"Making Meaning: The Paradox of Postmoderism"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
June 21, 2009

Reading          Charge to the Minister - Ordination of the Reverend Bruce Russell-Jayne, Reverend Dr. James H. Macomber (adapted)

I bring greetings from the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos.  We wish you, Bruce, as well as the congregation here in Ogden, great success as you travel together on your respective religious journeys.  May your time together be fruitful and satisfying even as you challenge each other to be the best that you can be.  That is our challenge as ministers, you see, to give the world our best.
            As I look around this sacred space, inviting and full of beauty this evening, I realize that the Ten Commandments are nowhere in view.  No posters, no plaques, no tablets.  But, then, this is not a courtroom.
            I mention the Ten Commandments because those biblical rules, the basis of a religious legal code, are, at best, arcane.  At worst, they are outdated, anachronistic.  They are unwavering, absolute, and thus they ignore the pervasively paradoxical way we live these days, especially ministers.  We are challenged to do the right thing, even in the face of opposition, adversity, and uncertainty.  We face life’s paradoxes every day.  Neither life nor this profession are easy.  What we need to keep before us as ministers are, therefore, not the Ten Commandments, but rather the Paradoxical Commandments.  Conveniently, there are ten of them.  And I need to warn you, some of them make reference to—well—difficult people we as ministers may encounter.  Bruce, you might encounter such people in your future ministries, but I assure you, no such people will be found here in Ogden.
           
On to the first Paradoxical Commandment:
People are sometimes illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
I saw a bumper sticker in Santa Fe the other day that read: “Only YOU can prevent narcissism.” 
            The second Paradoxical Commandment:
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish or ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
            In a similar vein:
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
            The fourth:
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
            The fifth is about risk:
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
You know, they’re all about risk.
            The sixth Paradoxical Commandment:
The biggest women and men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
            And the seventh:
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
We Unitarian Universalists champion lots of underdog issues, don’t we?
            The eighth:
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
            And the ninth:
People really need help but may resist, even attack you, if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
            And, finally, the tenth Paradoxical Commandment:
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

With apologies to whomever actually wrote Deuteronomy 6:
Hear therefore, O Bruce, and observe these commandments diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may prosper in a land flowing with milk and honey.
Give the world the best you have.  So might that be.  Amen.

Sermon           Making Meaning: The Paradox of Postmodernism  Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
One of my favorite stories comes from the book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum.  Fulghum, a one-time UU parish minister, tells of being left in charge of about eighty children in the church social hall and organizing them to play a game of Giants, Wizards and Dwarfs.  The game involves some decision making, but he says its real purpose is, “to make a lot of noise and run around chasing people until nobody knows which side you are on or who won.”  He let them run for a few minutes until “The excitement of the chase had reached a critical mass and then yelled out: ‘You have to decide now which you are—a GIANT, a WIZARD, or a DWARF!’
      While the groups huddled in frenzied, whispered consultation, a tug came at his pants leg.  A small child stood there looking up, and asked in a small, concerned voice, ‘Where do the Mermaids stand?’
      Where do the Mermaids stand?
      A long pause.  A very long pause.  ‘Where do the Mermaids stand?’ he said.
      ‘Yes. You see, I am a Mermaid.’
      ‘There are no such things as Mermaids.’
      ‘Oh, yes, I am one!’
      She did not relate to being a Giant, a Wizard, or a Dwarf.  She knew her category.  Mermaid.  And was not about to leave the game and go over and stand against the wall where a loner would stand.  She intended to participate, wherever Mermaids fit into the scheme of things.  Without giving up dignity or identity.  She took it for granted that there was a place for Mermaids and that he would know just where.
      Well, where DO the Mermaids stand?  All the ‘Mermaids’—all those who are different, who do not fit the norm and who do not accept the available boxes and pigeonholes?
      Answer that question and you can build a [church], a nation, or a world on it.
      What was his answer at the moment?  ‘The mermaid stands right here by the King of the Sea!’ he said.  (Yes, the King’s fool I thought to myself.)  So they stood there hand in hand, reviewing the troops of Wizards and Giants and Dwarfs as they roiled by in wild disarray.”
      He ends the story with, “It is not true, by the way, that mermaids do not exist.  I know one personally.  I have held her hand.”
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Isn’t that a sweet story?  This story probably sounds familiar to you because it could easily be about the kids in our Religious Education program.  We give them liberal guidelines and encourage them to be creative.  When they  begin to define their own identities, even if we don’t understand them perfectly, we affirm them and welcome them as part of our community.  We pride ourselves on being open to diversity – and we try to maintain our composure when diversity begins to feel a little chaotic to us.  And when someone’s ideas or behavior is just too far out for us to accept, we may wonder if we really believe in the value of diversity as much as we say we do, but we usually keep our thoughts to ourselves.

Probably another reason UUs like the story is because so many of us are Mermaids.  We draw from many religious traditions: Jewish and Christian teachings, humanism, women and earth honoring religions, Buddhism, and Native American are some of the sources of our inspiration.  Each of these traditions provides a system through which many people have found personal grounding and direction for their lives.  But you know what?  Most UUs don’t practice any one of them in real depth.  We pride ourselves on our eclecticism – picking and choosing what we like from any source – and we reject the parts of religious traditions we find unreasonable.  We call this “reason based faith,” and each individual’s right to interpret theology in her own way is a basic tenet of the liberal church.  Our principles affirm and promote the right of conscience and a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  However, as anyone who has left one of the traditional religions and set off on her own looking for life’s meaning can tell you, it’s not an easy task.  For awhile at least, the search can result in a failure to find spiritual values which make sense in a world with so many divergent points of view.
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Look at the photograph on the cover of your Order of Service.  Can you tell it’s a face?  I consider this to be a postmodern photograph because it exemplifies one of the notions of postmodernism - that people don’t stand alone, that all of our life experiences and relationships become part of us in some way.  We are created as much by our relationships as by our heredity and environment as well as our own intellect and initiatives. 

Postmodernism is not so much a orderly philosophy as it is a set of critiques of the societal issues which have arisen as a result of following the premises of modernism to an extreme. For example: postmodernism says an over-emphasis on individualism has led to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and consumerism, and the violence that so pervades our lives.  The concepts of postmodernism are used a little differently in regard to literature, or political theory or religion, but we can illustrate some of its ideas using this weird photo.  Each of you will have to decide for yourself if you like it and what it means – you don’t have to take my word for it.  Postmodernism says, “Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, or point of view—both literally and figuratively—and your interpretations can not be deemed good or bad. With postmodernism, we often hear that not everyone is right, but no one is wrong.  Not everyone’s end analysis will be the best, but we are unable to label any particular point of view as wrong.  Along side this is the truism that everyone has something valid to contribute. Postmodernism posits that truth, insight and relevance can be found in all things. Even if you think one person’s creation looks better than another person’s, it doesn’t make the lesser person’s contribution meaningless.”

These postmodern ideas seem to be consistent with the modern liberal religious precept that each person should rely on her own insight rather than the external authority of the church or scripture to determine the right course of action.  Modern liberal religion was built on Enlightenment philosophies such as Immanuel Kant’s whose injunction, “Have the courage to use your own reason.” became a motto of our UU forebears.   On this point it seems both modern and post modern philosophers would agree.  Liberal theology is a product of modern culture, but modernity is not the end of the story.  The world is very different from the one that spawned liberal religion two centuries ago.

Religious liberals are not alone in feeling a loss of certainty about what is ultimate truth.  We all live in a disorienting culture where everything is relative.  We can no longer depend on the traditional metanarratives which assured us the world would inevitably turn out alright, either because it was God’s will or because human intellect would guarantee progress in all of our major problem areas.  Anyone who claims to have found a universal truth is sure to be challenged - probably both from the left and from the right.  And it’s not just that each of us has only a partial view of some larger truth. One metaphor I have heard is of a large church sanctuary with many stained glass windows where we each see different colors through different windows, but the source of all those colors is one and the same light.   Many of us don’t see it that way anymore.  To us it feels like we are each on our own paths, each with our own knowledge, and that there is no unbiased point of view we can depend upon to help us interpret life.  This uncertainty about reality is one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism.  Whether we pay much attention to philosophy or not, we can’t escape postmodernism’s influence.  We all live in a postmodern world.
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Postmodernism challenges the premises of both traditional and liberal religion, and not everyone is willing to accept its assertions.  Some traditionalists seek to recapture the religious principles of pre-modern times.    Even we liberal have to concede there are a lot of sound ideas and lessons learned we should retain from our history.  We are determined liberal religion’s responses to postmodernism’s challenges will not reject out of hand all of our forebears’ ideas.  When we say “post” anything: postmodern, post feminist, post colonial, we mean something that comes after, not necessarily something that replaces everything that came before, but the task remains for us religious liberals to respond to postmodernism’s criticisms of a religion still mostly based on 19th century philosophies.

“Many liberals resist seeing themselves as part of an ongoing, living tradition out of fear of losing their sense of independence.”  This tension between the authority of tradition versus the individual’s right to self-determination  has been present in liberal religion so long it is often mistaken as an article of our church constitution.  This tension  is misguided because honoring and learning from our liberal religious tradition does not entrap us.  We don’t exist independent of our past; our traditions influence us whether we acknowledge them or not.  Our liberal religious tradition is a valuable resource for deepening our sense of personal awareness and for understanding why we approach spirituality the way we do.

In my “Ways of Knowing” sermon series last year I told of several different ways UUs approach religion.  Each of these liberal religious systems contains a concept of human nature pretty much based on modern western philosophy which defined the human self largely in terms of individual reason and self awareness.  Postmodernism poses several critiques of modern liberal philosophy and religion, and one of the most serious is modernism’s definition of personhood.  Modernism posited that people’s views were validated by their own internal processes, and elevated the individual such that no external authority or affirmation is needed.  Modern liberals located religion primarily within the individual.  This leaves each individual to come up with a sense of purpose from within and not from her community.   Liberal religionists long claimed that if people would just look deep inside themselves they would find god.  As I said earlier, many have tried and not experienced anything they would call divinity, so that we can no longer claim personal introspection is a universal way to connect with divinity.

20th century psychology has taught us our “understanding of ourselves as autonomous individuals is an illusion.”   What we call our self, our internal sense of who we are, our self-identity is created over time.  It is a dynamic and complex process that begins in infancy and continues our entire lives.  Selves are not created in isolation; our identities are always formed in relationship to others, first with our parents and later with every person in our social environment.  We acquire knowledge in a very social and communal manner.  Modernism told us we start as individuals who may later come together in community, and postmodernism says just the opposite – that the self begins imbedded in a social system learning the attitudes of others and may later emerge as an individuated self.

Young people develop morality by ascertaining the norms of their social group and learning to apply them appropriately. Many individuals, and I would guess most UUs, at some point yearn for autonomy and learn to distance themselves from the social norms of their childhood by exploring a larger framework.  This process of individuation enlarges a person’s social context and deepens self-realization which can free her to express her own distinctive personality.  As autonomous individuals, in order to express ourselves, we find ways to present our unique personalities within a social framework.  It takes both individual creativity and a social community to allow the self-expression that increases self-respect and self-worth.
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Self autonomy brings us back to our reading for today.  I’ll tell you my friend Jim Macomber lifted his list from a little book by Kent Keith entitled The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World.  Dr. Keith doesn’t claim postmodernism as the reason the world seems so crazy, but that’s essentially what he means when he says, “Many people have turned away from the human values that served all the generations that came before us.  Some people have decided all things are relative, and complain life has no meaning.”  His thesis is: even though the world is crazy, if you follow the paradoxical commandments, you will find personal meaning and be less crazy yourself.  And, I have to admit, when Jim charged me to follow them, doing things like loving people, doing my best, no matter what, etc. sounded pretty good to me.  Helping people in spite of being misunderstood by half the people in our world sounds like a UU thing doesn’t it?

But, there’s the rub. Doing good despite the disparagement of my values by others does build inner resolve, but I am not always strong enough to go it alone.  I need a community of people who both challenge and acknowledge my values to help me feel I am on firm ground when I do stand up to the crazy world.  Dr. Keith says that by standing up for underdogs, building loving communities, and being honest even though it leaves us vulnerable, we will find meaning.  The fact that we can do things we choose to do, that we can act with purpose and pursue goals, is the starting point for human agency.  However, human agency means more than being people who accomplish things.  It means making deliberate choices based on our values and holding ourselves accountable for our actions.  Since our actions are always taken within a social context they affect our relationships with other people, and the element of accountability creates ethical norms for human behavior. When we are part of a supportive community, we have help in determining our values, and we don’t have to stand alone in order to stand up for them.

As religious liberals who have championed the individual search for truth and meaning, we need to appreciate more that our self-identity and an orientation that permits us to take a moral stand, “is constructed through participation in communities, institutions and systems of meaning.”   We need to swing the balance between the individual and the community in recognition of the importance of community to all individuals who are part of it.  Our well being is deeply connected to the well-being of others.  When we join a Unitarian Universalist church, we are embedding ourselves in a tradition; we don’t have to create it from scratch.  Our tradition and the beloved community that is Northern Hills Fellowship support our individual choices to follow the Paradoxical Commandments.  In our postmodern world, where we no longer rely on the absolutes of traditional religion, it is our choices, and the actions which proceed from them in relationship with others in our community which make meaning for us.  As we continue our individual search for truth and meaning, let us learn to appreciate more the value of community in our lives.