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. 

 

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