by Posted in Davidson Loehr, En Español, Former Ministers, Sermons

(Traducción al español, Francisco Javier Lagunes Gaitán)

Hay muchas ironías en los temas de ciencia y religión. Entre ellas está el hecho de que muchos de los ideales prescritos por las religiones, de hecho han sido cumplidos por nuestras ciencias. Podrías alegar que mientras las guerras religiosas siguen desatándose alrededor del mundo, nuestras ciencias nos han hecho más saludables, han prolongado nuestras vidas, nos han dado esperanza, vida y buenas noticias, así como empezado a establecer una comunidad mundial, incluso nos han dado el único lenguaje universal de que disponemos. Piensa en algunas de las cosas que nuestras ciencias nos han traído a todos, independientemente de si creemos, o no, en ellas.

? Enfermedades una vez consideradas como sentencias de muerte han sido curadas. Incluso el sida que fue declarado un asesino sin solución hace quince años, comienza a ser entendido, y bien podría curarse o controlarse indefinidamente.

? Cirugías que eran impensables hace 100 años ahora salvan rutinariamente miles de vidas cada día.

? El único lenguaje realmente universal que tenemos es la matemática. Mientras que las religiones occidentales enseñan el relato de la Torre de Babel, y de cómo estamos condenados a nunca ser capaces de comunicarnos con gente de otras lenguas y culturas, los matemáticos chinos se comunican con matemáticos de África, Europa y de cualquier otro continente de manera rutinaria.

? El impacto de las computadoras sigue en expansión. Aunque ya el correo electrónico conecta a gente de todo el mundo, en el intercambio de relatos, bromas y en la creación de una cultura de comunidad ?que las religiones han siempre predicado pero nunca creado. Recibí un mensaje electrónico esta semana que se originó como un proyecto de investigación de una secundaria (creo que en Virginia). Los alumnos de una clase enviaron una nota a sus amigos, en la que les pedían retransmitirla a sus amigos, y así sucesivamente, para ver a cuánta gente podrían alcanzar, en cuántos países, en dos meses. La respuesta automática que recibí decía que en las primeras seis semanas, recibieron más de 300 mil respuestas provenientes de unos 100 países. Nunca antes en la historia habíamos sido capaces de comunicarnos con tantas personas y culturas.

? Las leyes de la física, la química, y los principios de las matemáticas y de la ciencia de los lenguajes de computación son universales. Ellos estructuran nuestro mundo y organizan nuestros pensamientos, creamos o no creamos en ellos. Esto también es algo que las religiones no han sido capaces de lograr, incluso con su historia de guerras sangrientas.

Las ciencias han hecho esto a través de limitar estrictamente las clases de preguntas que consideran preguntas científicas apropiadas. Tratan con cuestiones de hechos, no con preguntas sobre significados. Tratan con cuestiones objetivas que pueden ser contestadas igual por científicos de todo el mundo, no con cuestiones subjetivas. Si quieres conocer la estatura, el peso o características conductuales de otras personas, los científicos pueden responder tus preguntas. Si deseas saber si realmente las amas, si te hacen feliz, y viceversa, no estás formulando la clase de preguntas para las que las ciencias están diseñadas.

Las preguntas sobre qué es la ciencia, qué es la religión y las claras diferencias entre ambas son preguntas enormes e imponentes. Tengo un programa de ocho horas que hice sobre este tema para las clases de educación religiosa para adultos, así que es un poco frustrante pasar al vuelo sobre ello en unos pocos minutos. Intentaré encontrar algunos patrones lo suficientemente claros como para no te resulten frustrantes. Es una historia fascinante, cómo la ciencia se convirtió en la religión dominante de nuestra cultura. Quiero contarles esta historia en unas pocas partes, con las que trataré de redondearla.

I. La visión precientífica del mundo

Primero, quiero hacer un boceto del mundo de las creencias religiosas e intelectuales de hace 200 años. Siempre es un poco chocante darse cuenta de lo que la gente inteligente creía en los tiempos de Thomas Jefferson, de la misma forma que resultará chocante para la gente de dentro de 200 años darse cuenta de lo que creemos ahora. Pero he aquí algunas de las cosas que la gente más educada creía cuando nuestro país acababa de nacer, justo unas décadas antes del cambio repentino:

? Todo el universo tenía unos 6 mil años de antigüedad, una fecha que a la que se llegaba al sumar los periodos señalados en la Biblia.

? Todo en el universo era creado por Dios, quien era nuestro amante padre celestial. Y estábamos todavía bastante cercanos al centro de la creación de Dios y de sus preocupaciones.

? Todas las formas de vida sobre la tierra fueron creadas más o menos al mismo tiempo, y ninguna especie podía llegar a extinguirse. Tengo una historia sobre esto. En 1785, Thomas Jefferson inspeccionó un enorme hueso fosilizado, un hueso demasiado largo como para pertenecer a cualquier animal conocido. Jefferson escribió que “tal es la economía de la naturaleza, que no se puede producir un ejemplo de ella habiendo permitido que alguna raza de sus animales llegara a extinguirse”. Y una de las razones por las que envió a Lewis y Clark al oeste a explorar fue para encontrar los animales de los que ese hueso enorme provendría, para Jefferson era seguro que seguirían existiendo en alguna parte.

? La realidad, en otras palabras, era una imagen estática más que una en movimiento. Las especies eran fijas, todo era creado por Dios de acuerdo a un plan suyo, y así permanecería hasta el final de los tiempos.

? La mayoría de la gente creía que el único cataclismo geológico jamás sucedido habría acaecido hace 4 mil años, durante el Diluvio.

? Lo más importante, nosotros como humanos estábamos en el mismo centro de las preocupaciones divinas, y su plan para todo el universo nos daba un lugar especial y amoroso en él. Este era nuestro hogar, hecho apara servir todas nuestras necesidades por nuestro padre celestial. Éramos amados: amados por el hacedor del cielo y la tierra, amados por el Dios que creó todo el asunto. Y como los comerciales televisivos de cerveza lo proclaman, “¡Nada es mejor que eso!”.

Este es un rápido boceto de un mundo que, para la mayoría de nosotros, hace tiempo que se fue, excepto quizás como cierta clase de nostalgia dulce y soñadora. Las mayores diferencias con nuestro mundo moderno eran el profundo sentido de unidad, la naturaleza estática de aquel, y la creencia incuestionada de que las glorias de la tierra eran las glorias de la obra de Dios y la evidencia de su amor por nosotros. Esas ideas son tan extrañas para muchos de nosotros hoy que cuesta trabajo recordar que fueron simplemente asumidas, incluso por las mejores mentes de su tiempo.

II. La revolución científica

Ahora vamos a la segunda etapa de este drama, y miremos la parte más emocionante de la historia, los avances científicos del siglo XIX, donde podemos ver el surgimiento y ascenso de lo que pienso que puedo persuadirte que es la religión de la ciencia.

Los avances logrados por las ciencias durante el siglo XIX fueron absolutamente explosivos. Cambiaron la forma de pensarnos a nosotros y a nuestro mundo. A partir de la década de 1790, los geólogos comenzaron a mostrar que la tierra tenía que ser muy, pero muy vieja. No 6 mil años, sino millones y millones de años, tal vez incluso más. James Hutton, el padre de la geología moderna, escribió en 1795 que él había estudiado los hechos de la geología por cincuenta años, y había sido llevado a una conclusión sorpresiva: “El resultado de esta investigación física”, escribió, “es que no encontramos vestigio de un inicio, ni perspectiva de un final”. El mundo era mayor, y diferente, de lo que la Biblia decía que era.

La siguiente conmoción vino casi inmediatamente. Para 1801, dieciséis años después de que Thomas Jefferson había dicho que ninguna especie podría jamás llegar a extinguirse, un paleontólogo francés llamado Cuvier había ensamblado los esqueletos de 23 animales extintos de tiempos prehistóricos, que fueron expuestos en lugares públicos, y llevados en exhibición itinerante por todo Estados Unidos de América, tanto en museos, como en ferias.

En 1830 otro geólogo, Charles Lyell, publicó un libro llamado ‘Principios de geología’, que representó un golpe aplastante al literalismo bíblico. Lyell convincentemente demostró que millones de años de un lento trabajo de las fuerzas naturales habían dado forma al rostro actual de la tierra. La geología repentinamente obsesionó a los teólogos usamericanos, y comenzaron a cambiar de opinión sobre la cuestión del literalismo bíblico. Es difícil creer esto actualmente, pero para 1860 el literalismo rígido era algo propio mayoritariamente de la gente sin educación formal, o de los arrogantemente obstinados, ya que la mayoría de los predicadores y maestros de religión estaban dispuestos a admitir que la Biblia, después de todo, no se basaba completamente en hechos reales.

El libro de Lyell tuvo muchas ediciones, y ayudó a educar a toda una nueva generación de científicos. Uno de aquellos jóvenes científicos que leyó el libro de Lyell en 1830 fue un naturalista llamado Charles Darwin. Dos años antes, Darwin recibió el segundo volumen del trabajo de Lyell mientras hacía su histórico viaje a bordo del Beagle.

La crítica de la biblia surgió desde dentro de la religión, y se presentó a sí misma como un estudio científico de la Biblia. Comenzó en Alemania, en las décadas de 1820 y 1830, y para 1840 los estudiantes de Harvard aprendían que la Biblia había sido escrita por mucha gente durante muchos siglos, en vez de caer de la mano de Dios encuadernada en cuero negro en la traducción del Rey James. La conspiración del silencio entre ambos, los predicadores y los maestros de religión todavía me llena de ira; ¡los estudiosos han conocido por 160 años hechos básicos sobre la Biblia que todavía no le han dicho a la gente en las bancas de las iglesias y las calles! Esto está en alguna parte entre un ultraje y un pecado, y muestra que los predicadores y maestros de religión parecen tener una opinión terriblemente baja de la gente ordinaria. Pero no debo salirme del tema?

Y entonces llegó el año 1859. En ese año, Charles Darwin publicó ‘El origen de las especies’, y lo que quedaba de la imagen del viejo mundo cayó al suelo hecha trizas. Aunque hay muchas razones por las que los descubrimientos de Darwin fueron tan destructivos para la vieja imagen religiosa ?que de alguna forma es todavía la imagen religiosa de millones de personas? la más famosa es que los descubrimientos de Darwin destruyeron lo que se llamó el Argumento del Diseño para probar la existencia de Dios. El Argumento del Diseño fue una especie de patada de ahogado de los teólogos para aferrarse a la imagen de un Dios personal que creó todo de acuerdo a un plan divino. Ellos podían señalar a los pajaritos y decir, “Mira. Estos pajaritos tienen pequeños picos, y adivina ¿qué es lo que les gusta comer? Semillitas. Ellos no quieren comer papayas, ellos quieren comer semillitas que quepan dentro de sus lindos piquitos. Esto demuestra que un Dios inteligente diseñó todo esto”. Luego de Darwin, hubo una explicación aún más simple: “Caramba, hubo una vez pajaritos que solo querían comer papayas. Si fue así, todos se murieron de hambre”. No hay necesidad de un argumento de “diseño”; la selección natural mantiene a las especies que se ajustan al ambiente, y el resto se mueren. Darwin, junto con otros científicos naturales, nos pintó la imagen de nuestro mundo que ya no necesita de un Dios para hacerlo funcionar.

Después de todos los avances tenidos en las ciencias, la iglesia empezó a perder su control de las universidades. Tú podrías ni siquiera saber que jamás tuvo ese control, pero sí lo tuvo. Harvard había tenido siempre a un ministro como su presidente, y uno tenía que contar con una recomendación eclesiástica para obtener un grado académico en Oxford y en Cambridge, así como en muchas universidades de los EUA. Pero alrededor de 1870 los exámenes religiosos se dejaron de exigir en las universidades británicas, y nombraron presidente de Harvard a un químico. Harvard no ha vuelto a ser dirigida jamás por un ministro. .

Durante esta época, la Ciencia, de una manera lenta pero segura se convirtió en una religión, incluso en la religión más influyente en nuestra cultura. Sé que no te has convencido de esto aún, pero pienso que lo estarás en unos pocos minutos. Sucedió a la manera de un cangrejo ermitaño que vuelve su hogar la concha de otro animal. He identificado por lo menos diez dimensiones de la religión que fueron asumidas, o al menos copiadas, por la Ciencia en el siglo XIX. Es difícil ya pensar en una lista de diez cosas sin recordar las listas de éxitos del “Top Ten” que vemos por todas partes. Así que he aquí mi lista de las diez cosas más socorridas que la Ciencia asumió de la religión en el siglo XIX:

10. La Salvación fue reemplazada por el Progreso. Los cristianos trabajan sobre la tierra para alcanzar un estado ideal futuro en el cielo. Los científicos trabajan aquí para contribuir al Progreso ?que, según ellos creen, nos conducirá a un estado ideal aquí en la tierra, en el futuro.

9. La Revelación fue reemplazada por el Descubrimiento. Por siglos, las iglesias han sido lugares a los que ibas para encontrar revelaciones sobre la palabra de Dios, la Verdad última. Ahora la revelación comienza a perder respeto intelectual, conforme confiamos en los descubrimientos de la ciencia más que en las revelaciones de los sacerdotes. Aún lo hacemos. Claro que si tomas como ejemplo estas dos palabras, revelación y descubrimiento, descubrirás que significan la misma cosa. Revelar es remover un velo. Descubrir es remover una cubierta. Hace unos 150 años, el trabajo de remover el velo o cubierta fue transferido de la religión a la ciencia, donde permanece hoy en día

8. La sotana del sacerdote fue reemplazada por la bata blanca de laboratorio del científico. Ambos son atuendos, pero por más de un siglo hemos visto a la gente con la prenda blanca como más fidedigna que aquellos que usan las prendas negras. Incluso si los sacerdotes visten togas color granate intenso con capuchas y barras, no es probable que te convenzamos de que conocemos más sobre los hechos que un científico. Y, desde luego, conforme cambiaron los atuendos, también lo hicieron los personajes dentro de ellos, así como los sacerdotes fueron reemplazados por los científicos como fuentes de la verdad.

7. La reverencia por el pasado fue sustituida por la reverencia por el futuro. Para cada cultura tradicional en el mundo, la frase “el nuevo modelo mejorado” resulta simplemente desquiciada. Las culturas se basan en la sabiduría de sus ancianos y en su pasado sagrado. Con el mito del Progreso, las antiguas verdades (y la sabiduría de ancianos y ancianas) fueron y son dejados de lado en la fe que en la que “novedoso” significa “mejor” y el futuro será superior al pasado. Esto nos ha despojado de mucha de nuestra sabiduría inmemorial y de la de los ancianos, haciendo de nuestra superficialidad algo especialmente triste.

6. Los rituales religiosos fueron reemplazados por los rituales científicos. Por siglos, las iglesias y sinagogas aquí han experimentado las mismas transformaciones de las mismas formas en sus servicios de adoración, y aquellos en la tradición vieron los rituales como el camino hacia alguna clase de verdad y paz. Ahora parece más importante que los científicos realicen los mismos procedimientos cuando conduzcan el experimento que nos llevará, así lo creemos, hacia el descubrimiento de los hechos.

5. Las iglesias fueron reemplazadas por los laboratorios. Por lo menos en tanto que lugares donde uno espera encontrar lo que es realmente la verdad.

4. Los símbolos y metáforas fueron reemplazados por el literalismo y los hechos. Esta es especialmente devastadora, pienso yo. La semana pasada les leí algo de un antiguo teólogo cristiano que explicaba que los escritos religiosos no significan realmente lo que dicen, sino que deben ser interpretados por métodos aparentemente disponibles para unos pocos. Si los científicos no tuvieran nada más exacto que símbolos y metáforas, nunca podrían construir un puente, o un cohete, o hacer diagnósticos y prescripciones confiables para las enfermedades.

Un desdichado, pero probablemente inevitable efecto colateral de la cultura científica es que nos ha vuelto mucho más literalistas, más preocupados con los hechos duros que con los significados más cálidos y ricos.

3. Las creencias se han vuelto intelectuales. Esto puede sonar extraño, porque todas nuestras vidas se nos ha enseñado a pensar en las creencias como en cosas cuya verdad afirmamos. Pero eso no es lo que la palabra solía significar. La palabra inglesa “belief” proviene de la palabra Alemana “belieben”, que significa “amado”. Las creencias religiosas fueron, y creo que deberían seguir siendo, entendidas como cosas a las que confiamos nuestros corazones. Pero dado que el conocimiento ha sido reemplazado por la ciencia, y los hechos han reemplazado a los símbolos y metáforas, las “creencias” ahora significan un conjunto de afirmaciones intelectuales más que un conjunto de acatamientos existenciales. Alguna vez los buscadores espirituales podrían haber dicho, “Creo esto porque resulta cálido a mis oídos, porque es profundamente revelador de la condición humana”. Ahora, nos han enseñado a decir, “Creo esto porque, de hecho, es verdad”.

2. La Sabiduría fue reemplazada por el Conocimiento. Incluso en la Edad Media, los teólogos conocían la diferencia. Ellos escribieron frecuentemente sobre la distinción categórica entre ‘sapientia’ y ‘scientia’. “Sapientia” es la palabra latina para sabiduría, como el autoelogioso nombre de nuestra especie: “homo sapiens”. “Scientia” es la palabra latina para conocimiento, que ha llegado a significar una red de hechos. Hace siete siglos, los teólogos enseñaron que el único conocimiento que realmente importaba era la clase de conocimiento que lleva a la sabiduría, el que nos dice quiénes debemos ser más profundamente y cómo debemos vivir, las demandas del amor y la naturaleza de los acatamientos y de la responsabilidad. Estas no son proposiciones científicas.

1. Dios fue reemplazado por la Ciencia. La gente siempre ha atribuido cualidades humanas a Dios. Decimos cosas como “Dios dice?” y “Dios nos dice?” como si Dios fuera un humanoide que pudiera hablar. Pero ahora, en nuestros periódicos y en la televisión, todos los días oímos a la gente decir “La Ciencia dice?” y “La Ciencia nos dice?”. Seamos claros: no hay tal cosa como la “Ciencia”, escrita con “C” mayúscula. Hay muchas ciencias y muchos científicos. Los científicos dicen cosas, pero no siempre están de acuerdo. Pero cuando construimos una frase que comience con las palabras “La Ciencia dice?” hemos creado un humanoide ficticio, lo hemos llamado Ciencia, y comenzamos a buscar consejo y guía en la misma forma en que solíamos mirar a Dios.

Pongamos juntas estas palabras dentro de frases para que puedas escuchar cuán similares que son. Los predicadores y los laicos dicen, “En una iglesia, a través de los rituales y tradiciones, sacerdotes ataviados de negro proclaman las tradiciones y las revelaciones de Dios, con lo que nos ayudan a aprender las creencias y sabiduría que pueden conducir a nuestra Salvación”. Muchos científicos y legos dicen, “En un laboratorio, a través de seguir los rituales y el método científico, científicos ataviados de blanco proclaman las nuevas teorías y descubrimientos de la Ciencia, con lo que nos ayudan a ganar entendimiento y el conocimiento que puede conducirnos hacia el Progreso”.

Los logros de nuestras ciencias han sido espectaculares. Las religiones no podrían colocar a un hombre en la luna, realizar un transplante de riñón o resolver problemas complejos de ingeniería a través de la interpretación de las escrituras. Creo que la razón fundamental por la que nuestras ciencias han sido tan exitosas es debido a que desde el principio, han limitado su enfoque a cuestiones de hecho, más que a cuestiones de significado. Aunque conseguir billones de dólares en fondos federales y corporativos no lastima?

Las ciencias han ignorado intencionalmente las preguntas existenciales y subjetivas. Pueden ser esenciales para nosotros, pero no son preguntas científicas. Nadie puede hacer una declaración científica sobre qué deberíamos amar, cómo deberíamos tratar a nuestros vecinos, si es que es más moral tener un aborto que traer a la vida a un niño no deseado en un ambiente de desatención, o miles de otras preguntas morales, éticas y subjetivas. Y cualquier científico que intentara hacer semejante declaración sería prontamente denunciado por otros científicos por no ser científico en esto. Estas preguntas son las preguntas a las que nos dedicamos en la religión, la ética, la filosofía y las humanidades, no así en las ciencias duras. Y las respuestas a estas preguntas son, como cualquier científico podrá decirte, no precisas, no iguales en todos los contextos, y no objetivas. Pascal una vez escribió estas palabras famosas “El corazón tiene sus razones que la razón no entiende”. Son bonitas, pero pienso que nadie reivindicaría como científicas.

Los sentimientos de Pascal, sin embargo, me recuerdan algunas otras palabras muy obscuras escritas por Charles Darwin hacia el final de su vida. Darwin escribió en su correspondencia privada sobre lo que llamó “las torpes, derrochadoras, erróneas, bajas, horribles y crueles obras de la naturaleza”. Él creyó en el progreso, pero incluso su fe en el progreso fue de poco consuelo para él, porque el progreso, según su advertencia, era “dolorosamente lento”. Aún peor, incluso la esperanza de progreso sucede como contraria a un terrible estancamiento. Así es como Charles Darwin la describió: “La certeza de que el sol algún día se enfriará y nos congelaremos. Pensar en millones de años, con cada continente pletórico de hombres buenos e iluminados, todos terminarán así, y probablemente sin un nuevo inicio hasta que nuestro sistema planetario haya sido de nuevo convertido en gas rojo y caliente. Sic transit gloria mundi, reiterada e inmisericordemente?”.

“Sic transit gloria mundi” significa “De este modo pasan las glorias de la tierra”. “De este modo pasan las glorias de la tierra, reiterada e inmisericordemente”, dijo Darwin. ¡Imagina eso! Un científico que pasó su vida dedicado a recolectar, analizar e interpretar las glorias de la tierra, concluye al final que las obras del sistema de la naturaleza son “torpes, derrochadoras, erróneas, bajas, horribles y crueles” y que sus glorias pasan rápida, reiterada e inmisericordemente. Darwin encontró, y ayudó a establecer, un nuevo mundo ?pero él no pudo encontrar un hogar confortable en él. Y su problema sigue con nosotros.

Cuando un Dios cae y se derrumba, esta es la clase de sonido que hace. La curiosidad de nuestras mentes estaba divorciada de las necesidades de nuestros corazones, y una mató a la otra. Y así murió dios. Puedes llamarlo selección natural.

Para vivir en el siglo XXI, necesitamos tener una fe que sea consistente, tanto con la ciencia, como con las demandas de nuestros corazones: una religión que pueda satisfacer a ambos, a nuestras mentes y a nuestros anhelos espirituales. Nos definimos a nosotros mismo y a nuestro mundo a través del conocimiento que hemos obtenido de nuestras ciencias. Nuestras creencias religiosas deben evolucionar y crecer para seguir ayudándonos a dotarnos de un sentido profundo de quiénes somos, y de qué somos llamados a hacer. Los predicadores deben tener un ojo en las ciencias, y pienso que esta es una cosa buena. Si yo solo predico mensajes que te hagan revisarte el cerebro a la entrada de la iglesia, te habré insultado, y habré deshonrado a mi propia profesión. Esto hace difícil a la religión liberal, pero si lo hacemos bien, puede llevarnos a una clase de autenticidad intelectual y emocional que podría no estar tan disponible de cualquier otra forma.

Hay una gran hambre espiritual hoy, y Pascal tenía razón: el corazón tiene sus razones que la razón no conoce. Y también sus necesidades y anhelos. Responder a esas necesidades, llenar esos vacíos, no es una ciencia, es un arte. Sin aprender algo de ese arte, no importa cuán inteligentes que seamos, no importa cuánto conocimiento ?scientia? tengamos, no podremos sentirnos plenos o satisfechos. Desde luego, difícilmente podemos vivir en absoluto. Ahora que, para el registro, este es un hecho. Y es un hecho para el que seguiremos intentando hacer justicia aquí, semana tras semana.

************

Referencia: John C. Greene, The Death of Adam, Iowa State Univ. Press, 1959.

The Religion of Science

by Posted in Davidson Loehr, Former Ministers, Sermons

© Davidson Loehr

February 25, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Sermon: The Religion of Science

There are a lot of ironies in the topics of science and religion. Among them is the fact that many of the ideals prescribed by religions have actually been accomplished by our sciences. You could argue that while religious wars keep breaking out all over the world, our sciences have made us healthier, let us live longer, given us hope, life and good news, begun to establish a world community, even given us the only universal language we have. Think about some of the things that our sciences have brought to all of us, regardless of whether we believe in them or not:

– Diseases once considered death sentences have been cured. Even AIDS, which was pronounced an unsolvable killer fifteen years ago, is beginning to be understood, and may well be cured or arrested.

– Surgeries that were unthinkable 100 years ago now routinely save thousands of lives every day.

– The only really universal language we have is mathematics. While Western religions teach the story of the Tower of Babel, and how we are cursed with never being able to communicate with people of other languages and cultures, Chinese mathematicians communicate with mathematicians from Africa, Europe and every other continent routinely.

– The impact of computers is still growing. But already e-mail connects people from all over the world, trading the same stories, jokes, and creating a kind of culture of commonality which religions have preached but never created. I was forwarded an e-mail this week that originated as a middle school project (in Virginia, I think). The class sent a note to friends, asking them to forward it to their friends, etc., to see how many people they could reach in how many locations in two months. The automated reply I received said that in the first six weeks, they received over 300,000 responses from about 100 countries. Never before in history have we been able to communicate with that many people and cultures.

– The laws of physics, chemistry, the principles of mathematics and the languages of computer science are universal. They structure our world and arrange our thoughts whether we believe in them or not. That too is something religions have never been able to achieve, even with their history of bloody wars.

The sciences have done this by strictly limiting the kinds of questions they consider proper scientific questions. They deal with questions of fact, not questions of meaning. They deal with objective questions that can be answered the same by scientists all over the world, not subjective questions. If you want to know the height, weight or behavioral characteristics of another person, scientists can answer your questions. If you want to know whether you really love them, whether they make you happy and vice versa, you’re not asking the kind of questions with which sciences were designed to deal.

These questions about what science is, what religion is and the clear differences between them are huge vast questions. I have an eight-hour program I’ve done on this for adult education classes, so it’s a little frustrating to fly over this in just these few minutes. I’ll be trying to find some patterns that are clear enough that it won’t be frustrating for you. It’s a fascinating story, how Science became the dominant religion of our culture. I want to tell this story in just a few parts, which I’ll try to bring full circle.

The pre-scientific world view

First, I want to sketch a picture of the world of intellectual and religious belief of 200 years ago. It is always a little shocking to realize what intelligent people believed in Thomas Jefferson’s time, as it will probably be shocking for people 200 years from now to realize what we believed. But here are some of the things that most educated people believed when our country was being born, just a few decades before the dramatic change:

The whole universe was about 6,000 years old, a date arrived at by adding up all the time periods listed in the Bible.

Everything in the universe was created by God, who was our loving heavenly father. And we were still pretty near the center of God’s creation, and of his concern.

All forms of life on earth were created at about the same time, and no species could ever become extinct. I have a story about this. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson inspected a huge fossilized bone, a bone too large to belong to any known animal. Jefferson wrote that such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct. And one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark out west to explore was to find the animals from which that huge bone came, for Jefferson was sure they must still exist somewhere.

Reality, in other words, was a static picture rather than a moving one. The species were fixed, everything was created by God according to a plan of his, and would remain so until the end of time.

Most people believed that the only major geological upheaval there had ever been happened about 4,000 years ago, during the Flood.

Most importantly, we humans were at the very center of God’s concern, and his whole plan for the universe gave us a special and cherished place in it. This was our home, made to serve all of our needs by our heavenly father. We were loved: loved by the maker of heaven and earth, loved by the God who created the whole shebang. And as a television beer commercial puts it, “It doesn’t get any better than that”!

That is a quick sketch of a world which is, for most of us, long gone except, perhaps, as a kind of romantic nostalgia. The biggest differences from our modern world were the deep sense of unity, the static nature of it, and the unquestioned belief that the glories of the earth were the glories of God’s handiwork and the evidence of his love for us. Those ideas are so foreign to many of us today that it is hard to remember that they were simply assumed, and by even the best minds.

The scientific revolution

Now let’s go to the second stage in this drama, and look at a more exciting part of the story, the scientific advances of the nineteenth century, where we can see the birth and rise of what I think I can persuade you is the religion of Science.

The advances made by the sciences during the 19th century were absolutely explosive. They changed our way of thinking of ourselves and our world. Beginning in the 1790’s, geologists began to show that the earth had to be very, very old. Not 6,000 years, but millions and millions of years, maybe even more. James Hutton, the father of modern geology, wrote in 1795 that he had studied the facts of geology for fifty years, and was led to a shocking conclusion: The result of this physical inquiry, he wrote, is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. The world was bigger, and different, than the Bible said it was.

The next shock came almost immediately. By 1801, sixteen years after Thomas Jefferson had said no species could ever become extinct, a French paleontologist named Cuvier had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct animals from prehistoric times, which were placed on public exhibit, and later toured this country in both museums and carnivals.

In 1830 another geologist, Charles Lyell, published a book called Principles of Geology, which delivered a crushing blow to Biblical literalism. Lyell convincingly demonstrated that millions of years of slow workings of natural forces had shaped the present face of the earth. Geology suddenly obsessed American theologians, and they began to backpedal on the issue of biblical literalism. It’s hard to believe this today, but by 1860 rigid literalism was largely left to the uneducated or the arrogantly obstinate, as most preachers and teachers of religion were willing to admit that the bible was not, after all, completely factual.

Lyell’s book went through many editions, and helped to educate a whole new generation of scientists. One of those young scientists who read Lyell’s book in 1830 was a naturalist named Charles Darwin. Two years later, Darwin had the second volume of Lyell’s work sent to him while he was on his historic voyage aboard the ship The Beagle.

Biblical criticism arose from within religion, presenting itself as a scientific study of the Bible. It began in Germany in the 1820’s and 1830s, and by 1840 students at Harvard were learning that the Bible had been written by many people over many centuries, rather than falling from the hand of God in a black leather binding and the King James translation. The conspiracy of silence among both preachers and teachers of religion still angers me; scholars have known for 160 years basic facts about the bible that people in the pews and the streets still aren’t being told! This is somewhere between an outrage and a sin, and shows that preachers and teachers of religion seem to have a terribly low opinion of ordinary people. I digress.

And then came the year 1859. In that year, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and what was left of the old world picture came crashing to the ground. While there are many reasons that Darwin’s discoveries were so destructive to the old religious picture which in some ways is still the religious picture for millions of people the most famous is that Darwin’s discoveries destroyed what had been called the Design Argument for the existence of God. The Design Argument was kind of a last-gasp effort of theologians to hold on to the picture of a personal God who had created everything according to a divine plan. They could point to little birds and say “Look: these little birds have little beaks, and guess what they like to eat? Little seeds. They don’t want to eat watermelons, they want to eat little seeds that fit into their cute little beaks. That proves that an intelligent God designed all of this.” After Darwin, there was an even simpler explanation: “Heck, maybe there once were little birds that only wanted to eat watermelons. If so, they all starved to death.” There is no need for a “design” argument; natural selection keeps the animals that fit their environment, and the rest die out. Darwin, along with the other natural scientists, painted us a picture of our world that no longer needed a God to make it run.

After all the advances made by the sciences, the church began losing its hold on colleges. You may not know that it ever had such a hold, but it did. Harvard had always had a minister as its president, and one had to have the church’s endorsement to get a college degree at both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as many American universities. But by about 1870 religious tests were no longer required at British universities, and the president of Harvard was a chemist. Harvard has never again been led by a minister.

During this time, Science slowly but surely became a religion, even the most influential religion in our culture. I know you’re not convinced of this yet, but I think you will be in a few minutes. It happened the way a hermit crab makes its home in the shell of another animal. I’ve identified at least ten dimensions of religion that were taken over, or at least copied, by Science in the 19th century. It’s hard to think of a list of ten things any more without being reminded of the “Top Ten” lists we see everywhere. So here is my list of the Top Ten things that Science took over from religion in the 19th century:

10. Salvation was replaced by Progress. Christians work on earth to reach a future ideal state in heaven. Scientists work here to contribute to Progress which, they believe, will lead toward an ideal state here on earth in the future.

9. Revelation was replaced by Discovery. For centuries, the churches had been where you went to find revelations of God’s word, the ultimate Truth. Now revelation began losing intellectual respect, as we trusted the discoveries of sciences more than the revelations of priests. We still do. Yet if you look up those two words, revelation and discovery, you’ll discover that they mean the same thing. To reveal is to remove a veil. To discover is to remove a cover. About 150 years ago, the job of removing that veil or cover was transferred from religion to science, where it remains today.

8. The priest’s black robe was replaced by the scientist’s white lab coat. Both are costumes, but for over a century we have regarded the people in the white costumes as more authoritative than those in the black costumes. Even if preachers dress up in wild maroon gowns with hoods and stripes, we’re not likely to convince you that we know more about facts than a scientist. (And, of course, as the costumes were changed, so were the characters in them, as priests were replaced by scientists as sources of truth.)

7. Reverence for the past was replaced by reverence for the future. To every traditional culture in the world, the phrase “the new improved model” is simply insane. Cultures are grounded in the wisdom of their elders and their sacred past. With the myth of Progress, ancient truths (and the wisdom of old people) were and are shrugged off in the faith that “newer” means “better” and the future will be superior to the past. It has robbed us of much wisdom of the ages and the aged, making our superficiality especially poignant.

6. Religious rituals were replaced by scientific rituals. For centuries, churches and synagogues here had gone through the same motions in the same ways in their worship services, and those in the tradition saw the rituals as the path toward a kind of truth or peace. Now it seems more important that scientists go through the same procedures when conducting the experiments that will, we believe, lead us toward the discovery of facts.

5. Churches were replaces by laboratories. At least as the places where one expects to find out what’s really true.

4. Symbols and metaphors were replaced by literalisms and facts. This one is especially devastating, I think. Last week I read to you from some ancient Christian theologians who explained that religious writings don’t really mean what they say, but must be interpreted by methods apparently available to a few. If scientists had nothing more exact than symbols and metaphors, they could never build a bridge, a rocket, or make reliable diagnoses and prescriptions for diseases.

An unfortunate but probably unavoidable side-effect of the scientific culture is that it has made us all much more literalistic, more concerned with cold hard facts than with warm rich meanings.

3. Beliefs became intellectual. This may sound odd, because all our lives we have been taught to think of beliefs as things we assert to be true. But it isn’t what the word used to mean. The word “belief” comes from the German word “belieben,” which means “beloved.” Religious beliefs were, and I think still should be, understood as things we trusted our hearts to. But since knowledge has been replaced by science and facts replaced symbols and metaphors, the “beliefs” now mean a set of intellectual assertions rather than a set of existential allegiances. Once spiritual seekers might have said “I believe this because it warms my hears, because it is profoundly revelatory of the human condition.” Now we have now been taught to say “I believe this because it is factually true.”

2. Wisdom was replaced by Knowledge. Even in the Middle Ages, theologians knew the difference. They wrote often of the categorical distinction between sapientia and scientia. “Sapientia” is the Latin word for wisdom, as in our self-flattering species name, homo sapiens. “Scientia” is the Latin word for knowledge, which has come to mean a web of facts. Seven centuries ago, theologians taught that the only knowledge that really mattered was the kind of knowledge that leads to wisdom, that tells us who we most deeply are and how we should live, the demands of love and the nature of allegiance and responsibility. These aren’t scientific statements.

1. God was replaced by Science. People have always ascribed human qualities to God. We say things like “God says” and “God tells us” as though God were a humanoid who could speak. But now, in our newspapers and on television every day, we hear people saying “Science says” and “Science tells us.” Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as “Science” spelled with a capital “S.” There are many sciences, and many scientists. Scientists say things, but they don’t always agree. But when we construct a sentence that begins with the words “Science says” we have created a humanoid fiction, named it Science, and begun looking to it for advice and guidance the way we used to look to God for.

Let’s put these words together into sentences so you can hear how similar they are. Preachers and lay people say “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the traditions and the revelations of God, helping us to learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay-people say “In a laboratory, through following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the knowledge that can lead us toward Progress.”

The achievements of our sciences have been spectacular. Religions couldn’t have put a man on the moon, done a kidney transplant or solved complex engineering problems through the interpretation of scriptures. I think the primary reason our sciences have been so successful is because they have, from the start, limited their focus to matters of fact rather than matters of meaning. (Though getting trillions of dollars in federal and corporate funding didn’t hurt.)

Sciences have intentionally ignored the existential and subjective questions. They may be essential to us, but they are not scientific questions. No one can make a scientific pronouncement on what we should love, how we should treat our neighbors, whether it is more moral to have an abortion or to bring an unwanted child into an uncaring environment, or a thousand other moral, ethical, subjective questions. And any scientist who tried to make such a pronouncement would quickly be denounced by other scientists for being unscientific. These questions are the questions we take up in religion, ethics, philosophy and the humanities, not the hard sciences. And the answers to these questions are, as any scientist can tell you, not precise, not the same in all contexts, not objective. Pascal once famously wrote “The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.” It’s pretty, but I think no one would claim that it’s scientific.

Pascal’s sentiments, however, remind me of some other very dark words penned by Charles Darwin late in his life. Darwin wrote in his private correspondence about what he called the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature. He believed in progress, but even his faith in progress was of little comfort to him, for progress, he noted, was painfully slow. Worse yet, even the hope of progress came up against an awful dead-end. This is how Charles Darwin described it: The certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi, with a vengeanceÉ.

Sic transit gloria mundi means thus pass the glories of the earth. Thus pass the glories of the earth, with a vengeance, Darwin said. Imagine that! A scientist who spent his life collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the glories of the earth, concludes at the end that the system of nature is clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel, and that its glories pass quickly, and with a vengeance. Darwin found, and helped establish, a new world but he couldn’t find a comforting home in it. And his problem is with us still.

When a God falls and crashes, that’s the kind of sound it makes. The curiosity of our minds was divorced from the needs of our hearts, and the one killed the other. And so God died. You can call it natural selection.

To live in the 21st century, we need to have a faith which is consistent both with science and with the demands of our hearts: a religion which can satisfy both our minds and our spiritual longings. We define ourselves and our world through the knowledge we have gained from our sciences. Our religious beliefs must evolve and grow in order to keep helping us make profound sense of who we are and what we are called to do. Preachers have to have one eye on the sciences, and I think that’s a good thing. If I can only preach messages that make you check your brains at the door, I have insulted you, and disgraced my own profession. It makes liberal religion harder, but if we do it right it can lead us to a kind of intellectual and emotional authenticity which may not be quite as available in any other way.

There is a great spiritual hunger today, and Pascal was right: the heart does have its reasons that reason doesn’t know. And also its needs and yearnings. Answering those needs, filling those holes, is not a science, it is an art. Without learning some of that art, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter how much knowledge, scientia, we have, we cannot feel fulfilled or satisfied. Indeed, we can hardly live at all. Now that, for the record, is a fact. And it’s a fact to which we will keep trying to do justice here, week after week after week.

———-

Endnotes

1 John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (Iowa State Univ. Press, 1959), p. 88

2 Greene, p. 78

3 Turner, p. 205

4 Greene, p. 336

5 Ibid.

Oh God!

by Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr, Former Ministers, Sermons

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Davidson Loehr

February 18, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: “What you need to grow”

There was a boy with an unusual problem. He was only two feet tall, and all of his school classmates made terrible fun of him, calling him all the names you might imagine, and more. One day he heard that there was an old Wise Woman living on a hill outside of town, who had been known to be able to solve problems like this.

So he went outside of town and climbed the hill to find the old woman. She was there, and welcomed him in. “Old Wise Woman,” he said, I have a terrible problem!” “Well,” she replied, “have a seat, and tell me your story.” So he did, pointing out that he was only two feet tall, and nobody else he knew was only two feet tall.

The old woman smiled, studied him for a bit, and then announced, “Well, I know what your problem is, for I have seen it before. Your problem is that you don’t have enough stories in you.”

“What?” said the boy, very surprised by such a silly answer. “I don’t have enough what?”

“Stories,” she repeated. “You don’t have enough good stories in you. Without good stories, you will probably never grow any bigger at all. So go back home, and during the next year start listening to stories, and collecting them. Come back to see me in a year, and we’ll see how you’re doing.”

He hardly knew what to do! He’d never really thought of collecting stories before! The idea! He didn’t even know what to listen to, so he just listened to everything that came easily along. He heard a lot of very bad jokes, and a lot of very nasty gossip about his own friends, always spoken behind their backs.

The next year, he returned to the cabin of the old Wise Woman. “Stand up,” she said, “and we’ll measure you.” She did, and the news was very bad: he had actually shrunk! “Goodness!” she said as though she were surprised, “What kind of stories have you been listening to?” He told her, and she just shook her head. “Well, no wonder you’re shrinking! You can’t grow by taking in bad stories! They can only make you smaller! Now go back home, and this next year I want you to listen to stories of what people love. Just that. Now go!”

Another frustrating year! Though the second year wasn’t as bad as the first, for he heard much nicer stories. He learned that his friend had a gerbil named Max that she loved like crazy. She invited him over to her house, showed him her pet, and even took Max out so the boy could hold and pet him. “Oh, wow!” he said, and he felt like he had just grown an inch.

Another friend loved riding his bicycle, because he rode it, he said, to the most beautiful place in the whole world, a place he loved more than anyplace. So the boy rode out with him one day, to the top of a very high hill, and saw the most beautiful view he had ever seen. “Oh, wow!” he said.

There were other stories he heard that year, about pets places and people that were loved by his family and friends. He had never known these things about them before, and each time he learned what someone else loved, and shared that love with them, his world got a little bigger, and he felt like he was getting bigger too. He could hardly wait to see the Old Wise Woman again!

And, sure enough, he had grown, and grown a lot! “You see?” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You need good stories in order to grow! Now go back home and collect more stories. This time, learn what it is that makes people bigger. Now go!”

Well, this year was more fun. He began learning about all his friends’ religions, the things they believed that made them bigger, and he learned all sorts of things! One friend told him about Jesus. She told him all kinds of stories about Jesus, and about how having Jesus in her life made her feel better and more safe. She even showed him her blue bracelet that said “WWJD?” on it, and explained that it meant “What Would Jesus Do?” and was the question she asked herself whenever she had a hard decision to make.

“Oh, wow!” he said: “Jesus!”

Another friend had just moved to this country with his family from Iran during the last year. He said he was a Muslim, and told the boy about Allah, who was the God of his religion. He spoke of how he kept Allah in mind during the day, how Allah was like an invisible friend and parent, and how he never felt alone because of his faith in Allah.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Allah!”

Still another friend was Buddhist, another religion the boy had never heard of. The friend told him the famous story of how the Buddha had once held up a Lotus blossom in his hand, to teach that the Lotus blossom is like the whole world: it seems so small, so easy to hold, but when it unfolds it contains all kinds of wonderful and unsuspected things.

“Oh, wow!” said the boy: “Buddha!”

These stories were so interesting, he collected them for a long time, and forgot about the Old Wise Woman. Years later, when the boy had grown, he decided to go see her once more. “Let’s measure you!” she said when she saw him, and she stood up to face him. He was now taller than she was! “Yes!” she exclaimed, “This is the day I’ve been waiting for! Come sit here,” she motioned toward her own chair, “there is someone who wants to meet you.”

The boy sat in the chair, the Old Wise Woman seemed to disappear, and suddenly a young girl entered the room. “Old Wise Man,” she said, “I have a terrible problem!”

He looked at the girl, who was only two feet tall. He smiled at her, and said “Please sit, and tell me your story.”

SERMON: “Oh, God!”

 “There is no race so wild and untamed as to be ignorant of the existence of God.” That’s an old quotation. The god he was talking about was Jupiter, for those words were written by the Roman Cicero, 2045 years ago (44 BCE). Well, today perhaps we are that race “wild and untamed,” for few of us spend three thoughts a year on Jupiter or his Greek version, Zeus (though we spend some time on them, as we will see).

If you read in some religions like Buddhism or Taoism, you won’t encounter the word “god” much, because those faiths don’t use god-talk to think about life. But in all Western religions based on the Hebrew scriptures, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you read about God on nearly every page. So since almost all of us were raised in this Western culture, it may sound odd when I say that religion isn’t about God. But it isn’t. Religion isn’t about God. It’s about something else. Still, when you read the great writers of (especially) Western religions, It looks like God is what they are going on about, especially if you read literalistic, rather than liberal, theologians.

It’s an odd fact, but in their own time, almost every famous theologian of history was quite liberal, and most of them took great pains to distance themselves from the literalists of their day, and they seldom did it politely, either! When they used the word “God” they meant something with it that sounds pretty modern, no matter when they lived. I’ve chosen some quotations from some ancient and some modern people talking about the meaning of the word “God.” I’ve picked only a few, because of the well-established scientific fact that if you listen to more than six theologians in a row you are almost certain, right on the spot, to drop dead from boredom.

First was one of my favorites, the 3rd century Christian theologian Origen. It is said that when he died, he left behind over one thousand theological writings. He was born in 185 and died, after imprisonment and extended torture, in 253.

“God must not be thought of as a physical being, or as having any kind of body,” he wrote. “He is pure mind. He moves and acts without needing any corporeal space, or size, or form, or color, or any other property of matter.”

The other ancient theologian is St. Augustine. He lived in North Africa, from 354 to 430, and could be considered the inventor of Roman Catholicism. Augustine had some complex and strange ideas about sex and sin, but when he talked about the meaning of the word “God” he was quite liberal:

“Some people imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth. When these people hear that God said “Let such and such be made”, and accordingly it was made, they think that once the words had been pronounced, whatever was ordered to come into existence immediately did so. Any other thoughts which occur to them are limited in the same way by their attachment to the familiar material world around them. These people are still like children. But the very simplicity of the language of Scripture sustains them in their weakness as a mother cradles an infant in her lap. But there are others for whom the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it.” (Confessions, p. 304 in Penguin Classics edition).

I’m not sure that many newspapers would even print quotations from liberal ministers today who described fundamentalists as being “still like children”! You get the idea that God, at least in the hands of the best theologians, is a bit of a mystery. It sounds like a Fellow, but it isn’t a Fellow, isn’t a being, doesn’t live in the sky, doesn’t have a body at all. It’s something else. I hope for us to get a glimpse of what that something else is today.

Let’s jump from the fifth to the nineteenth century, to one of the first Unitarian preachers in the United States. His name was William Ellery Channing. These two sentences come from the 1830s, but see how similar they sound to the two ancient ones, and to things you might say today:

“God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth. The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls.”

I’ll add two more thinkers from the 20th century, a historian and a novelist. First, the historian:

“I find in the universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law, and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order, and law of the world.” Will Durant, This I Believe, 1954

And the novelist Upton Sinclair wrote “I am sustained by a sense of the worthwhileness of what I am doing: a trust in the good faith of the process which created and sustains me. That process I call God.” (What God Means to Me, 1935)

It looks like Voltaire may have been right when he wrote that “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him”!

Still, the best theologians have been clear that the word “God” isn’t the name of a Being somewhere. It’s a symbol, our most powerful symbol, being used to allude to something that is beyond our ability to express.

The Buddhists have a metaphor for this. They call it the finger pointing at the moon. They say we usually mistake the finger for the moon. We do that with symbols. We mistake them for what they’re point to, and worship the symbol instead of that unnameable thing to which the symbol is pointing. You could almost say that we worship God rather than that to which the symbol of God is pointing.

For many people today, perhaps for many of you, the word “God” is associated with so much hypocrisy and deception you don’t even want to hear it. I don’t have such strong reactions against it, but I’ll admit that for me too, God-language isn’t the most interesting or useful way to talk about life’s most enduring questions and yearnings.

On the other hand, I don’t think illiteracy should be defended, and that includes religious illiteracy. I think God-language is one of the languages we need to understand, especially if we want to communicate with most other people.

So what is it like, this business of using powerful words like God? Here is an analogy that might be useful. I pick up a Stradivarius violin, perhaps the best violin ever made. I put a bow to it, saw back and forth, and make horrible squawking noises that scare the cats. I put it down and say “What an ugly instrument is the violin!” But the fault wasn’t with the violin. I just didn’t know how to play it.

I may not want to play the violin. Most of us don’t. I’d prefer the clarinet, which I can’t play very well either. But our lives can be enriched if we are open to hearing the music that can be created by those who can play the violin well.

The music analogy is helpful for religion, though it isn’t exact. Those who love the violin have never declared war on clarinet players, tried to convert them to violin, or burned them at the stake for persisting in the heretical love of clarinet sounds. A symbol like the word “God” is just far more powerful. If we get it right, it can be sublime. If we get it wrong, it can be vulgar, vicious, deadly. Some of the meanest hatreds I have ever seen were defended as God’s will.

But that’s where god-talk is like a violin again. It measures the character, imagination and heart of those who use it. Or maybe its double-edged quality makes it more like a bow and arrow. If you are an archer, you can use a bow and arrow to get food, to attack an enemy, or — if you’re really good at is, as Cupid was as a vehicle for expressing love.

At its best, God-language is a language of power and glory. We know that’s true, but it’s odd. How would a word have that kind of power? Nationalism has a similar potential for power and glory. It is not a mystery why these two vocabularies of God-talk and patriotism have that deep kind of power and glory, but it’s worth mentioning it.

It goes far deeper than religion. It goes far, far back into our evolutionary past, and is studied in the field of etholgy, or comparative animal behavior. Both the worship of God and the allegiance to a country are behaviors that look a lot like behaviors in a million other species. So let me back off from religion for a minute, to look at it from outside.

We are deeply territorial animals. That means that our sense of who we are is deeply connected to our place, our people, and our way of life. We build fences around our yards, defend our borders, and make battle-cries out of territorial boundaries like “Fifty-four forty or fight!” When we do these things, we are doing with weapons, flags and rationalizing speeches what a million other territorial animals do with teeth, threats and squawks or roars. Remember that a dog barks at strangers from inside your fence for the same reason you built the fence. So “nationalism” and “patriotism” are the words we have invented to describe and call forth our territorial instincts.

Besides being territorial animals, we are also hierarchical animals. We defer to presidents and kings, we fear the boss’s wrath. The ancient Greeks used to talk about how their god Zeus would throw lightning bolts down from above when he was angry. And even today, when somebody speaks out against authority figures, we still talk about “waiting for the lightning to strike.” In short, as students of animal behavior have noticed, God looks a lot like an Alpha Male. Alpha Males are the dominant males that rule the troop or herd. They are the top dog, the silverback gorilla, the male lion who rules the pride of lions. In a million different species, including ours, the acknowledged role of Alpha Males is to set the behavioral boundaries, reward the obedient and threaten or discipline the disobedient. They protect and punish and bomb Bagdhad and those under them fear their wrath and seek their approval. Their job is to draw the boundaries of their tribe’s permissible world. They keep the natives in and the aliens out.

A lot of scholars have said that the god of the ancient Hebrews looks like a super-sized tribal chief. And the God of the Bible was probably first formed as a projection of a tribal chief from somewhere in Canaan, the source of the ancient Hebrews’ religion. But even more anciently, it looks like the Alpha Males of a million other hierarchical species.

So God is an Alpha Male that embodies and claims ultimacy for our sense of place, normative behaviors, our amity toward those who are like us and our enmity toward outsiders. Religious wars show this on a large scale. Creeds, heresy trials and shaming sinners are close-up examples.

There’s something in us that needs to know who we are, whose we are and where our place is in life, the world, everything. And judging by our history, it looks like we need to believe that we’ve heard the answer from On High.

So God, at least in the three religions based on the Bible, is a symbolic vehicle for our highest hopes, our deepest fears, our assurance that the world is safe, we have a meaningful place in it. We make him our father, our father who art in heaven. We crave his love and fear his wrath and seek our peace in an obedient relationship with Him, usually mediated by priests, creeds, rituals and sacraments.

You see that what we’re exploring here is not gods but some of our own deepest levels. Our most powerful symbols measure us as a Stradivarius violin measures us if we try to play it.

Once you frame your quest in god-language, you can go either shallow or deep, the language permits both literalism and liberalism, as theologians have been noting for a couple thousand years or more.

Origen, that 3rd century Christian theologian I quoted earlier, taught that religious scriptures had three levels, which he called the body, soul and spirit. The “body” was the lowest level, the literal level, and he had nothing good to say for it. He thought nothing religious could happen at that level. To understand the “soul” of scripture meant you could raise it a level, and understand the key words, including the word “God” as symbols and metaphors for a deeper kind of awareness and wisdom. And at the highest level, those who understood the “spirit” of religious writings finally see that religion isn’t finally intellectual. It isn’t finally about holy words, but about living a holy life. He wrote that the cardinal rule of understanding religious scriptures is to seek out those things “which are useful to us and worthy of God.” That was the 3rd century, and it’s about as liberal as you can get!

So what is god-talk? It isn’t the name of a Being. It’s a language, an idiom of expression, a certain stylized way of thinking and talking about the human situation understood profoundly.

For me, part of what it means to become human religiously lies in learning how to hear spiritual music played in different keys, on different instruments, in different idioms of expression. It’s being able to hear the violins, the clarinets, the trumpet, drums, the oboe and the rest of it. In religion, it is the learned ability to allow the many different religious languages easy access to our minds and our hearts. The whole human sound, and the full divine sound, goes up only from the full orchestra and chorus.

I work every week, struggling to find words to wrap around who we are, what we seek, and how we might find it and let it find us. Expressing it with power and glory is an art. I seldom achieve it, and always admire it when I hear someone else do it. There are things we know, and things for which we yearn, and I don’t think they have changed much throughout our history.

We know that whatever the forces of life are, they’ve been a part of us forever. These incomprehensible dynamics gave rise to the world and all life on it, including ours. In the span of our planet’s billions of years, we’re hardly here for an eyeblink, then we fly away, and return to the dust from which we came. Our lives are swept away by these infinite forces, as though we didn’t even matter.

Who can begin to measure this power? The sustaining parts of life may feel like love, but the destructive aspects, accident, disease, war, the death of those we love, if we take it personally, and we almost always do, those things can feel like anger, even wrath. If we could get a little humility by seeing ourselves and our vanities against this immense background, we would probably be wiser than we are. In the face of this immensity, we yearn for a sense of peace, a sense that we are, somehow a beloved, a cherished, part of it all. And we wish the things we work for during our lives could somehow become established, and outlive us. Most people can die in peace if they know that the things they have loved, the things they have worked to create, will outlive them. I think, though my language wasn’t very poetic, that everyone who has ever lived has had these feelings and hopes.

Now let me play you the same song I just gave you in the last two paragraphs. But this time, I’ll play it on a borrowed Stradivarius. Listen to those same basic human concerns, as they were expressed by an anonymous poet of perhaps 2500 years ago, in the 90th Psalm of the Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament.” Here is that old tribal god, that ancient Alpha Male, raised to the level of timeless beauty.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.

Thou turnest us back to dust, saying “Turn back, O Children of Adam!” For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Thou dost sweep us away; we are like a dream, like grass which is renewed in the morning: in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are consumed by thy anger; by thy wrath we are overwhelmed. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days pass away under thy wrath, our years come to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of thy anger, and thy wrath according to the fear of thee? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on thy servants! Satisfy us in the morning with thy steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as thou has afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.

Let thy work be manifest to thy servants, and thy glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Oh, God!

Amen.

Choosing the Feathered Things

by Posted in Audio available, Davidson Loehr, Former Ministers, Sermons

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PUPPET SHOW:

INTRO. (Lisa): Now is the time for children to come down for the Story for All Ages. Children please come sit in front of the curtain and bring your gifts for Caritas so you can put them in the wagon after the puppet show. And now The First UU No Strings Attached Puppet Players present”The Lesson”.

GRUMP: I am so bored, nothing ever happens at this church.

BIG RACCOON: We’re looking for sticks!

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

BIG RACCOON: You can do lots of tricks with sticks. Can you help us?

LITTLE RACCOON: Were in a fix. We need some sticks!

GRUMP: Uh, no. (sarcastically)

WOLF: I need some bricks to go with their sticks ’cause we’ve got a lot of fun things to fix. Would you like to join us and show off your tricks?

GRUMP: You people. I mean puppets, are nuts!

CATERPILLAR: I was wondering whether, you might have a feather? If you join me, we could make things together.

GRUMP: What do I look like, Big Bird?

CATERPILLAR: Could I assume, you don’t have a plume?

GRUMP: No, but you need a padded room.

BIG RACCOON: (appears with sticks) Would you help us with our sticks?

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

WOLF: (with brick) Would you help me lay some bricks?

CATERPILLAR: (appears with feathers) Would you help me glue some feathers?

ALL PUPPETS: We can all have fun together!

GRUMP: No, I will not help you with your sticks! I will not help you lay some bricks! I will not help you glue your feathers! Why don’t you all get lost together!

BIG RACCOON: Okay.

LITTLE RACCOON: Have it your way.

WOLF: You don’t have to huff and puff about it.

CATEPILLAR: What a bird brain!

(Puppets disappear and make all kinds of construction noises.)

(Raccoons and Wolf appear with house)

WOLF: All you do is gripe and grouse.

BIG RACCOON: But look at us.

LITTLE RACCOON: We made a house!

GRUMP: That’s not fair! I don’t have a house!

WOLF: Stop your complaining.

BIG RACCOON: Stop your grousing! You had your chance.

(Turn house to logo)

LITTLE RACCOON: at Paws-on-Housing!

GRUMP: DOH! (Buries head in hands)

BIRD: Look at me up in the sky. With these wings, I can fly!

GRUMP: I want to fly. I want a house. I wish I hadn’t been such a louse. You’re right, you’re right. I’ve learned, I’ve learned. I have no right to what I’ve spurned. I’ve learned my lesson. Okay. Okay. Now what can I help you make today? (Walks over to side of puppets.)

BIG RACCOON: I ‘ve got some string.

LITTLE RACCOON: String!

WOLF: I’ve got some glue!

BIRD: Let’s go figure out what to do!

ALL: Yea!

END

SERMON: Choosing the Feathered Things

As many of you have read in the latest church newsletter, your governing board and I have been busy during the last month, on two very exciting projects. The first was the remarkable offer of 142 acres of land in the Hill Country, complete with four buildings, a new barn and an outdoor pool. Some of you have visited the land; I hope others will make the trip to see it before you vote on whether to recommend that your board accept this gift in the congregational meeting two weeks from today. There are some legal and financial details we are still investigating, and some good sober questions we need to resolve, but it’s an amazing gift, filled with exciting possibilities.

For me, though, the other project was even more exciting. Your board and I developed an ambitious model for serving the church that we have modestly called The Austin Model. While it will evolve and change over time, as a living thing would do, its essence is really very simple. We know that organizations, including churches, exist to make a difference in the world, that they are supposed to be doing something. It is like sailing a boat rather than minding the store, and like standing on the bridge to see where we’re actually going rather than being in the engine room check oil levels. We’re not just trying to stay afloat, we need to ask where are we going, and are we making any progress?

Here’s another way of understanding it. We are taking nearly a half million dollars a year from this community, and the time and talents of over five hundred adults. What are we doing that’s worth that amount of time, energy and money? The money could be used instead to open a bookstore, a little coffee house, maybe a donut shop. In what ways is what we are doing more worthwhile than that? I think we need to be able to answer, both to ourselves and to the community, just what differences we are making that are worth that kind of time and money. And I think you need to be able to give a satisfactory answer to your Baptist or Catholic friends who wonder what in hell (or at least the preparation for hell) you are doing here.

We want to begin consciously planning the actions of myself and the other staff to make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the community. And as far as possible, we want to take a rough measurement of the differences we are making, and keep you informed of them so that you will feel some of the excitement as we move in this new style.

This may all sound very obvious, you might expect that of course all churches and all organizations would think this way. But they don’t. And to be honest, it is an intimidating prospect, this business of actually taking who we are and what we’re doing with your money and your trust seriously enough to measure our actions by the differences they are making.

It is exciting and frankly, a little scary. It changes, or at least sharpens, my focus in planning sermons.

I wonder what I should do to be more intentional and effective in addressing issues that might make a positive difference in your life, the lives of your children and the community? How do we choose the things in life that might make a positive difference? Or in terms of this morning’s puppet show, how do we choose those things we need to make a home, or those feathered things that can help our spirit take flight? It was Emily Dickinson who said that hope is the thing with feathers, and I’ve always liked her definition. Hope is the thing with feathers, the thing that lifts us up. How do we choose that thing?

There is plenty to gripe about if we’d rather do that, you know. Our lives aren’t as perfect as we fantasize they should be. Not everybody loves us, or even understands us. Our jobs are like most jobs, filled with ups and downs, but not ideal. And as of this week with Motorola’s layoffs, there are over 4,000 fewer jobs in Austin, a number that may soon increase. Besides our jobs, our relationships are seldom perfect. And our kids will almost all grow up to be just regular old adults, not the envy of the civilized world. They’ll probably make about as many dumb mistakes as we did, as will their kids and their kids’ kids. It’s easy to just sit it out, gripe that Nuts, I don’t like this place, or this place, or this place. And we do it too often and too easily, don’t we?

It’s as though we come to believe that the world owes us something. As though we were born with this long list of entitlements. I don’t think we are. I think there is only one gift offered to us, and that is the gift of life itself. I think we’re paid in full the day we’re born. After that, it’s up to us to learn how to negotiate for the other things we wish we had. I don’t think the world owes us love. It doesn’t even owe us fairness or justice. Those are conditions we have to create if we really want them. We were given life, and the chance to make something of it, or just sit and be disappointed. It matters what we believe. It also matters what we choose.

And given the choice, we have to work to discover who we are and make a home for ourselves in life. We need to choose the things with feathers. And I think we must wish the same for others, and try to make our interactions with them positive rather than negative, creative rather than destructive. If our beliefs can’t help us do that, we probably have the wrong beliefs. If they can help us do that, they’re probably working fairly well for us and those in our greater community. That’s a pretty pragmatic approach to religion, but I think it’s the right one.

But the only real miracle is the gift of life. It wasn’t supposed to be perfect, it was only supposed to present itself to us, to let us see what we would and could do with it. If we sit back like couch potatoes waiting for life to please us, it will probably be a very long wait. This is true in churches, too, including this one.

Several years ago I was talking about things like this with two colleagues, and we discovered that the same visitor had been to each of our churches a few times, and then went away. So she had visited a Unitarian church, an American Baptist church, and a liberal Disciples of Christ church.

They were all good churches with good people. In each one, the visitor could have found ways to ask her questions, to meet wonderful friends, to struggle with personal and spiritual issues on several levels. None of the churches was any more perfect than the visitor, but they were all good enough. Maybe she finally found a church where she decided to take root, make friends and become a participant rather than an onlooker. If so, she was the exception.

It’s easy to read this as a failure of the church to integrate visitors, and it’s fair. We could do more to integrate visitors into the body of the church, and we should. But it isn’t only a failure of the churches. It’s also the habit of people to see themselves only as shoppers who keep moving on until something finds a way of keeping them there.

If you are a visitor here, or have just been coming for a few months, here’s something to think about: less than half of you will still be here a year from now. In this or any other church, most who come never join, never make a commitment, and never become a part of the church. Liberal churches, conservative churches, big churches, little churches, it’s the same: most visitors don’t last a year.

I think people visit churches sort of thinking, “Well, I’ll just sit here quietly and see if they swarm around me to make me feel welcome.’ The truth is, it isn’t likely to happen very often. So while I want to welcome all visitors, I want to challenge you. Don’t be passive here. Don’t expect these people to try harder to keep you than you try to stay. We’re not any better at it than you are, and creating a meaningful relationship is a two-way street.

And the way you stay ‘ here or anywhere ‘ is to seek for and choose those things, those relationships, that you can build on and grow from. Seek the things you need to make a home for yourself here, and seek the hopeful things, the bits that nourish you.

This isn’t something I have always known. It is something I learned in a memorable moment. And while I can’t give you the experience I had, I can tell you the story.

It was about twenty years ago, in a preaching class in graduate school. David, our professor was a very gifted preacher who was deeply serious about the ministry, and equally serious about professionalism. In those minutes before class begins, several of the students were whining about the church they all attended, complaining that the preacher was horrible, the service was amateurish, and they didn’t get a single thing out of it. David glared at these future ministers and said ‘How hard did you try?’

That was the first time I really understood that attending a worship service, like attending to living, is meant to be an activity, not a passivity. It changed a lot for me. The church I attended during graduate school also had a very poor preacher, and I could fall into whining about not getting anything out of the worship service as quickly as the next person.

But after that day in class, the question ‘How hard did you try?’ stayed with me. And, while I seldom heard a sermon worth remembering in the next five years, I was always glad I had attended church, but each week I saw it as a personal challenge to find something moving, something memorable in the service. Sometimes, it was the organist, sometimes the sound or feel of a hymn. Sometimes, it was just sitting there as the candles were extinguished, watching the wispy smoke rise up into the dark at the top of the big old church, thinking of the smoke as a spirit set free. But every Sunday, I went to church to try and find something, and it made all the difference.

So if you are a visitor, or have been coming here less than a year, I want to offer you a challenge. Don’t sit passively with us. Come try with us. Or if this church doesn’t suit you and you need to find another, try hard there.

Most churches are pretty good, and this one is pretty good too. We can raise spiritual questions here without any regard for whether they cross over the boundaries of an orthodoxy. You can find some interesting and engaging people here whose spiritual searches are similar to your own, once you get to know one another. We have a strong and active social conscience, we are important parts of our community, and during the coming years we will learn to make even bigger positive differences in the community.

So I challenge you to try hard here, and to come up to me next February and tell me you are still here. We’re not unfriendly. In fact I think many of us are quite friendly. But acceptance and community here require some effort on your part. If you want meaningful relationships and associations here, you have to try. If you want to feel chosen, you have to choose. If you want to live in a friendly community, you need to make friends. I challenge you to come see me and tell me you have done it.

Now some of you are sitting there thinking “Yeah, right!” It’s a lot easier said than done. We sit passively; we hesitate to reach out, to meet new people, partly because most of us just aren’t very good at it, but also because it is very risky. You could fail, feel rebuffed, and be embarrassed. It is so easy to stand back, mind the shop, wait cautiously to see if maybe the world will take the first step, come to you, and make it easy.

It’s like sailing a boat again. Much of life is kind of like sailing a boat. On shore, the boat looks good, and you can have all these great fantasies about how cool it would be to be sailing. But once you actually put the boat in the water, it’s bound to get messier. The wind comes up, the balance shifts, you have to learn what you’re doing, and not all lessons keep you dry.

I like this sailing metaphor even though my experience with sailboats has not been impressive. I was about sixteen the first time I went sailing. My friend Tom took me out in his family’s small sailboat. He steered, I sat on one side feeling the breeze and thinking how cool this was, this sailing business. Within a few minutes, he uttered the strangest sentence I had ever heard in my life. “Prepare to come about,” he said. “Prepare to come about,” I thought: hey, that must be sailing talk. Now I really know I’m a sailor, because we’re talking sailing talk. This is so cool!

Then, with absolutely no warning, I learned what that four-word bit of sailing talk meant. For the land-lubbers here, those words are a kind of shorthand that mean “In about three seconds, the sail is going to swing across the boat, hit you in the chest, knock you overboard, and tip the whole boat over!” Tom explained that to me while we were swimming around in the middle of the lake. And I decided, right there bobbing up and down like fish bait, that I didn’t much like sailing. I still liked the idea of sailing, and the fantasies about it, as long as no boat containing me ever touched the water.

So I understand the fear of failure, and the fact that wishing something were so doesn’t accomplish a single thing, though it’s not as intimidating as putting the boat into the water. I suspect that’s why, in so many areas of life, we are controlled by our fears rather than our hopes, and keep our boats on the shore. We don’t want to fail, we don’t want to be embarrassed, and we don’t want to feel like an idiot.

Sometimes, it helps to hear stories about others who have failed, so we don’t feel so alone when it happens to us. So I have another story for you about someone who was so good at failure he made a career out of it. If you’ve ever felt foolish or inadequate because you made a fool of yourself, this might make you feel better.

It was a while ago; he was a man without any apparent gifts or any apparent luck. I have never personally known such a failure, and I doubt that you have either.

First, he failed as a businessman. Maybe he thought politics would be easier, so the next year he ran for the state legislature, and lost. He went back into business and two years later, he failed in business again.

Besides his habit of failure, life wasn’t very kind to him and he wasn’t very lucky, because the following year his sweetheart died and the next year, not surprisingly, he had a nervous breakdown. Two years later, incredibly, he tried politics for a third time, and for a third time he lost. Then perhaps thinking that his problem was that he had set his sights too low, he ran for Congress. He lost.

About this time in reading his story, I thought this is a guy who just didn’t get it. There are people like that, and he was one of them. Life was giving him all the clues he needed, and he wasn’t listening. If he had any gifts, it seemed pretty clear they didn’t lie in running a business or in winning elections. How many times do you tip the boat over before you decide you weren’t meant to be a sailor?

Still, three years later he ran for Congress again, and was defeated again, and two years later he tried again and again he lost. This man had never won an election. He had run five times and lost five times. When do you get tired of bobbing up and down in the middle of the lake like fish bait? But he wasn’t through. He decided to aim still higher.

So his sixth defeat was for the Senate, his seventh defeat was for the Vice Presidency, and his eighth consecutive defeat, with no victories, was for the Senate again.

Finally, finally! Two years later, he was elected President. Then he won the second and last election of his life when he was re-elected as President in 1864. If you look on your calendars or your daily planners, they’ll tell you that tomorrow is his birthday. We Americans tell a lot of stories about Abraham Lincoln. But we almost never remember that in his whole life, he won only two elections and one war and his victory in that war is still not universally acclaimed in some parts of the South.

But how, after so many successive defeats, was he able to keep choosing the feathered thing? How did he keep putting the boat in the water, when it had turned over on him eight times in a row? I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t have done it. I would have given up, or found another career, some time before the eighth consecutive failure. I suspect most of you would have, too. That’s just one of the reasons that we won’t have our birthdays written into the next century’s calendars. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time looking for sticks and bricks, looking to stop and make a home. But Abraham Lincoln had an amazing ability to keep looking for and finding hope over, and over, and over again.

If this were a competition, we could feel pretty inadequate next to Lincoln. But this is church. This is the time and the place when we gather together to seek inspiration from higher visions and strivings of more nobility and character. Sometimes we do it by looking to the lives of great religious figures. Today, I used the life of a great American for whom official religion was not a very important category. It is remarkable, I think, how many similarities we find in the lives of great religious figures and great civic figures.

They all show the powerful presence of an invisible kind of force, a kind of dynamism that helped them steer the course of their lives. It isn’t a “force” in the sense of some scientifically demonstrable energy field; it is the force of a powerful and life-affirming kind of attitude. The power of that hopeful, trusting attitude beckons to me through these stories, and I hope it beckons to you as well.

Because life wants to be an active word, not a passive one. And there is a source for that activity that seems to dwell within and around us. Call it the will of God, the inner and outer moving of the Holy Spirit, the Tao, the dynamic presence of the Life Force, or call it something else. As long as you can call it forth, it doesn’t much matter what you

call it. But it has feathers, this indescribable thing. And if we can keep seeking and choosing that feathered thing, it will absolutely make all the difference: all the difference in the world.

Endnotes

The puppet show script was a collaborative effort. I gave the puppeteers a script that gave the general direction and made the points I had incorporated into the sermon. They modified and adapted it, adding their own creative twists. They also turned it into Dr. Seuss-like rhyming. The puppeteers were Lisa Sutton, Eric Kay, David Smith and Melissa Smith.

The Story of a Life

Failed in business – 1831

Lost election for legislature – 1832

Failed again in business – 1834

Sweetheart died – 1835

Nervous breakdown – 1836

Lost second political race – 1838

Defeated for Congress – 1843

Defeated for Congress – 1846

Defeated for Congress – 1848

Defeated for US Senate – 1855

Defeated for Vice President – 1856

Defeated for US Senate – 1858

Elected President – 1860

(Abraham Lincoln)

Three Steps From the Edge

by Posted in Guest Speakers, Jim Checkley, Sermons

© Jim Checkley

February 4, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

If spirituality could be put into a pill and sold over the counter, then in this country at least, billions would be sold annually. The ratio of spiritual fulfillment to material wealth appears to be at an all time low-although the number of books, seminars, and discussions about both subjects is at an all time high. In the Golden Age of Materialism I want to suggest that there is an inherent conflict between the traditional rendition of the American Dream and finding meaning and spiritual fulfillment in life. And I do not refer to the conflict between serving God and mammon. The conflict I wish to discuss is far more insidious, manifests in many areas of our culture, and goes to the heart of who we are. But it is, I believe, reconcilable; hence, the basis of Sunday’s service.

Today would have been my Father’s eighty-sixth birthday. He died in 1981 at the age of 66 and never saw any of his grandchildren. I owe my intellectual curiosity to my Father and it is in that spirit of curiosity about ourselves and the world we live in, that I present this service today.

When I was growing up in the 60s, my family was very poor. Things got worse when I was nine years old and my Father had a massive heart attack. He never was able to work a real job again in his life. I, on the other hand, had gotten my very first job just a few months before he had his heart attack. In the summer of 1964 I got a job handing out flyers for a butcher shop on Main Street in Clifton, New Jersey. I have no idea what I was paid for this job in the conventional sense, because the butcher used to weigh the flyers on his meat scale and then paid me by the pound. Except for one semester of law school, I have had some kind of a job ever since.

In many ways I was oblivious when I was really young about being poor. It wasn’t until I and my brothers and sisters became teenagers and started seeing the world and going to friends’ houses for overnights and the like that we realized how little we had. I had really never liked having old everything when I was very young, but by the time I was 16 or 17 years old, I was becoming quite embarrassed about it. Being poor, feeling poor, as I approached adulthood was a major defining element in my life.

Today I am a partner with one of the forty largest law firm’s in the country. I have had the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging and interesting cases in Texas over the last 18 years. One might almost be tempted to say that, from an economic point of view at least, I have lived the American Dream.

I was thinking about this and the coincidence that I was asked to speak on my Father’s birthday, and I realized that I wanted to talk about something that has bothered me in recent years about the American Dream. I wanted to talk about how it can be that despite the fact that we live in the richest nation on Earth, a nation that consumes 50% of the world’s resources for only 4.3% of the world’s population, a nation that has more gadgets, cars, TVs, movies, airplanes, designer clothes, choices of music, cable stations, and professional sports teams than anywhere else on the planet, how can it be we are so well off and yet so many of us seem to be so unhappy?

The array of stuff that is available to us is staggering and although we still have poverty and too many of us remain poor, that array of stuff is available to a really huge proportion of the population. For while millions of people made fortunes during the greed era of the 1980s and more recently, in the amazing economy of the 1990s, even more millions have joined the ranks of the great American Middle Class and achieved a kind of safety and security few people in centuries past have ever known.

And yet, despite all this, huge numbers of people (successful people) say they are unhappy, or at least unfulfilled. My favorite anecdotal example is something I read in Time Magazine last year. In a story about the search for meaning among our material possessions, a doctor was quoted as saying that more of his and his associates patients were complaining of depression, loss of interest, lethargy, loss of energy, and the like than ever before. He said that the existential crisis had hit epidemic proportions and if you could just put spirituality into a pill you could sell billions of them.

There appears to be a paradox here. If people have more stuff than ever before, if their needs and wants are being met in greater proportion than ever before, why aren’t more of us happy? I like paradoxes. Whenever there is a paradox, there almost certainly is an opportunity for learning. And this one happens to be near and dear to my heart. I certainly have no delusions of solving it today, but I do want to at least talk about it. And to talk about it, I want to start right in the middle of things.

For a long time in our country, the American Dream was viewed as a rags to riches kind of thing. It was epitomized by the cliched notion that any one could grow up to be president. But over the last forty or fifty years, in my lifetime at least, something has happened either to us or to the Dream. I’m not sure, but I think that as we have become more of a meritocracy where increasingly more people have had access to the fruits of our incredible economy and the opportunities that go with it, the American Dream began to take on a new dimension. On some level, I think the American Dream was transformed into the notion of creating safety and comfort for ourselves and our families within this complex and dizzyingly fast paced society we have created. In this sense, I want to say that the American Dream became the great Middle Class Dream.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. When I was in college, I noticed that very few of my friends ever talked about their dreams. What they talked about was having majors in areas where there were jobs. I specifically recall talking with many of my friends in chemistry and physics and discussing how our majors hard science offered the prospect of many excellent jobs. And I also remember overhearing many conversations where people questioned the sanity of students who were studying in majors where the job market was poor. So it seemed very much to me that most of my generation, at least, of college students primarily wanted a good and secure job, a place to live that they could call their own, a good school system for the kids, and finally, being part of a community or neighborhood of equals who respected and obeyed the same rules and had similar beliefs to their own.

Most of us got all that and more. And we believed that in gaining the safety and security of the great American economic bounty, we had satisfied our needs, our desires, and our dreams. But it turns out we hadn’t. There was something we didn’t count on about dwelling in what I will call the great American middle in honor of our Middle Class Dreams.

Living in the middle, in relative safety, turns out to be like making a popcorn string. Each day is like a kernel of popcorn, each different from the last, but each exactly the same, and we put each kernel on a string, and when we die, we have a very long string of barely distinguishable days. Oh, every once in a while there is a string of seven to fourteen kernels that have a different color, perhaps, those days when we went on vacation, but even those days are hardly distinguished.

And yet, we Americans truly have a love for the middle. It is part of our folklore. By the time we are five, we all have heard of Goldilocks, who is excited when she finds porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold, but is just right. It is part of our deepest held beliefs about the nature of truth. If I had a quarter for every time I heard somebody say that truth is somewhere in the middle, I would be rich. Just yesterday there were two articles in the newspaper in which the author of each suggested that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. Finally, when I think of this issue, I think of a herd of zebra. If you are a zebra out on the plains of the Serengeti, then you should get as close to the middle of the herd as possible because it is less likely any lions will get you. In many ways, we are no different from the zebra: our thirst for the middle is driven by the same concerns, only translated into human culture.

And now we’ve gone well beyond safety in our quest for the middle. So many of us are to the point where we want and can have Pema Chodron’s Perfect Room that was the basis of today’s meditation. And don’t get me wrong: I think that is great, I really do. But there is a danger. Living in the great American middle there is a danger that we will become complacent, will get soft, and we will end up being lukewarm, like Goldilocks’ porridge. Within our Perfect Room we become ever more distant from life, and not just figuratively, but literally. I wonder how many people feel connected to the world because they watch CNN or CNBC or CSPAN or some other ‘C’ network? But it is a false connection.

We are bombarded every day with news of catastrophes all over the world and we just keep on eating our dinner. Does anybody else think it is weird that our network news programs wherein we are treated to images of war and violence in our schools, where we hear about youth killed by drunk drivers, and catastrophes of all kinds, coincides with dinner time and bedtime? I can’t figure out which of the two is worse, to tell you the truth, but I do know this. If the connection were real, then we would get upset and be unable to eat our dinner or go to sleep when we were told that many thousands of Indians died in a major earthquake. The truth is that living in the safety of the middle, living in our Perfect Room, we begin to lose compassion as we lose touch. We also begin to lose our sense of being, our sense of meaning, and finally we end up losing our sense of spirit and self.

I tend to see our love of the middle as quite Darwinian. Evolution is about survival. Evolution tells us that mostly we should choose safety. But what works for our bodies does not necessarily work for our souls. This is the great paradox of life and my take on the conflict between the contemporary vision of the American Dream and having a spiritually meaningful life. Evolution and middle class dreams are about the survival, and more than that, of the body. But in order to have a spiritually meaningful life, we need to talk about the survival, and more than that, of the soul.

Oh I know, we are Unitarians and we are scientific, and science seems to be telling us we probably don’t have souls. Well, let me tell you something: I don’t care. I am going to talk about them anyway. In fact, I am going to suggest that we would do well to reconsider the rejection of the notion of the separation of mind, body, and soul. Because, while it may not be true as a scientific reality, I think we need to treat ourselves as having minds, bodies, and souls in order to have a better shot of having complete lives, because each of those three aspects of ourselves have different needs.

Without at least thinking of ourselves as having souls, whether we actually do or not, we are more likely to ignore the real spiritual needs we have as humans and concentrate more on the needs of the body or the mind. And along these lines, how could we have ever thought that the human spirit would be happy with life in the middle, with being safe and secure but ultimately lukewarm? It isn’t. The human spirit needs challenges, it needs dreams, it needs faith, the kind of faith necessary to leave the safety of the middle and go to the edge and take some chances for something we value and believe in, something besides our own safety or having porridge that tastes just right, or having digital cable TV. To this extent, the life of the soul, of the spirit, is different from the life of the body and sometimes is even in conflict with it. The truth is, a spirit out on the edge is a mutant as far as the body is concerned.

I recently found something neat about this in the Bible. The Book of Revelation, Chapter 3, verses 15-16 states:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

This is so great: John, the author of Revelation, tells us that being lukewarm is the ultimate sin. God would rather that we be hot or cold. But we love being lukewarm. We are drawn to the middle and its safety and security like a moth to the flame. And I would suggest to you that as safe as the middle is for our bodies, the middle can be just as deadly a place for our souls.

Here then is the heart of the conflict I have been talking about: the only place to feel truly alive is close to the edge, but it is also the place where we are the most likely to be hurt. So if we want to be alive, if we want to grow, if we want to explore life and all its possibilities, then we have to be brave enough, and motivated enough, to give up the comfort and safety of the middle and venture to the edge.

I have a friend who lives in Minneapolis. He is in his early fifties and has practiced law since his mid-twenties. Ever since I met him ten years ago, he has been on a mid-life quest for meaning and answers for the second half of life. We were talking one day about how he had gotten a puppy and how the puppy changed his life. Now for a single man who is a partner in a major law firm, getting a 6-week-old puppy is really going out to the edge and is a case of leading with the heart rather than the intellect. And for two months, he left the office every day and went home for lunch. This is a man who skipped lunch most of the time because of the pressures of work. And because he had to walk his dog twice a day, he says that he noticed the arrival of spring for the first time in 15 years. Imagine that.

He and I talked a little bit more about living a life that made us feel alive, one that had some zip to it. And in the course of that discussion, he made a profound observation. He told me that in walking his dog and noticing the arrival of spring, he observed that growth occurs at the edges, not in the middle. The middle may be green, may be solid and set, but it is not where the action is. That happens on the edge.

This was a wonderful observation. And I liked it even more because for years I have been defending stuff like comic books, science fiction, and fantasy because I believe that those genres, as far out as they often are, nevertheless provide wonderful opportunities for understanding ourselves and the world simply because they, unlike mainstream literature, constantly grapple with issues on the edge.

So many people end up struggling to fight the symptoms of living in the middle, but they do not realize that the problem is the very real conflict between the safety of the middle we all desire and the wants and needs of our souls, which would much rather go playing around at the edge. So we have the strange phenomena of people living in the middle but jumping out of airplanes to feel alive; they jump off bridges with elastic tied around their ankles to feel alive; they listen to Madison Avenue and buy cars that can give them a certain thrill so they can feel alive. All this and I suggest that the real problem is the fundamental approach to life: becoming lukewarm living the middle class American Dream.

Our spirits long for space, not the claustrophobia of the middle of the herd. How can our hearts and souls be free living in the Perfect Room Pema Chodron talks about? It is actually a trap, albeit a nice one. And the irony is that the longer we stay trapped in our perfect porridge world, the more resentful we become of the real world. What I mean is, how are we ever going to develop real compassion for anybody when it means leaving the sterility of our Perfect Room, of getting messy in the world, of enduring odors, sights, sounds, and risks that our Darwinian survival instinct tells us to avoid like the plague? We are explorers and adventurers we humans. And if we sit all comfy with our perfect porridge in our Perfect Room with no windows and a big screen TV that gives us the impression of being connected to the world’we will die inside. We will. And many of us already have.

Don’t misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with being comfortable, safe, fed, happy, and secure. These are in fact good things. I want them for my family and myself. Nor am I suggesting that we have to indulge in dangerous or self-destructive behavior. My suggestion is simply that we become aware that what is good for our bodies is not necessarily good for our souls and that the safety of the middle we so yearn for can be death to our spirit. As stated in the poem I read earlier, the soul is a quiet animal and we need to pay attention to it and its needs or we will simply drift apart and lose contact until it is too late. And in order to help myself do this (I am really bad at practicing what I preach sometimes) I have developed a rule for making choices in my life.

But before I talk about that rule, I want to say that choosing to be alive, truly alive, is not an easy choice to make. Choosing to go to the edge, to be alive, means paying more attention; it means taking risks, but risks that are both reasonable and meaningful; it means investing energy and emotions into something important to you and having the faith in it and yourself to go and do it; it means developing your senses and your awareness like you never have before; and it means sometimes having to go too far in order to understand how far you can go, and frankly, paying the consequences.

If it is hard to do, then how do we do it? All I can tell you is that the best way I have found is this: in everything you do, everything, lead with your heart. That is, follow your passion first, and then use your intellect, reason, and logic to insure that wherever your heart and passion may lead, you will be at least three steps from the edge and not three steps over the edge. The goal is to be close enough to see it, but not so close that we are in constant danger of going over. So it is necessary for us to use our intellect to monitor and channel our hearts or else we may end up like Wylie Coyote, suspended in space several steps beyond the edge, certain to fall as soon as we recognize that nothing is holding us up. If you remember nothing else from this talk, I hope you will remember this simple rule.

You see, the intellect can always give shape to what the heart wants. That is, the intellect is a tool that operates upon whatever situation is brought to it. It is objective, indiscriminate, and cares only for the cold hard facts. But that does not apply to the heart and soul. Passion is often very picky and mysterious in where it will cast its desire and energy. It is for this reason that the finely made balance sheet of pros and cons thought out by the intellect will not by itself insure that the heart will agree to follow. Hearts are like that. They have minds of their own, you know. And they are stubborn. Show the intellect that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and it will believe you. Show the heart that this is the most logical path to take, and it still may rebel. We go against our hearts at our own peril.

In 1978 I was faced with a life choice. I could have gone to law school or I could have earned my Master’s in Radio, TV, and Film. My mind, reason and logic, said go to law school. My heart said RTF. In part because of a youth spent in poverty, in part because I felt that success at law school would more easily translate into my own Perfect Room, I chose law school. This was one of the most pivotal decisions I ever made in my life and frankly, was the inspiration for this service. And while I will not say that I made a mistake, for I have been successful and who knows what may have happened otherwise, I will tell you that my heart has never forgiven me.

But the good new is that it is not too late. It is never too late to leave the middle and move to the edge. It is never too late to recognize that sometimes moderation in all things is not necessarily a good thing. Let me put it this way: Does it feel right to love with moderation, to dream with moderation, or to dance with moderation? I hope not. But that is what happens if we allow ourselves to lose touch and become lukewarm. That’s why God is ready to spew lukewarm people from his mouth. I say: Love with passion, dream with abandon, and dance until you drop.

I will conclude by saying this: leading with your heart and living three steps from the edge is the difference between being Jean Luc Picard or James T. Kirk, and being a couch potato. Jean Luc and Jim Kirk actively embrace life and go often to the edge, following their hearts, sometimes at great risk, while the couch potato passively hides out in his Perfect Room and pretends to be engaged with life through his television. It’s more dangerous to be at the edge, and it isn’t always very comfortable either, but in the end it is much more meaningful. We don’t need to choose between our bodies and our souls. We can satisfy both. But we need to recognize that they have different (sometimes conflicting) needs and then set about to honor them all. Living three steps from the edge does that.

I know my Father would not want me to do it any other way.