sermon delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 9/30/07
link to audio will go here when available.
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The villager went up to sit on the hillside that morning to sort out his head and contemplate what had become of his life of late. The winter had been hard. Many of his animals had frozen, and the ground had become almost impossibly hard to plow when the time came. Now, at harvest, he had little to show for what he was able to plant. Winter was coming again soon, and there were signs that it would be even harder. He didn’t know if he could live through another year like this one.
He looked down over the village with its many farms and families. He was grateful for his community in that moment. He was certain his family could not have survived without their help and kindness in the last year. With gratitude came a sense of hope. One way or another, he realized he would get through the hard winter and what would follow. The village would not let his family suffer, and he knew he would return the favor if he were in the position. With gratitude and hope, then, came a strong feeling of connection – a certainty that he was not alone, that his life was entwined with others.
As he looked around the hillside, he saw other villages much like his own dotting the countryside. In a moment of reverie, that sense of connection extended to those other villages, whether he had visited them or not. In that moment, he was filled with an indescribable feeling, one that moved beyond feelings of kindness and connection. He did not have the words to give the feeling voice, and yet he felt compelled to describe it, nonetheless. He felt he had made an important discovery, and he needed someone, anyone, else to experience it, to understand it, to make it that much more real.
He set back toward the village, hoping he could find the words to do this newfound feeling justice.
***
It was almost inevitable that when it came time for me to cultivate a spiritual practice, I would choose something art-centered. Most of my friends and colleagues had taken up some form of contemplative meditation, sitting Zen for hours at a time. This was not the path for me. I’m a fidgeter. I couldn’t sit still for two minutes if you tied me to a chair. I needed a meditative practice that allowed me to move around. I’ve always been a doodler, with the margins of a library full of notebooks covered in geometric patterns and cartoons — more doodles than notes in some cases. And yet, my studies never seemed to suffer — so, perhaps that artistic fidgeting was doing something for my mental processes.
Better still, when I spoke of the job of ministry to others, I most often spoke in art metaphors: seeing details and the big picture at the same time; weaving tapestries of people.
Of course I was going to engage in a drawing meditation.
Much as my drawing metaphor, my meditation focused on seeing the parts and the whole at the same time. If I could focus on that one still subject for a long enough span of time, I could begin to really see it as it was. My greatest triumph in those early days was a large charcoal drawing of a pear. One pear. It took me two hours to see the pear and reproduce it on paper. It was an exhilarating, revelatory moment when I did. Those moments are not always easy to come by.
It is those sorts of moments that Dr. Betty Edwards pushes her students to achieve. Edward’s classic text, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, is dedicated to the premise that anyone can draw what they see, and that it’s not the drawing that’s the difficult part, but the seeing where most people get tripped up.
The language center of the brain dominates most people’s thought processes. But language is a predominantly symbolic process, producing what are essentially verbal shortcuts for larger realities. The word “pear” for example, conjures up a fairly common image. However, the reality of the object “pear” is much larger than the word, for it contains all our sensory experience of the object without describing it in detail – its color and shape, its smoothness and sweetness. If we hadn’t created the verbal symbol “pear,” we’d be standing around all day communicating all of the minute details of the object until speaker and listener had achieved some sort of mutual understanding of what was being spoken about.
When the language center of the brain imposes itself on the process of seeing, a person begins to “see” in shortcuts. Early on in her career as an art teacher, Edwards would get frustrated with students who seemed to be taking lazy shortcuts in their work. Say, for example, she had asked them to draw the pear we’ve just been talking about. More often than not, students drew what they knew a pear should look like, rather than the pear they were seeing.
“Can’t you see that’s not what the pear looks like?” she’d ask them.
“Yes,” they’d answer.
“Why can’t you draw what you’re seeing?” she’d ask.
“I don’t know how to draw that,” was the inevitable response.
Baffled, Edwards tried an experiment one day. She handed the students a copy of a Picasso drawing upside-down and asked her students to copy it. To a person, each student created a near-faithful reproduction of the Picasso.
“How come you can draw upside-down when you can’t draw right side up?” she asked.
The answer surprised her: “Upside-down,” they said, “we didn’t know what we were drawing.”
Look at a young child’s drawings. The artistic vocabulary of most children takes on definite symbolic structure. A sun is a circle with radiating lines. A house is a box with a triangular roof. When my son was younger, a hand was always a circular palm with three fingers. All people were shaped the same, but grown-ups were bigger in scale, and mama had longer hair. The drawings look nothing like the subjects, but we know what they are, nonetheless.
Frequently, that symbolic certainty follows us into adulthood. The certainty of knowledge contained within language becomes a crutch when attempting to see something as it is. The bulk of Dr. Edwards’ work revolves around getting her students to stop “knowing” and to start seeing.
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Language is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. However, by its nature as a system of symbols, it is inherently limited. Look again at our “pear.” It’s a concrete object that most of us have a direct frame of reference for. Putting aside the wide variety of pears out there, we can be fairly certain that when I say “pear” we can all get on the same page fairly quickly. However, there’s a lot of information contained in that little word when we start to really think on it — all of the qualities that make a pear a pear, any of which, if taken away, would make that object something other than “pear.”
If so much information is packed into the word “pear,” how much more information are we attempting to pack into our verbal symbols when attempting to describe something even more abstract?
For as much as researchers have studied the inner workings of the human brain, we know so little. One thing that has been uncovered in the last few decades is this: when we think in abstract terms, our brain behaves in a physically different way than it does when we use language. Specifically, when we operate in the abstract, our neurons fire in parallel, cutting broad paths through our brain. When we write or speak, our neurons fire in series, following much narrower paths.
When I consider this, I am presented with an image that, while probably neurologically incorrect, provides a compelling metaphor. Wide paths of experience — paths encompassing all of our engagement with the world, sensory input, abstract thought, and meaning making – are being forced into the narrow channels of language.
Our broad minds are hindered by our narrow words.
How can language ever do our deepest thought processes justice?
More specifically, how can a word ever sufficiently describe religious experience?
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In our Unitarian Universalist circles, we tend to get hung up on issues of religious language.
Perhaps we have come from a tradition that has misused language in such a way as to injure us.
Perhaps we cannot reasonably accept another’s definition.
Perhaps we have no frame of reference from which to make sense of the word.
Whatever the reason, it is probably safe to say that there is no Unitarian Universalist who does not have some ongoing struggle with some form of religious language. Most Unitarian Universalists I know have at least one word that sets off some sort of visceral reaction within them.
One of the greatest benefits of being a UU is the ability to engage in that very struggle with religious language. So many faiths do not afford their faithful that opportunity.
The question is: How do we engage in that struggle?
The sad truth is that many of us would rather disengage. It’s a tempting and an easy path, especially for those of us who carry wounds from prior engagements with our faith lives.
How many here this morning have a mental list of words they’d rather not hear uttered in a church ever again?
How many know with certainty what another means when they speak those words?
Think of our villager headed home after his epiphany on the hillside. So much has gone on in his life to lead to that moment. He struggles the whole walk back to the village with how to put his experience into words. And he knows he will fall short of painting the full picture.
Imagine that, in his ecstasy, he tells his closest friend that he has seen the face of God.
Could his friend truly say he knows what that means?
The pathways of abstraction are broad, and there is little more abstract than religion. The narrow channels of language cannot contain the totality of religious experience. And yet it seems so easy, sometimes, to judge — or even outright reject — another’s religious experience based entirely on the words they use.
We hear religious language. But, do we listen?
It’s something I’ve struggled with, even as recently as the weeks before I entered seminary.
One morning at my job, I was on the phone with a long-distance co-worker, someone with whom I’d had a friendly working relationship over the years. She was sorry to hear I was leaving, but pleased at the path I was choosing. As the conversation wrapped up, she said to me, “John, I’d wish you good luck, but we Christians don’t need good luck. We’re God blessed!”
I will admit, with some chagrin, that I heard the words before I listened to the person.
The narrow channels in my brain spoke up first, “Wait a minute! We’d better straighten her out. Don’t want her getting the wrong impression. I’ll give her the quick rundown on Unitarian Universalism and show her why she shouldn’t have said that to me.”
Thankfully, my abstract side got my attention before I’d really stepped in it.
“Hey! She’s wishing you well. She’s got her own way of doing that, and she’s not trying to insult you. Accept it with some grace, you jerk! Besides, the journey you’re about to go on? You could use all the blessing you can get!”
I politely thanked her, and we said our goodbyes.
There is a difference between hearing and listening.
I am not the only Unitarian Universalist minister to have been presented at the end of a sermon with a detailed scorecard listing which offensive words I used and how often.
A few years ago, I was chided for begin a chauvinist when I referred to objects of shallow idolatry as “small gods” rather than “small goddesses.”
There is a difference between hearing and listening.
I can accept the struggle with religious language. I embrace that struggle as part of our shared responsibility as religious liberals. But I don’t believe that we can engage in that struggle honestly until we can stop hearing, and start listening.
Much like Dr. Edwards has discovered that one can draw when one stops knowing with the language center of the brain and starts seeing the totality of the object with the broad processes of the abstract center, I believe we can only engage with our religious struggles honestly when we stop merely hearing language, and begin to receive in our abstract centers the totality of the word and the speaker.
To borrow from our earlier reading, we must see the speaker with soft eyes. We must hear their words with soft ears. We must begin to listen on the right side of the brain. If there is more in an individuals religious experience than can be contained in a word, then we must learn to practice a broad listening that breaks outside the bounds of the narrow language centers of our brains.
We may not like everything we discover in the process. There are no guarantees that mutual understanding will result from deep listening. Some beliefs may be beyond understanding, and some past hurts are hard to do away with. However, I can guarantee that if we engage our theological struggles only within the narrow channels of language, the chance for understanding, or healing, or even a basic connection, is lost before we even start. There is risk in listening deeply, but dialogue without risk is simply small talk.
***
Starting next Sunday, we begin our exploration of what it means to identify as a Unitarian Universalist in a religious way.
In a few weeks, I’ll begin teaching the adult education course, “Owning Your Religious Past” — a course designed to engage with our past faith lives as we look towards the future.
By the end of this year, if all goes well, our small group ministry program will be underway.
All of these activities require an honest and open engagement with religious language, and our own struggles with it. I challenge us all, myself included, to see one another with soft eyes; to receive with some grace both the word and the speaker; to meet others where they are at; and to open the broad pathways within our minds, so that narrow, imperfect words might reclaim some of the fullness and depth of their meaning.
The work is hard, and the risks are many — but, the potential reward for our spirits is immeasurable.
Let us meet the challenge together with broad minds, and with love.
May it be so.
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