First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThe Wisdom of Un-knowing
A sermon preached by the Reverend Mary Margaret Earl, Guest Preacher
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
January 9, 2005
This morning I drove here from Providence to be with you. Almost every day this year unfortunately finds me driving. From my home in South Providence to my job in Central Falls. From my job to see my friends. From my friends house to the grocery store.
Last year, living in Boston, I often tried to take the bus. I lived in Jamaica Plain and worked as a chaplain at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton. Often I hopped on the bus for the five miles into work ... partly because overall it was cheaper than driving, partly because it cut down on traffic.
I feel badly about heavy traffic, and my contribution to it ... I think it's bad for us in so many ways ...
In what we breathe and how it elevates our stress levels. In how it disconnects us from one another. But, taking the bus takes a lot of time and effort, and I remembered this, too, one day last winter as I was trudging from the snowy bus stop up the hill to the hospital.
I was cutting across a parking lot, when someone honked … presumably at me, presumably nudge me out of the way.
I was startled. And I was mad. I mean, here I was, doing my best for humanity and the planet by using public transit - and some driver honks at me. Here I was, spending an hour getting to work when driving would take fifteen minutes, and this driver honks at me to trim two milliseconds from his trip.
I kept walking and fuming. I mean, really, this is what's wrong with the world. Here I was, a vulnerable human out in the chill and some bully, protected by his metal bubble, honks his horn.
I fumed all the way to the hospital. The honk had colored my morning walk with annoyance. I took off my coat, a co-worker arrived. And she said: "Good morning, Mary Margaret. I beeped hello at you in the parking lot but I don't think you saw me."
Ouch ... What a lesson.
The greeting of my good colleague, a woman I loved, in a flash stripped away all I'd "known," in that parking lot. Her warm greeting showed me how many assumptions I sometimes make.
Her greeting exposed how I'd filled myself with negative energy because of the sound of a single beep in the morning air.
Swift conclusions tempt us daily: The scowling stranger, the scowling cashier, the impatient mother in the post office line. It easy, at least for me, to dwell on some imagined slight, on someone's imagined failed character.
It's easy to spend too much time picking at judgments and criticisms like scabs. To keep the heart a little hunched over itself.
And, you know, I want my own heart to open wider. To keep opening to compassion and to peace. Premature judgments crowd my heart's edges.
My colleague's greeting reminded me that one path to staying open to the world is the wisdom of not knowing.
The wisdom in pausing before the rush to judgment: In saying "I really don't know the whole story here. I don't know where this person has been or what they've suffered. I don't know what's on their mind or in their heart."
The wisdom in breathing. In practicing letting go. In saying, over and over, I just don't know.
The Tao Te Ching, a lovely and sacred text written by Taoist Lao Tzu 2,500 years ago, says this: "Not knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize you are sick; then you can move toward health. The Master is her own physician. She has healed herself of all knowing. Thus, she is truly whole."
I love the Tao Te Ching, and all its poetry. I love its wisdom of Not Knowing. But, being human as we are, this is a difficult spiritual practice.
Our lives are busy, and full. We're asked to navigate well, and to make decisions quickly.
We drive, work, shop ... have how many fleeting encounters in a single day? How many exchanges in which there's little history or context? In which there are huge, blank spaces?
Sometimes we fill in the blanks with our own stories. And sometimes, it’s our wounds that give birth to the stories, our deep scarred places ... our vulnerabilities that get poked.
The speeding driver not only jangles our nerves, but reminds us of ways we been pushed around. The frowning boss evokes times we've felt powerless or ignored.
So the hurt and the anger and the resentment come rushing in, filling the spaces with furious scribbling.
I wonder if the honking driver in the parking lot this winter, hit the place in me that's been bullied before. The part that resents spending too much time traveling. The part that wishes life was easier.
In a single encounter, when we know so little, big miscommunications are born.
I think of a story I heard once, years ago, from a co-worker named Mike. I adored Mike. He became my definition of a gentleman. He was elegant in negotiating among friends and strangers.
He made people around him feel at ease, and I learned social graces from him.
He was married with three children, and one day told about when he and his wife Marion had their first baby, a little boy.
As new parents are, they were protective of their cub. And one day the baby swallowed a feather. I don't know how serious feather-swallowing is, really, but in their mama- and papa-bear state, Mike and Marian panicked. They bundled their boy into the car, and began speeding to the hospital. And then hit road construction. The cars were backed up in front of them.
So, frantic, they steered onto the highway shoulder, to keep moving. And then, another driver saw them coming. And he pulled onto the shoulder, too.
To block them from going further.
I picture them all, there, on the roadside. The man in the car in front, thinking in an instant that a rude driver was crowding the line, and, wanting justice, pulling out. I imagine Mike and Marion, holding their precious bundle, hearts racing, stalled on the roadside.
I imagine the tangles and misunderstandings that come from making up stories and getting them wrong.
I suspect that if that driver had known of Mike and Marion's plight, he would've let them pass. Most of us would. When we get a chance to hear more of one another's stories, we often find our hearts opening, a little wider.
As a chaplain as St. Elizabeth’s, I was blessed to hear stories for much of my day. I visited patients and was privileged to hear stories of common human struggles and pain and fears.
One of my best teachings was listening to the stories from women and men on the drug addictions unit. I lead spirituality groups there, meeting with teenagers and middle aged women and men with families. They were addicted to barbituates or alcohol or heroin. They came to dry out. And they told their stories.
They spoke of their pain and their loneliness. They told of wrong things they'd done, like stealing, in service of their sickness, and their shame of it. They told how they feared they'll never heal. How they'd drag their addiction behind them, like a weight, like a wound, forever. .
And I thought of these stories one night last year as I watched the late night news. The newscast told of a man who'd mugged someone at an ATM - maybe for drug money. The reporter told the story plainly and it felt like this: a Bad Person, with a capital B, was caught and taken away.
I know mugging is bad, of course, stealing is bad, and it makes sense for us to feel relief when a mugger is stopped. But I couldn't hear the newscast without hearing, too, the voices from the hospital, the sadness of it. I couldn't hear without wondering about the life of this man handcuffed and hunched in the back of the jail-bound van.
It wasn't so easy any more for my heart to wall itself off from those "dangerous addicts," for the bars of my heart to clang shut like a castle gate.
If we could hear all the stories, our hearts might open wide as the sea. But we don't. We hear snippets. We encounter fragments. That is how life is.
So maybe, in the midst of the rush and brief encounters, we can practice just this: Knowing we don't know. We hum a mantra like this ... I don't know. I don't know. And I just don't know.
In this, perhaps, we can create a fragile wedge between our fleeting experience, and quick condemnation.
We can create a slender space into which something like compassion enters, like cracks in the sidewalk into which good and growing things come.
Maybe we can practice giving one another the benefit of the doubt.
There's so much at stake. Our own peace. The possibility for peace between us.
What did I miss on my walk from the bus to the hospital, during my ruminations? The color of the sky and the possibilities of the day and the feeling of my own breath going out into the cold morning air ...
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron in her book The Wisdom of No Escape describes the magical that is present in an ordinary day. She writes: "You could just relax and realize that, behind all the worry, complaint and disapproval that goes on in your mind, the sun is always coming up in the morning, moving across the sky, and going down in the evening. The birds are always out there collecting their food and making their nests ... The grass is always being blown by the wind or standing still. Food and flowers and trees are growing out of the earth. There's enormous richness."
There is enormous richness, and we feel it with hearts, opening. We welcome peace when we open to all we don't know. There is enormous richness, and we feel it with hearts, opening. We welcome peace when we open to all we don't know.
We hope to be given the benefit of the doubt, just as we would like to give the benefit of the doubt to others.
It's not easy, it won't be easy.
The judgments race into our encounters quick as dragonflies across the water.
I pray this: To try. To try to pause. I pray for a moment of grace to remember, to recite to myself, under my breath, and in the heat of the moment, I don't know. I don't fully know who you are, and where you've come from. What journeys you've traveled, and what ails you.
I know you are another brother or sister. So much else, I don’t.
I don't know. I don't know. I wish you well, and I just don't know.
May we embrace that which cannot be embraced: the vastness of the stories, the unknown and what is untold.
May we keep unclenching our hands, and our heart, and opening deeper, and deeper still, into our unknowing.