The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

This story tells of two wooden men, lying in the sun, and wondering how it is they came to be. How did they get here, and how were they made? 

 

When we hold the orientation classes for those who want to become members of this Fellowship, we sometimes do a getting-to-know-you exercise that involves pulling a slip of paper from a basket. Each person is asked to complete the sentence they find on that slip of paper.   One begins, “I used to believe....”   To date, no one in our classes has finished that sentence by saying that they used to believe that the earth was flat or that they used to believe that the world was created in a literal six days.   But still, for each of us I suspect, there are many things that we used to believe but that we no longer hold true. 

There’s a book, called “Butter Comes from Butterflies” that captures some childhood beliefs, beliefs that I’m sure seemed reasonable at the time. Beliefs like: 

For years I believed that cheerleaders had had surgery to replace their hands with pom poms. 

When I was young, I believed that the windmills in farmers’ fields were used to keep the cows cool.

I was afraid to be baptized because my grandfather told me that being baptized meant you got to go to heaven- and I thought he meant immediately.

This reminds me of a song in the musical, “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown”...a song in which Lucy tries to transmit her ‘knowing’ to Linus. She begins...
           D’you see that tree?

It is a Fir tree.

It's called a Fir tree because it gives us fur,

For coats,

It also gives us wool in the wintertime.

 

This is an elm tree.

It's very little.

But it will grow up into a giant tree,

An oak.

You can tell how old it is by counting leaves.

 

It goes on from there. Linus soaks it up; meanwhile Charlie Brown tries to interrupt, and finally ends up banging his head against a tree in frustration. Just as I suspect we’ve all abandoned some beliefs, I also suspect that we have all occasionally been the ones pounding our head against a wall, saying “Good Grief! How can you believe that?”

 

As you’ve already heard, today we’re celebrating, a few days early, the 201^st birthday of Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of the Species, and the person credited with ‘discovering’ natural selection, the once-missing key upon which today’s view of evolution is built.   This is the third year that we’ve marked Darwin’s birthday. In part this evolving tradition is because science is one of our sources of wisdom, and this anniversary is slowly becoming part of the Unitarian liturgical year. In part it is because I am a member of the Clergy Letter Writing Project, which endeavours to bring a religious voice to the evolution/creationism debate. This year some 830 congregations in 12 countries are participating in Evolution Sunday. Eighteen of those congregations are in Canada, and 7 of those Canadian congregations are Unitarian. 

 

Two years ago I tried to make the point that religion and science, reason and intuition, are not diametrically opposed, but rather two necessary pieces of the same quilt...a quilt that displays our diverse proficiencies and our diverse ways of interpreting experience. Last year, I was inspired by the documentary, “Kansas Vs. Darwin” which is about a Board of Education hearing, and which exposes the vehemence of the science/religion debate. In that message I struggled with why it is so difficult for us to listen to ‘the other side.’ 

 

Since the time of that first sermon, I’ve begun to wonder if my idea of the quilt is not sufficiently nuanced to be helpful in this postmodern era where new information and far-fetched discoveries are in fact being ‘fetched’ every day. Maybe a quilt is too patchy to be compatible with the new ways we are learning to understand reality. Maybe focusing on, or worrying about why we can’t all just get along ignores the inescapable ways in which we are connected and intertwined. 

 

For today’s sermon, I chose to move away from the science and religion debate and instead to look at the difference between knowing and believing, which perhaps is impossible to separate from the aforementioned, since, as a rule, science claims to know and religion claims to believe. But what draws me to this exploration is an evolving awareness that much of what I want to believe cannot be known, at least not in the scientific sense. Does that put me in the same category with creationists? 

 

To believe something is to hold that it is true, and is more of a psychological state than an intellectual one. Knowledge, one the other hand, is based on something that is both true and justifiable. We know something to be true when we can prove it. We believe something to be true when we feel it, whether it is based in known fact or not. Of course, there is a lot of overlap. We can adamantly believe in something that is a proven fact, and we can claim to know something that from another perspective is seen as subjective and even false.

 

In preparation for today, I was reading (or more accurately listening to) Michael Dowd’s book, Thank God for Evolution. Michael is a United Church of Christ minister and a ‘great story’ evangelist, who travels the continent with his scientist wife telling the story of evolution as sacred text.   He calls himself something which can be read as either cre-athiest or crea-theist. The latter better describes him. 

 

Anyway, he talks about the difference between public revelation and private revelation, saying that public revelation is that which is universally accepted as fact, while private revelation is that wisdom we find within ourselves. He also talks about this as day language and night language...where day language is the stuff of science and fact and logos, and where night language is the stuff of interpretation and meaning, story and mythos. Belief is often expressed in night language. 

 

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme said in a recent audiocast produced by Integral Enlightenment that “modern culture has learned to denigrate the inner ways of knowing. Science, in its extreme form, regards [inner knowledge] as of no value. But now,” he said, “this ancient, mystical inner way of knowing, has found congruence with a scientific way of knowing…an amazing feature of this moment in time.” He believes that we are a critical place in history...where there is a new marriage about to happen between inner knowing and scientific knowing.[1] Does that scare you, or excite you? 

 

Sometimes, particularly in the realm of religion, belief is used synonymously with faith and trust.   I imagine you’ve all heard the quotation from Hebrews that says that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” 

 

It is a blind kind of faith, the faith expressed by some creationists, that can lead us to pound our heads in frustration and to exclaim, “Good Grief! How can you believe that?”   But here’s my point. In our zeal to show the fallacies of such belief, we have sometimes come to see belief itself as misguided. In our disgust for faith in things that cannot be reasonably believed, we have thrown out the whole concept of faith, and in so doing, have split off a crucial piece of our potential. Truly, belief, in and of itself, is not highly held in Unitarian circles. We are more likely to describe ourselves by what we ‘don’t believe’ than what we do, and when asked what Unitarians believe, can be quick to say that we are not required to believe anything. We associate belief with creedalism, and we are dangerously allergic to creeds. This has led to a pretty common misconception about us...that we are the group that doesn’t believe anything, when in fact, that doesn’t really describe us at all. Unitarianism is “a faith in which each of us is free to believe what we are each compelled to believe based upon a free and disciplined search for truth...”[2]   Yes, it is difficult to express what ‘we’ believe, but that should not imply that we, as individuals, do not believe anything. 

 

Certainly, some of us, after engaging in that free and disciplined search for truth, are compelled to believe only what can be proven scientifically. That’s a perfectly acceptable result of one’s search. But just as certainly, others might be compelled to believe things that are not so easy to prove. This too is a perfectly acceptable result of our ongoing search for truth.

 

We are generally skilled at day language, at ‘knowing’. Learning, brainpower, education...all pretty high on our list of values.   The ability to reason is a beautiful and cherished part of our humanity. But let’s not forget about that other way of ancient authority...that ability to know something that cannot ‘yet’ be proven...that stands beyond the lexicon of fact...our just-as-human ability to believe.   Perhaps we are now at a place where we can see that a conviction that ‘head knowledge is superior’ is an antiquated belief, and something we can let go of. Faith and belief and trust...things once rejected as subjective and superstitious...are an equally valid type of knowing. 

 

One pre-requisite to being able to swallow this, I think, is understanding that both belief and knowledge are transient. Revelation is never sealed. Things change, and as long as we’re open to seeing that, our beliefs will also change. Surely our knowledge is subject to change as well. 

 

I return to Michael Dowd’s book. In it, he refers to the way we create meaning to fit the way we understand the world, and makes the point that humanism grew out of a mechanistic view of the world...a view that saw the natural world as a machine, and something that could be controlled with precision.   I found this fascinating. Today, our view of the universe is no longer mechanistic. Today we know about holons and quantum physics and how everything in the universe is part of a nested whole, moving always toward more diversity, more complexity, more awareness, more intimacy. What meaning do we make from this? I’m not sure, but it seems that this might explain why Unitarian Universalism is beginning to encompass more mysticism... because our view of the world has changed and enlarged, and we have begun to see the once inconceivable ways in which all is interconnected. 

 

Things are changing quickly, and as we scurry to keep up, what we know to be true is shifting.   Beliefs, or hypotheses, can often be the search party that leads the way, providing that compelling carrot that fuels our search for truth. Beliefs are formed from wondering, the way our two wooden friends in the children’s story[3] began to form an understanding of where they had come from.   Beliefs might change as we learn more, but beliefs are the critical stuff of meaning-making. 

 

And, perhaps more importantly, beliefs, by their very nature, tend to compel one to act and live with conviction. I quote from a colleague’s sermon:

“What you do not believe has no power. There is no power present in what you do not believe to transform you. Therefore it cannot transform this community, this city, or the world in which you live. There is only power in what you...believe. ”[4]

 

We can put ourselves behind proven facts...whether that is the science of evolution or the reality of gravity. But the power of belief...that personal fiery conviction...is sometimes missing from our beloved tradition.   What bugs me about creationists is not that they believe, but that they believe something that is untrue. Still, I have to admire their conviction. Still, I can admire the power of belief in their lives. I believe, though I cannot not prove, that this faith could do with some of that kind of belief.  

  

I mean, do you believe in what we say in our unison affirmation most Sundays? You know it by rote, you know it in your head. But do you really know it in your heart? Do you believe that the promises we make to one another are sacred and that they are central in creating the beloved community? Do you believe that we are responsible to care for our earth and to serve the family of humanity and to cherish one another as friends? Do you believe these things in such a way that they have the power to transform you?   We are united by the spirit of life, we are profoundly connected at a deep level. This is powerful stuff, worthy of our belief. 

 

I close with two light-hearted reminders of the need for both knowing and believing, for both head and heart. A biography called "Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution", says that toward the end of Darwin’s life he felt that he had atrophied his spirit somewhat by his almost exclusive focus on things scientific. He wrote, "If I had my life to live over again, I would have made it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week." He explained that the loss of poetry was "...a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our brain."[5]

 

And finally, I wonder if you’ve heard this one:

One day a zookeeper noticed that an orang-utan was reading two books: the Bible and Darwin’s Origin of the Species. 
Surprised, he asked the ape, “Why are you reading both those books?”

“Well,” said the orang-utan, “I just wanted to know if I was my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”

 

We are both, my dear apes, we are both. 

So be it. 

 

We gather in the spirit of love.

We welcome all who enter in friendship.

In freedom and in peace

we make our covenant

with this beloved community:

To care for our home, the Earth,

to serve the family of humanity, and

to cherish each other as friends.

The Spirit of life unites us.

 

 

 

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