Sermon: So Let It Be Written...

(delivered to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin on Sunday July 31, 2011)

Prayer:

Somewhere out there

On a dusty shelf

Or a spinning disk

On parchment aged

Or in pixels bright

There are words waiting for you

These words were written for you

And when you find them

They will touch your heart

And change your life.

Somewhere in there

Between the synapses

Of your frontal lobe

Or floating around

In the recesses of you consciousness

Are words destined for another

Words that will touch their heart

And change their life

It is your duty to record them

So that they may be found.

Somewhere out there

Is a better world

waiting to be described

We spend our days and our nights

Imagining this world

When we are wise,

We record these imaginings

For each other

To bring this dream one step

Closer to reality.

When we are unwise,

We think that

all of these imaginings

are just stories.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Sermon: “So let it be written…”

“So let it be written, so let it be done.”

I have to start this morning with an amusing admission, I chose the title of today’s sermon off the cuff after being approached by Vicki and Dwayne who hoped that I would tie the sermon into the end of our Hogwarts Summer Camp and our Bookspring summer social action project. 

I thought it was from the bible.  I thought it was from Moses or one of the other Old Testament prophets… But, as I was doing research for the sermon I found out that the quote was actually from Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film The Ten Commandments.  Furthermore, it was not one of God’s noble representatives, but the Pharaoh who utters this famous line.  Here is the quote in context:

The Egyptian Master Builder Baka asks Pharaoh, ”Will you lose a throne because Moses builds a city?”  Pharaoh Rameses answers, ”The city that he builds shall bear my name, the woman that he loves shall bear my child. So let it be written, so let it be done.” 

Well, you can thank Vicki and Dwayne for saving you from the torturous sermon on self-righteousness that I was planning.  And you can thank me for drawing the title of a sermon on the sacredness of all texts from a movie line that exemplifies the petty vengefulness of tyrants.

Being unfortunately trained in the contemporary American academic tradition, my first thought when I decided to write a sermon about the sacredness of all texts was to be critical of its weakest point, which, to my mind is more or less, the Harlequin Romance Novel.  Can I make the case that even the schmaltz-iest novel is a sacred text?  Now I want to clarify that I don’t believe that the success or failure of the proposition that all texts are sacred rests on whether or not I prove the holiness of the romance novel.  However, I would like to challenge you to think about whatever genre or type of writing that you find most banal and least likely to be sacred.  Must not the author of this dubious work, by necessity, confront the human condition?  Does not this topic, this domain of inquiry speak to some pertinent aspect of our shared reality and thus derive its readership?  What else is there?  We are all at different points in our journey, and so it ought not be too surprising that we find a wide variety of different material insightful in different ways and at different times in our lives.

I think that the more important differentiation, in terms of sacredness, or to echo our prayer closing from Jack Harris-Bonham, holiness, is not what we read but how we read it.  It is not which book we select, but why.  It is not the level of enlightenment or spiritual power of the author, but how well the book resonates with our own spiritual journey that matters.  Ultimately, the sacredness of any particular text to us is about whether or not, and to what extent, we allow the text to change us…

From this perspective, we can come to recognize the transformative potential of essentially all human writings.  To be sure, some texts will have objectively greater transformative breadth and depth, but this describes a continuum of sacredness, not an either-or proposition.  For the sexually repressed, salvation might just come in the form of a Harlequin.

In the spirit of this revelation, I would like to share with you some of the writings that have changed me.

I want to frame these writings using Ursula Le Guin’s introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness.  I started reading science fiction and fantasy when I was twelve, but it wasn’t until I read this introduction in my thirties that I understood why it had always had such a hold on me.

(quoting) “Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative… This book is not extrapolative.  If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment.  Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens… In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there a built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.” (end quote)

I remember concretely the moment when I first read this paragraph.  I was lying in bed reading, excited to start a new book by an author I was just discovering. I remember feeling a bit breathless, I remember laying the book down on my stomach.  I remember closing my eyes and flashing through twenty years of my favorite books.  I remember realizing that my favorites were the ones where this counterfactual universe, this imagined world, produced in me a type or degree of moral complexity, sometimes even moral clarity, beyond what I had ever experienced in reading traditional literary fiction.

For example, in his series that begins with Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card takes on the themes of xenophobia and just war theory in a fictional war with aliens.  Ultimately, the reader finds a way to identify with and find compassion for the aliens, while becoming self-critical of the might-makes-right and win-at-all-costs mentality of humanity.  I can think of no finer gift for a loved one preparing to enlist in the military than a box-set of Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind.  Not that these books would dissuade their service, Card’s work is steeped in the value of civil service and self-sacrifice.  What these books would do is encourage them to struggle with questions that are particularly relevant to anyone preparing him or herself to enter a profession with regular access to weapons of mass destruction.

To continue from Le Guin; “The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future – indeed Schrodinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted – but to describe reality, the present world…  Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” (end-quote)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings famously describes the struggle between those who wish to live in harmony with nature and those who seek to control it.  Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials describes the struggle between free inquiry and powerfully institutionalized dogma.  While Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land describes the perverse oddity of culture, any culture, when viewed critically by an outsider.

(quoting again from Le Guin) “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists.  It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.  …Certainly.  Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it.  But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing this pack of lies, the say, There! That’s the Truth! 

…In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane – bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon.  Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. (end quote)

What has struck me about some of my favorite works of alternative histories and futures, many by Kim Stanley Robinson, such as his Mars and California trilogies and his compelling The Years of Rice and Salt, is that these thoughtfully constructed alternative worlds have often felt far more sane than the world we live in.  Not a Pollyanna-ish sanity that denies our darker angels, but a cooler-heads-have-prevailed sanity where our social energy is focused on living good lives together and not at each other’s expense.

Returning to Le Guin’s words: “…I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them.  Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? if they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands?  Maybe only once, once in their lives.  But once is enough.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist.  But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar.  Distrust everything I say.  I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie.  Psychologically defined, a symbol.  Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.  Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little… But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.  The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Words can thus be used paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage…” (end quote)

Ah, paradox; such fodder for reflection; such a treasure trove of possibility for the mystically inclined.  My first serious introduction to the power of paradox probably came through the robot novels of Isaac Asimov, most famously I Robot.  In these books Asimov deconstructs the power of both logic and rules by forcing his sentient robotic protagonists through sequence after sequence of moral crisis brought on by situational conflicts with and between the immutable laws of robotics.  Asimov deals similarly with the paradoxes of time and prediction in his famous foundation series.  If I can claim today to have the insight that logic, in and of itself, is inadequate to solve the problems of humanity or to answer our biggest questions, the seed of that insight was planted by Asimov in my thirteen year old brain many years ago.

And now, Ursula Le Guin’s finale, “All fiction is metaphor.  Science fiction is a metaphor.  What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, …and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them.  Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another.  The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.” (end quote)

That is how the six page introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness ends.  I have tried to pull out the most succulent language and ideas from those six pages… my wife insisted that reading all six pages aloud to you was a bad idea, one that would end in, at best, a half-glazed congregation.  After reflecting, I couldn’t disagree.  When I read this introduction the first time, which was followed immediately by rereading it a second time, and then a third time, I put the book on my nightstand, turned out the light, and spent the next few hours in quiet contemplation until sleep finally overtook me.  On subsequent nights, I went on to finish the book, diving deeply into the world of Gethen, where the native intelligent species is much like mankind, except for its being without gender.  I’m not exactly sure what a planet full of androgynous hermaphrodites is a metaphor for, but I can tell you that it is a great book.  I can tell you that it challenges you to think, and to feel, beyond gender to what lies at the heart of our shared humanity.

I have stood in this pulpit many times.  I have shared with this community my reflections on growing up as an evangelical Christian, I have laid out for you my obsession with barefoot running, I have pondered with you the concepts of karma and natural law, and I have read to you the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Tenzin Gyatso the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Mohandas K. Gandhi, these ones who seem to me the prophets of our modern age.  But what I have not told you, not until today, is where my faith comes from.  I have not told you… why.  Why I stand up here, why I care so much about trying.  I have not told you WHY I believe.

My faith comes from science fiction.  I do not have to guess whether or not we can imagine a better world.  I do not suffer from doubt on this count.  We can, and we have, and we do… We actually know EXACTLY what kind of world we want, and we need, and we deserve.  I see this knowledge reflected back to me from every single person I meet… in their desire for justice, for compassion, for community, for truth and for beauty, for goodness and for peace.  But nowhere do I see these desires mirrored more faithfully and more clearly, than in the thousands of worlds and cultures and peoples that we, ourselves, have projected out there, onto the great metaphorical unknowns of space and time. 

And so, we have already let it be written…

What remains, is to let it be done.