With a Capital T

When I was a kid, I used to walk a mile each way to the elementary school I attended. I’d walk down Hasler Lane to Spruce St, turn right, go down Spruce, turn left onto Elmwood Ave, walk all the way down Elmwood Ave to Maple Street, where I’d turn right and go three more blocks to the school on the corner of Maple and Vine. It was how my mother taught me to get there when I was in Kindergarten, and it’s how I walked every day until one day in third grade, when my friend Amanda, who lived on the other end of my street, asked me to walk to school with her.

To my HORROR, she walked us down 66^th St all the way to VINE STREET, and then wanted us to go down Vine to the corner of Maple where the school sat. We had a huge argument about this very OBVIOUS mistake on her part. This was NOT the way to get to school. I fretted the entire way down 66^th St, until she finally stomped her feet and told me to SHUT UP because this way would get us to school too. At the corner of 66^th and Vine, I got scared, turned around, and ran home. My mom ended up driving me to school that day. I was in tears because we’d gone the wrong way. Amanda was angry and annoyed because I was ‘too dumb to know that you could get to school more than one way.”

We didn’t play together at recess for a while after that.

In my 8 year old brain, there was ONE right way to get to school – the way my mother had taught me. I was so sure that deviating from the path would cause certain doom that I just couldn’t do it, even though Amanda told me it was okay, and that she’d walked that way every day since KINDERGARTEN, so practically forever. It took me a while, and my mom had to drive it with me a few times to reassure me, but I eventually learned that there really was more than one way to walk to school.

A lot of people live their spiritual lives thinking like I did on that morning in the third grade, standing on the corner of 66^th and Vine.

Me included.

For most of my life, I believed in one thing. One straight and narrow path. And anyone who didn’t follow that path was on the road right to hell. My religion’s way was RIGHT. It was the only way. I could even cite scripture that pointed to that. Some of you might know the verse I’m talking about, right? It’s the one that says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and no one comes unto the father except through me.”

And that was that. Our religion held the truth – which was always written with a capital T, since it was the only TRUE truth out there. There were even whole songs about how to talk to people who might be on the wrong path – one of those songs talks about confronting a non-believer with the question “what if you’re wrong? What if there’s more?”

Almost a decade ago, as I found myself back at a crossroads, much like the corner of 66^th and vine…..questioning my own beliefs. Only, instead of turning and running back to the religion I’d grown up in, I turned that question on myself:

What if I’m wrong?

The more I asked myself that, the more I began to think that the worth TRUTH might not need a capital T.   I started thinking a LOT about being wrong…and looking for answers in other places, on other paths than the one I’d taken my whole life.

It’s a hard thing, thinking that you just might be wrong about something, especially when it’s something you’ve been SO SURE about.

In fact, most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about the fact that we, of all people, could possibly be wrong. I mean, we get it in the abstract. We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. That people, as a whole, are fallible – We have entire social media platforms for telling people how wrong we think they are!

But when I’m talking about myself…..well now, that’s a different story, isn’t it?

When it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold here in the real world, suddenly my appreciation of fallibility goes out the window — and I am RIGHT. My beliefs are RIGHT. My position is the correct one, and my truth all of a sudden has a capital T again, whether I want to admit it or not.

It’s easy to see this error blindness play out on facebook, isn’t it?  What a great example of a place [is facebook a place?] where everyone thinks they have a monopoly on the truth. I find myself falling into this trap myself, especially if I click on the comments  section of ANY news story these days. I just KNOW, in my gut, that I’m RIGHT, and I just need to tell everyone why they need to see things my way.

You ALL know what I’m talking about – I know you do, because I follow a lot of you on facebook!

This internal sense of rightness in our own heads that we all experience so often is just not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that’s when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or ending up with 11 school shootings before the end of January. So this is a huge practical problem. But it’s also a huge social problem, and dare I say, a huge spiritual problem.

I want you to think for a second about what it means to ‘feel’ right…… thinking your beliefs about the universe, about morality, about god or lack of a god…. perfectly reflect reality.

And then you intersect with other people, who might not *exactly* see thing the same way you do.  So now,  you’ve got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to categorize all of those people who disagree with you….all those people who are just WRONG?

It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. Again, we can look to the comments section of facebook news stories to watch this play out on a global scale.

The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they’re innocently ignorant. They must not have access to the same information that we do, and when we oh so generously share that information with them, they’re going to see the light and come on over to our team.

When that doesn’t work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that obviously, they’re just idiots. They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they just don’t have the brain power to put them together correctly.

And then, when it turns out that the people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately refusing to acknowledge it because they’re just stubborn. And all of a sudden, even though we’d like to think of ourselves as magnanimous, tolerant, broad-minded Unitarian universalists, we find ourselves stuck on our own path, our own route, standing there at the corner unwilling to explore a different way of thinking or believing or doing things.

We can even find this clashing of TRUTHS in our own congregations. We know that not everyone holds the same exact beliefs in this room. We know that we have people of many faith backgrounds, many political positions, many schools of thought, right here this morning.

And this is the most uncomfortable thing of all  for all of us to think about, isn’t it? I know it is for me. To think that there are people who I fundamentally disagree with, who appear to be on a totally different path than me, even though we share the same label as a UU—it’s terribly unsettling.

I have to remind myself that, no matter the path we take, it’s what’s at the end of that path that we yearn for, and that we’re all working toward the same end. It’s also incredibly inspiring to be surrounded by people of many beliefs and ideas. So the question becomes, not ‘whose path is right?’ but ‘How can we remain in beloved community with people who hold such varied beliefs, and how can we celebrate those beliefs with them?’

One part of the answer is that we remember the inherent fallibility of the nature of our own beliefs. For many of us, we have held strong religious convictions at some point in the past, even if that conviction is that nothing is out there at all.  And perhaps at some point, we asked ourselves that question – what if I’m wrong…… and then modified our belief paths to accommodate those questions and doubts. A few of us have been through this belief-doubt-belief spin cycle more than a few times.

So I think that out of these experiences, we can come to have a certain degree of…healthy  humility…. about our beliefs. We learn that beliefs can grow, and change, and they can die, and that’s all ok.

We also can learn to have a kind of open curiosity about other people’s beliefs. Even though we may have no intentions of adopting them— even when they are trying to proselytize us — we can still be curious: How did they come to have those beliefs? How do they live them out in everyday life?

When we come to the realization that we don’t have a monopoly on truth, we start to learn that beliefs are bendable and malleable, and not rigid or fragile, We can become quite comfortable interacting with others who have different beliefs.

We learn not to be scared of them.

We learn that there’s more than one path to the elementary school…or god.

Or the universe.

Or the book club, if that’s your thing.

And that’s how it goes. We learn another path. We come up with another idea. We tell another story.

We step outside of that tiny, terrified head space of our own rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and say, “Wow, I don’t know. Maybe truth doesn’t need a capital T.”

May it be so.