First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
November 23, 2003

It is a poem about a painting about a myth about a boy who fell from winged freedom into the sea. From the Greek storytellers to the artist Brueghel to the poet Auden, the tale of Icarus and his doom comes down to us with a double perspective. It is impossible not to resonate with the youth, escaping captivity and bondage on his wax and feather wings, soaring into freedom, into hope, into the immeasurable possibilities of a life and a world laid out beneath his giddy eyes. Who would not glide, and swoop, and climb for pure delight? And who does not believe that of course he grew careless, and in his ascent beneath the sun, let the brittle wax soften, so that the feathers dropped away, and suddenly he plunged, like a fragile meteor, into the Aegean waters? The waves closed over him, as waves must do, and in a moment all hope and triumph, all life and freedom, all his youthful strength and joy, were gone from the world - yet the world went on. That blazing sequence of triumph and folly and mortal terror and tragedy unfolded, unnoticed, in the same moments that the sweating laborer ploughed his field, and the sailors held their ship's course across a favoring sea.

Great art does this, I think; it gives us human passion so truthful that it cannot be denied, always observed and set into the detachment which delicately suggests that in fact the universe may not care. I think it takes a kind of courage to create such art; to observe with the dispassionate accuracy of the sun or the sea or a drowsing horse, the supreme moment of human agony and loss, and then to set that intensity down in images of words or paint or stone that will endure across the generations. It takes courage to make such art, and it takes courage to experience that art as well. That is why the sentimental and the reassuring and the titillating will always be more popular than the great, in literature or music or the visual arts - because what is great is not intended to, and cannot, reassure us. Greatness is manifest precisely by leaving us in this paradox; knowing that however deep our grief or vast our joy, however intensely WE may care, the universe itself seems, and may actually be, utterly indifferent.

Last month a former evangelical Christian, Greg Peterson, made a presentation to the membership meeting of the Minnesota Atheists, in which he explored some of the impossible beliefs that had characterized his former faith. Most humanists are familiar with the litany of rational absurdities that people who attempt to believe the Bible literally are required to accept; the creation narratives, Noah's world-wide flood, the parting of seas and the stopping of suns, walking on water, and virgin births, and resurrections from the dead. Some of us remember trying to press our own questioning minds into believing these stories because we thought we should; others of us only wonder how anyone can possibly swallow such ideas in an otherwise rational world. I can remember as a child hearing that the famous evangelist Billy Graham had made some arithmetical calculation of how big heaven could physically be, and how many souls it could hold at maximum. The famous Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies had challenged Graham to produce any sort of actual evidence for his claims, and not surprisingly, Graham never responded. It is easy to conclude from these kinds of exchanges that our humanism is the only religious tradition that does not require of its followers to believe anything irrational or difficult, but I have come to see that this is not exactly true. Humanism has its own difficult articles of faith; propositions that we must struggle over and over again to wrap our minds around; beliefs that are, in the end, too hard for some human minds to sustain. It is of these difficult beliefs that I would speak to you this morning, as we welcome our newest members, and celebrate those who have made this community their spiritual home now for a decade. If you have come here in search of an easy path, you may want to reconsider quickly; let me show you something of the leap of faith that a serious humanist must undertake.

To begin with, it seems to me that humanism asks us to acknowledged that human minds are finite, material organisms; sequences of nerve endings and arranged chemical reactions that function within certain parameters for the original purpose of contributing to the survival and reproductive success of our species. That they have capacities beyond that purpose is a kind of freakish bonus; an accident of evolutionary excess that provides no guarantee of our being able to understand all the dimensions of the universe in which we find ourselves. Our brains are hardwired to respond to certain kinds of stimuli, to seek patterns, to react to dangers, to find ourselves always at the center of concern, to see what we expect to see. As any number of simple optical illusions demonstrate, even when we rationally understand a certain fact to be the case, what our eyes tell us can make us want to doubt what our reason knows. Moreover, those organic brains of ours are suspended in a volatile soup of chemical signals induced not by logic but by emotional reaction. That we are able to know as much as we do is cause for enduring astonishment. This awareness, however, stands in challenging contrast to the brains own intuitive self-perception, that it is completely equipped to grasp the entire nature of all aspects of the universe and perceive them with absolute objectivity. The organic limitations of the brain as an instrument of knowledge is the implausible presupposition with which we must begin our quest for a humanist faith. For many people, it is easier to believe the existence of an omniscient deity who informs our own awareness of the world than it is to accept that there might be a great deal that no one does or ever can know, simply because of the way our minds are physically constituted.

In addition to this limitation in our knowledge, humanism requires us to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of our own annihilation. Whatever we might like to imagine about other worlds and future lives, the only existence we can be sure of is our present one, precarious and fleeting as it is. Quite possibly we die and are no more, and even our memories endure but briefly beyond us. As with Icarus of legend, the waters of life close over our last, despairing cry; the candle of consciousness goes out, and soon it is as if we have never been. Moreover, as much of a struggle as it may be to wrap our minds around this likelihood, we are called upon to accept it not only of ourselves, but of all that we cherish as well. The children for whom we suffered and sacrificed, the institutions and causes on whose behalf we labored, the people we loved - all these sooner or later perish too. We must learn to accept our grief as absolute; mere patience will not avail. There is no promise that our lost loves will be restored to us in some merciful hereafter. The human heart, with its tenacious capacity for connection, intuitively protests that this bleak prospect is impossible, unendurable, and we paint with glowing colors a future existence of restored happiness, as insistently for others as for ourselves, but that is the easy way. The skeptical path requires that we confront the all but unthinkable potential of our real, absolute mortality.

In addition, a humanist faith raises the daunting possibility that neither human history nor the universe as a whole actually has what Theodore Parker called 'a moral arc'. It may be that truth simply does not win out in the end. It may be that justice is not ultimately served. It may be that in the long run, our own virtue does not count, our compassion does not change anything, our love doesn't matter. If there is, as a naturalistic world view affirms, no rescue and no reward, then we must be content to live in a world where the tides of history are quite possibly arbitrary; where the wicked really do prosper, and the good suffer, and a lot of things happen just by accident. And yet our minds are designed to find purpose and cause in the events we observe, because seeing such order is a survival mechanism. It is more difficult to live in a world that is potentially random and purposeless than it is to submit to a governing god who may be cruel or vengeful, but who at least has some kind of intention. Even if we are the doomed heroes in a fated tragedy, our afflictions are easier to bear than if we must see ourselves and our choices as irrelevant to the arbitrary forces in a series of cosmic chance events.

The ability to create meaning out of our experiences is the great evolutionary advantage bestowed upon homo sapiens by our overdeveloped brains.. It is this capacity that has enabled us to cooperate in effective problem solving, to bend the forces of nature to our own comfort and well being, and to pass a heritage of wisdom down the generations of our own progeny. How can we possibly reconcile ourselves to a view of the universe as inherently meaningless? How can we function as the kind of creatures that we have evolved to be, and still embrace these ideas? It is easier for the human mind to accept that a virgin shall conceive and bear a child, or that the waters of a mighty sea could be parted by a command, or that the creator of the universe imposes arbitrary suffering, than to accept its own annihilation, and the probability that evil, despair, and futility may be the universe's final word. I tell you, my friends, it takes no more determined credulity to accept the many mansions of Jesus, or the commandments of Yahweh, or the superior attractions of the Hale-Bopp comet, than it does to embrace our own genuine mortality, the irrelevance of our ideals and convictions, or the indifference of the universe. Every religious tradition asks its adherents to believe something incredible, to accept something irreconcilable, including ours. The question is not whether we will swallow an implausibility; the question is, which ones, and on what basis? The mere fact that something is difficult to believe does not of necessity mean that thing is untrue; many perfectly sound truths are counter intuitive or implausible upon first hearing, and many myths are far easier to understand than the complex explanations of science or probability that would be their rational alternatives.

The exchange between Alice and the White Queen takes on a new resonance in this light. You remember it:

'I can't believe THAT!' said Alice.

`Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. `Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'

Alice laughed. `There's not use trying,' she said: `one CAN'T believe impossible things.'

`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

We laugh, of course, and think pityingly of people who continue to distort plain common sense in the service of doctrinal myths or their own comforting self-deceptions. And yet what if the original remark that evoked Alice's response had been something like, "You're going to die too, you know," or "Maybe good people suffer for no reason."? It takes daily practice, before or after breakfast, to come to terms with such possibilities, and still face the day. So why bother? Why strain our minds and hearts to reconcile ourselves to what we so deeply would rather deny? The answer, it seems to me, is that this practice of acceptance is part of our chosen spiritual path. We have asked to confront a vision of the universe and ourselves which, like great art, lives in the paradox between passionate human longing and the unconcern of a random cosmos. And this vision, if we can endure it, finally sends us back to our human values and concerns with a renewed intensity. For if it does not matter to the universe, it matters all the more to us. If there is no cosmic justice, then there is only our own, and we had better be about it. If all that we cherish is mortal, we had better press those dear ones to our hearts, and speak our love in these fleeting, irreplaceable moments right now. If life has no inherent, given meaning, and we are creatures to whom meaning is essential, then it is up to us to be the creators of our own, and let us begin at once. It is an earnest business we are engaged in, once we have come to terms with the impossible notion of an arbitrary, indifferent universe.

And there is yet one more implausibility to affirm. However random they may be in their origins, life and human consciousness are still great, wondrous gifts. The love that we receive and bestow, the justice that we sometimes achieve, the goodness and plenty that come as arbitrarily as suffering does - all these command a sense of gratitude, whether or not we think there is any recipient of our thanks. A grateful heart makes for a better, more meaningful, more fully human way of life, and to give thanks is not a function of TO whom, but FROM whom, and for what. We didn't earn the right to be here, you and I; it doesn't work that way. The universe doesn't care whether or not we appreciate it, but when we live in appreciation we have a better shot at living into all those values that as humanists we affirm; truth, freedom, compassion, love for one another, beauty, hope, joy... And so I wish you a good and happy Thanksgiving. In the midst of all our feasting and fellowship may there be for each of us a moment, however improbable, of heartfelt gratitude, and praise.

Reading:

Musee des Beaux Artes WH Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance; how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.