It’s Complicated
Rev. Paul Beckel
First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org
October 9, 2011

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Rainer Maria Rilke


GATHERING SONG         Now Let Us Sing      #368
RE MINUTE
CHILDREN’S FOCUS        
It’s so warm today I’m think about being on the beach... and seeing you makes me think of kids and how smart they are and how much we can learn from each other. So I’m remembering a couple of things that happened to me this summer at the beach.

I was walking along the beach with my son Ben when I saw two kids building a giant fancy castle. They were having so much fun and we could tell they had put a lot of time into it. Then a big wave came up and washed the whole thing away. Then the kids laughed and jumped up and holding hands they ran to another spot on the beach and started again.

Another time I was out on the beach with my honey, Jane. We came to a very big rock and I said, “Do you think I could move that rock if I use all of my strength?” She said she thought I could. So I tried and tried and I was pretty disappointed when the rock didn’t move. I looked up and said, “I guess you were wrong.” She answered, “No, you didn’t use all of your strength. You didn’t ask me to help.”

Now I have to tell you just one more thing: neither of those things really happened to me. I read stories kind of like these in a book, so they might have happened. But since they aren’t my stories, do you think it’s ok for me to tell them? Or was I lying to you?

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago I told a story about the creation of the Earth? Is it ok to make things up? Could that be part of using all my strength?

CHILDREN’S BLESSING    
It is in my blood, it is in my body...No one can take it away from me: Creativity

ANNOUNCEMENTS & GREETINGS
OUR PRAYERS of JOY and SORROW
READING                 from Owning Your Own Shadow Robert Johnson
I recently heard about a couple who had the good sense to call upon the shadow in a wedding ceremony. The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their “shadow vows.” The groom said, “I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself.” The bride replied, “I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I will take your money and your house.” They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out. They were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmasked it.

RESPONSIVE READING          “Connections are Made Slowly”    #568
SHARING OUR GIFTS
MESSAGE    
Against the advice of the experts, I do not use unique passwords on each of my computer accounts. Nor do I change passwords as often as I’m supposed to. It’s just too complicated. Far too often I’ll forget a password and call customer service for a hint. They’ll ask what street I grew up on, but there were several. And maybe Jane set up this account so maybe they’re asking the street she grew up on... or her childhood pet or her favorite color... and I wonder if I say “green...no, I mean blue!” will I be arrested or just catapulted into the valley of utter darkness?

Some questions just don’t have simple answers. When we’re getting to know someone we may ask, in a friendly way: “How are you?” But without context or established trust, it’s hard for people to know where to go with that question. So we may get more specific, and ask: “How many children do you have?” When people ask me this, half the time I answer, “three;” half the time I say “two.” Neither answer is complete; neither feels quite right, and I’m always unsure if I’m going to have a chance to explain. It’s especially awkward when I answer “two” but then fumble into that other truth which is “three.” I ought to know how many kids I have, right?

And my having been married twice is a comparatively simple situation. There are more complex and poignant family scenarios, and yet I rarely have the presence of mind to help people
frame their story with both integrity and emotional safety by asking something more open ended, like, “Tell me about your family.”

Steve Jobs was born to one set of parents, offered for adoption to another set who said, “No thanks, we want a girl.” He was offered to another who said “yes,” but then his birth mother said no these people don’t have college degrees. Then she relented when they promised they’d send Steve to college, which they had little control over -- he dropped out after one semester.

And yet, Steve Jobs made life simple. Or at least he knew how to wrap complexity within an easy to understand package.

Of course there is loss that comes with apparent simplicity. If your music and book collections are now being funneled into I-pods and e-readers... if more and more of us take the pictures from our messy refrigerators to organize them somewhere up in the clouds...then we’re eventually going to lose out on that enlightening experience of browsing each other’s collections.

In an essay about the significance of books juxtaposed on a shelf, Anne Fadiman recalls a friend telling her:

“I visited the apartment of John Clive, the historian, after he died...to pack up his library and move it to our store. I had taken Clive’s class on the British Empire that semester, but he was an unflashy lecturer and I didn’t feel I’d gotten to know him. It was only when I saw his bookshelves — James Bond paperbacks cheek by jowl with nineteenth century parliamentary proceedings — that I got a sense of who [he] really was. His intellectual furnishings explained him in a way his lectures hadn’t. We took the books back to the store and divided them up by topic — history on the left wall, literature on the right, philosophy in the back alcove — and somehow, all of a sudden, they weren’t John Clive any more.... I felt very sad. And I realized that books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.”

Does this apply to people as well – to each of us? For our life’s meaning, are we indebted, at least in part, to our context? To the people, the times, the stuff, the activities...in which we find ourselves, and place ourselves.

There’s an interesting question floating around the Unitarian Universalist movement these days. Here’s the question: “Whose are we?”

The question is not intended to lead to a particular answer; it’s intended to arouse some curiosity within us about our context -- our most significant relationships, whether personal or mystical...historical or aspirational.

Our UU movement is focused on relationships rather than beliefs ...in particular the covenants we make to seek truth and meaning responsibly, humbly, and with mutual respect.

So, with whom do we make those covenants?
To whom / with whom do we belong?

Whose are we? We are the babes of our parents’ of course, whether we knew them or not. We are the next generation’s cloud of witnesses; we are, for them, “the ones who came before.”

Let yourself get poetic and you can take that question in a lot of directions. And I hope you will. I have a feeling that that question is going to come up again among us. But I’m going to set it aside for now because within the theme of “It’s complicated” I want to address two more things: complicated logic and complicated feelings.

==
Yesterday afternoon I walked into church and immediately someone asked me, “Paul, will you eat meat?” I was stumped. She wasn’t asking, “Do you eat meat?” To which I could easily answer, “yes, I do a few times a week.” She wasn’t asking, “Are you eating meat?” which would have also been very easy to answer, “No, look my hands are full of books and my mouth is empty.” The question, rather, was, “Will you eat meat?” which is known in the realm of logic to be a Complex Question -- a common fallacy.

A complex question is two or more questions jumbled into one, or a question with a big presupposition embedded within it. It’s also called a trick question or a loaded question. The famous example, of course, is: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” And in courtroom dramas you get questions like, “Where did you hide the money you stole?”

But we probably encounter more subtle complex questions every day:

·    How can we save our country from the creeping socialism of the present administration?
·    Or: On which day did god create the dinosaurs?
·    Or the most common of all: did you pick up the library books and the kids, get gas in the car and bring home milk and bananas?

Asking two questions at once can be perfectly legitimate when its presuppositions are clear and non-controversial. But a complex question can also be manipulative by presupposing an answer to questions that have not even been asked. Yesterday’s meat question was not particularly sinister; the unasked question was just, “Are you having pizza with us?”

But in debates and political rhetoric, complex questions are often misleading and almost always unhelpful.

Why bring up pizza and politics, logic and rhetoric...in the context of our religious community? To promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Because we interfere with the pursuit of truth and meaning when we consciously or unconsciously use complex questions...or allow others to use complex questions against us. So notice this week. And don’t do it. And don’t fall for it.

Especially don’t do it to yourself! Sometimes we so badly want something in our life to be simple that we get attracted to simplicity as a false idol. Or we may convince ourselves that there is a simple answer to some of life’s absurd complex questions because we don’t want to face the alternative.

For example, in India, a man was once walking along the road when an elephant broke loose and began charging right toward him. Pulling himself up from his initial sense of fear, he stood firm, remembering what his guru had taught him: “All is Brahman; you have nothing to fear.” Soon the elephant ran over him and knocked him unconscious. When the guru came to visit him in the hospital the man complained: “You said all is Brahman. I thought the elephant was Brahman—how could it hurt me?” The guru replied, yes but the mahout riding the elephant was shouting at you to get out of the way, and he too was Brahman.”

A desire for simplicity is natural. But does our desire for simplicity sometimes arise out of too narrow a focus -- a focus perhaps only upon ourselves?

I wonder because when we go outside ourselves it’s never simple -- there is always context.

Facebook provides the phrase “It’s complicated” as an option for describing the nature of our primary relationships. I would be tempted to say that for almost all of us, “it’s complicated.” But just to be sure, I checked the online “Urban Dictionary,” which provides some insight into how people actually use emerging language.

The Urban Dictionary allows people to submit definitions to words and phrases, and others can vote thumbs up or thumbs down...so the most popular definitions rise to the top. And since we’re talking about language-use, popularity is what matters. So, in its most popular usage, “It’s Complicated” refers to a couple in an ambiguous state between “friends” and "in a relationship.”

It may also indicate dissatisfaction with an existing relationship. Or it can mean their  relationship doesn’t fit into normative categories or may not be socially acceptable, like polyamory, bisexuality, or friends with benefits.

People may also say “it’s complicated” out of reluctance to be called single or when they’re still hoping to work things out in a relationship that’s ending.

But this is not a modern phenomenon. A Sufi tale from hundreds of years ago tells of Hodja and Ahmed, having tea and talking about life and love. “How come you never got married, Hodja?” Asked Ahmed.

Well, I spent my youth looking for the perfect woman. In Cairo I met a beautiful and intelligent woman with eyes like dark olives. But she was unkind. Then in Baghdad I met a woman who was wonderful and generous, but we had no interests in common. One after another the women I met would seem just right, except... Then one day, I met her. She was beautiful, intelligent, generous, and kind. We had everything in common. In fact, she was perfect.

“OK, so what happened? Why didn’t you marry her?” Well, there was one problem: she was looking for the perfect man.

==
There’s one more definition in the Urban Dictionary. I like this one best, even if it was toward the bottom in popularity:

It’s Complicated: An easy brush off when you don't want to explain something.

I like that because “It’s complicated” is how I view my relationship with the interdependent web of all existence. And I often don’t have the time or the patience or especially the knowledge to explain any further.

When I was a kid -- in one of my many annoying phases -- I would ask my parents long series of questions that went: Why? Why? Why? Why do we have to dig up all these potatoes? (Because they’re ready in October) Why are they ready in October? (Because....)

My parents were reasonably responsive, explaining why something may have come to be because of their own preferences, or because of historical dynamics, or the natural cycles of life. But I would persist with, “yeah, but why?” And in the end we always got to this: “Because the Good Lord made it that way.”

I don’t pretend to have any better answers than my parents did. One difference, maybe, is that I perceive the present to have arisen out of a complex set of causes rather than a single consciousness. But ultimately, they and I both come to this: “We don’t know.”

==
But if it’s hard to answer, “why? why? why?” perhaps the most persistent complex question we face, day in and day out is the one I mentioned earlier: “How are you?”

Even with a lifetime of practice, I still stumble over this one. The truth is almost always complicated, and the socially acceptable response options are distressingly narrow.

“How are you?” And “Whose are you?” As if these questions aren’t complex enough, I’ve brought them both up in the same sermon. So I’ll conclude today with an excerpt from a piece by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn. It’s called, “Please call me by my true names.” It strikes me as a reasonable response to both of these questions at the same time:

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am also the grass snake who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

...[so] Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.