion (jiyū shūkyō) I have inherited from Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei and the Japanese Unitarian tradition.
But, this is to make no forced or abstract parallel on my part, because when I brought Imaoka-sensei’s free-religion to a meeting of the British Unitarian-Hindu Connections group in September 2024, two of the older Hindu participants excitedly noted that this is what is known in the Hindu tradition as Sanatana Dharma (meaning ‘The Eternal Path’ or ‘Eternal Truth’), which was the original Sanskrit name for Hinduism. It describes an inclusive, universal set of spiritual laws and moral duties that apply to all living beings, transcending history, specific prophets, and sectarian boundaries.
And this reflection now brings me directly to the question the extreme heat forces upon all of us today: how does this extreme heat change YOUR own theology or philosophy of life? You, we, have to ask this because here in the UK, and Europe more widely, we are no longer going to be able to live according to a 21°C theology and understanding of God, Jesus Christ, Brahman/Atman, or the Great Life of the universe. We have no choice but to start living according to a 39°C–45°C understanding.
And where do we look for an appropriate response? Well, as you now know, Klostermaier’s experiences suggested to him that it can be found in consciously practising something like Sanatana Dharma, this universal spirituality that transcended the distinction between Christianity and Hinduism. My experiences mean that I find my appropriate response in consciously practising free-religion (jiyū shūkyō), a religion that transcends the distinctions between Christianity, Buddhism, Shintō, and Confucianism.
But, despite the superficial difference in emphasis between Klostermaier’s way of resonding and my own way of responding, I hope you can see Klostermaier and I are saying pretty much the same thing, and more importantly, that the same message can be heard in all the other great religious traditions of the world, especially in their more mystical, experiential forms.
This heat wave is, undeniably, the result of a corporate crime born of human greed. But the levelling it is bringing about (distressing though it is) can serve to remind us of a deeper, eternal divine truth: that our artificial separations between each other and all things are illusions. It is telling me that, ultimately, we and all other sentient and non-sentient things really are in this together, and that if we can find ways to unite beyond our divisions then we still have a chance to prevail, but if we remain divided, then we are almost certain to fail.
I look forward to hearing what religious/spiritual lessons you have drawn, or are now drawing, from another week of extreme heat.
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