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Walking Together with Beginner's Mind
Reverend Amy Zucker
September 21, 2003
Palo Alto, CA
Funny, Bill, I'm a beginner too. I'm new to the Bay Area, I'm so new to this congregation that there are still a couple of unopened boxes in my study, and while I’I'm not brand-new to ministry, the things I don’t know about this vast undertaking far outnumber the things I do.
We value knowledge, as well we should. Presumably one of the reasons I'm standing here this morning is that you all decided I knew some things you wanted your minister to know; I have some kind of expertise to bring to this community. And yet, most of all I think of myself as a learner, and learning is only partially about knowledge. Intelligence, that ability to be a good learner, is a quality of mind, a quality that in large part depends upon a willingness to ask questions. The best learners are those who are comfortable enough with their own ignorance to pose questions. When we feel a pressure to be expert, we remain silent rather than expose our ignorance to others, or even to ourselves. Beginner’s mind is about that balance of ignorance and knowledge that characterizes any foray into learning.
John Holt, who was a thoughtful observer of how children learn or fail to learn and wrote two books entitled, logically enough, How Children Learn and How Children Fail, described this process within himself when he sat down to watch a game of rugby, the rules of which he did not know. What he refers to as a child's way of learning sounds like what Suzuki means by beginner's mind, and what he refers to as the "teacher-voice" sounds like the loss of beginner's mind.
"Before [the match] had gone on two minutes, I found myself in [a] panicky confusion . . . Rugby is a hard game for a novice to understand. It is like a crazy combination of soccer and football, just enough like either one to be misleading. As I watched, the teacher-voice in my head began to ask, "Why did he do that? Why did he put the ball there? Why is he running that way?" And so on. But there were no answers.
After a few futile minutes of this, I saw that . . . I didn’t know enough about the game to be able to reason about it. . . . I didn't know enough to know what questions to ask. The only thing to do was to turn off the questions and watch - like a child. Take it all in . . . . At half-time I seemed to know no more than at the start. . . . Soon the second half started, as puzzling as the first. Then, suddenly, about ten minutes into the period, the patterns of the game all fell into place. I suddenly found that I knew what the players were doing, what they were trying to do, what they might do next . . . (How Children Learn, 182-3)."
Because he didn't get too anxious about his state of ignorance, because he calmed his panic at being faced with a situation in which nothing made sense, he was willing to stay with the game and learn what he eventually did learn. Being a beginner does not keep one from learning; it is discomfort with being a beginner that does that.
These past five weeks, I've been enjoying the special position of the beginner. I can ask any question that comes to mind, about the most elementary facts of the church: What's Undie Sunday? Who chairs which committees? How do you work the microwave in the kitchen? Which members of the Program Council are actually members of the Planning Council, and vice versa? Ignorance - what bliss. No one expects me to know anything! No one's going to look at me funny and say, "You don’t know that?"
I even got permission to be ignorant from none less than our just-previous president. Andrew and I got together about ten days after my arrival and he said, "So, do you know everything yet?" I said, "No, how long do I get before I have to know everything?" He said, "A year." Great! A whole ten and a half months more to become perfect. What a relief.
I'm joking, but I really do fall into the trap of thinking that I am supposed to know everything - maybe you do too, now and then. If we really have beginner's mind, it doesn't bother us in the slightest that we don't know everything, because the state of beginning feels fresh rather than embarrassing. We embrace knowledge but we don't let it trap us in a fear of ignorance.
Well, so, Andrew gave me a year of grace, and a year out is what I really want to look at - and five and ten years out, when I hope we will still be engaged in the ministry of this congregation together. Will we feel like we’ve learned everything there is to learn about each other, tried everything, been there, done that? Or will we still have the freshness of beginner’s mind?
In my vision of a Unitarian Universalist faith community, we are all learners. We come here to learn, not only theology and history, but the convictions of our own minds and hearts. We are explorers, and explorers by definition are always ignorant. They head straight for the thing they don't know, and when they have thoroughly explored it, when they're finally familiar with something, they go on to something brand new and once again plunge themselves into ignorance. So I hope we will treasure our beginner’s mind, that delicate state of being unafraid of unknowing.
What we are doing as a community is "walking together". The Puritans who are among our spiritual ancestors made walking together, journeying, their central promise to one another. Conrad Wright, a historian of Unitarian Universalism, writes:
"The earliest New England covenants of which we have record were simple statements. The Salem covenant of 1629 is as follows: "We Covenant with the Lord and one with another; and doe bynd ourselves in the presence of God, to walke together in all his waies, according as he is pleased to reveale himself to us in his Blessed word of truth." While there are words here with theological significance, such as "Lord," and "God," and "his Blessed word of truth," it should be remarked that this was not a creedal statement ["We believe"]. The operative words here are: "we … doe bynd ourselves … to walke together." (Walking Together)"
We are on a journey; we are a community. A community, no less than a journey, is not so much about the goal as about the path, and so no matter how many goals it reaches, it's never finished. We are never going to reach that promised land and stop, because just as the Israelites did, when we get there, we discover that there is more to discover, more to do.
As the Reverend Richard Gilbert writes, "Life is always unfinished business." His meditation on that point reads in places like a manual on zazen:
Catch your breath; Relax your body; Loosen your grip on life. Consider that our lives are always unfinished business; Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete; Allow your life to be a work in progress. . . . From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process, And always there is more to be done. Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit; Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day; Do not fear that we are still in the making. (In the Holy Quiet of This Hour)
Since there is always something unfinished, we are always beginners. We bring our past experience, our accumulated expertise, and many other tools to each new challenge, but because it is new, something else we must bring to it is the attitude of freshness and openness that Suzuki praised.
Now, I’m a recovering perfectionist. Perfectionists, ironically, are not very good at trying new things. The perfectionist says: I mustn't do anything I can’t do perfectly. I can’t try something new unless I’m quite sure I’m going to be able to do it right. I can’t watch a rugby game and just let myself sit in ignorance–that’s too scary. And so the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, and the new.
As I’ve been touring the committees and programs of our church, wandering around taking advantage of the permission to be a beginner, I’ve felt a kinship between my inner perfectionist and UUCPA. As a congregation, we demand a lot of ourselves, each other, and our leaders. I noticed it from the moment I opened UUCPA’s very impressive packet, just about a year ago; it was one of the things that drew me here. “These people really know what they’re doing!” The flyers looked so polished, the annual report so thorough; every kind of expertise one needs to make a complex organization run seemed to be among the abilities of the extraordinary lay leaders. It was all very professional. I knew I wanted to walk with a community that sought such high standards for itself. I knew it would ask a lot of me, and that the challenge would stretch me to learn and grow.
The uses of perfectionism are that it can inspire one to great achievement; it holds us to high standards; it raises the bar after each success and presents new challenges; it keeps us from resting on our laurels and urges us to move forward. The down side is that if allowed to run rampant, it can be paralyzing; it can keep would-be leaders from trying their hand because they’re inexpert. Not wanting to do things halfway is admirable. The problem with the perfectionist is that he or she doesn’t want to ever be at the halfway point, and that makes it mighty difficult to get from point A to point B.
Remember, we’re on a journey. We’re in process. So, as one perfectionist to another, walking together on this bumpy path, allow me to give you permission to make mistakes. We travel well when we walk toward a vision of excellence, but we’re paralyzed if the vision is of perfection. Let’s walk together into the places we know least, the places that will make us feel the discomfort of our own ignorance. I pledge to sit across a table from you a year and ten years from now and say, just as I can say now without embarrassment, “I don’t know anything about this–help me out here.” I hope you will feel free to do the same.
Allow me to give you permission to celebrate and congratulate yourselves. Organizers such as those who lead us at PIA will tell you that every small victory must be celebrated and then you go on to the next step, the next challenge. Always knowing there is more to be done, always stepping forth into the unknown, always with a vote of self-confidence to make that step a little less frightening. The confidence is not about being an expert–oh, no. It is about knowing that it is all right to be a beginner. After all, we didn’t know how to achieve this most recent step until we did it. But now we’ve organized a block. On to organizing a neighborhood! Who knows, next we may organize a city.
This congregation has achieved amazing things. As I told the search committee back last December, I looked at your goals and could see that for each one, you already had something in place to help bring it about. You wanted to have top-notch religious education for children, so you called a Minister of Religious Education. You wanted to foster a culture of generosity, so you changed the bylaws to require financial support from members and focused the canvass on abundance rather than scarcity. You wanted to deepen your sense of connection to one another, so you launched covenant groups and have now rejuvenated the Adult Religious Education program. Everyone who knows and loves this congregation can think of a dozen things that we’d like to do better and a dozen more we’d like to add. But the reason we now dream of even loftier things is that we stand on the shoulders of past achievements. So while we are looking ahead impatiently to the next leg of the journey, let’s celebrate how far we have come. That joy will help us to be secure in finding ourselves in yet another unknown place, beginners anew.
Ours is a faith of possibility. We don’t have to know whether there is a God and what a God might be like; whether there is a soul that goes beyond this life; whether truth is absolute or relative; whether the religious path we are currently on is the best one for us for the rest of our lives. We are beginners and whenever we think we know something, we go on to question it and therefore begin again. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.” In the dogmatist’s mind there are few possibilities, but in the religious seeker’s, there are many. We are saved from dogmatism not because we have “Unitarian Universalist” on our sign, because religious liberals can get just as stuck in a stubborn rut as any fundamentalist. What keeps us in the expansive country of the open mind and heart is not where we are but where we are going–that we are going–that we are exploring–that we are on a lifelong journey of learning. The first step in learning is allowing ourselves to be beginners, and to remain learners all our lives, we take that first step over and over. What an adventure! Richard Gilbert again:
Let us be grateful that the world is still to be created;
Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are;
Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete;
For life is always unfinished business.
If we treasure beginner’s mind, we can walk in the uncertainty of unknowing and let things reveal themselves to us, each new discovery revealing more directions to explore, more ways in which we are only just beginning. And we take that walk together. May our steps be joyous and as light as air.
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