A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor 1/25/04 IT'S ALL A MYSTERY TO ME! The question was simple enough: "why do otherwise peaceful, rational individuals enjoy stuff like this?" The otherwise peaceful, rational individuals referred to were the questioner and myself. The stuff of which this person wrote was mystery stories, a large pile of which had been given to me by this individual. I offered some preliminary thoughts on the matter: mysteries are a distraction, mystery writers are great story tellers, mystery stories let the good guys win and make sense of life. I said that someday I would do a full sermon on mystery because mystery is the central fact of existence. This is that sermon. Mystery is about that which defies adequate explanation. Mystery is about that which is ultimately incomprehensible. Mystery is all around us. Some of this mystery is quite ordinary. Who better than the late Erma Bombeck to describe its manifestations in ordinary life. "Why is it that the magazine that was so irresistible in the dentist's office that you felt compelled to steal it becomes totally uninteresting once you have subscribed to it? Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother. How come anything you buy will go on sale next week? When turnstiles are made, does anyone bother to measure the average heights and parts of the human body? Who was the fool who came out with the long-leg girdle the same week they came out with the miniskirt? For some things there are no answers. One must take things as they are and know that mysteries will always be with us." I would add only the mystery of why some of us become so attached to sports teams and sports figures that we will brighten up or sink into despair because they win or lose. Does it really matter if EMU, UM, the Lions, the Pistons, the Red Wings, the Tigers do well or poorly? Yes, to some people, and that is a mystery. There is mystery at more elevated levels of human life. What is it that causes us to be attracted to this man or that woman? What really is in the heart of those we live and work with? Why do the bullets and bombs of war kill some, maim some, and spare others? Why is it that things, including human beings, grow? Why do they stop growing? Then there is the mystery at the heart of the universe. Why is there anything at all? Why is there life? Why is the universe so vast when it seems to be so empty? Do human beings have free will or is that the veriest delusion? Mystery is part of the world in deep and ineradicable ways. We see mystery in the strangeness of life. J.B.S. Haldane commented that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." It is said of Haldane that he liked to quote a statement he gave initially in answer to a question of what his study of nature had revealed to him, that "God has an inordinate fondness for beetles." He based this judgment on the fact that there are more than 400,000 species of beetles on earth and only 8,000 species of mammals. Sometimes he added "stars" to that for which God had an inordinate fondness, since the universe contains tens of thousands of billions of stars. A friend of Haldane's suggested that by Haldane's reckoning it is likely that when we meet the creator, it will resemble a beetle or a star rather than the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope. The universe is strange, stranger than we do and can suppose. Annie Dillard writes of this in PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK: "The creeks…are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains…are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, resolute, absolute." (pages 2-3) Who could have imagined such a world as we are in? A world where we are literally "the stuff of the stars," a world that is 15 billion years old, a world with more than 60 elemental particles! The world is a strange place, full of mystery. It is also a beautiful place, and that too is mysterious. Creation is beautiful. The first fall of snow, the autumnal leaves, the first sign of green after a cold and weary winter, the deep blue sky and white fluffy clouds of a summer's day, the endlessly rolling waves washing up on and receding from shore, the reverential majesty of a mountain, the deep peacefulness of a valley, the music the birds sing and the songs of whales, the multi-colored coral on a tropical reef, a dancer's body in motion, the sight and the sound and the smell and the touch of our beloved and of our children. Creation is beautiful. We do not know why. It is mysterious. Our own creating is a mysterious process by which something beautiful comes into being. Elie Wiesel remarks that "for an artist, for any writer or creator, there is nothing so mysterious as the moment when something within him or her begins to take shape, to be revealed, whether in painting, music, or literature. If the creator knew what that something was, if he (or she) was aware of the mystery, than he (or she) could no longer create." That mysterious process produces a ceiling on the Sistine Chapel, a Ninth Symphony Chorale, a MIDDLEMARCH, and a poem from our eight year old daughter that says that "roses are red and violets are blue, you're my daddy and I love you." Each of these is a beautiful creation that comes from we know not where. The mysterious can be beautiful. This is the way Einstein saw life. "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds…constitute true religiosity…I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature." Life is profoundly and simply beautiful. Life is simply and profoundly strange. Life is mysterious. With no set of directions handed to us when we enter life, what are we to do with this strangeness, this beauty, this mystery? One thing we should not do is to try to resist the truth of mystery. The most common way we have of doing this is by confusing mystery with problems. Noam Chomsky said that all human puzzlements can be divided into two kinds, problems that can be solved and mysteries that cannot. Learning the difference between them is a critical lesson for us all. We must avoid the mistake of the psychotherapist written about in the Ann Arbor News last summer. She claimed that life is nothing but a series of problems to which "there's always a solution." No, there is not always a solution because some challenges are not problems but mysteries. That is a lesson Phillip Simmons learned the hard way. Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis) at the age of 35, he found the problems associated with this debilitating disease not easy but mostly resolvable by good medical care. The mystery of why he had the disease and how he was to face life knowing how grim a future he had were far harder for him to deal with. Like the Biblical character of Job, he sought an answer from God, but no answer came. In a book he wrote about his experiences, LEARNING TO FAIL, he says that one of the great lessons he learned is that life is not so much a problem, though there are plenty of those, as it is a mystery. We can solve problems, and we do that very well. Mysteries can only be accepted. Problems can be spread out before us in all their fascinating detail and worked at until we have resolved them. We can solve the problem of stretching a tight budget to fit our needs by dropping some expenses and taking a part-time job. We can discover whether there is water on Mars by sending spacecraft there to look for evidence. We can work away at our crossword puzzle until we have filled in all the blank spaces. Mystery stays with us, enduring a lifetime if it is personal, enduring through all the ages of human existence if it touches on wider dimensions of life. We ask and wonder and then ask and wonder all over again, but some things just remain beyond our understanding. A preacher was expounding on an esoteric theological doctrine in quite incomprehensible language when someone in the front row shouted out desperately, "We can't understand you. " The preacher promptly responded, "You aren't supposed to. It's a mystery!" Science is the most rational of all human enterprises.Its structure is that of converting ignorance into questions that can be answered and problems that can be solved.Even science runs hard up against mystery. Thinking of such things as relativity and complexity and uncertainty, the eminent 20th century physician Lewis Thomas spoke of the "deep mysteries and profound paradoxes" of life. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman talked of scientific laws always having "an edge of mystery" to them. At a profound level, Feynman observed, all explanations end. There are problems in life and we should do our best to solve them. There is also mystery.That we cannot solve, only accept. How we accept mystery tells a great deal about how we live. There are several ways in which we might do this. First, we can do so poetically. Such a response can be about relatively minor mysteries, like one's incapacity to handle mechanical things. Virginia Scott Miner, my high school English teacher and a prolific daughter-of-Indiana poet, wrote these lines: "All things mechanical/Make me feel panical." As one who shares the poet's uneasiness before the mechanical—and the electrical and the electronic—those words are a beacon in the dark night of a world full of technological gimcrackery most of which is utterly beyond my comprehension and use. The mystery of why that is so is not cleared up, nor will it ever be, but in those seven words I find a way of living more comfortably with my disability. Another of Virginia's short poems expresses her Unitarian Universalist theology. That theology has to do with our ignorance of why the world was created, what if any Meaning there is to the world, what happens to us when we die, and what we can do in the face of our unknowing. She says: "I shall not question/his theology/who last holds my hand." That is a typically UU response to the mystery of why there is no ready Answer to life's puzzlements, why it really does not matter what our theology is, why in the end only one thing is really important: how we treat each other. If kindness and mercy and good cheer and similar virtues are the way we live, we are doing right under whatever ideological banner we may march— fundamentalist, orthodox, liberal, conservative, reactionary, radical. Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry won a Nobel Prize, speaks in a similar vein: "Julia, Isabel, Luke, Titus! It's us, our kinship and mutual pity, This body so fragile and woundable, Which will remain when words abandon us." Looking outward into the Vast Unknown of the universe, Gordon McKeeman, asks, "How does one address a Mystery? Cautiously—let us go cautiously, then, to the end of our certainty, to the boundary of all we know, to the rim of uncertainty, to the perimeter of the unknown which surrounds us…." One way of responding to the mystery of life is poetically. A second way is humbly. We live 75 or 80 years in a universe whose time scale is billions of years. Big to humans is well over six feet and more than 200 pounds in a world in which elephants weigh in at several tons and giraffes tower feet above us and the earth itself is 25,000 miles in circumference, which would be an impossibly long walk for any one. We know maybe several hundred people, far fewer than that well, in a world of more than six billion, a world that whether we are here or not will go on and on and on just as it has for eons of time. Writing of the change to the human psyche when astronomy began to tell us of the vastness of the physical universe, John Herman Randall, Jr. described that change as having swept humanity "out of …(our) proud position as the central figure and end of the universe, and made…(us) a tiny speck on a third-rate planet revolving about a tenth-rate sun drifting in an endless cosmic ocean. The absolute insignificance of…(humanity) before the mighty and relentless will of Calvin's stern deity seems pomp and glory indeed compared with the place to which…(we have) been relegated by modern astronomy." (all changes by KWP) Our lives seem to us to be enormously important. We have no way to know if that is true. What seems true is that the world, vast in time and space when we are so tiny in space and time, is indifferent to our striving. We have no way to find out for sure one way or the other. As E.L. Doctorow puts it in his novel CITY OF GOD, we are "Dancing In The Dark." "…I mean, no candlelight, no firelight, not one lumen, This is definitely the dark we're dancing in, As we ponder the meaning of our existence here— Let me ask the equally imponderable question: Where is here?… Of course we are lucky to have something under our feet on which to do our dancing. That's something. On the other hand who are the we I speak of? I'm holding on to you and you dance well enough, but I can't see you and you haven't said a word. Are you in fact there? If you are, you know as well as I do life is short and as time goes by we don't go with it. We're both looking for enlightenment, am I right? Like a love at first sight? And when this luminous love arrives bringing us out of the darkness of where and who we are We'll know what we're about, we'll see everything clear including the person we're dancing with, yes, babe, the person dancing in the light with, though obviously it won't be either of us. Until that happens, if it ever does, I am holding on to you and you are holding on to me which I suppose is some consolation. All in all, this not very promising situation suggests That, arm in arm, we'll be left facing the music Though how music can be faced when it's all around you in the darkness is anyone's guess…" Dancing in the dark is much of what life is: learning how to grow up, learning how to relate to other people, learning how to be a parent, learning how to do our work, learning how to take pain and failure without collapsing, learning how to die. Mostly, it's on the job training. We can respond to the mystery of existence with humility. Doctorow's poem hints at a third way of responding to the dark ignorance in which we dance, with hope. We may never know for sure if hope is worth the effort, but there is reason to cling to hope in a world in which cruelty and pain are among the most unbearable aspects of mystery. One of these reasons is, in Annie Dillard's words, that "anything can happen; any pattern of speckles may appear in a world ceaselessly bawling with newness." There is an extravagance to nature, an abundance of happenings that includes sometimes an end to suffering, even happiness. Flannery O'Connor makes the point that the good writer is always searching out the possibilities in the depths of life, not merely describing the probabilities. That is why the good writers all teach us hope, whether they are gloomy like Dostoevsky or cheery like Cervantes. We do not know why the world was created. What we do know is that there is wonder in our hearts when we are part of a birth experience, when we observe deep distress being turned into relief, when we see emerge from the fiercest warriors a new commitment to non-violence. These things happen every day. The memory of the birth of my son that I attended and assisted in is indelibly a part of me. I do not know words that could tell others what this incredible event meant and means, or how it reminds me over and over again that life has possibility. I never forget it. I can only imagine what a woman giving birth must feel like in that moment and in all moments thereafter. Deep in my memory bank is the face and the gentle hands of a male Army Nurse who guided me through a particularly unpleasant episode of disease with gentleness and efficiency. I will always be able to see his gentle brown face, his large eyes, his smile that seemed never to end.They said to me that all would be well. It was. I have been active trying to encourage non-violent means of resolving conflicts for almost 40 years. I have marched beside men who fought in World War II and vowed they would not kill or hurt again. I have seen men who fought in Vietnam return determined that the most important thing they could do is never engage in war again. The world will be safe only when all people agree to put down their weapons and live peacefully with disagreement and difference. Anything can happen. Above all else that can happen there is love. Shirley Hazzard's new novel, THE GREAT FIRE, is a novel of love. It is a story set in the years immediately after the Second World War. One man, active and vigorous, contracts polio and can no longer walk. A friend pledges her life to him because love touches each of them. It is a story of a sister who loves her dying brother and takes care of him as no one can or will. It is the story of the man who loves that sister, who is only a teenager. They endure long separations and stressful months of absence until they can take up their life together. The great fire is the fire of war that consumes and destroys. It is mysterious because it makes no sense for human beings to do such harm to one another. More importantly, the great fire is the fire of love that helps us to live with the disasters, the destructiveness, the disappointments, the defeats that come into every life. Anything can happen, including love. So little children are adopted when otherwise they would face a more difficult life in an institution. So teachers extend themselves in a thousand ways to help students struggling to learn. So nurses offer not just the care of the body, but a tenderness that helps to heal the whole self in the midst of the experience of disease. So men and women who have failed at marriage or who have lost the great love of their life or who happen to love someone of the same sex gather their courage and follow their heart into relationships of commitment and responsibility and delight. Anything can happen. Even in a world full of mystery, there is hope. This is what the Unitarian Universalist religious approach is all about. It is about accepting the mystery for what it is, a mystery. It is about refusing to reduce the mystery so that it becomes simple to understand, a mere problem. It is about recognizing the strangeness and the beauty that are the faces of mystery, and celebrating them. It is responding to mystery poetically, humbly, and with hope. In the end it is saying with Thornton Wilder, "Everything is mysterious, but how unendurable life would be without the mystery." BIBLIOGRAPHY Karen Armstrong, A HISTORY OF GOD: THE 4000-YEAR QUEST OF JUDAISM, CHRISTINAITY, AND ISLAM, Alfred A.Knopf, 1991. Margaret Atwood, THE ROBBER BRIDE, Bantam Books, 1993. Daniel C. Dennett, DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA: EVOLUTION AND THE MEANINGS OF LIFE, Simon and Schuster, 1995. Annie Dillard, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, HarperPerennial, 1974. E. L.Doctorow, CITY OF GOD, Random House, 2000. Ursula Goodenough, THE SACRED DEPTHS OF NATURE, Oxford University Press, 1998. James Gleick, GENIUS: THE LIFE AND SCIENCE OF RICHARD FEYNMAN, Pantheon Books, 1992. Edward Harrison, MASKS OF THE UNIVERSE, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985. Shirley Hazzard, THE GREAT FIRE, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003. John Horgan, THE END OF SCIENCE: FACING THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE SCIENTIFIC AGE, Helix Books, 1996. Kathleen Norris, AMAZING GRACE: A VOCABULARY OF FAITH, Riverhead Books, 1998. Dennis Overbye, LONELY HEARTS OF THE COSMOS: THE SCIENTRIFIC QUEST FOR THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE, HarperCollins, 1991. John Herman Randall, Jr., PhD, THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIND: A SURVEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND OF THE PRESENT AGE, Houghton Mifflin, 1926. Lewis Thomas, LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON LISTENING TO MAHLER'S NINTH SYMPHONY, The Viking Press, 1983. Elie Wiesel and Phillipe-Michael de Saint-Cheron, EVIL AND EXILE, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Thornton Wilder, THE EIGHTH DAY, Avon Books, 1976. Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved 1