You Might Be Wrong
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I grew up Catholic, even pondered becoming a nun, and studied theology with awesomely radical social justice Jesuits before following the theological thread of my life right into Unitarian Universalist seminary. I started seminary when I was barely old enough to drink.
But the wide-open theological embrace of Unitarian Universalism was and is the home for my spirit. It was where I belonged. It still is. I knew when I found this faith that there was room in it—both theologically and personally—for change and growth. I felt assured that if I followed my path to a different belief structure than the one I carried with me through these doors, there would still be room for me in our tradition. I wouldn’t be shut out. And I wouldn’t have to shut anybody else out for the precise structure of their belief system either.
I have always been at home among this tradition that we share—all except for one thing… one little sneaky issue that I noticed from the earliest days of seminary… one thing that has itched and ached for me all along in my identity as a Unitarian Universalist, and that I still have not adequately resolved within myself.
What has always bothered me about us righteous do-gooders with open minds and warm hearts and helping hands is this: we can be so utterly and damnably sure of ourselves.
As I walked the halls of my Unitarian Universalist seminary I kept encountering people who were just so certain that they were right about stuff. Lots of stuff. About theology, sure. The existence or non-existence of God was a favorite topic of highly-assured debate. But it wasn’t just that.
People also seemed curiously certain about a whole lot of other stuff too, like geopolitics and wine and meditation and how nobody should ever, ever eat at McDonald’s. Sometimes I felt that my fellow Unitarian Universalists moved in the world as if everyone else was just about to break through and come around to their perspective on all of these important things—especially that bit about McDonald’s.
Given time, the good liberal church people seemed to think, everybody else would get on board and we’d all get busy together bringing down those waters of justice and making sure peace rained down on the whole dang world like an ever-flowing stream. Perhaps we would start this endless process through a grand gesture of solidarity with all peoples—like planting a Peace Pole. Surely that would bring on the kingdom of righteousness sooner rather than later, don’t you think?
By the way, we have a Peace Pole here at River Road. I quite like it. It’s right outside of my office and it says the word peace in many different languages. It is perfectly lovely—and has not, as of yet, succeeded in bringing about the much-anticipated advent of world peace.
And that’s the real kicker of it. You see, most of the time—then and now—I didn’t really disagree with many of the perspectives of my self-assured fellow progressives. Much of what my colleagues and co-religionists asserted about the social, political and theological world around us seemed true enough to my limited understanding, and I have never been one for lukewarm opinions myself.
After all, as inveterate Texan Jim Hightower likes to put it, “there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” I do believe we need to stake our claims to truth somewhere, and I don’t begrudge us that.
What was challenging to me among my liberal religious compatriots was not the analysis of any given situation. Rather, it was the utter certitude with which everyone seemed to hold those ideas. We had found our places on one side or the other of every single idea, and we not only avoided the middle of the road, but we also failed to see that there were drivers headed somewhere worthwhile on that other side to begin with.
What bothered me back then, and what bothers me still—even about myself—is how very little room I sometimes perceive in the liberal church for acknowledgement of either one’s own limitations or the tragic dimensions of our days that confound even the very best laid plans of mice and men and ministers.
We live in these tragic dimensions: the edges of our own capacity and the frayed borders of what we know and what we can control. We meet one another in those places every day. Mutually, we arrive through honest conversation at the place in which there are no clear answers. And then we get up from our tear-filled reveries and walk around in the world as if we know what we’re doing, as if we are all OK, even though we know full well that we are merely, and blessedly, stumbling through it all together.
Though I could not have stated it then, I knew that this confident projection of bright ideals imposed on the actual, sometimes deeply uncertain, experience of our lives was something I would eventually have to come to terms with in liberal religion.
To that end, for the last decade or so, I have written every single one of my sermons underneath a Peanuts cartoon that I have pasted on my office wall. Here it is—the tonic for our surety:
Charlie Brown approaches Snoopy, who is perched atop his doghouse clacking away at his latest composition.
“I hear you’re writing a book about theology.” Charlie Brown says, “I hope you have a good title.” “I have a perfect title,” comments Snoopy in his perennial thought bubble: “Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?”
And that—that simple statement, “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” might just be the most powerful thing we Unitarian Universalists have going for us. Even though we are self-assured and sometimes a little bit puffed up. Even though the idealism and sense of confident assurance present in so many liberal religious settings has something to do with privilege and with class and with education and, yes, even with whiteness—even so, underneath it all there is a fundamental humility in our theology that we can return to.
Our tradition teaches that there is deep and abiding truth in many paths—and that it is possible not only that we may individually be wrong on a number of issues great and small, but also that our way is not the right way or the only way for any number of partners and companions we will meet along the journey. We actually believe in diversity of perspectives. We actually believe in theological difference. At our best, we don’t profess lukewarm “toleration” while secretly believing everybody ought to be just like us.
And I’m not saying we shouldn’t be proud of who we are and invite people to join us. We absolutely should—we’ve got a good thing going here.
What I’m saying is that, uniquely among faith traditions, we don’t have to operate under the illusion that we’ve got a corner on the market of truth. In fact, it is in the center of that humility where all of our deepest work and most profound growth is possible. That’s what our covenant calls us to. The way we choose to be together invites us first of all to listen to understand rather than to judge or prove a point, to assume good intentions, to meet each other with the respect of taking one another seriously.
The great philosopher Rousseau once said that “I don’t know is a phrase that becomes us.” It is a starting point for ongoing growth. It is an acknowledgement that wherever it is we are going, we have not arrived there yet. There will always be spaces in between our blessed assurances.
This space, which starts with I don’t know and leads to continued conversation, is the whole basis of congregational life. The open space that is left by all we do not know is the origin point of the next step on the journey, and it is an essential component of even the most rational of questions.
Without leaving some open space for all you do not know, the whole world could change around you and you would remain fundamentally unmoved.
Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?
It is the question that makes community possible.
It is the question that makes spiritual and personal growth possible.
It is the question that makes science possible.
This is a question that haunted the civic life of empires before us, and it is the same question that currently haunts our civic life for those of us in the United States of America, where the performance of blustered self-assurance is placed before us every day as if it is a normative form of discourse.
The stakes could not be higher. We are forgetting how to speak to each other, how to deliberate, how to remember that we might be wrong.
As Leah Hager Cohen writes:
Our civic life is heavily marked—indeed, pocked—by debates in which each side is so certain of its position that any movement is effectively impossible. For that matter, debate—in its original sense of “to consider something, to deliberate”—is impossible. We wind up with so much sound and fury and nothing gained.
We spin and we spin and we exhaust ourselves in our continual drawing of lines in the sand, and we are so busy being reactive that we can’t remember how to empathize across the categories we have placed each other in.
We are each more fragile than all of the certainties we might perform for one another. None of us is in possession of all the wisdom we will need to survive. We are, all of us, so desperately in need of each other’s empathy and compassion that the absence of it could be our undoing.
And the gift of not being so sure—of coming home to a theology of humility which says you do not have to have it all figured out, and which invites you to lean over the edge of all you do not know—is right here, every day.
Sure, I know we good liberal religious people have every reason to project confidence in ourselves and in the human capacity to overcome great obstacles. Our fundamental optimism is one of our gifts to the world. We can build a world where we bind up what is broken. We can plant poles that at least point the way toward distant peace. But we can only do it together with others who fill in the gaps of all we do not know. We can only succeed with a kindness that is deeper than our need to be right, and with an empathy that turns all of our bluster, our certitude, and our self-assurance into a starting-point for all that yet will be.n
Adapted After the Good News: Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism, from Skinner House Books, available in January.
- You Might Be Wrong - December 1, 2018
- The Call to Prayer - November 1, 2016
I grew up catholic and still have tons of family that still go to church… and of course harass me a bit every holiday because I changed directions to my own journey.
Still love them though!
I sighed to see your comment on this, Ingrid, as it seems to miss the point. The defensiveness of certitude betrays a certain fragility. The point of the sermon seemed to be less that “aren’t UU special because they can change directions, unlike those stodgy people over there”. Rather, the same inflexibility and aggression is poisoning everyone regardless of superficial ascription. That definitely includes UU people.