First Parish Unitarian UniversalistAnchors, Filters and Focus
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, Massachusetts
December 10, 2006
READING
Set In Stone
From Walking Toward Morning, by Victoria Safford, minister, White Bear UU Church, St. Paul, MN. This 2003 UUA meditation manual is available from the UUA Bookstore.
In a cemetery, once, I found a soothing epitaph. The name of the deceased and dates had been scoured away by wind and rain, but there was a carving of a tree with roots and branches (a classic nineteenth century motif) and among them the words, "She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things." At first this seemed to me a little meager, a little stingy on the part of her survivors, but I wrote it down and have thought about it since, and now I can't imagine a more proud or satisfying legacy
"She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things."
Every day I stand in danger of being struck by lightning and having the obituary in the local paper say for all the world to see: "She attended frantically and ineffectually to a great many unimportant, meaningless details."
How do you want your obituary to read?
"He got all the dishes washed and dried before playing with his children in the evening."
"She balanced her checkbook with meticulous precision and never missed a day of work-missed a lot of sunsets, missed a lot of love, missed a lot of risk, missed a lot-but her money was in order."
"She answered all her calls, all her e-mail, all her voicemail, but along the way she forgot to answer the call to service and compassion, and forgiveness, first and foremost of herself."
"He gave and forgave sparingly, without radical intention, without passion or conviction."
"She could not, or would not, hear the calling of her heart."
How will it read, how does it read, and if you had to name a few worthy things to which you attend well and faithfully, what, I wonder, would they be?
SERMON
Most of us, I believe, feel that there is too much information coming at us in this so-called "age of information." Some of us just avoid (or try to) the incoming onslaught altogether, and others often feel overwhelmed and troubled and need sympathetic souls, like their First Parish friends, with whom to sort it all out.
That there are both types (and more) among us here at First Parish came home to me recently when I attended a meeting of one of our Covenant Groups. Let me digress here for a brief aside about Covenant Groups. These are small groups of about eight parishioners who meet regularly, at least monthly, and whose meetings consist of about an hour of supportive personal sharing about how their lives are going, and another hour in heartfelt discussion of a topic chosen by the group to help them "get at" the meaning of life. Each has a facilitator and I meet with the facilitators every six or eight weeks. We currently have five such groups and may be starting a sixth, so if you would like to consider joining a Covenant Group or moving to a new one, please speak with me.
Anyway, at this one Covenant Group meeting, they were to choose their next topic. One person wanted to discuss the overwhelming and fear-provoking news of terrorist attacks in various places and the violent chaos in Iraq. Another person said no to that topic—"I don't watch the news and I won't have anything to say in the conversation." In the end, though, the group agreed on a meaningful topic for their next meeting and I subsequently was told that it was a great discussion, with everyone participating.
I'm fascinated by our differences in knowing what matters. How do we know what matters? How do you know what matters to you? What anchors you, what could anchor you, in the midst of modern sensory overload and information surge? What could keep you from being swept into a lifestyle of attending "frantically and ineffectually to a great many unimportant, meaningless details," as expressed in the Reading ("Set In Stone" by Victoria Safford in Walking Toward Morning) earlier?
How do you filter the information available to salvage what you need to live a good life? How do you know what "few worthy things" you want to "attend to well and faithfully" at this time in your life? Do we value what we value because of what we're taught and what we've learned, or are we hard-wired to value some things more than others?
If I could have been a scientist, I would have been a neuroscientist. I'm fascinated by the way the brain works. And I'm fascinated by how our minds work. As much as scientists are learning about how our minds work, they are learning about how brains differ one from another. Some minds anchor and filter better than others, due to certain things happening in their brains better than other brains, and therefore those people may be better able to attend to a few worthy things well and faithfully than others whose brains don't work quite that way.
For example, I've enjoyed getting to know somewhat a young adult in the congregation whose profession is working with autistic children. I don't know much about autism, so I asked her to recommend a book about it. She didn't hesitate for a moment. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, she said. "What?!" "It's the name of a book. If you read it, you'll learn more about autism."
Since then, my women's book group and my UU minister's Study Group chose to read that novel with the fascinating title, a first book for author Mark Haddon. Perhaps you've read it, too? It's a story told in the voice of a fifteen-year-old British boy, about what happens to him as he investigates the cruel murder of his neighbor's dog.
Though the term autism is not mentioned in the novel, Christopher seems to be an autistic savant. He is brilliant in math, but unable to cope with normal daily life that most of us take easily in stride, like reading another person's face for signs of emotion, or like riding the underground subway system in London. The latter is a challenge because he is unable to filter the incoming sensory information. This inability made the book exhausting to read- all those details of sight, smell, sound, texture and taste described as if all equally important and in rapid, succinct succession. Phew!
In the book Christopher reflects on his behavior in ways an autistic person typically could not I'm told by a child psychologist in the congregation. But in the novel it helps us understand his experience. As he explains:
When I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn't any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you don't expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the place, and also you have to noticed things that might happen as well. And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DELETE and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going. (p. 143-4)
Haven't most of us at some point, or more, felt like rebooting ourself??!! Really, modern life often feels like a sensory overload, even to people who don't fall anywhere on the autistic spectrum. We often have way too many choices about inconsequential matters (and sometimes too few on what matters most, I might add-just think of those among us who are seeking Mr. or Ms. Right).
In fact, it's been shown that having too many choices does make life more difficult. A study was done of a display of gourmet jams. When only six different jams were on display, thirty percent of the passers-by who stopped at the booth ended up buying some jam, whereas when twenty-four jams were displayed, only three percent of those who stopped bought jam.
Why? "Because," says Malcolm Gladwell in another unusually-titled book Blink,
buying jam is a snap decision. You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our [our ability to make] snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality. (p. 142-3).
On the other hand, we need to be conscious of when we are making snap judgments because sometimes they aren't in our best interest, and may be determined or at least shaped by deeply held prejudices. Gladwell gives a great example of that: how major classical orchestras were for centuries denying themselves some of the best musicians by making snap judgments about who can or cannot play an instrument superbly. White men can and everyone else cannot, was the judgment (are we surprised?).
However, when musicians began to organize themselves to fight for proper contracts, health benefits, and protections against arbitrary firing, they also began to push for fairness in hiring because some musicians felt that conductors were choosing their favorites. They insisted on having hiring committees, identifying candidates by number not name, and erecting a screen between the auditioner and the auditioning committee. If the auditioning musician made a sound that revealed their gender, like clearing their throat, they were ushered out, given a new number and brought in again. In the thirty years since screens in auditions became commonplace, the number of women in the top U.S. orchestras has increased fivefold. (Blink, p. 249-50).
One of them was Julie Landsman. Here's her story as told by Gladwell.
When she auditioned for the role of principal French horn at the Met[ropolitan Opera in New York], the screens had just gone up in the [audition] hall. At the time, there were no women in the brass section of the orchestra, because everyone "knew" that women could not play the horn as well as men. But Landsman came and sat down and played-and she played well. "I knew in my last round that I had won before they told me," she says. "It was because of the way I performed the last piece. I held on to the last high C for a very long time, just to leave no doubt in their minds. And they started to laugh, because it was above and beyond the call of duty." But when they declared her the winner and she stepped out from behind the screen, there was a gasp. It wasn't just that she was a woman, and female horn players were rare. And it wasn't just that bold, extended high C, which was the kind of macho sound that they expected from a man only. It was because they [already] knew her. Landsmen had played for the Met before as a substitute. Until they listened to her with just their ears, however, they had no idea she was so good.
As Julie Landsman says about her experience since, being on the audition committee herself, "I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgment. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart."
The orchestra audition screen is a good example of a filter. It filters out visual information that is irrelevant to judging someone's musical ability. It blocks sensory input from the eyes and allows the committee to focus on input from the ears only.
When we feel overwhelmed, we might choose to filter out one or more of our sense's input, like Christopher who says, "I close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan."
For example, like that Covenant Group member, I don't see the news on TV either, but I regularly hear it on the radio, filtering out the visual, and regularly read it in the newspaper, which filters out audio input and all moving visual images, leaving mainly the printed word, a few still photos and cartoons. This makes it easier for me to take in what I do feel I need to know, as a world citizen.
Time can act as a kind of filter, I think. Time might be said to be the filter in the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. Like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, it is one person's story told in great detail, but in Saturday the information is not overwhelming, because it is presented in slow motion. The entire story, all 289 pages of it, takes place in one day, in one twenty-four hour day. One day's worth of one man's mind-reading, of his own mind and that of everyone he encounters.
Now, what do you think, would it be hopelessly boring, or what, to read a 289 page description of one of your days, or mine?
But the British neurosurgeon Henry Perowne's one day is anything but boring. It is set in London, on a day I well remember, the day millions of people world-wide rallied against the impending U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, February 15, 2003. My front-page newspaper clippings from the day after, showing the rally in New York where I had been, are still on my refrigerator, posted there until the war is over, which perhaps will be sooner now, thanks this week to the Iraq Study Group, I hope.
Henry, however, doesn't go to the rally. I won't tell you what he does do, so as not to spoil the suspense should you decide to read it. The events of the day (some of them frightful) unfold, as I said, in slow-motion. Reminding me of the few times I've been witness to an automobile accident, when time slowed to nearly a stand-still, imprinting the visual aspects of the event clearly in my mind, as if seeing the frames of movie film one by one.
I still remember one accident that I saw more than ten years ago, the slow folding up like an accordion. of the hood of the tan sedan. that ran the red light hitting a large dump truck. and the only injury to either driver being a small trickle of blood on one's wrist from a shard of glass.
When in danger or fright, our brains have the amazing ability to slow down the input, as if time was the information filter, so that we can make the best snap judgments possible, utilizing what each of our senses is taking in. It's a survival mechanism that I'm sure natural selection reinforced. The most likely to survive danger would be those individuals with the best-read sensory information and that takes time.
In Blink, Gladwell describes one veteran police officer's two-second encounter with an armed youth and how it didn't end in a shooting, because the
officer's experience and skill allowed him to stretch out that fraction of time, to slow the situation down, to keep gathering information until the last possible moment. He watches the gun come out. He sees the pearly grip. He tracks the direction of the muzzle. He waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kids' face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. Is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? (p. 241).
I think one of the challenges of this "information age" is that so much of the incoming information is hyped. It's intentionally presented to heighten our fright, thus provoking fear. But actually, the fright isn't appropriately ours, because we're too far removed from the danger, most of the time, so far.
But, our brains are confused by that. They're hard-wired to, when in danger, slow the input down to take in more of it, so we're drawn like moths-to-a-light to those hyped sources of information (just what the advertisers want!). And, so, either our brains want to react either by slowing down the sensory input and then apathy sets in or, as Christopher in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time said, by rebooting in order to losing it all!
We all need ways to stay sane in this over-stimulating environment. Some withdraw. Others turn to drink or drugs to take the edge off of modern life, or become addicted to activities which take on an unhealthy ability to assuage self-doubt.
But, many of us are working hard to create space in our lives for love, for the quest for truth, for service to others and the larger good. That's why we seek moments in our week, in our day, to filter out the incoming data, and instead nourish our spirit and anchor ourselves in what is right and good.
That's why we're here, this morning. That's why we share silence here, and fellowship. It's why we pray and meditate together, enjoy beautiful music and stained glass windows together.
And, that's why we sing our hearts out here, which is what we are about to do in a very brief moment. We will rise, in body or in spirit, to sing out praises for the journey we're on together, this journey of faith, this one life we're each given to live, in this one crazy and amazing world, which is-after all-the only one we know.