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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Truth or Consequences
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
September 16, 2007
As we heard in this morning’s reading, Irwin Kula’s mother taught her son about the nature of truth: When you’ve got an answer, it’s time to find better questions, she constantly told him and his brothers. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for him as a child, when developmentally he was only capable of looking for clear distinctions between right and wrong, day and night, white and black, to have been turned back time and again to look for complexity, a more informed perspective.
Interestingly, Kula’s mother was not teaching her children that there was no distinction between right and wrong. But she did raise them in an ancient process of questioning, inquiry and discovery that traces back in Jewish tradition to the great rabbinic schools of the third century. And in Western culture this spirit of questioning and inquiry can be traced back to Socrates and Plato.
Both of these great traditions value inquiry into truth, and both are dynamic, rigorous processes. we must be careful not to simply say that since everything is partially true, nothing really matters, as if there aren’t standards of right and wrong, Kula says. Yes, in every view there is a partial truth. But not every view is equally true. There are standards of right or wrong, gradations of truth.
Unitarian Universalists tend to be people who understand this questioning, questing process in our bones. We’re the kids who grew up rewarded with praise for asking good questions. Or if we didn’t grow up UU, we were sometimes asked to leave our former religious traditions’ Sunday Schools because we questioned the teacher if the teaching didn’t square with our lived experience.
Throughout history, we’ve tended to ask questions and make religious choices based on our experience of life and truth, and this has often put us at odds with the powers of the day. Throughout history we’ve often been labeled hereticwhich comes from the Greek word that simply means to choose. Our tradition is one of choosing integrity, the inner wholeness that comes from being in-formed by our experience, reason and conversation with others. We have been wiling to risk the consequences of truth telling because we understand that there are greater consequences if we ignore the still small voice of truth inside us.
Like other religious liberals, Unitarian Universalists value the search for truth. We have insisted on our human capacity and human right to name and make meaning out of our own individual experience, especially when it comes to knowing and naming Ultimate Reality, God, the Universe, Life, Truth, Love, for ourselves, on our own terms. And while religion and science are two different realms, our quest for religious truth has spilled over into other realms and has made us very sympathetic to the quest for scientific truth as well.
And yet, ironically, in any area or discipline, just as Irwin Kula’s mother taught him and his brothers, the truth isn’t something that one person alone can possess once and forever. It’s not a fixed commodity; there isn’t a limited amount of truth in the world. Kula retells a Jewish story to illustrate this point. He says, In this story, the God character wakes up on the sixth day of creation with what may be the most creative idea ever: humankind. Full of wonder and excitement, God can hardly wait to get to work. As so many of us do before we undertake a momentous task or face a risky venture, God first asks for the advice of consultants, in this case, the angels. But the angels are ambivalent, undecided, caught between Truth and Love. Truth argues against the idea of humanity, fearing that human beings will lie and kill in their pursuit of Truth. But Love understands that humanity will engage in great acts of altruism and self-sacrifice, and that God’s desire is born out of that most powerful of yearnings: the yearning to love.
In the end God decides to go with Love, and in that moment has a realization: Truth on earth cannot be what it is in heaven. In heaven there is Truth; on earth there are truths. Absolute truth cannot exist for any human being. And so Truth is cast out of heaven and down to earth. There Truth is shattered into pieces, fragments of it everywhere, so many it’s impossible to count. And Adam, the very first human being, is created out of the earth, out of those shards of Truth. From now on there will be only partial, multiple, and contradictory truths. And human beings will search forever for truths within themselves and throughout the entire world. Life will be an ongoing act of creating, revealing, and discovering. Each person, each culture, each religion has part of the truth; none has it all. (Yearnings, p.5-6).
Unitarian Universalists have always made choices that acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We might tell different stories, but we too recognize and value that each person’s experience endows them with the human right and responsibility of naming truth.
And yet, that’s only the beginning of the process, because there is a world of difference between a living, growing, changing, evolving truth and a dead certainty. Like other people, if religious liberals rest assured, even in what today is innovation and radical realization, if we stop asking questions and questioning our own assumptions, eventually we put ourselves at risk of becoming tomorrow’s fundamentalists.
Which is very difficult for some liberals and progressives to get their minds around. But it’s true. Last week we considered how human life has many of the properties of water. As water is always rising and falling and moving, we human beings move and grow and change throughout our lifetimes. This is true for our ideas and thoughts and also for our feelings.
There’s an activity in one of the church school curricula called Used to Thinks where the children talk about how they used to think one thing about the world, but now they think differently. I used to think that cats were the mothers and dogs were the fathers in an animal family; now I know that’s not true. But when I think about what I used to think during my adult years it’s less charming, more poignantI used to think that if we just talked about a problem enough we could solve it. I don’t think so anymore.I’ve learned that listening is much more important than talking. Even more, I’ve learned that sometimes living with terrible tension is sometimes the only way you’re ever able to squeeze through a rabbit hole and pop into a whole new world, a reality totally different than any you’d ever imagined.
Like squeezing through a rabbit hole, or a birth canal, this process of wrestling with evolving truth often doesn’t feel good. It often feels like death and loss. Because in part it is. What is true at one time in our life doesn’t stay true forever. People and relationships go through tremendous changes. Someone who never wanted children all of a sudden realizes that they didn’t want to bring children into the kind of family in which they were brought up. Years after swearing they’d never have children, they realize that they have a deep longing to create a different kind of family than the one in which they were raised. If they claim this new truth, in a few years they’re knee deep in toddlers. But first they have had to be brave enough to look behind door number one, and door number two, and number three, and in a deep and significant way face the painful things they shoved in there earlier in their lifetime. But before they get to the happy new life full of satisfaction and joy and poopy diapers, there have been countless sleepless nights and many boxes of tissues in support of the process of wrestling with what was true then, what is true now.
This wresting with the great truths seems to me to be like those flippers in an old pinball machine. When we really engage the big questions in our lives in a real and significant way, and when we finally have an ah-ha about something that’s real, it sends us flying toward the bumpers. We don’t wrack up big points in life as we can in pinball, but sometimes the lights do seem to flash, and whistles and bells do seem to set off when we make one of those great ah-ha kind of breakthroughs or connections in our hearts and minds. When it’s happened in my life, it hasn’t been a head only or heart only kind of processbut has involved the fullness of my being. And when I have really wrestled with big questions, the universe has opened a road at my feet, a direct route to what wanted to happen next. Wrestling with the truth is risky because if we do it seriously, it means change, sometimes big change that takes us to places we’d onlyor neverdreamed of.
There is a difference, I think, between facts and the kind of truth we wrestle to discover at the center of our existence. The physicist Nils Bohr said that the opposite of a fact is a lie, but the opposite of a great truth can well be another great truth.
The Talmud records the great ancient legal and theological debates between two scholars, Hillel and Shammai. Each had their own academy filled with the brightest students; the academies often debated the great issues and questions of the day: How do we create economic justice? What do couples do when love fails? What does it mean to be vulnerable in this world? How do we make time sacred? (Yearnings, pp. 6-7) Often they came forth with opposing answers. Then Hillel and Shammai would take up the debate and their debates would be judged by learned councils.
Most of the time the decisions went to Hillel. The Talmud says that what the two great teachers taught was equally valid, each a living interpretation of the word of God. But the decisions most often went to Hillel because of his method, which was to study and wrestle with Shammai’s opinions. Hillel’s method was to respect and value what he found to be true in his opponent’s thinking, and then use it to broaden his own. He would firmly root his own arguments in his own thought and reasoning, yet informed by his opponent’s perspective, he would come up with the fullest, most inclusive, insightful answer.
There is a great difference between an absolute fact, and what I would call evolving truth. The more we’re willing to risk the challenge to our own certainty, the more we invite the possibility of transformation and healing into our lives. There is an important difference between an evolving truth and a dead certainty. In Hebrew, the word for truth is emet. If you remove the first letter, e, you are left with met the word for death. We slice and dissect truth at our peril of death.
Yet when we engage truth in the living process of wrestling with truth, we might encounter a living reality, a fragment of Truth, a little piece of the sacred at the center of our being. When we wrestle with the truth, like Jacob in the Hebrew bible, we wrestle with God, an ultimate, living reality. And sometimes we are so changed by this process that we are given a new name, a whole new identity. We don’t so much toss off or reject the old, as add to it, take on something new, embroidered, painted, colored with vibrant new symbols and images, textures and meanings.
Here at the beginning of this brand new program year in this Unitarian Universalist congregation, let us be open to new possibilities, new truths as they emerge to color our lives, and the life of our community. May the truth we find illumine our lives with hope, joy and trust. In this way may we find inner peace. May the light of our happiness and peace encourage our friends in this community and in the world, that they may increase their own inner goodness, and thereby the happiness and peace in the world. Amen.
Irwin Kula was quoted from Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, Hyperion, NY, 2006.
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