Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
January 13, 2019
Reading
“Spring Giddiness” by RUMI
Sermon
When Carol Cheney and Lois Smith first came to us to say they were interested in raising money for a new kitchen at USNH, they thought they could raise $50,000.
The first estimates for the kitchen renovation were coming in at $125,000.
Members of the Management Team and I will tell you that it was hard for us to see anything but the $75,000 gap. We couldn’t see a way forward; there weren’t funds available, and we couldn’t imagine that the congregation would or could fill the gap. We were wrong.
As of this morning at 8:30am (before this morning’s Kitchen Shower event) you had pledged $104,441 towards the Kitchen Promise. And as of 10:05am, we had collected over $6,000 in gifts. You have blown us away. Those gifts range from $20 to $25,000. Your generosity has astounded your leaders and has inspired us to think beyond what we thought was possible.
Isn’t that so often the way it goes? That our initial thinking about something is limited in scope. I’m not saying that Carol and Lois underestimated you; their $50,000 figure was well thought out, based on Carol’s experience of leading pledge campaigns here and her extensive professional fundraising experience. But what we didn’t take into account was that what we thought impossible, was simply uncertain. We actually had no idea how a new kitchen would resonate with you – and it clearly did.
I’ve been thinking throughout this process of the quote by Lewis Carroll in his book Through the Looking Glass.
Alice is talking with the White Queen who lives in a backwards world where effects happen before their cause. This is massively confusing to Alice, who begins to cry. The queen asks how old Alice is and she responds that she is seven and a half. The queen shares that she is 101 years old, plus five months and one day. (But who’s counting?).
Alice can’t believe the Queen’s age and they have an exchange about what is possible and what is impossible:
Alice laugh[s]. “There’s no use trying,” she [says] “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” [says] the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Six impossible things before breakfast.
This is the title businesswoman Anne Halsall chose for her 2017 article on entrepreneurship and uncertainty. She writes: “Entrepreneurs have a unique relationship with reality. Entrepreneurship is defined by risk. Founders are risk-takers who put their financial security, their careers, and their reputations on the line in pursuit of something as insubstantial as an idea.”[i]
She tells the story of being approached by a man looking to recruit her as a web developer for his start-up in 2008. He had this crazy idea that he could create a website where people would offer rooms in their homes for rent for a night or a week or a month.
Halsall thought he was nuts: “Who would pay to stay on someone else’s couch? Who wants to give strangers access to their home?” she thought. She sent back a note saying: Thank you very much, but she was happy at her current job.
Ten years later, Airbnb is valued at $31 billion.
“Most entrepreneurship,” Halsall writes, “and certainly the case of Airbnb, involves true uncertainty. While many successful businesspeople in organizations of all sizes are good risk-bearers, what is unique to entrepreneurs is their ability to be uncertainty-bearers. Not only are they willing to take risks, they are willing to take risks in the face of totally unknown and unpredictable outcomes….”
“In short,” she says, “they believe impossible things—that other people don’t.”
When was the last time you believed something impossible? Was it before breakfast? Or long ago? Life has a way of beating out of us the ability to believe or even imagine the impossible.
At seven and a half, Alice is already out of practice. But what would it look like to regain this skill?
Unitarian Universalists have long-prided ourselves as a people who believe in scientific fact. Our tradition has been significantly influenced by the Humanist Movement which was instituted in the 1930s and 40s by men one might call “religious entrepreneurs”. They imagined a new way of doing religion, of being religious, that offered so much to our understanding of who we are as Unitarian Universalists.[ii]
The Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, states as follows (I’ve retained the original masculine-centered language here):
Today man’s larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion. Such a vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfactions may appear to many people as a complete break with the past. While this age does owe a vast debt to the traditional religions, it is none the less obvious that any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age.[iii]
Fifteen statements follow this introduction, outlining the Humanist point of view.
Many of those statements – such as “Nothing human is alien to the religious” – I agree with.
Others, including the assertion “that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values,” I do not.
I’m especially interested in the eleventh statement and its impact on Unitarian Universalist thought and culture.
The eleventh statement of the Humanist Manifesto reads: Man will learn to face the crises of life
in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.
Ah ha. I think we may have stumbled upon something here. Something that led to our being out of practice imagining the impossible. Our spiritual forbearers – the religious entrepreneurs of the mid-twentieth century – actively discouraged it.
To imagine the impossible would have been to be “sentimental” and have “unreal hopes.”
Their view was presented as counter cultural to what they saw as the dangers of belief in the supernatural, in religious stories that denied reality. Instead, people should, they believed, “learn to face the crises of life” in terms of their “knowledge of their naturalness and probability,”
be reasonable and manly.
While I agree that religion must adapt and change to meet the needs of the age, I think that perhaps in trying to meet the needs of their age, our forbearers swung the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that we forgot that science itself requires imagination and thinking beyond what we already know.
Albert Einstein famously said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”[iv]
Imagination moves us from the realm of the known to the realm of the possible.
Imagination allows us to face life not only with reason and “manly-ness” (whatever that means) but with flexibility and grace and sometimes some wishful, outside-the-box thinking that allows new possibilities to emerge.
Here’s what I know to be true.
And the poet knew it too, hundreds of years ago:
“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.”
Oh, you may have woken today refreshed and excited, but, as a people, as a human race, we wake each day empty and frightened, because the crises of life are fast at our heels. Each moment we live is uncertain. And things aren’t really going to get any easier. That’s just true.
And so what is our response? How do we bear such uncertainty? Do we enter the study and begin reading? Seek out what is known about the naturalness and probability of our existence. Perhaps.
Might we not also take down the musical instrument? Begin improvising? Find new ways to kiss the ground and love this life – in all its uncertainty?
We cannot go back to sleep. The stakes are too high.
And we are awake now.
Awake to all that is required of us as conscious and contentious, people, determined to make the world a better place for all the beings that reside on this planet. We are awake to the courage required to reverse the greatest effects of climate change, to the collaboration required to make lasting social change, to the commitment required to crack open the chains of racism and white supremacy that bind us all.
We cannot go back to sleep.
The stakes are too high.
We are going to need to think big, to think impossible things, and to make them possible with our hope, our faith, and our rolling-up-our sleeves and getting-our-hands-dirty work. We’re going to need to ask, to make the case, to share the reality of what is and paint a picture of what could be.
~
Now, I’m still trying to figure out what Carol Cheney called the “magic spell” that came over this congregation when the kitchen project was presented. Even people who have moved away have pledged to help renovate the kitchen.
What is it?
Carol says it is all those things. You were waiting to be asked. And when you were asked, you jumped at the chance to be a part of a project with a hard-working team who had made the case for a new kitchen: presenting the reality of what is and the difficulties it presents, and also painting a picture of what could be.
You have made the impossible possible. And the Kitchen Promise tells me not only that this congregation wants to center hospitality as a core value and care for each other and our community, it tells me that you can do anything you set your collective mind to, anything you put the thought and effort into.
It tells me you can do anything you can imagine.
So often, our limits are self-imposed. We are the ones who tell ourselves – and each other – that something is not possible. I am guilty as charged. I truly believed that it the kitchen was impossible. I am sorry I doubted you.
~
The Queen tells Alice that, when she was young, she believed impossible things for a half-hour every day. She reminds us that in order to cultivate our imaginations and enter the realm of possibility, we must engage the impossible as a spiritual practice.
This week, I invite you to do so.
Anne Halsall outlines a practice for entrepreneurs, and I think we could benefit from it as well.
First, she says, “start with a seemingly impossible goal.” Then, “assume that is it, in fact, possible.” The next step is to “rule out the truly impossible (or highly improbable) ways forward—solutions that take infinite time, defy the laws of physics, etc.”
Then, “find something to try that you have no idea if it will work—and then try it.”
“Evaluate. Did it work? What did you learn?”
“Repeat the final two steps until you have enough data to create a new statistical understanding of something that was previously uncertain.”
In other words, do this again and again
until you know that what seemed impossible, is, in fact, possible.
You might raise over $100,000. Or you might design an experiment that takes your research to the next level. You might open a new way of thinking that allows you to explore your faith like you never have before. Or change the way you parent – or paint. You might start a new project or a new business or make a shift in your career or your volunteer work.
Above all, don’t underestimate yourselves. Don’t limit yourselves – individually or collectively.
“Never doubt,” Margaret Mead, said, “that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
So, today, the USNH kitchen.
We can only imagine what is next.
[i] https://medium.com/@annekate/six-impossible-things-before-breakfast-471848027c7f
[ii] Our Humanist Legacy by William Schulz UU WORLD November, 2003. https://www.uuworld.org/articles/unitarian-universalisms-humanist-legacy
[iii] https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto1/
[iv] from Einstein’s On Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms, 1931, p. 49.