It turns out I’m not as good at daydreaming as I used to be. When I was about nine, my mother would have to physically rouse me from my bed, not because I was sleeping, but because I was spending happy hours imagining my life as Mrs. Paul McCartney.
My fantasies involved boats, castles, me on stage at Beatles concerts—that is, ‘me’ bearing no physical resemblance to any adult I might ever grow up and become. I was devastated when, one day, somehow, I let my dream slip out and my older brother said scornfully, “Why would Paul McCartney marry a nine year old in Akron, Ohio?”
After that I got more realistic. I moved on to George Harrison, the youngest Beatle. Perhaps that first ‘realistic’ decision was the beginning of the demise of my fantasizing prowess.
Because these days, it turns out, I’m no good at daydreaming at all. Over the years I’ve gotten much better at planning, and actually executing plans. I’ve moved across country, switched jobs, launched projects, had a wedding, adopted a kid—done all kinds of other things that took hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny acts and choices, promptly scratched off my to-do list. But somewhere in there, daydreaming fell off the table.
I didn’t know how bad I’d gotten at it until my spiritual teacher gave me an assignment this week. Take time each day, she said. Stare into space. Daydream. Imagine what would be most fulfilling, delicious, inspiring, to do and to be. It doesn’t matter if you’ll never do it, if no one ever could. Just see what you imagine! Find your young self, see through her eyes!
What once would have been a breeze is now really hard. Back then, along with being tall and willowy and beautiful, and marrying a Beatle, I had every intention of being super-wealthy, being a famous writer, traveling to the most exotic places. Now my rational mind jumps right in. Super-wealthy? I say? You want to be part of the one percent? And instead of enjoying, even for a moment, some delicious luxury vacation, or even the philanthropist I might become, I am fuming about the ‘fiscal cliff’ and drafting imaginary letters to Congress. Word by word.
I think what my spiritual teacher is pointing me to (though she is a bit cryptic and never says why she gives me the particular assignments she does) is to find joy in the longing itself. To allow the imagining to take on a life of its own, but primarily to allow that quality of desire and longing to truly take root in me, until I remember what my young self knew—that we are made to dream, as well as to act.
So, here’s what I’ll do, needing structure to help me out. I’m piling up all of the magazines, random bits of ribbon or paper and 2012 calendars in the house, which I would otherwise be recycling as I clean up the holiday wreckage. I picture looking through all of the materials with one focus—to find items which evoke longing in me, which provoke desire, even if I’m not sure exactly why!
After I gather up images, words, whatever I want—ribbons, sheets of color, fabrics, who knows? I’ll piece them together to see how they fit, to see what shapes they make.
And then, at the end of the day, I’ll have—I don’t know what!!! A jumbled mess? A picture of young Paul McCartney, back when he was cuter than a puppy? What I hope to have is a little bit of a snapshot about what longing feels like in me, so that I can begin to recognize its voice when it whispers in my ear. So that I can become a respectful vessel for my heart’s deepest longings. So I get better at this again.
On New Years’ Day, I plan to go through my usual practice, with friends, of making gratitude boards for the year that’s over, and a vision board for the year that’s coming—same process of cutting and pasting, but with a very different focus as I look through my materials. This time, celebrating 2012 and envisioning things I actually hope and plan to do in 2013.
I’m going to be really curious to see what effect, if any, my extra session of fantasizing has on the visioning process. The fun thing about creative experiments is that you can never guess their results!
However you see in 2013, however you imagine it and live it, may it be full of blessings for you and yours. See you next year!
One night as the on-call hospital chaplain, I witnessed the end of three marriages, each representing over 50 years of love and struggle, as death claimed the husbands. The depth of grief of each wife haunted me for days. Was this the price of great love? Such great pain? This is what I have to look forward to after years of joy with my beloved?
I found myself restlessly meditating, pacing and praying, trying to unpack the promise of pain. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized that grief and love are two sides of the same coin – AND this is not cause for despair.
Life is about spending that coin. Loving with all my heart, grieving what is lost along the way, and loving more.
I learned to find gifts in sorrow, learning in the bad times. Hope.
I do not grieve what I do not love. Great grief is a sign of great love – and great love is a gift beyond compare. When my parents die, if they die before I do, I will mourn deeply, painfully, for years. Just the thought of not being able to call my mom and dad is enough for tears to spring to my eyes some days. But I have stood with children who do not mourn the loss of their parents, who mourn more for the lack of love they felt as a child than for the grief of their parents’ death. So I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that love is the gift. I would far rather mourn the loss of a great love, than have no love to grieve.
This really is hope for me. Not that loss is inevitable, no – but that if I love with all my being, the grief will be sharp and deep and clean. The pain will be intense and there will ever be an ache – but an ache of life well loved, not the ache of regrets nor of despair. I look to the beautiful and the sweet, because it will always lift me towards hope. The price of love is steep, but it is nothing compared to the life sucking numbness of not loving, not caring, not trying.
The great deception is that there is safety – that we can protect ourselves or our loved ones from harm. The truth is that life is mystery, change is constant, control is a figment of the human imagination. When I can be present to the truth that nothing is promised – all life is gift, then despair has a harder time getting a grip in my psyche. Each involuntary and thoughtless breath is amazing, is unearned and unearnable. Grace, by another name.
Years ago, I read the words of Anne Lamott, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” “Ah,” said my soul. “Yes!” My source of hope lies in that mystery. I trust the universe to be endlessly creative, to be rife with paradox, to seek generativity. Life will! In the most inconceivable places and times and situations, life insists most creatively and assertively. And death will too. Two sides of the same coin, much like love and grief.
And so, I live holding all that I love lightly and tightly.
Lightly enough that it may take its own path, tightly enough that it never doubts my love.
It is a spiritual practice.
It is a daily struggle.
It is a daily joy.
For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are
On November 12th of this year, three congregations co-ordained me, giving me a new name – Reverend Deanna Vandiver. On the morning of December 21st, Katherine Grace was born and I received another name – Aunt De!
Beloveds, that every child born could arrive so loved, so cared for as my beautiful niece, baby Kate… For so the children come into this world, into our lives, and we – we are called to love them enough to begin what Howard Thurman called the work of Christmas: “finding the lost, healing the broken, feeding the hungry, releasing prisoners, rebuilding nations, making peace among brothers [and sisters], making music in the heart.”
There is no such thing as “somebody else’s baby.” They are all our children, our beloved miracles of life to care for, to care about, and to commit to healing a broken world so that they may not suffer unnecessarily. As our nation grieves the death of the slain children in Newtown, CT, we are deeply aware of our accountability for their lives and the lives of all children who are harmed by violence and the devaluation of life.
Unitarian Universalist theology tells us that we are a part of an interconnected web of creation, related to and in relationship with each thread of creation. Our society tells us that we are isolated individuals, worth only what we can produce or inherit, and that violence is a credible response to violence. We tenders of the web of life know that violence increases alienation & fear, hides the connections we have to each other, allows us to become numb to the miracle of life, to the wonders of this universe.
My mother has a calendar of days in her bathroom. On the day my niece was born, the wisdom of the calendar instructed “Give people a piece of your heart, instead of a piece of your mind.” Navigating the dynamics of multiple families, hospital policies, and fear for my baby sister’s health with very little sleep, that nugget of wisdom was salvific for me. Life lived from a place of gratitude and wonder is very different from a life lived from a place of ingratitude, anger, and fear.
We who grieve the beloveds of Sandy Hook Elementary are also called to grieve the 800 “civilian casualties” of our country’s drone strikes in Pakistan in the last four years, for the children who are caught in cross-fire in our urban centers, for every child who has lost a parent in the endless US military actions. We understand that we are not called to stand on the side of love for some children. We are called to stand on the side of love for all children. No matter what we think about their choices, their policies, or their cultures, our hearts are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all creation.
Beloveds, each child that’s born is a holy child. You are a miracle. So is your neighbor. As we swim through the ocean of the universe, may we remember this wisdom born of a child called Jesus. Love your neighbor as yourself – and beloveds, love yourself – because if you cannot have compassion for the spark of creation that is your being, you will be able to deny compassion to other sparks of creation.
Give yourself and your neighbor a piece of your heart instead of a piece of your mind. See how quickly this begins the work of Christmas…
For so the children come, and so they have been coming for thousands of years…may each child born find peace and love in our hearts and good will toward all of creation as we commit to doing the work of Christmas.
For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are
It is only natural that in the wake of the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, the world of social media is awash with solutions, things that we should have done to prevent this tragedy, things that we urgently need to do to prevent more such tragedies, things that will make us safe. Some of these suggestions strike me as downright bizarre, such as the idea that we need to arm teachers so that they can protect their classrooms. Hmm…guns in the classroom—what could possibly go wrong? Some of these suggestions are, to my mind, flat-out offensive, such as the claim that this tragedy happened because we have taken God out of the schools, and that “God will ‘bless the USA’ when we put him back in it.” Really? God allowed innocent children to die out of a fit of pique over the lack of prayer in school? Who would believe in such a God?
Other suggestions make more sense to me: that we should limit the sale of assault weapons, or require gun owners to carry liability insurance, or that we control the sale of ammunition. Still other people are arguing for better mental health care, to which I can only say “about time.”
Unfortunately, the more I think about it (and like much of the country I’ve been thinking about it obsessively for days), the less I think that any of these solutions—including the ones I like—are going to really make us safe. By all means, let’s have sensible laws limiting weapons. But no, we’re not going to get all the dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. Or people who were never dangerous until the moment that they snapped. Absolutely, let’s give people better access to mental health care. But even if we could assure compliance with medication and therapy not every illness responds will to treatment. And we will never be able to know for sure the difference between someone who is dangerous and someone who is merely volatile.
And really, if you get down to it, even if we were able to prevent every shooting spree, that’s hardly a guarantee of safety. No amount of control over people’s behavior could prevent the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, or Katrina before that. As someone who lives pretty much on top of a fault line in California I know that a devastating earthquake in the area where I live is basically inevitable – a matter of when, not if. While I in no way agree with people like Adam Lanza’s mother who prepare for cataclysm by stockpiling weapons, given the ever-increasing effects of climate change, I would say that expecting disaster is not unrealistic.
The question is what we plan to do about it. We could prepare our children for the possibility of school shootings by sending them to school with a gun (as one parent is bizarrely said to have done). Or we could teach them to be kind to loners and misfits, to report or stand up to bullies, to tell an adult when another child seems depressed or distraught. We could deal with crime in our neighborhoods by arming ourselves. Or we could get to know our neighbors, and keep an eye on one other’s houses so that we are prepared to call the police if something seems amiss. We could stockpile food and weapons so that in a local or national emergency we are prepared to defend ourselves against all comers, prepared to go it alone. Or we could support increased money for the government emergency services that we are sure to increasingly need. And we can get together to fill sandbags when it seems like the floodwaters are coming, or find ways to share electricity with those who are without power after the storm comes, or offer shelter to those who have lost their homes.
This is what people did for Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. In the aftermath of 9/11 people poured into New York to search the rubble or support the first responders. When a section of freeway collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake folks in that “dangerous” neighborhood converged to help the injured and look for people who might be trapped. This is what we do. This is who we are.
The conservative entertainment complex and the NRA make a lot of money selling fear, and solutions to fear that involve scapegoating, isolation and the capacity to inflict damage before someone gets to you. And yes, that gut-level defensive reaction is who we are, too.
But we get to choose what we act on. We get to choose what we practice, so that when the time of crisis comes our habitual ways of being come to the fore. What makes us safe is the ongoing work of caring for the vulnerable; loving our neighbors; living, like the lilies of the field, in the beauty of the moment rather than in the fear of what might come. We will never be safe. Safety just isn’t part of this package we call life. But we can harbor one another, creating all the safety we can muster in this dangerous world.
Tomorrow morning in the congregation I serve, we will open our worship for all ages with these words:
There are a lot of good and beautiful things in our world.
There are a lot of scary things in our world.
Sometimes we feel great joy and a lot of hope. Sometimes we are brokenhearted and afraid.
We are here in our church this morning because there are a lot of good and beautiful things here. Here, we are surrounded by people that care. Here, we love, and we are loved.
It’s okay to be afraid sometimes. It’s normal to feel pain or anger when something terrible happens. Everybody feels those things sometimes. It’s a part of life.
When those times come, think of places like this. Think of people like the kind people that are here.
We know we don’t have all the answers. Here, we can at least share our questions. And here, we can share a lot more than that: we can share our thoughts and ideas, we can share our pain and our hope. Here, we can remember that we are not alone.
We are here in our church this morning because there are a lot of good and beautiful things here. We’re also here to learn how to bring good and beautiful things into the world.
And so we wake up the morning after, and it wasn’t a dream. The children are still dead, the teachers beside them. It is another day, a gray one, where people and animals must be fed and life will go on no matter how we feel.
Many of us took the occasion, yesterday, to find one another and weep. The people of Newtown wept. The President wept. Many of us watched them online and wept along with them. Many of us gathered, with our families, or friends, or in churches, or online, to weep together.
And today the weeping will continue. But along with weeping, those of us who are not in the center of the tragedy will begin, together, to grope our way along in the darkness and imagine what we might do besides weep. Some will begin researching gun control organizations and join them. Some will call for a March on Washington. Some will argue endlessly on facebook about whether gun control would have helped. Some will call for us, instead or as well, to address the issues of mental illness more aggressively. Some will simply be with their own families, grief sharpening their gratitude for all they have.
Of everything that I heard yesterday, and of everything that was cited by others last night in the three hour online time of mourning that my congregation held on our Livestream channel, the #1 cited words of comfort came not from Scripture or Shakespeare, but from Mr. Rogers. These four words, people lifted up over and over: Look for the helpers. Look for the helpers.
The full context of Fred Rogers quote is this: When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
And so, yesterday, many of us were awed by the thousands of people who surrounded the scene of the tragedy to help. We spoke with reverence of the courageous teachers who never stopped helping through the whole event. We spoke of first responders and politicians and counselors who helped and will help.
Today, as we wrestle with complex emotions and struggle to imagine what we might do ourselves, how we might go on, I suggest that we use Fred Rogers’ words as our compass. As we are about to take an action, as we are choosing what to do or not do, say or not say, we can ask ourselves, “Does this help? Am I a helper? If someone is looking for the helpers, will they see this? Will my action give hope to children who are looking for it?”
We may have different ideas about what exactly will help. But we have some pretty good hunches. Some things we’ll all agree on. Listening to each other as we process the event will help. Giving a child the most precious gift of all: our full attention, floor or lap time, will help. Engaging in activities which strengthen our connection to our neighbors and our local community will help.
And I believe that strategic and focused action to limit the carrying and use of weapons will help. Better options and care for people with mental illness will help. Some of us, me included, will put some of our helping energy in this direction.
However we are called to help, may we be bold about it. May we allow our commitments, our action, to be visible. May we claim our power to act, to care, to change the world. As we move out into our day, our week, and 2013, may we be part of the healing.
No. 428: “Come out of the dark earth,”
From Singing the Living Tradition
No. 190 Light of Ages and of Nations
from Singing the Living Tradition
“God Comes to Us in Our Dreams”
by Mary Ann Moore
There once was a girl who lived with her family in a small village. It was a very small village, so everyone there knew each other. The girl’s family loved her and the people of the village loved her. When she woke up crying one night because she had had a frightening dream, everyone in the village knew about it and everyone cared.
In the morning, the people of the village asked the girl about her scary dream. “In my dream, I was walking down the path to get some wood,” she recalled. “All of a sudden a tiger jumped down from a tree and got in front of me on the path so I couldn’t go by.” The girl almost started to cry again as she remembered how scary it was. “Then the tiger started coming toward me and it was snarling and growling and showing its teeth, and I was sure it wanted to eat me. I turned around and started to run as fast as I could, but the tiger ran right behind me. Just as it was going to catch me, I turned around and started to run as fast as I could, but the tiger ran right behind me. Just as it was going to catch me with one of its huge paws, I woke up!” The girl went to her mother and hid her head under her mother’s arm. She was still very frightened when she thought of the dream, and she was afraid for night to come when she would have to sleep again.
The elders in the village gathered together and talked for a while about the girl’s dream. Then they went back to the girl, who was still with her mother, and said, “If you want to learn not to be afraid in your dreams, we can help you.
The girl thought for a minute and then said, very quietly, “I do want to learn not to be afraid in my dreams.”
One of the elders said to her, “All right then, try this: Tonight if you dream the same dream and the tiger starts to come toward you, don’t run, but stay where you are and say ‘Hello, tiger. “
“But the tiger will eat me,” said the girl. “I’m too scared.”
“Yes, you may be scared,” replied the elders, “but we believe you will be brave enough to do it. And we don’t think the tiger will eat you.”
That night the girl dreamed of the tiger again. But when the tiger started toward her, she remembered and stood bravely, facing the tiger, and said, “Hello, tiger.” When the tiger got right in front of her, it stopped.
And then a wonderful thing happened. As the girl looked at the tiger’s face, she saw it smile, and as she looked some more, the tiger’s face began to change and she saw there the faces of lots of animals. They smiled at her, too. As she looked some more, the animals’ faces changed into faces of people, and the people’s faces smiled at her. The girl felt a wonderful happy feeling coming over her when she realized that she wasn’t afraid anymore. And then, as she looked again, she saw not only the animals and the people, but trees and earth and sky and water and beautiful colors and beautiful darkness all swirling around and mixing together, and all smiling at her. And she felt a great joy.
The next morning the girl couldn’t wait to tell everyone in the village about her dream. Everyone gathered around, and as she told it, everyone sighed and smiled and shared her joy. Once again the elders went off by themselves for a while to talk about the girl’s dream. When they returned one of the elders said to her, “You were blessed, my daughter. Because you were brave, God has come to you in your dream and blessed you.”
Later that day, as the girl was walking down the path to get some wood, she was still thinking about her wonderful dream. She was eager for night to come so that she could dream again.
No. 487: “The bell is full of wind”
from Singing the Living Tradition
from the Boston Globe
[In wheatfields in south central England, mysterious huge flattened circles have appeared for years. Large numbers of people had come to believe they were put there by paranormal forces or by aliens.]
London. Every summer, the mysterious crop circles, large and intricate patterns of flattened wheat, appear in the fields. And every summer they are greeted by expressions of reverence and wisecracks about little green men.
Now two British artists have offered a new and elegantly simple explanation of the phenomenon: They done it.
Doug Bower and David Chorley, both in their 60s, claim to have created the circles all by themselves.
They said they worked at night, using a ball of string (to keep the circles round), a wire sight attached to a baseball cap (to keep the lines straight) and two long sticks with rope handles (to flatten the crops).
The con men said they came forward because they were tired of people making money off their joke.
In fact, two circle “experts,” Patrick Delgado and Cohn Andrews have made a nice income off the mystery in recent years.
Delgado and Andrews wrote two best-selling books about the subject. They also gave speeches and organized conferences. And they ran a $1.8 million dollar research project for Japanese television, aimed at capturing the formation of a crop circle on film.
The latest news on the crop circle front, that the whole thing apparently was a joke, came to Delgado last week in the cruelest possible way.
With a newspaper reporter and a photographer watching, Bower and Chorley made one of their circles in a wheat field. Then the circle was shown to Delgado, who solemnly pronounced it genuine and explained that no mere mortals could have made such a thing.
Then he was informed that two mere mortals had made it. The man was shaken.
“I was taken for a ride like many other people,” Delgado told reporters. But by yesterday, he tried to mount a recovery. When Bower and Chorley made yet another circle, this one for British television, Delgado gave it a firm thumbs down.
“This is not a genuine crop circle. It’s totally different from the real thing,” he said firmly.
Bower and Chorley claimed they started making their circles in 1978. At first, no one noticed. There was no media coverage. But then Delgado saw his first circle. And the mystery took off.
The hoaxsters said they did not get truly committed until they heard Delgado talking on the radio about the involvement of a “superior intelligence.”
“We laughed so much that time we had to stop the car,” Chorley said.
“Making Meaning of a Random Universe”
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka
There was once a man who lived in England and preached Universalism. The year was 1770, his life was working out badly, he landed in debtor’s prison, his wife and baby died, he was called to task for his theology in London. He decided to sail for the New World, much relieved that he would never have to preach again. His name was John Murray.
At the same time, an elderly man, Thomas Potter, sat in his farmhouse in Good Luck, New Jersey, and thought up a Universalist theology on his own. He was so enthused about this new religion of his that he built a little church building there on the farm. He figured, “If God wants my church to succeed, he’ll send me a preacher.”
Meanwhile, John Murray’s ship encounters some peculiar winds, and lo and behold, it goes aground at Good Luck, New Jersey, right there at Thomas Potter’s farm. Murray finds Potter just waiting for him to show up. Murray prays for the winds to shift, and fast, but they don’t. Obviously, God has sent Murray to Potter’s meetinghouse; Potter and Murray decide that Providence was clearly at work, and Murray winds up preaching Universalism for the next 35 years, thus starting the Universalist Church in America.
This story is nonsense. At least that’s my opinion. Sure, John Murray did wash ashore at Good Luck, New Jersey at Thomas Potter’s farm and all that, and what a great coincidence that was, but we really have no reason to believe that God meddles much in nitty-gritty day-to-day affairs down in New Jersey.
But we’re human beings. It would be so nice if the events in our lives made sense. But for us, meaning is not pre-figured by somebody else; we create it. If Potter and Murray want to start a new American religion, good for them. They have given their lives meaning. Just as if in our own lives a car goes out of control on 128 and nearly hits you but doesn’t, you can decide that yes, this is the day to finally tell your sister you really love her in spite of everything, and you will have made meaning of your near miss. Or say your teaching job gets axed, you decide you will find a way to get your MBA, which you had wanted to do in the first place. You have created meaning. Or you win the Mega-Bucks, you get yourself a new car, but you also donate a room to an AIDS hospice, and you have taken a random event and made meaning. We make the ‘promises we keep.’ We choose our own stars.
Our minister in San Francisco, Victor Carpenter, has a daughter, Gracia, age thirteen who operates at the level of a one-year-old. He finds that people frequently try to tell him the “purpose” for this tragedy; they want to explain why it makes sense that Gracia is the way she is; why this had to happen. Victor says, “We all want a world that is orderly and predictable and will conform, at least in the main, to our standards and expectations…. [Well,] Baloney! It is our ability and our willingness to deal with reality on its own terms that makes reality meaningful, us wise, and life endurable. I am continually amazed by the prevalence of [people] who always stand ready to offer “purposes” for Gracia (complete with silver linings). Cathe and I have been told that Gracia was sent to us in order that we might be better prepared to give comfort and solace to other people who were ‘afflicted’ with similar children. Or that she was sent because we were strong enough to learn from her and provide for her without breaking. Or for reasons God chooses not to vouchsafe but, nonetheless, we’ll discover one day. Such attempts to discover some kind of purpose are inappropriate because they always start at the wrong end of the situation. They start with some pre-established ideal of ‘purpose,’ then attempt to fit reality to that purpose rather than start with the reality.” (Stations of the Spirit, p.84)
You probably remember the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, where Kushner says, “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not, ‘Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?’ That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’ (p. 136)
We have to be careful. Because ambiguity is hard for most of us to tolerate, because an unpredictable universe is difficult to live with, because we find inherent meaninglessness unsatisfying, most human beings are prone to spot meaning where there simply is none, and we see patterns in randomness. Where there are stars, we see constellations.
When we see meaning in the meaningless we can be in some danger. For example, a fraudulent stockbroker gets some fancy letterhead and sends out 32,000 letters to potential investors. In 16,000 of these letters he predicts the index will rise, and in the other 16,000 he predicts a decline. No matter whether the index rises or falls, a follow-up letter is sent, but only to the 16,000 people who initially received a correct “prediction.” To 8,000 of them, a rise is predicted for the next week; to the other 8,000, a decline. Whatever happens now, 8,000 people will have received two correct predictions. Again, to these 8,000 people only, letters are sent concerning the index’s performance the following week: 4,000 predicting a rise; 4,000, a decline. Whatever the outcome, 4,000 people have now received three straight correct predictions. This goes on a few more times, until 500 people have received six straight correct “predictions.” These 500 people are now reminded of this and told that in order to continue to receive this valuable information for the seventh week they must each contribute $500. This fraudulent broker knows that a number of us are willing to ascribe meaning and predictive powers to what has in fact been random success. (Paulos, p. 32)
Most of us believe a number of things that aren’t true: We may not necessarily believe that a stockbroker has a corner on the future of the market, or that God sent John Murray to New Jersey, or that crop circles were made by aliens. But a large majority of the general public thinks itself more intelligent, more fair-minded, less prejudiced, and more skilled behind the wheel of an automobile than the average person. This phenomenon is called the “Lake Wobegon effect,” after Garrison Keillor’s fictional community where “the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” (Gilovich, p. 77)
If you think you are above these kinds of pitfalls, if you think you are rational, you might have fun with a couple of books that are out. One is Innumeracy (John Allen Paulos, 1988), and the other is How We Know What Isn’t So, by Thomas Gilovich (1991).
We all know, for example, that men and women who cannot have biological children and subsequently adopt, are more likely to then conceive a baby than couples who can’t conceive and don’t adopt. On-lookers figure that after having adopted, there’s less stress associated with the child-bearing issue, and the woman gets pregnant after all. I can think of a half dozen couples in this church who began filling out adoption papers and at some point went on to have biological children.
The thing is, the phenomenon is simply not true: If you are a couple who cannot conceive, it makes no statistical difference at all whether or not you adopt. Some of you will go on to have a biological child, and some of you won’t. It’s just that we tend to notice the pregnancies more in families who have adopted children. (Gilovich, p. 31) There’s no connection here, no causality, no meaning. Sometimes what we’re observing is simply probability theory at work, our high school math books come alive.
Just now there’s a lot of interest out there in randomness, in chaos theory, and in probability, partly because these mathematical theories demonstrate that our intuition often leads us astray. Part of this renewed interest was caused by a little teaser in Parade Magazine in September of 1990, the magazine that comes with the Sunday paper. You mathematicians know it as the “Monty Hall Problem.”
For 27 years, Monty Hall hosted the TV game show “Let’s Make a Deal.” Contestants are faced with three doors. Behind one, say, is a sports car. Behind the other two are goats. Monty Hall knows what’s behind each door. So you, the contestant, choose a door-let’s say Door Number 1. Before he opens the door you chose, Monty Hall opens a different door and shows you that one of the goats is behind it. Then he says, “Do you want to stick with the door you picked, or do you want to switch to the other closed door?” The question is, should you switch?
Most people’s instincts tell them that it doesn’t make any difference, that either way they have a fifty-fifty chance of winning the car. But they are wrong. If you switch, you will double your chances of winning.
Here we go. When you chose Door Number 1, your chances of winning the car were one in three. Monty Hall reveals a goat behind Door Number 3. He’s not back there moving goats and cars around, so the chances of the car being behind Door Number 1 haven’t changed any-you still have a 1 in 3 chance that the car is behind Door Number 1. But Monty has eliminated Door 3 altogether. Therefore, if Door 1 only gives you a one third chance of winning, Door 2, the only one left must give you a two thirds chance. If you switch to Door 2, you will double your chances of winning. What we want to believe, what we think we know, just isn’t true. (If you want to try it yourself, get three playing cards and try it twenty times or so.)
In American culture today, it is popular to want to nurture and cultivate “the intuitive” part of one’s personality. Intuition is seen to be somehow warmer, or more spiritual, than “cold rationality.” But what I’m working toward this morning is a reminder that fact and scientific truths have their place in our religion. Scientific fact helps us guard against outright fraudulence, to be sure. But perhaps more important, mathematical science can be its own miracle, and when we recognize that miracle, we have available to use a kind of “warm rationality” that also deserves a place inside us.
Let’s look at basketball. The books I mentioned both talk about basketball. You know the feeling: You dribble, you shoot, you sink the ball. You dribble, you shoot again. Swish. Another shot, another two points. You’re on a roll. You’re confident. You’re hot. The players, the coaches, and the fans all know that the player has a “hot hand.” Almost everybody believes that players tend to shoot in streaks. In fact, 91% of the people asked believe that a player has “a better chance of making a shot after having just made the last two or three shots.” (Gilovich, p. 14, Paulos, 46)
Not true. If you actually study the games, if you record the numbers and do the math, you find that players are not any more likely to make a shot after making their last one, two, or three shots than after missing their last one, two, or three shots. There’s no such thing as a hot streak. If you have a hypothetical player who sinks a shot 50% of the time, pure chance would predict runs of 4, 5, or 6 baskets in a row, just as flipping a coin results in predictable long streaks of heads or tails.
Certainly, hot streaks, if they actually existed, would be amazing, exciting, miraculous. But to me, the hard, so-called “cold reality,” is even more amazing, exciting, and miraculous. What I like about it is this: A great deal in life seems random. Will the basketball sink into the net? There’s no telling for any given shot. None. But over time, what seems utterly unpredictable falls into a dependable pattern. That’s what “chaos theory” is all about. (see Chaos, James Gleick, 1988) Who knows whether any given coin flip will turn out to be heads or tails? But over a long enough period, you can count on the fact that it’ll be heads about half the time, and tails about half the time. So do we live in a random universe or is it predictable?
We human beings are funny. We seem to like feeling amazed, even when the chances of the event Occurring weren’t all that unlikely. Take birthdays. There are 366 possible birthdays. So if you have 367 people in a room, you know for sure that at least two people in the group have the same birthday. What if we wanted to be just 50% sure that two people in the room would share a birthday? How many people would have to be in the room? The answer is 23. Half the time that twenty-three people are gathered, two or more of them will share a birthday. To be truthful, if I were with 22 other people and two of them had the same birthday, I would think that was some special coincidence. But the truth is, the miracle is not in coincidence, but rather in the marvelous, dependable, predictability of the universe, that in a small room of people, one would reasonably expect that two people may have the same birthday.
I was once a high school exchange student for a year in Australia. While I was there, I knew another American exchange student. Years later, I ran into this fellow in a youth hostel in Denmark. I’ve always thought this to be an impressive coincidence; “What were the chances of my running into him?” But after reading these books, I’ve come to realize that the chances were much greater than I would have thought, that what’s impressive is that almost everyone can expect to have some kind of “it’s a small world” story. To my way of thinking, the logical response to what seems to be an amazing coincidence is not a belief in Providence, or synchronicity, or fate, or that something was “meant to be,” but simply to recognize the world as a pretty neat place, just on the face of it, just as it ordinarily operates. Myself, I was never very big on math. But I have learned some things this week. I have learned that one can expect a whole constellation of things to happen-to just happen. That one can expect some of us to get cancer, some of us to get a phone call from a kid selling magazines, some of us will win a trip to Disney World, some of us will get a grocery cart with a wheel that doesn’t turn right, some of us will die too young, some of us will inherit money from an unknown relative. I have learned that if the universe is operating in its usual random way, I can depend on all that.
And I have learned that we can decide to make meaning of the cancer, or the trip to Florida, or anything at all. Will I make something of my life, of this week, of the rest of the day? I decide.
And finally, I have learned that living in the midst of all that happens, the good things are abundant. John Murray lands in New Jersey. Or in that championship basketball game, you make a whole string of baskets in a row. Or you do get pregnant after all. Or you run into an old friend in a youth hostel in Denmark. We can expect all that.
May our eyes be open, and our hearts, and may we glory in the wonders that most certainly are ours.
Amen
No. 345 With Joy We Claim the Growing Light
from Singing the Living Tradition
No. 694: “May the Love which overcomes all differences”
from Singing the Living Tradition
by Joy D. Gasta
OK, so what if we accepted that “guns don’t kill people, people do”? Just for the record, I don’t happen to accept that premise, since guns kill people a whole lot more efficiently than, say, knives or fists, but never mind. Let’s just take it as a starting place.
Isn’t it just possible that our culture of guns encourages people to kill people? Mightn’t the fact that it is legal in many states to carry concealed weapons to the grocery store or to church create an expectation that we NEED guns wherever we go? Might it be possible that memes like the picture going around Facebook of a gun holstered under a steering wheel as an anti-carjacking device teach us that the solution to being hurt or scared or offended or threatened is respond with lethal force?
Perhaps people do feel more secure carrying guns about, but it is a security based on the assumption that the solution to fear of violence is to escalate the violence. Maybe the guns themselves aren’t the root of the problem. Maybe the guns are the effect of an assumption that the way to feel safe is to become more dangerous ourselves. Maybe the ever more rampant violence is bred by a culture that says that if you have been offended, if you are hurting, then the solution is to make those who offended you pay.
What if we didn’t have the guns to back us up in that belief? What if we all had to admit that there are situations in which we are powerless or terrified or ill-treated, and there is, ultimately, nothing we can do about it? What if we had to accept that life is dangerous in more ways than we can count, and that pain and, ultimately, death is inevitable? Might we then come to a little more compassion for our fellow human beings who all share this lot in life? Might we learn to address our pain in ways that are more constructive—or at least less damaging to those around us? Might we try to find solutions to some of the systemic problems that drive people toward desperation? Might we, just as a “for instance,” learn to teach our young men that striking back is not an available option, let alone one that our culture admires?
Isn’t it time that churches started taking seriously Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek, and consider what that might mean for our society? God knows it’s time for some leadership to come from somewhere.
You Got People
This Public Service Announcement brought to you by a Unitarian Universalist minister who has just been creatively reminded by the universe of this important truth.
Beloveds, in the crush of this season of holidays, remember that YOU GOT PEOPLE.
Contrary to the images of loneliness and unworthiness being projected onto us during this commercialized season – you are intimately and ultimately connected to all of creation.
Whether you buy or receive holiday gifts, send cards, light menorahs, kinaras, or bonfires – during the longest nights of the year and during the longest days and every time in between, you are not alone.
The myth of our culture is one of worth based on stuff and perfection.
The myth of our culture says you have to earn grace.
The myth of our culture is deeply isolating and numbing.
These are not life affirming myths.
These are not myths to live by.
Sister Joan Chittister declares that “The paradox is that to be human is to be imperfect but it is exactly our imperfection that is our claim to the best of the human condition. We are not a sorry lot. We have one another. We are not expected to be self-sufficient. It is precisely our vulnerability that entitles us to love and guarantees us a hearing from the rest of the human race.”
In this season of need and greed remember:
You are enough.
You belong.
You are not alone.
You got people.
‘Tis the season. The standard greeting these days seems to be, “So, are you ready for Christmas?” Frankly, this is a question that flummoxes me every time. Honestly, I really have not the faintest idea how one is supposed to answer. Am I ready for Christmas? What does that even mean?
Have I decorated the house? No. To be perfectly frank, I haven’t even mopped the floor in some weeks. I have not hung lights. So far, there is no tree. In my house these things are usually accomplished somewhere in the vicinity of Christmas Eve. In my defense I will say that trees are much cheaper then, and my daughter has come to understand Christmas Eve as the traditional time to decorate a tree.
Have I baked cookies for my co-workers? That’s an easy one. I work online. My co-workers, wonderful as they are, live across the country. They don’t expect cookies. But then, neither do my neighbors. OK, neither do my friends and family. Sometimes it’s best to set low expectations.
Have I bought presents for all and sundry? Um…not so much. Some day very soon I will think about what incredibly thoughtful items might be purchased for my nieces and nephew that Amazon can gift wrap and mail for me. Shopping for my 14-year-old daughter is best done by gift card. We agreed that the lovely hand-made mask my wife dearly wanted would be her Christmas present, but it’s already hanging on the wall. The rest of my family doesn’t really exchange presents. Can I just say that anything involving a shopping mall is NOT my idea of a jolly holiday?
I guess by all prevailing standards the clear answer is that no, I am not in the least ready for Christmas.
Unless you mean: Am I ready to wish wes-hael—be whole—to those around me in the traditional wassail greeting of the season?
Unless you mean: Am I ready to embrace the dark of the year, but also keep an eye on the lights that shine in the early night?
Unless you mean: Am I ready to consider what it means to imagine God in the form of a powerless baby?
Unless you mean: Am I ready to follow a star, or whatever might beckon me toward the surprising, the miraculous, the new?
In that case, I’m still not sure, but I suspect—I hope—that the answer is yes.
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