The Realm of Possibility
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In Lewis Carrol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice is talking with the White Queen, who lives in a backwards world where effects happen before their cause. This is massively confusing to Alice, who begins to cry. The queen asks how old Alice is and she responds that she is seven and a half. The queen shares that she is 101 years old, plus five months and one day. (But who’s counting?).
Alice can’t believe the Queen’s age and they have an exchange about what is possible and what is impossible:
Alice laugh[s]. “There’s no use trying,” she [says] “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” [says] 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.”
Six impossible things before breakfast.
This is the title businesswoman Anne Halsall chose for her 2017 article on entrepreneurship and uncertainty that appeared on medium.com. She writes:
Entrepreneurs have a unique relationship with reality. Entrepreneurship is defined by risk. Founders are risk-takers who put their financial security, their careers, and their reputations on the line in pursuit of something as insubstantial as an idea.
She tells the story of being approached by a man looking to recruit her as a web developer for his start-up in 2008. He had this crazy idea that he could create a website where people would offer rooms in their homes for rent for a night or a week or a month.
Halsall thought he was nuts: “Who would pay to stay on someone else’s couch? Who wants to give strangers access to their home?” she thought. She sent back a note saying thank you very much, but she was happy at her current job.
Ten years later, Airbnb was valued at $31 billion. Halsall writes:
Most entrepreneurship, and certainly the case of Airbnb, involves true uncertainty. While many successful businesspeople in organizations of all sizes are good risk-bearers, what is unique to entrepreneurs is their ability to be uncertainty-bearers…. In short, they believe impossible things—that other people don’t.
When was the last time you believed something impossible? Was it before breakfast? Or long ago? Life has a way of beating out of us the ability to believe or even imagine the impossible. At seven and a half, Alice is already out of practice. But what would it look like to regain this skill?
Unitarian Universalists have long prided ourselves as a people who believe in scientific fact. Our tradition has been significantly influenced by the Humanist Movement, which was instituted in the 1930s and 40s by men one might call “religious entrepreneurs.” They imagined a new way of being religious that offered much to our understanding of who we are as Unitarian Universalists.
The Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, includes an introduction and fifteen statements, outlining the Humanist point of view. I am especially interested in the eleventh statement and its impact on Unitarian Universalist thought and culture.
The eleventh statement of the Humanist Manifesto reads:
Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.
Ah ha. I think we may have stumbled upon something here. Something that led to our being out of practice imagining the impossible. Our spiritual forbearers—the religious entrepreneurs of the mid-twentieth century—actively discouraged it.
To imagine the impossible would have been to be “sentimental” and have “unreal hopes.”
Their view was presented as counter cultural to what they saw as the dangers of belief in the supernatural, in religious stories that denied reality. Instead, people should, they believed, “learn to face the crises of life” in terms of their “knowledge of their naturalness and probability,” and so be “reasonable and manly.”
While I agree that religion must adapt and change to meet the needs of the age, I think that perhaps in trying to meet the needs of their age, our forbearers swung the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that we forgot that science itself requires imagination and thinking beyond what we already know.
Imagination moves us from the realm of the known to the realm of the possible. Or the not-yet-possible. Or the seemingly impossible which could yet become real.
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Megan returned to Connecticut in 2011 where she completed her internship at The Universalist Church in West Hartford. She was ordained by that congregation in collaboration with her home congregation, First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, in 2012. Megan served the The Universalist Church as Associate Minister from 2012-2013 and then the Shoreline Unitarian Universalist Society in Madison, CT as consulting minister shortly after the birth of her daughter. She returns each summer to Spring Green, Wisconsin, home of her Unitarian ancestors where she preaches in the historic Unity Chapel. Megan was called to USNH in 2015 and lives in New Haven with her husband, Anthony Clark, her two-year old daughter, Arden and two cats.
- The Realm of Possibility - November 1, 2020
- Thus Do We Covenant… - March 1, 2017
- Be Still - November 3, 2014
Thank you very much. This bolsters my efforts to continue drafting my 3rd book, Talking about Touch Topics, and believe there will come a time (when COVID19, hurricanes, etc. aren’t distracting potential readers so much) that the market will be ready for it.
Oops, that should have been “Touchy” Topics.