Aha Moments
The following sermon was delivered as written at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville on November 27, 2022. A video of the sermon being delivered can be viewed here.
Good morning
Today’s sermon actually sprung up from a seed planted during a talkback after a sermon I delivered on getting good with external change, where I ended up in deep reflection not on my ability to handle unexpected change in my life but instead on my ability to handle deep inner change – changes in perspective in belief. Changes in personal “knowing,” changes from seeing things as less absolute to more nuanced, with more opportunities for different truths to take shape. I started thinking about my own journey with the 4th principle of Unitarian Universalism: the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
From a young age, I have had a tendency, which I believe to be born from my early religious upbringing, to perceive “right” and “wrong” on most topics as being absolute. All of my adult life I have found it difficult to grow beyond an “all or nothing” stance. The baby gets thrown out with the bathwater 100% of the time unless I take a deep breath and try to look on all sides of something new that doesn’t initially ring all the bells of truth or rightness in my heart.
I’ll give you an example. Most Sundays when I am speaking to a congregation, you’ll find some hint or flavor of Buddhist philosophy in the ideas I’m sharing. Discovering Buddhist teachings and the space they give me to exist in liminal space have been life changing for me, but it took years of inner struggle to finally feel comfortable understanding that I have full permission to “part & parcel” what I take from the Buddha’s teachings. When I first started learning about presence, mindfulness, non-attachment, etcetera – I began to experience a new inner freedom that I’d never felt before. I started to wonder early on in my study, which was just before I visited this church for the first time, if I might end up wanting to fully identify as a Buddhist and if I could find a Buddhist community, or sangha, to join. My struggle with fully jumping in, however, was with the fact that I did not, nor did I see myself being able to, hold a belief in reincarnation. In those days I was pretty hard and fast with my disbelief in any kind of supernatural realm or afterlife. Any belief in an interventionist god or plane of existence outside of the one I was living in was anathema to me, and caused me to throw up a hard boundary in an attempt to protect myself from being disingenuous in my belief.
This meant that the more I studied this millennia-old tradition, the more I felt like I couldn’t identify with it, because I learned that it held beliefs or teachings that I did not. If I were to remain authentic and true to myself, then well – I had to walk away.
I feel sympathy for that person that I was and that same person who still takes up space within me, who is so concerned with being absolutely “truthful” that they’re willing to walk away from something that gives them peace out of fear of being inauthentic in some way. Who worries I’ll come off deceitful or two-faced somehow. This person who feels like changing their mind is somehow changing their identity – of giving up some part of themselves that I’ve previously held dear.
As I mentioned, it was just after my initial struggle over adopting a Buddhist identity that I found my way into a Unitarian Universalist church – this church – for the first time and had that oh-so-familiar to us experience to us of 1) shaking in my Sunday shoes as I entered the sanctuary and took a seat in one of the pews and 2) starting to cry almost as soon as the service started as I began to recognize that I had found a place where all of me was welcome, complicated and tangled up beliefs included. I have always been a person who was terribly resistant to having my beliefs changed in any way. To suddenly let go of a belief or to comfortably declare that I saw something in a new way felt like announcing to the world not, necessarily, that I had been wrong before, but instead that I had been lazy in my belief before changing my mind or, to bring up the dreaded boogeyman of my inner life again, to recognizing that I had been living in some inauthentic way. My search for truth and meaning carried with it a lot of self-judgment and subconscious requirements to “get it right” that truly held me back from expanding my mind and heart – and ultimately claiming more freedom for myself.
Maria Popova, author of the book Figuring and publisher of the beautifully enriching literary blog, Brain Pickings, describes my resistance and my predicament beautifully in this writing:
“The fact that we humans have such a notoriously hard time changing our minds undoubtedly has to do with the notion that ‘human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,’ which belies the great robbery of the human experience — by calling ourselves beings, we deny our ever-unfolding becomings. Only in childhood are we afforded the luxury of inhabiting our becoming, but once forced to figure out who we want to be in life, most of us are so anxious about planting that stake of being that we bury the alive, active process of our becoming.”
She goes on to say “The uncomfortable luxury of changing our mind is central to the courage of facing our becoming with our whole being.”
I love that switch in perspective – from a resistance or fear of changing our mind or having our mind changed to identifying this experience as a “luxury.” We have the freedom to change our minds. To do so is to welcome becoming our whole selves. We do not lose anything by changing our minds. We gain more. We expand. We find more of ourselves. This isn’t something to be feared. This is something to be sought after. Something to value. Something to celebrate.
I believe that it was with a combination of discovering Unitarian Universalism and being in discussion with other UUs, along with years of participating in cognitive behavior therapy and also, probably just age and life experience, that I started to relax this way of holding onto beliefs. Once I found myself in a community that embraced and encouraged a pluralism of belief my edges started to soften. Once I found myself presented with more and more ways of doing and being, I began to (slowly) accept the reality that there is more nuance to most things than there isn’t. As a UU, I am surrounded by people who make a spiritual practice out of changing their mind – out of learning something new and allowing it to transform their thinking, and somehow, magically, that experience has stopped becoming something I resist and has started being something that I not only enjoy, it’s something I seek out.
Where I used to hold my beliefs as gospel and require some sort of litmus test around infallibility when it came to accepting a new way of thinking, I now look forward wholeheartedly to having the script flipped on me. I can’t remember exactly when this changed for me, but it’s true. Now that I recognize this love in myself, I equate it to the unmatched value I place on my own inner freedom. The experience of having something explained to me in a way that shifts my thinking and ultimately my understanding feels like having an itch scratched that I can’t reach or soothe in any other way. Instead of being fearful of learning something that will upend my belief, I now sit waiting for it to happen.
I call these moments of coming into new understanding lightswitch moments, or as I learned about them when studying acting, “Aha moments,” and they now feel more to me like direct experiences with the divine than something to be feared. These are a before and after to these moments for me. I’m walking around carrying a certain perspective or way of believing and then I experience something that shifts things for me. And now I have a choice. I can either reject this new idea, however much it excites me, in order to 1) stay true to who I believe I am and 2) keep a sense of stasis, or I can say yes to the newfound invitation to something new. I’ll give you a somewhat dramatic example.
Part of my spiritual journey in life has been about first blindly accepting a belief in God, to struggling to find that belief within myself throughout years of being in my church of origin, to outright and passionately rejecting any belief in God, to opening my heart to a curious and loving state of “there must be, but it is unknowable.” It’s been a wild ride. It’s the shift from “no, absolutely not” to “I can’t deny the possibility” that I will describe here. All of these shifts have been lightswitch moments, but only the last one got me out of binary thinking.
For several years I had felt good and solid about my atheism. I felt comfort in it and it carried a deep sense of freedom with it as well. I was unburdened, clear, and confident, and I enjoyed this way of being very much.
On a random morning, I was out for a run on the greenway in my neighborhood, experiencing the lovely cognitive dissonance that comes from parking your car in an urban parking lot and stepping into woods that somehow exist right in your neighborhood. It was early and the weather was pleasantly neutral. The light of the morning was beautifully golden. I was at the part of the couch to 5k that I’ve been starting and stopping for the last 8 years where my running sprints were now longer than my walking ones and I feel strong and confident about my progress. I had opted to listen to a podcast that morning instead of music, but the topic or even the voice that was speaking to me has been lost to my memory. But as I trotted down that paved path, all of the sudden I caught something in my vision that startled me. It was the simplest sight. So common that I normally wouldn't examine it further. But the image struck my mind and instantly tried to change me – and I had to decide if I was going to let it. It was so simple. It was a beam of early-morning sunlight hitting a spot on a leaf where a perfectly cherry-red and symmetrically spotted ladybug sat. I don’t know why my vision picked up something so small. Or why something so ordinary was framed in that moment to seem so spectacular. I don’t even think noticing it would have struck anyone else the way it struck me in that exact moment. But what I saw was a perfectly designed creature in a perfectly serene moment of beauty. And as I trotted past it and stuck in mind, I had this overwhelming sense of “oh no. There is a God.”
It was a dramatic moment for certain. It was completely unexpected. It was also, to be honest, completely unwanted. I wasn’t looking to change my mind about this, the most grand of topics. I wasn’t interested in exploring what the existence of such a deity meant for my life, especially in the life I was leading after my exodus from Christianity. But as random as it was, it was an undeniably large moment for me, and my mind’s eye couldn’t look away.
So I had a choice to make. I could remain in my tendency to view things in a black and white way. Either I aligned with my thinking before this random moment I took the giant binary leap that my heart was guiding me towards that was screaming that there must be some sort of divine designer behind all of this, OR I could soften. I could allow for both/and. I could stop demanding an absolute truth or a purity of belief. I could allow myself to be open to another possibility. I could change my mind to allow for nuance, new ways of being and understanding, and space for the not knowing as well.
That experience was years ago now. And the miracle of the story for me is that I never landed firmly on the other side of the binary “is there / isn’t there” question. I have been blessed with growth into a place where I hold the not knowing and the tendency towards believing with love and without demanding more from myself. As it stands now my belief/disbelief in god feels more like a “both/and” scenario, and a trailhead that leads to some unknown and amazing territory whenever I decide that it’s time to walk down it.
My past and still inherent tendency to stand firmly in what I know is very much a part of me, but what I’ve come to understand and even cherish now is that learning something new and expanding my belief isn’t to be feared and it isn’t a hallmark of inconsistency or lack of authenticity. Instead it is something to be looked for, open to, and even sought after. As Maria Popova indicated, to change one’s mind is to continue becoming more whole.
What I hope you will carry with you as you leave today is this:
To change one’s mind is to remember that we are alive and free. To change our mind is to open our hearts and draw our circle wider to include more and more people whose experiences and ways of understanding are different than ours. Beloveds, what I’ve come to understand is this: to change one’s mind is holy.
May it be so. Amen.
