Authenticity or Bust
From the First Great Awakening of the 1740s that energized the North American colonists and eventually led to the American Revolution to the Transcendentalists to the Beats, Hippies, and What-Have-Yous, a frequent cry of Americans has been “authenticity.” Americans want it to be real; genuine; visceral; heartfelt; roughhewn . . . something like that.
Authenticity, I take it, has something to do with being yourself. Or finding yourself. Or getting out of your head and into your heart. Something like that.
In the US, finding one’s authentic self has often involved hitting the open road and going West. Or heading to the big city. Sometimes it’s the distance from the pew to the alter in a holy roller church. Or to the free air of an ashram after escape from the stale breath of a parish church.
It often involves both geographic space and psychic distance–the distance from of a Midwestern farm to Gay Paree or Hometown, USA to Greenwich Village or North Beach.
Whatever else it might be, it appears that the authentic self is open to new experience and fresh possibility. Open to taking advantage of options. And changing fundamental beliefs.
(It is also a marketing opportunity. The authentic individual often needs a particular look and particular accoutrements.)
Self Like a Sieve
I grew up in a farming community near the Ohio River. My parents rode farm wagons pulled by horses into the nearest town when they were kids. For those children of the farm and the Depression, the speed and power of a 185 horse power V8 Chevrolet engine on a paved road spoke to them of possibility and adventure.
My parents transformed themselves from farmers to factory workers. The sort of folks the Beats, also of their generation, found square. Authenticity, it appears, comes in many packages.
My farmer parents were what philosopher Charles Taylor termed “porous selves.” They lived fully aware of the difficulty and dangers of survival. This reinforced their faith in the Christianity of the lower Ohio River Valley.
My father was born prematurely in a two-room sharecropper’s shack. He survived because August without air conditioning is a great incubator. His family nearly starved during the Depression. Next, he survived house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat in Europe during the Second World War. Then he worked as a boilermaker, sometimes suspended high over the water, working on ships; sometimes he worked several stories up, on smoke stacks.
My parents qualified as “porous selves,” as philosopher Charles Taylor put it–the sort of people for whom life itself is as authentic and real as anybody could want. They weren’t out looking for authenticity . . . Nor did they seek new religious thinking.
As Charles Taylor puts it, “The porous self is vulnerable: to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear.”
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/
This “buffered self,” according to Taylor, often becomes secular, or at least “believes” in received religions only insofar as they choose not to seek authenticity in that direction. “Buffered” people are free enough, in other words, from the fear of looming, immanent privation and death to–if they choose–begin examining cultural assumptions, including one’s religious ideas.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow had a similar idea, which he called a “hierarchy of needs.”
Boomers and the Big Bang of Authenticity
A very large shift in US consciousness occurred post-World War II. What became known as the Beat Generation served as catalyst. But it was more than one particular group of young people. I like Taylor’s distinction between porous and buffered because it helps grasp what happened.
Many Americans–like me–were able to move from a porous understanding to buffered understanding. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac or Allan Ginsberg or Gregory Corso became models for our religious, spiritual, and artistic quests.
Remember what Charles Taylor said: “The buffered self has been taken out of the world . . . of fear.” Unlike my parents, I never faced starvation. Or war. Or educational deprivation. Or the feeling of being less-than because of my social location in US society.
For many like me, the Beats became models for this “buffered” sort of individualized “finding yourself.” They became the models for making choices.
Whose Yer Daddy?
Charles Taylor is trying with his distinction to explain why safety leads to secularity. Why it is that people who are not in constant want and fear choose to drop out of their childhood religions and question the norms they have been taught.
Immediately after the September 11th attacks, the churches and synagogues and mosques of the America were full. My supposition at the time was that the fear of the day would lead to a resurgence of piety of the sort that swept the nation during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
This did not happen.
As a matter of fact, the reverse has been true–attendance has dropped steadily ever since. It appears Americans felt “porous” for a short time but returned to “buffered” robustly. Why?
Perhaps it’s fairly easy to feel safe in the US of the 21st Century, despite constant low-level wars and rising debt and poverty. Perhaps a majority of Americans still feel that the likelihood of growing old is in our favor. Perhaps it’s always 9/11 now. But we have adjusted to that new normal.
After all, that “invisible hand” of Capitalism continues to pump out the calories and the iPhones.
So, we go on, wandering from one religion to another, one answer to another. We go on seeking authenticity. Whatever that means . . .
Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe
Me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Hafiz, 14th century Sufi poet
“It may be that we have lost sight of our mission. Primarily, the church is not for social or political pronouncements, nor for the fashioning and dissemination of erudite philosophical doctrines. It is for the generation of love. The church is the only institution in society so purposed. We strike at the heart of our very purpose for existence when we neglect that major aim.” ~ Albert Ziegler wrote, 20th century Universalist minister
Beloveds, each morning we are asked to take a moral stand on the side of love. May we find the courage and compassion to love like the sun, to generate love in abundance for a world that sorely needs it.
Each time that I facilitate conversations on systemic oppression and solidarity, I am struck anew at how programed we are to defensiveness and denial. Each time, my challenge is to love, simply love. We are not machines, broken and in need of fixing. We are wounded warriors in the struggle of life and we need, each of us, compassionate love to call us to our whole and holy selves.
May we wake each day with the mission to generate love in this world as humbly and faithfully as the sun generates light. May we trust that we can lean on each other for comfort when the struggle is relentless. May we know in the bones of our bones that we are not alone. May this knowledge give us the courage to shine the light of compassion on everyone. No exceptions.
We learned from the Beatles that Eleanor Rigby “keeps her face in a jar by the door.” Clearly the Fab Four thought that was not a good thing to do. But what were they critiquing? Was it where Eleanor kept her face? Or that she had a “face to meet the faces that we meet” at all? Should we wear the same face all the time? Is one of our faces the “true” one?
Whether or not there’s noise when a tree falls in the forest, a more pertinent question for us is whether or not we have a face, a personality, when no one is around to experience it. This is why Eleanor Rigby’s plight haunts us still. We know she’s out there. We don’t want to become her. We fear that she is faceless. We fear that for ourselves.
Most of us wish perhaps that we were like the stone imagined by Emily Dickinson,
How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone,
And doesn’t care about Careers
And Exigencies never fears—
Perhaps we wish to be,
. . . independent as the Sun
In our hearts, however, we know very well that we are creatures dependent upon others of our kind. And that’s scary.
Interactions Are Us
In the Nineteenth Century, US prisons adopted the practice of solitary confinement, depriving a prisoner of visual stimulation and human contact. At the time, the idea was that a prisoner with some “alone time” would reflect on his or her misdeeds and come out a better person. It was quickly noticed, however, that instead of becoming a moral paragon, prisoners in solitary confinement began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness.
After this discovery, the practice was for the most part discontinued until the late-Twentieth Century, when US prisons began to transition from a rehabilitation model to one of retribution. Now we know that being alone hurts . . . a lot. And that’s why prisons do it. (There are in the US today something on the order of 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement at any given time.)
We people don’t like being alone for extended periods. It drives us crazy. Therefore, when we are alone, those of us not under arrest find ways to simulate human interaction—TV, social media, perhaps even writing a letter. We are social creatures. We need human interaction. We need an excuse to put our faces on.
Skip the Sermon
My father died recently, and my mother found herself alone after sixty-five years of companionship. She wonders aloud: should she give up and leave her face in the jar by the door? Is it disloyal of her not to do so? She no longer feels like Emily Dickinson’s independent little stone. She feels the full weight of dependency.
My prescription for my mother (and Eleanor Rigby) is . . . Go to church! Or bowling. Or a book club. Something. Father McKenzie’s message (or disconnected ramblings about a book) may not be much to text home about, but the coffee, wine, or potluck involved might just be the ticket.
A member of my congregation recently brought me one of those graphics called a bubble cloud, generated by a questionnaire concerning what was important to a Christian congregation near my humanist congregation. The most-used word? “Community.” And the congregation I serve would would have the same big bubble, “community.” In their case “Christ” and in our case “reason” would be tiny little bubbles compared with the true reason we gather as congregations, community.
Human interaction reminds us to pull our faces out of that jar.
Bowling with Father McKenzie
As the Beatles knew, denizens of post-industrial countries may exist in utter isolation. We often shop in anonymous supermarkets rather than bustling markets. We buy clothing off a hanger, not from the source of the craft. As Robert D. Putnam pointed out, many of us bowl alone.
I don’t think any of us has an “authentic” or “true” face. We adjust the faces we pull from the jar according to the circumstances of our interactions. We have a “going to a funeral” face. We have a “going to the theatre” face, and so on. These are constructed in the bustle of human relationships. Without the bustle, we don’t bother. And that’s not good for us.
Perhaps Eleanor—and all the lonely people—should share a selfie. Not a bad first step in getting that face out of the jar by the door and spiffed up a bit. Then? Go to church. Or temple or mosque or . . . a bowling team. Perhaps even chat with Father McKenzie. Who knows what he knows when he’s not pontificating . . .
This morning I tended to my garden and that of an elder neighbor. Walking back into my home for a second cup of coffee, I realized that I felt more like a grounded, alive human being than I have in a while. In the past few weeks, the phone has rung repeatedly, bearing news of grief and sorrow or rage at yet another systemic injustice personally harming a beloved. So many people and so many places suffering all at once… And so I have remembered to return to the garden, to keep faith with the source of life, as I continue to live and minister in this beautiful, wounded world.
I hold this sustaing wisdom from Rebecca Parker (Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now) in my heart and I share it with you today.
To keep faith with the source of life, knowing that we are not our own and that Earth made us; to keep faith with the community of resistance, never forgetting that life can be saved from that which threatens it by even small bands of people choosing to put into practice an alternative way of life; and to seek and even deeper awareness of that which springs up inwardly in us. Even when are our hearts are broken by our own failure or the failure of others, even when we have done all we can and life is still broken, there is a universal love that has never broken faith with us and never will.
You are not alone, beloved. Keep the faith. And keep in touch…
In “Tombstone Blues,” a song released in 1965, Bob Dylan sang, “The National Bank at a profit sells roadmaps for the soul / To the old folks home and the college.” In the context of the song, Bob clearly doesn’t think this is a good thing. Commodifying the meaning of life?
Yes, well . . .
Suppose for a moment that all the religious and philosophical speculation through time, and all the art and architecture to boot, have been about the same thing as the hunting and the fishing, the gathering and farming. Suppose that all human actions—from the sacred to the profane—have been and are still . . . ways to survive. Ways for us to adapt to our environment and, perhaps, thrive.
Sounds Reasonable, Doesn’t It?
Does such a supposition denigrate—or cheapen—all the blood and tears shed in service to the gods? Or in service to art? I don’t think so.
Is a symphony less because it’s an adaptive trait rather than a window onto absolute truth? What if the search for truth and meaning is itself an adaptive trait—a way of surviving.
Put this way, it’s hard not to say, “well, duh!” Yet we often don’t go quite far enough. Yes, human activities of all sorts are attempts at survival. But if our search for truth and meaning in all its manifestations, from fine art to fine dining to religion, is an adaptive trait, doesn’t it follow that the search for truth and meaning is an entirely human construct? It’s filling a need but has no larger purpose.
It’s Easy If You Try
Like most people, I searched for a “really true truth” for a long time. Hey, I’m a Baby Boomer, it’s what we did. It was a brilliant marketing ploy. Forget the gurus; the tax dollars you lose giving churches tax-exempt status is seventy-one billion dollars a year.
That’s a lot of moolah for Moloch. (And full disclosure: as a minister, I ride that particular gravy train.)
The search for truth and meaning puts a lot of food on the table and a lot of money into retirement accounts for various sorts of people. No, this isn’t about tax exemptions. It’s about the price we are willing to pay purveyors of truth and meaning. After all, yoga alone is a twenty-seven billion dollar a year industry.
The Fine Print
We pay a lot for truth and meaning, in bookstores, museums, churches, and storefront meditation centers. To repeat, I think that’s great. It’s an adaptive trait. Yet, it’s good remember that there is no one truth to find.
This particular survival trait only becomes problematic when we fall into the trap of thinking there’s a truth out there to find. It’s problematic when we begin paying a high price for one particular roadmap for the soul, or when those around us begin paying too high a price.
Until someone gets hurt.
Yes, it’s the search itself that is the answer. Not the answers. Or the roadmaps.
Today we bless Tela La’Raine Love as she prepares for her gender reassignment surgery. Every day, Tela blesses this world with her courage, her determination, and her clear vision of a world where transwomen of color live safe, fulfilling, and long lives. Only in her 30’s, Tela serves as an elder, a mother, and a mentor to many young transwomen of color, struggling to survive in a culture that tells them to disappear or die.
Although we hope that “it gets better,” 2012 saw the 4th highest murder rate of LGBTQ and HIV-affected people (LGBTQH) in recorded history, according to the Hate Violence Report released annually by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP-http://www.avp.org/about-avp/coalitions-a-collaborations/82-national-coalition-of-anti-violence-programs ).
People of color, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of homicide. Black and African-American people “were particularly overrepresented in the homicide rates: over half of reported hate murders had Black or African-American victims, even though Black and African American people made up only 15% of total survivors and victims of hate crimes overall.” In 2012, LGBTQH people of color represented 53% of total reported survivors and victims of all hate crimes, but 73.1% of homicide victims. Living at the intersections of racial, gender, economic, and sexual oppression, trans-women of color are told to disappear or die.
In the midst of a dominant cultural narrative of oppression and repression, Tela Love is living into her journey towards wholeness with a spirit fully grounded in her inherent worth and dignity. She is the co-founder of New Legacy Ministries (http://www.newlegacystartstoday.com/), a grassroots organization striving to raise the voices of marginalized communities, especially transgender women of color, and create a spiritually welcoming and sustaining community.
Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience, will be a documentary of her experience as a openly HIV Positive trans-women of color in the south undergoing gender reassignment surgery June 18,2014. In sharing this personal window into her life, she understands that she is taking a risk. Traditionally trans-women have disappeared into the constructs of a patriarchal society after their surgery, rather than remain targets for hate and fear.
Tela realizes that she is allowing herself to be a target for greater judgment and persecution than that of which she already endures. However, inspired by the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “silence is betrayal,” she has determined that she can be silent no more. She cannot be silent when waking from her nightmares of another young transgender woman being murdered or dying because she’s too ashamed to follow through with her HIV treatment after being diagnosed out of fear of being further alienated. Tela cannot be silent while there are little or no job opportunities for trans-women, while there are little or no housing opportunities (unless HIV infected), while black trans-women walk the streets in order to survive.
And neither, beloveds, can we. Our silence, too, is betrayal. Let us speak into the space of fear and hatred, ignorance and oppression. Let us bless Tela and every one of her sisters with the welcoming arms of beloved community. (https://www.facebook.com/Blacktranswomenarepowerful)
Please support the creation, production, and distribution of the documentary Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience. Together, let’s re-write the narrative of oppression into thriving, joyful beloved community.
Donations to support the creation of this documentary can be made via PayPal or sent to the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal marked “Designated Donation: New Legacy Ministries” 2903 Jefferson Ave, 2nd FL, New Orleans, LA 70115.)
Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey once said, “Growth itself is the only moral end.” To philosophers a word like “only” means a lot more than it does to most of us. And here, in the Twenty-First Century, looking back on the wreckage and horror of the Twentieth, it’s easy to dismiss such a sentiment with a “meh” and move on to the next soundbite. And “self-help”? Fahgettaboudit!
After all, we’ve had it up to our ears with “growth,” haven’t we? Now we know something Dewey did not: that when “personal” met “growth,” sparks flew and wedding bells rang, and out of that union many fortunes and many suckers have been born. It’s easy at this point to cynically dismiss the whole enchilada.
“Development” is an even more problematic word. “Personal development.” Ugh. That’s the personal. And in the communal sphere, some of us live in the “developed world” where we have “developers” producing something called . . . “developments.” These developments have produced a great deal of sterile, ugly space.
Somewhere, sometime, in the last century many came to believe that the “onward and upward” march of humanity wasn’t such a sound formula for growth. Somewhere back there “onward” and “upward” and “developed” too often began it mean trodding on the heads of the poor, over the bodies of animals and plants, across the last bits of pristine earth.
(The spell check tries to prevent me from typing “trodding,” offering instead “trod” and “trodden.” Is there a grammatical conspiracy against admitting that we have trodden and we are trodding still?)
Somewhere in there humanists such as Dewey, who thought that it was all up to humanity itself, not a supernatural being, to do the growing and developing began to be dismissed as naive. Somewhere in there the neo-orthodox, such as theologian Karl Barth, began to say—can’t you see that Satan, or at the least humanity’s flawed nature, is in charge and must be handled with a chain?
When Dewey said “growth itself is the only moral end,” he meant we, us—he meant growing, developing, cultivating the human psyche and human interactions, not the wetlands or the aquifers. He meant our individual and communal selves. Dewey meant development and growth in such things as ethics and art and democracy, not in the grossness of the national product. Or the boundaries of empire.
In this, Dewey was joining a long line of non-Christian Western philosophers who taught that eudaimonia, “human flourishing,” arises through an “examined life” lived in pursuit of virtue. It isn’t about human perfection, but rather about being a bit better than we were born, a bit better than other primates such as we.
The human right to this pursuit may have been what Thomas Jefferson was talking about when he wrote that human beings have three “unalienable rights,” one of which is the “pursuit of happiness.”
That this curious and intriguing phrase gets discussed far less in the United States than what the Second Amendment means, and what it allows, perhaps tells us more than we want to know about the development of the US since that document declared independence. I suspect that Jefferson would have agreed with Dewey that democracy itself “begins in conversation.” That’s the communal aspect of growth.
As another fan of the pursuit of virtue, Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, put it, “I believe the process of understanding the problems is itself a good.” This is not about talk; it is about conversation—and you can’t converse alone. Conversation is democracy. It is communal. And it is growth, when we actually converse rather than pontificate—an ability based in individual growth.
If the pursuit of happiness were defined as the ability to pursue questions of virtue, isn’t it interesting to consider what it would mean for each US citizen to have the right to pursue happiness?
The pursuit of happiness . . . Should I head for the self-help section of my local bookstore to begin my pursuit? Uh, no. The pursuit of happiness—the pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of truth and meaning and democracy—exists as conversation for a good reason—it’s communal as well as personal. Perhaps that’s the biggest reason Jefferson’s line gets ignored—we have defined happiness as an individual pursuit in the United States, land of individualists and of self-help. That solipsism has had its logical outcome in mass murder and misery.
The personal growth Dewey advocated was a personal growth within the larger communal whole. The pursuit of virtue, after all, is about how we treat others far more than it is about how we treat ourselves. Dewey had in mind the ideal of the Socratic dialogue, which isn’t easy to live up to. It can’t be found on TV. Or among pundits.
Growth itself is the only moral end because it is about striving to be a better human being for the good of the whole, for human flourishing. The gods can’t be much help with that. It is a profoundly human-ist thing to do.
For her 75th birthday, my Granny talked my dad, her 4th born son, into driving her and my Great Aunt Dot out the see the Grand Canyon “before I die.”
Once they had made the long journey from North Georgia to the Grand Canyon, Granny turned to my dad and said “you know what else I want to see before I die? The giant redwood trees! We’ve come this far. We might as well go.” What else could my dad do but get everyone back into the car and go see those amazing trees. What’s another 2000 miles roundtrip with the trickster Granny in your car and in your heart?
Granny was a born again Christian who would speak of her salvation from cigarettes as a miracle worked in her life by Jesus Christ. When she died in 2007, two ministers preached her funeral and they began the service by saying “Granny wanted us to preach a full service today, complete with alter call, because she knew this was the last time she could make y’all all come to church.” I sat in that pew laughing through my tears of grief…and prayed that one day, I would have her courage, her ability to live faithfully into the mystery, even unto death.
My granny taught me to trust the mystery of the world, to delight in the many colorful stories that sustain our days, to ask for what I need to survive, to figure out how to thrive. She taught me to believe that I am loved and can love, no matter what. To believe that you are loved and can love, no matter what.
No matter what.
How Granny learned to live so bravely and unapologetically may always be a mystery to me. But I am ever so grateful for the lessons of her life, of her faithfulness, of her creativity.
Whenever we start to flag, to judge, to doubt, to tire, may we remember and be encouraged by the trickster energy of Granny.
We’ve come this far. We might as well go see the giant redwoods – host General Assembly in New Orleans in 2017, grow our faith in the Deep South, bend the arc of the universe toward justice – whatever faithful longing we carry in our hearts.
Let’s be brave, beloveds, and live into the mystery together.
Buddhism had been known in the United States since the mid-Nineteenth Century, but really came into its own with the return of Pacific War vets who had spent some time in Japan. (The creation of Red China insured that Chinese Buddhism would not be generally available to the Western World for some time.) One of the aspects of Buddhism that attracted post-War interest is that it is based more in psychology than in theology. Buddhism—at least in the Zen form that came back with those vets—is about practice, not theory. The practice is learning to watch one’s own thoughts and the realization that these thoughts can be changed.
Zen Buddhism might have remained just another exotic thing that came back from the war, something like samurai swords, if not for what was already beginning to happen in Western thought—the suspicion that religion and psychology are more or less the same thing, working the same ground. Monotheist religions can give you salvation; psychology can give you . . . self-actualization. And this idea was coming from different directions at the same time—not only humanists were making the argument. Reformed Rabbis agreed. As did many mainline priests and preachers. And then there was the capitalist angle taken by Norman Vincent Peale with his bestselling ideas about positive thinking.
Take for example the work of the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a survivor of not one but four of the Nazi death camps. Frankl said, “We give suffering a meaning by our response to it.” Yep: that’s Buddhism. Frankl condemned what in the death camps had been called “give-up-itis.” In the death camps, Frankl realized that those who had the best chance of survival were those who found meaning in the suffering and kept on going. Furthermore, Frankl didn’t push a particular path to meaning. The meaning is personal. Again, a bit like the difference between duty and responsibility—a personal choice made without being pointed in a particular direction by outside authority.
Buddhism had long drawn a distinction between suffering and pain. Pain is what happens to you—it can’t be avoided. Wounds happen. But suffering is what you think about the pain. “This is happening to me because . . .” “This always happens to me because . . .” “You are doing this to me because . . .” All of that is negative meaning making. Those are ways of catching a bad case of give-up-itis.
“Salvation” is a hackneyed word. Better to ask, “What will save me?” “What is the source of my suffering and what can give it meaning?”
It’s a truism in looking at prospective seminary students to wonder if they are recent converts to Twelve Step programs. Or newly divorced. Or have recently encountered some other trauma. Are these people signing on to be Karl Jung’s “Wounded Healers.” I’m certainly not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s a natural human thing: Here is my wound; here is my suffering; where is the meaning? Then: How can I help others who have been through what I’ve been through and worse?
And here’s the biggest paradox of it all: just as meaning and responsibility are choices arrived at from individual lives, they are about sharing. Sharing with other human beings.
Isn’t it amazing that—no matter what may happen to us—we can be confident that there are people who will take care of us? This is confidence in the human spirit. It is a religion (if you will) not of victimhood and suffering but of creativity and compassion.
I have spent the past few days saturated in extraordinary music, delicious food, dear friends – and almost completely off of the grid, just checking in from time to time with the office and the work phone to keep disasters to a minimum.
Today I return to the world of administration and e-mail, deadlines and accountability, pastoral care and organizing.
Today I pray to the universe “give me the heart.” Give me the heart to love, the heart of compassion and commitment. Give me the heart of return, the heart of restoration.
And I will give. I will give thanks for the gift of life, for the gift of love and compassion bestowed with grace. In my gratitude, I will serve with heart.
I will live from a place of gratitude.
I will say thank you.
Thank you, universe.
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Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.