The elegantly dressed woman strode to the microphone in a group of about 150 Unitarian Universalists. She appeared to be in her sixties, beautiful hair, beautiful skin—she seemed to be the picture of health and vigor. She said, “Many of you in the congregation have known me for many years now, and I know many of you. Regrettably, I wish I knew even more of you because everyone I have met has added something lovely to my life. In some ways being a part of this congregation is the equivalent of being on a long and interesting journey to foreign lands. The things you have told me about what you know and what you have seen have been a real source of joy. You have enlarged my understanding and my capacity for affection. For these gifts you have freely given to me I am truly grateful.”

“I hope to hold onto the memories I have of our many delightful interchanges over the years but,” and here she paused, “I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and truly, things have already begun to dim. I will slowly lose my capacity to know your name, your connections to me or anyone else. It is sad but true that I am losing my memory, perhaps my most cherished possession. So I ask this of you: when I no longer know you; please remember—that you know me.” She was asking, in a sense, “Will you catch me when I fall?”

When I don’t know you, please remember that you know me. As she sat down a silent grace moved through the room to give the answer, “Yes we will.”

There are two unusual things about her declaration. First, that she said such an honest and vulnerable thing in public, and second, that she said such an honest and vulnerable thing at all. Unitarian Universalists as a group are generally not well known for their admission of vulnerability. It is common among us to assert, when asked, that we are fine, quite fine, thank you. We will deviate from this assertion if our trouble is something which can be overcome with some assistance such as a quick visit with the surgeon. As long as the remediation of our trouble seems quite certain we are willing to admit to the trouble. Among other things, the probability of a successful outcome demonstrates that we are not only quite fine, but so robust that we are able to overcome such a challenge.

Trouble, you can’t fool me, I see you behind that tree.
Trouble you can’t fool me, trying to get the ups on me,
Trouble, you can’t fool me, I see you behind that tree.
You want to jump on me.

         —Ry Cooder

In November of the past year the British Humanist Association conducted a curious ad campaign on public busses in London. Large posters on the sides of the busses said, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Richard Dawkins, famous evolutionary scholar and harsh critic of all things religious had committed to pay half the cost of the ad campaign but he was soon pleased to discover that donations exceeded what he had originally planned to contribute.

Simon Barrow, writing for the Manchester Guardian newspaper, doubted that the campaign would swell the ranks of either believers or non-believers. I share his view and imagine that the effect would be as large as bus posters which said, “God loves you, have a nice day.”

Barrow also wrote that, God or no God, what we all need to do is practice compassion. If religious people do not practice compassion, then they are not practicing their faith very well. And, he continued, if atheists are not practicing compassion then they are mis-behaving humanists. He thought that how ever people can find the means to live with compassion and find joy in their lives, so much the better.

I could not disagree. But obviously, expressing compassion and enjoyment is a very complicated project. Few are those who would claim they are not fond of compassion and joy. Because there is such unanimity of opinion about the worth of compassion and joy we therefore all experience it and express it on a regular basis. Well, that’s not true. Just the fact that some feel it is necessary to resort to bus advertising campaigns suggests instead that our grasp of this very important element in anyone’s life is poorly understood. But unlike what Mr. Dawkins believes, religion generally plays a very important, if misunderstood, part in compassion and joy. But I would agree with Mr. Dawkins that the practitioners of religion, any religion, really don’t understand how it is that having some kind of faith can lead to an increase of compassion and joy.

Both sides thank or blame God as the source or lack thereof of such good things. The faithful thank god for their blessings while the atheists, like one Barrow reader, pointedly exclaim, “Anyone who believes in an invisible entity is suffering from a delusional psychosis and should be excluded from any kind of responsible position in society.” But God is an important part of the capacity for compassion and joy, although probably not for the reasons that believers imagine. As I said, it is very complicated, but not so complicated so as to be beyond our comprehension.

There are several steps involved in unpacking this big box of human experience regarding compassion and enjoyment. The place to begin is by asserting that human beings are, on a normal day, easily led to worry. The sources of worry are infinite in number and can be either about a pile of smallish things or solitary big things. Sometimes all it takes is one small thing, like a frown from someone else. If we have children we worry, if we have a job we worry, if we have a spouse we worry, etc., etc.,etc....We worry that we are not smart enough, not pretty enough, not handsome enough, not strong enough, not anything enough to get through whatever we face in the day. We try to tell ourselves that we shouldn’t worry so much and because instructing ourselves to stop our worrying has been such an effective strategy we are able to get rid of our worrying in short order. Well.

Anthropologists were among the first to lift up a logical explanation for worry among human beings. Religions have tended to say something along the lines like, “We worry because we are sinful, separated from God!” Anthropologists by contrast sought for some explanation beyond such theological pyrotechnics. They said, “Hey, we are carnivores, but we are hardly on top of the carnivore food chain. There are a lot of creatures who look upon us with no thought other than, ‘H’mmm. Tasty.’” Furthermore, since we have a very large brain, that very large brain presents us with a whole host of additional reasons for worry. We can not only worry about things that are right in front us, we can worry about things that are far far away. We can worry, not only about things that are happening right now, but worry about things in the future and the past, both of which can be of infinite expanse. Because of our immense capacity for worry we are probably much worse off than nervous bunnies. Most creatures on the planet go something like, “Yikes (pause), huh?” Human beings, by contrast go, “Uh-oh (pause), uh-oh, (pause) uh-oh....

Sometimes we think it might be nice to live like other creatures who are not as anxious. Eat, sleep, the other thing. Repeat. That’s it. But the fact of the matter is, our capacity to be worried has been a huge source of motivation behind the creation of our culture. There are important reasons why bunnies do not compose operas. They are not worried enough, they are not puzzled by nor seek explanations for and methods to avoid tragedy. This burden of being able to imagine the danger we are in has led us to an astonishing effort to organize our energies and capacities to blunt the effects and at least make a dent in the probable outcomes. Worry is a great teacher and we all probably learn our most important lessons when we make mistakes. But there clearly can be too much of a good thing. Too much worry is paralyzing. Too much worry is as painful as the things about which we could be worried.

And thus we have religion. Religion as it has been traditionally practiced serves as a very important worry modulator. Religion accomplishes this very important human need to constrain worry in two ways, both of which have to do with providing the extremely important antidote to worry—trust. One stream of religious thought answers the question, “Who among my companions can I trust to help me?” The other stream is, “How can I come to believe that the world itself is trustworthy?” As you can well imagine, it is quite comforting to feel that the people in your life are trustworthy and to imagine that the world itself is not always conspiring to undermine your efforts. Being able to trust both others and the world takes a great deal off of the edge of life. Without these kinds of trust it can feel like it’s simply you—against the rest of the entire cosmos. That’s a trifle overwhelming.

Religion of any variety accomplishes the very important matter of building trust with two time honored techniques. Both of these techniques are true enough to seem plausible. Neither is absolutely true, but given the immense need for some sense of trust, “true enough” will usually do just fine.

In our day and age the principle technique for building trust among human beings involves finding people who are “of like minds.” People who we imagine are “like-minded” are emotionally and intellectually reassuring while people who are “un-like minded” are emotionally and intellectually exhausting. “Like minded” people allow us to drop our guard and relax. Of course, there has to be some means of making sure the “like-mindedness” is sincere and not faked. The way that religions prove sincerity involves requiring that people believe something that is hard to believe. Believe it—you are trustworthy, dis-believe it, you are not. Furthermore, because an important part of the core business of religion has always involved beliefs about how the world can be trustworthy, the hard beliefs include an assertion that adopting the belief will also align the faithful with the wishes of a creator of the universe. Religion as it is typically practiced thus gives adherents a twofer, people to trust and a comforting universe. That is not a bad deal. It is such a good deal that people in general are loath to give it up or see it challenged. Thus, when believers encounter those who would undermine their beliefs, they tend to get quite anxious, which anxiety quickly morphs into anger—and sometimes into violence.

It’s important to realize that when you are disagreeing with someone about their faith commitments, you are not simply engaging in an academic dispute about the reliability of their opinions; you are asking them to consider giving up the very things which make the world, for them, survivable. You are asking them to give up their community of trust and the feeling that the world itself is trustworthy. Indeed, one of the reasons why scientific opinion has not made more of an inroad on traditional belief is that people prefer comfort over accuracy, particularly if the increased accuracy about the world such as science provides elicits a feeling of spiritual vertigo. All people encounter on some level the question, “Who will catch me when I fall?” and seek out like minded companions who will do just that, and imagine as well, that God’s love will handle everything else. One can therefore lean back into the arms of Jesus or be reassured that Allah is merciful.

This very human pattern of seeking to be among those who are “like-minded” is so robust that we practice it in Unitarian Universalist congregations. We have largely dispensed with much of the theological architecture that provides the shape of like-mindedness but we still practice the behavior. We fool ourselves if we think that our capacity for overcoming orthodox doctrinal beliefs has freed us from this long standing habit. We too build a sense of community out of people who we imagine are rather like us, at a bare minimum well educated, post-orthodox, curious, and suspicious of authority. People who do not appear to share these qualities tend to make us nervous. And if I was a smart minister I’d do nothing but reinforce those standards for participation. To do so would enhance our reassurance that we are among trusted companions in a trustworthy universe. When any of us would fall, we feel we would be more likely caught. We would be remembered when we could no longer remember. Being caught, being remembered, these are very good things. These help provide the very important antidote to our inclination to worry. But I have two problems with this scenario.

First, as strong as is our habit for seeking like-minded companions, it is estimation that is derived from evidence so flimsy as to be truly unreliable. We think the people we are with are like minded—but I have yet to meet any one mind that was like another. Have you? What I have always encountered instead is an amazing mixture of habits, emotional styles, experiences and beliefs that are so complex that they are rather like a fingerprint of the soul, a swirl that is unique and issued—only one to a customer. And while there are points of similarity, I shudder at the thought that you would be like-minded to me. Does that mean that you get not only my flashes of insight but also my stubborn incapacity to see what is sometimes in front of my nose?

Second, our propensity for preferring people we imagine to be like minded in fact blinds us to who other people really are. Rather than bringing us closer, it actually keeps us apart. In my experience the presumed “like-mindedness” is brokered more often by what we don’t say to one another than by what we do say. The woman who stood up to describe the onset of Alzheimer’s did not look like she was in any kind of distress and I suspect that our capacity to clean up well leaves us strangers to one another. We do not guess the sadness over estranged children, the sadness of estranged children, ill parents, bouts of depression, addictions, and confusions. We do not see the full palette of joy and woe; do not see how sadness and delight intertwine. Even worse, on some level we are not eager to hear of such complications because such ordinary tragedies would disrupt the conspiracy of being “like-minded.” Even much much worse, we each find ourselves reluctant to admit to such trouble lest we be thought of as an unreliable partner in the community of supposedly like-minded-souls.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you to think of it this way but I believe that the technique which human beings use to ensure community in reality makes us strangers. We react too easily to small pieces of each others’stories and never get to hear the entire tale. Most often we make educated guesses about each other, make assumptions about each other, have impressions of each other, any of which could be true; but we rarely know—because we never ask. We act like these random bits are defining but it has always been my experience, what we do know of each other are only a few facets on an extraordinarily complex gem. The rare exception occurs when one of us dies—and a loving complex eulogy is lifted up for all to see. I have often thought, why do we wait so long?

We need not. Of course, as turtle found out in the story I told, sometimes when you open your mouth you will feel like you are falling. To be frank, I’m not sure we really know how to reach this level of communication easily and well. That’s why we need to practice. To that end we have worship, a quiet time to reflect upon and a noisy time to celebrate the creation of a community of appreciation for truly un-like minded, real, people. We also have opportunities for adult education and the small spiritual exploration groups set up by Judy Richardson as well as the Covenant Groups shepherded by Sarah Boyd and Nancy Lipp. I encourage all of us to participate as we are able in some such exercise, not only as a way of pursuing our own journeys in life, but also as a way of building up a different kind of religious community in which we get to see beyond what people appear to be to the vast riches that lie just below the surface.

There are indeed reasons to be worried. But have you ever wondered if we typically overestimate the dangers and vastly underestimate what we have each been given—a life, one wild and precious life. And get this, you even are afforded the delightful opportunity to live it in the company of other wild and precious lives. To get to know, really know, to pay attention to this abundance is one long non-stop journey to exotic and amazing landscapes and “lifescapes.” Our jaws should be constantly agape so that in addition to our “uh-ohs” we can liberally toss in “wows” cascading one after another. Doing so we will find that compassion is not scarce, enjoyment is not scarce,—these lie all around us, ready, waiting for us to notice, to pay attention. Let us find the will and the way to lift each other up, carry each other forward, moving ahead on this one wild and precious journey of life. Let us join, rising in body or spirit, to sing Siyahamba, 1030 in the turquoise hymnal.