Acts of God

"God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want."
-- Heraclitus

Opening Words: by the Reverend Mark Morrison Reed (SLT #580)

The central task of religious community 

is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all… 

Once felt [our bonds inspire us] to act for justice…

The religious community is essential, 

for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, 

and our strength is too limited to do all that must be done. 

Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.

Meditation: by the Reverend Max Coots (from Leaning Against the Wind)  

I have witnessed a miracle,… I have seen God!  I saw God last spring, underground, pushing seeds up into plants; between the rows, pulling beans and tomatoes and squash out of blossoms; and, after frost, wilting it all down to give it back to soil - as all are given back.

I saw God.  I saw her with her arms around her child, laughing.  I saw him talking to his child as if the child were as real as he.

I saw God dressed like a clown in this fall’s leaves and know God will come back as April and as buds…

I touched God and was touched: in the wood and the words I worked; in whatever it was that moved me to do what I should, but didn’t want to do; in the hands and hugs of a very small boy I know and from a very old woman I know, and so many in between, in the sun of summer and of hope, in the wind of autumn and of grief, in the snow that creeks cold under my feet but warms the roots of grass and the lives of mice, until spring lets them out again….

And, maybe, in a week or in a year, I will think back to now, and maybe I’ll realize that I saw and touched and heard God here.  Maybe not. I never know. 

Reading: by Nick Paumgarten, from an article entitled “Acts of God” (The New Yorker, July 12, 2010)

Last month, after a limb fell from an elm tree near the Central Park Zoo, critically injuring a woman and killing her infant daughter, citizens wondered, as citizens will, how such a thing could be allowed to happen. When trees kill, as trees will, you blame it either on the tree pruners or on “an act of God.” You are supposed to choose one or the other—last week, Mayor Bloomberg cited the latter—rather than detect any trace of God’s will in the fallibility of arborists and bureaucrats. This assumption owes something to the fact that “act of God” is a legal term specifically deployed to absolve human beings of any fault or indemnity. When God acts, apparently, the rest of us do not…

Questions of agency, divine or otherwise, dog us these early-summer days, amid a pileup of ill tidings: an intractable war; hints, once again, of economic depression; the deep-sea oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Who’s to blame? Who’s in charge? On the day of the Mayor’s pronouncement, a technician who is working with British Petroleum to drill relief wells told the Times, in response to questions about the state of the damaged well, and about the prospects for fixing it, “No human being alive can know the answers.” A line like that could put a [person] in a theological mood…

Reading: by Jeff Stryker, from an article entitled “Suing God” (The New York Times, December 9, 2007)

It sounds like a kooky law-school exercise. Your life has been upended by a horrible tragedy, one of those “acts of God” listed in the clause in your insurance policy denying coverage. Why can’t you take a higher power to court and make it pay through the nose? The hypothetical became real on Sept. 14 when State Senator Ernie Chambers sued God in Douglas County District Court in Omaha.

The lawsuit blames God for a passel of alliterative ills, including “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues” and “ferocious famines.”

The complaint anticipates law students’ objections. Jurisdiction is obvious “by virtue of the fact that Defendant, being Omnipresent, is personally present in Douglas County.” The suit asks to waive the requirement for personally serving notice, noting that it would be futile to “nail a notice to the front door” of the various “religious denominations, persuasions, cults and the like” who claim to speak for God.

Reading: by the Hindu teacher Swami Muktananda from Play of Consciousness (God in All Worlds, edited by Lucinda Vardey, p. 727)

This world is a perfect reflection of God. …Everything is God. All countries, all holy places, all names are God’s. Only in the eyes of men [and women] are there differences between high and low. Truly, all the regions of this earth are holy places of the Lord. All bodies of water are holy rivers of God. All shapes and forms of the world contain the very sound of God’s name. … There is no end to God. However much you read, there is something left to study. However many holy places you visit, there are still more left to see. However far you see, there is always more ahead. Such is the pervasiveness of the divine principle, the divine vastness… 

Acts of God

A Sermon Delivered on March 30, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

This has been a bad winter. Too long, too cold, too much snow. This is my opinion. But I know I am not alone. In the course of the last weeks and months I have commiserated with many of you and exchanged mutual complaints about the cold. The News-Gazette said, we got about twice the annual average of snow this winter. Maybe you read that too. But did you know we survived a natural disaster? Did you know we suffered through several acts of God?

This is what I learned from the superintendent of Urbana schools, who has been under some scrutiny in recent months, because of the number of snow days he declared for Urbana school kids, of which my daughter is one. 

The Urbana school district, I learned, allows for up to five snow days per year, as required by state law. And those five days missed in the winter are added at the end of the school year, just before summer vacation. But if the weather is so forbidding that more than five days need to be canceled, the district can apply to the Illinois State Board of Education for additional days off, which aren’t added to end of the year. And they aren’t called snow days. They are called “Act of God Days.” The district calendar codes them as “AOG” days. This year we have been granted several of them.

Several times this winter, I now realize, I was in the midst of an act of God, and I didn’t even know it. This left me wondering what, exactly, constitutes an “act of God.”

* * *

So what is an act of God? According to the Wex Legal Dictionary, it is “an overwhelming event caused exclusively by natural forces whose effects could not possibly be prevented (e.g., flood, earthquake, tornado).  In modern jurisdictions, "act of God" is often broadened… to include all natural phenomena whose effects could not be prevented by the exercise of reasonable care and foresight.”

Last week the residents of Oso, Washington, were victims of a sudden devastating mudslide, that many have called an act of God. And while the tragedy is real, and certainly more serious than a few extra inches of snow, not everyone agrees it qualifies as an act of God. As Timothy Egon points out in this morning’s New York Times, the danger of a mudslide was pointed out by scientists years ago, but their warnings fell on deaf ears. Logging above and into the area of the current landslide went beyond legal limits, but no one, it seems, was concerned enough to confront the issue. Calling the landslide a “completely unforeseen” act of God, Egon says, is blatant denial, a willful ignorance of cause and effect. 

* * *

Legal scholars Gerald and Kathleen Hill say acts of God are significant for two reasons: First, “for the havoc and damage they wreak.” And second, “because often contracts state that "acts of God" are an excuse for delay or failure to fulfill a commitment or to complete a construction project. Many insurance policies exempt coverage for damage caused by acts of God, which is one time an insurance company gets religion. At times disputes arise as to whether a violent storm or other disaster was an act of God (and therefore exempt from a claim) or a foreseeable natural event. God knows the answer!”

* * *

I wonder, what kind of a God is it, that is imagined by legal experts and insurance agents? Is God the culprit responsible for “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, [and] terrifying tornadoes”?

As Nick Paumgarten points out, we may have an opportunistic incentive in imagining God as a ferocious, fearsome fellow. By blaming all things horrendous and terrifying on God, we can conveniently absolve human beings of any fault or indemnity. 

This God of legal documents and insurance policies was not made up by lawyers. Rather it is a God that grew up in the context of a distinct theological tradition. 

As the physicist and religious naturalist Chet Raymo sees it, there have traditionally been two major pathways to understanding God. The first path, he writes, 

“followed by the overwhelming majority of believers – looks for God in exceptional events. In miracles. The stacked crutches at Lourdes. The raising of Lazarus from the dead. Making the blind see. The virgin birth. Answered prayers. There was a time, of course, when everything was explained by the interventions of supernatural agencies. The sun was driven across the sky each day by the god Helios in his golden chariot. Comets were divine portents. Plagues were signs of God’s displeasure… A second pathway to God looks to the creation [- the world of nature-] as the primary revelation.” (When God is Gone Everything is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist, p. 114)

It is the first path to God - a God found in extraordinary rather than ordinary events, and imagined in supernatural rather than natural dimensions - that even today, even in the twenty-first century, still “retains a powerful hold on the human imagination,” he says. 

* * *

In a book entitled Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, the historian and legal scholar Ted Steinbert offers this example: 

“On March 27, 1994, Palm Sunday, over 100 parishioners of the Goshen United Methodist Church sat together in prayer when suddenly an F3 tornado tore the church to shreds. Twenty members of the congregation lost their lives, including four-year-old Hannah Clem, the daughter of the church’s minister, Rev. Kelly Clem. Some said it was an act of God. [The] mayor, Vera Stewart, remarked that people were asking a lot of questions. “The said, ‘Why did God do this? Was he mad because we were wrongdoing?’ We have gotten a lot of negative letters, things like ‘Where was your God while you were praying?’” (p. 147)

For Christians and non-Christians alike, for both theists and atheists, this kind of tragedy provides a perfect opportunity for a religious blame game, in the midst of which onlookers can consider themselves superior, because they were spared God’s fury, and victims may wonder what they did to deserve it. 

But not all religious people would consider the tragedy an example of divine intervention. As Steinbert writes, 

“The Rev. Kelly Clem…said that God had little to do with the tragedy. In the mind of this 33-year-old pastor, wind, not God, killed her daughter, though she did tell Vice President Al Gore, who toured the area immediately after the disaster, that a better system of storm warning might have prevented the calamity. … In all the rhetoric that grew out of the disaster, the vast majority focused on the forces beyond human control – God or nature – responsible for the tragedy. Certainly nobody called it an act of man, or better yet, an act of man’s inhumanity to man.” (p. 149)

And yet, as Ted Steinbert sees it, the pastor Kelly Clem was right. Her daughter would be alive today, if the town had been equipped with tornado sirens, and had been served by the government’s National Weather Radio service. Like many people who live in poor rural areas, the members of the Goshen United Methodist Church, just happened to live beyond the 40-mile reach of the nearest radio tower.

The term “act of God” is little more than a convenient evasion, Steinbert says, that allows us to plead innocence and helplessness when disaster strikes. Regardless whether we portray ourselves as helpless in the face of “natural disaster” or the “whim of God” – either way - the catastrophe is stripped of any moral dimension or ethical implication for us.

Steinbert offers another example: When Hurricane Hugo swept over the South Carolina coast in 1989, Time magazine proclaimed in its headline that the “Winds of Chaos” had arrived, citing a wind speed of 150 miles per hour. Most news reports used a slightly lower number, 135 mph. Yet according to civil engineers the sustained winds were actually in the neighborhood of 90 to 95 mph.

He wonders, could there be a connection between the effort to puff up nature’s fury, and the fact that even five years after the storm virtually no action had been taken to update building codes throughout South Carolina. It turns out that since the early 1960s engineers had known about the need for proper wind-loading criteria when building in hurricane-prone areas. But that standard was largely ignored out of respect for development interests.

A very similar approach was taken a few years later in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Civil engineers long knew that the dikes surrounding the city were inadequate. And the thousands whose homes were subject to severest flooding just happened to be overwhelmingly poor.

Examining the historical record, Steinbert finds that “the concept of “natural” disaster developed [in the 19^th century] when those in power in disaster-stricken cities sought to normalize calamity in their quest to restore order, that is, to restore property values and the economy to their upward trajectory.”

He writes, 

“The emphasis on [God or] chaotic nature as the culprit – to the exclusion of human economic forces – has… influenced not [only our] local response to disaster, but the entire federal strategy for dealing with the problem. … Natural disasters are not simply technical matters in need of more and better engineering; they are at their core sociopolitical issues. … Worse still, by recruiting an angry God or chaotic nature to their cause, those in power have been able to rationalize the economic choices that help to explain why the poor and people of color – who have largely borne the brunt of these disasters – tend to wind up in harm’s way. [Our] response to natural disaster… has both contributed to a continuing cycle of death and destruction and also normalized the injustices of class and race.” (p. xxi)

* * *

Whether or not we believe in God, there is something deeply disturbing about the habit of using “God” as a supernatural scapegoat, for our very natural moral failures. 

There is something wrong with our notion of God, if it encourages us to distance ourselves from what is happening in the world. There is something wrong with our notion of God, if it allows us to throw up our hands and plead helplessness when we witness the suffering of others. There is something wrong with our notion of God, if it allows us to close our eyes and ears to the consequences of wrong-doing, the consequences of our efforts to advance our own self-interests, while remaining blissfully indifferent to the interests of others – others who are less privileged, less prosperous. This is a tragic abuse of the religious imagination. 

The central task of religion at its best is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all, and thus inspire us to act for justice. 

Likewise, any understanding of God should serve to show us how we are not separate, but all intricately bound up in an interdependent web of creation, inseparable from the natural world. 

Acts of God are taking place all around us, every day. Every day is an “Act of God Day.”  If we pay attention we can see the everyday miracles of the natural world. The miracle at work underground, that will push seeds up into plants, will pull beans and tomatoes out of blossoms. The miracle of a mother’s love, and child’s laughter. The miracle of autumn leaves that fall, and turn to earth, and come back in April as buds. The miracle of hands and hugs, and hope beyond grief.

As Swami Muktananda sees it, the whole world is a perfect reflection of God. All regions of the earth are holy places. All bodies of water are holy rivers. And no matter how many holy places we may visit, there are still more left to see. 

Whether we believe in acts of God or act of Nature,

May we open our eyes and ears to the miracles all around us,

May we be mindful of holiness everywhere,

And may we recognize the miraculous power that dwells within each of us

To help us create a better world.

Amen. 

Of Failure and Success

"The key to success isn't much good until one discovers the lock to insert it in."
-- Tehyi Hsieh

Meditation: a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “The Messenger”

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth

and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,

over and over, how it is that we live forever.

Reading: by Marian Wright Edelman from The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (p. 39) 

Lesson 3: Assign yourself. My Daddy used to ask us whether the teacher had given us any homework. If we said no, he’d say, “Well, assign yourself.” Don’t wait around for your boss or your co-worker or spouse to direct you to do what you are able to figure out and do for yourself. Don’t do just as little as you can to get by. If someone asks you to do A, and B and C obviously need to be done as well, do them without waiting to be asked or expecting a Nobel prize for doing what is needed. Too often today too many ordinary, thoughtful deeds are treated as extraordinary acts of valor… If you see a need, don’t ask, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Ask, “Why don’t I do something.” Don’t wait around to be told what to do. There is nothing more wearing than people who have to be asked or reminded to do things repeatedly. Hard work, initiative, persistence are still the nonmagic carpets to success. 

Reading: by Laura Berman Fortgang from The Little Book on Meaning: Why We Crave It, How We Create It, this is from a chapter entitled “Success Happens” (p. 24) 

A woman walks into her kitchen after a long day at work, to find chaos everywhere. Her teenagers are glued to the TV, pizza boxes and soda cans are strewn across the counters. “Has anyone started their homework?” she asks, knowing the answer in advance. She’s not one to talk, though. Her life is a mess. Bills are a week late – not because doesn’t have the money, but because she’s so busy managing she’s barely functioning. Climbing the corporate ladder has helped her fall a few rungs in her home life. Piles of dirty clothes lie in her bathroom. She hasn’t cooked a meal in weeks and she’s had to change her kids’ parent/teacher meetings twice. She could hire someone, but why pay someone when she can do it herself? Success happens…

All stories are different, but really, they are all the same. Getting what we want seems to come with a price. The more money we make, the more money we have to make. The better the job, the more the demands. And so on. We’re a tired bunch. We move like lightening to fulfill the obligations of our day. With our nose to the grindstone, jumping through all the hoops of modern life (neatly or not), making our way systematically through the benchmarks that are expected, we lose track of the richness that we hoped our efforts would achieve. The richness is there, but we are preoccupied. We’ve invented a man-made state called success, and we are so entrenched in managing it that we wear ourselves thin. We become blind to what we hoped it would create.

Reading: by the Indian sage Krishnamurti from a book of entitled Think on These Things

You see, we are so afraid to fail, to make mistakes, not only in examinations but in life. To make a mistake is considered terrible because we will be criticized for it, somebody will scold us. But, after all, why should you not make a mistake? Are not all the people in the world making mistakes? And would the world cease to be in this horrible mess if you were never to make a mistake? If you are afraid of making mistakes you will never learn. The older people are making mistakes all the time, but they don't want you to make mistakes, and thereby they smother your initiative. Why? Because they are afraid that by observing and questioning everything, by experimenting and making mistakes you may find out something for yourself and break away from the authority of your parents, of society, of tradition. That is why the ideal of success is held up for you to follow; and success, you will notice, is always in terms of respectability. Even the saint in his so-called spiritual achievements must become respectable, otherwise he has no recognition, no following.

Of Failure and Success

A Sermon Delivered on March 16, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Have you done your homework? Did you get your grades for last week’s test? Isn’t there an exam you should be studying for?

At home, these are the questions that are perpetually on the tip of my tongue every time one of our two children enters the room, or passes by within earshot. If you ask them, they might say that the father-child exchanges at home have become somewhat repetitive, predictable, and annoying lately.  But what they don’t know is that I have actually resisted nagging, and been able to bite my tongue ten times, for every single time the predictable questions escape my lips.

Noah is a sophomore in college, Sophia is a high school senior, and both are near that early stage in higher education, where doors for future pursuits will either be opened or closed to them, depending on their academic accomplishments right now.

Don’t waste hours surfing the internet, or hanging out with friends. “Assign yourself!” I want to shout all day. Work hard, show initiative, be persistent, that’s the path to success. 

What I don’t tell them is that when I was their age I was not a highly motivated student myself. My grades reflected the fact that – at that stage of my life – academic achievement was not my highest priority.

Nevertheless, I was not oblivious to the fact that my older brother Derek breezed through high school with straight A’s. On the side, he learned shorthand stenography, and got so good at it, he taught evening classes to adults while we was still in high school. At the same time, he became such a skilled ten-finger typist, that he earned money on the side, helping out in my father’s office. Then my brother went to med school to be a doctor. This was the kind of accomplishment my father favored.

My brother was on the fast track to success, and I seemed to be at the brink of failure in the game of life my father envisioned. My father thought his four sons, should all be doctors and lawyers, wealthy and well-adjusted, happily married, and providing him a multitude of grandchildren – or so he said, half joking.

But this is not how things turned out. Toward the end of his medical training, my brother got involved with a spiritual group called the Ananda Marga. And rather than completing his dissertation and opening a practice in Germany, he moved to India, to practice yoga and become a celibate monk and teacher. He wore orange robes and a turban. And I was the one who went on to become happily married, and provide the obligatory grandchildren.  

I remember, at the time, my brother’s vocational reassessment was a real challenge for my parents. In the years that followed, it was much more difficult to say who in the family was headed for success, and who was a failure.

* * *

What does it mean to be a failure? What does it mean to succeed in the game of life?

As Unitarian Universalists we draw from many sources to find answers to these questions. For instance, from the work of Milton…  Bradley. A hundred and fifty years ago Milton Bradley invented a board game called “The Game of Life.” 

The object of the game is very straightforward. Right here in the instructions, updated in 2000, it says: “Collect money and LIFE tiles (show LIFE tile)… Each LIFE tile carries a secret message: a special achievement, and a dollar amount that counts toward your total cash value at the end of the game.”

So, for instance, one LIFE tile says: “Build a Better Mousetrap - $50,000.” Others say: “Open Health Food Chain - $100,000.” “Write Great American Novel - $150,000.” “Win Nobel Peace Prize - $250,000.” (Gather LIFE tiles. The more the better.)

In the course of the game, you spin a wheel that tells you how far you can advance for each turn. Along the way, you choose a career and a salary, get married, have up to four children, buy a house, purchase insurance and pay taxes. The game ends when everyone has reached retirement. Then you tally up your LIFE tiles, and count your money. The player with the most money wins – and is a success.

* * *

In real life success is not quite so simple. This is what Laura Berman Fortgang has discovered. Trying too hard to succeed in one area of our lives can lead to failure in others. In real life career success and family failure often exist side by side. A preoccupation with material affluence, can lead to spiritual impoverishment. And – tragically – even if we achieve our most treasured life goals, after toiling year in and year out for the sake of the single accomplishment we thought would make us happy, we may find ourselves anything but. 

Striving for “a man-made state called success” may seem like a sure path to wealth, health and happiness, but actually worldly success has several pitfalls. At least this is the way the religious scholar Huston Smith sees it. 

Smith says a certain degree of success is needed in order to support a household and to discharge one’s civic duties. But beyond that, worldly success has some real limitations. First of all, because worldly success – fame and fortune – is always precarious. What can be gained can also be lost. Secondly, the drive for success is insatiable. Experience has shown that the more power and money people acquire, the more they want. Also, our achievements are ephemeral. Our worldly success dies with us.  “You can’t take it with you,” they say. And finally, fame and fortune ultimately do not satisfy our deepest desires.

What are our deepest desires? To answer this question, Huston Smith looks to the teachings of Hinduism. Hinduism, he says, describes a Path of Desire, and several stages along the way. The first stage involves satisfying our desire for personal pleasure, the enjoyment of sensual delights. Hinduism doesn’t condemn hedonism. But rather realizes that sooner or later purely self-centered pleasures no longer satisfy us. 

That’s when we often shift our attention to the goal of worldly success. But that, too, proves to be ultimately unsatisfying. The third stage along the path is that of service. 

In the mind of Marian Wright Edelman, service is a crucial aspect of a more enlightened understanding of success. Apart from advising her children to assign themselves, she also asks them to use their political and economic power for the community and others less fortunate. She says, “Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.” And she says, “Never work just for money or for power. They won’t save your soul or build a decent family or help you sleep at night.”

According to Hindu teaching, it is when we realize that our own personal pleasures and accomplishments don’t fulfill our deepest desires, that we try to contribute to a greater good, something larger than ourselves, whether family, community, or nation. But ultimately, even this is not enough. Nevertheless all these stages of desire have some value. They should be understood and accepted, not rejected. 

As Huston Smith puts it, 

“Hindus locate… success on the Path of Desire. … Nothing is gained by repressing [our] desires… or pretending that we do not have them. As long as… success is what we think we want, we should seek [it]… Hinduism regards the objects of the Path of Desire as if they were toys. If we ask ourselves whether there is anything wrong with toys, our answer must be: On the contrary, the thought of children without them is sad. Even sadder, however, is the prospect of adults who fail to develop interests more significant than dolls and trains. By the same token, individuals whose development is not arrested will move through delighting in success… to the point where their attractions have been largely outgrown.” (The World’s Religions, p. 16, 17)

Beyond personal pleasure, worldly success, and devoted service, what humans truly desire is the experience of joy. We want the opposite of “frustration, futility, and boredom,” Huston Smith says. Because have the capacity to imagine infinity, we want infinite joy. We want infinite being, infinite awareness, and infinite joy.

And the kicker, Huston Smith says, is this: 

“What people most want, that they can have. Infinite being, infinite awareness, and infinite bliss are within their reach... Not only are [they] within peoples’ reach, says Hinduism. People already possess them…

…The answer… lies in the depth at which the Eternal [- the Infinite -] is buried under the almost impenetrable mass of distractions, false assumptions, and self-regarding instincts that comprise our surface selves. A lamp can be covered with dust and dirt to the point of obscuring its light completely. The problem life poses for the human self is to cleanse the dross of its being to the point where its infinite center can shine forth in full display.” (p. 21, 22)

Pursuing the path of religious practice is how we learn to clear away the dust and dirt, and uncover the light that has existed within us all along, the light of love. Devoting our lives to this task, according to religious thought, is what it means to succeed.

* * *

Our fear of failure runs deep, Krishnamurti says. We are forever afraid of falling short of the expectations placed upon us. We are afraid of being judged as inadequate, as hopeless, as worthless. 

And yet our so-called failures, our so-called mistakes may simply be steps we need to take in order to break away from the authority of our parents, of society, of tradition. As we chart our own path in life, we may need to fail in order to succeed. 

I think Winston Churchill had this same idea in mind, when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” I like the way Thomas Edison put it. He said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Success means fearlessly pursuing the path that is uniquely our own, even when others may fail to see the wisdom of our way. Krishnamurti says, 

“Society has very carefully established a certain pattern according to which it pronounces you a success or a failure. But if you love to do something with all your being you are then not concerned with success and failure. No intelligent person is. But unfortunately there are very few intelligent people, and nobody tells you about all this.”

* * *

In recent years I have had a few opportunities to visit my brother Derek in India, where he is now running a small but very efficient health clinic not far from Calcutta. On a shoestring budget he has built it from the ground up. Apart from providing essential medical care and teaching yoga, he has lately been producing educational videos with local actors, to teach basic hygiene to nearby villagers. He is making a real difference in the lives of many people. 

He isn’t married, doesn’t have children, and has very little money… but there is no doubt in my mind that he has assigned himself. There is no doubt in my mind that his hard work, initiative, and persistence have provided him with a sense of success – not only in the measurable fruits of his labors, but also in the satisfaction of knowing he has applied himself fully to his chosen life’s work, the work he loves. 

And today, when I wonder which one of us is successful, and who is the failure… I conclude that we have both succeeded. Our paths are different, for sure. And we have each made our share of mistakes along the way, but we have each found what we love.

Do what you love with all your being. This is the lesson we are trying to learn. Don’t wait around to be told what to do. Find the work you are uniquely qualified to do, the work that touches you deeply and engages you fully, and do it.

Mary Oliver has found her work. Her work is to love the world. It is to keep her mind on what matters, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. Which is mostly rejoicing. Which is mostly gratitude, to be given a mind and heart, and a mouth with which to give shouts of joy.

May we each find the path that leads us to our life’s work,

And may we have the courage to follow it.

Through good times and bad times, through failure and success,

May we forever strive toward a deeper love.

Amen.

Will Science Save Us?

"If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has conferred on [humankind] the power not only to create but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing."

-- John F. Kennedy

Reading: by George Johnson from an article entitled “Hills to Scientific Discoveries Grow Steeper” (The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2014)

Armed with a stopwatch and a perfume atomizer, Robert Millikan embarked in 1909 on a landmark discovery in physics. Squirting out a mist of oil drops and timing how quickly they fell in the presence of an electrical field, he ultimately showed that the world is awash with tiny, identically charged specks of matter — subatomic particles called electrons.

His apparatus could fit on a tabletop, and his findings were recorded in notebooks. One can be read — if you can decipher his handwriting — on the web.

Those were simpler days. By the time a century passed — and protons, neutrons and quarks had been discovered — the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator 17 miles in circumference, was making its first runs. In 2012, after analyzing petabytes of data (the electronic equivalent of billions of notebooks), researchers laid claim to discovering a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson [- a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe]. So many people were involved that together they would constitute the population of a small town.

That is how science has changed in 100 years. As the effort to understand the world has advanced, the low-hanging fruits (like Newton’s apple) have been plucked. Scientists are reaching higher and deeper into the tree. But with finite arms in an infinite universe, are there limits — physical and mental — to how far they can go?

Reading: by Al Gore from The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (p. 204) 

In mythology, the lines dividing powers reserved for gods from those allowed to people were marked by warnings; transgressions were severely punished. Yet no Zeus has forbidden us to introduce human genes into other animals; or to create hybrid creatures by mixing the genes of spiders and goats; or to surgically imbed silicon computer chips into the gray matter of our brains; or to provide a genetic menu of selectable traits for parents who wish to design their own children.

The use of science and technology in an effort to enhance human beings is taking us beyond the outer edges of the moral, ethical, and religious maps bequeathed to us by previous generations. We are now in terra incognita, where the ancient maps sometimes noted, “There Be Monsters.”

Reading:  by Philip Ball, British science writer, from “Sublime Intervention” (New Statesman, May 7, 2012)

A sense of wonder at the natural world is what drives the quest for scientific knowledge -- but it must provoke curiosity, not passive acceptance of the way things are

The day I realized the potential of the internet was infused with wonder --not at the network itself, however handy it would become for shoveling bits, but at what it revealed as I crowded round a screen with the other staff of Nature magazine on 16 July 1994. That was the day when the first piece of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, turning our cynicism about previous astronomical fireworks promised but not delivered into the carping of ungrateful children. Right there on our cosmic doorstep bloomed a fiery apocalypse that left an earth-sized hole in the giant planet's baroquely swirling atmosphere. This was old-style wonder, awe tinged with horror, at forces beyond our comprehension.

Aristotle and Plato didn't agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, "It is owing to their wonder that men … first began to philosophize." This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. …

Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance?

Will Science Save Us?

A Sermon Delivered on March 2, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Every Monday morning, I have a ritual of calling my mother, who lives in Germany, and hearing her tell me what she has been up to in the past week. I sit on the sofa in my study, with a cup of tea at my side, and my laptop computer balanced on my knee. At the designated time, I boot up Skype, and with the touch of a finger launch our weekly mother-son video conference.

She sits in the living room of the family home I know so well. And we carry on a conversation, as if we were sitting across the same table, sharing a cup of tea. 

Our weekly Skype routine has now become a habit I hardly give a second thought. But when I stop to think about it. It is truly amazing. It’s as if I were living in a science fiction world, like the one imagined in “2001 – A Space Odyssey.” I remember, when I first saw the movie years ago, it wasn’t space travel or mysterious aliens that most fascinated me – it was when the hero of the story at one point talked with his family at a pay phone that also included a video screen. Wow… And I remember, it wasn’t so long ago, when my mother and I first tried this new method of connection. I remember we had a hard time carrying on a conversation, because it was simply too baffling, too distracting, to see the person at the other end of the line. 

This wasn’t science fiction. It was science fact.

* * *

I am most vividly aware of the amazing powers of science every time I visit someone in the hospital. I visit the man who suffered a heart attack just a few days earlier. His heart stopped while he was exercising. But thanks to some attentive helpers, and thanks to a handy defibrillator, he was jolted back to life, rushed to the hospital, where skilled surgeons performed open-heart surgery, a triple bypass operation. When I see him, just two days later, he is sitting up in bed, with a computer in front of him, working away.

Every time I go to the hospital and hear about the medical tests and treatments now being put to good use, easing chronic pain, setting broken bones, replacing worn out joints, and addressing a multitude of medical issues, I invariably remark how fortunate we are to live in the year 2014, rather than 1914, or even 1994. 

* * *

We look to science for answers, because in the past 100 years especially, the scientific method has proven to be a remarkable source of understanding. We look to science for answers, even if we barely understand the questions science is asking, or the answers that are being offered. 

For instance, I can’t claim to understand much about the dynamics of sub-atomic particles – whether electrons, quarks or Higgs bosons. The energies expended to pursue these lofty areas of science seem just about as mind-boggling as the puzzling truths about our universe they reveal. 

The Large Hadron Collider, for instance, with a 17-mile circumference, buried deep beneath the French and Swiss Alps, is the largest machine in the world. It is a series of superconducting magnets, so powerful they need to be cooled to -271 degrees Celsius – colder than outer space – which also makes the collider the world’s largest refrigerator.

What it does is this: 

“Two particle beams no thicker than a human hair make their way around the collider in opposite directions. The magnetic fields coax the beams to go fast and faster, until they approach the speed of light. And then the two beams smash into each other in front of a particle detector. It’s like shooting two needles at each other from a distance of 6 miles. [When they meet] the particles… break into subparticles, which exist for just a fraction of a second before they… disappear… When it’s running at peak speed, the [Hadron Collider] can produce as many as 550 million collisions per second.” (The Writer’s Almanac, Sep. 10, 2013)

This is an amazing achievement for the hundreds of scientists working on this experiment. But what difference does it make for the rest of us?

The results of a survey conducted by the National Science Foundation that were released last month showed that a quarter of Americans think the sun goes around the earth – rather than the earth around the sun. And only a minority of Americans know that the universe began with a huge explosion.

The problem with science is that  - for all its power and promise – on some very basic level we really don’t know what we are doing. 

Science does a spectacular job shedding light on some very specific and some very useful aspects of the world in which we live. But in other ways science leaves us completely in the dark. 

As the bioethicist and physician Leon Kass sees it, science – despite its promise and its power - has real limits. “Despite its universality, its quest for certainty, its reliance on reason purified from all distortions of sensation and prejudice by the use of mathematical method, and the reproducibility of its findings, science does not—and cannot—provide us with absolute knowledge.” (“Science, Religion, and the Human Future,” Commentary, Apr. 2007)

Science sets itself limits, in what it considers legitimate objects of study. Science strives to be rational, and so it examines only those aspects of the world, and of human experience, that yield to rational inquiry. It’s a very specialized kind of rationality. Science “seeks to know how things work and the mechanisms of action of their workings; it does not seek to know what things are, and why… Science can give the histories of things but not their directions, aspirations, or purposes”

“In a word, we have a remarkable science of nature that has made enormous progress precisely by its metaphysical neutrality and its indifference to questions of being, …[of] purpose… [and of] the goodness or badness of things, scientific knowledge included.”

Science has its limits. 

The philosopher and theologian Keith Ward puts it this way. He writes, 

“One of the things a scientific approach to the world does is to remove [the] rich texture of personal [experience] and response and construct a model of a depersonalized world of “pure objectivity,” without purpose, passion, meaning, or value. This is not meant as a critical comment. It is simply an attempt to [explain] what science does to the richly interactive world of human experience in order to turn it into a value-neutral… world of measurable, predictable processes….” (The Big Questions in Science and Religion, p. 168)

I always liked the way Douglas Adams concisely captured the limitations of science, in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In it, an enormous supercomputer is built in order to calculate “the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Over a period of 7.5 million years the computer works on the question, and then indeed finally comes up with the definitive answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The answer is 42.

* * *

Science does a spectacular job shedding light on some very specific and some very useful aspects of the world in which we live. But in other ways science leaves us completely in the dark. 

And moving forward in the dark, when we can’t see a thing, is dangerous. We can’t see where our path will lead us. We can’t anticipate the consequences of our actions. We can’t predict the pitfalls of the powers we have discovered, and which we try to harness.

The quote by John F. Kennedy on the cover of our bulletin speaks to this dilemma. Scientific discovery has given us the power to create and to annihilate, he says. It has provided us with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing.”

The quote is from a speech Kennedy delivered on October 22, 1963, at a convocation of the National Academy of Sciences. When he speaks of a “supreme testing,” he is alluding to the nuclear test ban treaty that scientists and policy makers were debating at the time. The Cold War was in full swing, and the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse was on people’s mind. And while today we are relieved the Cold War is history, the nuclear arsenals around the world continue to haunt us. And the radioactive fallout from long ago nuclear tests will continue to affect us for hundreds of thousands of years. 

* * *

The dangers Kennedy identified fifty years ago are still with us. But the advances of science, industry and technology have led us down a path with ever increasing dangers. Al Gore speaks of the unprecedented ethical dilemmas of genetic engineering. But we also know of the ever-growing dangers of climate change, the consequence of our long-standing habit of environmental exploitation, and the careless use of fossil fuels. 

How can we deal with these dangers? What should we do? These are the critical questions we need to answer. And these are the kind of questions science cannot solve for us.

Science does a fine job providing us with certain kinds of objective information, about the world as it is. But science has little to tell us about the meaning and purpose of our lives. Science has little to say about the ethical implications of our actions and inactions. Science tries to tell us what is, but doesn’t tell us what should be, how we should live, how we can tell the difference between good and bad, and how we can find the courage to do good.

This is an arena of human experience better understood through other forms of knowledge. One important candidate is religion.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, 

“Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning… Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. The difference between them is fundamental and irreducible. They represent two distinct activities of the mind. Neither is dispensable. Both, together, constitute a full expression of our humanity.” (The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, p. 37)

* * *

Science has been the source and engine of unprecedented human progress. But science cannot answer all our questions. It can tell us where we have come from and where we are. It cannot tell us where we should go from here. The paths ahead are uncharted, the dangers, the monsters around us, are real. To navigate the uncharted unknown, we need both the insights of science and the wisdom of religion.

At their best, both are rooted in a deep sense of wonder. A sense of wonder that inspires within us a sense of curiosity, and a spirit of adventure. A sense of “old-style wonder” that instills within us a sense of “awe tinged with horror, at forces beyond our comprehension.” Wonder is the beginning of wisdom, Socrates said. A wonder that instills within us a deep sense of humility, reverence and awe. A wisdom tinged with a healthy dose of “fear and trembling,” because the powers around us and at our finger tips are indeed dangerous.

I would like to conclude with words by John F. Kennedy, what he said following our earlier quote. He said, “If the challenge and the testing are too much for humanity, then we are all doomed. But I believe that the future can be bright, and I believe it can be certain. [We are] is still the master[s] of [our] own fate, and I believe that the power of science and the responsibility of science have offered [us] a new opportunity not only for intellectual growth, but for moral discipline; not only for the acquisition of knowledge, but for the strengthening of our nerve and our will.”

Science cannot save us. But we can save ourselves, if we muster the wisdom and the will to use the knowledge science has provided us to serve a greater good.

May all our inquiries be guided by a spirit of wonder.

May wonder lead us from ignorance to understanding.

And may we muster both the will and the wisdom 

To choose the path to a better – a more wonderful - world.

Amen.