| May 25, 2008 | Chance, Choice, Change, Destiny Reverend Jane Bramadat |
Meditation
I don’t want to live a small life.
(from Red Bird by Mary Oliver)
I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun
kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might
feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift
I will bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.
Comment
Let us take time in the silence to absorb these words ... open our life, open your hands ....listen, be aware, don’t close up with what you already know....it’s just the beginning....remember, we live in a world of both hope and risk.....
Let us take time in the silence to absorb these words ... open our life, open your hands ....listen, be aware, don’t close up with what you already know....it’s just the beginning....remember, we live in a world of both hope and risk.....
Sermon
This morning I offer you what I call a “President’s Choice” sermon. It is an opportunity I offer the outgoing Board President of First Unitarian every year or two (in this case Ted Humphreys) to challenge me to weave into my sermon, something of a personal interest, a concern, a puzzlement, a deep yearning -- some topic that has religious or spiritual connectedness for this person leaving office.
Here is what Ted has asked me to speak on. He said:
“I have always believed that ‘chance’ was what determined what happened in the world, and that very little we could do would essentially change that.....”
So my topic could revolve around that, [but] with an emphasis on the role that "diversity" ... plays in enabling us to adjust to the fundamental changes that occur in our lives because of chance.
[Sound crazy?] In a world of "Super Capitalism" (Robert Reich) , Fundamentalist thinking, and the "God Delusion" (Richard Dawkins) is there any point in having "the Audacity of Hope" (Barack Obama)?”
This is a huge topic with at least four sermons in it! It is a very good topic to give me and does not have an easy or simple answer. There’s one on chance and other options to explain reality; one on how diversity effects change in society; another on the presently strongly worded and felt criticism of western culture; and one on possible scenarios for the outcome of life as we know it. I will not be delivering four sermons this morning!
I will mostly be talking about chance and other options to explain reality ... and I’ll sneak in some thoughts about change and diversity. The other sermons will have to wait for another time.
My sermon title, “Chance, Choice, Change and Destiny” tells you a little about how I intend to approach this challenge. That is, I want to honour Ted’s challenge and I also want to be sure to approach it in a thoroughly Unitarian way - and that means bringing in other elements that complement chance. For me, they are choice, change and destiny.
First of all, let me ask each of you the questions I asked myself as I began to prepare this sermon -
Do you believe that chance determines what happens in the world?
What ideas besides chance need to be part of this exploration?
If you aren’t completely comfortable with “chance” as the model of reality, what does work for you? How many models are you aware of?
How is this connected to our Unitarian Universalist faith?
Chance. Do I believe in it? Yes. and No. It is one of the possibilities offered to explain the beginning of all of life as we know it. And certainly there are many things in life that happen by chance. We can be walking down a street and a previous snow storm can cause a large snow-laden branch of a tree to fall on to the road and hit you or your car or your dog. There would probably be very little you could do to avoid the results of that sort of “chance” encounter. And there are many other times of ‘chance’ encounters that can leave us feeling helpless, fearful or perplexed. But sometimes what appears to be chance turns out to be something quite different. While on sabbatical I had the experience of having the vitreous sac around one of my eyes burst ... for no reason that I could determine at the time. I initially thought it was either, a) I had done something wrong to cause it (after all, I had been sitting in a hot tub in -45 degree weather and sipping on a glass of wine; or b) it was just chance? When I went to a specialist I was told that some people have a genetic predisposition to have this particular thing happen. And so it wasn’t chance at all, it was simply my body living out its genetic code.
On the other hand, just yesterday I went over to hug my granddaughter because I hadn’t seen her for 9 days. I picked her up, hugged her and twirled her around .... and the glass baby bottle she had been drinking out of, fell and smashed on the cement steps. It was the last baby bottle they had. I rushed out and bought another bottle....and my daughter decided to use this ‘chance’ opportunity to make the transition to having no bottles.
My initial reaction was to try to return everything to stasis; my daughter’s was to use the opportunity to help her daughter move on developmentally.
Why do I tell you this anecdote? Because it made me realise how ‘chance’ encounters can have such different results for each participant.
And this equally applies to the bigger belief that all life as we know it happened according to chance. One reaction to that belief could be to feel that there is no meaning or purpose to anything - resulting in what Logotherapist Victor Frankl called becoming a “plaything of circumstance” [found in David Korten’s The Great Turning p. 38] a feeling of having no control; another reaction could be a realisation that since everything happens by chance, or randomly, that you can make your own future - there’s nothing holding you back, nothing getting in your way. In both cases a person makes a decision to choose one response over the other. One is positive and one is not.
The second question was:
What ideas besides chance need to be part of this exploration?
I decided I would definitely need to bring both choice and change into the equation. Part of this was because “chance” in Ted’s statement was defined (at least this was the way I interpreted it..) as something that was static, that is, the assumption was that chance was predetermined; as Ted said, “very little we could do would essentially change that.” ....
But in my nearly 40 year association with this faith, choice is a “given” to Unitarians and Universalists. One of our hymns (#374) says it clearly:
“Since what we choose is what we are
And what we love we yet shall be
the goal may ever shine afar -
the will to win it makes us free.”
Nobody tells us what we are to believe or how we are to live; we have our conscience, our mind, heart and spirit to do that. We take on to ourselves the right and responsibility to choose in all aspects of our lives - in what we will believe, in what we value and in how we will translate those beliefs and values into action. And that means, we are also free to choose poorly and then be accountable for that as well. And here is a small achilles heel for us ....we can sometimes be rather arrogant about empowering ourselves to choose. we sometimes forget that we are also creatures of habit and many times we are not “choosing” but rather doing what we do out of habit ... as does everyone else form time to time. Regardless, choice is essential to us. It is as necessary as freedom and breathing.
And our attitude to change makes change completely necessary. We recognise change as an integral part of life. Change is often painful but it also brings growth with it. It is implicit in all our principles. We are moved towards change many times when we celebrate diversity. Sometimes (almost always) this requires us to stretch ourselves, to take the blinkers off our eyes and see the humanity in all human beings and then as well to see the sacredness in all beings. We are all minorities in one way or another, but it has taken much longer (too long!) for some minorities to be accepted than others. It is my fervent hope that we will continue to grow and expand our acceptance of one another so that the goodness and potential of each person is recognised past their age, or size, or colour, or sexual orientation, or gender identification, or physical or mental challenges. Learning and then remembering how to change is an ongoing necessity for religious liberals, one we take on with loving determination.
When I came to the next question: If you aren’t completely comfortable with “chance” as the model of reality, what does work for you? I found I could think of quite a few other options: one of course was positing a “God” who was responsible for creating and sustaining everything; another was the idea of “destiny” or “fate” being responsible. Destiny is a predetermined course of events beyond a human being’s control. And closely related to this is “karma” - the idea shared by Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains that, in common parlance, “What goes around, comes around.” Karma can be either good or bad - the idea is that the good and evil a person does will return either in this life of in a later one. Among Pagans, the theory is that whatever negative or positive energies one sends out will come back to the sender in like kind.
Let me go back to destiny for a minute - to a tragic incident that happened on May 13, just before I left for the CUC AGM. Many of you, I imagine, will still recall this incident. There was a helicopter accident in Cranbrook, BC in which four people died. One of the people in the helicopter was a man who replaced another man who had fallen sick in the morning and was not able to go on the helicopter. One of the commentators asked if this was fate .... or was it chance? It is something to ponder indeed....
((After the present service was over, several of you reminded me of the Ethiopian student who was also killed in this accident in a rather bizarre way - he was out for a walk and was wearing earphones/ear buds and may not have heard the helicopter approach and was dragged under it as it crashed..stranger and stranger...))
Another model of reality is something coming out of what’s known as chaos theory. It is the idea that there are unlimited, usually invisible patterns within chaos. In other words, our lives may appear to be chaotic or run on ‘chance’ but within the chaos there are patterns repeating themselves everywhere we look. And more than that, there are parallels between how things are patterned in the human and non-human worlds, so that the earthworm and a person’s trachea have the same pattern; a brain cell and the universe have a similar (identical?) pattern. It is both weird and magical!
Although parts of each of these models of reality held some attraction for me it didn’t feel quite right. Then I realised I had bumped into my final question: How is all this connected to our Unitarian Universalist faith?
Some of us who are Unitarians, Universalists or Unitarian Universalists hold to a single model of reality, but many of us are glad to have more than one model. I am one of those people. There are days when I wake up and everything is humming and continues to hum. Then I know for sure that I am part of a larger transcendence that could be called God, but I usually call it “mystery.” There will be another time of awareness when “chance” just seems so logical and right and the way things are ....and I am balanced enough to feel that even though it’s chance I am not helpless in facing it, I am strong enough to be able to move with chance and dodge any large tree branches that may come my way. Then again, and most often, I sense that I am part of a larger pattern in my journey. I can seldom “see” what this pattern is, but the occasional glimpse has been enough to hold me gently and safely in its mystical arms.
This is the joy and challenge of our religious perspective. It is broad enough to include all who want to be part of the spectrum; it is deep enough to provide the challenge of searching out both the complexities and the simplicity beyond complexity; it is flexible enough to be able to morph in to other ways of being when conscience demands it, or when heart, mind or spirit sing a changing song. It can even reach high enough to allow us to glimpse from time to time the star stuff from which we all came.
Chance is very much a part of who we are and where we came from, and so is choice and change.....and it’s even possible that our destiny is to remain open enough to hold all the different models of reality as true in their own way and for us to live up to our pluralistic name.
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