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An Age of Uncertainty
March 27, 2011
First Universalist Unitarian Church
Rev. Paul Beckel
“It isn’t easy to accept that the world is being shaped by forces you don’t understand and can’t agree with. It requires a willingness to master some of the strangeness instead of simply labeling it as ‘mad’ or trashing it as ‘evil.’ It means getting comfortable with the attitude that Niels Bohr once described as an inevitable part of a quantum view, that tickling ‘are you kidding me?’ feeling as you try something a bit nuts only to discover that it works wonderfully.” Joshua Cooper Ramo
WELCOME
“Uncertainty” was a big buzzword last summer and fall. In the debates about whether to extend tax cuts, the rhetoric of “uncertainty” was cast about ominously: if tax cuts were not extended for those making over $250,000 per year, rich Americans would be so overcome with doubt about the future that they wouldn’t be able to create jobs for the rest of us.
But the new year began, the tax cuts were passed, and uncertainty has...quadruplicated.
In the Middle East: revolution, civil wars, and more American intervention. In Japan: an earthquake triggering a tsunami triggering a nuclear disaster. Across the globe: new economic, military, energy, and environmental uncertainty. And improbably, overshadowing it all: local turmoil around schools, unions, recycling, buses, arts funding, and contraception.
So is this a temporary extension in uncertainty? ...or an inevitable result of accelerating change in an increasingly interdependent world? ...or is today’s uncertainty pretty much what human life has always held?
As we light the chalice let us take a moment to sit back...in awe. And feeling perhaps thankful, perhaps defiant, cry out our wonder.
GATHERING SONG We Utter Our Cry #137
CHILDREN’S FOCUS
I heard an inspirational story this past week about Matt Powers bringing to his local elementary school a cake frosted with the words, “Thank you teachers!” I imagine that his gesture will be remembered and appreciated for a long time.
Our world is unpredictable. We don’t know exactly what it will take to live and thrive in the years to come. But I’m pretty sure we’ll always need teachers. So I’ve asked a few people to say a few words today about a teacher who prepared them for the future. [Several people gave tributes to a teacher who had shaped their life.]
RESPONSIVE READING “The Journey of Love” by Mohammed Iqbal #610
Where in our hearts is that burning of desire?
It is true that we are made of dust and the world is also made of dust,
But the dust has motes rising.
Whence comes that drive in us?
We look to the starry sky and love storms in our hearts.
Whence comes that storm?
The journey of love is a very long journey,
But sometimes with a sigh you can cross that vast desert.
Search and search again without losing hope;
You may find sometime a treasure on your way…
MESSAGE
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t yet seen the future you might not want to listen to this sermon. There are some big surprises coming! Just kidding. I’m not really able to predict the future, except for the part that there will be surprises.
Wouldn’t life make a great movie? I almost want to pretend it is. An American soldier this week plead guilty to killing Iraqi civilians for sport, even posing for a picture holding up one victim’s head like a trophy.
I go back and forth, actually, from wanting to distance myself from the history of our interconnected lives now unfolding...wanting only to observe...as if all this is just a story filled with lessons and intrigue, with no real impact on my bank account or my children’s prospects. It seems I move constantly between that state of imperturbable distance...to horror and shame...to feeling proud to participate, and excited to be in the midst of our Badgerland bedlam – even as its repercussions are immediate for my household and for many of yours.
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In our minds we can distance ourselves from uncertainty...or we can engage. In practice we face the same choice. We can attempt to protect ourselves with heavy defenses (like the armored exoskeletons of primitive creatures). Or we can progress, seeking creative alternatives that might enable us still to touch, communicate, and expand our understanding of one another.
But no one knows if we have time for that mushy idealistic stuff, or whether we should just hunker down while we still can.
The world is out to get us; let’s not pretend otherwise. Well, I don’t know that the world takes a personal interest in my demise or yours, but I do know that toxins, bacteria, radioactivity and random projectiles are zinging throughout the biosphere at this very moment. And all that separates us from these deadly enemies is some combination of physical barriers, immune systems, personal or collective intelligence, and grace or luck. And most lucky of all: we have the exhausting, life-giving, crazy-making ability to adapt.
Of course our enemies adapt too, and with amazing speed -- turning everything we depend on against us (computers, energy and financial systems, airplanes, air and water). Cell phones sticks and wires whipped up into improvised explosive devices that for five bucks can cripple our trillion dollar war machine.
So why is adaptation our friend -- if it can always be turned against us? Because it reminds us that even the strongest defense, alone, cannot protect us from uncertainty.
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Consider an hourglass. In a photograph, with time standing still, we see a stable pile of sand...and perhaps a single grain ready to drop in, unnoticed. But that seemingly stable mound is really just organized instability from one moment to the next. Like all seemingly “stable” systems, our sand pile is always on the edge of dramatic, unstoppable, unpredictable shifts. And even a slight shift (Japan moved just one parking space closer to us last week) even a slight shift can have global repercussions.
The sand pile effect is nonlinear. There is no correspondence between cause and effect. 1 grain or 20 grains added, you don’t get a proportional response. The activity from one moment to the next is not predictable, and not map-able. Every grain of sand is related to every other grain in an invisible web of pressure and tension, so every new grain creates entirely new forces, and an entirely new map of forces.
Our Roman Catholic friends were smudged with ashes a couple of weeks ago as a reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. I heartily affirm this sentiment. And yet, in the meantime, even piles of sand or dust can have some pretty big and unpredictable adventures.
Because even if a supercomputer could store and calculate every relationship between every data point in this moment...[snap] now that moment is past and everything has changed.
Revelation is not sealed. All of the forces in existence, and all that will come to be -- natural or divine -- have not predetermined the future. This earth, this universe, is not a big mechanical contraption, but a throbbing organism, a mashup of minerals and gasses, fire and dreams, momentum and subatomic emptiness within which every new moment is created.
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For the first three-quarters of my life the central global conflict -- the lens through which every smaller question had to be seen -- was the nuclear standoff between the Soviets and the West. I try to explain this to my kids today; it makes no sense. Just before they were born, the wall separating us and them was torn down. It didn’t make everything better but everything was different. It was breathtaking.
Then one day I flipped on the TV and saw the World Trade Center collapse. The announcer was talking as if this were real. But that doesn’t happen. The World Trade Center does not collapse. It simply doesn’t. It seems like yesterday that damn announcer was saying something impossible again. Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers were about to go bankrupt. And an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not only bigger than Exxon Valdez, but everyone agreed that it would continue spilling at about the rate of one Exxon Valdez per week for months to come. I had always thought of myself as imaginative, but these events were simply beyond the scope of my imagination.
My point today is not that we are doomed. My point is not to make everyone depressed. I am simply awestruck by the global dilemmas we face:
In regard to the economy: the only way we can maintain our standard of living is through unsustainable growth.
In regard to terrorism: since we can neither prevent it, nor accept it in small doses, I don’t know if we can avoid overreacting.
In regard to peace through strength: everything we do to feel more secure makes our neighbors feel less secure (which, contrary to our dreams of post-cold-war times, leads us to continued and perhaps unlimited military escalation).
In regard to health care: there is no limit to the value of life and health. So research and technological advances, which are clearly nowhere near their limits, divided fairly or unfairly, will inevitably bankrupt us.
In regard to policing the globe: not long ago $2 machetes pretty much wiped out an African nation while billion dollar satellites observed. Preparation and execution of the September 11 attacks cost about $1 million. Today non-military efforts to prevent another attack cost $1 million -- per hour.
In regard to personal safety and organizational liability: risk is forbidden, and learning is difficult without the personal experience of risk and consequences.
In regard to germs: It seems too dangerous to expose ourselves and thereby develop our immune systems.
In regard to information: we have more than we can conceivably use, especially since a great deal of it is irrelevant, misleading, or constantly changing.
And in regard to horror: when machine guns were used in WWI we assumed that that unimaginable horror would put a final end to war. But 100 years later, we are flummoxed by something much simpler: suicide bombers, and our inability to dissuade someone who sees themselves as already dead.
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So what surprises lie ahead? Imagine no religion. Researchers from Cornell University this week released a study suggesting that organized religion will essentially disappear in 9 countries in the coming years. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it’s certainly something that could affect this beloved community.
One of the classic questions in our Unitarian Universalist tradition has been: What is transient, and what is permanent? Theodore Parker, one of our founders, presented this question almost 200 years ago. The standard answer has always been form vs. content. That is: there is an underlying content or substance to liberal religion, something about freedom and responsibility, compassion and creative love...something that carries on from generation to generation...something known by Jesus and Laotze, and Socrates...something expressed in countless forms over the millennia. Through changing institutions and forms of prayer and music, family and social configurations, a spirit that transforms endures.
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Still Ecclesiastes cries: vanity, all is vanity and chasing after wind. And resistance is futile. Resistance -- as if we could protect ourselves from change. But resistance is
· Expensive and exhausting. We cannot prepare for everything.
· Resistance creates in us an un-nerving psychological weakness.
· Resistance puts us in a reactive mode, waiting, on edge, waiting to be hit.
· And from a stance of resistance, when things go wrong, which they will, we find ourselves weaker, more afraid, and more vulnerable.
But resistance, confrontation, counterattack -- these are not our only options. That which endures is formless, resilient, ever melting into those invisible subatomic spaces where their speed can be measured, or their location ascertained, but never both at the same time.
If that which endures were ever seen it would be in the margin for error. In the peripheral context of our lives dancing with hope and with the materials from which tomorrows grow.
It is true that we are made of dust,
And the world is also made of dust,
But the dust has motes rising.
For now, at least, humans, unlike dust, can choose, can cling, can let go, can laugh in wonder at the infinity in the sand...at the power in our hands...at the mistakes we hadn’t planned.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. It’s far too difficult to coordinate the forces of fortune, nature and the human heart. But I do believe it’s all connected. And one thing I believe is permanent: What we do to others we do to ourselves.
What we do with others, we do with ourselves. What we do for others we do for ourselves. What we do around others we do around ourselves.
The living body -- the web within which we live and move and have our good days and bad – the partnership to with for and around which we dance -- the embrace, the cure, the dying, the melting, the resilience. Blessed be.
SILENCE / DIALOGUE
o Some systems fail under stress. Rare ones grow. What characterizes the latter?
o Rather than crafting a world in which we imagine nothing will go wrong, can we craft a world in which we can deal with what goes wrong? What would that look like?
SENDING SONG With Heart and Mind #300
POSTLUDE / SHARING OUR GIFTS
BENEDICTION
May I have courage to change the things I can,
Serenity to accept things I cannot change,
And wisdom to know the difference.
May I have patience with things that take time, Appreciation for all that I have,
Tolerance for those with different struggles,
And the Strength to get up and try again, one day at a time.
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