© Davidson Loehr
9 September 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
NOTE: This sermon was delivered without notes, then transcribed from the recording of the 11:15 service on this date, and edited by Dr. Loehr. While the sermons will necessarily vary some between the 9:30, 11:15 and 5:30 Sunday services, this is a fair approximation of the original. This is also why it reads more like an oral presentation than an essay.
What is truth? Usually when we ask the question, we’re asking it like a grand inquisitor, standing outside of it and treating it as an intellectual thing. We want to know what it is so we can judge it and tell you whether it is right or wrong. When we let it get inside of us, to quote one of America’s current philosophers, Chef Emeril Legasse, “we really kick it up a notch.”
When we let the question “What is truth?” get inside of us it is a whole different kind of question and it’s a lot scarier. Now its like looking at the “mirror mirror on the wall” and asking who really is the fairest of us all, and we might not like the answer we get.
We talk a lot about truth as though it were a dangerous thing to be near. I think a lot of truths are things we try to avoid more than we try to seek. Sometimes we avoid them because the truth that’s offered to us is just too small to qualify as “true.”
There’s an example of that going around the University Baptist Church down on the UT campus right now, where some bigots from Topeka, Kansas have come here to picket outside the church because UBC welcomes gays and lesbians just as Jesus might have. They carry signs with a couple sound bytes from hateful parts of the Bible – you can read it all on their web site, which is – believe this or not – www.godhatesfags.org.
Anything that is so small that it separates life and divides it into little pieces and pits the pieces against each other isn’t truth in the sense that we’re looking for in religion. It’s only a tormented fractured piece that can’t find its way home to the whole. When I hear the salvation story from Christian fundamentalism I’m struck this way. This will be two-sided in a second – I don’t like to throw stones unless I throw them up in the air so that some of them land on us too. But when I hear that least imaginative version of the Christian salvation story, a story primarily of obeying until you die, and then going to heaven, I think this just isn’t an interesting story. It’s too small. I can’t fit into it the parts of me that I have to fit into it if I’m ever going to be whole. The story can’t make me whole. It would just put me in a little compartment. So it won’t do for me.
I had a friend a dozen years ago in the ministry who was a fundamentalist minister, a wonderful man, absolutely as caring a person as I’ve ever met. And I asked him when he became a fundamentalist and he said he used to be mostly a secular humanist and when he was in college he took a biology course.
He talked to his biology professor one day about this notion that we have a special place in the world, that there was something precious about us because we had somehow been created by some loving intelligence. And his biology professor said he was an idiot for thinking like that. There was no God. Nothing had been created. There wasn’t anything special about us at all. We just evolved like slugs and slime mold does. The only rule of evolution is that whatever fits the environment best survives no matter how sleazy or crummy it is. That’s the end of it, his professor told him. Get used to it.
He said you know, my response to that story of indifferent mechanical evolution is about the same as your response to my story of special creation. And I thought you’re right, there is nothing in the story of evolution that gives people a home, gives anyone a special place to be. I think there’s another story that can, a story of which indifferent mechanical evolution is an intrinsic part. But explaining that would take a lot longer, and he’s already found something that gives his heart someplace to live and has helped him be a loving person. It sounds like he’s got the right religion for now. So sometimes we reject the truths that are offered because they are too little for us.
We can take it down another level though and say sometimes we reject the truths because we’re afraid the truth will be bad. And we’ll stay in any kind of denial offered to us rather than moving into a truth that we think will be bad. The place you find this happening most often – you find it everyday, we’ve found it in most all of our lives – is when people have a terminal illness. And you find that in early stages of dealing with their prognosis and the jargon for it is that the prognosis is negative. In ordinary language it means you’re going to die. And almost no one wants to accept this right off.
The truth is bad. Of course they don’t want to accept it. And yet there’s an ironic lesson that comes from working with terminal patients. I spent a year doing this in Chicago while I was writing my dissertation in graduate school. I worked the afternoon and evening shifts in a 900-bed hospital in downtown Chicago. And I worked almost exclusively with terminal patients because that’s where the serious work was to be done.
What you find when you work with people who are dying, and it is quite ironic, is that when they find peace — and everyone I worked with found peace before they died, partly because I was such an activist in this — when people find peace they only find it after accepting the truth that terrified them the first time they heard it. They only find it when they accept the fact that they are going to die. And there’s something about being able to get in harmony with that kind of truth that lets them forgive life, forgive God, forgive the universe, make peace with the people they’ve loved and find peace in their own hearts.
Watching that transformation was not only one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. It was one of the most uplifting because it gives you faith in the fact that we can make a home in the truth if we work at it, and that it pays to do so. I think there’s a third reason that we sometimes choose not to tell the truth or not recognize it. And that’s that even though we know it’s true and we know it’s right, we don’t know how to live in it.
The most famous story of this, my favorite, comes from the ancient Hebrew scriptures. It’s the story of Moses leading his people from slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land and freedom. And my favorite part of the story is the part that says the people didn’t want to go! They wanted to go back to Egypt. It’s true there was suffering there, but they knew how to suffer. They’d done it all their lives. But they didn’t know how to be free. And they’ll pick the familiarity of being in their rut over a freedom they have no idea how to live in.
We’ve seen little pictures of this in some of the communist countries that have flirted with democracy, when all of them seem to be going back toward a form of totalitarianism. It’s what they knew. It’s what they’re comfortable with. So sometimes we don’t choose the truth because we do not know how to live in it.
There’s a five-line poem by Stephen Crane. It’s one of my favorite poems, and it puts all of this more succinctly than any story I know. He wrote:
I was in the darkness.
I could not see my words
nor the wishes of my heart.
Suddenly, there was a great light.
Let me back into the darkness again!
Suddenly, there was a great light and it showed me a world so big, so free, so unconstrained, so open with possibility and hope that I was terrified all the way down to the bottom of my soul. Because I’ve never lived like that once. Let me back into the darkness again. I don’t know how to be free! This poem outlines a tragedy. But it’s a human story to which every one of us can relate in some ways from some times of our life.
So where do you find the courage to tell the truth? While I think we each find our own path to it I’ll tell you part of my path and how I found it and how I still think of it. Maybe some of it will be useful.
When I was in graduate school I read a lot of theologians. That’s what you get when your Ph.D. is in theology, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science. You read a lot of philosophers and scientists and theologians.
One of the theologians I read is regarded really as a fairly conservative theologian of the 20th century (Karl Barth). But like my fundamentalist preacher friend of a dozen or more years ago, he was also someone who was so warm, so full, so alive, that I liked fifty percent of what he wrote very much. And fifty percent isn’t bad. One of his best insights came from a short talk that he gave to a group of young ministers who were in school and were preparing to go out into the ministry. They wanted to know what this world-renowned theologian had to say to them that might help them save souls. And what he told them was this. I memorized it because it was so powerful for me as soon as I read it. He said:
“Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”
I think that’s dead right. And it is a thought that comes to me several times a month. Anytime I’m trying to think how do I serve this congregation of people who are actually giving me your attention for twenty or thirty minutes in a week. You deserve something that I think is worth saying, that I think is worth hearing even though your lives are in many ways so different from mine.
I think I have to try to take you more seriously than you may be taking yourself. And I have to trust that it’s what you want and that you won’t forgive me if I fail to do so either.
There’s a story from Buddhism that I like better that most of the stories of western religions. Buddhism doesn’t start from the idea that we are estranged from God, or that we are sinful and need to somehow make amends. Buddhism starts from the idea that every single person can be a Buddha. In every single person they say there’s a Buddha seed. There’s that within us which can be nourished and turned into a flower of awakening and enlightenment in Buddhahood. And our job, they say, is to act from that seed in us and speak to that part of other people.
Now that’s saying the same thing. That’s saying that the mirror mirror on the wall that we’re talking about is the same mirror that we have to be able to look at ourselves in and live with in the morning. And that means that the mirror mirror is on the wall of our soul, not our hallway. It’s that mirror inside of us that we have to be able to live with.
So the courage to tell the truth, I think, comes from knowing that what we owe one another, perhaps more than anything, is to recognize that each one of us has that kind of a Buddha seed, that kind of a God-spark, and that’s the level that we need to communicate with. We have to take others more seriously than they take themselves and we have to take ourselves more seriously than others may take us.
And those parts of us that dwell there can only live in the truth: nowhere else. There’s also a penalty for not doing it right. If we live in fear, if we live by incorporating the fears of others and if we live by the values of others we may find at the end that we have lived their lives. And that nobody lived ours.
There’s only one person in the world who is able to live your life. What a tragedy it would be if that life weren’t lived! And the kind of truth that makes us whole and connects us with each other and with the world is probably the only route there is or has ever been toward living that kind of life. That truth really can set you free. And for the record, that’s the truth.
