Attitude of Certainty
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
There's a story of a child in a religious education class that's circulating around. The day's topic was finished, and the children were given paper and encouraged to draw whatever they might like to draw. The teachers, after tidying up the room, circulated among the students, looking at their work, talking with them. A teacher approached a girl who was scrawling away with deep intention. "What are you drawing?" the teacher asked. "I'm drawing a picture of God," the girl replied. The teacher cleared her throat, and said to the girl gently, "Well, no one really knows what God looks like..." "They will when I'm finished." the girl responded.
Such a sureness, a confidence in vision is startling to most of us, especially those of us who try to live out a belief that revelation is not sealed, that truth is always waiting to break forth from many sources and in many ways. To know what God looks like, to be sure that you can show that authoritative picture to someone is something that most of us run from. Those are the people with the capital T Truth, that tell you the one and only way that you can be saved. The ones who are certain are those who would take our freedom from us, who would put their own particular religious beliefs as the supreme good, who would try to impose their beliefs upon us in whatever way the can.
Some of these folks have been all over the news in recent weeks, talking about what is permissible in terms of embryonic research.
But the truth of this is, too, that those people are us. In our own ways we are just as certain, and though we may espouse doctrines of acceptance and tolerance, we often fall short of that goal. At least, that's been my experience.
For me, what defines fundamentalism isn't so much the specific beliefs that an individual holds, but the attitude of certainty with which those beliefs are held. Nancy Ammerman, in her monograph "North American Protestant Fundamentalism", says this about the people that she is considering:
The primary affirmation of ordinary believers is simply that the Bible is a reliable guide for life. It contains systematic rules for living that have been proven successful over six thousand years of human history. Fundamentalists are confident that everything in Scripture is true, and if they have questions about a seemingly difficult passage, they know that prayer, study, and a visit with the pastor are guaranteed to provide an answer.
It is the guarantee that is most troubling to me -- that answers can be found as easily as consulting a book. It's not so much the specifics and particulars, but the intensity of holding to a certain idea, or belief, and giving it supreme reign over all other matters in life.
We, as Unitarian, are prone to the same sorts of problems. Mary Midgley writes about practioners of science in this same way in her book Utopias, Dolphins and Computers. She writes:
The trouble about science is absolutely not that it tells unwelcome truths, but that its prestige obscures other truths which are every bit as well established and important -- for instance, the truth that, quite literally, people can't live by bread alone and that without vision they perish, so that our imaginations will continue to work, and to influence our thinking powerfully, whether we pay attention to them or not. [She continues] To repeat: the trouble with science-worship is its exclusiveness. Obsession with scientific method makes people ignore other topics and forget that there are any other mental disciplines.
The trouble isn't the specifics of the belief system. Fundamentalism is as easily a problem of scientist as much as it is of Christians or Muslims. The issue isn't the particular truth, but the attitude of certainty with which one holds it.
We are too often people caught in a deep and troubling dilemma: there are beliefs that inspire us in our living, values that connect us to this community and to what we experience as deep and essential truths. In order for us to live the sorts of lives that we think are important, we must act upon those values and beliefs, share them with our children, take stands, to act upon what we know most deeply in our hearts. We hold to those values and beliefs because they seem true, and we turn ourselves and our lives toward them because of their truth and worth in the world.
And yet, one of the defining characteristics of Unitarian Universalism is its openness. We are, in this way, thoroughly post-modern, recognizing that there are many truths, many ways of coming about understanding the world. At least that's what we affirm intellectually.
We've all got those places where we are convinced that we hold the single truth. All you have to do is explore around a bit and you'll find them. A friend recently told about his experience with his daughter, who at 6, wanted to attend church with a friend. He allowed it, and was appalled to find that she came home with a coloring book of Jesus, and hellfire and damnation. He assessed that what she really needed was the opportunity to have community with other girls. He found the Girl Scouts or Campfire Girls – that would be the Girl Guides here, I think – and got her signed up. Crisis averted, he told us with a sigh. But his final comment was telling "Having my daughter become a fundamentalist Christian is about as appealing has having her become a heroin addict." Trust the children in your life to push you into corners that you didn't expect to be in, trust that as life goes along, you'll find those beliefs and values which you cannot get beyond, and cannot accept anything but.
That was as true of me as it was of any child. In early teens, I found Jesus, and joined prayer circles and began praising the lord for everything that happened that I liked. As difficult as my mother found it all -- and that was probably one of the reasons I found it so attractive -- she refrained admirably from negative comment. She believed deeply that each person needed to find her own path, and no matter how repugnant she found my conversion experience, she didn't criticize or chide me, though she did on a couple of occasions engage me in conversation about it. The most memorable one was when she asked why our church -- the UU church -- wasn't good enough for me. I responded that I'd never learned about religion there. She bristled, but didn't have much response to make.
She, like my friend whose daughter wanted to go to church, did have places where she was convinced that she knew the right way -- or at least the more right way.
I'm as prone to that attitude of certainty as anyone -- prone to believe that I'm the only one who has really thought through concerns and dilemmas, who has the single right answer on matters as small as the way to properly cut an orange, to matters as difficult as abortion and the right to choose, to perceptions and perspectives on God, how we might reasonably use that language and metaphor to enhance our religious life. The topics range from the trivial to the profound, from directional use to concerns of justice.
As I said before, this is one of the most difficult dilemmas of a liberal faith such as ours: we believe what we do because it seems true to us, and we must be able to act upon those beliefs, we must be able to act upon those values, or spend our days in a blurry confusion, our own religious life simply a mass of conflicting ideas and possibilities. And in addition to that, we're encouraged to hold to the belief that truth may yet break forth from surprising places. Maybe even from one of those evangelists, those happy, clappy people who make us uncomfortable, maybe even from someone whose political orientation is radically different, maybe from a little girl who knows what God looks like.
I suspect we all have our struggles in this regard. We all have places where we are pretty certain that we've got the truth, and there's not much conversation that can sway us.
Somewhere along the way, I got the notion in my head that somehow I would get all of this figured out and it would be easy from then on. And it's a persistent sort of impression, it will not leave me, no matter how many times I figure out that I should dispense of it. The impression is this: that somehow, once I've figured out a certain number of ideas and values, that the rest will be easy. I'll have the formula for figuring things out, and it'll just be a matter of plugging in the right numbers and doing the math and it'll all be fine. That certain number of values and ideas always seems to be just one more than I've gotten figured out.
In this same vein, it seems that the good life is one which is untouched by trouble. The image of a well put together person has always seemed to me to be people who had great clarity of purpose and intention, who somehow got through life's difficulties and problems with what seemed a minimum of trauma.
Both are, I think, truly mistaken. A conscious, intentional journey through life will never be the easy one. A life that is characterized by wide and deep commitments will always have within it conflicts and dilemmas that seem to have no answers. Our goal and purpose here isn't to find the trouble free path, but rather to fully engage the path we're on, to live into our values deeply, to embody them as fully as we can, and, -- this is the most difficult for me -- to fail again and again to do it as we want. We fail because we are human, and are drawn away from what we know by longings beyond words. We are diverted because we confront pain that we didn't ask for and don't want. We don't embody them all because to have a rich life, to have wide and deep commitments means of necessity we will make choices and decisions: to love and care for our families means not following our vocations sometimes, to stand for justice means that mercy loses some of its depth, to hold to one vision means that other visions die.
We make choices, weighing practical realities against principles and the wisdom of our hearts. Learning to be open, to accept wisdom and learning from whatever source, while still holding to those beliefs and values that enable us to move through life, this task is near the top for me of the difficult balancing acts that is demanded of us by our faith.
E.B. White had a dog, Fred who was very difficult in many ways. He wrote this about him: "Life without him would be heaven, but I'm afraid it's not what I want." In that same way, I don't expect that any of us would truly want the heaven of a life without these sorts of contours. The task set before us is ever to learn to live within those contours, knowing that we will be faced with difficult situations, pushed into corners that we didn't choose, forced to respond to circumstances that we didn't anticipate, all the while keeping our hearts and minds open.
I offer to you two suggestions for how we move along together both within this community and outside of it.
First, what will help most is our own self awareness. Where is it that your heart recoils and you respond with little charity and less openness? Where is it that your mind will not even consider that there might be some other perspective? When we come right up against our own intolerance, our own certainty and narrowmindedness, this liberal faith demands that we examine our own beliefs and seek to understand. This tradition has always prized the open mind, and the full heart, and to embody the faith that has been given to us is to engage ourselves, turning a critical eye upon those beliefs and attitudes and values that seem unassailable, just the plain truth. If we do indeed care about living with an open mind, then we must be ever learning about our own blinders. We will never be wholly rid of them, and in some sense that's not really the point, anyhow. The point is to live in growing awareness, with greater consciousness and intention about our lives.
The second suggestion is to live in the spirit of Mohan Singh. We always must act upon what it is we believe our duty to be. We cannot live a good life without caring deeply and being committed to other people, to the ideas and values and beliefs that seem to us to be most true and which relate us to that which seems most deep and real in the world. We cannot be empty vessels that are ready to receive any and everything that comes our way. As we are able to discern and articulate the beliefs that inform our living, we are called as well to hold to them as did Mohan Singh: with passion and intensity, acting from our hearts, giving what we can to help shape and form the world.
But as we are doing that, we must also have the wisdom to know that there are others who are following their own passions, living out of their own certainty not because they are unreflective or incapable of the high thought that we are, but because of their own particular series of life experiences and commitments and loves and longings. In our own certainty, let us not dismiss and discount others, but seek to find the common ground with them, even if it is to offer them the single cucumber that remains, even if it is only to affirm that we don't hold the single and final truth, though we have truths that make sense of the world for us, that give our lives shape and meaning, continuity and vision.