Perception: Empathy

A sermon offered by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia
Unitarian Universalist Church, Lafayette, Indiana, January 7, 2001

I keep hoping I’m wrong and that someone, somewhere, really does have the answer.  But I know we don’t live in that universe any longer.  In this new world you and I have to make it up as we go along, because reality changes shape and meaning as we’re in it.  It can’t happen without us, and nobody can do it for us.

How will we navigate these times? The answer is together.  We need each other differently now.  We cannot hide behind our boundaries, or hold onto the belief that we can survive alone.  We need each other to test out ideas, to share what we have been learning, to help us see in new ways, to listen to our stories.

Ira Progoff, from the Well and the Cathedral:

We are exploring together
In the underground stream.
each of us came down our own well
Alone
As a private person,
but we are meeting here
in the underground stream.
There are no separations here.
We intermingle freely.
We find that we know things
we see visions
we hear sounds
we have perceptions, recognitions,
intuitions of truths
that were mysterious to us before
but here, in the underground stream we know them directly.

In the movie, What Women Want, Mel Gibson, receives a jolt of electricity that alters his brain so that he can read the minds of women.  He visits the therapist to try to cope with or get rid of the voices and she says to him "You may be the luckiest man on earth.  If you play your cards right you can rule the world."  This is a new variation on the theme of movies like Tootsie, in which a man dresses  as a woman and gains a deeper insight into the circumstances in which women live.  These gender-bending movies are legion -- actually the stories are legion -- ranging back to William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and beyond.  Men and women are so close and yet divided by vast chasms of misunderstanding -- we feel our curiosity keenly. But this playing at being able to step into the realities of others goes far beyond gender switching.  In the movie Freaky Friday a mother and daughter magically switch places.  In the Prince and the Pauper two boys cross barriers of class and power and learn intimately about one another’s lives.  These are stories about perspective, understanding, and the desire to cross boundaries and broaden the vistas of knowledge.

We love this idea -- of being a tourist in the realities of other people -- of having a day off from our single-reality, mono-dimensional lives and step into another reality -- a living one -- into the skin of another.  We are hungry for that cross over experience -- to cross over in gender, class, race, age.  Black like Me, Big, Prelude to a Kiss, Dave, we seek some sort of Vulcan Mind Meld.  We want to explore that place beyond that which is the "given" of our lives.  We want to cross that boundary of personal, private consciousness -- the boundary of the self -- with a small "s".  We want to cross that boundary into the unknown -- the just- glimpsed world of the other.

Oh, don’t get me wrong -- we love the boundaries, too.  We stay within the  boundaries of skin, ego, address, personal history, gender, identity.  We crave the security they provide -- the familiar and predictable.  Within the boundaries we find clarity, definition, we can say, with some assurance, this is this and it is not that.

In terms of good psychological health -- good boundaries are essential -- essential to identity and wholeness and safety.

To know the boundary of the self is to have grounding and security in order to move out into the world.  To know the boundary of the self is to be able to find pleasure and to seek joy.  To know the boundary of yourself is to be able to allow the other person freedom to fully exist -- without feeling threat to yourself.  To know the boundary of the self is to be able to feel and to remain whole.  We need boundaries to allow children to flourish -- to move beyond reflecting our dreams, wounds, and yearnings so that they may embody their own.  Children gradually develop these boundaries -- they loose their unified sense of being in the world -- yet what remains is this funny dreaming that we do about shape shifting, about changing consciousness -- the odd hunger to cross over -- if only for a day or a week.

We seek the place where the boundary vanishes.  In architecture boundaries are funny things.  They are, in fact, the place where things transform--for example--when you stand in the doorway the space transforms from inside to outside.  The wall holds the space--it is the meeting point of inner and  outer. 

A couple of months ago I spoke about liminal space -- space that is between-- threshold space -- boundaries are those places--the creative edge--the place which is neither something nor the stuff around the something but the thing that makes the something possible.  The boundary is the place where freedom is, where the possibility exists to move in any number of directions.  It is the place where form emerges and vanishes and where amazing things are possible.  Between humans that place is the heart of the I/Thou relationship.

What is possible there is not amazing because there are special or dramatic effects -- it is made of listening and watching -- of paying deep attention to persons -- to events.  It is made of the mundane work of allowing another person room to express and then waiting to see and to learn.  What’s possible isn’t amazing because it defies reality.  It is amazing because at that point life springs into reality.  Almost as though when we are stuck in our own heads--our private versions of reality --we are stuck in a flattened world.  It is like the difference between an Egyptian Hieroglyph and Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

As we reach out in connection, seeking understanding the world becomes round--the cosmos becomes --AT THE VERY LEAST-- three dimensional.  It is not really very dramatic -- it is not as though we really find ourselves -- as Nick did in What Woman Want -- standing in the midst of Marshall Field’s and hearing every single conversation -- what is so amazing is that, as we can understand the perspectives of others, as we gain in cross personal insight we are no longer alone--we cease to live alone and begin to live in humanity.  And our fascination with the notion of doing this, though it may degenerate into mere entertainment, is a signal from the soul--a longing for a consciousness which we need and which is, in fact, what we are truly made of--we are interconnected beings in an interdependent world--our ability to see through the eyes of others is the earmark of our deepest character and the symbol of our greatest hope.  In fact we are incomplete without it.  Incomplete.

The first amazing thing that the ability to deeply see with the perspective of others yields is that we no longer live alone.  We live embedded in the world.  The Philosopher Leibniz believed that reality was a sort of great cineplex in the ether -- that each person had such independent reality as to be living in utter isolation from one another.  If you are not a character in my movie but a co-actor in this scene I am less alone.  You can touch me and I can touch you.  In ways neither one of us can imagine.  We can observe when children move from the stage of playing parallel to one another and begin to play together.

The second amazing thing is greater understanding--we learn more about the world in which we live--beyond our single vantage point we are given a new perspective.  We are able to live in richer meaning because it is not constructed by ourselves alone.  As Edith Stein, author of On the Problem of Empathy  wrote: "Another person is not given to us as a physical body, but as a sensitive, living body belonging to an I".

And that leads to the next amazing thing-- our ability to see with the perspectives of others yields a larger mind--an expanded consciousness, some might call it. Too often the human mind is like that primitive individual who, looking out at the line of the horizon, thinks she sees the end of the world.  The world is made not only of our needs for shelter, procreation, warmth, rest -- our pulse beats not only for our single and mere survival but for the flourishing of the whole.  This is not the same as the unified world of the baby -- being awakened means sustaining -- even for a moment’s awareness -- sustaining that tension between the bounded self and the infinite stream of being.

Therefore, as we encounter the understandings, the perspectives, the lives of others we discover new and fuller ways of being ourselves and potentials of new creation not only for ourselves but in concert with others in the world.  Henry Nelson Wieman called his version of this the creative encounter--deep meeting of humans that produces creative life, the possibility of new forms, and is the source of human good.

And finally, the most amazing gift of knowing the world through the perspectives of others is the gift of compassion.  It is the thing that makes all of the other amazing things something useful--redeeming.  This is the story that we share when we tell the story of the Buddha’s emergence from his palace--that he had lived sheltered from the world and its realities--had seen only joy and delight and one day decided to leave the comforts of his palace and see the world.  It was then that he saw suffering and began to live to alleviate that suffering.  Each of us has the opportunity in every moment to emerge from the palace and join the deeper stream of life.  I imagine that each one of us has had a moment of revelation in which we saw the depth, perspective, and value of the other -- when they ceased being the other -- and found ourselves moving in the deeper stream of life.

In What Women Want Nick overhears the suicidal inner dialogue of a co-worker -- for the first time he is aware that there is depth and pain in the lives of others ... he is beginning to sense how unsensing he has been.  And that it is vital that he have this deep human sense.

That is what the Ghost of Jacob Marley says to Scrooge -- a man who gets to cross over time and age.  The ghost says "it is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen and travel far and wide"  and to learn the business of life - which is to care for humankind.  So says the ghost.

I remember when I was a kid and I read Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. It is the true story of a young white man who dyed his skin to appear as an African American and spent a month living that way.  Of course, it is folly to think that one month or any part thereof could really mean that he had suffered as people of color suffer.  But it opened a window.  I remember reading how he was followed and harassed by a white man.  I remember my sense of injustice  that the same person would be treated so differently in a new skin.  Many years later I remember how haunted I felt by that book.  I know that there were many people for whom that book altered a simple white perspective on the world.

I suspect that the power of the Diary of Anne Frank is in this same thing -- that we are given to share the intimate thoughts of this young girl and through her we identify with the suffering and the heroism of a people and of time.

The Buddha’s story is a dramatic one -- with everything changing in a moment of awareness.  Often the pattern of being able to see from another’s perspective is created over time -- growing up in a diverse neighborhood, having a friend of a different race or religion, or from a distant country.  Yet, however it happens the writers of the book Common Fire -- leading lives of Commitment in a Complex World say: Some event or experience of otherness jolted their idea of who they were and where they stood in the world, challenging their previously held assumptions about who was one of us and who was not.  This kind of enlarging experience tills the ground in which a seed of commitment to a larger and more inclusive common good -- can be planted."  Over and over in the book activists report how their meetings with people different from them changed and enlarged their world views. In a speech once Frances Moore Lappe said that she thought that the Peace Corp did more for the volunteers then it had done for the people they ostensibly went to help.  And it was a Peace Corps worker who said: "look long enough through another’s eyes and sooner or later they will fall on yourself."  Yet the writers of Common Fire found that ultimately Peace Corp workers learned there how to celebrate diversity, how to serve a greater good, and then returned to choose life work that would enable them to serve that good again and again.  To serve the world.

That is the awakened life, the awakened heart.  Perception shifts and we see beyond the boundary of our personal horizon and into a truer depth of meaning.  We are awakened but to remain that way takes something almost as remarkable as being struck by lightning or finding a real fortune maker -- like Tom Hanks did in Big.

This being awake is a religious act -- a practice -- which engages us at the deepest level of our being.  It’s a religious practice as prayer is -- the opening of the individual to that which is sacred -- in this case the sacred is the revelation we find of one another -- through one another -- certainly not all pretty revelations, not all revelations of glory and goodness often humble and even mean -- but deep and true revelations about the nature of the world in which we live, the way it touches and shapes people, the way in which we can be moved by that.  If it’s true that, as Margaret Wheatley says, and our Unitarian Universalist principles affirm, we live in a participatory universe, a cosmos of interdependence, if it’s true that we are most fully living in being by participating and by giving witness to the revelation unfolding around us then, indeed, being awake and crossing over to understand the world from the perspective of another is a religious act, a practice that opens more of being to us.  The act is one of listening, hearing, seeing, opening the heart -- of sensing with the heart instead of with the flat senses.  That is depth perception.

Like that evolution from Egyptian hieroglyph to the celestial heights of the Sistine Chapel, those who see beyond the confines of the separate ego see with new eyes.  Can discern and, what is more, create new patterns -- new ways of being.  This is self-renewing and ultimately hopeful.  Wheatley also wrote; "How will we navigate these times? The answer is together.  We need each other differently now.  We cannot hide behind our boundaries, or hold onto the belief that we can survive alone.  We need each other to test out ideas, to share what we have been learning, to help us see in new ways, to listen to our stories."

I agree with her.  For me that is the power and promise of any Sunday morning -- that out of our individual lives we come together -- and possibility breaks open among us.  Possibility.  That is what caused me to see that movie this week. That possibility of what we can create together -- of what our hopes are as a community and as people in the world.  The possibility of what we bring to light and generate here.  For here, certainly here, we must have, must give ourselves permission to be our finest, most authentic, inviting, listening, caring, giving, creative selves.  Not necessarily to teach others but to learn from them, to be moved by them.  To create with them, with one another.  This is my hope: that this is no humdrum sitting together -- that at any moment we can turn to one another and discover profound insight and new creative energy.  Beginning one on one, asking, hearing, respecting, watching  -- we create the possibility of those many gifts that come to us from the spiritual practice of crossing perspectives.  To bring more being into being -- being together.

Quoting Wheatley again: It would seem that the more participants we engage in this participative universe the more we can access its potentials and the wiser we can become."  The wiser we can become -- that is the wisdom I think we reach for in stories like What Women Want or Big or Black Like Me -- in stories silly or sweet or noble -- the wisdom that is greater than any one person.  Beyond the boundary of the self with the small s is the common world we share -- the interdependent being that is made of us all.

I think that the potential that we access is nothing less than the power to create the world anew together -- the power to see and act for the Common Good.  As we move toward an exciting future here in our church I find myself thinking about the creative energy we have had and can have here.  It requires that we both know ourselves and be willing to move beyond our familiar selves -- that we can hear one another creatively, share ourselves tenderly, and understand that our best ideas will come from dialogue with one another -- from what we cannot imagine or have the courage to do alone.  That we come together for worship or for a congregational meeting -- like we will have this afternoon, or for any meeting -- leading with hope and receptive to the possibilities we can create together.  That we listen to one another as though struck by lightning or transformed as those who live far beyond the boundary of simple private thought -- that we live together in the place where new life is sparking around us -- between us -- generated by our witness, our creativity, and our commitment to one another and to the future.