Official life and real life - discrepancy - that's a fact

In Linda McCullough Moore's story "That's A Fact" in her collection of short stories, This Road Will Take You Closer To The Moon, the narrator of the story, a young girl of 10 or 11 in 1955 says:

"People in a family need to be so careful. My family are. Everything - our whole life up till now - has been possible because we're careful. We keep it all inside our house. Whenever we go outside in the street, we take our different selves, and leave real life at home. Until tonight." p. 5

The first principle of Unitarian Universalism is to covenant to affirm and promote the inherent dignity and worth of every person, and in reading this passage with which I can strongly identify I am reminded of what us psychotherapists call "boundary issues" and wonder who are the "persons" who have inherent worth and dignity? Is it the "different selves" that they take to the street, or the "real life" they leave at home?

The narrator's working class family is visiting a German immigrant middle class professional family at Christmas time and the narrator describes her frustrated, discouraged, severely financially stressed father who finally let's the cat out of the bag about how difficult things are within the family.

"But still I know this is no sudden thing: my father spilling his guts to these German strangers. He has dragged himself, inches at a time, over to the cliff's edge and, head heavy, tumbled over. That's how it's done. A person doesn't run a mile to reach the edge and hurl himself into the void that ends in jagged rock below, for the simple reason that by the time you've reached the edge, you're winded, and you stop just shy to catch your breath and reconsider. The ones who take the plunge make camp just crawling distance form the edge and every day inch closer, living in a place where tumbling over - be it suicide or saying all - is not a great departure from routine." pp.5-6

Dad breaks the boundary. He let's it rip. Has he had too much to drink or is the discrepancy between a working class guy without even a high school degree and a German immigrant engineer rocket scientist just too great to make the game of pretend and keep up with the Joneses overwhelmingly impossible? There are times when the facade crumbles. It is no longer worth keeping up the pretense. The counterfeit dignity isn't working any more. And such a moment is either an excursion to hell or a crack in the shell where the light can come in leading to transcendence. Which will it be?

The narrator tells us:

     "The husband reaches out and pulls the water bucket closer to the chair. The wife points to the cake. In accusation? Some desperate hostess offer of distraction?
     But no, oh no, we will not be diverted, not from our lives. We'll take them home with us and sleep with them tonight. We children will grow up and carry them away and keep them with us everywhere we go." p.6

Oh yes we are like turtles. We take the shells of our lives wherever we go. We not only tell ourselves these stories of our lives constantly, often unconsciously, but they become the lens, the filter through which we perceive the world. If we were told we were good as children and the world was a good place, we wake up in the morning and expect good things to happen to us. But if we were told we were bad as children, and the world is a bad and dangerous and hurtful place we wake up and expect bad things to happen to us. And depending on our stories about our lives we either live relatively happy or on the edge of the abyss.

Religion, of course, is itself a story, a meta -story within which we understand our lived experience and come to believe what to expect. In this story, the 10 year old girl's religion is the Weekly Reader which she gets in school which reports "the facts". It is the Weekly Reader, the secular version of the world to which she compares her personal life, her lived experience, and she, as only a 10 year old, has picked up on the irony, the incongruity, the absurdities of our lives, the idea that there is an official version of how life should be lived which often is quite discrepant from one's actual experience.

It's shame that the Weekly Reader has become the purveyor of the official story of what life is like in the American dream. Too often in our media dominated culture the religious stories of uplift, inspiration, guidance on the living of the Good Life have been drowned out. Mammon has taken the place of the holy, the sacred. And so the narrator's family lives a life of quiet desperation as compared to the immigrant German professional family. They live in the same neighborhood, apparently, otherwise they would not be sharing a Christmas party together because they have little else in common. The narrator, a child, does the comparison through the eyes of her father and comes up short handed maybe not because of a lack of real needs being met, but because in comparison, based on material values, the working class family comes up deficient.

What is screwed up here is not the discrepancy in class but the values which determine desirability. In the 50s in the United States the whole culture was overtaken by a materialistic ethic which was called "progress" which has taken us down a path of degradation of our planetary environment which is contributing to the death of many species and possibly in a century a drastic threat to our own. While the Weekly Reader was held up as the repository of the societal facts, the 10 year old narrator senses that there is something not quite right, not authentic, pernicious driving people to the brink of suicide or a crisis in meaning contributing to a "letting it all out."

Perhaps it is not the facts that are as important as the meanings we make from them. Keeping up with the Joneses in the American competitive spirit is not the way to the Good Life and our failure to recognize this has contributed to our despair. And that's not a fact, but an opinion which are two different things.

Two Family House - a movie depicting the living of the fourth principle: a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli) is a guy with a dream as big as his heart. Defying everything and everyone, including his wife (Katherine Narducci), Buddy decides to follow his dream. When he meets a woman who truly believes in him (Kelly Macdonald), he must choose between the only life he's ever known and his desire for happiness. A tender, romantic comedy in which two people discover that happily ever after can come from the most unlikely place. "This rich romantic comedy, with its message of love and tolerance and hope and its great old tunes, won the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival and seems destined to capture many more fans..."(THE NEW YORK TIMES).

As we reflect on the fourth principle this month on UU A Way Of Life on line magazine no movie could be more appropriate than Two Family House, a movie in which Buddy Visalo defies his family, his ethnic group, the conventions of society to follow his heart in his search for truth and meaning. I highly recommend this movie which is available streaming on Netflix.

Story of the day - Haiku: Aren't getting the answers to life's important questions?

Wrong answer if wrong question.

The right question makes all the difference.

Question the question if stuck.

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning is not a job for sissies and cowards

The fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism, "we covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning" is perhaps what true spirituality is all about. Osho said that the first step on a spiritual path is rebellion by which I think he meant questioning. The "why" question.

Rev. Galen Guengerich wrote in his book, God Revised, that when he left his Mennonite community of his family to go to Princeton Seminary, "his" people were afraid he would lose his faith. Rev. Guengerich wrote that he didn't lose "his" faith, he lost someone else's. He was just beginning to search for a faith of his own.

Unitarian Universalism may be one of the few religions which not only accepts but encourages a free and responsible search for truth and meaning requiring no allegiance to a creed or dogma for membership in its congregations and denominational body.

While there are seven principles, I like to think of them as values, that Unitarian Universalists are asked to covenant together to affirm and promote, there is no required set of beliefs. UUs are "freethinkers" as they have been called which include people from all former religious groups or none supporting each others search for truth and meaning. James Fowler in his model of faith development describes this search as step four in his six stage model of faith development. Here is how Fowler's fourth stage is described on Wikipedia: "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-twenties to late thirties) a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for his or her beliefs and feelings. As one is able to reflect on one's own beliefs, there is an openness to a new complexity of faith, but this also increases the awareness of conflicts in one's belief."

Unitarian Universalism is not a faith for concrete thinkers, literalists, people needing the security of authority figures telling them what they should believe and think.

Unitarian Universalists are not so much looking for answers as they are willing and open to, as Rilke said, living the question. Here is what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

To live the question of the forth principle takes, according to Rev. Fredric Muir in his essay on the fourth principle in the book With Principle and Purpose: Essays About The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, humility, awareness, non judgment, balance, learning, engagement, and focusing. I would add curiosity, courage and bravery. Living the fourth principle takes curiosity, courage and bravery. It is not for the insecure, the unsure, the submissive, the weak, or the lazy. And further, beyond Muir's six virtues, and mine of courage and bravery, I also would add patience and perseverance, what I call the "2 Ps".

Unitarian Universalism is not a faith for children but a faith for responsible adults grown-up enough to ask grown-up questions about their existential experience. They are ready to engage in an interior search of their own meaning making and for their own truth as they can best discern it. This is not a job for sissies or cowards, but for the courageous, the brave, and the curious.

Consider the "responsible" in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning

"Tommy's gone," my mother had said to me when that long ago boy died. "The diphtheria. They're going to dig a hole and put him in the ground."

Mother, you don't say that to a child.

Let's set the ages down. My brother and the boy who dies are both five years old. That makes my mother twenty-seve.

"Mother, you don't need to tell children every bad thing in detail," I would say if she were here today.

"It's just the truth," she would reply.

"You told me my dog got run over and his guts were splattered everywhere."

"I'm not going to lie."

Then, why did you become a mother?

Linda McCullough Moore, "On My Way Now", The Sun, April, 2014, p.19

Editor's note:

I consider the Unitarian Universalist fourth principle, "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning" and I am struck by the importance of the word "responsible". It means so many things in the context of sharing "our truth" with someone. When a five year old asks, "Where to babies come from?" What does she really want to know, and what do we say. When your spouse asks you if you are cheating on him, do you tell him the truth even it means the end of your marriage and family? When your boss tells you your job is secure when you know the company is being bought out by some corporation and the operation is being moved to Mexico do you believe him or ask for more information even if it might lead to early termination? When your mother tells you that your leaving the church of your child hood means you will be cast into eternal damnation of hell and you will be ostracized from the family and community, do you tell her she is wrong and has been corrupted by false teachings. So many things to consider that telling the truth, especially to power is terrifying, confusing, and often far from easy.

It takes guts to be a Unitarian Universalist and live responsibly according to the fourth principle. The mother telling her five year old child that his playmate died and will be buried in a hole in a ground strikes one as irresponsible. Telling a daughter that her beloved dog was run over and her guts were "splattered every where" strikes one as cruel and insensitive. What kind of a mother or a father does this? One with a chip on his or her shoulder. One who has been hurt and is angry and enjoys seeing other people suffer too. Misery loves company as they say. When we deliberately attack and hurt other people with the truth and then smugly, passive aggressively, justify our behavior with "I was only telling the truth", we need to look a little deeper into our motivations and soul and be more honest with ourselves.

Truth telling can be a work of mercy, compassion, and empowerment, and it can be a work of attack, violence, and destruction. UUs, like every loving human being, need to know the difference. We, UUs, pride ourselves on our fourth principle, and rarely discuss the word "responsible". Let's discuss it further. What are your ideas?

My Kind Of Church Music, You lie by Reba McEntire

"That's a fact" - the two sides of life

I was first introduced to the writing of Linda McCullough Moore when her short story, “On My Own Way Now,” appeared in the April, 2014, issue of The Sun Magazine. I was so taken by it, and blessed by it, that I investigated her published writing further and besides being published in many magazines and journals learned that she has a book of short stories entitled, “This Road Will Take Us Closer To The Moon.” It is a book of 14 stories that, as with “On My Own Way Now,” I feel blessed by.

From some brief email correspondence I learned from Ms. Moore that she is deeply Christian which puts her work in the same frame for me as Flannery O'Connor and like Flannery O'Connor, Ms. Moore does not shy away from the dark side of life but entering this world of suffering is able to bring our attention to the absurdity and incongruity of the lives we have created, often hellish in tone, on the ego plane. Reading Moore’s stories I laugh and cry and realize once again, and then again that there has to be a better way. It is in this realization that there must be a better way that Moore’s stories prod us to a more spiritual awareness, a desire to be better people than we are.

In the first story, “That’s a fact” Moore tells the story through the eyes of probably a 10 or 11 year old girl in 1955 about the time her family goes to visit neighbors at Christmas time who are German immigrants having come to the United States after World War II. The German father teaches at a local college while the narrator’s father sells cars. The Germans extol the virtues and benefits of life in the United States while the narrator’s father finally shares what he really thinks and feels about his life. Here is a short excerpt of how Moore writes the scene:

“I am a scientist at university,” the husband says. “The world is open for us now.”

“Well, good for you, buddy.” My father’s voice could knock down soldiers. “I didn’t finish high school.” He addresses his remarks to the shoelace he pulls between two fingers. “And let me tell you, my friend, your life is pretty rotten when you got no education in this country, and a wife and three kids and a fourth on the way.”

I snap my head around and catch my mother’s eye, but she is looking at her lap. My sister grimaces, and shrugs don’t look at me, I didn’t do it.” pp. 4-5

Moore describes class in America and how it feels on the street. Even immigrants with a better education have it better than home grown Americans without an education, and this discrepancy is perceived and understood by a child watching her parents interact with this German family at Christmas time.

The title of Moore’s story “That’s a fact” refers to the juxtaposition of what the 10 year old narrator reads in her Weekly Reader at school and what she experiences in her real life. The title of the story, “That’s a fact,” is irony at its best. 

The narrator in Moore’s story tells us, “I read a story in the newspaper about a family in Germany who were so poor they ate candle wax. You won’t find that in the Weekly Reader. The paper said that the family died of poisoning. They boiled needles from a yew tree to make broth.”p.5

We get the sense through the narration of this young girl that there are two worlds: the official one, the supposedly official one, described in the Weekly Reader, and the real one where people struggle, suffer, and die.

Rev. Galen Guengerich has written that the ethical imperative of Unitarian Universalism could be gratitude, but it is hard for broken people, suffering people, struggling people to feel gratitude. That brokenness, struggle, and suffering has to be recognized, acknowledged, and addressed before people can move to gratitude. The young narrator of this story realizes, even at her young age of supposed innocence and naiveté, that the “facts” she is reading in her Weekly Reader and the pretense that her family tries to project outside of the house is not really real. There is a clear appreciation that people live in a dream of pretentious wishing while the deeper reality is uglier, more painful, and frightening. And Moore, in the title of her story, writes, That’s A Fact.

If you don't know where you're going any road will take you there.

The third principle of Unitarian Universalism, "acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations," when looked at deeply, has several interesting aspects.

First, why does the principle stop with "our congregations" and not extend outward to the community and world? Unitarian Universalism is known for its inclusivity not its exclusivity and yet in this principle it explicitly makes an exclusive statement that acceptance and encouragement to spiritual growth is affirmed and promoted in "our congregations" and not throughout the community the congregation is ensconced in nor the world. Unitarian Universalists eschew evangelisation and proselytization, but it seems odd that UUs would not want to share their faith beyond their congregations. Perhaps this limit in vision in this third principle is why the denomination has remained very small and, in fact, is shrinking.

Second, "acceptance" and "encouragement to spiritual growth" have little meaning without a frame of reference, a model, some map, a context for what this might entail. This question of what is spiritual growth is not answered easily and depends on the practice of the fourth principle which is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Without some sense of "the truth" and some answer to the question of "what gives life meaning" we are lost when we try to answer the question of what "acceptance" might mean, and "encouragement to spiritual growth" might entail.

The Dali Lama has said that the meaning of life is happiness. The next question, "what will make me happy" is the humdinger, where the rubber hits the road. The devil is in the details as they say. Will tailgating and getting loaded before the football game make me happy. "Hell, yes." Hedonism many people believe makes them happy. I'm not sure that UUs would agree, certainly not all UUs. So what would Unitarian Universalism offer as an alternative to Hedonism as a pathway to achieve a happy life? Unitarian Universalism obviously has not come up with anything popularly recognized because there are hundreds of thousands of more people tailgating on any given Sunday at football games than ever attend a UU congregational activity.

Third, human beings are meaning making creatures and while Unitarian Universalism claims to draw from six primary sources, it does not do well in integrating the perennial wisdom of these six sources and so the nuggets of wisdom, gold, the diamonds of crystallized grace, get overlooked in the mud and slurry of nonessential nonsense in which these nuggets of wisdom are embedded. The function of the new religion of the 21st century should be to help us ferret these nuggets of wisdom out of the mines of these six sources, and yet this work is failing to get done and so people even if attracted to Unitarian Universalism wander on because while the acceptance may be there on the congregations part, it is not there on the seekers part because the encouragement to spiritual growth is not found only psychobabble and mediocre fellowship offered over coffee and scones. Acceptance is a two way street, and while congregations desperate for new members who can help pay the bills will accept just about anybody no questions asked, just sign the book, the seeker finds nothing of substance, nothing challenging enough, coherent enough, to make a disciplined commitment to which will facilitate the growth sought. And so UU congregations continue to be very small and losing members because they offer nothing coherent, substantive, meaningful to the growing population of "nones" in our society who state that they are "spiritual" but not "religious."

Fourth, in conclusion, Unitarian Universalism needs to develop more clarity about this "spiritual growth" thing. Do they even know what they are talking about or is this just psychobabble? Perhaps we will get a better idea when we move on to the next principle which is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The huge danger which Unitarian Universalism has not addressed well is the old proverb that if you don't know where you are going any road will take you there.