Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Living in Theory

Reverend Darcey Laine
May 2, 2004
Palo Alto, CA

"A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon" the Buddhist teaching says to remind us that all of Buddhist theory only gestures in the direction of what is real. The concept is a simple one, but an awareness of the distinction between theory and reality is one that is revealed again and again over the course of a lifetime.

When I was a little girl, my best friend and I were like two sides of a coin. She called me a dreamer, and I agree in retrospect that my feet barely touched the ground. During my elementary school years I would burry m head in a book, and emerge only when some authority figure would require it. I would get lost in my inner world, the world if ideas, "daydreaming" the teachers would say when trying to bring me back. My best friend, who also loved reading, had her feet solidly on the ground. She always knew what was going on in the real world. No one every caught her drifting off to another realm in the middle of a board game or a class. As we grew older my obsession with fiction had ebbed, but my love of ideas had not. I often saw the world as could be if it were perfectly fair. When I came to the conclusion that women and men were not given equal opportunity in our culture, my realistic friend responded "that's just they way things are." Her response mystified me. Having been raised by progressive-minded parents, the reality of the world was not relevant when discussing how things should be. Raised on a steady diet of idealistic children's books and songs, I could conceptualize a world where men and women had equal opportunity to follow their own calling, to parent, to serve in the military, to be president of the United States.

This is the job of the imagination: to see beyond the present realities. The imagination built the Land of Oz, and the Starship Enterprise. Those are her most obvious creations, but imagination also was the space in which the General Theory of Relativity was created, and women's suffrage conceived. In fact, every time I think to myself that after church I am going to drive home, take my shoes off and crack open a soda, I use my imagination. The imaginary story about witches or flying monkeys and my vision of a cold soda in my living room seem quite different, but in fact neither are real, each is a vision that exists only in my mind.

This distinction is true even in the realm of science. Newtonian physics provides excellent theories about how the world works. It is a wonderful and mostly reliable tool for making predictions and analyzing our world, but as Quantum physics reminded us, a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. A theory, even the most elegant and accurate of theories is only that, a theory. How grateful generations have been for the wisdom of Buddhism. How many thousands have come to greater peace and insight because of those theories; often that finger gesturing at the sky does a good job of refocusing our attention, of helping us locate an important truth. So despite the advent of Quantum physics, the Newtonian model still structures our understanding of the physical laws that govern daily living. The trick is not to confuse the theory with the reality it describes.

Remember all those elegant and lofty ideals you learned in school, or in periods of self reflection and study? The vision of a sustainable ecology, or of power shared equally among people of every gender and race points us in a noble direction. If we guide our ship using visions like these as our north star we move towards a more just world. Conversely if we let the inertial forces of water and tide, of "how things are" and "how things have always been done" provide direction, or even the diffuse day to day push and pull of our lives, we may miss precious opportunities to move the world in the direction of justice.

This dance between theory and reality has power not only in the large scale of global justice, but also on the narrative of our personal lives. Being a dreamer, I approached even the birth of my son deep in the realm of theory. I spent a lot of time processing each aspect of this life transition. As my pregnancy progressed, I spent those months learning about and thinking through the birth process. I got every book I could find on pregnancy and birth. I called over a dozen Dulas and Midwives, toured 4 different hospitals, and took 2 separate birth classes in addition to ongoing pre-natal yoga. I synthesized and evaluated all the information and theory I could find. All the experts said "nothing can prepare you for labor" and I believed them, so I did everything I could to get ready for unimaginable pain. I learned every theory about how to navigate contractions, I tried to stay open to the idea that though I imagined having the baby in my bedroom, he might be born in the study, or the nursery.

Following my month-by month pregnancy wall calendar that explained what one could expect in each stage of this process I came to the final page. I began my maternity leave, I put the house in order, I set out all the supplies I would need for a home birth, I finished old projects. The due date came and went. There were no pages left in my calendar to tell me what to expect. Visitors who had bought plane tickets to see the newborn child began to arrive, and I had never had even a Braxton-Hicks contraction. When the midwife decided we had exhausted all the natural options available, that it was time to get some medical help, I could not be reconciled to the fact that this process was so completely different than anything I had imagined. No where in any scenario I had constructed was I admitted- 2 1/2 weeks overdue to a hospital without having felt a single contraction. I had worried about pain management, but now all my wishing was for the pain of contractions, I longed to be swept up in the overwhelming forces of life emerging that I had read was central to the birth experience.

Through the next 80 hours contractions began. They ebbed and flowed, but never led anywhere near the birth of my child. Much of my struggle was not with the pain, but with the cognitive dissonance that the reality of my labor was so unlike any image in my mind of what my labor would be like. I clung to the theories of how this "should go" in denial of reality I was experiencing. My vision of the birth process was like an absent friend, and I waited for her to return home, to reunite with my reality so that my labor could finally begin.

This is, for me, a powerful and archetypal example of a phenomenon that happens on an almost daily basis. Even that cold diet coke I imagine opening at home is not a sure thing. I have found repeatedly that whatever reasonable scenario I envision might greet me when I return home after church, I am almost always wrong. Maybe I arrive home and guests have stopped by while I was at work. Maybe an errand needs to be run before I can take of my shoes. Maybe we're just out of soda, or the soda never made it in from the car after a recent grocery trip. This is in the fundamental nature of reality. It deviates in large and small ways from what is probable, from what is expected, from what has always happened before.

When reality clashes in significant, or even subtle ways, with my expectations, my whole being revolts. I may refuse to believe the events as they are actually unfolding. This is why shock and anger are part of the grieving process. When someone dies, it can be very difficult to integrate our changed reality, a world without this person. The mind and body may reject the untenable idea of this death. We grieve not only the loss of the person, of their presence in our lives, but we also lose our vision of a future with this person. The shock of death can powerfully undermine our faith in our ability to predict and plan for our changing and emerging world.

Theravada Buddhism has a lot of wisdom to offer for people struggling to live in the face of death, and the same philosophy and techniques are offered to help relieve even the milder suffering of daily life; encouraging us to live fully in the present moment. But even the ideal of being fully present in each moment is only that, an ideal. What is important is not the abstract goal of being completely mindful, but our actual lived experience, even when that experience is brief flashes of awareness in a broiling sea of thoughts and distractions.

There is a theological point here as well as the psychological one. Reality is not a failed version of what should be. It is not an incomplete manifestation of perfection, Reality is all there is. It is complete. Only a theory is perfect. We live in a world of infinitely complex variables, a world that changes and grows and where learning is possible. Anything can happen in the imaginary realm, but reality is limited by time and space, and the laws of our physical universe. When theory and reality are in harmony, it is a joy. But when the two disagree, I would like to suggest that you trust the your particular reality. Because when the theory and reality disagree, it might mean that the world is changing. How hopeful and miraculous that the unexpected is possible, that our days can be more than the playing out of a vision cast long ago.

Think about this church. We can imagine many more times the classes, social justice projects, acts of hospitality, expressions of our caring, improvements to our buildings than we can ever manifest given the limits of even the most generous time and resources. An idea that takes only a moment to conceive can take years to complete. What seems simple and clear compexifies as it meets the reality of our particular community. A map can never portray every feature of the landscape that one meets when encountering the terrain it portrays. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. There are literally thousands of books written about what –usually- works in congregations similar to ours, but we are not a theoretical congregation, we are a unique group of people living in a particular moment in time that can never be duplicated. At any time we can choose to facilitate the unfolding of the particular community we are, or to let this real community seem like an incomplete version of something that might be.

It is easy to get frustrated if have a particular vision of what a church can or should be, and despite our best efforts we come no closer to that vision. It's easy to blame our reality when it seems a long way from our vision, to cling to what we expect and hope for at the expense of what is. I'm told there is a saying among birders "When the book and the bird do not agree, believe the bird." As a faith tradition which values reason, which values our direct experience, we are willing to put our theology to such a standard. Our tradition is built on our habit of speaking out when reason or experience defy tradition or creed. But it is hard to do the same with the expectations and plans we carefully shape and lovingly hold. From my grandest dreams of a natural home birth, to my incidental expectation of a cold soda, it is sometimes a great challenge to see what is real and lay aside visions and expectations when reality calls us to do so.

Therefore, I think one of the prime challenges of being human, is to integrate our reality with our vision for it:

We do this through good science- checking our theories with the physical reality. The piece of data inconsistent with our theory leads to a more useful tool in understanding our world.

We do this by cherishing and reflecting on our experience. No one in the history of the world has ever lived in your body. No one has ever seen what your eyes have seen. The wisdom and creativity you bring to the world is uniquely yours.

We work towards this integration by trusting our intuition. Our world needs visionaries and prophets who show us where we may be headed before we can see it with our own eyes. The work for women's suffrage spanned the course of more than one lifetime. If that first generation of suffragettes had not trusted their vision, the generation that followed never could have achieved it. There may not be woman president of the United States in my lifetime, but I will teach my son to look forward to that day.

We do this by loving our vision of the world enough to work toward creating it in the world. Be what you want to see. This is the most reliable way of bringing vision and reality together.

As much as I love to dream and theorize, I realized one day that what I was hungry for was a way to apply those theories in the real world . What good is a theory of "how churches work" without a church. I no longer cared how elegant and logical a theology is if it couldn't help a real person through a long night. The potter imagines a bowl in her mind, but when real hands touch a particular piece of clay, the clay and the biology of the hands influence and inform the manifestation of that idea. Have faith in the clay that is your body, your community, your reality. The union of the vision and the clay is what we call art, the beauty of thought and matter united, the miracle of birth.

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