When I told my friend Phyllis about this sermon topic, she shared a favorite story from a book called The Three Pound Universe. It is about a man who had his brain wired with electrodes. Every time the electrodes stimulated his brain cells, the man would turn his head slowly from side to side. When asked if he knew why he was turning his head he explained, calmly and without a hint of frustration, "I'm looking for my slippers."
Phyllis, who has long been interested in left brain/right brain studies, reports she has pretty much concluded our brains are not wired for knowing the truth, any more than a bunch of field mice in the basement of a skyscraper can know what's going on, on the 50th floor above their heads.
She does believe we humans are well wired for trying to figure it all out, despite our limited vision, and believing we understand -- like mice in the basement claiming knowledge of 50th floor activities. Stuff happens and our "logical" left cortex poses plausible stories to explain it all. Through the left hemisphere of the cortex human beings have been hell bent for explaining and knowing truth -- every floor in the building -- as long as we've been capable of it.
We've accomplished so much in the use of our brain's left cortex, including our collections of truth, our creeds, our beliefs. Truth, which we count on to be able to take action in any given moment, directs our lives.
My own exploration helped me begin to think about knowing in new ways. My intuition mattered and it was real. New understandings of the brain that taught my friend Phyllis how to understand the left brain also helped understand right brain operations - feelings, affect, intuition - emotional intelligence. The left brain can't do it alone. We need our right brain. AND our right brain has its own ways of becoming hell bent for knowing truth with a capital T; its own price to pay in our loss of perspective -- when viewed as the only way to know.
How do we Unitarian Universalists go about recognizing truth so we're doing more than shaking our heads back and forth and claiming it is "living a just life," "loving my neighbor" or "God is...." God is not...."? Knowing truth is invaluable, necessary --inevitable; whichever side of the brain we know it on, or from.
Our Principles and Purposes and the Sources we acknowledge are our guidelines, our core references, but because we do not claim them to be truth with a capital "T," they do not have absolute jurisdiction over our judgments and our behavior. They are not eternal. Otherwise, they would be a creed to which we would necessarily ascribe.
Our Principles and Purposes, only agreed upon in the mid 1980s, change as we recognize more, using both our left and our right brains. For instance, we only recently added a sixth source; you'll note it is not present in the "new" hymnal.
Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
That this is a powerful and working religious source is not a new concept but our tradition has grown in recognizing it as a particular source.
AND THEN how do we UUs go about recognizing when we are living "true to our values" - to truth? The truth that exists - that is, the truth we live, not the truth we merely claim, as Emerson came so close to claiming in our reading today. It is only in "being true" that truth exists in any way that really matters. "I'm looking for my slippers."
As a non-creedal religious tradition we model and live a looping path between "knowing truth" and "being true." We continuously return to our truths to test their deep usefulness and the integrity of our experience -- the being true part. Our experiences test the truths we claim. It is our path, loopy, not a straight line.
Theologically, I think this loopy testing of experience (or being true) against truth, and in reverse, is how Unitarian Universalism works to avoid idolatry. Idolatry is not a term we often use in our congregations. It has such a bad reputation - generally deserved. But I think the term can be helpful, when used judiciously and in compassion. There is idolatry when we define truth -- either a left brain fact, or a right brain, intuitive "I know, I know" -- as certainty -- as mice in the basement believe they know objectively - with certainty -- that what they know defines the 50th floor.
Our living tradition is our ongoing reminder to test our certainties as well as our experiences, one in relationship to the other, and remain open to new possibilities. I am confident that when we consciously, and with discerning attention, examine and explore truth in relationship to our experience, we take hold of a skill and a process with the power to critically discern how to live it, indeed, how to be true to our values - our truth.
I've used this phrase BEING TRUE several times now. Being true by my definition means: choosing and living in line with our truths. It is our active response to what we know.
Sometimes it strikes me as absolutely amazing that we know anything at all, amazing that we find our way through life's complexities, that we struggle through change toward better, stronger knowing, and through life's chaos, a richer experience of being true in our daily lives and public commitments. Wiccan leader Starhawk writes in her own amazement: "Tell me old ones, how did you do it?" .... [They answer]
We struggled
We held out our hands and touched each other
We remembered to laugh
We went to endless meetings
We said no
We put our bodies on the line
We said yes
We invented, we created
We walked straight through our fears
We formed the circle
We danced
We spoke the truth
We dared to live it
Truth or Dare
Few of us live so powerfully. But there are those who do, have done.
One remarkable example resides in the life of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. We so often remember him at the time of his birthday as the man who brought a coherent approach and voice to the civil rights movement. Indeed, he did, although not alone; and we do well to remember those "lesser" heroes and heroines.
Martin King knew truth through the gospel of Jesus. He knew truth reading the work of such folk as Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi. King was an educated and broadly well read man who never stopped learning.
Martin Luther King also knew about being true. In being true to truth -- as it unfolded and grew -- Martin King found the difficult part of the last few years of his too short life. Being true to his values began to mean that more than civil rights must be addressed. He began to speak out against the Vietnam War. And, when he did...
Columnist Max Freedman wrote: "Is he casting about for a role in Vietnam because the civil rights struggle is no longer adequate to his own estimates of his talents?" The NY Herald Tribune suggested King was not up to looking at foreign policy, as it was a "field" "strange to him". In a time of Cold War, Carl Rowan reports that a White House presidential aide shouted, "My God, King has given a speech on Vietnam that goes right down the commie line!"
From Nobel Peace Laureate to Commie, arrogant, inept traitor, being true to new truth cost him dearly. But as a Rochester newspaper retrospectively reported a decade ago, Martin King, "remained true to his moral convictions even if it meant opposing a U.S. president...."
David Halberstam wrote of an incident he witnessed at a fund-raiser in Great Neck: Whitney Young (Urban League President and UU) dissented from any comment on Vietnam -- that civil rights and the ghettoes were supreme. At the end of the evening Halberstam writes, "Young and King got into a brief but very heated argument. Young told King that his position [on Vietnam] was unwise.... King angrily responded, 'Whitney, what you're saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won't get you into the kingdom of truth.'"
When King spoke to Unitarian Universalists as the Ware Lecturer of the 1966 General Assembly he reflected on a trip he took to India years before. There, he made witness and connection to how our American values and our national budget was so skewed as to spend billions on war efforts and to leave bellies in India and America empty.
"All I'm saying is this: that all life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality." - a powerfully stated fresh, new? truth for King.
Nearly a year later Martin Luther King made his famous speech against the war at the Riverside Church in NYC as speaker for, and co-chair of "Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam." He began by saying that he had come "because my conscience leaves me no other choice" and went on to quote from the organization's executive committee statement: "'A time comes when silence is betrayal.'" -- not living true to truth. He described this new calling "a vocation of agony" that was yet necessary. "We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.""
King did not know that he would come to this; he was a minister of the word of God who had been called to serve a church and then called to serve his nation toward civil rights for Negroes. India found his truth and Vietnam found his truth - and expanded its meaning - and reshaped what it meant to King to be true to it.
He said, in the Riverside Church speech, "Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path...and when I hear them, though I often understand the sources of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."
Martin King, through the truth he knew and in living a life true to them, came to greater knowing. Testing truth against his experience and his experience against truth. He began to know that the money spent on war drastically diverted money from other needs; black and white men, particularly the poor, were dying in a country on behalf of freedoms they didn't have at home.
As he talked in the ghettos of the North to broken young black men who were mounting a fight for civil rights with violence, he heard them say that nonviolence would not, could not work; these young men rejected King's claim that violence couldn't change anything - because -- what about the violence of our own country in Vietnam? Young men in urban ghettoes found his truth and expanded it. These were new lines of truth for Martin King, yet not.
Few of us live so powerfully, yet the truths we live and how we go about being true to them make their own difference. When we only know truth, in creeds or Principles and Purposes -- without remaining connected to their meanings -- and to how we live them -- we know them only as conditioned responses, monotoned, head-shaking mutterings -- IDOLATRY.
When we live our lives true to truth whether through creeds or Principles and Purposes, what we know lives and grows in how we live. Inspiring us and giving us direction, they are not IDOLATRY. They are ICONS or TOUCHSTONES to what makes a hard life good living.
Knowing, really knowing, is difficult.
Be gentle with one another.
May we live our lives open to new truth.
Living a life true to our knowing is difficult.
May we be gentle with ourselves.
There may be no heroes for the ages among us.
May we be heroes in whatever ways life calls us.
May we live a life that shapes and reveals ever new knowing.
It is life itself.
It is a theology of knowing truth and being true to an ever expanding knowing and living.
May we live both true and truly.
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