Life Issues – Page 3 – Dan Harper

Sleep

Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation. The poems were read by Carol Martin, worship associate.

There are those who find sleep to be a waste of time. Sometimes these are the same people who find night to be wasteful or fearful or something to be avoided. They may be the people who say that dreams are delusions and snares. The only good time, so they say, is the day time, the time of bright sunshine, and at night we turn on all the lights so that it looks like daytime. Day time is the good time, the pragmatic work time, the time for getting things done and working towards your goals.

But where do your goals come from? The least of our goals come from the pragmatic work time. These are the incremental goals: we make a thousand dollars and next we want to make ten thousand dollars, then a hundred thousand dollars, then a million dollars. It all seems very grand, but what does it mean?

In the time of the ancient Hebrew prophet named Joel, the nation of Israel had fallen on hard times, and they longed for a time when “the threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil” — the ancient equivalent of having a million dollars. But simply to have an abundance of physical pleasures was not enough, said Joel; beyond that, God would pour down God’s spirit upon all the people, and…

“Your children will prophesy.
Your elders will dream dreams,
and your young people will see visions.”

Dreams and visions…like the Langston Hughes poem “Dream Variations”…

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Langston Hughes praises rest and night and dreaming in his poem, and he adds something of vital interest to those of us in the United States: he connects these things to race and racism. Western culture has traditionally thought of darkness and night and sleep as being less than brightness and daylight and wakefulness. Beginning in the fifteenth century or so, Western culture went further and began equating skin color with things like daylight and darkness. Westerners started saying that people with darker skin colors were like darkness, night, and sleep. This meant (so they said) that darker skin colors were not as good as light skin colors, which were like daylight and wakefulness. Westerners started calling Africa the ”dark continent,” and this meant several things: that Africa was populated by people with black skin, that Africa was a dangerous “heart of darkness,” that Africa was not as enlightened as Europe, that Europe had the right to send its soldiers and warships to “enlighten” Africa.

Langston Hughes turns this Western imagery upside down. Night is gentle and tender, he says, and then goes on to say that night is “black like me.” This one short poem challenges a metaphor that many in the West carry around inside ourselves: the metaphor that night and darkness and blackness are somehow bad, while day and light and whiteness are somehow good. Langston Hughes makes us ask ourselves: Why set up a hierarchy like that? Why not allow day and night to be equally good? And furthermore…why not allow White people and Black people (and all other skin colors) to be equal?

Which brings us to a poem by Emily Dickinson…

Sleep is supposed to be
By souls of sanity
The shutting of the eye.

Sleep is the station grand
Down which, on either hand
The hosts of witness stand!

Morn is supposed to be
By people of degree
The breaking of the Day.

Morning has not occurred!
That shall Aurora be —
East of Eternity —

One with the banner gay —
One in the red array —
That is the break of Day!

Now the stereotype is that every time Emily Dickinson writes about “sleep,” she is actually writing about death. Therefore, many people will simply assum this is a poem about death, and leave it at that. But you can’t reduce Emily Dickinson’s poetry to a single simple logical explanation. There is more to this poem than meets the eye.

Emily Dickinson tells us what “Sleep is supposed to be,” a mere mechanical “shutting of the eye.” But, she says, sleep is more than that: sleep is the “station grand / Where a host of witnesses stand.” Emily Dickinson knew the Hebrew Bible well, so it’s reasonable to hear echoes of the Bible in her poems. I think I hear echoes of the prophet Joel when he prophesied about how the elders will dreams dreams, and the children will prophesy, and the young people will have visions: a host of witnesses dreaming and making prophecies for the future. Sleep is more than the mechanics of shutting your eyes; day break is more than the sun rising. First come the dreams and visions. After that, we act on those dreams and visions. Day cannot exist without night. Night cannot exist without day.

Emily Dickinson wrote this poem during the Civil War. With that in mind, we might say this is, in fact, a poem about death: the death of the many soldiers who died in that brutal war. But I also hear this as Emily Dickinson’s statement of hope for the future. When the Civil War ended in a victory for the North, when there was a victory over the forces wanting to maintain slavery, then would the dreams and visions for racial justice begin to be fulfilled. Well, here we are, a century and a half later, still trying to complete the work of the Civil War — still trying to bring complete equality and freedom to all people. Emily Dickinson’s poem is still topical.

Perhaps we will always be striving for the perfect future that never quite arrives. Yet it is the dreams and visions that keep us moving towards that perfect future — it is sleep in the sense of the “station grand” surrounded by a host of witnesses that will bring us those dreams and visions of a perfect future.

Which brings us to the third poem, by James Weldon Johnson, titled “Mother Night.” The range of his writing was unusually broad: he wrote lyrics of hit Broadway songs, and published a well-received novel, three books of poetry, a non-fiction book, political essays, and finally perhaps the best American autobiography of the twentieth century. At the end of his autobiography, he gives a summary of his religious outlook, which makes him sound very much like a Unitarian. With that in mind, here is his poem, “Mother Night”…

Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay.
And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay,
Shall run their fiery courses and then claim
The haven of the darkness whence they came;
Back to Nirvanic peace shall grope their way.

So when my feeble sun of life burns out,
And sounded is the hour for my long sleep,
I shall, full weary of the feverish light,
Welcome the darkness without fear or doubt,
And heavy-lidded, I shall softly creep
Into the quiet bosom of the Night.

Now this is indeed a poem that equates sleep with death. But the poem says: death is not something fear; it’s something to be welcomed when the time is right. Now it was perhaps easier for him to say that when his time to die came along, he would, “full weary of the feverish light,” welcome the night of death. He wrote this poem when he was 51, by which age he had already lived a very full life: first African American to pass the Florida bar exam, hit songwriter on Broadway, successful poet and novelist, U.S. consul to Nicaragua during a revolution, and the first executive secretary of the National association for the Advancement of Colored People. If, like James Johnson, you’ve had a successful life full of major accomplishments, I think it’s easier to say that you might “welcome the darkness without fear or doubt.”

Yet there’s more going on here than the poet saying, “Hey, I’ve had a good run, when it comes time to die, I’ll be ready.” He makes a theological point: out of the chaos of darkness came the universe. (Today we might talk about the Big Bang, but that’s a scientific theory that wasn’t developed until after James Weldon Johnson died.) From the primordial Night came blazing suns, and from blazing suns came planets and life and eventually human beings. And at the end of time, human beings, planets, stars, will all return to primordial Night. From stardust we have come, and to stardust we shall return. If this is what we really believe, we too will “welcome the darkness without fear or doubt.” James Weldon Johnson is telling us that each human life is of utmost significance precisely because it participates in the great drama of the universe, from the Big Bang to the ultimate end of everything when entropy finally takes over. You may or may not agree with him, but you can see how such an attitude might reconcile him to death: like Socrates, he is a poetic rationalist who understands death as a long night of perfect sleep; not something to be feared, but something to be desired, when the time comes.

Each of these three poems tells us different things about sleep. Langston Hughes upends the old Western notions that nighttime and sleep are bad, that blackness is bad and whiteness is good, that dreams should be ignored: instead, he says that night and darkness and blackness and dreaming and sleep are things we should value. Emily Dickinson tells us that sleep need not be the mere shutting of the eye, for when we are guided by a host of witnesses it can guide us to a hopeful future. And finally, by placing our brief human lives in the context of the lifespan of the universe, James Weldon Johnson tells us that sleep is not something we need to fear.

On this day when we lose an hour of sleep, I hope I’ve convinced you that sleep is good. Sleep is more than merely good, it is cosmically good, it connects us with human striving for justice and with the life of stars and the universe. With that in mind, I think I’ll take a nap this afternoon to make up for the hour of sleep I lost last night.

The Disabled God for Unitarian Universalists

Readings

The first reading is from The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability by Nancy Eiseland.

“For me, epiphanies come too infrequently to be shrugged off as unbelievable. … I had waited for a mighty revelation of God. But my epiphany bore little resemblance to the God I was expecting, or the God of my dreams. I saw God in a sip-puff wheelchair — that is, the chair used mostly by quadriplegics enabling them to maneuver by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device. Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. In this moment, I beheld God as a survivor, unpitying and forthright. I recognized [God] in the image of those judged ‘not feasible,’ ‘unemployable,’ with ‘questionable quality of life.’ Here was God for me.”

The second reading is from the 2022 book The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

“It’s radical to imagine that the future is disabled. Not just tentatively allowed to exist, not just: ‘OK, I guess there’s one white guy with a wheelchair, cool — diversity.’ But a deeply disabled future, a future where disabled, Deaf, Mad, neurodivergent bodyminds are both accepted without question as part of the vast spectrum of human … ways of existing, [and] where our cultures, knowledge, and communities shape the world….

“Some people have scoffed at me when I broached the idea of a majority disabled future — surely I don’t mean this literally? But I kind of do….

“We are in the third year of a global mass disabling event — the COVID-19 pandemic — where, as I and many other disabled activists and people have noticed and stated, the world has been [disabled]. The entire world has been immersed in a disabled reality for the past two years. Masking, hand-washing, long-term isolation, awareness of viruses and immune vulnerability, the need for disabled skills of care … are just a few of the disabled ways of being that everyone, disabled and not, have been forced to reckon with.

“The COVID-19 virus and the failure to create a just global public health and economic response to support people undergoing it is also creating a disabled world in that mass numbers of people are becoming newly or differently disabled because of getting COVID, long COVID, and/or long-term complex post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disabilities from the grief, loss, and stress of the pandemic….”

Sermon — The Disabled God for Unitarian Universalists

Let’s start with some statistics. The statistics around disability in the United States are attention-grabbing numbers, and help us understand why disability is so important for us to talk about.

The Center for Disease Control issued a report in August, 2018, with the imposing title, “Prevalence of Disabilities and Health Care Access by Disability Status and Type Among Adults — United States, 2016” [Catherine A. Okoro et al.]. Using data from 2016, the authors of the study determined that one in four adults in the United States, or an estimated 61.4 million adults, reported a disability.

The study covered six categories of disability. Most prevalent was mobility problems, that is, serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs, with 13.7% of adults reporting this as a disability. Cognition disability, or serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions, was reported by 10.8% of adults. Disability affecting independent living, that is, difficulty doing errands alone, was reported by 6.8% of adults. Serious difficulty hearing was reported by 5.9% of adults. Serious difficulty seeing was reported by 4.6% of adults. And finally, disability affecting self-care, that is, difficulty dressing or bathing, was reported by 3.7% of adults.

Those figures are based on data gathered in 2016, data from before the pandemic. I would expect that the numbers of adults reporting cognitive disabilities would be somewhat higher today. We’re seeing an epidemic of mental illness that appears to be a direct result of the pandemic, including anxiety disorder, depression, and other ailments; this would tend to increase the numbers of adults reporting a cognitive disability. Then there’s long COVID, which can affect both cognition and independent living. As a result, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in today’s post-pandemic world, something more than one in four U.S. adults with some form of disability.

When you listen to these statistics, you come to an obvious conclusion: disability is a normal part of life. Disability is normal, yet our society tends to think of disability as somehow abnormal. I remember hearing a disability rights activist say that those of us who consider themselves to be able-bodied should really be thinking of ourselves as temporarily able-bodied. Most of us will be disabled at some point in our lives. If we’re not disabled ourselves, someone close to us will be disabled and there’s a good chance we’ll wind up helping care for for that person. Disability is a normal part of life.

Somehow we have to get ourselves to remember that disability is normal. Religion is a powerful tool for telling ourselves stories to make sense of life. So what stories might we, as a religious people, tell ourselves to remind ourselves that disability is normal?

First of all, we have to let go of the old religious stories that say disability is always something to be cured, something to be gotten rid of. This is, unfortunately, a regular part of Western folk religion. While it is true that sometimes disability is something that can be cured, more often disability is simply a part of who we are. We are a certain gender, we are a certain race or ethnicity, we are a certain biological sex, we have a sexual orientation — these are all aspects of who we are.

This is why what Nancy Eiesland says in the first reading is so profound. Eiesland asks: What if God is a quadriplegic? What if God is disabled? What if God is disabled in any one of the many ways human beings are disabled? A central part of the teachings of Western religion is that human beings are made in the image of God. The clearest statement of this comes in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Genesis, chapter 1 verse 27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Later on in Genesis, there’s another story of how God created male human beings first, then created female human beings from ribs of the male human beings. But this later passage gives us a story that is, not to put too fine a point on it, a little weird; I prefer the story in Genesis 1:27. In that first story, God creates humankind in God’s image, both male and female human beings, God creates in God’s image. (As an aside, this implies that God is actually, to use current jargon, non-binary gender; but that’s a sermon for another day.) So if all human beings are created in the image of God, then logically disabled human beings are also created in the image of God. This is Nancy Eiesland’s profound insight.

Eiesland’s insight is extremely important to Western cultures, like our culture here in the United States. Even though not everyone here in the United States is Christian or Jewish, our Western culture contains has an unexamined assumption that this story of the creation of human beings is somehow true. The Declaration of Independence of the United States claims that all men (to use the gender-specific language of the late eighteenth century) are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. We human beings are created equal by God. We human beings have human rights. And the justification for human rights in the West derives in large part from the Torah, from the book of Genesis, from this story that God created all human beings in God’s image. To be able to have human rights — this is a great gift we have received from the Bible, and it’s one of the reasons we religious liberals need to reclaim the Bible as our own.

(Now at this point, those of you who are atheists, or heretics, or Buddhists, or nothing-in-particularists are saying to yourselves: This is all very fine and good, but I don’t believe in that old story. The God of the Israelites, the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians — that is not my god. But please remember we’re not talking about personal, individual beliefs here. We’re talking about the big widespread myths that underlie a shared Western culture in which we all participate, like it or not. So even if you don’t believe in this myth personally, this is a myth we want to claim for ourselves. This is one of the myths that gives us human rights in the West — surely, we can work with this, even if we personally don’t believe in it. So even for those of you for whom the Bible is not your bag, there are solid pragmatic reasons why we religious liberals want to retell this story as the shared inheritance of anyone living in our Western culture.)

To return to Nancy Eiesland: If God created all human beings in God’s image, then clearly God also created disabled people in God’s image. In other words, God is disabled. In other words, disabled persons have human rights just as able-bodied people have human rights. We all have human rights.

This is a surprisingly important conclusion. The Center for Disease Control tells us that one in four adults in the United States is disabled. If disabled people did not have full human rights — if, according to one of the founding myths of our Western culture, God did not create disabled people in God’s image — then one in four adults would not have full human rights. Clearly, we could not tolerate such a situation. Instead, we say: all people have human rights, regardless of ability.

This conclusion is surprisingly well aligned with the Universalist tradition of which we are the inheritors. The old Universalists pointed out that if God is actually as good as everyone says, God is not going to condemn anyone to an eternity of damnation in hell. Instead, the old Universalists said that all human beings are equally worthy of God’s love. Now apply this old doctrine of universal salvation to people with disabilities: all persons are equally worthy of God’s love. This is an important corrective to an unfortunate strain of the Western Christian tradition that said people with mental illness were demon-possessed, or that people with physical disabilities were either sinners or somehow cursed by God. Nonsense, we Universalists would reply. That is ridiculous. All persons are worthy of God’s love. No demons are involved, no sin is involved, and no cursing is involved. If you believe that kind of stuff and nonsense, you’re the one who is sinning. Disabilities are not marks of disfavor from God, since everyone is loved equally by God. A disability is simply that: a disability. (This notion of universal love, by the way, is one of the chief reasons I’m proud to say I’m a Universalist, even if I don’t have quite the same conception of God as the old-time Universalists had.)

All this might tend to have personal importance for the one in four among us today who happen to be disabled. But it’s also likely to be of personal importance to all of us at some point in our lives. Remember, there’s a very good chance that most of us, probably all of us, are going to be temporarily or permanently disabled at some point in our lives. I know people who have contracted long COVID, and who haven’t been able to work or to function normally for months; that would be considered a temporary disability. The pandemic has apparently caused an epidemic of mental illnesses, and some of these mental illnesses are serious enough to be considered disabilities. As I noted earlier, it seems likely that if the CDC researched the rate of disability in the United States today, more than one in four United States adults would report themselves as being disabled. This is what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha means when they suggest that we might be headed towards a majority-disabled future.

When I think about a majority-disabled future — or even a future where one in three adults in the United States are disabled — my big concern is how we’re going to care for one another. As a whole, our society provides inadequate support for persons with disabilities. Anyone among us who are caring for an aging partner, or an aging parent, has direct experience of this. Anyone among us who has had to fight for accommodations for a child with disabilities has had direct experience of this. Anyone among us who has had to explain to an employer why we are not able to work as much as usual because of long COVID or Lyme disease has had direct experience of this — actually, while I was recovering from a pulmonary embolism a few years ago, I had to explain to the congregation I was then serving why I could no longer work fifty hours a week, but had to drop back to working just forty hours a week.

Since our society provides little support to persons with disabilities, we’re going to have to figure out how to care for one another. This is part of what Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha means when they say that disabled people’s “cultures, knowledge, and communities [can] shape the world.” People with disabilities have had to learn how to care for one another; they have had to learn skills of interdependence. We can learn skills of interdependence from the disabled community.

Actually, here at First Parish we already work on our interdependence skills. We have the Caring Circle, where we help each other out when someone is ill or needs meals or other help. And we provide to each other not just physical care, we also give each other spiritual care. We talk to each other about our health problems or disabilities, we listen to one another, perhaps most importantly we are simply there for one another. We do that spiritual care for one another when we go to social hour after the service and talk with one another; or when we pick up the phone and call someone who can’t make it here on Sunday mornings; or when we send cards or texts or set up a videoconference call with someone who is stuck at home.

Here at First Parish, we’ve already started caring for one another. Yet we can learn more about caring for one another from the disabled community. I’ll give you one example of how we can learn from the disabled community — and I almost hesitate to say this, because I know what a hot-button issue this is — but each of us might consider wearing masks more often. I know how annoying it is to wear a mask, but wearing a mask can serve as a form of mutual aid and caring that supports the health of other people, particularly people who are immune-compromised. This is one way we can support interdependence.

And as a liberal religious people, there is another small task we can take on. We can reclaim that old story in Genesis where God creates all persons in God’s image. (Remember that this is a central myth in our Western culture; you may not believe in God yourself, but the majority of people in our society do.) If we happen to hear anything that sounds like someone is casting disabled people as less than human, we might gently challenge them. In the words of the Torah, “God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God, God created them.” However you conceive of God — as a myth or metaphor, as a cultural inheritance, as a living presence in your life, as something else altogether — whatever your conception of God, we can think of God as disabled because God created all humankind in God’s image. Or to put it in more familiar language, we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights.

How Can We Know What Is True?

Readings

The first reading comes from Plato’s Republic, 514a-515c, as translated by Francis Cornford. In this passage, the character of Socrates is speaking.

“‘Imagine the condition of [people] living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see only what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads. At some distance higher up is the light of a fire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and the fire is a track with a parapet built along it, like the screen at a puppet-show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top. Now behind this parapet imagine persons carrying along various artificial objects, including figures of men and animals in wood or stone or other materials, which project above the parapet. Naturally, some of these persons will be talking, others silent.’

“‘It is a strange picture,’ Glaucon said, ‘and a strange sort of prisoners.’

“‘Like ourselves,’ I replied….”

The second reading this morning is from the Christian scriptures, Matthew 13:1-9. This is the translation by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar.

“That same day, Jesus left the house and sat beside the sea. Huge crowds gathered around him, so he climbed into a boat and sat down, while the entire crowd stood on the seashore. He told them many things in parables:

“‘This sower went out to sow [said Jesus]. While he was sowing, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground where there wasn’t much soil, and it came up right away because the soil had no depth. When the sun came up it was scorched, and because it had no roots it withered. Still other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them. Other seed fell on good earth and started producing fruit: one part had a yield of one hundred, another a yield of sixty, and a third a yield of thirty. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!’”

Sermon: “How Can We Know What Is True?”

The question facing us this morning is how we can know what is true. In today’s divisive political climate here in the United States, this has become a most pressing question.

As one example of what I mean, consider the politics surrounding the teaching of systemic racism. There are now laws in several states that forbid teaching about systemic racism. The proponents of these laws say that teaching about systemic racism is divisive and destructive, because it turns white people into oppressors, and anyone else is a victim. The people who want us to teach about systemic racism in the schools say teaching about systemic racism shows that individuals are not responsible for structural racism, and thus it can empower people of all races to help end structural racism.

One side claims that teaching about systemic racism makes racism worse. One side claims that teaching about systemic racism will help end racism. How can we know which claim is true?

Probably many of you have strong opinions about this particular issue. If you have strong opinions about this issue, you’re probably thinking to yourself right now: “I know which claim is true! The other side is wrong! How can anyone possibly believe what the other side believes!” But the other side has equally strong opinions. Just like you, they are now thinking: “I know which claim is true! The other side is wrong! How can anyone possibly believe what the other side believes!”

How can we know what is true?

And this brings us to the first reading, the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic. In this allegory, the character of Socrates asks us to participate in a thought experiment. What if, says Socrates, we were chained in a cave? What if the only things we could see were shadows cast by puppets moving in front of a large fire that was behind us? We would think those shadows were real, because those would be the only things we knew.

Socrates went further with this thought experiment. What if you were one of those people chained in that cave, then you were removed from your chains, and caused to stand up, and stare at the fire? At first, your eyes would be dazzled, and you would not be able to see clearly. In fact, you would doubt the evidence of your eyes. You would be used to seeing the shadows cast on the wall of the cave, and you would be convinced those shadows were real. So you would believe that the fire was false.

And then, says Socrates, what if you were taken out of the cave, up into the sunlight? Your eyes, accustomed from birth to being in a cave, would be completely overwhelmed by the bright sunlight. You would not be able to see at all for an extended period of time. Again, you would believe in the reality of the shadows. You would doubt the evidence of your senses.

But if you are kept up in the sunlight long enough, you would learn how to see in that bright world. Eventually you would even be able to see the Sun, the ultimate source of light and life. Then if you went back down into the cave, and told what you saw to your friends who were still chained down there, they wouldn’t believe you. They’d think you were deluded.

This allegory is so much a part of Western culture that I think many of us believe it to be true, without even thinking about it. We actually believe there is just one truth, like the sun in Plato’s allegory. We think of ourselves as the ones who have gone up out of the cave to look at the sun. And then, if anyone disagrees with us… well, they must be the ones who are still chained in the cave.

In fact, this is how most Western religion works. Most religions in the West claim that theirs is the only truth. For example, many Western Christians say: We have the truth and all non-Christian religion is wrong. Different branches of Western Christianity look at each other and say: Our branch of Western Christianity has the truth, and everyone else is wrong. Then the Western atheists come along and say: No, WE have the truth, and all you Christians are wrong. Each group is quite convinced they are the only ones who have the truth. To use Plato’s allegory, each group is convinced they are the only ones who have left the cave and perceived the sun, the ultimate source of truth.

That’s not the way it works in other parts of the world. For example, in East Asia it is common for people to follow more than one religion. Thus in China one person might follow Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, and Chinese folk religion, all at the same time, or at different times of life. Contrast this with the West, where a multi-religious identity is still uncommon; you’re either one religion or another, or no religion at all; you only get to choose one religious category.

Here in the United States, we are particularly fond of this either/or thinking. You are either Christian or non-Christian. You either believe in God or you don’t. You are either Republican or Democrat. You are either liberal or conservative. You have either escaped from the cave and seen the sun, or you are still trapped in the darkness.

Either/or thinking makes it hard to have productive arguments. If someone says you are wrong, you are liable to reply: You may think I’m wrong, but I know I’m right. I’M the one who has climbed out the cave and seen the sun. Maybe you climbed up far enough to see the fire that casts the shadows, but you didn’t get all the way out to see the sun. I’M the one who has climbed out the cave and seen the sun. I’M the one who is right.

Either/or thinking makes us rigid. Either/or thinking can make us oblivious to complexity. We become so sure we’re correct that we may no longer be aware when we’re actually wrong.

Now some people try to get out of the bind of either/or thinking by claiming that there is more than one truth, that you may have your truth but I have my truth. There are “alternative facts.” Or as Rudy Guiliani put it: “Truth isn’t truth.” This is what’s known as postmodern thinking.

I don’t want to go down that path. I’m reasonably convinced out there somewhere is Truth-with-a-capital-T. I don’t want to do away with Truth, I simply want to answer the question: How can we know what is true?

This brings us to the parable reportedly told by Jesus of Nazareth. In the parable, a person goes out to sow some seed. Depending on where the seed falls, it either gets eaten by birds, or it sprouts and quickly dies, or it gets choked out by weeds, or or it sprouts and produces fruit in large amounts.

Many contemporary Western Christians are quite sure they know what this parable means. It means that there are some people who know what the truth really is, and others who don’t. And of course the people who know what the truth really is are the ones who are telling the story.

I have a different interpretation of this parable.Jesus does NOT say the seed grows in one place but not in another. Jesus does NOT say only only a few people know Christian truth, and the others are ignorant and miguided.

In this parable, Jesus is not talking about Chrisianity — there was no such thing while he was alive. Instead, he is talking about what he called the Kingdom of Heaven. What Jesus meant by the Kingdom of Heaven is some kind of ideal state of being, where all people recognize their interdependence; or, to use Jesus’ words, all persons love their neighbors as they love themselves. All people, indeed all of life, is bound together in an interdependent web of existence.

To explain his idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus used an ecological metaphor. Jesus asked us to imagine seeds being sown. Plants produce more seeds than than are needed to keep the species alive. Plants produce enough extra seeds so that birds and other animals may feed on them. They produce enough extra seeds so it doesn’t matter if some seeds don’t reach maturity. Even if some of the young plants are out-competed by other plants, there will still be more than enough to produce seeds for the next generation. This is how ecological systems work.

Jesus added another layer of complexity to this short parable. In the parable, the seeds which do not sprout can be understood as Jesus’ analogy for the people who don’t perceive the Kingdom of Heaven. As I understand the philosophy of Jesus, he felt that the Kingdom of Heaven is always present — the interdependent web of all existence is always present — though often we fail to perceive it. First, there are the people who have lost all understanding of the interdependent web. Second, there are the people who, for the sake of short-term profit, deliberately ignore the interdependent web. Third, there are the people whose understanding of the interdependent web gets choked out by competing trivial concerns.

Finally, there are the people who fully realize that we are bound together in an interdependent web of existence. We are bound to all other human life. We are bound to all non-human life. We are interdependent.

Despite what popular culture believes about the teaching of Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven is NOT pie in the sky, bye and bye, after you die. To quote Joe Hill, that’s a lie. Jesus tried to tell us that the Kingdom of Heaven — the interdependent web of life — exists right here and right now. Jesus also tried to teach us how to know that truth. He continued the ecological metaphor. We can know the truth in relationship to one another. Truth happens in community.

Community, by the way, is the power of the scientific method. Scientific method is a communal approach to finding truth. Science does not happen without the scientific community. It is the community which tests and refines new concepts. It is the community as a whole that slowly works its way towards the truth. Mind you, I am NOT saying that Jesus was some kind of proto-scientist. The questions which interested Jesus differ from those which interest today’s scientific community. But in both cases, to know the truth requires being in community.

Community is also why we come to Sunday services. We are a community which seeks after truth and goodness together. No, we have not yet reached ultimate truth here on Sunday morning. Reaching the truth is a process. By participating in various communities that seek to know Truth, we can over the course of our lives make significant progress towards the Truth.

You will notice that a communal search for truth differs from the way most people interpret Plato’s allegory of the cave. In the common interpretation of the allegory of the cave, one individual at a time escapes from the cave, sees the sun, and so knows the Truth. Although I don’t think that’s what Plato intended, that’s the way our highly individualistic society interprets this allegory. Unfortunately, that’s also the way many people interpret Jesus’ allegory: you have an individualistic relationship with a personal God, and you know the truth through that one-on-one individualistic relationship.

That individualistic way of knowing truth is not working well for us right now. In politics and in social media, you’ll find little pockets of people who are quite sure they’ve found the ultimate truth, and they shut themselves off from any dissenting views. If you gently challenge these little pockets of people by suggesting that they might not have the final and complete truth, you are liable to find yourself on the receiving end of vitriol.

How can we know what is true?

We know the truth in relationship to other people, and in relationship to other beings. We know the truth by being in community, by being in relationship to all other people. We know the truth by recognizing that we and all other beings are part of the interdependent web of life.