What Truth?

    In exploring the internet for a definition of religious truth, I found this on the web page Answers.com.  It was written by Emdrgreg.   “You may call me a nit-picker; I have been called worse. A religious truth would probably be best described as a tenet of faith rather than a religious fact. Religion is a set of practices associated with a given faith or a faith community. The tenets, doctrines or dogmas underpinning the practices of a faith-based fellowship are, or should be, based on a faith approach to the major questions in life and not centered in matters of practice, many of which might change from time to time, or after long periods of time. It might be possible to come to agreement on a definition of the term "religious truth", but it is very unlikely that there will ever be complete agreement on what those truths would be.”
    Well, I agree with Emdrgreg, “it is very unlikely that there will ever be complete agreement on what those truths would be.”  In many other faith traditions, there is an emphasis on religious truth—the ultimate truth that we should all follow.  This truth determines how we should act, what religious texts and traditions to follow, what god is the true god, what the answers to the ultimate questions of existence are.  These truths are sometimes presented as fact, but most often are understood as matters of belief.  For some these truths provide some consistency and grounding in a world that is far from consistent.  Truth today comes at us from science, from religion, from media, from government, from friends and family, as well as from our own personal experience, far too much information, more than we can digest.  How do we find a truth that is consistent and grounding in such a world?  Can we find a truth that is consistent and grounding?  Should we try to find a truth that is consistent and grounding?    
    Unitarian Universalist minister, Reverend Kenneth Twinn, has struggled with this:

 “What I look for in religion is a system of thought that will give meaning to life—not necessarily that will answer all the questions that I might raise, but that will give coherence to my experience of the totality; and a meaning which at the same time suggest a way of life, involve a commitment…of the whole [person].  The conclusions I have reached, the system I have evolved, such as it is, is far from complete; it can be shot at from many sides, no doubt.  It is not original, but influenced by what I have been taught, by patterns of thinking in which I have been brought up.  I confess that I can never ultimately be satisfied with it, and I ought to keep on examining it and modifying it, but it is something I can live with now.  I recognize that it should not conflict with any facts that have been scientifically demonstrated, but equally it must respond to and correspond with sides of my nature, spiritual and emotional as well as purely rational: my insight as well as my five senses.”
    All of us struggle with how to build a mental, emotional, spiritual system within ourselves that helps guide us as we move through the world, make decisions, and try to live a moral and ethical life.  I know I want some truth that I can hold onto.  But perhaps it as Gandhi practiced.  We have to try on truth, to see how it fits us.  And we have to be open to the possibility that the world or we might change.  A truth that fits at one point in our lives may no longer fit us at a different point in our lives.  And I would add that sometimes a truth that fits us at one time in our lives, may not fit at another, and even later might fit again.  When I was a Catholic, saying the “the Lord’s prayer” expressed a truth for me.  It affirmed that I believed in the Christian god, and gave me some ways to live in the world:  Our Father, Who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name;
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.         

When I became a Unitarian Universalist, this prayer held no meaning for me.  If anything, I refused to say it.  I felt a knot in my stomach when I even heard the words; I felt they expressed the beliefs of an outmoded, inflexible, destructive religion; I could not believe I ever accepted this religion into my heart. 
    When I become a Unitarian Universalist minister, I circled back to this prayer and I saw and felt something different in it.  This prayer is not unlike saying “AUM” in Hinduism or focusing on your breathing as in Buddhist Zazen meditation.  Reciting this prayer can be, for many, a grounding meditation.  The words provide meaning, but one could unpack the meaning in many ways.  And with some unpacking and/or liberal editing, I could use this prayer again as a way of grounding myself in my soul.  Listen to this revision by Unitarian Universalist minister, Reverend Fred F. Kelp, Jr.: 

“Indwelling God, who art infused throughout all existence, we hallow thee with many names. Thy Kingdom is within the human heart. We accept life for all that it can be, on earth as throughout all creation. May we continue to draw sustenance from this earth, and may we receive forgiveness equal to our own. May we ever move from separation toward union, to live in grace, with love in our hearts, forever and ever. Amen.”

    We all need some truth to hold onto, to ground us, to be the consistency that the world around us seems to lack.  As sojourners on a life long journey in search of truth and meaning, we understand that truth is spread across this world.  Truth flows everywhere, through the lives of others, through religious traditions, through our own lives at different points. Some falls here, some falls there. No one gets all the truth, but everyone gets some. This is why, even today, truth is everywhere. If you listen to the stories—stories spun from storytellers all around the world—you will hear it.
    One more thing about truth that Unitarian Universalist minister, Max Alden Coots, reminds us: “Technologically there is almost no resemblance between us and our ancestors.  Philosophically there is little difference.  We still look at our faces in the mirror and wonder, at times, who we really are, what twenty, forty, or seventy years of life amount to.  We still look at ourselves in the midnights of our doubts and wonder if we matter.  We still have to stand vulnerable, questioning, and sometimes afraid…”  We all need some truth to help us make sense of these universal human experiences—we all will die; we all have to face ourselves; we all seek out the purpose and meaning of our lives; and we are all vulnerable, questioning, and afraid creatures, doing the best we can to cope with the many changes in ourselves and in the world.  
    We must also engage in the world and find our truth, if we are to thrive despite our vulnerability.   Eileen Day Magill wrote of engaging life and find truth in this engagement:  “I stood on the deck of a boat and looked over the water, where the wheeling gulls came crying in, were caught by the air and swung up again sailing high and away—then dropped suddenly to the churning wake below, or gliding back, joined the other gulls following behind the mainstream of our boat.  One can stand a long time at the rail of a boat, playing with water’s motion, or resting one’s eyes wherever the cloud formations call his attention.  Something about the sea brings its own long, deep look into one’s imagination and stirs there the timelessness of [our] days on earth.  I meant to be worthy of the sea’s enduring message as I stood there—and I thought how all [people] mean to honor their humanity; at least they begin that way, reaching out, to know and understand, opening mouths and eyes and hands to the wonder of discovering, trying to repeat in word and gesture what they have found. I was reminded once again, that unless one goes where the wind is blowing and where the tide is racing for the shore, unless one renews experience, [he/she] is capable of forgetting the nature of the wind, and even what [he/she] once had future out about the pleasure and danger of its force.”
    We all have to face our lives and the limitations that life affords us.  The questions of existence can only be engaged if we live life fully, with all its pleasure and danger.  If we let them, joy and wonder are easily ignored, minimized, or completely obliterated by existential concerns.  Unless we go where the wind is blowing and where the tide is racing for the shore, unless we renew experiences, we can get stuck in the questions and not open to the truth that living in the world can offer. Living, fully engaged, in the world will guide us to truths about the questions of existence, to meaning and purpose, to embracing joy and wonder, and to realizing that fear, doubt, questioning are normal, natural things—fear can give us energy to do work in the world, and it will pass; doubt can help us to look deeper into things, if we don’t let it keep us from accepting any truth that into our lives; and we realize that we will find answers to our questions that make sense to us at a given point in our lives, even if they are not complete answers. 

    This journey we are on individually and together will give us many opportunities to find truths that we can hold onto and live in the world.  Just because we are Unitarian Universalists does not mean we don’t affirm finding truth, it just means that we are always open to our ever evolving self and our ever evolving world for new insights, new revelations, new truths.  And we have to be careful that we don’t just routinely discard old truths that had meaning to us at one point of our lives.   We may need to come back to them with new eyes and a new heart, to find a home for them in a new way, inside us.  This process of searching for truth and meaning is not an easy one, because we all want something to hold onto, it is hard be open and flexible, but it is also interesting, fun, never dull, and I feel much more congruent with who I am as I live it.
    The Buddha said: “If you seek after truth, you should investigate things in such a way that your consciousness as you investigate is not distracted by what you find, or diffused and scattered; neither is it fixed and set. For the one who is not swayed, there will be a transcending of birth, death, and time. Whether you walk or stand or lie down, stretch your limbs or draw them in again, let all these things [be done] attentively, Above, across, and back again. Whatever your place in the world, let you be the one who views the movement of all compounded things with attention.”  My friends go out into the world attentive to the many truths that you will be exposed to, regardless of what you are doing or where you are or who you are with.  Be open to truth that comes your way, but realize that you need not accept that truth as fixed and absolute; let it be like a sip of water—drink in the insights it gives you, but be not distracted by them.  Let it flow through you giving you sustenance.  And realize it will eventually flow out of you, leaving part of itself behind. 

Being in Darkness

         Nyctophobia—fear of the dark, or more precisely the fear of what would or could happen when you are in the dark.  It is one of the most common fears.   On the webpage Phobia Fear Release, an online treatment page for people with phobias, one woman named Malaysia wrote:  “I think I am suffering from nyctophobia. I [was] really scared when suddenly my house had a blackout [one night] around midnight. I [could] breathe but I [felt] there [was] no oxygen. I told myself to relax because I [knew this was]  only [in] my imagination, but I [was] out of control. The most terrible [thing was], in my imagination I [believed I wouldn’t] be able to see the sunshine anymore. I [was] only thinking of death.  I [was] crying aloud. Seeking oxygen, hoping for a sunrise.”  For some people, perhaps many, or most, there is a link between darkness and the knowledge that one day we will die. When we are vulnerable and darkness envelopes us, suddenly, we think “what if my life is over;” then cascading comes “what about all the things I haven’t done;” “all the choices I regret;” “all those chances I let pass by.”  

I have felt a little stressed, a little vulnerable, a little close to the darkness lately.  I shared this with my peers at the Eastern Iowa Unitarian Universalist minister’s cluster.   After I shared some of my feelings, and experienced some relief, some peace, Reverend Eva Cameron told us about a book called Greenlanders.  It is a tale of the early settlers of the hostile environment of Greenland, a place of the midnight sun, with 24 hours of daylight near the summer solstice and of noontime nights with 24 hours of darkness near the winter solstice.  These early settlers had to hunker down inside their homes during the long dark winter, with freezing temperatures from November to April, an average of four degrees below zero Fahrenheit.  In order to survive, they brought their cows inside to live in the basements of their homes, where the cows ate the stored up grasses and other food that the settlers could spare.  Can you imagine having cows living in your basement all winter?  Let’s just leave it at that.  Over the winter, the settlers and the cows became skinny, lethargic, eating just enough to survive.  Then in the spring, the settlers, barely able to move their thin, emaciated bodies would have to carry the thin, emaciated cows out of the basement because the cows did not have the strength to get out of the basement by themselves.  The settlers and the cows would thrive over the spring, summer, and fall, which was May through October, only to go through this process again when the winter arrived.

            As she talked about these Greenlanders, I started reflecting on the many people I’ve met who struggle with depression.  And I’ve met some people who were paralyzed by depression, unable to get out of bed or even respond to another person.  There was nothing physically wrong with them; they had just crossed a threshold that some of those Greenlanders might have easily crossed; they were used up.  They had no personal resources left.   Perhaps they overwhelmed by weakness, perhaps they reached a point where they just didn’t care whether spring would arrive.  The promise of a personal spring, of getting those smelly cows out of the basement, was no longer enough to energize them to take even one more step, much less get out of bed.

            I once had a patient who, each time she arrived at my office, would tell me how depressed she was, how difficult it was to get out of bed to go to work, how distant she was felt she was becoming from her son, and how her husband was threatening to leave her.  She cried and cried.  Each session she would tell me more and more examples of things worsening in her life.  She refused to take anti-depressants; she refused to follow therapeutic recommendations; she refused to bring her family in to discuss her condition.  She refused to let any of her cows see the light of day.  She knew that she had the opportunity to haul up a cow or two, but she was too tired, too overwhelmed, to look beyond the darkness.  In fact, I would say that she was more invested in fighting the darkness, in denying its existence, than embracing it and working with it.  Eventually her life imploded—she lost her husband; she lost her son; and eventually she even lost her job—she collapsed under the pressure of the darkness inside her.  Just before the loss of her job, I terminated treatment with her, feeling that I was enabling her to stay locked in the darkness. 

You can’t fight darkness, not really.  It’s there; it’s part of the natural cycle of things.  You can’t banish it any more than you can stop the earth from spinning on its axis around the sun.  Darkness comes, and then it goes, and then it comes back again.  You can’t really work against it, but you can work with it.

In the reading by Randy Miller, we heard of his waiting, his struggle with darkness and hopelessness, his seemingly endless winter of incarceration behind bars.   It would have been easy for him to give in to that endless waiting, to give into the helplessness, to give up, and perhaps, at times he did.  But you know what?  Randy’s article did not end with hopelessness.  Randy learned to meditate.  He writes, “Waiting led me to meditation and prayer, which eventually helped me discover what I consider to be my purpose in life: to work towards the complete prevention of youth crime and abuse.  While waiting, I’ve made every attempt possible to inquire and learn as much as I can about child psychology and the juvenile justice system.  I have written for several youth advocacy organizations and developed close relationships with people running those groups…I used to dread all the hours I spent alone, waiting for something to happen.  Now I miss those opportunities so much.  Waiting gave me a chance for discovery, and what I found, in all likelihood, saved my life.  It is my prayer and my hope that everyone will learn to love to wait, and to see waiting for the precious gift that it is.”      

So here we come into the darkest time of the Great Wheel, when the weak rays of the sun do not shine very long or warmly.  When it’s dark by 4:30 and we wonder why it’s not dinner time yet.  And when, in normal years, we are hunkering down for more snow to trap us in our houses, or at least make us very grumpy when we have to leave them.  What’s to embrace about all that? 

When you embrace the darkness change can happen, hope can be renewed.  Randy Miller filled that trapped time with meditation and prayer; others use ritual, journaling, deeper conversations with friends as a way to move through the winter of their souls. 

Former journalist, photographer, sculptor, and follower of the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff, Henri Tracol in his article “Without sleep, no awakening” writes: “Is not the first essential act recognition—recognition of the utter necessity of the search itself, its priority, its urgency for him who aspires to awake and assume as fully as possible his inner and outer existence?...Whenever a man awakes, he awakes from the false assumption that he has always been awake, and therefore the master of his thoughts, feelings, and actions.  In that moment, he realizes—and this is the shadow side of recognition—how deeply ignorant he is of himself…how helplessly at the mercy of any suggestion that happens to act upon him at a given moment…whenever a man awakes and remembers his purpose, he awakes to a fleeting miracle, and at the same time an unanswerable riddle.  He realizes, at moments, that in order for him to awaken he was foredoomed to sleep…” 

            Ultimately we can choose to embrace a quest into our darker interior spaces whenever we face a winter, whenever we feel our resources running out, whenever we feel we just want to stay in bed and not face the possibility of hauling cows from the basement.  The quest gives us the opportunity to learn and grow.  It is the quest into the darkness that leads to the light; it is the willingness to take the risk of hauling the cows out of the basement even when you feel it is impossible for you to even make a step that can give you the opportunity to thrive. 

            I was wandering around the internet and found this quote by Roy Peng: “There is no light without dark, no happiness without grief, no improvement without error, and no true love without heartbreak. Take every bump in the road as a signal for something greater to come.”  I offer you this quote because it sums up what I hope for you when you find yourself in the dark.  Darkness is going to happen; there will be bumps in the road.  You can’t change that.  But you can change what you do during the dark times.  You can choose what will be fed and nurtured during your winter; and you will see what blooms when step out of the darkness into the light of a world of spring sunshine.  So heave ho, pick up that cow, and get moving. 

Irrational Hope

          Victor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote that the way he stayed alive in a Nazi prison camp was to cling onto… “my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.”  When Nicaraguan women were fighting both against the Somoza government and against their culture, for a free and fair democracy, and to "abolish the detestable discrimination that [Nicaraguan] women have suffered with regard to men and establish economic, political and cultural equality;” they did so because they believed that change could happen.  They continued the fight for years despite the lack of any discernible change in the Sandinista government and despite the entrenched machismo culture of their country.    Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family was shot at, his fellow African Americans were harassed and some of them murdered, yet he continued his for equal rights because he believed “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.”

             Victor Frankl concluded, "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.”  So, what about hope in the face of tragedy, disaster, pain, failure, or suffering?  Some might call this irrational hope;  Victor Frankl referred to this as “tragic optimism.”   What is it that causes some people to embrace irrational hope?

            Does “tragic optimism” have a place in Unitarian Universalism?  “We live, we die, we laugh, we cry.”  Each of us will experience tragedy, disaster, pain, failure, or suffering.  If you haven’t yet, trust me, your time is coming.  What is your theology about suffering, tragedy, and failure?  Do you try to remain detached, holding the belief that they are just part of the natural cycle of life?  Is there a reason for suffering and failure? What is it? Are they tests?  Are they fertilizer for new personal growth?  Do you believe that suffering and failure are random? Meaningless?  Just things to be coped with and endured?  What about suffering, tragedy, and failure as relationship builders?  As community glue?        

Frankl reflected: “In the concentration camps…one morning, at five, [several men] refused to get up and go to work and instead stayed in the hut, on the straw wet with urine and feces. Nothing—neither warnings nor threats—could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred: they took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. [Life’s] meaning… had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.”  These men had given in to immediate gratification—smoking—because there was nothing else to hold on to…nothing else between them and feeling hopeless. 

            What about we rational Unitarian Universalists?  We pride ourselves as a denomination on our rationality.  Does this concept of irrational hope, of “tragic optimism” have a place in Unitarian Universalist theology?  I think of our denomination’s ceaseless, decades long work for justice and equity, and of the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee all over the world in the face of so many humanitarian crises and environmental injustices, and I have to say “yes.”  But what about on a personal level?

Years ago I talked with a nurse at the burn unit at the University of Texas Medical Center in Galveston Texas.  When a person comes in with third degree burns, a process ensues which entails extremely painful scraping of the burn tissue to allow new healthy tissue to form.  This debriding occurs daily, and sometimes multiple times daily.  Some of the adults on the unit were so frightened of this process that they would tense up for hours in fear of the inevitable excruciating pain.  With their muscles rigidly tense for hours on end, the skin tissue healed with less flexibility, and the patients ended up with limited mobility after their treatment.  These adults seemed to have learned helplessness very much like the dogs in Martin Seligman’s experiments.  If they could just be still enough, long enough, maybe the pain would stop, and maybe they would survive. 

            David McRaney, from our reading earlier, does observe some hopeful coping strategies for the stress-related positive feedback loop that can lead to learned helplessness: “Every day you feel like you can’t control the forces affecting your fate—your job, the government, your addiction, your depression, your money.  So you stage micro-revolts.  You customize your ring tone, you paint your room, you collect stamps.  You choose. 

Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there.  You must fight back … and learn to fail with pride.  Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.  Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.  You are not so smart, but you are smarter than dogs and rats.  Don’t give in yet.”

McRaney, like Vitktor Frankl, affirms these micro-revolts.  Choices, even small choices, like Frankl clinging to his wife’s image, which became more present to him than the rising sun.  Was his hope, based on his ability to imagine his wife’s presence, irrational?  Perhaps, but Frankl survived in part due to his choice to embrace tragic optimism.

Most of us have at least flirted with the idea of accepting helplessness in one area of our lives or another.  For instance in my life, I flirted with helplessness and hopelessness when I was failing advanced chemistry in High School.  As many of you have probably experienced, everything in high school feels so very important, like your life depended on each and every decision that you make.  So when I barely scraped by with a “C” the first semester, and was failing up until the final, I felt my life was over.  I could easily have given up.  I could have skipped the exam and accepted my fate.  Why put myself through the stress of studying information that I didn’t seem to grasp?  Why take an exam which I knew I would fail?  Why do anything?  I could just stay in bed, in my jammies, binging on donuts and chocolate milk.  But instead I clung to the image of a “D” on my final exam, with an uncanny acuteness.   Real or not, that D was then more luminous than the sunrise. Yes, I know I wasn’t shooting very high.  But clinging to that image, got me to study and got me up on the morning of the test.  And, yes, I did survive high school. 

We each face situations, while rationally not as severe as a concentration camp or as dangerous as a dictator, situations that feel profound, intense, life and death to us.  I am not here to judge what life experiences may cause you to flirt with hopelessness or helplessness, but to say to you there are ways to fight back, to hold back the crushing weight of helplessness.  “Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there.  You must fight back … and learn to fail with pride.” 

And what is “learning to fail with pride?”  I think it is essentially different than “being proud that you did your best” or “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  I think it speaks to those times we attempt something believing we have no hope of succeeding.  I think of the women of Nicaragua, fighting systemic oppression for equality.  Every day they woke up—if they were lucky, if they had survived to wake up—knowing today, they would fail, just like they failed yesterday, just like they would fail tomorrow.  Day after day, month after month, year after year, they failed with pride.  1,000s died, failing with pride, knowing that some day, some how, the granddaughters of their granddaughters might someday gain the equality they had failed to win for themselves.  And they were proud.

Frankl wrote:  “tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action…It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope.”  Frankl believes that finding meaning in life, or in specific areas of one’s life, is how one can hold onto hope.  He wrote: “there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love… the third avenue to meaning in life [is] even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.  He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph…”  One example of this was found by the Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine.  They wrote "[we] have been impressed by the number of prisoners of war of the Vietnam war who explicitly claimed that although their captivity was extraordinarily stressful—filled with torture, disease, malnutrition, and solitary confinement—they nevertheless . . . benefited from the captivity experience, seeing it as a growth experience.”  Seeing torture as a growth experience!  Some of us might find that irrational.  But sometimes it is the irrational that can save us, can get us up when there is no rational reason to do so, can transform us when we are on the verge of hopelessness. 

American theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote: “nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope.  Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”  Faith, hope, and love.  This is an irrational trinity Unitarian Universalists can embrace.  This is an irrational trinity “more luminous than the sun beginning to rise.”  I leave you with the words of David McRaney: “Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.  You’re not so smart, but you are smarter than the dogs and rats.  Don’t give in yet.”  Even if it seems rational to do so.  So may it be.