Worship

I return to the question: What are we here for? For those of you who have a "thing" about prepositions at the the end: For what are we here? That is, for what do we come to a worship service?

Well, we come to worship. OK. And what does that mean?

Coming to worship is different from coming to watch a performance. Ruth Lewis (the Music Minister at the UU Fellowship of Gainesville) and I are not performers. The worship associate for the day, the soloist singer, the rest of the choir: none of us are performers. We are co-liturgists. And "liturgy," as you'll remember, means "the work of the people." It is your work. It is, as my colleague Rev. Abhi Janamanchi put it when he was our guest preacher here in Gainesville last October: the work of “uniting together in mind, body, and spirit with a larger reality that is known and unknown by many names.”

We can’t make it happen, sometimes it doesn’t happen, and if it does happen, it’s a kind of accident. Worship is for the work of trying to be a little more accident-prone. It is, as Abhi also said, for

“witnessing to the creativity which can evolve from the inevitable tension between the individual voice and the group which gives it resonance and depth. And we gather to witness to the presence of the depth of being which expands, renews, and reinvigorates us to encounter levels of reality not [noticed] in our day-to-day lives.”

You’re not here to take in a show. You didn’t pay your money for your ticket to a show that you expect to be able to watch in undisturbed peace. If that is your expectation then allow me to upset that expectation.

Worship is a communal act. It’s the people around you, not the people up here on the chancel, that matter most. That’s why I call it a chancel, not a stage. The people around you cannot be a distraction FROM the worship, because the people around you ARE the worship. They might distract you from my sermon, they might distract you from the choir's anthem, they might distract you from writing your check for the offertory, but they cannot distract you from the worship because the people around you in this space made sacred by our intention that it be so -- they ARE the worship.

Worship, after all, means "worth-scrippen": worth ascribing. It means ascribing worth – taking this time from our week to remember what is really and truly of worth in this life – to ascribe and inscribe it in our hearts and memories to fortify us for the week ahead. And if the people around you aren’t of worth, then all I can say is that’s one mighty big gator you’re wrestling. If the people around you, children, young adult, middle-aged, or senescent, are not of worth, then all I can say is, "So sorry about your bad luck!"

So: in that moment – that moment when annoyance is flashing across your brain because somebody else is STILL shuffling her papers, or whispering too loudly, or clapping, or shouting back “Amen” – in that moment, THAT is your invitation to the opening of your heart to love and the opening of your mind to peace, THAT is the accident that was waiting to happen to show you a glimpse of a new possibility for connection. In that moment, THAT is your worship, that is the worth to ascribe in your heart, not my carefully crafted sermon, not the choir’s carefully rehearsed and lovingly offered spiritual music.

And, by the way, just FYI: studies of noise in church sanctuaries when children and adults are both present, show over and over that it is the adults who make most of the noise.

I really really would like to say that there is one exception. I want to say that one thing that is a distraction and is not itself the suddenly surprising breaking through of transcendence, the one thing that really is simply a despicable and unworthy annoyance is:

Cell phones going off.

Well, I can recognize that that’s my gator to wrestle, while still hoping you won’t be the one push me in.

No, scratch that.

We don’t get to decide what pushes us. We only get to decide whether and how to wrestle. In the end I cannot unequivocally declare that a cell phone going off can never be the sound in worship that will jolt you to awaken to a wider awareness of love.

We don't get to decide what pushes us. We only get to decide whether and how to wrestle. How are your decisions about that working out for you?

I’ve done some gator wrestling. Let me know if I can help.

Amen.

* * * * *
Part 5 of "Neurodiversity"
Previous: Part 4: "The Second Smooth Stone of Liberalism"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

The Second Smooth Stone of Liberalism

I'm addressing neurodiversity, for, as Meg Jobes said in an email to me:

“Everyone will be encountering more than one child who has [autism]. I think Unitiarian Universalists should be speaking not just to racial diversity and social diversity, but we should be including neurodiversity and be welcoming to people with autism and other neurological issues (adhd, etc.)”

I am particulary jazzed to take this opportunity to talk about stretching our welcoming, our acceptance, our radical hospitality, our love to the neurodiverse, the neurologically atypical. You see, in my years as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I have preached about feminism and patriarchy – and I’m a man.

I have preached about racism and the unfinished project of racial justice – and I’m white, in the sense that I’ve been told all my life that I’m white, and society grants me the tacit privileges of whiteness.

I have preached about homophobia and queer theory and transgender fairness and understanding – yet I am straight, and the body that I am trapped inside of, aside from the fact that it isn’t 20 anymore, seems to suit me. It seems, so far, to match fairly well my sense of my gender self.

I have preached about immigration justice – and I am a native-born citizen of this land, and my US passport gets me easily into most other countries.

I have preached about the need to better understand and address poverty – and I was born, raised, and remain solidly middle-class.

I have referenced the importance of accessibility for the differently-abled -- and I have the use of limbs that is called “normal.”

I’ve preached about cruelty to nonhuman animals – and I am human.

All of this is well and good. We need to hear the voices of the oppressed, and we also need for people of privilege like me to speak out for justice. There is a place for US-citizen, normally-abled, average height, average weight, right-handed, middle-class, middle-aged straight white human men to stand as allies of women, gay men, lesbians, the transgendered, African Americans, undocumented workers, the poor, the differently-abled, and of all the critters of God’s green earth.

But when I speak on the topic of neurodiversity, I speak to you as a person who is, himself, not neurotypical. A year and a half ago, in late 2010, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now, at my Doctor’s suggestion, I do brain training exercises, I take zinc and omega-3 fatty acids, and B-vitamins, and an anti-oxidant and a prescription stimulant. I try harder and more conscientiously to get more sleep, since my doctor says that getting less than 8 hours sleep is the single greatest factor that will exacerbate my scatteredness. ADHD is the gator I’m wrestling with.

You might be wondering: Whatever happened to fault? Isn’t anybody responsible for themselves any more? If we can’t shush a distracting child’s noise, who can we shush? If we can’t criticize our minister without actually talking to him about our concerns and how we can help, then who can we criticize without talking to them about it?

I am reminded that 30 years ago, a corner was being turned in our culture’s attitudes about domestic abuse. In 1979, as a law against marital rape was being considered, Bob Wilson, representative from California, said, “If you can’t rape your wife who can you rape?” It’s strange to think that only 33 years ago, that question could be asked in all seriousness – that it really did express a real sentiment in our society then. I don’t imagine the sentiment has entirely disappeared, but it’s been a long time since a public figure could get away with expressing it publicly.

The answer that the vast majority of Unitarian Universalists have been giving since well before 1979 is obviously, you can’t rape anyone. It is the second of our "five smooth stones of liberalism" that relations between persons ought to rest on mutual free consent and not coercion. (Click here.)

This idea of consent applies also to the way we treat our children. I'm not talking about formal consent, which requires have reached "the age of consent." Rather, I mean what is at the core of the idea of consent: a relationship of respect, care, and accountability. Parenting-type behaviors – like shushing a child – need also to rest upon consent. If I have a relationship with both the child and that child's parent, if I share in an understanding of what’s going on in the given situation, then I might not be out of line to give a mild admonishment. But only if I first have understanding, and an established relationship that affords me that role. I would certainly have to be aware of what neurological conditions might be at play. We have to know the child before we can help that child grow.

* * * * *
Part 4 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 5: "Worship"
Previous: Part 3: "The Holy Wholly Other"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

The Holy Wholly Other

I thank Meg Jobes (see her May 14 guest post) for her sharing about her son, Eli, and for urging me to address the way that congregations are not always welcoming, are not always understanding, are not always accepting of those who are neurologically atypical.

Can you hear it? Can you hear the call to a wonderful and transformative opportunity for opening our hearts? We have an opportunity here to learn a fuller love.

I’m not going to devote much time today to an interesting and informative talk on the biology, psychology, phsiology of autism and autism-spectrum-disorder. I will just note that autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood. Autism itself, Asperger’s syndrome and PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified are the three recognized forms of ASD, Autism spectrum disorder.

That’s the very basics. Even more basic is the message of this acronym for "AUTISM":
Always
Unique
Totally
Interesting
Sometimes
Mysterious.

Meg's post told us a little bit more, and I encourage us to learn more. Google "Autism". The Wikipedia entry is a start (click here).

Rather than a learned discourse on the nature of autism, my focus is on this question: What are we here for? Whatever the details of how autism works may be, what is asked of us as people of faith, people on a spiritual path, people who have come to worship and find some of our expectations not met? Maybe we didn't expect to find anyone neurologically atypical in our midst at worship. How do we handle the upsetting of that expectation? We didn't expect, right in the middle of Sunday worship, to have a chance to be welcoming, accepting, and understanding of a sudden outburst or unusually active moving around.

LoraKim once said we ought to pass out hard hats for Sunday worship. Watch your head. There's liable to be debris from crumbling expectations.

It was from Meg that I first encountered the word “neurodiversity.” And as she pointed out, diversity is important to us Unitarian Universalists. Diversity is a central part of the self-conception of the thousand-congregation denomination called the Unitarian Universalist Association, and it is central to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville. -Every week we at UUFG, we repeat out loud an affirmation that declares our commitment to be a diverse religious community.

Theologians have characterized God as the holy wholly other – that is, holy, and also completely different. They’re on to something. When we make contact with that which is so different that it pulls us out of our usual patterns and habits, pulls us out of our usual ego defenses, then it does feel transcendent. That experience that some of us call God, then, depends on experience of The Other, which we encounter right here on Earth in the form of other living beings. The holy other is encountered in plants and trees and other animals – living beings outside our species. The holy other is encountered in human beings outside our gender, outside our sexual orientation, outside our race, outside our ethnicity, outside our class, outside our generation, outside our condition of physical ability, outside our casual assumptions, outside the neurological brain patterns we are used to encountering.

That’s where we encounter the divine: outside of our expectations, outside our comfort zone. Sometimes, maybe, it might be an autistic kid who pushes you out of your comfort zone and into a place where the magic happens.

Connecting in compassion is the holy encounter. If I may call upon wisdom from the Jewish and Christian traditions – traditions from which we have diverged but with which we share deep roots – then, friends, I let me ask us again to remember Genesis, chapter 18:

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.”

Now Abraham doesn’t recognize who these visitors are. Abraham's use of “my lord,” is a general term of respect. Abraham thinks he’s greeting human strangers. He says:

"Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant. . . . Abraham ran to the heard, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.”

In ancient times, a stranger often represented a threat. Yet Abraham rushes out to show kindness. He sets out his best offering. What he finds out, is that he is serving God. Abraham's act of practical compassion leads to a holy encounter.

As I read that story, it’s not that reaching out to needs greater than our own causes a magical being to reward us for it – though I understand why a group might describe it that way. It certainly feels magical.

Reaching out and connecting to The Other IS the holy encounter. And the more OTHER, the more it stretches what we’re used to, violates our norms and expectations, the greater the possibility for encountering the holy. We touch the divine when we contact in compassion the other, the stranger. Whoever it is, that’s God. Whoever it is! And it might be a child whose brain is wired to upset your expectations.

* * * * *
Part 3 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 4: "The Second Smooth Stone of Liberalism"
Previous: Part 2: "Meg's Story: Elijah Has Autism"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

Meg's Story: Elijah Has Autism

Guest post by Meg Jobes

Reflection at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville

Delivered 2012 May 6, Sunday

My name is Meg Jobes, a member of this Fellowship for two years, and a mom of four extraordinary people. One of those extraordinary people, my little son Elijah, has autism.

One in every 88 children is being diagnosed with autism. That’s a big increase, and it is because we understand better what autism really is. Many of the classifications of special needs are no longer being used or are now being correctly classified as autism. For example, it used to be common to diagnose an autistic child as mentally retarded.

Kids think differently and learn differently from other kids, but they are not retarded. Nor are most of them like Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man,” nor are they savants in general. They do take longer to show their skills in some areas.

Elijah appeared to be able to read when he was just a baby – a trait known as hyperlexia. Actually, he had memorized all his books.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is an inability to understand social rules, sometimes an inability to verbalize, and seems to contain another disorder as part of it known as Sensory Processing Disorder, or Sensory Integration Disorder. There’s a lot going on with these kids, and, while they have some things in common, it’s different for each one of them. In Eli’s case, he cannot understand how to do basic things like read an expression on a face and assess what the person might be feeling at that time. I might feel angry, but it is impossible for him to understand the look on my face or the tone of my voice as angry.

He’s a sweet guy, my son. He senses the world in a different way, so he doesn’t act the same way. When he’s sitting here in the congregation, he might find the lights too bright, or the noises too loud or too soft. He might feel the air is strange on his skin or that the smell in the air is unbearable.

He can’t express his thoughts and feelings like others. We’re lucky if he can manage to use words to ask for help or to tell me he needs the bathroom. He has developmental delays so that he may look 9 years old, but he acts anywhere from 2 to 9 years old, depending on the situation. He is not undisciplined or intentionally trying to disrupt or be annoying. He simply cannot control the way his senses process information, so sometimes he jerks or claps or makes a noise so he can cope with the environment better.

Imagine sitting in your chair and an overwhelming light envelops you while discordant noises assault your ears and funny smells assault your nose all at the same time. So you clap, because that can make you focus on only the clap and not the overwhelming amount of information coming in. That’s what we think he and other children with autism are going through every day.

Eli wants to be here. He asks to come to church. Some vibe in the air, some feeling of normal he gets here makes him want to be here, despite how hard it can be.

We talk a lot in our fellowship about diversity of beliefs, of culture, of class, of race. The time has come to talk about neurodiversity. Every brain processes inputs differently and forms responses differently. Some brains – like the ones my other three children have – process within the range we call “neurotypical” – which means their brains work more-or-less the way we expect them to – so far. Who knows if any one of them will be assailed with challenges such as depression or ADHD or something else a little non-neurotypical.

We don’t understand much about how brains work, though, if the brain is typical, it’s easy to act like we know "what’s going on in there." Autistic brains surprise us. The strange and unusual ways they process their world startle us into realizing that we do not, in fact, know "what’s going on in there." With 1 in 88 children now diagnosed with a form of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, we, as a society, are going to have to figure out how to make those kids a part of an adult world that doesn’t work for them right now.

We need to look at any person with understanding and acceptance and strive to understand who they are.

I learn from Eli every day. You can learn from him, too. That little boy or girl who cannot sit still, who seems to be the biggest brat you ever saw, may be facing challenges you can’t see. His parents are probably exhausted, stressed, scared, embarrassed, ashamed. They are also proud, loving and stronger than almost anyone.

* * * * *
Part 2 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 3: "The Holy Wholly Other"
Beginning: Part 1: "Gator Wrestling"

A slightly different version is posted on Meg's blog: Click here.

Gator Wrestling

Here's a story that came into my Inbox a few days ago. Perhaps you've seen it?

A billionaire Florida man decided that he wanted to throw a party and invited all of his buddies and neighbors. He also invited Leroy, a rather less couth fellow in the neighborhood. He held the party around the pool in the backyard of his mansion. Leroy was enjoying himself. At the height of the party, the host said, 'I have 10-foot and very hungry gator in my pool, and I'll give a million dollars to anyone who has the nerve to jump in.' The words were barely out of his mouth when there was a loud splash. Everyone turned around and saw Leroy in the pool! Leroy was fighting the gator and seemed to have the upper-hand. Leroy was jabbing it in the eyes with his thumbs, throwing punches, head butts and choke holds, biting the gator on the tail and flipping it through the air like some kind of judo master. The water was churning and splashing everywhere. Both Leroy and the gator were screaming and raising heck. Finally Leroy strangled the gator and let it float to the top, belly-up like a dime-store goldfish. Leroy then slowly climbed out of the pool. Everybody was just staring at
him in disbelief. Finally the host says, 'Well, Leroy, I reckon I owe you a million dollars.'

'No, that's okay. I don't want It,' said Leroy.
The rich man said, 'Man, I have to give you something You won the bet. How about half a million bucks then?'
'No thanks, I don't want it,' answered Leroy.
The host said, 'Come on, I insist on giving you something. That was amazing. How about a new Porsche and a Rolex and some stock options?'
Again Leroy said no.
Confused, the rich man asked, 'Well, Leroy, then what do you want?'
Leroy said, 'I want the name of the so-and-so who pushed me in the pool!'

I don’t know who, or what, pushes you – what impulse pushes you to seek connection, to seek transformation – a glimpse of the possibility of a new way of being, an inchoate hope that your heart can open up to love, that your mind can know a deeper peace. There you are – jumped in, or thrown in, by an impulse you might not have expected.

Perhaps you arrive at Sunday morning worship for a nice, sedate time – something calming: some nice music, an interesting talk. You probably don't expect a gator fight. As my mother-in-law used to say when I complained of being dealt a bad hand at bridge – or anything: "So sorry about your bad luck."

The spiritual path involves a lot of wrestling. We wrestle with our inner selves. We come together in community to love and support each other. Truth be told, we also come to wrestle with each other. Sometimes the waters get to churning.

We come here with expectations. Part of us knows that the path of growth means upsetting those expectations. We come to worship with expectations. There's nothing wrong with having expectations, and no way to avoid having them in any case. The question is: what about when those expectations aren’t met? You might expect an Order of Service to be handed to you. If there is no Order of Service, how do you react? Or if there were no toilet paper in the bathrooms, how how would you take that in stride?

Getting upset is one option I can choose when my expectations aren't met. I can identify with my expectation: so if it is upset, then I am upset. I can make that choice.

When I do make that choice, there’s another little saying I’m liable to hear – not from my late mother-in-law, but from her daughter: “How’s that working out for ya?”

The path of spiritual deepening runs into the mountains of our resistance: it isn’t easy to let go of judgment about how things should be. Partly, that’s because judging mind has a good and important purpose to fill. We need to be able to exercise good judgment about what’s good and what isn’t. It’s just that if we’re getting upset, angry, scared, that’s probably not terribly functional most of the time. Whenever we choose to be upset, it’s worthwhile to ask ourselves: "how is this strategy working out for me"?

* * * * *
Part 1 of "Neurodiversity"
Next: Part 2: "Meg's Story: Elijah Has Autism"

Saturdao 20

Dao De Jing, verse 12

16 translations

1. James Legge:

Colour's five hues from th' eyes their sight will take;
Music's five notes the ears as deaf can make;
The flavours five deprive the mouth of taste;
The chariot course, and the wild hunting waste
Make mad the mind; and objects rare and strange,
Sought for, men's conduct will to evil change.
Therefore the sage seeks to satisfy (the craving of) the belly, and
not the (insatiable longing of the) eyes. He puts from him the
latter, and prefers to seek the former.

2. Archie Bahm:

Interest in the varieties of color diverts the eye from regarding the thing which is colored.
Attention to the differences between sound distracts the ear from consideration for the source of the sounds.
Desire for enjoyment of the various flavors misdirects the appetite from seeking foods which are truly nourishing.
Excessive devotion to chasing about and pursuing things agitates the mind with insane excitement.
Greed for riches ensnares one’s efforts to pursue his healthier motives.
The intelligent man is concerned about his genuine needs and avoids being confused by dazzling appearances.
He wisely distinguishes the one from the other.

3. Frank MacHovec:

The five colors blind the eye; the five notes deafen the ear; the five tastes dull the tongue.* Hunting and pursuing will unbalance the mind; striving for earthly goods produces unhealthy tension. Therefore the truly wise satisfy the inner self and reject the external. They accept one and deny the other.

4. D.C. Lau:

The five colors make man's eyes blind;
The five notes make his ears deaf;
The five tastes injure his palate;
Riding and hunting
Make his mind go wild with excitement;
Goods hard to come by
Serve to hinder his progress.
Hence the sage is
For the belly
Not for the eye.
Therefore he discards the one and takes the other.

5. Gia-Fu Feng:

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.

6. Stan Rosenthal:

“The Repression of Desires”
Through sight, the colours may be seen, but too much colour blinds us.
Apprehending the tones of sound, too much sound might make us deaf,
and too much flavour deadens taste.
When hunting for sport, and chasing for pleasure, the mind easily becomes perplexed.
He who collects treasures for himself more easily becomes anxious.
The wise person fulfills his needs, rather than sensory temptations.

7. Jacob Trapp:

“The Senses”
The five colors may blind the eye,
The five notes deafen the ear,
The five flavors numb the taste-buds.
Indulgence dulls and deadens the senses.
The race, the chase,
Destroy men’s peace.
Rare treasures
Rob men of rest.
Do not cater to your senses,
But provide for your needs.
Seek inner satisfaction
Rather than outward excitement.

8. Stephen Mitchell:

Colors blind the eye.
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.
The Master observes the world
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is open as the sky.

9. Victor Mair:

The five colors
make a man’s eyes blind;
Horseracing and hunting
make a man’s mind go mad;
Goods that are hard to obtain
make a man’s progress falter;
The five flavors
make a man’s palate dull;
The five tones
make a man’s ears deaf.
For these reasons,
In ruling, the sage
attends to the stomach, not to the eye.
Therefore,
He rejects the one and adopts the other.

10. Michael LaFargue:

The five colors make people’s eyes go blind
the five tones make people’s ears go deaf
the five flavors make people’s mouths turn sour.
Galloping and racing, hunting and chasing, make people’s minds go mad.
Goods hard to come by corrupt people’s ways.
And so the Wise Person:
Goes by the belly, not the eye.
Yes:
He leaves ‘that’ aside, and attends to ‘this’.

11. Peter Merel:

“Substance”
Too much colour blinds the eye,
Too much music deafens the ear,
Too much taste dulls the palate,
Too much play maddens the mind,
Too much desire tears the heart.
In this manner the sage cares for people:
He provides for the belly, not for the senses;
He ignores abstraction and holds fast to substance.

12. Ursula LeGuin:

“Not wanting”
The five colors
blind our eyes.
The five notes
deafen our ears.
The five flavors
dull our taste.
Racing, chasing, hunting,
drives people crazy.
Trying to get rich
ties people in knots.
So the wise soul
watches with the inner
not the outward eye,
letting that go,
keeping this.

13. Ron Hogan:

Sight obscures.
Noise deafens.
Desire messes with your heart.
The world messes with your mind.
A Master watches the world
but keeps focused on what's real.

14. Ames and Hall:

The five colors blind the eye,
The hard riding of the hunt addles both heart and mind,
Property hard to come by subverts proper conduct,
The five flavors destroy the palate,
And the five notes impair the ear.
It is for this reason that in the proper governing by the sages:
They exert their efforts on behalf of the abdomen rather than they eye.
Thus eschewing one they take the other.

15. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura:

The five colors blind the inner eye.
The five tones deafen the inner ear.
The five flavors dull the inner tongue.
In pursuit of outer pleasures,
Racing and hunting madden the inner mind,
Rare goods obstruct inner progress.
Therefore,
The sage attends to that which is within, not that which is without.
He lives from the center, not from the periphery.

16. Addiss and Lombardo:

Five colors darken the eyes.
Five tones deaden the ears.
Five tastes jade the palate.
Hunting and racing madden the heart.
Exotic goods ensnarl human lives.
Therefore the Sage
Takes care of the belly, not the eye,
Chooses one, rejects the other.

* * * * *
*[MacHovec’s note:] According to the ancients, the universe exists in fives:
Five colors: blue, yellow, red, white, black.
Five notes: do, re, mi, sol, la
Five tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, salt

* * * * *
The concluding lines today echo what we saw back in verse 3b (Saturdao 7):
"It is for this reason that in the proper governing by the sages:
They empty the hearts-and-minds of the people and fill their stomachs,
They weaken their aspirations and strengthen their bones." (Ames-Hall).

* * * * *
The belly: the center, satiable.
The eye: outward, peripheral, insatiable, ever restless, wandering, discontent.
Be filled with the simple, satisfying.
Live from being rather than doing,
Eyes wide closed.

* * * * *
See: Saturdao Index

Horizontal, Vertical, Rorty, Me, God: Mostly Harmless

My friend David Rhaesa left a comment on Lake Chalice about a week ago in which he remembered me telling him -- some nearly 30 years ago -- about "horizontal" versus "vertical" infinite regress.

"Infinite regress" comes up whenever we are trying to explain or justify ourselves. We offer some kind of rationale, but then the rationale can be questioned, and we offer a defense of the rationale, and the defense can be further questioned . . . ad infinitum.

David and I met at Baylor U, where, in 1984-85, we were both graduate students in communication studies. I took a number of classes in "argumentation" where we talked a lot about human justificatory devices for bolstering belief. I had the vague and vaguely unsettling sense that some of what my undergrad philosophy profs had been carrying on about might be relevant. So one semester I wandered across the quad to take a course, "Epistemology," in Baylor's philosophy department. The last reading assignment in the class consisted of two chapters from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) by Richard Rorty.

I was hooked. I read everything by Rorty I could get my hands on. I wrote my thesis at Baylor on "Richard Rorty's Pragmatism: Implications for Argumentation Theory." By 1987, after working a couple years as a speech instructor, I was enrolled as a PhD student at the University of Virginia, where Rorty was then on the faculty.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Rorty (click here) begins:

Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted.

I loved it: both the critique of philosophy's "business as usual," and the positive vision. And I loved that it was controversial enough to support my renegade self-image.

A few months ago, David Brooks wrote in his NYTimes column (click here):

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview. If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition....If you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true. The old leftists had dialectical materialism and the Marxist view of history. Libertarians have Hayek and von Mises.

And Meredith Garmon, age 25-35, had Richard Rorty (along with the pragmatist tradition and others Rorty frequently invoked: William James, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Willard Quine, Donald Davidson).

"What did the little bastards think they were doing?"
Rorty (circa 1991) describes the reaction of Ivy League English
professors to the news in 1980 that polls showed a majority of
their own students had voted for Reagan. That news
prompted English departments to begin churning out
an extensive body of work insisting that literary theory,
such as deconstruction, implied a particular (and leftist) politics.

The "horizontal" and "vertical" thing comes from Rorty's first published essay (not counting three book reviews), written back in 1961 when he was a 29-year-old assistant professor of philosophy at Wellesley College. "Pragmatism, Categories, and Language," Philosophical Review (v. 70, 1961 April, pp. 197-233) was the first of hundreds more that followed over the next 46 years. In it, Rorty champions Charles Sanders Peirce (which will come as a surprise to people who know only Rorty's work starting with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature or later) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (which will come as no surprise to anyone). Rorty interpreted both Peirce and Wittgenstein as "insist[ing] on the unavoidability of certain 'harmless' infinite regresses." There may be "potentially a sign behind every sign" (Peirce), or "potentially a language game behind every language game" (Wittgenstein), but since "practice does not require the actualization of these potentialities," the regress is harmless. Both Peirce and Wittgenstein repudiate the urge many philosophers have felt to

"look for something determinate underlying the indeterminate -- something of which the indeterminate is an epiphenomenon."

Rorty finds (and finds in Peirce and Wittgenstein), that the supposedly determinate substrate turns out

"to be itself indeterminate and to require the postulation of a still deeper lying determinate, and so on. Whether one thinks of this regress as going down in search of the Deepest or up the ladder of logical types in search of the Highest is less important than what I shall call the vertical character of both searches. This character consists in the fact that one looks at each new step as a transition to a new level -- a level which is a necessary condition for the existence of the previous step(s). That is, at level n one looks at the existence of level n-1 as possile only by virtue of n, which itself exists a se. Such a regress can be contrasted with what I shall call a horizontal one, in which each new step gives us something which is of essentially the same kind as what we had at the last, but something which renders the last step more determinate than it was. The relation between step n and step n-1 is thus not like the relation between creator and created, but like that between a mystifying book and a brilliant commentary on it; the book was there already, even though perhaps noody could make much of it until the commentary came along. Nor would there be anything surprising in somebody writing a commentary on the commentary, and so ad infinitum. Movement along a horizontal regress lacks the sort of jolts we feel whenever we are forced to a new level in a vertical regress (the sort of jolt felt by the child when the question "Who made God?" first occurs to him) and it also lacks the sense of utter futility which grips us when we realize that we can always be forced to move on from any level of vertical regress. The reason a vertical regress can be condemned to futility...is that it attempts the impossible task of making determinate the relationship between the purely determinate and the purely indeterminate (resembling in this the task of explaining creatio ex nihilo, or the Concrete Universal). The reason why a horizontal regress cannot be destroyed by the same argument is that it takes the datum as it finds it, as a determinate indetermination, and realizes that all further steps will also produce determinate indeterminations which, while they can render the original datum more determinate, cannot, because of their own indetermination, render it perfectly determinate....The permanent possibility of practice is what renders harmless the indefinite horizontal regress of interpretation."

Rorty never again -- in print, nor in speech in the many honors I spent in his classes and seminars -- invoked this distinction between vertical and horizontal. I once asked him once whether he had changed his mind about it. He shrugged and said he hadn't. It just hasn't occurred to him to mention. Ever again. Guess he himself had moved on out that horizontal regress.

I, however, still refer to the "vertical" and "horizontal" distinction. I'm in the business, now, of talking with people about God and "God" -- and what might be the meaning of the word, and what might be the meaning of the experiences which prompt them to use that word. It's hard (and necessarily must be hard) to say just what we mean. The phrase, "some sort of higher power," is likely to occur. When it does, I'm liable to say, or think about saying, something like: "Maybe the search for the true and the real isn't a matter of digging down for the deeper or climbing up to the higher. Maybe it's simply a matter of weaving a web of connections among our experiences and intentions, beliefs and desires, that are all at the same level. Maybe the process of discerning reality is horizontal rather than vertical. Maybe, that is, God isn't so much a 'higher' power as a 'broader' power."

Rorty himself made a rare venture into theology in this, his first essay, written back in the Mad Men era.

Does it harm our relation to God if we realize the futility of understanding his relation to the world? To some men, this is indeed harmful; they may, for instance, cease to be able to pray. Such men are analogous to those who commit the classic reductionist error of expecting the results of analysis to exist prior to the analysis, and who take the ill success of an analysis to entail the irreality of the datum. But, as existentialist as well as pragmatist theologians tell us, such a realization need not be harmful (and may well be therapeutic). When Tillich, for instance, tells us that the task of theology is no more and no less than to "correlate" revelation with the culture of the times, and that revelation prior to such correlation is, in so far forth, indeterminate, he is saying that theological explanation takes a horizontal rather than a vertical form. But since theology is, after all, not the religious life but simply one (more or less optional) expression of it, this eternally indeterminate character of theological explanation is harmless.

I'm reminded, looking back at that essay more than 50 years after its publication, of Douglas Adams' Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Guide's entry for "Earth," according to the story, is one word: "Harmless." As the story progresses, one of the writers for the Guide submits an updated and expanded entry: "Mostly harmless."

Postscript: Inequality and Polarization

A few days ago, Lake Chalice posted this graph:

The graph shows how one of the effects of rising inequality of income is a polarizing of our political system. Or vice-versa. "House polarization" is a measure of the internal homogeneity (low diversity of viewpoint) among House Democrats and among House Republicans, and the ideological gap between an average House Democrat and an average House Republican.

The Gini Index (or Gini coefficient) was developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist, Corrado Gini in 1912. It measures equality or inequality of distribution. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 (where every person has exactly the same income) to 1 (where one person has all the income there is, and everyone else gets none).

Getting the Gini index and the House polarization index to map so neatly onto each other is, of course, partly a matter of adjusting the graph's two scales to get the best match. But that's not all there is to it. However we  set the scales, we're going to see both the Gini and the polarization indices going sharply up since the late 70s -- and every 0.1 increase on the polarization index corresponds to about a 0.017 increase on the Gini index.

Growing inequality of income tends to encourage political polarization -- while political polarization leads to policies that further widen the gap between the rich and the poor. How do we break out of this vicious cycle?

This week's defeat of six-term Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar certainly illustrates the trend toward polarization. Lugar and Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine were dealmakers within the Republican party, willing to work with Democrats to compromise rather than effect gridlock by standing firm on ideological principles. Snowe is already gone -- and now Lugar has been ousted by a tea-party hardliner. Our political polarization continues to worsen.

Paul Krugman's column last week (click here), makes the point that:

If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971,...Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed. But that was then. Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

Growing polarization makes it increasingly difficult for either side to see a distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph -- though Krugman finds that it is the Republicans who have become especially unable to see such a distinction.

For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

Our country has managed to break out of this vicious cycle before. The graph above starts in 1947. Let's look further back to 1879:

We have had high levels of polarization before. From 1879 until the mid-1920s political polarization was about where it is now -- and income inequality was similarly high then. How did we break out of the vicious cycle before?

Let's remember our history. The constitutional amendment allowing a federal income tax was passed in 1916. Oh, and look -- that's about when the trend toward decreased polarization began. Factors that plausibly facilitated the continuation of that trend include the crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, the creation of Social Security and a slew of other safety net programs under FDR, and World War II.

With a return to the income tax rates we had in the 50s and 60s and renewed commitment to social safety net programs, maybe this time we can skip the need for a World War. But, dear and gentle reader, we will not get those policy changes without a spiritual shift toward greater connectedness with our neighbors.

To break the vicious cycle of domestic abuse generation after generation requires intentional work at counseling and creation of social structures of accountability. To break the vicious cycle whereby inequality fosters polarization which fosters further inequality will require a similar intervention of intentional creation of habits of building connection, and being accountable to one another for doing so.

* * * * *
This is a postscript to the series, "Our Spirits Long to Be Made Whole," which begins here.

Deep Rooting of a Passion for Connectedness

How does a country achieve equality? In the nations of greater equality, some of them, like Scandinavian countries, get there with redistributive taxes and benefits and a large welfare state. Others, like Japan, manage to have greater equality before taxes and benefits: the highest-paying jobs aren't all that high and the lowest-paying jobs still pay fairly well. For the U.S. to make progress in rolling back the inequalities that have been growing since 1981 when Ronald Reagan took office, some combination of income caps, higher minimum wage, and a more progressive tax structure might be a good start.

Unitarian Universalists care about our world. And it’s clear now that “further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth. The issue is now community and how we relate to each other.” That means: the political task is fundamentally a spiritual task. Even if the laws could be passed, they could be repealed by the next administration. Hope must lie in the deep rooting of a passion for connectedness.

Let me say that again:

Hope must lie in the deep rooting of a passion for connectedness.

That’s why, as important as it is for us to get our voices out there, it’s even more important to get our ears out there. Put away the smart phones, stop texting with our friends who post clever repartee on Facebook to reinforce our prejudices, and start listening with care, face to face, with people we might not agree with.

Let us be charged full with the charge of the spirit, with a passion for connection. Isn't that how a people of love live in the world? Isn't that what is ours to do? Isn't that why we are Unitarian Universalists? Is it not a passion for connectedness that has brought us here?

Well, is it?

So here’s what I want you to do. Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Find someone this week with whom you don’t see eye to eye. Have a conversation with them about the topic you don’t see eye to eye on.

I appreciate that this may be challenging. This is my assignment, too, and right now I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm going to try to find a way.

Give yourself a week. Then check in at your local Unitarian Universalist congregation and find someone there to tell how it went for you. Or, leave a comment here at Lake Chalice to describe the encounter.

To get full spiritual credit for this assignment, it must be face to face, and must last at least half an hour. Partial credit for phone calls. No credit for emails or text messages.

A real conversation. Just one: some time in the next seven days.

Come spirit, come. Our heart’s control.
Our spirits long to be made whole.

Amen.

* * * * *
Part 6 of "Our Spirits Long to be Made Whole"
Previous: Part 5: "Roots of Joy, Roots of Despair"
Beginning: Part 1: "Lost But Making Good Time"

For the "Postscript" to this series: click here.

Roots of Joy, Roots of Despair

A relatively equal society (i.e., one in which the total of the top 20% of incomes is less than 5 times the total of the bottom 20% of incomes) is able to sustain a shared understanding among its members. But if, as in the U.S., the top fifth are getting eight or nine times what the bottom fifth are getting, there’s a disconnect. The wealthy are beyond attainability, beyond any story of deservingness we could tell ourselves. We lose the sense that we’re in this together.

The wealthy become “them.” We can’t see "them" as caring about "us" -- so we don’t care about them. Anomie and division set in: anger and alienation.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"?

Sensing our resentment, they retreat behind gated communities, which further increases the disconnect. We begin to believe the game is rigged; we don’t have a chance. When we believe that, we become more likely to behave in ways that make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, our neighbor really is our self, so when there are neighbors we don’t care about, we don’t care about ourselves, don’t do the things that better conduce to our own well-being.

Rich and poor alike feel the division, the disconnect, and respond with higher levels of depression, higher levels of consuming things that aren’t good for us: from drugs to alcohol to junk food to mindless TV shows to mindless consumer products.

Our spirits are not whole when inequality is so massive – and our spirits long to be made whole.

The benefits of equality show up all over. They show up, for example, on baseball teams.

“A well-controlled study of over 1,600 players in 29 teams over a nine-year period found that major league baseball teams with smaller income differences among players do significantly better than the more unequal teams.” (Wilkinson and Picket, The Spirit Level, 237).

Yogi Bierra, the baseball player who pronounced his team, "lost, but making good time," also, on another occasion, expressed (charmingly, if nonsensically) that spirit of equality and basic care. A reporter asked him what he would do if he found a million dollars. Yogi said, "If the guy was poor, I'd give it back."

When people feel like they stand on equal footing with their neighbors or teammates, there’s a cohesion that lifts spirits, heals wounds, and improves performance.

My colleague, the Unitarian Universalist minister at our Clearwater, Florida congregation, the Rev. Abhi Janamanchi, was born and raised in India. He was a young adult before he ever left India. At our District gathering in Jacksonville last month I heard Abhi share his Odyssey. The annual Odyssey presentation is a tradition among the Unitarian Universalist ministers of Florida, as it is in a number of our districts. I was honored to present my Odyssey last year (I have gotten around to posting only the first part of it on Lake Chalice: click here), and this year Abhi had that honor. He spoke movingly of the shock of coming to this country. Of course, there was a new language to be learned and a new culture. But it wasn’t just that US culture was different. It was that it was so disconnected. And so unhappy. There are many poor in India. By sheer material standards, India's poor are worse off than most of the U.S. poor -- except that almost all Indians do have some kind of home: a shanty perhaps, but there is relatively little homelessness in India. What was striking was the despair in the U.S. In both the homeless poor and those who have a place to live, the weight of despair brings with it dysfunction. Abhi spoke of the joy in life that in his homeland is evident even among the poor. It was moving and disturbing and hopeful all at the same time.

There is a joy in community and connection to which material wealth, or lack of it, is all but irrelevant (as long as ill health and strong hunger are mostly at bay). High levels of social inequality destroy the basic grounding for that community and connection.

* * * * *
Part 5 of "Our Spirits Long to Be Made Whole"
Next: Part 6: "Deep Rooting of a Passion for Connectedness"
Previous: Part 4: "Love Knows No Means. It Knows Standard Deviation"
Beginning: Part 1: "Lost But Making Good Time"

Come spirit come, our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed. By this we worship and are freed.

Verse 3 of "Thou I May Speak with Bravest Fire", words by Hal Hopson, melody from Trad. English. Hear the tune: click here.

Love Knows No Means. It Knows Standard Deviation.

The US is quite wealthy. Annual national income is around $38,000 per person.

But on the measure of social health (combined scores for life expectancy, infant mortality, homicides, obesity, teen births, imprisonment rates, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, children's educational performance, social mobility, and level of trust) we’re doing worse than most countries that have only half that much per-person income.

After meeting a certain minimum, more wealth doesn’t do us any good. What does correlate with social health is equality. Countries with high inequality, whether they are rich or poor overall, have worse social health. In statisticians' terms, it’s not the mean income that matters, it’s the standard deviation.

Assuming a minimum level of wealth (about $9,000 per person per year), if a country’s top 20 percent is making 4 or 5 times what that country’s bottom 20 percent is making, then that country’s social health is going to be pretty good. If a country’s top 20 percent is making 8 or 9 times what that country’s bottom 20 percent is making, then that country’s social health tends to be worse.

The US, for instance, is quite rich, and Portugal is relatively poor. Yet they both have high inequality and low social health. US social health (combined scores on the factors listed above) is roughly the same as Portugal’s.

The US and Norway, however, are both quite rich. Both countries have average income of about $37 or $38 thousand per person per year. Yet Norway has much greater equality – and much higher social health.

Researchers conclude:

“The evidence shows that reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us . . . this includes the better off.” (Wilkinson and Picket, The Spirit Level)

If we are to be charged full with the charge of the spirit, and carry that forward into our lives and into our world, we need a sense of how this should be so. If I’m poor, and I’m going to be poor anyway, how does it hurt me if you’re rich? That seems like a reasonable question.

I might not know how to articulate the answer, but if I’m poor, and you are, too, then I can feel like we’re in this together. I have a sense of common cause with you. We may not have much, be we’ve got each other.

Societies with relative equality (the top 20 percent earns less than 5 times what the bottom 20 percent earns) maintain some shared assumptions about wealth and about each other. Roughly, the attitude is:

If there are somewhat wealthier folks among us, that’s OK. I can accept that some people are luckier, or more skillful at work that society prizes, or they’re more driven to work hard, and they end up wealthier. The relatively wealthy serve as a reminder to me of what good schooling and commitment and a little luck might make available to my children. If the town doctor has a bigger house on a hill, that’s OK – he’s smart and had a lot of training, and he’s using that to help us when we get sick, so more power to him. Maybe my kid can get a scholarship and be a doctor.

If, however, the rich-poor gap grows too large, that attitude loses purchase. The ones at the bottom and middle can no longer see the wealth of the ones at the top as either attainable (by anyone who doesn't already have it) or deserved. That the previous paragraph sounds as quaint as it does is one of the indicators that the US rich-poor gap has been unhealthy for some time.

* * * * *
Part 4 of "Our Spirits Long to Be Made Whole"
Next: Part 5: "Roots of Joy, Roots of Despair"
Previous: Part 3: "High Inequality Corresponds to Low Social Health"
Beginning: Part 1: "Lost But Making Good Time"

Come spirit come, our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed. By this we worship and are freed.

Verse 3 of "Thou I May Speak with Bravest Fire", words by Hal Hopson, melody from Trad. English. Hear the tune: click here.

High Inequality Corresponds to Low Social Health

When you compare nation to nation, there’s no correlation between wealth and life expectancy or mortality. Rich countries have about the same life expectancies and mortality rates as relatively poor countries, until you get into the really poor end of the spectrum. As long as a nation has per-person income above about $9,000 a year, further increases do nothing to increase life expectancy. That’s the nation-to-nation comparison.

But when we do a zip code to zip code comparison, we get a different picture. The poorer zip codes have higher mortality than the richer zip codes. If you took several of the poorest zip codes, created a new island in the South Pacific, put them all there, maintained their per-person incomes as they were, made a new island nation of them, they’d have decreased mortality. They’d be fine. But because they live near the wealthier areas, they perceive that difference. They see inescapably all around them that they live in a society that is set up to work others, but not for them.

There are various ways to measure inequality: We can compare the top X% to the bottom Y% for any X and any Y. And all the measures very closely correspond with each other, so it doesn’t matter much which one we use. One very common measure it the ratio of the top 20 percent to the bottom 20 percent. In Japan and four Scandinavian countries (combined), the top 20 percent bring in less than four times what the bottom 20 percent earn. The ratio is between 3.4 to 1 and 4.3 to 1. In the US, the ratio is 8.5 to 1: the top 20 percent get eight-and-a half times what the bottom 20 percent get. Singapore's inequality is even worse: the ratio there is 9.7 to 1.



As a people of faith, as a people of compassion, we care about our world. As a people of compassion, we need to know what’s going on.

An image that comes often to my mind is from a story of the Dalai Lama approaching someone he knew. He discovered that her leg was in a cast. He said to her, "What happened?" The Dalai Lama has a way of his compassion being so obvious on his face, and in his voice. So you have to imagine that simple question -- “What happened?” -- as the expression of a gentle man exuding compassion with every aspect of his being. That’s the image.

We take in the wonder of this world, and we also take in the broken-ness we see, and ask, “What happened?” What went wrong here? As a a people called to love, we ask, “what happened?” How can this social woundedness be healed? Let us see what we can learn.

Researchers created an overall measure of social health. The social health measure is an amalgam of various factors. High social health is comprised of low rates on these:

• homicides,
• obesity,
• teenage births,
• infant mortality,
• imprisonment rates,
• mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction),

plus high rates on these:

• life expectancy,
• children’s educational performance,
• social mobility, and
• level of trust.

Those are nine factors that go into an overall score of social health. It turns out that a country’s overall wealth does not correlate with social health. That is, as long as the per-person income is at least about $9,000. After that, more wealth has no effect on social health. Equality, however, does correlate with social health. Poor countries (as long as they are not so poor as to fall below about $9,000 per person per year) have greater social health the lower the ratio of the top 20 percent to the bottom twenty percent. Rich countries also have greater social health the lower the inequality among their citizens. Rich countries with high inequality have social health that is as low as poor countries with high inequality. Poor countries with $9,000 or $10,000 per person per year, but with low inequality, have social health that is pretty high -- as high as rich countries with low inequality.

* * * * *
Part 3 of "Our Spirits Long to Be Made Whole"
Next: Part 4: "Love Knows No Means. It Knows Standard Deviation"
Previous: Part 2: "Numbers to Know"
Beginning: Part 1: "Lost But Making Good Time"

Come spirit come, our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed. By this we worship and are freed.

Verse 3 of "Thou I May Speak with Bravest Fire", words by Hal Hopson, melody from Trad. English. Hear the tune: click here.

Saturdao 19

Dao De Jing, verse 11b

16 translation

1. James Legge:

The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends.
Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness.

2. Archie Bahm:

In order to build a house, although we must establish solid walls, we must also provide doors and windows; so both the impenetrable and penetrable are essential to a useful building.
Therefore, we profit equally by the positive and the negative ingredients in each situation.

3. Frank MacHovec:

Doors and windows are cut out of the walls of a house but the ultimate use of the house depends upon the parts where nothing exists. So there is advantage in using what can be seen, what exists. And there is also advantage in using what cannot be seen, what is non-existent.

4. D.C. Lau:

Cut out doors and windows in order to make a room.
Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the room.
Thus what we gain is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be put to use.

5. Gia-Fu Feng:

Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

6. Stan Rosenthal:

“The Utility of Non-Existence”
Without a door, the room cannot be entered, and without windows it is dark.
Such is the utility of non-existence.

7. Jacob Trapp:

“Stillness, Emptiness”
The empty areas enclosed by walls,
The openings into space
Of doors and windows,
Make a house habitable.
Motion, stillness,
Emptiness, solidity,
Existence, non-existence,
All serve.
A man should be at times
An empty vessel waiting to be filled,
Still at the very core of his being
As the hub of a wheel is still.

8. Stephen Mitchell:

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

9. Victor Mair:

Cut out doors and windows to make a room,
but it is in the spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the room lies.
Therefore,
Benefit may be derived from something,
but it is nothing that we find usefulness.

10. Michael LaFargue:

Cut out doors and windows in making a house --
in their ‘nothing’ lies the house’s usefulness.
Yes:
‘Being’ makes for profit
‘Nothing’ makes for usefulness.

11. Peter Merel:

Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.

12. Ursula LeGuin:

“The uses of not”
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

13. Ron Hogan:

A house is made out of wood or brick,
but you live in the space between the walls.
We work with something,
but we use nothing.

14. Ames and Hall:

We bore out doors and windows to make a dwelling,
But the utility of the dwelling is a function of the nothingness inside it.
Thus, it might be something (you) that provides the value,
But it is nothing that provides the utility.

15. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura:

A room is created by cutting out doors and windows;
The usefulness of the room
lies in the space where there is nothing.
Therefore,
The benefit of things lies in the usefulness of nothing.

16. Addiss and Lombardo:

Windows and doors are cut to make a room.
The room’s use comes from emptiness.
Therefore,
Having leads to profit,
Not having leads to use.

* * * * *

What we value, profit and benefit from,
are various things.
What we use,
in the quotidian flow:
Oh, that's nothing.

Numbers to Know

I know we have created for ourselves such a hustle-bustle world, and actually listening to someone slows us down. It slows me down to have to take the time to listen, to reflect back what I think I’ve heard. It takes time to make sure I heard it right. And maybe by the time the other person is ready for my turn, time is up.

That’s OK. We don't always have to get our turn. We can let go of that need.

But we do have to be ready, just in case. So let us know some numbers.

Q: In 1980, what was the percent of the nation’s total income that was earned that year by the top one percent?

A: It was eight percent in 1980.

That’s a number I had read and forgotten, and re-looked it up this week, and I’m going to try to remember now. That, and the next number, are worth remembering. The top one percent of incomes accounted for 8 percent of the nation’s total income in 1980. Eight times the average income would seem to be plenty. Who could want more than that? Surely that’s more than enough.

You can probably tell where I’m going with this. We had some substantial income inequalities 30 years ago, and today, you guessed it, it’s even worse. So, how much worse?

Q: What percent of the nation’s income goes to the top one percent now (well, as of 2007)?

A: Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, and now professor of public policy, reports that in 2007 the top 1 percent of US earners were bringing in 23 percent of the nation’s total income.

Wow.



Starting in the early 20th century and continuing through the middle decades of the century, the trend in this country was toward steadily improving income equality. The gap between the top one percent, or the top twenty percent, and the average of everybody else was shrinking. Then that trend reversed.

Our spirits long to be made whole, to be connected to each other on this wonderful world we share – to be connected with equals as equals. I don’t mean that we all have to have exactly the same income, but when the inequalities get this bad, it has a corrosive effect on the social contract, and on our souls as a people.

“Consider executive pay. During the 1950s and 60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker . . . In 1980, the big-company CEO too home roughly 40 times. By 1990 it was 100 times. By 2007, . . . CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned.” (Robert Reich)

Various studies in various ways show that when inequality is greater, violence goes up, trust goes down.

“It is a remarkable paradox that, at the pinnacle of human material and technical achievement, we find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, worried about how others see us, unsure of our friendships, driven to consume, and with little or no community life.”

– so write Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket in their illuminating study, The Spirit Level.

All of those conditions of modern life -- anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community -- are connected with inequality – either as cause or as result, and often partly both. Wilkinson and Picket go on to write:

“The unease we feel about the loss of social values and the way we are drawn into the pursuit of material gain is often experienced as if it were a purely private ambivalence which cuts us off from others. . . . As voters, we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.” (4)

When we're all in it for only ourselves, there's increased political polarization.



This is not a life of spiritual wholeness.

* * * * *
Part 2 of "Our Spirits Long to be Made Whole"
Next: Part 3: "High Inequality Corresponds to Low Social Health"
Previous: Part 1: "Lost But Making Good Time"

Come spirit come, our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed. By this we worship and are freed.

Verse 3 of "Thou I May Speak with Bravest Fire", words by Hal Hopson, melody from Trad. English. Hear the tune: click here.

Lost But Making Good Time

The great catcher for the New York Yankees, Yogi Bierra, got his start in the minor leagues. Once, the team bus was winding its way through the hinterlands looking for some small town where the team was due to play. Yogi was studying the road map. He looked at his watch.

"We're lost," he announced. "But we're making good time."

Our economy for the last 70 years -- the recent recession notwithstanding – has been making good time. But we're lost.

To begin to find our way, we have to understand where we took a wrong turn. We took a wrong turn when we decided that the measure of how well we’re doing is our total wealth rather than how it is distributed. We take a wrong turn every time we look at our national mean per capita income, or mean per capita spending, or mean per capita productivity, but don’t look at the standard deviation, don't look at the growing gaps between us and how that gap corrodes our common life.

To help our country find its way again, people of good will (that would be us, right?) must have some basic facts ready at hand. We need to know some numbers. We need to let our voices be heard. We are a people of faith, a people of heart and soul, and we want peace. Our spirits long to be made whole.

Yes, all around us we see such amazing beauty. As the song goes:

I seen trees of green, red roses too
I see ’em bloom for me and you.
I see skies of blue, clouds of white
Bright blessed days, dark sacred nights.
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do?
They’re really saying, “I love you.”
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

What a wonderful world!

Because this world is so intrinsically wonderful, when injustice mars that wonder, it tears our hearts. That wonderful world needs us. It needs our engagement. As thoughtful people, people of heart striving for a fuller love, as people of a faith that tells us that everyone is worthy of decent treatment, as people whose spirits long to be made whole, what is ours to do is to speak up for fairness, equality, love. The public arena needs our voices: writing letters to the editor, letters to our lawmakers, organizing, filling up the blogosphere, and the social media with our vision. Let the beauty we love be what we do.

But there are two things missing from public discourse. Truth is just one of them. Listening is the other. Our world needs our engagement, and, yes, it needs us to speak some truth, it needs our faithful voices at the table. And it needs us not to let that need lead us to fail to listen. And I know this is hard. I have not mastered the skill of making sure a person has been heard and feels heard before I venture to offer an alternative viewpoint. But I believe in such listening. If we help each other, we can learn this together.

* * * * *
Part 1 of "Our Spirits Long to be Made Whole"
Next: Part 2: "Numbers to Know"

Come spirit come, our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed. By this we worship and are freed.

Verse 3 of "Thou I May Speak with Bravest Fire", words by Hal Hopson, melody from Trad. English. Hear the tune: click here.

Postscript: Explaining "Explaining"

In the frist segment of “Evolution’s Arrow,” I addressed the meaning – or, rather, vagueness -- of “explanation”:

What is explanation? What does it mean to “explain”? A literature teacher explains James Joyce’s Ulysses. The chess master explains why it’s better not to take the bishop on move 21. A museum docent explains the Van Gogh paintings. You explain to your new friend the idiosyncratic behavior of your old friend. These are all very different, though they all go by the name explanation. Science offers a sort of explanation. Science helps us make sense of things in one particular way: namely, a way that allows for control and prediction. Religion helps us make sense of things in a different way. Where science helps us control and predict the universe, religion helps us befriend our world, enter into a relationship of love and value with it. Scientific understanding lets us know what’s going to happen. Religious understanding lets us feel at home in this universe, at peace with it, whatever may happen.

On Facebook, I linked to that blog post, along with the question: “Science and religion have no more to do with each other than auto mechanics and flower arrangement?” It’s a multi-valent question: whether you think the science-religion connection is tighter than the auto mechanics-flower arrangement connection depends not only on how connected you regard the former, but also on how connected you regard the latter. (Indeed, as the bud vase in VW’s “New Beetle” illustrated, perhaps auto mechanics and flower arrangement are connected after all).

My facebook update was favored with a comment from Lyn Robbins. Lyn and I were students together at Baylor for a couple years almost thirty years ago. Lyn blogs over at Blogarithmic Expressions. He’s an articulate and thoughtful Christian, and, Lord knows, the world could use more of those. (The world could also use more Unitarian Universalists committed to spiritual cultivation, but that’s a topic for another time.) Quoth Lyn:

Meredith, you will not be surprised that I disagree at some level. Science and religion are in fact related: they are both human attempts to explain the work of God. Certainly they come from (apparently) different starting places, make (some) different assumptions, and use (mostly) different methods. But at their core, they both ask why the sun rises, why two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen make water, and why the human being is different from all other created animals. And then, the similarities cease, for while science can and does describe each of these questions with more detail and perhaps with bigger words, science has to answer each of them "I don't know."

I replied to Lyn, and I confess I was a touch on the cranky side because I thought I had already answered this “explain” thing on Lake Chalice, and I didn’t know whether Lyn had bothered to actually read it. Probably he did – and, as usual, I was neither as clear nor as persuasive as I deliriously imagine myself to be. (It’s also possible that I might not be as right as I imagine, but, naturally, I don’t think that’s it. Must be that I just haven't been clear. My view on the subject hasn’t changed except insofar as clarifying a view does change it.) Quoth I:‎

1. My status update is asking a question, not stating a claim with which one could disagree.
‎2. The key word is "explain" but we have no clarity on exactly what "explaining" is. The variety of activities that get called "explanation" is vast. A chess player might feel that chess explains life. A musician might say that music explains life. But that doesn't mean chess and music have much to do with each other.
3. I appreciate Lyn's conclusion that science must end in "I don't know." Religion, too, must end in that "I don't know" of mystery and wonder. So science and religion have at least these two things in common: (a) they both explain, and (b) they both utterly fail to explain. (Auto mechanics and flower arrangement have more concrete similarities than that--precise positioning of physical parts, for example.)
4. RE: "why the human being is different from all other created animals" Actually, I find both science and religion to be more gratifying, more helpful, more inspiring, and more whole when they facilitate awareness of the similarities and connections (rather than the differences) between us humans and the rest of creation. "How we are like them" tells us a lot more about who we are than the vain project of glorifying slight differences.

Lyn was curtly dismissive:

Mer, I will continue to be sorry that your religion "utterly fails to explain" and leaves you with "I don't know."

So I shot back:

Lyn, any religion that doesn't bring us to a god of mystery and wonder isn't worthy, and any god boxable within the categories of human knowability is too small a god to be of interest.

Lyn:

Meredith, I don't claim that we can or will (this side of Heaven) know or understand everything about God, and I fully embrace the concept of the mystery of God. On the other hand, the inherent purpose of the incarnation is that in Christ we can and do know God. To say that we know God is not to say that we know and understand all the details of God. I cannot explain all details of H2O, but I can land on God as an explanation for why things are the way they are. Pure science, if it is honest, always reduces (much like a 3 year old) to the question "Why?", and that is the difference between science and religion... at least my religion. Christianity reduces to the answer "God."

At which point, Jon Zila, a friend from my El Paso days, jumped in:

"Christianity reduces to the answer "God."" That is not the answer. That is still a question. While you might "know" god, in the sense that you have had an experience with god, to know everything about god (to which you agree) is two different things. You may not know how H20 works, but to ultimately say it's just god is me saying "I don't know what makes this car move as fast as it does, yet I know it's because of physics." Both of which are things I do not know well. Although I know physics more than I know cars. You are replacing one thing you don't know with something else you don't know. The true miracle is the wonder of it all. To ultimately try to reduce it to a label is what takes away from that wonder. To write anything off as a simple word is what (imo) takes the miracle away.

Lyn:

I am sorry that I have articulated this poorly. I am not eliminating miracles or mystery and I don't claim that knowing God means we understand all the wonders of the universe. My point is only that saying that God is the source of physics and chemistry and biology is a huge step that pure science cannot take, and when coupled with knowing that God produces a far different answer than does the "I don't know" of science. I admire both fields - but they both try to answer some of the same questions, and religion gets much further down the road.

Ah, and what road would this be? It would seem to the old “explaining” road. Lyn, I gather, is saying that religion explains "more" than science does. Gone are the days when I was interested in debating, on its own terms, whether science or religion “explains more.” What I now want to say is that the notion of “explaining” is itself confused and illusory. Once we clear that up, we will see that the question of whether X or Y explains “more” is itself a nonsense question.

French playwright Moliere gave us a famous illustration of illusory explanation. In his play, “The Imaginary Invalid,” Doctor Bachilierus addresses the question of why opium cause people to go to sleep. The doctors “explains” that this is because of opium’s “dormative power.”

You see the problem here. The proferred explanans (“Opium has a dormative power”) merely restates the explanandum (“Opium puts people to sleep”).

Yet the reason Moliere’s lampoon works is that the reality of “explanation” isn’t much different. We can see how a listener (one not quite as clever as we are) might have the impression that Dr. Bachilierus has actually explained opium’s sleep-inducing tendency. His “explanation” does have a momentary “explanatory feel” to it. When re-statings of an explanandum are a little more elaborate, the illusion of “explanation” gets much harder to see through. Some of us find that “because of God” has a very satisfying explanatory feel to it, while others of us find that offering “God” as an explanation feels as circular and uninformative as “dormative power.” On the science side: some find that Newton’s laws of motion have a satisfying explanatory feel, while others point out that Newton’s laws don’t explain motion but merely describe it.

What are we really doing when we (think we) “explain” something? Fundamentally, this human activity we call “explaining” is narrative. Humans are a story-telling species. For us, stories give us the feeling that things make sense. So when we assess some “explanation” as “satisfying” or “further down the road” or “incomplete,” we are making a literary judgment – not unlike the judgment we make when we assess Dickens’ novels as more developed that Defoe’s.

Does this mean that if scientists took a few courses in literature criticism, they’d be better equipped to evaluate the explanations of phenomena that appear in the science journals? Maybe. Or maybe it’s enough that scientists-in-training stick to a science curriculum because the science curriculum IS a form of training in literature criticism.

In the preceding seven segments of “Evolution’s Arrow,” I spoke often of evolution as a “story,” and not at all as an “explanation.” “Explanation” is essentially story-telling, but there are certain pitfalls that we avoid by saying “story” instead of “explanation.”

One pitfall is the chimera of the “complete explanation.” No one supposes that fiction-writing would ever develop to the point that no further story need be told. Stories aren’t aimed at an endpoint – whereas if we say “explanation” we can fall into the mistake of imagining that they are aimed at an endpoint.

Another friend from El Paso, John de Castro, wrote this week of attending some “International Symposia for Contemplative Studies”:

Last evening we attended a panel discussion of the nature of consciousness. The anel consisted of an internationally renowned neuroscientist, a Tibetan monk and aide to the Dali Lama, and a renowned Philosopher. After wonderful thoughtful presentations by all about consciousness from completely different perspectives, they all came to the same conclusion! Consciousness cannot be understood within any current paradigm.

What does this mean? “Understood,” like “explained,” sounds like an allusion to an endpoint. But there is no such thing as THE understanding or THE explanation. There is only AN understanding and AN explanation – just as there is no such thing as THE story but only A story.

It’s true we don’t have the final understanding of consciousness, but that’s because there’s no such thing as a final understanding of anything: rocks, oranges, algebra, love, death, or Australian-rules football. There’s no final story about anything.

We do have stories to tell about consciousness – just as we have stories to tell about quasars, rain forests, transfinite cardinals, and monogamy. We may, of course, hope for and continue to work toward more satisfying stories about consciousness just as we hope for and continue to work toward more satisfying stories about everything else. What will count as “more satisfying” will depend as much on changes in the sensibilities of the readers as it does on changes in the stories.

Also back in the first segment of “Evolution’s Arrow” I mentioned that science helps us control and predict the universe, while religion helps us befriend it.

Science could continue to do what it does without thinking of itself as engaged in the project of producing something called explanation. It could, instead, simply say, “If we tell this story, then here are some cool research projects that might further extend our ability to control and predict.”

Likewise religion could continue to do what it does without thinking of itself as engaged in the project of producing anything called explanation. It could, instead, simply say, “If we tell this story, then we provide narrative support for certain practices – and the practices and story together help increase our ability for love, connection, inner peace, and joy.”

* * * * *
This is a postscript to the seven-part Lake Chalice series, "Evolution's Arrow." To see the series: begin here (and click on the "next" link at the bottom of each part.)