READING
from “The Poet and the World”
(Nobel Lecture 1996)
by Wislawa Szymborska
The world –
Whatever we might think when we’re terrified by its vastness and
our own impotence
Or when we’re embittered by its indifference to individual
suffering
Of people, animals, and perhaps even plants
(for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain);
Whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of
stars
Surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover,
Planets already dead, still dead, we just don’t know;
Whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which
we’ve got reserved tickets,
But tickets whose life span is laughably short,
Bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates;
Whatever else we might think of this world –
It is astonishing.
But astonishing
is an epithet concealing a logical trap.
We’re astonished, after all,
By things that deviate from some well-known and universally
acknowledged norm,
From an obviousness to which we’ve grown accustomed.
But the point is, there is no such obvious world.
Our astonishment exists per se,
And it isn’t based on a comparison with something else.
Granted, in
daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word,
We all use phrases such as
“The ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of
events.”
But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
Nothing is usual or normal.
Not a single stone, and not a single cloud above it.
Not a single day, and not a single night after it.
And above all, not a single existence,
Not anyone’s existence in this world.
SERMON
I’ve made some of the most
valuable discoveries in my life with a spade in my hand. When I
started transitioning out of law practice, I knew I would need
to spend some time letting that experience recede. It was such
an intense and absorbing form of problem-solving – especially
after twenty-five years. It felt like I hardly knew anything
else. I needed to reflect on what to do with my life -- rather
than jumping quickly into some other form of
problem-solving work. Some close friends suggested I take up
gardening.
So I did. At first, the law
practice work was still so demanding that the only time I could
find for it was late at night. I’d actually get out there with
the floodlights on and plant stuff. Eventually even I
could see how absurd this was. I named this form of gardening
“plant-slamming” – as if the only real point was to inject
flowers and shrubs into the ground as rapidly as possible. When
I told some other men at my church this story, they shot me
looks of recognition. They were soul brothers. They too had
plant-slammed.
I gradually made more and more room for gardening. I really got
into it. The gardening experience became intense and
absorbing. Before very long, I had gardened enough to create a
whole new and expanded garden. I invited those close friends
over to see what I had done. They looked at it, nodded, and
said, “Yep. You Preston Moored the garden”. They also praised
it, and assigned themselves the job of coming over regularly to
relax in it -- to make sure it didn’t go to waste. That was an
important assignment, because I had solved the garden
problem, you see, and rather than just sit in the garden
myself, I was moving on to the next problem.
When I realized I had turned my garden into a problem to be
solved, I began to appreciate how challenging the transition
away from law practice was going to be. I knew my addiction to
problem-solving couldn’t possibly be all my fault, so I looked
around for someone else to blame. And finally, I found the
culprit. It was a guy named Rene. Rene Descartes.
After looking into Descartes’ work as a philosopher and
mathematician, I became convinced that we were related by blood
– that I was suffering from hereditary addictive tendencies that
indeed were not my fault. It was around 1640 that Descartes
said something that became quite famous: “cogito ergo sum.” I
think, therefore I am.
Descartes offered new answers to very old
questions about human life. Questions like “who am I?” “I
think therefore I am” is awfully close to “I am my mind,” or
even “I am my thoughts.” Questions like “who or what is in
charge in the universe?” To most people of Descartes’ day, the
answer to this question was “God.” What they heard him saying,
though, is “we humans are in charge,” or more precisely, “our
minds are.”
We’re all familiar with what happened for
the next few hundred years after Descartes. Progress. Lots of
progress. Lots of problems solved. The problem-solving was
breath-taking. We might even say miraculous. So it’s not hard
to see why so many people embraced rational thinking so
enthusiastically – one might even say fervently.
The mind solved more and more problems,
expanding the acreage of life’s territory under its control.
This gave human beings the very good feeling that they were in
control. Human beings tend to assume that more is better. So
we eventually got to the point where it seemed natural and
obvious that the rational mind was running, and ought to be
running, pretty much everything. This led in turn to the
dominance of two particular modes of engaging the world:
utilitarian language and math. I say utilitarian in order to
distinguish away other forms of language, like poetry for
example, that are not very relevant to problem-solving. The
mind uses these language and math tools to problem-solve by
performing three operations: classification, comparison, and
counting. Everything is given a name or classification, which
determines how the mind will relate to it. The names are
arranged in a pattern that achieves a result, and that result is
compared with “the problem” by some form of measurement or
counting. If the result compares favorably with the problem, we
call it a solution.
The more we used language and math, the more
rational we became; and the more rational we became, the more we
lived and breathed language and math – until, eventually, we
became what I would call hyperrational.
In reaching its hyperrational stage, the Age Of Reason
supplied more new answers to very old questions. Questions like
“what is my purpose?” And the answer was “problem-solving.” As
an end in itself. The jug wants water to carry, and humans
want problems to solve. And questions like “how do I know what
I know?” And the hypperational answer was: by using language
and math in a process called reasoning. This meant “if I cannot
classify it, compare it, and count it, it doesn’t really exist.”
Until recently, one very old question
continued to elude the vast reach of the Age of Reason: “what
does my death mean?” Now, it has always seemed to me that
religious leaders took comfort in the certainty of death – maybe
because it was the one piece of life’s territory about which the
Age Of Reason had so little to say.
But lately comes an answer from Reason’s
accomplice, Science: “your death means very little, because we
are going to postpone it indefinitely. Out beyond the outer
reaches of your Microsoft Outlook Calendar.” Soon the
possibility will be real and visible that with enough science
and medicine to replace every body part that could possibly wear
out, a person might never die. That possibility will be enough
to change what death means and thus what it means to be alive.
These five
very old questions, answered newly by the Age of Reason, are the
five basic questions every religion has always been answering.
In its present-day, hyperrational form, the Age Of Reason has
become a religion: the
Church of
Hyperrationality. It has answered all five of the compelling religious
questions.
Descartes’ answer to the question “who or what is in charge in
the universe?” deserves a closer look. Descartes is credited
with launching the Age of Reason – a kind of never-ending
celebration of human intellect. So it may surprise you to learn
that he wrote about God, and in a way that seemed to suggest he
saw God as ultimately in charge in the universe. He refers to
God as “a substance that is infinite, independent, all-knowing,
all-powerful, and by which everything else . . . [must] have
been created.” But what he allows in this declaration he
immediately negates by offering a highly abstract logical proof
that God MUST exist – in essence, that it just wouldn’t be
logical for God not to exist. But if God depends on the
dictates of anything – even an idea or method of thinking – then
God is not ultimate, not really God after all. Instead, that
idea or method is ultimate, which is to say, is God.
Descartes worshiped Reason. And so do we. But even an
idolatrous religion, like Reason worship, is still a religion.
The important question is whether this most popular of modern
religions moves us toward fulfillment, wholeness, the nurturance
of our souls.
What is your observation? I see our Reason-dominated world as a
place filled with unfulfilled people, starved for spiritual
nourishment. The Church Of Hyperrationality has provided
answers to the five compelling religious questions that do not
fulfill. And that’s because these answers are not true.
Our purpose isn’t just problem-solving. We
are not our minds or our thoughts. We’re human beings with
spiritual powers and needs.
We are not in charge in human life, nor are
our minds. Nor is Reason, which is a useful but inherently
incomplete and imperfect tool for comprehending our world.
As for death, being alive is meaningless
without it; and if we had to live a life with no authentic
purpose, looking at everything through logic-colored glasses,
and using rationality to pretend we’re in control, who would
want to live forever anyway?
Descartes’ answer to the religious question “how do we know what
we know?” is worse than unfulfilling. We cannot effectively
engage the world only through reason. That’s not the only way
we know what we know. And to act as if it is causes profound
spiritual damage.
Once the hyperrational mental cycle of
classification, comparison, and counting becomes automatic,
everything gets treated as comparable to everything else.
Caught in this cycle, a human being inevitably will treat his
own self as comparable too – which is to say, as just another
problem to be solved. No one has ever been transformed
spiritually by being treated as a problem to be solved.
Rational engagement of the world is about comprehending –
grasping through understanding. Religious engagement of the
world is rational, but it also is very much about apprehending
– becoming aware through a sensual experience – without the
reductionism of explanation and understanding. It is about
being present in the world, and with the world, and letting the
world transform us, just by being what it is, rather than the
other way around. And through this transformation, arriving at
new spiritual places that are closer and closer to the holy, to
wholeness.
When we apprehend the world, and
ourselves in it, without insisting on solving anything or
anybody, we open ourselves to that experience of astonishment
per se, of which the poet Szymborska spoke in her Nobel
lecture. Szymborska makes it plain that she is referring not to
exceptionally beautiful things as calling forth astonishment,
but rather, every single thing in the world.
In our tightly organized lives of endless problem-solving, do we
ever really see the world this way – beauty everywhere, rather
than something exceptional? Or does that seeing require moments
of stillness that we tell ourselves we can’t afford?
Stillness. Motion and time effacing themselves. An experience
of watching an immense locomotive come to a stop, its last
steamy exertions pushing the wheels through one more
revolution. At what station have we finally arrived when this
happens? What name should we give to a place that opens us to a
motionless, timeless perspective?
Szymborska seems astonished by our astonishment at our world,
since we have no standard of comparison by which to judge it
astonishing. From a purely finite perspective, she has to be
right. An obvious frog is not astonishing to another obvious
frog, nor a stone to a stone. But as the poet says, a human
being has the capacity to experience every single bit of our
world as astonishing per se. Why? Because embedded in every
human being is the one perspective from which these finite
things are anything but obvious: the perspective of the
infinite, the God’s eye view. Astonishment per se is God
peering through the lens of a human life, apprehending the
finite world, and blinking in unmitigated wonder. When this
happens to a human being – better to say, perhaps, through a
human being – it is transformative.
Every place and every person in modern life is affected by
hyperrationality – including church and including ministers.
For a problem-solving hammer like me, church is just full of
carpentry opportunities. It is a seductive environment for
problem-solving, because presented with one more challenge, I
can always say it’s for an extraordinarily good cause. The
challenges to be met are limited only by how broadly I cast my
gaze. If we run out of challenges within our own walls, there
is always a broken world out there, waiting to be fixed.
Being a problem-solver for our church is an
important part of my job. But the further I go in ministry, the
more it looks like the most important part of the job really
isn’t about problem-solving at all. It’s about being present.
That makes it sound like being a minister is just a matter of
showing up, but I’m talking about showing up in a very
particular way. I’m talking about apprehending -- instead of
comprehending and problem-solving. If I am present with one or
more of you, in a way that says “you are astonishing per se,” –
not compared to anything or anyone else; indeed quite beyond
comparison -- then there is a chance for us to make a difference
that can be felt in our very souls. That’s how rare and
valuable that message is, delivered from the heart.
The possibilities opened up when people
are this way with each other utterly dwarf the problem-solving
potential of all the world’s consummate practitioners of
Cartesian rationalism combined. But it’s not an easy thing to
do. For me, the first part of the challenge is accepting that
all those finely honed problem-solving skills on which I have
traded for so long actually might not be what is most wanted and
needed. Here’s an even harder part. No amount of commitment to
being present with others in this way will make any difference
unless I can be present with myself in that way too.
What is your ministry? I hope you didn’t think ministry was
only for ministers. What is your mission? What difference do
you long to make, and for whom? And at what cost? For your own
sake, don’t pick a cheap one. Among the people in your own
circle of family, friends, and community, and even beyond, who
might need to hear that life-altering message from someone just
like you, saying, “you are astonishing per se”?
When we had that recent spell of
unseasonably warm weather, Jennifer and I took a kayak down to
Powhatan Creek. My kayaking skills are on the low end of
amateur, but I took a turn in it. I paddled out into the creek,
and there it was – Wislawa Szymborska’s world. Astonishing per
se. It wasn’t picture postcard beauty. The vistas weren’t
grandiose enough for that. Rotting logs in the water.
Brackish, shallow, reedy. Trees standing knee-deep in the
creek. No real demarcation of where land stopped and water
started. A place teeming with messy nature. A life-nourishing
habitat innocent of shaping, naming, characterization,
explanation, typology.
Sitting in the kayak, leaning on the shoulder of the blue air, I
had not the slightest desire to solve it. The only thing to do
was be with it, be affected by it. And be with myself in that
same way. Astonishing per se.
Can you allow the possibility that your being truly present with
yourself, with your world, and even with another person, could
make all the difference?
AMEN.