Sermon

INTRODUCTION: When in the first grade at Robert E. Lee Elementary in Gainesville, Texas, we had an art project. Ms Howell, our teacher, divided us up in to groups of twos, and then we were assigned to draw each other’s pictures. I drew my best friend Larry and Larry drew me.

When finished, I was most pleased with the results. I drew Larry’s round face, put in eyes, nose, teeth and ears, colored it orange, and drew his brown hair – plus, drew and colored the stripes of his shirt. I mean this painting had everything. I was ready to be one of the ten best, chosen to go to the second grade class down the hall to show them our art. I was really proud.

However, on my road to being the next Picasso, can you believe that Mrs. Howell did not choose my artwork for showing to the second graders? To add insult to injury, she chose Larry’s drawing of me, but not my drawing of Larry.

I was crushed. In hindsight, I’ve concluded she was probably not able fully to appreciate embryonic impressionistic painting, and certainly not abstract.

Now I tell that to be humorous, but the fact that I can remember right down to the last detail what happened, indicates that it was and has been a very significant part of my artistic journey. From that point onward, I concluded that I could not draw or paint…I was not an artist. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years later: nope, not an artist…Mrs. Howell said so.

In the overall scheme of things that first grade scene was really incidental – probably. For the fact is that every one of us is an abstract artist: If we choose to live, we have no choice but to be. Namely, we have a very deep need to abstract from the pieces of life and compose them into some kind of seemingly coherent whole. From the enormity of human experience, we need to construct manageable chunks – abstract art, we might say. The lives we live are abstractions of our responses to living.

So when you see some of the artwork on display in the Gallery next door, some of it seems not to comprise any form with which we are familiar. We don’t recognize it. Which is as it should be. It’s an artist’s abstraction of a given segment of her or his reality. (Twink has one outstanding piece immediately on the left as you’re proceeding through the front entryway.)

Which is why I say that every one of us is an abstract artist. We live our lives in search of ways to express the reality, which we confront on a given daily basis. Our responses to life are abstracts of what we experience. They are living paintings, which we are creating, day by day.

Sometimes, our responses are imitations of others, derivative, we might say. Other times they’re original. But the artistic task is ours. It’s the task of life. Our lives are living examples of abstraction. Every moment’s an encapsulation of life caught in time, texture, and space.

But we have other vehicles, not just visually, through which we need to express reality.

Someone once asked a famous poet, “When did you decide to become a poet?” He answered, “That’s the wrong question. The better question is, ‘When did most people decide not to continue being poets?’” He added, “From the time we first learned to talk, we were all fascinated with words, phrases, sounds and their repetitions. Every little child loves poetry and is a burgeoning poet. But somewhere along the way, most of us suppressed the poet within.” He said, “I never did.”

One of the reasons that poetry can appeal to us is when it expresses our need to abstract the complexity of our world, in ways that ordinary discourse can never do. One of the most famous pieces of poetry to do this comes from the 17^th century, and the poet John Donne. He was also a member of the Church of England clergy – a priest. He writes from the view of an Englishman, on the British Isles, across the Channel from the continent of Europe. These are his most famous words:

No one is an Island, entire of it self;
each is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
any one’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Humankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

Poetically, he is expressing the reality that we all experience: We are all connected…we are all one. If a piece of dirt washes into the ocean, that’s really no different in principle than if one of the cliffs of Dover were to fall. If a household of your friends were to be washed into the sea, or if you fell off into the ocean, those events would all be a loss, because anyone’s death, everyone’s death diminishes each of us. Why? because we are all a part of human kind. So when we hear funeral bells, we don’t need to ask, who was it that died: Part of us died.

Poetry articulates the mystery of life in ways that regular speech does not. Sometimes only a poem can come close to expressing how we really feel. Remember W.H. Auden’s majestic poem, Funeral Blues, about the death of his lost love:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Poetry does not fit into convention, but it allows us to express the inexpressible…to articulate that which defies articulation. But there’s another way in addition to art and poetry, through which we address and respond to reality.

I forget who it was who first used this analogy, but imagine an immense, Universe-sized, super-orchestra. As you know, an orchestra has instruments that range from a tiny little piccolo, to giant bass violins and tubas. They play over a musical range of seventy-two octaves – that would be 504 different notes.

In Newton’s orchestra, every sound is predictable. This is the way the world is. This is the way the world is. Life follows and plays all the notes. Every instrument, like a giant clock is playing its part – tick tock, tick tock. The Universe is like a giant machine, with every piece playing its pre-determined part.

Then along comes Einstein. He keeps Newton’s music, but now it’s a giant jazz orchestra, with recurring rhythm and beat, but in endless variations that never repeat exactly. Always, there is something new, something made up as it goes along. The music can change key, change tempo, change tune as the situation demands. There is a certain structure, a form that the music is following, but the real art is in the endless improvisations, where each and every player, however small, is free to express herself or himself, and all the while keeping in step and in tune with the whole.

Here’s an example of what I mean: Listen to these renditions of the same piece of music. One is as Newton’s understanding of the world played it; the other is as Einstein’s understanding of the world plays it.

Two different understandings of the same piece of music. Newton and Einstein: Two ways of teaching us about life.

It was the point of our gathering last Friday evening. More than 150 of us were here in the Foulds Theater to watch a two-hour, twenty minute “director’s edited cut” of the original movie What the Bleep…?!, which we had shown last year at this time, and which also showed at the Bell Tower. It is filled with all kinds of data, claims and some far-out ideas. Not being in any way a scientist, I simply take for granted a lot of what it says, and take with a grain of salt some other things. But when it’s over, there is a very clear message stated: The world is not the way our senses perceive it to be.

According to the many featured persons of that movie, one of the worst things we do as human beings is to think of ourselves as separate not only from one another, but also from everything else. But are we?

Whitehead, who took seriously these data almost from the time Einstein first made them public, declared that we cannot understand nature except as an organism that participates fully in knowing. Let me say that a little more clearly. Think of nature as alive…as a giant organism, which fully participates in all that’s going on. And we are a part of it. But what does that mean?

So imagine if you would, that the universe is comprised of all these component parts: planets, stars, galaxies, super-galaxies, species that transcend the imagination. And when you’ve listed all the parts, you have the whole. In Newton’s time, that was it. The world was made up of matter, nothing more. It was a materialistic explanation of reality.

But after Einstein, we realized that the Universe cannot be reduced to matter. It has something more. It’s alive. It is more than the sum of its parts. That “more than,” according to religious tradition, is what we mean by God.

And in the same way that the human body is filled with the motion of cells, organs, and fluids, so the Universe is filled as well with constant activity.

We used to think – that is, Newton thought – that the Universe fitted into neat categories and laws. In fact, we talked about the laws of nature. Cause produced effect. Experience was a dependable monitor of reality. The Universe yielded to reason.

Surely, we know differently now. Imagine going with the highway patrol and me to tell a young woman who was such a wonderfully active member of my United Methodist Church, that her young brother had been hunting, and put his shotgun down as he went to crawl through the fence and it went off accidentally and blew his brains out.

Accompany me as I go to the home of a family living on the edge of poverty, to tell them that their most precious possession, an exuberant, couldn’t be still, six-year-old girl, had jumped off the curb in front of oncoming traffic.

Walk across the street from my home to the home of a young man who had said he wanted to be like me…to major in journalism and have a seminary degree and become a minister…and tell that outstanding high school senior’s mother and dad that while their son was taking his girl friend home, a 19 year old drunk broad-sided them going 90 miles an hour.

Use reason and logic and experience: that the world makes sense…that it’s all part of the way the world is. No, a thousand times no. There’s no god playing chess with the world, moving this one and that one, blessing this one and cursing that one. But neither is this a closed world in which everything works according to the laws of nature. Sometimes bad things…terrible things…happen to good people. What the new reality teaches us is that we are all in this together. You, me, God: We are all connected.

But what about those who don’t believe in God? The reality is, I probably don’t believe in the God they’re talking about either. May I suggest for those of you who think that way, that for a moment you erase all you’ve ever thought about when you used the word “god.”

Start off by thinking of God as a verb, not a noun; not a being, but Being itself. That means rather than thinking of God as a person or an extrapolation of humanity, think of God as process; rather than a body in a locale, think of God as the potential in all of us. Our task is to be open to the discovery of divinity in every Part of the Universe, as well as in the Whole. It’s what I mean by the case for a holistic understanding of life.

When I lived in Oklahoma, I had a dear friend whom I would date occasionally. She had two big dogs. They had these enormously deep barks. What always amazed me about her was when we went to leave her home, she would turn all the lights on. She had a glass door, in addition to a wooden door. She would leave the wooden door wide open: lights on, door open. Not so smart, I thought initially. Then I observed, at the slightest sound, here came those two big, barking dogs. As has been said, “If you want to hide a treasure, put it in plain sight. Then no one will see it.”

That’s a little bit like divinity in our lives. It’s all around us, in front of us, behind us, above us, and below us. As the poet of the Psalms said:

How can I get away from the presence of God? Where can I run to hide? If I ascend into heaven, God is there. If I make my bed in Hell, God is there” (Psalm 139:07-12).

So we’ve got to get out of our limited, this-is-the-way-the-world-is boxes. Because a part of the world compares God to grampa in the sky with a beard sitting on a throne, doesn’t make it so! What our new understanding of reality is teaching us is that our Universe is in one never-ending process of becoming. A Whole that we are a blessed Part. Amen and blessed be.

[1] Unitarian Summer 2006: On June 04, 2006, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting in the Foulds Theater at the Alliance for the Arts, 10091 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.