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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 17, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
You have probably heard the old “truism” that “Curiosity Killed the Cat”, but did you know that there is a lesser-known version that says, “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” What if curiosity can feel risky, but actually holds the key to both individual and collective liberation?
Welcome
Prelude: “Sailing” (Malone) Danny Malone, piano & vocals, Brent Baldwin, pedal steel guitar
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
ON GETTING OVER OURSELVES
by Dr. Sharon BlackieWhat would happen if we began each day from the position that we don’t know everything, and that what we proudly imagine to be ‘our truth’ and ‘our wisdom’ probably aren’t such perfect reflections of reality after all?
What would happen if we began each day with the realization that it’s entirely possible that we don’t actually know anything that really matters? If we only could cast aside all our categorical certainties, wouldn’t that make each day into a genuine adventure? Wouldn’t we be filled with curiosity, with all that childlike awe and wonder we lost such a very long time ago? Wouldn’t a day like that be so very much richer, so very much more beautiful? So very much wiser?
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Anthem
Danny Malone, piano & vocals, Brent Baldwin, pedal steel guitar & vocals
Reading
From CURIOUS: THE DESIRE TO KNOW AND WHY YOUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT
by Ian LeslieOur oldest stories about curiosity are warnings: Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge, Icarus and the sun, Pandora’s box. Early Christian theologians railed against curiosity: Saint Augustine claimed that “God fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” Even humanist philosopher Erasmus suggested that curiosity was greed by a different name. For most of Western history, it has been regarded as at best a distraction, at worst a poison, corrosive to the soul and to society. There’s a reason for this. Curiosity is unruly, It doesn’t like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, Impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point.
Centering
Music for Meditation: “Limbo” (Malone) Danny Malone, guitar & vocals, Brent Baldwin, pedal steel guitar
Sermon
CURIOSITY UNCAGED THE CAT
Once upon a time, a traveler came upon a small mountain village. She wondered why every house had bright blue doors except one.
At the very edge of town stood an old gray house with a red door. The traveler noticed that everyone in the village seemed to go out of their way to avoid that old house.
When she would ask why, the villagers would become extremely uneasy.
But the traveler – she could not stop thinking about it.
Why was the door red? Who lived there?
Why was everyone so afraid?
One night, curiosity took hold of her soul harder than caution, so she slipped through the darkened streets of the village and snuck onto the front porch of the old house.
The red door creaked open the moment she touched it lightly.
Continuing to risk her curiosity, she stepped through he door.
Inside, the house she could hear only silence. Dust covered everything.
But, as she looked around, she noticed a single wooden box.
The traveler hesitated only a moment before opening it and reaching in.
Inside she found stacks of letters letters revealing secrets the villagers had hidden for years: betrayals, oppression, stolen land, lies that had divided families.
And, as the traveler read, footsteps sounded outside.
The villagers had followed.
By morning, the entire village was in turmoil. Old wounds reopened. Friends and families coming into open conflict with one another.
The traveler realized that opening the box had unleashed pain that had long been buried – secrets that had been kept unspoken. Finally, an old man cried out:
“Some doors stay closed for a reason.”
The traveler hurried away from the village, that old saying ringing in her ears, “Curiosity killed the cat.”
When I was growing up, I always struggled with that old aphorism, “Curiosity killed the cat”.
“Why would our curiosity be something to fear”, I though, “something that can harm us”.
Aphorisms are what we had before the internet made online memes possible.
Well, anyway, I recently learned that the full version of this old cultural proverb, which we hear far less often, is actually, “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”
I like that meme a lot better! It more fully captures the complex, nuanced, and contextual nature of our curiosity.
With that as our full cultural proverb, our story gets a new ending that might go something like this.
But years later, the traveler returned to the village, which had blossomed into a cultural, social, and artistic center for the entire region. Old wounds had been faced and healed. Festering secrets had finally been spoken. Repair, restitution, and forgiveness had been made possible. New and more just ways of doing things and living amongst one another had flowered.
Had the box remained closed forever, the village might never have faced the truth or healed, much less come to thrive.
I am beginning to understand much better now this old aphorism in, this, its more nuanced form.
“Curiosity killed the cat” captures that we fear our curiosity because pursuing it often means taking risks, facing uncomfortable truths, getting our of our comfort zones, having the courage to challenge deeply held feelings and beliefs – let go of any sense of certainty.
“But satisfaction brought it back” recognizes that it is only through pursuing our curiosity, being willing to take calculated risks, that we can experience transformation and transcendence – that we become attuned to the wonder and awe to be found through exploring the mysteries of life and existence.
Curiosity is the key that un-cages the cat – the liberation that brings it back.
Remaining open to the mystery, allows us to let go of preconceptions and judgementalism so that we are freed to swim within the love that flows through us and our universe.
And I believe that this is true at the individual, societal, and spiritual- existential levels.
Now that was some was some big flowery language, wasn’t it?
So let’s get curious and break this down more tangibly for each of these levels.
At the individual level, our curiosity can free us from the cage of confirmation bias – that all too human tendency.
We all perceive our world through stories we tell ourselves or that we learned from others about who we are, how the world works, what other people are like, etc.
And we cling to these stories because they are how we make sense of the world.
We get very uncomfortable when new information challenges our self – stories, so we tend to filter out anything that questions the accuracy of them. We tend to only let ourselves take in information that reconfirms these pre- existing stories.
That’s confirmation bias.
The problem is, we spend a lot of mostly negative time, energy, and emotion engaging in all of this confirmation bias – upholding stories that may not be true and are no longer serving us well.
We get really anxious.
We worry and ruminate.
We get all judgmental about ourselves and others.
Challenging our stories, getting curious about whether they are really accurate is scary, so we cling to our biases instead, despite what it costs us!
The paradox is, as Dr. Jud Brewer, researcher and author of Unwinding Anxiety, has found that pursuing our curiosity is the key to freeing ourselves both from these unhelpful stories and the potential harm continuing to hold onto them can cause.
Here’s Dr. Brewer himself describing how a certain kind of curiosity can liberate us from anxiety and the worry and rumination loop it can create.
VIDEO
Many of us don’t actually know how our minds work. And this is especially true with anxiety. It can really feel like a black box. In fact, we might feel anxious and then start worrying as a way to do something to control that anxiety. And in fact, we can start to feed what’s described as a habit loop around this.
The trigger is the anxiety. The behavior is the worry. And then that feeling of control is the reward that our brain gets that says, oh yeah, I’m going to do something about this.
But paradoxically, our brains start to get wise to this and see, you know, worry doesn’t actually feel that good unto itself. And so that reward that I’m getting is not very rewarding. And then worry starts to spin out of control where the worry creates more anxiety, which creates more worry. And then we go into this black hole or this spiral of anxiety and worry.
So what can we do? The good news is we’ve been studying how our minds work for a long time in my lab, and we’ve got some very interesting data that might suggest some actually pretty simple solutions. So we can actually hack into this process, this habit loop, where anxiety can trigger us to get curious about what these thoughts and emotions and sensations actually feel like in our bodies.
And that leads to a completely different reward because curiosity itself feels better than being anxious or worried. So instead of getting caught in this endless worry loop, when we’re anxious, we can actually turn our awareness and just ask this question, “Hmm, what am I feeling right now? Where am I feeling this? What are the thoughts that are going through my head?” And that helps us not get caught up in those worry habit loops so that we can simply bring that curious awareness in and tap into that rewarding quality of curiosity itself.
If you don’t believe me, get curious you can try it for yourself.
In similar ways, we can liberate ourselves from being judgmental by getting curious.
So, for example, if the story our family taught us was that we have to be A+++ perfect at everything, we can instead suspend self-judgement through allowing ourselves to get curious by, oh, deciding to take singing lessons, or learn tap dancing, or play pickleball, or write novellas even if we are not very good at these things but just because we enjoy pursuing them.
If on the way home from church today, some “jerk” cuts you off in traffic, try replacing, “What a self-centered jerk” with “Hmmmm, I wonder if he is late to pick up his kids, or to visit his mom in the hospital, or maybe was just listening to some music he loves and got so absorbed in it that he wasn’t paying attention?”
Getting curious about others can free us from our judgmentalism about them.
Now, here’s a humorous example of how being judgmental rather than curious can get us into trouble. It’s from the television series Ted Lasso. Rupert, an antagonist in the series, is about to loose a high stakes wager over a game of darts because of his judgementalism.
VIDEO
Man, what do I need to win? Two triple 20s and a bonsai.
Good luck.
You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I was driving my little boy to school and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman painted on the wall there. It said, “Be curious, not judgmental”.
I like that. So I get back in my car, and I’m driving to work, and all of a sudden, it hits me. All them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them are curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, and so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me, who I was, had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would ask questions. Questions like, “Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?” Which I would have answered, “Yes, sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father from age 10 to 16 when he passed away.”
If you’re curious about even more practical ways to practice curiosity, I’ve put the 28 Building Blocks of Radical Curiosity from the book, Radical Curiosity, by Seth Goldenberg Here.
Shout out to my husband, Woodrow, for pointing me to it!
Now, I want to turn to how, societally, I believe curiosity can be a key to unlocking collective liberation for us all.
As our reading earlier told us, one of the reasons that down through the ages we have been taught that “curiosity killed the cat” is that curiosity is unruly, it doesn’t like the rules, it challenges the norms and brings us into conflict with authority.
When we get curious, we begin to see inequality injustice, suffering. So we’ve been taught to fear our curiosity and to control it. We’ve been taught that as a means of social control and a way to keep us divided.
Because if we get curious about each other we might find common ground and come to love our differences rather than fear them and that could create a powerful united force for collective liberation.
Indeed, when we start to get curious about one another, we begin to challenge our stories and judgements about each other. We celebrate difference as enriching for us all.
I begin to see that my destiny is inescapably tied to your destiny.
And thus, racism, bigotry, tribalism, fear of the other fall before the love that blooms out of what that curiosity is teaching us.
Scott Shigeoka is a curiosity researcher and scholar who describes himself as a queer, Asian-American.
A few years ago, he went on a journey across rural America to engage with folks whose perspectives were very different than his own, including going to MAGA rallies.
What he found was that by suspending his judgement about these folks, without erasing his own identity or hiding his differences, by getting curious about them, they in turn began to get curious about him.
And though neither he nor these folks entirely changed their perspectives or how they might vote, they did begin to stop “othering” each other. They dropped the stereotyping and began to embrace each others common humanity.
I’m going to let him describe something vital he discovered about the relationship between curiosity and love.
VIDEO
I learned something really critical about love. And yes, I’m going to drop the L word right now, y’all. I think it’s really important. There’s that old adage that some of us might have heard that love is a verb. But my question was always, okay, what’s the verb? How do we actually practice this? What’s the action?
And what I’ve learned through my years of research and experience is that the best way that we can love better is for us to practice curiosity. Because when we practice curiosity, we turn towards someone. We say, I want to know your story. I want to know who you are. I want to understand your full humanity, your nuances, your complexities, everything that makes you you. And I want to do this not because I want to change your view or your perspectives or who you are. I want to do this because I want to get to know you because you matter to me, because I care about you, because I love you.
Curiosity is not just this intellectual tool. It’s also this heart-centered force that we can bring into our life. And I think it’s a practice that we really need right now in our country and in the world.
If you’d like to explore even more real life ways to practice this curiosity, take a look at the book he wrote as a result of his travels called, Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World.
I’ve included his model for cultivating transformative curiosity on the church website also.
Well, this brings me to that final level where I believe curiosity can liberate us – the spiritual-existential level.
Our curiosity about the larger questions of life – of meaning and purpose and mortality and an intuition of being a part of something much, much larger than ourselves, I believe this curiosity drives our both our interest in science and in spirituality.
These are our, methods, our ways to quell existential anxiety by exploring the great mystery.
And when we do, we often discover within it, as Shigeoka did with those folks who had been such a mystery to him, that there is a love that flows through all of us and through all that is.
A healing love. A fierce love.
And if we call that fierce love “God”,then it is our curiosity that leads us through the red door into the divine.
And that, satisfaction, brings us back to create more love in our village – in our world.
Amen.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
from CURIOSITY AND POLITICAL RESISTANCE
by Perry Zurns“This particular configuration of the curious impulse begins by fidgeting with the fissures of social mores and political strata, poking and prying in search of a new space to stand tall.
It bravely barrels into the darkest recesses of suffering and pain, steels itself, and lays bare the true face of social inequality and social death.
And it raises its head to the sky, imagines as-yet-inconceivable worlds of justice and of peace…
This curiosity is politically resistant.
This curiosity is from and for the margins… comes alive in the streets and poetry, in shared meals and political protests….
When curiosity’s insubordinate potential is tapped, it investigates the suffering of the marginalized, it casts radical doubt on the status quo, and it fearlessly imagines new and better futures.”
May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “Blessed Be”
I love you fiercely.
Go in peace.
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