"WHAT WE DO KNOW"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday,. December 9, 2001

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

For those of you who aren't regularly tuned to this station, last week my sermon was entitled, "What We Don't Know." I used my recent trip to attend a Unitarian church dedication in Transylvania as an illustration of the fact that whatever we think we know, we can discover that there is much deeper knowledge yet to be known.

We may think we know a great deal about a person or a culture, but however much we know there is far more depth waiting to be learned. We may feel we know the history of a people, but talking with those people reveals far more intense understanding that we didn't previously realize. Part of my point last week is that for everything that we can know, there is always some depth of knowledge that we have yet to learn.

Today I wish to consider what we do, in fact, know -- or think we know. For this concept I will reflect again on some of those Transylvanian experiences, but also draw somewhat on the holiday season we are entering, and explore some of the Christmas myths we share as a culture.

There is quite a variety of ways to know things. Is our knowledge that two plus two equals four the same kind of knowing as knowing your way home from church? Is knowing how to play the piano the same kind of knowledge as knowing when to fold your hand in a game of poker? For that matter, if I say I know the Hungarian language, does that mean I can say "yes," "no," and "where's the bathroom," or does it mean I can carry on a conversation and read the newspaper in Hungarian?

There are different kinds of knowledge. If you tell me that you know your next door neighbor, that could imply vastly different things. You know his name, I presume. But does it mean that you know anything else about him. His occupation? His family situation? Where he is from? If you tell my you know him quite well, I'd assume you know all this, but how deep does it go? Do you know his views on politics or religion? Do you know his deepest fears about life? Do you know whether he is optimistic about his future, or wether he means it when he says he loves his wife and children? If you don't know these things, can you really say you know him well?

There are, indeed, several complex levels of knowing. It is apparent to me, though, that the knowledge that is most worth knowing comes from inside.

When Nancy and I went to Transylvania last month, we went there in part to

learn - to learn about the Unitarians there and to learn about their about their culture and circumstances. It is fair to say, I think, that we learned as much about ourselves, really, as we did about them. We came to understand better how our culture is in contrast to the culture we experienced there. We learned about our heritage as Unitarians, by observing this 400 year old tradition. We learned more about our own personal sense of priorities, and our own sense of connection to the world and to people in the world.

There was certain information we came to know on that trip that anyone else making the trip would learn as well. However, so much of our knowledge is filtered through our personal experience that inevitably everyone who learns has their own unique, personal learning experience.

It seems like a simple thing to have knowledge, but it seems to me that real knowledge is primarily, as Socrates would say, self-knowledge, and that ultimately what we know is what we, as individuals, experience. And our experiences are ultimately personal. What we do know is ultimately personal.

An important piece of Unitarian history is the legacy of transcendentalism. It is a movement popularly known as a literary school in American history, but it was far more than that. American Transcendentalism was a philosophy, arising from radical Unitarians in the middle of the 1800s, that not only shaped the foundations of the emerging American culture, but also challenged many of the complacent assumptions of the Unitarian establishment at the time.

As a philosophy, transcendentalism concerned itself with the question of what we know, or can know, as human beings. It questioned any assumption of certain knowledge. Transcendentalism acknowledged that there are, in fact, two very different ways of knowing things. There is what can be called "empirical" knowledge - knowledge of what we see and hear and touch. This kind of knowledge seems unflappable. Of course the ocean is wide! I've stood on the shore and seen its width. Of course the sky is blue! I've looked up at it many times and witnessed its color. These are pieces of knowledge I have, confirmed by both my direct experience and scientific study. These things I know. For certain.

Well, maybe not for certain, it turns out. The sky is not necessarily blue. The various elements that make up the atmosphere are arranged in such a way that, from our perspective, the sky is perceived as being blue. If we were to observe it from a different perspective -- from space, for example -- the sky may be perceived differently. And of course the sky's perceived hue can change drastically, given the influence of other factors, such as a sunset, or the approach of a thunderstorm. What seemed so simple and obvious may in fact turn out not to be so simple and obvious. If I were asked to list what I know for certain, one of those things is not, "the sky is blue." I do know for certain that much of the time, even most of the time, I perceive the sky as being blue.

And we also can't be certain that the ocean is wide, based solely upon my observation from the shore. For one thing the concept of "wide" is relative and subjective, but also my conclusions are based upon perceptions that may not be adequate. I may be looking, from shore, across a huge bay, and mistakenly suppose I'm looking across the ocean. In that case, while I think I'm drawing a conclusion about the ocean, I'm actually mistakenly forming an opinion about the bay. Put me on the shore of Lake Michigan, without telling me where I am, and I'll probably insist that it's the ocean and that this ocean is wide.

A host of empirical and skeptical philosophers, in England and France as well as the United States, had for some time been pointing out the limits of our knowledge based upon our sense perceptions. Everything we know about the world is filtered through our senses, and therefore subject to human mistakes.

But there is, the transcendentalists hastened to point out, another kind of knowing, a knowledge based on intuition, a knowledge that comes not from the senses, not from outside of us, but from inside of us. This knowledge is subjective, to be sure, but it is it is not subject to the trickeries of the senses.

For example, most of us claim to know when something is fair or just, or unfair or unjust. How is it that we know that? This is not the kind of knowledge that comes from sense experience, from simple observations of the world; it comes, rather, from some internal basis of judgment, what some call an internal "moral compass," which points us in the right ethical direction. Human conscience, the knowledge of right and wront, is an not something we learn by observation, it is something we are born with that continues to be shaped and honed through experience.

In some sense, it is this interior knowledge, this insight, that we identify when we say we "know" someone - we know they are honest or trustworthy, we know they are they are scared or confident, we know their good heart. This far more personal knowledge is every bit as much "knowledge" about someone as it is to know their height, weight, and age.

Human discoveries often come, not from simple observation, but from insight into how things work. Most intellectual and scientific breakthroughs are accompanied by what some call an "Ah Ha!" experience, seeing things, not so much with the eye, but with the mind. It is not uncommon, in fact it is far more often the case, that a mathematician or a scientist, studying a problem, will know the solution in his or her head long before actually working it out or demonstrating that solution on paper.

This is the kind of "transcendental" knowledge that we all have, that we all can use to understand the world better. There is a kind of knowing where we say, "I know it in my gut." There is a kind of knowledge where we say, "I know it in my heart." Please forgive my ignorance of anatomy, but these are clearly the same kind of knowledge.

The knowledge Nancy and I bring back from the Transylvanian Unitarians is knowledge of that kind - a personal knowledge of connection with people, knowing, for example, that we are related by something more and something deeper than simple coincidence of circumstance.

The great transcendentalist writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, put it this way:

"We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. The whole human family is bathed with an element of love, like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of the wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth."

The heart knoweth. Here is the kind of knowledge we can rely on, not because it is objectively certain, but rather because our personal knowledge does not depend for its veracity on something outside of us that we might misperceive.

It is not the outside world that contains our knowledge, our knowledge, our personal knowledge, contains the world outside. This, I think, was part of the meaning of the reading by the philosopher Pascal. We are in nature like a simple reed of straw, a feeble part of the universe. Yet, he said, we are a thinking reed, and our thoughts make all the difference. "Not in space am I to seek my dignity," he wrote, "but in my thinking."

"The universe comprehends me. It encompasses me. In its space, I am but a geometrical point. But in thought, in my thought, I comprehend the universe."

It is not a huge step, but it is a step, to go from "what we do know," to "what is true." I will make that shift by talking, for a moment, about the "truth" of Christmas, or put differently, "the true meaning of Christmas," or even a bit differently, "the true meaning of the Christmas myth."

I speak of the Christmas "myth," rather than the Christmas "story," precisely because what we truly know about it is, in fact, more true like a myth than true like a story.

Few words in our language are as equivocal as the word "myth." That is, the word "myth" can have opposite implications. It can be used either pejoratively, as in "that's not true, it's just a myth;" or, it can be used as acclaim for a story that communicates an important and valid message, as in, "the stories of Homer have a timeless and mythical power to them." When used positively, the word "myth" identifies a fictional story which has a moral or a message that is profoundly true. Such is the case of the Christmas story.

Let me illustrate both uses of the word "myth" by referring to the "great American myth" which is identified in the classic stories of Horatio Alger. Horatio Alger, you recall, wrote a series of books about young boys, born in poverty, who worked hard, and through their own initiative rose through the ranks of success, and won all the rewards of success. They captured what in another myth, a related myth, is known by all of us as "the American Dream."

The Horatio Alger stories are myths. They are fictions entirely made up. They are not true. These stories did not happen. But they are profoundly true in a different sense of truth, the sense of mythic truth. We know that at some level they are true, even if they are not factual. The myth in these stories does not deal with reality; it deals with our attitude, as a culture, toward reality. These stories illustrate what we would like to believe can happen. They communicate our common faith.

But even on another level, we know that this story is also "myth" in the pejorative sense. In America, the Horatio Alger story has happened; certain people have been able, through hard work and ingenuity, to break out of poverty and achieve great success. This has happened, and still happens, but we know it is not as common as we would want it to be. We know, for example, that there is a cycle of poverty in society, and hard work does not guarantee success in breaking out of that cycle. In this country, which wants so deeply to believe in the Horatio Alger myth, being born into privilege is still, by far, the greatest predictor of success, far more so than ambition or initiative.

So here it is: the Horatio Alger stories are myth in the sense that they are not factually true, which is something we all know. They are also myth in the positive sense: they are mythic. They accurately express, perhaps not always the reality, but rather the aspiration, the values, the spirit, of our society. They effectively express what we value in this society. This is also something we all know.

The power of myth is hard to underestimate. It is an effective way to communicate what we know. Much of what we believe can by understood within the dimension of myth. Socialism operates under a myth of classless society, that only a planned economy can insure that everyone shares equally from the fruits of society. Capitalism operates under the myth of what Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of economic justice, believing that if the economy is left to operate without government interference, prosperity will be distributed equally. Even psychology is often myth-based, in that we speak of somebody have a big ego, or low self-esteem, or a weak conscience, as if ego or self-esteem or conscience could be measured like we might measure cholesterol levels. The fact is all these things we think we know are fundamentally symbolic -- myths that give us insight into things we don't fully understand.

Another way of looking at myth is through the concept of a "useful fiction." "Useful fictions" are things we make up that go a long way toward helping understand things we don't know for certain. The American myth of the "melting pot" is a useful fiction. The factual truth is that racial divisions continue to be perhaps the most serious domestic problem we have, yet the mythical truth is that we aspire to be a nation where all races and backgrounds are blended into one harmonious society, and it is useful to have the melting pot myth to help keep us on the road to what we do want. The Freudian concept of "ego" is another useful fiction, for even though there is no such physical entity as an "ego," the concept is a tremendous help in our understanding of how the human mind works.

Here is another "useful fiction." We Unitarian Universalists affirm the conviction that every human being has inherent worth and value. Each person, by virtue of their humanity, deserves the presumption of respect until they may do something to forfeit it.

This notion of inherent human worth is fiction. It is a myth. There is no objective measure that requires us to reach this conclusion. There is nothing that we can see or touch or hear or test, there is no irrefutable evidence - in fact there is no objective evidence altogether -- that demands the conclusion that every person has inherent worth and value.

Yet the conviction about inherent worth and dignity, human value, is a tremendously useful fiction. It is a way of making the world make just a little bit more sense to us.

All this brings us to what we know about Christmas, the truth of the Christmas myth. There are two ways of approaching this story. On one hand, we could say that the myth involves the miracle birth of God's son, who was sent to be born, incarnated, and live among humans on this earth. At his birth, angels appeared in the sky announcing the coming of the Messiah. This is myth in the sense of fiction, where the facts are largely invented for effect. There is little in this story that we can consider to be "true," in the factual sense of truth. It is, as we say, "just a myth."

But there is another way of approaching the story that provides a mythical type of truth. There is a way of approaching this story in which it can become, for many of us at least, a "useful fiction." Let me tell this story as if it were a "myth" in this classical sense of myth:

Once upon a time, many centuries ago, in a far-off land, God appeared on earth in human form. God chose to do this in a most humble way, coming to earth as an infant child, born of a poor peasant family in a simple village in the Middle East. Instead of coming to earth as a king or emperor, God chose to exist as you and I do, being born as a delicate, whining, helpless, fragile baby. When hungry or lonely, God cried. When pleased, God gurgled and giggled. And when necessary, God even made a mess in the crib.

God came into this world to experience the entire range of life's events that you and I experience. As God grew in wisdom and stature, all the human emotions were felt: God knew what it meant to fear. God felt both love and hate, anger and compassion, approval and rejection. All these things God experienced because of that decision long ago to come to earth in the form of an infant child.

When presented as a true myth, rather than a factual story, this tale has some fairly powerful meaning. Is there any mythical story that could better illustrate the notion of inherent human worth and dignity? The concept that God would appear on earth as a common person is affirmation of the principle of human worth and dignity.

As a matter of fact, this was a very explicit metaphor used by early Unitarians. William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism in the early 19^th century, has a statue in the Boston common, and the inscription below the statue has these words: "He preached that divinity is within humanity."

Divinity is within humanity. It is that principle that led so many Unitarians to a humanistic principle honoring the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And is this not the mythical meaning of the Christmas story? Isn't it true in a mythical sense even though it may not necessarily be true in a factual sense? The factual truth or fiction of the story has no affect on the mythical truth. However fictional the story may be, it can be a decidedly useful fiction in that it reflects and reaffirms our values, reminding us of the value of inherent human worth and dignity.

I raised this question of whether inherent human worth and dignity is something we know or just something we believe. Inasmuch as our knowledge, as we have seen, has a personal dimension, and that, as the transcendentalists suggested, knowledge coming from the inside is as reliable, sometimes more reliable, than knowledge which is dependent on outside sources, then our opinion concerning human value is not just opinion, but a kind of knowledge.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: "I find the great thing in the world is not so much where we stand as in which direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor."

Religion remains alive to the extent that it opens itself up to freely exploring new truths and does not rest secure on old truths that will die. The nineteenth century American poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself an active Unitarian spoke of this in a poem entitled "The Mind's Diet":

No life worth naming

ever comes to good

If always nourished

on the selfsame food;...

No reasoning natures

find it safe to feed,

For their diet,

on a single creed.

It is not my place, I suppose, to declare that there is no such thing as truth. Who knows? But I can say I put little faith in truth. My faith resides more strongly in freedom. Over many centuries of human history, very little that has claimed to be eternally true has passed the test of time. Old truths die away with each generation. New truths are possible only to the extent that we embrace freedom to explore them more than we embrace the truths themselves.

Again, Oliver Wendell Homes spoke to this in a poem he entitled, "Truth":

Alas! how much that seemed

immortal truth

That heroes fought for,

martyrs died to save,

Reveals its earth-born lineage,

growing old

and limping in its march,

its wings un-plumed,

Its heavenly semblance

faded like a dream.

READING: From "Truths" by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour

Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth new-born

Looks a misshapen and untimely growth,

That some would strangle, some would only starve;

But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand,

Comes slowly to its stature and its form,

Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,

And moves transfigured into angel guise,

Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth,

And folded in the same encircling arms

That cast it like a serpent from their hold!

That same foundling truth, it grows

To unseemly favor, and at length has won

The smiles of hard-mouthed men and light-lipped dames;

Fold it in silk and give it food from gold;

So shalt thou share its glory when at last

It drops its mortal vesture, and revealed

In all the splendor of its heavenly form,

Spreads on the startled air its mighty wings!

Alas! how much that seemed immortal truth

That heroes died for, martyrs died to save,

Reveals its earth-born lineage, growing old

And limping in its march, its wings unplumed,

Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream!

READING from "Pensees" by Blaise Pascal (1669)

A human being is a reed, a bit of straw, the feeblest thing in nature. But a human being thinks. We are a thinking reed. When the universe chooses to crush us, the universe need not take arms against us. A whiff of vapor, a drop of water; either can kill us.

Human dignity, our dignity, lives in our thoughts. Thereby we rise.. Only thereby. Not through space; and not through time. Never can we fill either. So we take pains, such pains as we can, to think well. For therein lie all morals and all principles.

A thinking reed. Not in space am I to seek my dignity, but in my thinking. Possessions give me no more than I have already. The universe comprehends me. It encompasses me. In its space, I am but a geometrical point. But in thought, in my thought, I comprehend the universe.