Sundays Online Service
Making Meaning of a Random
Universe
Opening Words
No. 428: "Come out of the dark earth,"
From Singing the Living Tradition
Hymn
No. 190 Light of Ages and of Nations
from Singing the Living Tradition
Children's Story
"God Comes to Us in Our Dreams"
by Mary Ann Moore
There once was a girl who lived with her family in a small village. It
was a very small village, so everyone there knew each other. The girl's
family loved her and the people of the village loved her. When she woke
up crying one night because she had had a frightening dream, everyone
in the village knew about it and everyone cared.
In the morning, the people of the village asked the girl about her scary
dream. "In my dream, I was walking down the path to get some wood," she
recalled. "All of a sudden a tiger jumped down from a tree and got in
front of me on the path so I couldn't go by." The girl almost started
to cry again as she remembered how scary it was. "Then the tiger started
coming toward me and it was snarling and growling and showing its teeth,
and I was sure it wanted to eat me. I turned around and started to run
as fast as I could, but the tiger ran right behind me. Just as it was
going to catch me, I turned around and started to run as fast as I could,
but the tiger ran right behind me. Just as it was going to catch me with
one of its huge paws, I woke up!" The girl went to her mother and hid
her head under her mother's arm. She was still very frightened when she
thought of the dream, and she was afraid for night to come when she would
have to sleep again.
The elders in the village gathered together and talked for a while about
the girl's dream. Then they went back to the girl, who was still with
her mother, and said, "If you want to learn not to be afraid in your dreams,
we can help you.
The girl thought for a minute and then said, very quietly, "I do want
to learn not to be afraid in my dreams."
One of the elders said to her, "All right then, try this: Tonight if
you dream the same dream and the tiger starts to come toward you, don't
run, but stay where you are and say 'Hello, tiger. "
"But the tiger will eat me," said the girl. "I'm too scared."
"Yes, you may be scared," replied the elders, "but we believe you will
be brave enough to do it. And we don't think the tiger will eat you."
That night the girl dreamed of the tiger again. But when the tiger started
toward her, she remembered and stood bravely, facing the tiger, and said,
"Hello, tiger." When the tiger got right in front of her, it stopped.
And then a wonderful thing happened. As the girl looked at the tiger's
face, she saw it smile, and as she looked some more, the tiger's face
began to change and she saw there the faces of lots of animals. They smiled
at her, too. As she looked some more, the animals' faces changed into
faces of people, and the people's faces smiled at her. The girl felt a
wonderful happy feeling coming over her when she realized that she wasn't
afraid anymore. And then, as she looked again, she saw not only the animals
and the people, but trees and earth and sky and water and beautiful colors
and beautiful darkness all swirling around and mixing together, and all
smiling at her. And she felt a great joy.
The next morning the girl couldn't wait to tell everyone in the village
about her dream. Everyone gathered around, and as she told it, everyone
sighed and smiled and shared her joy. Once again the elders went off by
themselves for a while to talk about the girl's dream. When they returned
one of the elders said to her, "You were blessed, my daughter. Because
you were brave, God has come to you in your dream and blessed you."
Later that day, as the girl was walking down the path to get some wood,
she was still thinking about her wonderful dream. She was eager for night
to come so that she could dream again.
Meditation
No. 487: "The bell is full of wind"
from Singing the Living Tradition
Reading
from the Boston Globe
[In wheatfields in south central England, mysterious huge flattened circles
have appeared for years. Large numbers of people had come to believe they
were put there by paranormal forces or by aliens.]
London. Every summer, the mysterious crop circles, large and intricate
patterns of flattened wheat, appear in the fields. And every summer they
are greeted by expressions of reverence and wisecracks about little green
men.
Now two British artists have offered a new and elegantly simple explanation
of the phenomenon: They done it.
Doug Bower and David Chorley, both in their 60s, claim to have created
the circles all by themselves.
They said they worked at night, using a ball of string (to keep the circles
round), a wire sight attached to a baseball cap (to keep the lines straight)
and two long sticks with rope handles (to flatten the crops).
The con men said they came forward because they were tired of people
making money off their joke.
In fact, two circle "experts," Patrick Delgado and Cohn Andrews have
made a nice income off the mystery in recent years.
Delgado and Andrews wrote two best-selling books about the subject. They
also gave speeches and organized conferences. And they ran a $1.8 million
dollar research project for Japanese television, aimed at capturing the
formation of a crop circle on film.
The latest news on the crop circle front, that the whole thing apparently
was a joke, came to Delgado last week in the cruelest possible way.
With a newspaper reporter and a photographer watching, Bower and Chorley
made one of their circles in a wheat field. Then the circle was shown
to Delgado, who solemnly pronounced it genuine and explained that no mere
mortals could have made such a thing.
Then he was informed that two mere mortals had made it. The man was shaken.
"I was taken for a ride like many other people," Delgado told reporters.
But by yesterday, he tried to mount a recovery. When Bower and Chorley
made yet another circle, this one for British television, Delgado gave
it a firm thumbs down.
"This is not a genuine crop circle. It's totally different from the real
thing," he said firmly.
Bower and Chorley claimed they started making their circles in 1978.
At first, no one noticed. There was no media coverage. But then Delgado
saw his first circle. And the mystery took off.
The hoaxsters said they did not get truly committed until they heard
Delgado talking on the radio about the involvement of a "superior intelligence."
"We laughed so much that time we had to stop the car," Chorley said.
Sermon
"Making Meaning of a Random Universe"
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka
There was once a man who lived in England and preached Universalism.
The year was 1770, his life was working out badly, he landed in debtor's
prison, his wife and baby died, he was called to task for his theology
in London. He decided to sail for the New World, much relieved that he
would never have to preach again. His name was John Murray.
At the same time, an elderly man, Thomas Potter, sat in his farmhouse
in Good Luck, New Jersey, and thought up a Universalist theology on his
own. He was so enthused about this new religion of his that he built a
little church building there on the farm. He figured, "If God wants my
church to succeed, he'll send me a preacher."
Meanwhile, John Murray's ship encounters some peculiar winds, and lo
and behold, it goes aground at Good Luck, New Jersey, right there at Thomas
Potter's farm. Murray finds Potter just waiting for him to show up. Murray
prays for the winds to shift, and fast, but they don't. Obviously, God
has sent Murray to Potter's meetinghouse; Potter and Murray decide that
Providence was clearly at work, and Murray winds up preaching Universalism
for the next 35 years, thus starting the Universalist Church in America.
This story is nonsense. At least that's my opinion. Sure, John Murray
did wash ashore at Good Luck, New Jersey at Thomas Potter's farm and all
that, and what a great coincidence that was, but we really have no reason
to believe that God meddles much in nitty-gritty day-to-day affairs down
in New Jersey.
But we're human beings. It would be so nice if the events in our lives
made sense. But for us, meaning is not pre-figured by somebody else; we
create it. If Potter and Murray want to start a new American religion,
good for them. They have given their lives meaning. Just as if in our
own lives a car goes out of control on 128 and nearly hits you but doesn't,
you can decide that yes, this is the day to finally tell your sister you
really love her in spite of everything, and you will have made meaning
of your near miss. Or say your teaching job gets axed, you decide you
will find a way to get your MBA, which you had wanted to do in the first
place. You have created meaning. Or you win the Mega-Bucks, you get yourself
a new car, but you also donate a room to an AIDS hospice, and you have
taken a random event and made meaning. We make the 'promises we keep.'
We choose our own stars.
Our minister in San Francisco, Victor Carpenter, has a daughter, Gracia,
age thirteen who operates at the level of a one-year-old. He finds that
people frequently try to tell him the "purpose" for this tragedy; they
want to explain why it makes sense that Gracia is the way she is; why
this had to happen. Victor says, "We all want a world that is orderly
and predictable and will conform, at least in the main, to our standards
and expectations.... [Well,] Baloney! It is our ability and our willingness
to deal with reality on its own terms that makes reality meaningful, us
wise, and life endurable. I am continually amazed by the prevalence of
[people] who always stand ready to offer "purposes" for Gracia (complete
with silver linings). Cathe and I have been told that Gracia was sent
to us in order that we might be better prepared to give comfort and solace
to other people who were 'afflicted' with similar children. Or that she
was sent because we were strong enough to learn from her and provide for
her without breaking. Or for reasons God chooses not to vouchsafe but,
nonetheless, we'll discover one day. Such attempts to discover some kind
of purpose are inappropriate because they always start at the wrong end
of the situation. They start with some pre-established ideal of 'purpose,'
then attempt to fit reality to that purpose rather than start with the
reality." (Stations of the Spirit, p.84)
You probably remember the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People,
where Kushner says, "Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to
us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do
not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly.
But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness
by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not,
'Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?' That is really
an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be 'Now that
this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?' (p. 136)
We have to be careful. Because ambiguity is hard for most of us to tolerate,
because an unpredictable universe is difficult to live with, because we
find inherent meaninglessness unsatisfying, most human beings are prone
to spot meaning where there simply is none, and we see patterns in randomness.
Where there are stars, we see constellations.
When we see meaning in the meaningless we can be in some danger. For
example, a fraudulent stockbroker gets some fancy letterhead and sends
out 32,000 letters to potential investors. In 16,000 of these letters
he predicts the index will rise, and in the other 16,000 he predicts a
decline. No matter whether the index rises or falls, a follow-up letter
is sent, but only to the 16,000 people who initially received a correct
"prediction." To 8,000 of them, a rise is predicted for the next week;
to the other 8,000, a decline. Whatever happens now, 8,000 people will
have received two correct predictions. Again, to these 8,000 people only,
letters are sent concerning the index's performance the following week:
4,000 predicting a rise; 4,000, a decline. Whatever the outcome, 4,000
people have now received three straight correct predictions. This goes
on a few more times, until 500 people have received six straight correct
"predictions." These 500 people are now reminded of this and told that
in order to continue to receive this valuable information for the seventh
week they must each contribute $500. This fraudulent broker knows that
a number of us are willing to ascribe meaning and predictive powers to
what has in fact been random success. (Paulos, p. 32)
Most of us believe a number of things that aren't true: We may not necessarily
believe that a stockbroker has a corner on the future of the market, or
that God sent John Murray to New Jersey, or that crop circles were made
by aliens. But a large majority of the general public thinks itself more
intelligent, more fair-minded, less prejudiced, and more skilled behind
the wheel of an automobile than the average person. This phenomenon is
called the "Lake Wobegon effect," after Garrison Keillor's fictional community
where "the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children
are above average." (Gilovich, p. 77)
If you think you are above these kinds of pitfalls, if you think you
are rational, you might have fun with a couple of books that are out.
One is Innumeracy (John Allen Paulos, 1988), and the other is How
We Know What Isn't So, by Thomas Gilovich (1991).
We all know, for example, that men and women who cannot have biological
children and subsequently adopt, are more likely to then conceive a baby
than couples who can't conceive and don't adopt. On-lookers figure that
after having adopted, there's less stress associated with the child-bearing
issue, and the woman gets pregnant after all. I can think of a half dozen
couples in this church who began filling out adoption papers and at some
point went on to have biological children.
The thing is, the phenomenon is simply not true: If you are a couple
who cannot conceive, it makes no statistical difference at all whether
or not you adopt. Some of you will go on to have a biological child, and
some of you won't. It's just that we tend to notice the pregnancies
more in families who have adopted children. (Gilovich, p. 31) There's
no connection here, no causality, no meaning. Sometimes what we're observing
is simply probability theory at work, our high school math books come
alive.
Just now there's a lot of interest out there in randomness, in chaos
theory, and in probability, partly because these mathematical theories
demonstrate that our intuition often leads us astray. Part of this renewed
interest was caused by a little teaser in Parade Magazine in September
of 1990, the magazine that comes with the Sunday paper. You mathematicians
know it as the "Monty Hall Problem."
For 27 years, Monty Hall hosted the TV game show "Let's Make a Deal."
Contestants are faced with three doors. Behind one, say, is a sports car.
Behind the other two are goats. Monty Hall knows what's behind each door.
So you, the contestant, choose a door-let's say Door Number 1. Before
he opens the door you chose, Monty Hall opens a different door and shows
you that one of the goats is behind it. Then he says, "Do you want to
stick with the door you picked, or do you want to switch to the other
closed door?" The question is, should you switch?
Most people's instincts tell them that it doesn't make any difference,
that either way they have a fifty-fifty chance of winning the car. But
they are wrong. If you switch, you will double your chances of winning.
Here we go. When you chose Door Number 1, your chances of winning the
car were one in three. Monty Hall reveals a goat behind Door Number 3.
He's not back there moving goats and cars around, so the chances of the
car being behind Door Number 1 haven't changed any-you still have a 1
in 3 chance that the car is behind Door Number 1. But Monty has eliminated
Door 3 altogether. Therefore, if Door 1 only gives you a one third chance
of winning, Door 2, the only one left must give you a two thirds chance.
If you switch to Door 2, you will double your chances of winning. What
we want to believe, what we think we know, just isn't true. (If you want
to try it yourself, get three playing cards and try it twenty times or
so.)
In American culture today, it is popular to want to nurture and cultivate
"the intuitive" part of one's personality. Intuition is seen to be somehow
warmer, or more spiritual, than "cold rationality." But what I'm working
toward this morning is a reminder that fact and scientific truths have
their place in our religion. Scientific fact helps us guard against outright
fraudulence, to be sure. But perhaps more important, mathematical science
can be its own miracle, and when we recognize that miracle, we have available
to use a kind of "warm rationality" that also deserves a place inside
us.
Let's look at basketball. The books I mentioned both talk about basketball.
You know the feeling: You dribble, you shoot, you sink the ball. You dribble,
you shoot again. Swish. Another shot, another two points. You're on a
roll. You're confident. You're hot. The players, the coaches, and the
fans all know that the player has a "hot hand." Almost everybody believes
that players tend to shoot in streaks. In fact, 91% of the people asked
believe that a player has "a better chance of making a shot after having
just made the last two or three shots." (Gilovich, p. 14, Paulos, 46)
Not true. If you actually study the games, if you record the numbers
and do the math, you find that players are not any more likely to make
a shot after making their last one, two, or three shots than after missing
their last one, two, or three shots. There's no such thing as a hot streak.
If you have a hypothetical player who sinks a shot 50% of the time, pure
chance would predict runs of 4, 5, or 6 baskets in a row, just
as flipping a coin results in predictable long streaks of heads or tails.
Certainly, hot streaks, if they actually existed, would be amazing, exciting,
miraculous. But to me, the hard, so-called "cold reality," is even more
amazing, exciting, and miraculous. What I like about it is this: A great
deal in life seems random. Will the basketball sink into the net? There's
no telling for any given shot. None. But over time, what seems utterly
unpredictable falls into a dependable pattern. That's what "chaos theory"
is all about. (see Chaos, James Gleick, 1988) Who knows whether
any given coin flip will turn out to be heads or tails? But over a long
enough period, you can count on the fact that it'll be heads about half
the time, and tails about half the time. So do we live in a random universe
or is it predictable?
We human beings are funny. We seem to like feeling amazed, even when
the chances of the event Occurring weren't all that unlikely. Take birthdays.
There are 366 possible birthdays. So if you have 367 people in a room,
you know for sure that at least two people in the group have the same
birthday. What if we wanted to be just 50% sure that two people in the
room would share a birthday? How many people would have to be in the room?
The answer is 23. Half the time that twenty-three people are gathered,
two or more of them will share a birthday. To be truthful, if I were with
22 other people and two of them had the same birthday, I would think that
was some special coincidence. But the truth is, the miracle is not in
coincidence, but rather in the marvelous, dependable, predictability of
the universe, that in a small room of people, one would reasonably expect
that two people may have the same birthday.
I was once a high school exchange student for a year in Australia. While
I was there, I knew another American exchange student. Years later, I
ran into this fellow in a youth hostel in Denmark. I've always thought
this to be an impressive coincidence; "What were the chances of my running
into him?" But after reading these books, I've come to realize that the
chances were much greater than I would have thought, that what's impressive
is that almost everyone can expect to have some kind of "it's a small
world" story. To my way of thinking, the logical response to what seems
to be an amazing coincidence is not a belief in Providence, or synchronicity,
or fate, or that something was "meant to be," but simply to recognize
the world as a pretty neat place, just on the face of it, just as it ordinarily
operates. Myself, I was never very big on math. But I have learned some
things this week. I have learned that one can expect a whole constellation
of things to happen-to just happen. That one can expect some of us to
get cancer, some of us to get a phone call from a kid selling magazines,
some of us will win a trip to Disney World, some of us will get a grocery
cart with a wheel that doesn't turn right, some of us will die too young,
some of us will inherit money from an unknown relative. I have learned
that if the universe is operating in its usual random way, I can depend
on all that.
And I have learned that we can decide to make meaning of the cancer,
or the trip to Florida, or anything at all. Will I make something of my
life, of this week, of the rest of the day? I decide.
And finally, I have learned that living in the midst of all that happens,
the good things are abundant. John Murray lands in New Jersey. Or in that
championship basketball game, you make a whole string of baskets in a
row. Or you do get pregnant after all. Or you run into an old friend in
a youth hostel in Denmark. We can expect all that.
May our eyes be open, and our hearts, and may we glory in the wonders
that most certainly are ours.
Amen
Hymn
No. 345 With Joy We Claim the Growing Light
from Singing the Living Tradition
Closing Words
No. 694: "May the Love which overcomes all differences"
from Singing the Living Tradition
Questions for Discussion
by Joy D. Gasta
- This sermon is on the same general theme as Jane Rzepka's sermon,
"Is Anything Meant to Be?" How would you express her ideas about God?
In what ways are her ideas like and unlike your ideas about God?
- Some people say they have trouble knowing how to exist in a world
which is as random as Jane Rzepka's. Do you? Why or why not? What helps
you find moral order? What helps Jane Rzepka?
- In general, most UUs can tolerate more randomness and ambiguity than
members of more fundamentalist denominations. How do you explain your
views to them and to children, including your own?
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