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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
September 20, 2009
I think I should begin this sermon by admitting that I’m not very
good at crossword puzzles. My brother-in-law: he’s really good. He
rips through the daily New York Times crossword in a matter of
minutes, even the hard ones that appear at the end of the week.
I don’t rip through any of them, even the easy ones. When I start a
puzzle, I’ll go through the whole thing and maybe find four or five
words I can fill in. The rest just sit there, staring blankly at me.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because if I were good at this,
I doubt that I would have ever found God in crossword puzzles.
Let me explain.
I do crossword puzzles at night, when I’m already in bed but not
quite asleep. By this time I’m too tired to read; I begin a sentence
but by the time I’ve gotten to the end, I can’t remember what the
beginning was. That’s when I pull out my crossword puzzle book.
There’s a documentary about people who do crossword puzzles: famous
people like Ken Burns who produces all those other documentaries.
The documentary about crossword puzzles is called “Wordplay.” In an
interview, Ken Burns said that he doesn’t drink coffee but in the
morning, what gets him going is a crossword puzzle. That’s a clue.
My brother-in-law does crossword puzzles in the morning also. The
New York Times, where he gets his crossword puzzles, is a morning
newspaper. My suspicion—not scientifically proven (but probably
right)—is that people who are good at crossword puzzles do them in
the morning.
People who wait until later in the day aren’t as good at them, and
those who are the worst at crossword puzzles—like me—wait until the
very last moments of consciousness.
So it’s nighttime, I’m in bed, drowsy, but not quite ready to sleep.
I take a look the puzzle I’m currently working on. Let’s say I
started the night before, and I have five words filled in. I look
through all those clues I didn’t know the night before and, oh,
there’s one I should have gotten, but didn’t. And here’s another. I
don’t know why I didn’t see that before. Oh, and with the letters
from this one, I’ve got enough of a clue to get this one over here.
And then I’m asleep.
Incidentally, crossword puzzles are, for me, a very inexpensive
hobby or, for that matter, a very inexpensive way to find God. One
book of easy-to-medium crossword puzzles will last me for years. I
am not exaggerating. For my birthday at the beginning of August, my
wife, Amy, gave me a new crossword puzzle book with a total of 200
puzzles. Now, almost two months later, I’m on number 8: 192 to go.
(You do the math.)
Let’s move on to the third night on this puzzle. Now I have a total
of 11 words filled in. I go through the clues again and, here’s one.
Four letter word for “Bishop on old TV.” Now wasn’t there a bishop
who gave sermons on TV? I remember him in fancy robes: Bishop Fulton
J. Sheen, I think. But there are o four-letter words there. Then
something shifts, and I realize I’m going down the wrong alley. Not
a church bishop but a person named Bishop: Joey Bishop. Got it,
finally.
What intrigues me about this process is that from one night to the
next, I do not think about the clues that stumped me. I don’t think
about the crossword at all. If someone asked me to name any of the
clues I missed—or any that I got—I couldn’t do it. And yet, when I
return to the puzzle the next evening, I have several of the words I
didn’t know the night before. The night after that the same thing
happens with other clues that had previously stumped me.
So it seems that somewhere/somehow at some level of my
consciousness—without my knowledge or permission—there’s work
proceeding on this crossword puzzle.
* * *
I am a better writer than I am solver of crossword puzzles. I do my
crossword puzzles at night, but I write first thing in the morning.
The alarm goes off at 5:30, the second alarm goes off at 5:35, the
coffee pot clicks on at 5:40, and I’m at the computer by 6:00.
What do I find at 6:00 a.m. when I open the file I’d been working on
the day before? Well, the first thing I find is dreadful writing. It
is so bad I can hardly bring myself to look at it. But I do. I start
to read this dreadful horrible writing and then, oh, I’ll see
something I can do improve it, something I hadn’t noticed the day
before. Maybe I had been looking for just the right word, and it
hadn’t come. Or maybe a way to manage a transition, or something to
bring more clarity to a point I was trying to make. Once I notice a
few of these possibilities, I’m into the process, and it might be
hard to tear me away.
If I try to write something all in a single sitting—a sermon, a
newsletter article, even a letter—it is never is as good as one for
which I write a draft, let it sit for a day, and then return to it.
Because the next day, I’ll find better ways to say what I had been
struggling with. And sometimes when I’ve not quite known what I was
trying to express, I’ll begin to find the point the next day, and it
will be still clearer the day after that.
My wife is an architect. She describes a similar process. In some
projects, you reach a dead end. There’s just no way to solve the
problem you’ve been trying to address. The client wants a kitchen
where there isn’t room for one. Another client wants four new
restrooms for the price of two. Another wants a building extension
that will violate every code in the book. So you put away the tools,
give up, go to bed, wonder why you ever thought you could be an
architect because it’s just too darned impossible.
The next morning you get up, take a look at the problem again
and—oh, why didn’t I think of that before? Here’s where we could put
that kitchen into a house where there isn’t any more room. And
here’s something I hadn’t thought of when figuring the cost of those
new restrooms. And here’s a whole different approach to that
building extension the client so desperately wants.
No matter what field you’re in—from teaching to parenting to farming
to driving trucks—you may be familiar with that process. When
confronted with an a problem, put it on the shelf, go on to other
things, then return later and see where you are now. Chances are,
you will have been working on it without realizing it. You might
have even found a solution.
So what do we have here? At the very least, it’s a technique for
creative problem-solving. If that’s what you come away with from
this sermon, great: you could do worse. But I’m going to be a little
more ambitious this morning. I’m going to try to find God.
* * *
It puzzles me when people refer to the presence of God in their
lives. What are they talking about? What part of their experience
are they naming as coming from God?
So I listen. I try to understand what they are saying. What I hear
when I listen to talk about God is a sense of being in relationship
to something greater than ourselves: an unseen power of superior
understanding and deeper wisdom. This unseen power is not the
possession of any single individual but an expression of a creative
force that sustains all life. So that when we are in relationship,
we tap into a source of wisdom and strength that may guide us
through life’s challenges and opportunities.
Maybe it’s like what happens with my crossword puzzles: something
inside of me or outside of me or both knows more than I do about
what’s going to be the right answer and helps me along until I find
it.
Well, that might be claiming a bit much—that God helps me find
answers on crossword puzzles. So let’s just use that as an image, a
way of talking about something that we can’t quite express in words.
It is that sense that we participate in something greater than
ourselves that sometimes reaches out to us, calls us, draws us
toward what we might do and be, even challenges us to be better
people.
Let me give an example.
This is from the life of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell was an
English philosopher and mathematician of aristocratic lineage. His
was a family of privilege with a conservative heritage, yet he broke
with that past and forged a path of his own, becoming an outspoken
social critic, particularly on issues of peace and humanitarianism.
The following is drawn from his autobiography. It describes a time
when something grabbed his attention and demanded that he take a
look at his life and how he was leading it—and that ultimately
changed the person he was and sought to be.
To set the scene: The year was 1900. Bertrand Russell and his friend
and colleague—the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead—had been out
for the evening, attending a poetry reading. Upon their return, they
found Mrs. Whitehead, who suffered from angina, having an attack
that caused her severe pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and
everything around her. Bertrand Russell recorded what happened to
him as he observed the suffering of his friend.
Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found
myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through
some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human
soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest
intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached;
whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best
useless, it follows that war is wrong,…that the use of force is to
be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to
the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that…
At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely
different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination
possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody
that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion,
I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously
with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an
imperialist I became during those five minutes a … pacifist. Having
for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself
filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense
interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that
of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life
endurable. A strange excitement possessed me containing intense pain
but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could
dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom.
The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has
largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But
something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always
with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in
children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain
emotional tone in all my human relations.
Was that an experience of God? It sounds like it. It sounds like how
people talk when they describe an encounter with a power greater
than themselves. But Bertrand Russell was an outspoken atheist. He
did not interpret that experience as coming from God or any kind of
supreme being. Yet: it was life-changing in a way that experiences
of God are often reported to be.
This is awkward, isn’t it? In this sermon about finding God, my
central example turns out to be one reported by an atheist who was
deeply changed by the encounter but not converted. Whatever happened
to him during this experience, he did not become a believer as a
result.
So is there a God who guides us through life’s dilemmas, encourages
us to live with greater love and compassion, challenges us to bridge
differences between people, calls us to the life we are meant to
lead? Or not?
* * *
During the 1930s, there was a huge controversy among Unitarians. It
became known as the humanist/theist controversy. At stake was the
question of belief in God and whether Unitarianism would continue to
be a theistic religion or whether it would evolve into a largely a
humanistic faith. The humanists said: we don’t need a concept of God
to be ethical, caring, socially-concerned people. Our faith does not
come from a God “up there” but a belief in what human beings can
achieve by working together. The theists said, if we give up the
concept of God, we lose our connection to a long tradition that has
shaped us and our society. We abandon a sense of the mystery that
exists at the center of life, calling us to be more than we have
been.
It was a major fight. People on all sides stomped out in protest. “I
don’t want to be in a church with those humanists,” some theists
said. “I don’t want to be in a church with those theists,” some
humanists said. “I don’t want to be in a church that has fights like
this,” said others who hadn’t chosen either side.
So who won? Which side prevailed? Looking back from the perspective
of some 80 years, I would say that neither side won. To me, that
whole controversy was beside the point. I mean, it seems like the
biggest of all questions: is there or is there not a God? But since
we can’t know the answer, then something else becomes more
important.
What becomes more important is the experience itself: that sense
that we participate in something that guides us through life’s
challenges and that calls us to a deeper and truer existence.
Whether that experience originates from a higher power—that is,
God—or whether it comes entirely from within ourselves is less
important than being attentive to it. Pausing sometimes, listening
to what’s trying to call out to us, returning to old problems, being
present when it seems like there’s something we should be hearing
but have missed.
Because whatever we encounter in such moments, it’s often right. It
guides us toward who we ought to be. Emerson put it this way, “There
is a power in which we exist and whose ... (blessings are)
accessible to us.”
* * *
The question of spirituality in Unitarian Universalism is often
raised. For some, we’re just a little too reasonable, a little too
down to earth, we explain away too much. We don’t quite address
life’s spiritual side, we don’t help people summon the power it
takes to go out and deal with the challenges of the world.
When Unitarianism began in this country over 200 years ago, a
defining characteristic was the desire to subject religious claims
to the test of reason. The early Unitarians looked at religious
doctrines and reports of miracles and the beliefs that proceeded
from them and asked the simple question: does this make sense? And
often it didn’t. But in the process of being so darned reasonable,
we sometimes neglected that part of existence that draws from a well
of mystery and can’t be fully explained.
I understand to this because I experienced it myself, as a child,
growing up in a very reasonable Unitarian Universalist congregation.
We subjected everything to the test of reason. But what about the
lift we feel when encountering a passage in a piece of music that
hits us just the right way? And what about the awe we feel when
encountering something beautiful? And where do we get the strength
it takes to endure difficult times? And what about this sense that
we sometimes might get—coming from deep within—that we’re in the
world for some purpose, to do something that matters? And how
come—when I’m quiet and listen—then sometimes I appear to tap into a
source of greater wisdom and experience?
I don’t know where those experiences come from—but I do know what
they are real. They come from someplace valid and true, even though
I can’t quite put my finger on what that someplace is. So I try to
honor the experience: don’t let it get explained away; see where it
takes me.
In Zen Buddhism, there is a concept called a koan—K-O-A-N. A koan is
a statement or a question that defies rational explanation, but yet
may point to a truth. The most famous koan is, “What is the sound of
one hand clapping?” There are others, such as, “What did you look
like before your parents were born?”
A koan defies an easy answer, but you can’t quite let go of it
either. And so you live with it—you live with this question—because
that process opens you to new levels of understanding. Perhaps we
might view the question of God as a koan. There is no easy rational
explanation, yet we can’t seem to let go of it either.
So maybe we live with this question and remain open to the
experiences it brings. Is God present when I get a word in a
crossword puzzle? I don’t know. But there’s something going on I
don’t fully understand. Is God present when we feel compassion at
another’s pain, or when we feel outrage at an injustice? I don’t
know. Is there something of a higher deeper wisdom that calls us to
a particular task or mission in life? I don’t know, but many of the
great things that people do are fueled by that inner conviction.
The second hymn we sang this morning contained these lines,
“Like tides on crescent sea-beach,
when moon’s so new and thin,
into our hearts high yearnings
come welling, surging in,
come from the mystic ocean
whose rim no foot has trod
some people call it longing
and others call it God.”ext
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