Ambiguity
A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

When people come to me for advice about their marriage or their teenagers - subjects, by the way, in which I am a great Harvard-educated authority - I sometimes, with tongue only partly in cheek, advise them to go to Barnes and Noble, buy and read every possible self-help book available, then ask every imaginable friend and relative for advice, and if they haven't had enough by then, come back to me and I'll dispense some more cheap but very authoritative advice.

The point, of course, is that the more advice we hear the more we'll become confused; but if we become sufficiently confused, well maybe we'll return to the only source that is truly authoritative, our own innate wisdom and intuition and reason - not somebody else's but our own. Instead of straining to hear others' truth, we'll listen to our own; instead of grasping for security outside of ourselves, we'll let go and attend to that which deserves our trust and confidence within. We'll recover our lost balance and become more gyroscopic.

I want you to know that I practice what I preach, and so not knowing what to preach about, I asked you, in the newsletter and on e-mail, for advice - and I got it! In fact, I barely had time to write this sermon I've been so busy reading my e-mail. Here are some of the sermons you've suggested.

Many of you resonated with concerns regarding aging parents, our culture of violence, contemporary views of Jesus, but other suggestions included: applying some of the tools of our financial lives (like P/E ratios, volatility quotients, puts and calls) to the rest of our lives....the spiritual lessons of garden planning (some like the planning more than the doing....more about Hungarian Unitarians... and urban/suburban relationships....and space needs at First Parish....church/school issues (the Christian right, you know, may be a factor in the upcoming Bedford School Committee election)....and then somebody noticed the trend away from popular books about angels and the increasing number of books about vampires; what does this mean?....King David's music....retirement....tragic awareness....Biblical paradoxes (Cain and Abel; what's wrong with vegetables?...in the Lord's prayer, why would God lead us into temptation anyway?)....

The effect, of course, is that I am now confused about what to preach about; and so I've decided to preach about confusion, about living with ambiguity, really, and the truth is that many of the subjects you suggest are actually vignettes or windows through which we may see the human condition, our condition. Living is confusing, ambiguous, and uncertain: our jobs, our health, our families, our relationships - all are unpredictable; and we're not just confused by other people but we surprise ourselves by our own emotions and reactions. "I never expected this;" "I couldn't believe I said that;" "I looked in the mirror and was shocked to see my father, or mother;" "I just don't know what to do." I hear all these things from you; I hear these things from me. And so, to bring order to ambiguity, we create P/E ratios, and gardens, and religions and Bibles, and a million things and angels and vampires too I suppose.

I heard retiring Senator Bill Bradley say the other night that most of his life had proceeded like a John Philip Souza march in which he knew exactly where the beat came down and what was coming next, but now life seemed more like some avant garde jazz composition, and he didn't know anything about jazz.

I think that the rise of fundamentalisms in our world is a response to rising ambiguity, an attempt to play more Souza, less jazz. It's not exactly fundamentalism, but I'm sure you've noticed the popularity of heart-warming McGuffey Reader-style books about values, beginning with former Education Secretary William Bennett's Book of Virtues. That book was immensely popular and somewhat helpful but the trouble with it, you know, is that it lauds the private personal virtues of honesty and responsibility and so forth, but never gets around to suggesting that there might be a public social critique. So Bennett lambastes the immorality, poor hygiene, and rudeness of people in the 60's and 70's but never mentions the immorality of war or racism or the gross hypocrisy of institutions and social structures. So, seeing the popularity of Bennett's conservative book there's now in the stores a liberal McGuffey Reader-style book called A Call to Character; but all of them in this genre, liberal or conservative (and that includes the writings of UU Robert Fulghum, and Clara Pinkola Estes, and Hillary Clinton's new book), are attempts to make living seem less ambiguous...more Souza, less jazz.

Actually, some of the other reading I'm doing says that things are indeed more complex than they appear. There's an educator named Howard Gardner who writes about "multiple intelligences." We used to (and in many ways still do) judge how smart a person is by their IQ, their logical/mathematical intelligence; but Gardner suggests that there are at least six other standards that are equally valid: our musical intelligence, bodily/kinesthetic athletic intelligence, spatial/visualizing intelligence, linguistic intelligence, inter- and intra-personal/emotional intelligences.

This view is surely more complex and ambiguous than the old one, but has tremendous - and I think hopeful and exciting - implications for education.

Just as there may be multiple intelligences, we may also have multiple identities. Another author, Sherry Turkle, writes in a new book titled Life on the Screen about things that psychology is learning from computer and Internet communication where in a variety of situations, people can assume whatever identity or identities they choose: male, female, shy, assertive, comic, serious - identities that are much more constrained and conventional in what used to be known as real life. We are accustomed to the idea that the healthy personality is unified, integrated, at one with itself - whereas it just may be that within each of us are multiple identities and that human potential is more like a diamond with many facets, and that maturity may consist of the ability to draw skillfully and appropriately upon our multiplicity of personas. It's said that maturity is our ability to live with ambiguity.

I cite intelligence and identity as just two ways in which we are learning that reality is multi-dimensional, and this is more confusing and ambiguous than we once assumed. I'm sure that you can name lots more examples - close to home - of ways in which we're becoming aware that living is multi-dimensional, confusing and ambiguous.

This is not, of course, anything new. Part of the human dilemma is that we are born into ambiguity, born into insecurity and dependency. We're not like birds that get pushed out of the nest and off we fly into adulthood.

We never get over the need to be dependent, the need to have someone care for us, and the insecurity of having to depend on others. We are dependent on others; but inevitably we resent our dependence; and so we find all sorts of ways of overcoming life's ambiguity and insecurity.

How do we overcome ambiguity and insecurity? Let me count the ways.

Having power and possessions and money is one way. These things give us something to hold onto. This isn't a bad thing: money in the bank, some status, some possessions. You look around and see how settled you are.

But, ultimately in the struggle with ambiguity and insecurity, things are weak reeds. They don't reach the depths of the spirit.

Obsessing about our health or appearance is another way to overcome ambiguity. I got a haircut last week (I actually still do get haircuts) and another customer had apparently just heard about anti-oxidants, vitamins B,C, E and beta-carotene. "They stop your body from rusting," he gushed and I'm sure he was convinced that he'd live forever. Talk to the proponents of blue green algae or Manchurian mushroom tea. I drink that stuff, but my hunch is it just takes my mind off insecurity and ambiguity.

Political and economic structures are another way we overcome ambiguity. I don't diminish the importance of this either; I believe in politics. But when it comes to overcoming the ambiguities of living, institutions don't do it. Maybe they used to: Pax Romana, the Roman Empire, America! America used to be a structure of support that set our heart to beating. Nations used to be motherlands, fatherlands; they served the purpose of overcoming insecurity and ambiguity. But no more: even the essential federal employees (let alone the non-essential, or the poor, the sick and the unemployed) find much solace in government.

And then there is religion as a way of overcoming ambiguity.

Fundamentalism is on the rise, often mean-spirited and coercive let's- play-all-Souza-and-burn-the-jazz fundamentalism; but the rest of religion's in disarray. I read on my e-mail just yesterday that there's a big fight in the Church of England about hell. Some are saying, much like Unitarian Universalists, that hell is that hardness of heart or mind that keeps us from fulfilling our nobler impulses. But others insist on the old view of hell as a place, with fire and brimstone, and Christianity without damnation can't exist! No doubt heads will roll, but it all seems sort of antiquarian, quaint and irrelevant.

The old authorities try to keep the lid on ambiguity, but out it comes.

Sometimes these disputes are absurd. Did you read about the liberal French bishop whom the Vatican recently banished to some nonexistent diocese in Saharan Africa, just to get him out of the way? The bishop fought back by opening the first cyber-space diocese on the Internet! He has parishioners all around the globe, has more attention and possibly influence than if they'd left him alone in the first place!

So what I've been doing here up to now is emphasizing the depth of our disarray, personal and cultural, the depth of our confusion, of our ambiguity - the dilemma of nowhere to look with confidence, nothing to hold on to. What we do hold onto is inadequate, unsatisfying. And so lots of us go crazy, some of us get hospitalized, and lots more of us walk the streets in relative degrees of instability.

So now we come to the part of the sermon that tells us how to live with ambiguity, the solution for confusion. The drum roll please... The only solution to confusion, the only way to live with ambiguity (and this applies to aging parents, and retirement, and most of the other topics you suggested for sermons) is to accept it. Don't pretend that it isn't there.

Don't cover up. Don't trivialize. Don't escape. Face it!

There are no certainties in life. No guarantees. No assurances. And there aren't going to be any. So we'd better welcome ambiguity; not jut tolerate it but welcome it. Welcome it.

Ambiguity is the greatest opportunity that we have in our lifetime. If you don't know you are lost, you can't find yourself. That's a tricky sentence. If you aren't lost, you aren't going to find yourself. If you don't know you are lost, the chances of finding yourself are infinitely reduced, because you hang onto the things that aren't real - the status or money or possessions, the rules, the structures, the outward appearances, all the ways we try to keep the lid on our box of confusions - things that aren't real, that don't serve you, that have no depth and aren't working.

I mentioned the dilemma of aging parents and many of you agreed this was much on your minds also (as, I might add, it was also on the minds of the aging residents of Carleton-Willard when I spoke to them. They didn't want to worry their children). Our circumstances are different, but I think for those of us who share this as an issue we share the awareness that our relationships have changed irrevocably. Some of us are sandwiched between the needs of parents and children; parents growing older accentuates awareness of our own mortality; and relationships are changing from what they were to what we don't yet know.

My own 85-year old mother has what is almost certainly Alzheimer's, and it is very difficult to adjust to this change in the woman who used to drink beer with the Capone brothers in Chicago, who took corners in her old Studebaker on two wheels, who won the senior Olympics in swimming and bicycling into her eighties, and who taught me how to hitch-hike.

So far she and my father live at home, but I recognized her and myself in a poem by Elizabeth Mandlen who wrote of her mother in a nursing home with advanced Alzheimer's:

"Will you take me home?"

I cannot take you home.

But I can comfort you when the floor shimmers

like a sunlit lake,

I can wait while you layer, like memories,

tissue precisely on tissue

And remember for you who you are and what you have done.

I can give you order and refuge in the strange land you inhabit now.

I can love you as you are.....

But my hand cannot remold (such a fragile piece as you).

No, I wish, but I cannot take you home."

The Spanish philosopher Ortega said this:

"The person with the clear head is the one who looks life in the face, realizes that everything is problematic and feels lost. As this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - the person who accepts it has already begun to find...firm ground."

Christianity says this, really, Buddhism too. If you do not empty yourself, you will not be filled. If you don't become as a child, you won't enter the kingdom of heaven. There are hundreds of these statements, and they're not casual or accidental or trivial. They are at the heart of every religion.

If you aren't alienated, you aren't going to find yourself. The only ones who will be saved are those who are broken, those who are crushed, those who are dispossessed, those who are cast out, those who are poor and abandoned, those who are scared.

As long as you have something to hold onto, you won't look. You'll clutch at anything that keeps ambiguity and confusion at bay. That's why people hang onto their neuroses, their horrible lives, their terrible conditions because they are familiar. To live with ambiguity requires that we let go.

You remember the woman who goes to the zoo and is completely taken by the beauty and power of the gorilla. She cannot take her eyes off him; she falls in love. He is sleeping against the bars of the cage, and even though a sign says not to, she reaches her hand in to stroke him.

Instantly, he awake and goes berserk, tearing the bars of the cage open to get at her, mauling he to within an inch of her life. Finally, the zoo personnel manage to hit him with the tranquilizer darts. The woman is taken to an ICU, barely alive, but slowly, slowly, she pulls through.

After four days, she is finally allowed visitors. Her best friend arrives.

The woman can barely open her eyes. "God, you look like you're in a lot of pain," the friend says, and the woman sighs. "Pain," she says. "You don't know pain. He doesn't call, he doesn't write...."

Every social worker knows this. You hold onto anything rather than change, rather than be cast adrift. I haven't gone mystical on you: this is the message of religion - you get cast adrift, you feel life's ambiguity and confusion, then you have a chance.

Why do you have a chance then? Because bad as life can be, unfair as life can be, ambiguous as life can be, then and only then you may open your eyes to see and your ears to hear and become alert. When we're confused and desperate, we become alert because our lives depend on it. And we look around and ask what's going on, and we notice. And we say "What does this mean?" and "Where does this lead?" And you go see where it leads. And we find new relationships, and new meanings, and new security that is not dependent on someone else. We become dependent on our own mind and our own heart.

Einstein said the only way we going to understand the world is by changing the way we think. The Bible says, "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

We can welcome ambiguity like the gyroscope welcomes imbalance. Be like a gyroscope. I had all those alternate titles for this sermon: In the Farmer in the Dell - the cheese stands alone. Be like the cheese. In the Joan Osborne song, "What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us, a stranger on the bus." Be like God, and treat the next person likewise.

And in the R.E.M. song, "It's the end of the world as we know it." It is, truly it is. Welcome the end.

Awareness of ambiguity, the welcoming of ambiguity, releases something deep and powerful in us. There is this beautiful verse by Victor Hugo:

Be like the bird, who

Halting in his flight

On limb too slight

Feels it give way beneath him,

Yet sings,

Knowing he has wings.

This kind of attitude cannot be defeated. The bird sings when the limb gives way beneath because he has wings. I don't believe in angels or vampires, but I do believe that we have wings - wings of the human spirit.

We can live with ambiguity, if we welcome it.