The More Ample Mind: Growing Into Humanism, Part One
It’s one of those questions that you will find yourself confronting sooner or later, if you are willing to be upfront and public about having an unorthodox religious identity. Once conventionally minded people wrap their heads around the assertion that you *really* don’t believe in the Bible, or Jesus as savior, or the six days of creation, they will often demand, in some bafflement, “But why would a person who doesn’t believe in god go to church?” It can even come from the other side. I have run into more than one dogmatically secular humanist who posed the same question, with the implication of “Why would someone who is smart enough not to believe in god be dumb enough to go to a church?”
Not surprisingly, given my profession, I would assert that there are any number of good answers to this question. Moreover, dealing with the challenges of the unsympathetic is a topic for another day. What I want to explore this morning, and throughout this four part series, is one of the old-fashioned, traditional answers to that question, because I think that it has some surprising validity. I want to suggest that we go to church because it is good for us. Not because it is somehow going to earn us a place in heaven, or make the powers that be happy and draw down upon us good luck as a reward. I don’t even mean that church fills an important social need to be part of an intergenerational community, although I would hope that much is certainly true. And I mean that church is good for us whether we find it enjoyable or entertaining or exciting or lovely on any given morning or not.
I believe that church is good for me in the same way that my exercise class is good for me. Now don’t get me wrong; I am and have always been weird for religion, and I love doing church. I would want to engage in this stuff – what one of my colleagues calls ‘high play’ – whether I thought it did any good for me or not. I have a much more ambiguous relationship with my exercise class. I enjoy the teacher, and I share a bond with the other regulars, who also arise at dawn to pant and sweat our way into the beginning of the day. I’m happy to support the Saint Louis Park Community Education program. And even though I rejoice in the opportunity to sleep later, I am aware that when we don’t have class because of a holiday, or when I’m traveling, my body does miss it. Yet it would be a stretch – yes, okay, pun intended – to say that I like to exercise. I appreciate the class; I know that it is good for me, but enjoy it? Not really, no. Which is not anybody’s fault; there is nothing about the way the class is designed or conducted that could be changed to suit me better. I like some of the routines more than others, but the bottom line is that I’m just not the athletic type. All the same and nevertheless, I show up, because I am convinced that if I stopped, bad things would happen to my body.
I want to suggest that one of the reasons that we show up at church is that bad things happen to our humanness if we stop. It’s not about making points with the local deity; it’s about a kind of spiritual conditioning, that enables us to manage our lives with grace and meaning and dignity and compassion. You might make friends at church, and I hope you do; you might learn something that you didn’t know before, and I hope that happens too. But the essential thing that we are doing here is about the strengthening of our inner lives, and that is a never ending process. Just like physical exercise, it is a struggle against the forces of inertia, that constantly invite us into complacency, ease, and seeming self-indulgence, only to leave us unhealthy and disempowered if we embrace their temptations.
Part of that conditioning is moral. Life is full of invitations to cut the corners, just a little; to make things easier by not being too picky about principle; to take the quickest path to what we want, whether or not it is the most honorable. If someone, somewhere, isn’t reaffirming from time to time of the kind of ethical people we wanted to be, it starts to feel okay, like nobody else really cares, everybody does it, and after all, no one will know. It happened to Denny Hecker, it happened to Tiger Woods, it happened to John Edwards; it happens all the time with less spectacularly public results. I don’t want it to happen to me, which is one of the reasons I show up in church.
It’s also partly about strengthening our compassion. Popular culture is always filled with advice to ‘look out for number one,’ to ‘grab the gusto’, and with assurances that ‘greed is good,’ that ‘I’m worth it,’ and that ‘whoever dies with the most toys wins’. We can laugh at these self-serving aphorisms when examined in the light of day, but they are insidious; they work on our sub-conscious minds unless we provide some sort of counterbalancing influence. Where else are we to be reminded that consuming stuff is not the measure of success, and that it is relationships, not achievements, that sustain the meaning of our lives? Where else are we summoned to honor those who choose to lay aside their own interests and comforts in the service of the common good, and to follow their example in our own choices?
It has to do with the exercise of appreciation and gratitude as well, in a way that goes beyond mere politeness. It is very easy to become caught up in the challenges and difficulties of our lives, all the pieces that aren’t working the way we think they should, everything others have that we don’t, the particular tragedies and unfairnesses that everyone experiences in one form or another. Yet whenever I take the time to consider the matter from any rational perspective, I realize once again how incredibly fortunate I am, how full and rich my life is, how intricate and beautiful the smallest, most ordinary objects and events really are. I come to church so that someone will call my attention to the changing seasons, before I wake up one day and complain, “It’s hot out! Where did the springtime go?” In moments that follow great danger or great loss, people tend to see the world with new eyes, to notice colors and sounds with increased clarity, to find heightened significance in all their experience. I believe that this state of mind is accessible to me at other times, if I remember to seek it; if I am willing to lay aside my ego-drivenness, which is what danger or loss does to us, and become receptive to the reality that is going on all around me, that I so often fail to notice. Church does that for me – sometimes hauling me out of my self-absorption kicking and screaming, but insisting that I open my eyes and mind and heart to something larger than myself. That’s good for all of us, and we get better at it by practice, but we never reach the point where we stop needing the reminder.
Other religious traditions have various ways of talking about this process; often it goes by the name of spiritual practice. You might call it your walk with Christ, or realizing your Buddha nature, or Krishna consciousness, or enlightenment. Our own William Ellery Channing spoke of it as self culture, seeking a likeness to god. The term that makes sense to me, because it cuts across many of the confusions of vocabulary, is spiritual maturity. When I think about the kind of person I want to be, that I hope showing up in church on a regular basis is going to help me become, I want to have the qualities that characterize the masters across a variety of religious traditions. Just as one great athlete recognizes another great athlete, even though they participate in different sports, what I want is a developed inner strength and balance that will allow me to face a variety of life’s challenges without damaging myself or anyone else or anything. Just to be clear one more time, to my mind there is nothing supernatural about any of this. Whatever inner strength we have does not come from any magical realm, and does not endow us with superhuman powers. In the long run, it might enable us to live with a kind of wisdom and peace of mind and fulfillment that would seem awesome to other people, but is really nothing more than the product of consistent, intentional effort.
That is one reason why humanists come to church -- because we hope to become more spiritually mature human beings. And that is why coming to church on a regular basis, whether we feel like it on a particular morning or not, is good for us – it helps us to develop the qualities and capacities that constitute our best humanity, and enable us to live as well and abundantly as possible. Over these four weeks, I want to examine some of those qualities and capacities; the characteristics of spiritual maturity for humanists; what they look like and how they can be developed. Put another way, these are the attributes that I would wish that the public considered to be typical of humanists; I would like for us to distinguished not by our irritability and attitude of superiority, but rather by our maturity; by our wisdom, compassion, freedom and joy. What a reputation that would be!
The quality that I want to consider today is what I have called the ample mind; that is, the capacity to embrace intensity and ambiguity without becoming overwhelmed. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I think that he is correct, but I also think that it is more than just the mind at work in this process. The willingness to tolerate ambiguity is not just an intellectual proposition; it requires a kind of flexibility that can endure not to be in control, that is willing not to have everything sorted out neatly into black and white. You may remember the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who studied the intellectual and moral development of young children. In a series of brilliant experimental observations, he demonstrated that there are early stages in which a child is incapable of grasping the notion that fluid from a tall thin container remains the same amount when poured into a shorter, wider container. It’s not that the child is dumb, or uninformed; it’s just that that particular idea requires a certain conceptual maturity. In the same way, there are early stages of moral development when it is simply meaningless to suggest that rules themselves could be wrong. Both mental and moral development unfold as we become able literally to see the subtleties and ambiguities of what is real in the world. Of course life is easier and more orderly when everything fits neatly into the proper category, when authority can be verified and trusted, when joy is the opposite of sorrow and not its partner, when change occurs in incremental and understandable ways. But the truth is that the more we grow up, the less easy and orderly the world appears. Instead of resisting and resenting these complexities, spiritually mature people greet them with relish, and learn to enjoy the unpredictability of events and people. For those who are spiritually mature, novelty and possibility are just as welcome as certainty.
We learn this perhaps most intensively in the experience of loss. As the Prophet says, “…you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” Or as the humanist poet Kenneth Patton reminds us, “We learn to possess our sorrows as the measure of our love.” It is only if you care intensely about another person that their death or departure can cause you pain; grief hurts precisely because something or someone has mattered to us. Every time you get close to another person, or allow an institution or a project or a place to become important, you open yourself up to the possibility of loss and pain. It can be argued that if this is so, then the smart thing to do is not to get too close, not to let things matter all that much; then you can’t be hurt so badly. Yet this would be to close ourselves off from the greatest joys of life, from intimacy and mutuality and the happiness of seeing that which you love thrive. Wise people have always known that we must give ourselves to love as fully as possible, in the knowledge that loss and grief are the risk we take. And the more spiritually mature you are, the less you would ask for a life without sadness, because grieving is the evidence of our capacity for love. It may even be, as the Prophet suggests, that the experience of sorrow deepens us in a way that nothing else can, and thereby expands our capacity to contain love and joy. To live most fully is to embrace the full scale, from the heights of glory to the depths of pain; it is to put aside both the fear of disappointment and the demand for control, and engage the world in all its risky, ambiguous uncertainty.
We are not born knowing how to do this; we grow into it. It takes a lifetime to learn to care profoundly without clinging, to find peace in the midst of change, to cherish sorrow for what it testifies of love. It takes practice to become that kind of person, to remember every day and all the time what it is that we truly want from life – not its momentary gratifications, or guarantees of safety, but its greatest gifts. Gregg Easterbrook makes the interesting point that in some ways, the better the world actually gets, the more uncertain we are likely to feel – in part because the more we have to lose if things fall apart, as they always could. To be spiritually mature is to be able to live in a world of paradox, ambiguity, and change, without demanding assurances that never have been and never can be given. For humanists in particular, it means forgoing any promises of a happy ending by divine intervention. Tragedy, injustice, and incompleteness are real; god is not going to make it all come out all right in the end. We can sulk about that, if we choose to, or we can grow up, and acknowledge that the universe is not given on our terms, but on its own, and the only life we have is available only on those terms.
As for me, I haven’t completely got it yet. I’m still trying to make the world conform to my idea of what it ought to be; I still like things to fit into my categories, and I still sometimes wish I could make the pain that people feel when they lose the ones they love just go away. I still worry that the roller coaster ride of global history might come crashing down around us, and I’m still sometimes tempted to try to protect myself from caring too much about things I might lose. But I still have a vision of the person I want to be when I grow up, and I still want the larger life of my hopes, not the one circumscribed by my fears. In the end, that’s why I am here every Sunday, and would be, even if it weren’t my job, because that is what you help me learn and grow into. I’m not a humanist because I want to be smarter than everybody else; smart is good, but I would rather be wise and compassionate and free. What about you? What kind of person are you hoping that your humanism is helping you to become? What is it that you need to be reminded of by being here? Week by week, I want to stretch and strengthen a more ample mind, that can take the intensity and ambiguities of life in stride, and find within them peace and joy. That’s the path we’re on together; it’s why we need each other, so that we might grow into the kind of people we have always believed we could be.
