Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 5, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
As a people who have always been seekers of truth and askers of questions more profound than answers, following our curiosity can be a spiritual discipline for Unitarian Universalists.
Call to Worship
LET US BE CURIOUS
Alexis Engelbrecht
Let us be curious.
May we contemplate what we believe and why.
Let us be curious.
May we inquire to learn more about beliefs and experiences different from our own.
Let us be curious.
May we explore the world around us, so that we might broaden our awareness and appreciate the beauty that is, while exploring what else might be.
Reading
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Sermon
Dr. Michelle Khine had a problem.
Dr. Khine is a researcher whose scientific interest, life long empirical curiosity, involves developing nanotechnology that can be used for healthcare purposes.
Her problem was that at the time, her work with such nanotechnology required a lab with sophisticated equipment that allowed doing the work at the microscopic level.
She had just changed jobs, but the lab at the new job that she had been promised was nowhere near ready. In fact, it appeared to be months away from being equipped and useable.
How would she continue her work and meet the requirements of the grants to fund it that she was bringing with her? Without the equipment she needed to work on a microscopic level, all seemed to be lost.
Then, she remembered a toy from her childhood called, “Shrinky Dinks”.
Shrinky Dink’s are polystyrene sheets that can be cut into various shapes, colored and then placed in an oven, where they will shrink into small, hard plates without losing their original shape and characteristics.
Michelle Khine was curious whether she could use this process to allow her to do her work starting on a larger scale and then shrink everything down, thereby avoiding the need for the expensive lab equipment required to work at the microscopic level.
And thus was born the Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: 3D polystyrene chip.
And thus, did curiosity allow Dr. Khine to save her nanotechnology career with a toy from her childhood.
Dr. Khine’s story, I think, is a wonderful illustration of the power of our human capacity for curiosity. Among other benefits, curiosity is the source of our creative potential.
This month, our lifespan faith development activities and religious education classes are exploring the concept of curiosity, and I thought it would be a great topic for us to examine together for a while this morning.
After all, Unitarian Universalists come from a long tradition of being the
questioners and the curious – those for whom revelation is never sealed but rather is continuously unfolding and therefore always to be explored anew.
The Unitarians got curious about how God as a trinity could make any possible sense and eventually rejected this idea, among several others that had been and often remain Christian dogma.
The Universalists became curious about how a supposed all loving God could condemn those who were supposedly so loved to bum in hell for all eternity.
Eventually, some Universalists came to reject hell altogether, while others thought that sinners might burn in hell for some unspecified time period before God would lift them out of the flames so that they did not have to burn painfully for the rest of all eternity.
I’m glad we continued to cultivate our sense of curiosity and don’t believe that anymore.
Now, some aspects of religion have actually discouraged curiosity – witness the Adam and Eve story about partaking of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge for example – but all in all, I think both religion and science stem from our curiosity about our human condition, the world and universe in which we find ourselves and the larger questions of meaning in life, death, beauty, truth and ethics.
And they are at times trying to get at, different types of questions and certainly in different ways. As such, I don’t think the commonly held perception that science and religion have to stand in opposition to one another is necessarily true. I think at times they might indeed inform and enhance each other.
Certainly, through science, we have discovered changes that moved us from cave dwelling to landing on the moon to having a phone in our pockets more powerful than the original computers and on and on and it has been our curiosity that has driven our science.
So why do we humans have such a curious nature. After all, our curiosity drives us to spend time exploring not just those big questions I was just talking about, but also to spend time exploring seemingly unproductive curiosities like reading news about people we will never meet, watching movies and reading stories about people who do not really exist, exploring places we will never visit again and learning about topics that seem to have no practical use in our daily lives, just to name a few.
Well one evolutionary theory is that it stems from a trait we evolved called “neoteny”, which means that even as adults we retain more juvenile characteristics compared to other mammals, such as being relatively hairless and having brains relatively large in relation to our body size.
And this neoteny, while making us weaker than our primate cousins, has given us our lifelong playfulness, curiosity and deep sense of attachment to one another, all of which have provided survival advantages.
And it turns out that in a complex world, even those seemingly unproductive curiosities we are prone to explore that I mentioned earlier provide an advantage. They do so by keeping our brains open to novelty and new learning, so that we do not remain stuck in old but useless thinking algorithms when we encounter new challenges or threats.
What may have seemed to be useless learning in our past can turn out to be very useful knowledge later on.
Curiosity then is what keeps our learning alive and drives us to engage our full learning capacity.
As Albert Einstein once said it, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”
And it turns out that some research has found that maintaining that passionate curiosity is associated with better health and greater longevity, as well as developing and retaining higher intelligence.
In other studies, people who were actively curious about others more easily established close relationships, found greater satisfaction in their relationships and were less likely to express racism and other forms of prejudice.
Other studies found engaging with novelty and remaining curious are correlated with a sense of overall life fulfillment and happiness.
Now, while it is important to note that “associated” or “correlated” does not establish cause and effect, still these studies might give us reason to consider whether actively keeping our sense of curiosity alive might be good for us.
Here are a few practices in which can engage that may help us do that. For a faith steeped in questions more profound than answers, we might even call them spiritual practices.
1. Reconnect with play. Children are naturally curious, and play is one of the ways that as children we explore ourselves and the world about which we are learning.
We too often lose our our sense of play as adults; however, even as adults, play can still open up novelty for us.
And actually one good way to engage with play is to be around and play with children. They can teach us how to do it again!
One warning though, those curious children may surprise you.
I loved one story I found about a little boy who was curious about why his mother’s hair was beginning to turn grey.
So, one day, when they were at the playground and his mom was playing seesaw with him, he asked her, “Mommy, why are some of your hairs turning grey?”
Thinking she might use this playful occasion as a teaching lesson, the mom replied, “It’s because of you dear. Every time you do something bad one of my hairs turns grey.”
“Oh,” replied the little boy innocently, “Now I know why grandma has only grey hairs on her head.”
2. Intentionally building our knowledge enhances our curiosity to learn even more reading, attending talks, watching documentaries, traveling to new places, making lists of things we want to explore for a few examples. Studies have found the larger our knowledge base, the more likely we will be curious to learn even more.
3. Get comfortable with uncertainty and being uncomfortable. Being curious by necessity involves exploring the unknown, and while novelty and surprise can cause us tension, they are also some our greatest sources of joy and learning.
For folks who watch sports for example, part of the enjoyment is in the tension of not knowing what the ultimate outcome of the game will be.
4. In every conversation, think of questions too ask, not things to say next. Listening more activates our curiosity and can add much greater depth to our conversations and relationships.
So those are just a few of the ways I found that we can keep our sense of curiosity alive and fulfilling.
Now, with the exception of religion and sometimes play, the ways we can pursue our curiosity and practice keeping it alive about which I have spoken so far have been in terms of very concrete and literal thinking.
I want to turn now to some more emotional, embodied and metaphorical ways we can both explore that about which we are curious and also keep our curiosity active.
There are times when we are curious about things that we either do not have the ability to fully understand because of our current scientific limits or that are just not as easily understood and expressed on a concrete and literal level.
Love, beauty, meaning, morality, justice and injustice, human cruelty and human altruism, God or that which is ultimate, to name just a few examples – these are just a few of our human curiosities that may be further explored metaphorically.
And one way that we explore these types of interests is through storytelling. Whether told orally, written, expressed through television, movies theatre or the opera, the power of stories is that they help us understand things that may require us to go beyond literal, intellectual thinking. They help us approach matters that can only be pointed at metaphorically and that must be felt in our bodies, hearts and souls in order to better grasp at their meaning.
And by the way, you can experience the power of storytelling, at an event called, “Story Telling Under the Stars,” here at the church, on our courtyard at 6:30 p.lU. this evening.
Likewise, the visual arts, poetry, music, dance and the other performing arts can also help us to experience that about which we are curious but that may be best approached through metaphor. These too can move us beyond only the intellectual and help with that which requires the engagement of our emotions and senses.
And all of these not only help us with that about which we may be curious but need more than only a literal approach, they also stimulate our curiosity even further.
- How often has reading a good fictional book gotten you interested in exploring some subject brought up within the story?
- Or seeing a movie gets us interested in visiting a place we have never traveled to before.
- Or an engaging night at the theatre get us interested in a moral issue we had never thought much about, etc.
Experiences of storytelling, music and the arts then are other vital ways in which we cultivate and expand our curiosity.
My friends, we were meant to be curious creatures.
And science and religion are important.
Learning about the really big stuff matters.
But so too does the more mundane – something in which you get interested may seem to have little practical value in that moment, but go ahead and pursue your curiosity about it anyway.
Later on, it may well have value you would have never anticipated. At the very least it will keep your thinking adaptable and open to novelty.
So, yes, please do keep coming to church! Yes, keep up with what science is teaching us.
But also read that story about people you likely will never meet, attend that concert featuring music that is new to you, sing out loud, read up on shrinky-dink microfluidics just because your curious about it, spend hours admiring your favorite artwork, explore lands to which you may never return, start a new hobby just because it interests you, play with the abandonment of small children.
These too are spiritual work because they stimulate our curiosity and keep it alive and well.
Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
Benediction
As we go out into our world now, may we go with the courage to pursue the curiosity that transforms us and moves us toward wholeness, compassion and transcendence.
May we carry the spirit of this, our beloved religious community with us until next we gather again.
May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed Be”.
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