Humble Superstitions
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
Yesterday, during a break for lunch in a meeting with the Executive Committee of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, I admitted to the gathered company my fondness for Judge Judy, something I have confessed here before. As it has here, it elicited a good chuckle around the table as, apparently, people don’t expect such a guilty pleasure from a minister.
‘Really?’ someone asked, looking sideways at me. ‘Why in the world do you like Judge Judy?’
It’s easy enough to sort it out really. I like it that in a small part of the world, a part of the world no larger than the confines of her supposed court room, there is no moral ambiguity. There are no areas that are gray. You have a contract or you don’t and that settles the matter. You take responsibility for what you have done. You offer proof. And it’s all settled by the Judge. There is no doubt. I am comforted to know that there is a corner of the world where things are that clear.
Because we all know that it’s not nearly that clear out here where the rest of us live. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. In the moral realm, it’s nicely described by David Eagleman in one of his stories about a possible afterlife:
In the afterlife you discover that God understands about the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn’t take long for Her to realise that humans could be good in many ways . How was she to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to Hell? Might not it be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men’s lives? Might not a child unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family? Dividing the population into two categories – good and bad – seemed a more reasonable task when She was younger, but with experience these decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh hundreds of factors, and ran computer programmes that rolled out long strips of paper with eternal decisions. But her sensitivities revolted at this automation – and when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the opportunity to kick out the plug in rage. That afternoon she listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievance, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional, and she could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.
Even that, however, at least indicates that there’s someone in charge, someone who can make decisions, a God who, though unsure still has some sort of power to make that tidy little corner of the universe if She chooses.
It is plenty harder to get a tidy corner down here, though we mostly act like we’ve everything filed in alphabetical order and tucked away on orderly shelves. But the truth is that even once we get outside the specifically moral universe into even more mundane matters, it’s still a bit of a minefield.
Here’s the question: How can we be certain about what we think? Or believe? What is the truth? And if we can’t arrive at any certainty, how shall we act in the world?
This question applies easily to those moral questions that can be so complicated that they need massive computers spitting out long strands of paper that still don’t give you an acceptable answer. But it even applies to things that ought to be more clear cut, like science.
But even my colleague Bill Houff reminds us to note that it isn’t something like a fact. He tells us that the models he used to draw fit our experience of those substances, but the models he drew may in actuality have no correspondence to any reality that’s out there. It’s a part of the scientific method: our understandings are meant to always be fluid, adaptable if there is adequate evidence to show us that something different fits better.
This – the nature of science when understood at its very best – has been taken up by more conservative Christians in the US to attack the teaching of evolution. ‘It’s only a theory,’ they say with scorn, and proceed with an argument to include other understandings of the creation of human beings, namely, those understandings that start with the stories in Genesis about how the world we know was created. One theory, they would argue, is pretty much like any other, therefore, their theory should be included as well.
The whole conversation takes on a bit of the air of Alice in Wonderland if you pursue it too far. Many years ago now, a professor of mine from the University of Chicago was invited to take part in a panel with a creationist and a biologist. Langdon Gilkey specialised in theology and in particular had written and studied about the relationship between religion and science. During the filming of the programme, the biologist, frustrated by the whole thing finally exclaimed, ‘Don’t you know that your idea of God is just some electrons coursing through your nerves?’ Mr Gilkey, utterly blase about the remark, said back to the scientist, ‘don’t you know that your science is just some electrons coursing through your brain?’
Even what we think of as the most solid and confirmed of facts that we have in our possession, are in reality nothing like it. It’s all a theory. There is no ‘there’ there.
Yet we get up in the morning, make ourselves a cuppa something, make breakfast and get on with the day. Colleague Judith Walker-Riggs once described the theoretical idea that atoms are made up mostly of space, and so what appears solid to us is in fact largely air. Sensibly, she stepped away from the podium in the large hall where she was speaking, stomped the floor several times – my memory is that the noise resounded quite well – returned to the microphone and announced, ‘It seems solid enough to me!’
But don’t worry – I’m not going to leave you here in the middle of Wonderland, with the world seeming a bit loosely structured and unformed. The floor here is indeed solid, there will be real tea and coffee to quaff after the service, and we’ll all leave – at least I hope we will – with a sense of what is possible in this buzzing confusion I’ve just created.
Jane Wagner in her play ‘The Search for Intelligent Life In the Universe’, a one woman show written with and for Lily Tomlin, quips – accurately, I think – ‘Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.’ And it’s that collective hunch that allows us to be here and in conversation, and considering all of these crazy ideas. But there’s more, too. I’ve always held to the notion of ‘useful fictions’, or as the Buddhist monk put it ‘humble superstitions’. It has seemed to me for a long time that ultimately, there is no way of discerning the truth, finding the reality, knowing, well, knowing what is ultimately true. So, in some measure we have to do the best we can with what we can figure out, and carry on from there.
But those two modifiers – ‘useful’ and ‘humble’ – need to be our guides in the whole exercise. Gandhi, in the introduction to his autobiography, describes this attitude about how we act even in the face of uncertainty, recognising that Truth is finally unknowable. His subtitle for his autobiography is ‘The story of my experiments with the truth’, and he says that in writing down what has happened to him, he is attempting to offer what he has learned, how his experiments have given him power in his life, and in the same breath notes, ‘If the experiments are really spiritual, then there can be no room for self praise. They can only add to my humility. The more I reflect and look back on the past, the more vividly do I feel my limitations.’
He offers us his way of moving forward even in the face of the experimental nature of his understanding of his life:
I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility about my conclusions. One claim I do indeed make and it is this. For me they appear to be absolutely correct, and seem for the time being to be final. For if they were not, I should base no action on them. But at every step I have carried out the process of acceptance or rejection and acted accordingly. And so long as my acts satisfy my reason and my heart, I must firmly adhere to my . . . conclusions.
Wise guidance from the ages. We believe what we believe because we have in some measure carried out a process of accepting or rejecting ideas or beliefs, those truths that make some sense to us. And if we are honest, we have to come with that sense of humility that Gandhi lifts up. For we have been wrong in the past, and might well be wrong now. In this way we can both act and be open to the new truth that might break through.
In all of it, though, we need to be sure that what we have adopted, the truth that we act upon is also useful, that it somehow adds to the measure of goodness, love and peace in the world. The Rabbi offers the gift of a useful fiction to the abbot in our story this morning. That the brothers see that the messiah might be among them changes the way that they relate to one another, and, at least according to the story, changes the world for the better.
As we discern how to be in the world – something we do moment by moment in mostly unconscious ways – this, too, should be one of the markers we use to know that we are on the right path: that it increases love, increases peace, increases goodness for us and for the wider world.
On those days – I won’t tell you how many each week – when I turn off the telly after the final gavel has fallen in the Judge’s courtroom, and I leave that small corner of the world where life is clear, and truth is not ambiguous, and I come back into this buzzing confusion of partial clarity, and unsure actions, I am well served by asking myself: what is my humble superstition that helps me to serve the world? What is my useful fiction that will heal the broken and comfort the lost and weary of the world?
May it be in our days that we find the answers to our questions and live boldly.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
so often we are unsure.
The world is full of more
than we can name.
We can become lost,
forget what is best,
forget what is important.
In those days – today perhaps –
when all seems unsure,
may we find a glimmer,
a small light that
can show a way.
Attend us in those moments,
Spirit of Love beyond our understanding,
that we may be renewed,
upheld,
in our humble attempts
to live well in this world.
In the small light that can shine,
may we see and know to follow
your path,
choosing to love, choosing peace,
choosing compassion in all our actions,
that we and the world shall be blessed.
Amen.