Sermon

INTRODUCTION: I flew on the plane to and from Dallas this past weekend, and in the American Airlines Magazine, there was an ad featuring Tiger Woods, the great golfing phenomenon. It showed one rectangular bar, which was divided at the 40^th percentile. That meant that below the line there was 40%, and above the line was 60%.

The ad suggested that all golfers have the same information about the courses they are to play, but that Tiger has a unique ability to take the data and to interpret it in a winning way.

The point’s being that gaining information on anything: religion, politics, the environment – even golf – is only 40% of the task. The bigger task – the 60% task – is “interpretation.” Everyone sees much the same thing; but how we interpret what we see is a totally different matter.

Earlier in the service, I told the kids about Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from the time she was 10 months’ old. And then through a very patient teacher, Anne Sullivan, Helen learned to communicate in a world in which she couldn’t see, nor hear. And with the help of additional teachers and her own perseverance, she eventually learned to communicate, to write, even to some degree to speak, and was widely recognized as a phenomenal woman of achievement.

Here is a quote from a brief essay she wrote in 1933, entitled, Three Days to See. She writes:

I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during her or his early adult life. Darkness would make her more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joy of sound.

Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see. Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods. I asked her what she had seen. “Nothing in particular,” she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing, see little.

<Repeat> I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing, see little.

So let me ask you, have you taken a walk lately? How would you have responded to Helen’s question? What did you see? For example, did you see the trees? Did you really see them?

n Did you realize as you walked passed a tree, that in one year, an acre of mature trees absorbs the amount of carbon dioxide produced equal to driving our car 26,000 miles, while at the same time providing enough oxygen for eighteen people?

n Trees not only provide fruit, such as apples and oranges for humans, but they also provide food and homes for birds, bees, possums and squirrels.

n Did you see the trees, not as some inert object, but a living, breathing, essential part of our ecosystem?

Did you hear the birds singing from the trees? Did you locate them, see what color they were, the size of their beaks? Did you hear the insects chirping or see the ants working? What about the grass, the weeds, the flowers? If it was at end of day, were you stunned by the wondrous sunsets we have in Florida? Did you see?

Or are we one of those whom Helen Keller described as the “seeing, who see little.”

I who am blind can give one hint to those who see: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.

She might have added, after our walk, did we look into the eyes of the one we love and really see her or him? Have we looked in the mirror and seen the miracle that we are – all our history, our story, our present, our past, our uniqueness?

What kind of eye exam do we need so as to enable us to see the miracle in our every day lives? So that we, the seeing, see. How do we do that?

According to the ad in the magazine, there are two levels of seeing: gaining information and making an interpretation of the information.

I went in for an eye exam to get new glasses this past week. It meant that I read charts with different sized letters several times. That was the information collecting.

Then, based on what I saw, the optometrist prescribed the magnification I will need so as to see clearly. One was information gathering, the other was interpreting the data.

Or to put it another way, Helen Keller’s friend who saw, “Nothing in particular,” observed at the information level. It didn’t register more than the eye chart level of seeing.

But that’s only 40% of the task of seeing. The biggest item is what we do with the 60% – the interpretation. It’s the prescription based on the data. That makes all the difference in the world!

I suggest that’s really what our weekly Sunday morning services are all about: interpretation. Think of them as a weekly spiritual vision exam, not to read letters on a chart, but to help us to see…to see like Helen Keller suggested…to see the beauty and possibility which are surrounding our lives every day.

That pattern is present throughout our society. This past week we observed the 40^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The data he saw was not different than any White person saw. They saw the White and Colored restrooms everywhere in the South. They saw the White Only water fountains. They saw the signs that said, “Colored in rear” of the buses. And if they took the time they would have seen the Black schools that were given the leftover textbooks from the White schools, the left over band uniforms, athletic equipment, and miserably poor schools and colleges. You didn’t have to be Black to see the gross disparity that was rife in America.

Dr. King collected the data of not only of what the deprivation of segregation was doing to Black people, but what it was doing to the very souls of White people – the false pride of superiority based on nothing more than the accident of birth.

That was the information – the 40%. But Dr. King along with countless millions of other Black Americans took that information and he interpreted it and said it was time. It was time for us to live up to the principles upon which America was founded. That:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….

It did not say for only White people. It said “all men,” meaning all women and men whatever their color, all were equal, and that regardless of their race were created with certain inalienable rights.

That was the interpretation. It seems so obvious now. But it took marches and demonstrations, jail and beatings, enduring water hoses and baton beatings, to awaken the spiritual vision of this giant racist nation to what it was doing to its very moral soul. He saw, but he really saw.

In his immortal Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King was denied paper to write on, so he compiled it on the margins of the telephone pages and the white spaces of the newspaper, and finally was given paper. He said:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society… when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we…there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

That’s not only seeing the facts. It’s interpreting them. But the question becomes, how do we develop the ability to see…like Helen Keller suggested…like Dr. King demonstrated? How do we see?

At All Faiths, we’ve got the 40% of the data. But what are we going to do with it? What will help us see and interpret it so that it matters and is meaningful?

To answer that, I want to turn to baseball. (How many of you have ever played baseball?) Okay then, “listen up” as they say:

Back in the year 2000, Harvey Dorfman’s book, The Mental ABC's of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, was published. Though it’s ostensibly a book on baseball, specifically pitching baseball, there are some who feel it’s really a book about life.

After reading it, here’s a conclusion that columnist David Brooks of the New York Times reached:

Once there were intellectuals who thought the mind existed above the body, but that’s been blown away by evidence. In fact, it’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the mound.”

Let me repeat one part of that statement: “It’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior.” Namely, if you practice an attitude long enough, then your mind will begin to adopt it as its own. Or to put it another way, it’s not so much what you believe as much as it is what you practice. It’s all about practice. And what does that mean?

In some motivational material I encountered years ago, it said that anything we practice for 17 days in a row without stopping, becomes a habit. So if, for example, you want to experience the benefits of daily meditation, but it’s never worked for you in the past, then commit to doing it for 17 days in a row. By then, it will be a habit, and habits become natural expressions of who we are.

If you want to gain the benefits of a daily walk each morning, do it 17 days in a row. If you think it’s important to be well read, set a time of the day when you will read. Do it for 17 days.

If you want to experience any of the benefits of an enriched life experience, put it into practice. Do it. Do it for 17 days, and it’s yours.

But oh so much more important: What if we were to expand the loop so that we go against those things we don’t like about ourselves by practicing the opposite? Normally selfish people, can practice being unselfish, until what? Until we are unselfish people. Unloving people can become loving. Greedy people can become generous. Negative people can become positive. Pessimists can become optimists. It may be something we have to practice 17 days in a row until it becomes a habit. We smile at those we don’t know. We’re generous to the persons who wait upon our tables, to the clerks who check us out at the grocery store.

Those are spiritual practices. They can become a form of sacred repetition. That we become the persons we read about and hear about. We become caring and giving and loving people.

One final quote from the baseball book: “A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitches he wanted to throw.”

It’s easy sometimes to get down on ourselves. We said something we wished we hadn’t; we forgot something we should have remembered; or we simply did the wrong thing. Things happen.

But the evaluation of what we did has ultimately to be measured by our intent – what we were trying to do. And that’s a matter of seeing…it’s a matter of interpretation…it’s a matter of practice.

We will pause now for 7½ minutes of brief questions as a part of our Conversation Café. The Service and Support Council will provide microphones for you to speak into.

[1] A sermon presented on April 06, 2008, as the first in a series on Unitarian Spirituality, followed by the Conversation Café of All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, with the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.