First Parish Unitarian Universalist“My Inner Texan: Dialogue Begins At Home”
A sermon preached by Rev. Ben Hall, Guest Preacher
At First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
March 6, 2005
Has this ever happened to you? You’re in a conversation, and the other person says something that grabs your attention for one reason: the person is wrong. And perhaps you find yourself faced with two options. Number one: you could say nothing, because, after all, people who believe things like that usually are beyond reason — they’re just so set in their ways! So, why bother making a scene when it’s not going to do any good? Option two: you could, out of a sense of kindness and goodwill, attempt to set this person straight, to save him from the error of his ways. There are other reasons you might take this route, too: not out of goodwill, but out of your commitment to justice. Doesn’t justice demand that you not keep silent, but rather speak up? Or, you might take option two because what the person said is so amazingly dumb that you just can’t stand to let it go uncorrected. Anyway, these are two very common options: silence, or setting the other person straight. Sound familiar to anyone?
What I’m going to preach about this morning is a different way to handle this situation, a way I’m going to call dialogue. With all the talk lately about red states and blue states, about bridging the gulf between polarized America, it’s clear to me that dialogue is important—not just in our country in general, but in our congregations in particular, as well as in our families, and even inside each one of us. In other words, in speaking about dialogue, I’m going to suggest that there are two people you’re going to have to deal with—yourself, and the other person—and that dealing with each of these people is equally vital if dialogue is to have a chance.
What do I mean by dialogue? In his wonderful book, The Miracle of Dialogue, Reuel Howe describes dialogue as a meeting of meanings. I invite you to hear those words: a meeting of meanings. The problem with both options I just presented is that neither one allows for a meeting of meanings. In neither one do you recognize the meaning that the other person brings. I think this is particularly true of option two. You have your opinion, just bursting to get out of you. That might be the meaning you bring—it might. But what about the other person’s? The question is, can you bear to recognize that the other person brings his own meaning, which is just as real to him as your meaning is to you? Forget about right or wrong just for a moment, and stay with real, and try to see the balance of real-ness as equal between the two of you.
I can give you a painful illustration of how hard this is. I was in my hospital, where I serve as a chaplain, visiting with a patient I’ll call Mr. A. Mr. A told me he’s going to be 94 years old next June. “That’s pretty old,” I said. But, as I looked at him, I began to doubt this fact. So, I asked him, “When were you born?” He answered, “1933.” I’m no math whiz, but I saw a problem: if Mr. A was born in 1933, he’d be turning 72 next June, not 94. In my thick, option two mindset, I found it intolerable to let Mr. A go on being so incredibly wrong. What I was missing was that Mr. A was not wrong at all, any more than I was. The problem was not Mr. A’s math, but my unwillingness to meet Mr. A’s meaning.
The thing about meeting someone’s meaning is that it does more than make way for dialogue by giving him equal footing. What it does at a deeper level is recognize the other person’s humanity, his personhood, his inherent worth and dignity.
Howe says, and I also believe, that meeting a person’s meaning with your own involves taking a big risk: the risk that you will be changed. If both people are not open in this way, dialogue is blocked. It’s like trying to talk through a closed door, or make eye-contact with someone wearing mirrored sunglasses. Mr. A tried to reach me, but my door was closed. Finally, after trying to correct him by actually making him watch me do addition and subtraction with a pen and paper, which produced the result of him getting more and more angry with me, I gave up and tried to meet him, finally, to open my door at least a little. It really didn’t matter whether he was opening a door to meet my meaning or not. For one thing, as a chaplain, it’s my role to meet the other, not vice versa; in other words, it’s not about me. But even in other parts of my life, I’ve found it’s worth it to open however much I can open, and just let the rest sort itself out.
So, there you have it: for dialogue, just meet the other person’s meaning, bring yours, and risk being changed. Simple, right?
I don’t think so. As I said before, even if meeting the other person’s meaning were no big deal, there’s another person involved—myself—and meeting that person’s meaning, my own meaning, is equally important, and perhaps even more challenging.
Back in the first example I gave, the conversation with someone who was wrong, there are a few things going on. There’s the other person’s speaking, and there’s your hearing, and your reaction. Some of you might have said nothing if Mr. A told you he’d reached the age of 93 in only 71 years. It might not even have caught your attention. You might well have told him about your own 93 year-old grandmother, or invited him to let you know what it’s like to have seen so many years.
Not me. For some reason, I got hooked. In order to get unhooked, and to allow myself to communicate in the future without being blocked, I need to look not at the other person’s words but at my own hook. What is at stake for me? Reuel Howe says something interesting: that a central reason dialogue gets blocked is that each person’s very being is at stake; each person resists meeting the other person’s meaning and maybe having his own meaning challenged because that could threaten the security of his very being, of who he is and what makes him alive, and perhaps of what holds the universe together: all of this is at risk in dialogue, which makes it scary.
For me, the work of the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung is extremely helpful here. (I am a novice student of Jung, so I ask those of you already familiar with Jung’s work to forgive me for presenting it so simply here.) In a nutshell, Jung realized in his work with his patients—and, no doubt, in his own personal growth—that our conscious mind is only part of the picture of what each of us carries with us. Jung said that there is an equally significant unconscious part of each person. The unconscious, Jung believed, includes a number of things, some of which are unique to each individual person and some of which are shared by all people (the collective unconscious). The thing about the unconscious is that it isn’t just baggage, as we like to call it, meaning it’s not just a bunch of suitcases that sit quietly in some corner of our minds gathering dust. Rather, said Jung, my unconscious shapes my perceptions and words and actions just as actively as my conscious mind does. It’s in there, working its magic, whether or not I know it or believe it.
One example of this is getting hooked. Why are some things such a big deal to me? Why do they get my goat? Another example of how the unconscious affects dialogue, or maybe just a different way of saying the same thing, is something I’ll call the knee-jerk phenomenon. Have you ever noticed that many of us do not look for facts, weigh the evidence, and make a decision based on it? I have noticed recently that much more often I do the opposite, and that many other people do, too.
Here’s an illustration: the WMD issue. How many people actually used the presence or absence of so-called weapons of mass destruction as a reason to support or oppose the Iraq war? Think about it. There are plenty of other examples like this. What seems clear to me is that it’s not the evidence that convinces us. Most of us make up our minds before we get any evidence. Then, we notice evidence that supports what we have already decided to believe and store that up to convince others. As someone has said before, we see what we believe, not vice versa. If something we see happens to contradict what we already believe, we either call it bogus or, more likely, ignore it. Why? Perhaps because it threatens the meaning we have already made, or perhaps it even threatens our own being: what we believe about who we are and how the world works.
In dialogue, this kind of knee-jerk functioning creates a problem, because we are very reluctant to let in anything we don’t want to hear. The other person stops even being a factor. But what I make of this is that why we protect ourselves from a certain thing outside us is because we are trying to shield ourselves from the very same thing inside us.
At this point, I think it’s time to introduce you to someone. I have to begin by describing how and where I met him. About a month and a half ago, I was driving on a highway near my home church, that happens to go right by a new restaurant called the Texas Roadhouse, and I smelled steak cooking. I was a vegetarian from 1986 to about 2000, and since then the only meat I eat is fish, and that’s only about once a week. I am accustomed to turning up my nose at hamburger exhaust vents. But before I thought about it, I felt my mouth watering. It smelled darn good! Then I appreciated the situation: me, Ben Hall, almost-vegetarian, life-long New Englander, political radical leftist, person who gets out of the way to let other people through doors—I was sniffing and smiling past the Texas Roadhouse! So I had to think: well, why not? Why would I not say this smells good? What if I were not so wrapped up in my identity, in all the characteristics I just listed that make me determined to hate the Texas Roadhouse— what then? That’s when I first started to get in touch with my inner Texan. I could feel myself getting bigger. I could hear my voice getting louder. I could imagine myself behind the wheel of a really big car, like a Hummer, screaming out the window, “Yeee – haw!” as I floored it and ran over some sagebrush, leaving a cloud of flying sand and dust behind me, my cowboy hat clutched in my outstretched left hand waving at the wind, saying, “Come an’ git me! Just try to catch me!”
And so I met my Inner Texan, one face of my shadow, my unconscious persona. As I said a minute ago, it dawned on me that this part of me, my Texan, lived underground in me because he was such a contradiction to my conscious persona, to how I see myself and how I want other people to see me.
I invite you to try something, if you’re interested. Start noticing how you like to see yourself, and be seen by others. Then, notice also any little things that slip out of you that are either very strongly in line with this (perhaps a bit too strongly) or out of line with it. It’s not an exact science, obviously; I think it’s just an openness.
This is the part of dialogue that begins at home: a willingness to not just tell my Texan how things are, but to listen to his meaning. After all, if I find myself feeling a strong response to someone, say, driving a big car, taking up a lot of space, eating a lot of food, my Inner Texan is speaking, whether or not I hear him. I can learn just as much about myself by what I detest, what I hate, as from what I like—if, that is, I can stand to tolerate parts of me that are beyond the control of my option two conscious mind.
Jung said that the unconscious has most power when it is ignored or denied—then, it has to find ways to erupt. By definition, I can never know all of my unconscious. But if I can just open myself to the many meanings I carry, and acknowledge the power in them for me, it will help me to be able to meet the meaning of another person more cleanly. Just think how many battles you may have fought with other people that are really battles inside yourself!
In the end, it is a choice for each one of us. Each time you encounter another person, you have the power to influence the nature of your interaction. Do you want to deliver a monologue? For whom is your monologue really meant—the other person, or yourself? Or, are do you choose to create a dialogue, with all of its risks and possibilities?
Because our Unitarian Universalist religious faith is a non-creedal one, meaning there’s no set of beliefs that each member must swear to in order to join us, we define ourselves more by what we do, by how we are together. We are congregational (with a small ‘c’). Our religious life begins in community with each other. Being in community demands dialogue, demands a willingness not just to find and hold up sameness but also to recognize and explore difference. The difference between each of us and the difference inside each of us are like mirrors of one another.
May we have the courage to meet the meaning we find both outside and inside, to engage with both the other person and our own self, that we might, through honest, brave, creative communication, fulfill the promise of our communal religious life. And may we further risk bringing this religious practice to our relationships in the wider world, helping to build an environment of respect and curiosity in which holiness can be found in each of us. So may it be.
Amen.