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Thank
Goodness for Feet of Clay
Delivered by
Bruce Arnold
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
This presentation is going to be a bit of a dog’s dinner. Rather than one main theme, with secondary issues and random digressions, I’ve taken several topics that alone would not sustain a whole sermon and put them together. All things I wanted to say. All are topics that are worth your time. So today, we’re making like the “Reader’s Digest.”
Jake Jacobson did an excellent presentation on faith and reason a couple of weeks ago that inspired some thoughts in me. One of them was a realization that many of us have a fundamental misperception of faith. Because so much has been said and written about it, we tend to think of it as an intellectual construct. If we have shown that there is some kind of logical flaw, then we have somehow defeated faith itself.
Hundreds of years ago, Shakespeare famously asked if he should compare his lady love to a summer’s day. Let’s imagine some heartless curmudgeon sputtering over this. “You can’t compare a woman to a summer’s day. Summer is a season, for goodness sakes, not a human being. And a day, well, that’s 24 hours. What does time have to do with this woman he likes?” And so on. Is there anyone among us who would not just shake our heads and say, “I guess he just doesn’t get it.” There are people like this. I dated a gal once who said she didn’t like poetry. “Why don’t they just say what they mean?” Ironically, I had been just about to share some of my poetry with her. I didn’t.
I didn’t used to “get” opera. It did not speak to me. Then one day, while watching the Marx Bros. movie “A Night at the Opera,” I found myself really listening to the duet at the end, the “Miserere,” from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” And suddenly, I got it. I still do. Not an expert, maybe not really a fan, I enjoy listening to opera from time to time.
Here’s the important thing about that: it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to. My appreciation for opera would be no more meaningful if I could explain it. It is no less meaningful, because I can’t. If you don’t get opera there are no words in the world that I could say to make you have the same appreciation.
Some things are rational. That doesn’t mean right or wrong. It just means that we can use logic and fact to understand them. Some things are irrational. That means that they violate logic or fact. Spending rent money on lottery tickets is irrational.
Many, many things are non-rational. That doesn’t mean different rules apply. Art, drama, literature, dance, music, these are all non-rational. And we love them. They fulfill different needs.
Faith is non-rational. For all their contributions to the history of thought, Aquinas and other schoolmen like him were wrong to try to reduce faith to reason. Reason has a place in faith. Faith should not be irrational. Most of us know that the world is not coming to an apocalyptic end on some certain date in the near future: those who proclaim such things are irrational, if not delusional. And so reason—rationality—can help us avoid such errors.
Faith is a movement of the heart, not the mind. It is something that gives meaning to life, for those who have it, just as art or nature does. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I still don’t really “get” Elvis. But 50 million Elvis fans can’t all be wrong. So that’s that one.
Have you ever thought about the trap of the open mind? Here it is: the open mind is willing to follow wherever thought may lead. But we can’t be equally expert at everything. We may, in open minded fashion, stumble upon an idea, which seems new, creative, and fresh; and which was thoroughly explored, dissected, and discarded ages ago. That’s the trap of the open mind. Google is the best antidote to date. Humility is as valuable as ever.
Do you know the trap of the pseudo-open-mind? Thinking you are open-minded, when you really just have non-typical prejudices. So that’s that one.
Okay, now we have finished the newsreel, cartoons, and short features and come to the main event: Thank Goodness for Clay Feet.
There is a common romantic idealization of historical features in which we displace their humanity with their legend. Example: for all that was great, and humane, and witty about Abraham Lincoln, several sources tell us that he enjoyed, and had a large stock of jokes that were so coarse and racist we would not repeat them. Many people do not know that Gandhi struggled all his life with a fierce temper. Mother Teresa could be shrewish and demanding.
When we look at people like Jesus and Buddha, we tend to idealize them as always being so calm and serene. This is a projection, not of our fondest wishes, but of our own inadequacies. We don’t think they are so serene because that is what we want to be. Mostly we don’t want that all, if behavior is any guide. We know at some level that such eternal placidity would be inhuman. We know that, even while we believe in the legends.
There is a famous, short Buddhist text called the Rose Sutra. Someone, maybe Shariputra, asks the Buddha about the meaning of life. Buddha just raises a rose that he holds in his hand. Among all in the crowd, Maha-Kasyapa becomes instantly enlightened, and laughs out loud. The implication is that Buddha was saying, wordlessly, that the meaning of life is in its experience, not in words, just as the meaning of a rose is in its appearance and fragrance. That’s the legend. Everyone is a cardboard cut out. It’s two-dimensional.
Let’s consider it in more human terms. Maybe the Buddha was daydreaming about the rose and didn’t hear the question. We do this sort of thing all the time. Maha-Kasyapa took a leap, became enlightened, and everyone ascribed a meaning to the event, which the Buddha, shrewd leader of men that he was, did not see fit to correct.
Or maybe Maha-Kasyapa was daydreaming, and when the Buddha actually did raise the rose in response to the question, laughed about something completely unrelated. But with everyone looking at him, he’s not going to explain what he was really thinking about.
All of these figures—Jesus, Buddha, Maha-Kasyapa, Gandhi—they all had personalities. They were all real people. They all had likes and dislikes, quirks, and frailties. What is unique about them is that, unlike most people, personality is not all they had. They had something else, something special that transcended personality. Most people have little else by way of intellect, talent, character, or heart, to outweigh the role that personality plays in their lives.
Isaac Newton, for instance, had a towering intellect. He was a very quirky person, but his mental capacity and scientific achievement far out-weighed that. Mozart was a frivolous, even immature man, except where music was concerned. This was so well portrayed in the movie “Amadeus.”
When a man like Jesus is knocked off his equilibrium by something, which hurts or displeases him, his response is determined by his personality just as much as yours or mine would be — to a point. Yet there are other factors at play besides personality. He has spent so much time in prayer and meditation, he abides so frequently in what we might call God consciousness or cosmic consciousness, that he is not knocked off-balance as often. When he is, it does not last as long, or have such intensity, as a similar episode would affect the average Joe. His upsets are like dropping a brick out in the middle of the Neuse River. It’s still a brick, but compared to the depth, width, and volume of the water at that location, the ripples have relatively little effect on the river as a whole and subside before ever getting to shore.
For most people, the same upset would be like dropping the brick in a puddle. Most of the water will be displaced and the puddle is materially altered.
But I say not, look how special Jesus is, but thank God he still has bricks dropping in his life. Thank God the Buddha has people he likes and people he doesn’t like. Thank God, Mozart could be petty and extravagant. Thank goodness they all have feet of clay. Because if they are human, we none of us need be ashamed of our humanity. We don’t have to look at them and say, “They are so great, I could never be like that.” We can look at them and say, “They are so human—I too can be like them.”
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