Denial is Not a River in Egypt

April 23, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Help us to love what we cannot understand. Help us stretch the largeness of our hearts to make up for the smallness of our comprehension.

Too often and too eagerly, we restrict our acceptance to the narrow limits of what we can understand, touching only small parts of the bigger world around us. Too often and too eagerly, we also restrict our love to our kind of people, touching only a tiny sliver of the need around us.

When the narrowness of our certainty stifles the certainty of our need for one another, we need help. We need help toward a greater understanding, but even more, we need help toward acting out of a larger heart.

And the good news is that where our heart can lead, our mind can learn to follow.

Let us seek the help we need, within and around us, to let our hearts learn to lead. For even more than the world needs understanding, it needs compassion.

Amen.

SERMON: Denial is Not a River in Egypt

I’m trying to do some very ambitious things with you this morning, so I need you to work with me. I thought that in the next thirty minutes, we might cover the nature of all human knowledge, religious and scientific certainty and denial, discrimination and bigotry, the degradation of the environment, and the nature of the kingdom of God. I’ve tried to cut this down from its original length of nine years.

As far-fetched as that sounds, those really are some of the themes that can be woven together here. So I’m talking about very broad patterns that I see, and think I can get you to see.

Here’s what I think we want in life. We want to believe we know and live out of truth rather than self-deceptions, that we stand foursquare behind justice, goodness and love, and that we, our beliefs and our actions help – in our small way – to make this a better world.

We do it by knowing what’s true and good, and trying our best to serve what is true and good.

However, built in to the very way we are built, and the very way we try to serve truth and goodness, are all of the ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, indifference to the political, social, military and environmental situations, nearly all the evil in the world – as well as all of the good – and the enduring enemy of the Kingdom of God. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound encouraging.

Here’s how it works; see if you agree. I’ll start kind of abstractly, then bring it down to earth.

When we find the truth, in any area, then we become certain. We want, we need, to feel certain about these things. And our attitude of certainty is like a kind of spirit or feeling that guides both our thoughts and actions. I don’t mean just narcissistically. I don’t mean that we each just go into a small room, decide what we like, then lurch out and foist it onto the world. We’re social animals, and we touch many more bases in deciding what is true and gaining our deep feeling of certainty about it all.

When we develop our picture of the world, which defines not only what is true and false but even what counts as reasonable or sane, it is like building a big tub around us, a big wooden barrel, with a lot of staves in it. You could think of it as a fence or as walls that define the boundaries of our world, but I have a poem later that describes it as a tub, so I want to get us imagining our world as a tub around us.

Think of the things involved that give you your most distinctive feelings of certainty. Here’s the list I made for myself; see how many other staves in this tub of reality you”d add. We get our picture of our world from:

Role models and charismatic figures. We”ve all had a few wonderfully life-giving people in our lives, and if you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself guided by what actions you think they would advise.

People we love and admire draw us toward their ideals and beliefs. We want to feel like we’re in their community, and their beliefs have a greater pull on us than the beliefs of people we didn’t really admire.

Parents and family shape the world into which we’re born, and which we take to be normative when we’re growing up – and sometimes for our whole lives. So they influence our picture of ourselves and our world – for better or for worse.

Clergy – also for better or worse – help give us our understanding of who we are and how we should live, or what sorts of “gods” we will feel beholden to.

Respected teachers and elders help shape our world. Some years back, I was talking about this in a sermon, and mentioned one of the really magical teachers I had long ago – a 9th grade English teacher named Mrs. Williamson, and talked a little about what a powerful and affirming presence her memory still was. After the sermon – which I delivered in St. Paul, Minnesota – a woman about my age came up to me and said “Did you go to May Goodrell Jr. High in Des Moines?” She was sure – and she was right – that there could only have been one such Mrs. Williamson, who she’d had a year or two after I did. The best teachers not only inform us; they also help form us.

Friends: we usually feel odd if our beliefs put us outside the circle of the people we like and admire, and will tend to stay near beliefs that leave us within a community we value.

Education forms us: not only what we learned, but also where and how we learned it. Those who learned civics during World War II probably got a very different picture of it than those who learned it during the Vietnam War.

Religious scriptures and guiding stories – even novels, movies and television stories – shape our expectations more than most of us want to realize. That can be a fairly scary thought.

And logic. We all have a sense of how our beliefs relate, and for most of us there needs to be some kind of logic connecting the things we believe. We need to feel that what we take to be true is really connected with the way the world really is.

You may think of other staves in the tub that defines your world of truth and certainty, but I suspect it would contain at least these? And when a new idea presents itself, see if you don’t find yourself almost unconsciously doing a mental checklist to see if the people you most admire would respect this new idea, if you can see a compelling logic in it, if it fits with the other things of which you’re quite certain, and so on. In a way, we try to test each new idea against our community and our world to see if it should be admitted, because each truth we hold forms a part of the tub within which we live.

This idea of a tub isn’t meant to imply that we couldn’t leave it or think thoughts that didn’t fit in it, but why would we want to? There are a lot of crazy ideas out there, after all, and we try to keep our beliefs coherent enough that they have some family resemblances with the people and ideas that ground our notion of reality. You could think of our tub as a form of life, as some philosophers call it (from Ludwig Wittgenstein), or a form of living: the way we and our people have chosen to shape and edit what we include in our world and our awareness. But the point is that the picture of the world we live in – our tub – is always much smaller than the real world is.

Now if all this is too abstract, you can also think of this as the Davy Crockett School of Certainty and Action. In Texas, we know of Davy Crockett as one of the heroes at the Alamo, and don’t much think of him as a philosopher. But he had a very simple motto that applies to nearly all of us. Davy Crockett’s famous motto was “Just be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” You’re right, and you have that necessary feeling of certainty about it. And when you’re sure you’re right, you know it’s safe to go ahead.

Two areas where you could expect to find the most compelling sense of certainty might be among religious mystics and scientists. Mystics, because once they are certain that they are in touch or in tune with God, almost nothing can shake them. And scientists, because they have to ground their beliefs in empirical data and check them with the whole host of other scientists within their discipline. This includes checking the inherent logic of a new idea, whether it fits with what they are already certain about, whether the most admired scientists would be likely to agree, and so on.

This can mean that some bright young scientist may come along with a new idea that simply can’t pass the test, and they get their feelings hurt when their brilliant idea is rejected or even laughed at. But honest science isn’t about bending the truth to fit someone’s feelings. It’s about seeking facts and coherent, persuasive logic that fits the way the real world is put together.

One of my favorite stories from science is this kind of a story, involving one of the most famous scientists in the world, and a bright, assertive young man who tried to get an idea past him that couldn’t pass muster. It’s a story that contains most of what I’m trying to talk about this morning.

It happened back in 1935, in the field of theoretical astrophysics, and involved Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest mathematical minds in history. Eddington, at 52, was generally acknowledged as the world’s finest astronomer, and his book on the structure of stars was the classic in its field. The other character in the story was a very bright 24-year-old student from India named Chandrasekhar, or Chandra. He had been studying the structure of stars for only a few years, since he won Eddington’s book as a prize in a school physics contest – so you get a feel for the great distance between their levels of accomplishment in astronomy. But the young man was not shy, and had been discussing a radical new theory of his with Eddington for several months by mail. Eddington finally invited him to London, to present his paper before the prestigious Royal Astronomical Society at Cambridge. Eddington even told Chandra that he had used his influence to get extra time so the young man could present his work properly.

The day before the presentation, when a copy of the printed program was released, Chandra discovered that Eddington had placed himself on the program, following Chandra, and speaking on the same subject.

Chandra’s paper dealt with a fundamental question: What happens after a star has burned up all of its fuel? According to the prevailing theory of the day, the cooling star would collapse into a dense ball called a white dwarf. A star with the mass of the sun, for instance, would shrink to the size of the earth, at which point it would reach equilibrium. Chandrasekhar concluded, however, that the enormous gravitational forces at work in a large star (any star more than 1.4 times as massive as our sun) would cause the star to go on collapsing beyond the white dwarf stage. The star would simply keep getting smaller and smaller and denser and denser until” well, that was an interesting question, and Chandrasekhar delicately avoided it.

Then it was Eddington’s turn.

The point of his paper was that Chandra’s ideas had simply been absurd, and he proceeded to tear apart Chandrasekhar’s paper. The speech was frequently interrupted by laughter from the other scientists. Eddington couldn’t quarrel with Chandrasekhar’s logic or calculations. But he claimed that the whole theory had to be wrong simply because it led to an inevitable and outlandish conclusion. And one measure of Eddington’s brilliance was that he could see the logical implications of the paper better than Chandra could: “The star,” he said, “has to go on radiating and radiating and contracting and contracting until, I suppose, it gets down to a few kilometers radius, when gravity becomes strong enough to hold in even the radiation, and the star can at last find peace.” And no such object could possibly exist, said Eddington. A logical reduction to absurdity, he called it. And he added, in one of my favorite statements in the history of science, “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”

Do you see what Sir Arthur Eddington had done? He tested the new theory against a whole line of staves in his tub, against all he knew to be true, the logic demanded in science as he understood it, the style of reasoning that was necessary, even the reactions of a room full of some of the most distinguished scientists in the world, who joined him in raucously laughing down this odd new idea.

But that’s how science, or any good search for truth, works. It is no respecter of people’s feelings, just the facts as understood by those who have authority and are certain: the Davy Crocketts of their sciences.

The argument with Eddington dragged on for years, ruined any chance of Chandra’s getting a tenured teaching position in England, and finally persuaded him to give up the subject altogether. So, shortly after being hired by the University of Chicago in 1937, he put the theory in a book and stopped worrying about it, and switched his research to other and unrelated fields, where the weight of Eddington’s authority had not poisoned the well. And he had a very distinguished career.

Then, in 1983, Chandrasekhar, still at the University of Chicago, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, for the work he had done back in 1935, 48 years earlier. What he had discovered, that Eddington said couldn’t exist, were black holes. The greatest mind in astronomy had been wrong, and the force of his dogmatic but incorrect opinion set back research on black holes for five decades. He couldn’t quarrel with Chandra’s logic or calculations, remember: he opposed the results simply because, as he said, “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”

Eddington, like Casey at the bat, had struck out completely – though it took nearly half a century to find out, and the Nobel Prize wasn’t awarded to Chandra until 39 years after Eddington had died; so Eddington had spent the rest of his life certain that he was right.

The year before he won the Nobel Prize, Chandra looked back and tried to draw some conclusions from the story for an interview in the magazine Science 82. How can scientists of Eddington’s caliber be so wrong, and in such unscientific ways?

“For lack of a better word,” Chandra wrote, “there seems to be a certain arrogance toward nature which people develop. These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science which must therefore be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.

“Take Eddington. He was a great man. He said that there must be a law of nature to prevent a star from becoming a black hole. Why should he say that? Just because he thought it was bad? Why does he assume that he has a way of deciding what the laws of nature should be? Similarly, this often-quoted statement of Einstein disapproving of quantum theory: “God does not play dice.” How does he know? I think one could say that a certain modesty toward understanding nature is a precondition to the continued pursuit of science.”

From inside a worldview or paradigm or set of biases – scientific or otherwise – we see a wall made of our certainties that gives us an island of what passes for reason and sanity in a world too big to comprehend. That’s that small world within which we know who we are and what is most true, and I’m not sure we could live without it.

But from the outside, that same wall is seen as our tub of denial: denial of the fact that the world is far bigger than our little certainties. Our tub closes the world out and shuts us up inside of our certainties. It defines what counts as true and sane for us, and also defines how woefully inadequate our little world is.

Here’s why I’ve wanted to think of our small worldview as a tub: because I have a poem to read you. It was written about twenty years before Eddington’s first disastrous meeting with Chandra, and describes what happened to Eddington, and what happens to so many of us.

It is taken from a 1916 book by Edgar Lee Masters called Spoon River Anthology. It’s a wonderful book, though an odd one. There is no story, no plot. The whole book is a collection of fictional epitaphs from the fictional town of Spoon River, in which the dead speak through their epitaphs about their lives, and life in general. One of my favorites was the epitaph of Griffy the Cooper:

“Griffy the Cooper”

from Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters (1916)

The cooper should know about tubs.

But I learned about life as well,

And you who loiter around these graves

Think you know life!

You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,

In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.

You cannot lift yourself to its rim

And see the outer world of things,

And at the same time see yourself.

You are submerged in the tub of yourself-

Taboos and rules and appearances,

Are the staves of your tub.

Break them and dispel the witchcraft

Of thinking your tub is life!

And that you know life!

This is one way of understanding the human condition, the human dilemma. We live within small pictures of a universe that is sometimes infinitely larger than we can imagine. Still, those world pictures give us our sense of order, of home, of who we are and how we should live and how others should live. From the inside, we call it creating order out of chaos, and the order we impose through our world pictures, our paradigms, our biases, lets us feel at home, feel certain, even feel sane.

But from the outside, our wall of certainties looks like a wall of denial, of willful ignorance, or an unwillingness or inability to be moved enough by the vastness of it all that we can react not only with our minds, but also with our hearts. Griffy the Cooper nailed it when he said that we can’t lift ourselves to the rim of our tub and see the outer world of things, and at the same time see ourselves and feel at home.

I can’t think of any field of human knowledge that isn’t built this way: science, religion, music, art, architecture – everything, I think.

In religion, orthodoxy is the tub, heresy is the voice from one looking over the rim of the tub, trying to make a home in a bigger world. And the very bigness of that world is what threatens the adequacy and the comfort of the small world of orthodoxy.

In society, our world pictures, our tubs, tell us which kind of people and behaviors are acceptable and which are wrong. Our tub tells us what roles men and women may play, what kind of people we can and can not love, what sexes, sexual orientations or races are superior to the others, and all the rest of it. And we’re so sure we’re right, that we’re often dangerous to those who lives go beyond our understanding.

Yesterday was Earth Day, and our understanding of our environment is limited or enhanced in the same way. Is the earth here for us to plunder and have dominion over, or for us to be good stewards of, as though our lives depended on it?

A growing number of scientists are warning us that our greedy and uncaring treatment of our earth may have consequences more devastatung than we can imagine. If the arctic ice caps melt, they say Florida and New Jersey may be buried under twenty feet of water. Can we see over the rim of our complacency about using the lion’s share of the earth’s oil and energy in time to make a positive rather than a negative difference? Before our tub gets flooded? Or maybe we can’t think that far, like Eddington couldn’t.

When we reach the end of our intellectual tether, and our understanding can’t include a world bigger than our mind can fathom, almost every religion in the world agrees that it is time to turn it over to our hearts.

Buddhists say when we are faced with the choice of doing the right thing or the compassionate thing, we should do the compassionate thing. Jesus said What good does it do if you love those who love you? Even the worst of people do that. No, you should love even your enemies. And of course the irony here is that if you love your enemies, they are no longer your enemies, and you may have found, together, the power to transform the world.

No matter what religion you turn to, I think you’ll find this same advice. Poets like Edgar Lee Masters were twenty years ahead of Sir Arthur Eddington; sages and prophets like the Buddha and Jesus were aeons ahead of nearly everyone. Beyond the tub of our certainties lie the much bigger worlds that need our compassion and protection. And the ability to love beyond our understanding is the path – many believe it is the only path – toward that idyllic larger picture of the world known as the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God: the state of affairs where we simply treat all other people as our brothers and sisters, as children of God, and treat the entire earth as the handiwork of God, placed in our trust for loving care.

Even more than understanding the world, we are called on to take care of it, so that our presence might bless it rather than cursing it. That may still be the only path toward what Jesus called the kingdom of God – and a great deal more.