A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church
Lafayette, Indiana
April 1, 2001
by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

From Crazy Wisdom by Wes Nisker:

The fool is the most potent of the archetypes and, also, the most capable teacher of wisdom. There are actually two types of fool: the foolish fool and the great fool. The foolish fool is inept and silly, a clown of the mind. The great fool is wise beyond ordinary understanding. [And] is the rarest of beings.

Innocence is the trademark of fools. The innocence of the foolish fool makes him clumsy and unsophisticated, because he tries to live according to convention. The great fool, however, does not try to fit in; in his innocence he lives by his own rules. The fool and his money are soon parted, but the great fool gives his money away. The foolish fool gets lost, while the great fool is at home everywhere.

Jacob Bronowski said of Einstein that he was a man who could ask immensely simple questions.

The great fool, like Einstein, wonders about the obvious and stands in awe of the ordinary, which makes him capable of revolutionary discoveries of about space and time. The great fool lives outside the blinding circle of routine, remaining open to the surprise of each moment. We take for granted the miraculous dance of creation, but the great fool continually sees it as if for the first time. The revelations of the great fool show us where we are going, or – more often – where we are.

Dennis Campbell from The Congregation as Learning Community:

The world we live in so complex and changing so rapidly that most of us feel overwhelmed with the challenges before us. Nowhere is this state of mind more prevalent than in congregational life. Once the local church was a haven of calm stability. But now that our external context is constantly in flux, congregational stability may not be attainable, and possible not even desirable. The time is past when we needed only periodically to initiate redevelopment efforts in a congregation, attain a level of new vitality and health, and then settle back until the time came to do it all over. The healthy congregations of the 21^st century will be those that leave behind the process of linear thinking and create within their internal culture the behavioral patterns, structures, and values that will naturally position them for a continual cycle of renewal. These congregations will never be finished with their learning…

In the US April 1 is a holiday about pranks and silliness. Yet, more interesting traditions surround this holiday – it has some roots in the French holiday of the Feast of Fools. At least… in part. In sixteenth century France the new year was celebrated on April 1. However, in 1562 Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world. After that the new year fell on January first. Communications technology being what it was in the 1500’s there were some people, however, who hadn't heard about or didn't believe the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April first. Well, those in-the-know set about to play all sorts of pranks on the ignorant masses.

The Feast of Fools also has it origins in the same spirit of holiday as the Roman Saturnalia a time in which the ordinary order of things is reversed. The Feast of Fools was outlawed by the council of Basel in 1431. This outlawed holiday was a short social revolution – a time in which the strict hierarchy of the church was overturned. Now – we’re not talking about real revolution – we’re talking about Sub-deacons – called fools – offering prayers, or foolishness that might occupy two minutes of a church service. It also seems that periodically wild abandon might take over and crazy things could happen in church – perhaps like people reading in a common tongue or, maybe, women saying some portion of the service – well, no, that would be going too far. Anyway. The Reformation was yet to come to fullness and the church hierarchy governed all aspects of life – you’d have thought that the church could have spared one day a year for empowering the laity – But actually by the time the holiday of April Fools came about the Church was even governing the way that the calendar fell – So perhaps a day of levity was not in the cards…

The ancient outlawed holiday where paradigms are challenged is the one I celebrate today. It was the time when the Fools Feast. And I’ve long been a fan of the Fool – well – not just any fool – but the Great Fool – there’s a card you may know from the Tarot deck – the first card – the zero card and that card is the Fool. There is a picture of that Fool on your order of service and on the front of the pulpit. This is no silly fool – this youth is the great adventurer – the one willing to risk – to walk toward a goal that is higher than the road before him. Oh yes there is risk – the Fool is walking toward a cliff – is there a one foot drop or a great chasm – is there a river at the bottom or a branch that catches him? Were he not The Great Fool – he’d have stayed home, taken a job in the guild of his father, and never thought twice about the world beyond his town. But he has ventured out and that he will find wonders is far more likely than that he will take a fall – after all he wears soft shoes that may feel the edge before he treads off…

The Great Fool is about the openness to the journey of living, the journey of learning – about approaching life with questions and a fresh view. The Fool lives in the Aha! moment: those moments of recognition when we are each aware, free, and experiencing life deeply – when we are learning. Peter Senge wrote that we often confuse learning with the accumulation of facts – real learning is the way in which the world shapes us – the way we learn wisdom – how to use those accumulations of facts. We come into the world equipped for the most complex learning – for a life-long voyage of discovery and creation. That voyage of discovery and creation is what we are about here.

Great ones have taken this journey – the Buddha, who was raised in privileged innocence but discovered compassion; Jesus, who saw beyond priest or politics to new meanings; Mary Daly, the radical feminist, was willing to walk to the edge of extreme foolishness to bring liberating wisdom to women; Robert Ingersoll – one of the founders of humanism in the late nineteenth century had a powerful aha and he described it this way:

Aha! But this aha is not reserved for the great of fame – it is in each one of us – and this is what we value here – the free and responsible moment of discovery, the budding and blossoming passion for inquiry and there is in this place the standing invitation to come and learn – deeply.

Recently I was talking with a member of our congregation. She said: I love this place because I love to learn – it makes me feel – more alive." Yes. Here we affirm that life-long journey of creation and discovery. It’s our commitment. And yes, we’re simply human in this commitment. Each one of us – we each have times when we get stuck – every day’s not some glorious adventure. Often are the times we trip into or even take refuge in habit and in the safety of untried ideas. But, when we come here we’re reminded that the invitation stands – to the free and responsible search and to the work of spiritual growth. I really saw that last week – in the wonderful Forum that Brian Straight offered on Astronomy and the life of the Spirit and in the loving but deeply challenging questions that our visiting speaker asked. And that’s part of one simple week in the life of this congregation.

The world bearing upon us has changed and the course of our congregational life has changed over time. The invitation that once sustained us, as a community of ruggedly individual searchers, is something that we need throughout our life together – throughout the work we do as a congregation.

Dennis Campbell calls the place where learning is shared and dynamic a learning community. We are already seeing this in our work toward building a new church home. Don Ferris, at a joint meeting of the Board, the New Building Committee, and the Finance committee brought up this same idea – of the learning organization. The learning community is not only a place where information is shared but a place where learning happens on all sorts of levels. Learning communities are possible because "deep, deep down, we are all learners" – Peter Senge wrote in the Fifth Discipline. Learning communities flourish when people use the energy and possibilities of being together to develop themselves and their community. When people join to provide insight, vision, resources, and leadership. We all know of or have taken part in exciting learning teams both small and large. Building those teams became quite a pastime for a while in the business world – rock-climbing, trust building and long hours over the midnight oil creating and playing. Sounds like fun. I’ve been on stimulating teams to plan worship services, organize a march, design a class, write a theater piece.

But the benefits are greater than the fun and the improved, increased, and energized productivity. This place isn’t a business – not really -- and our bottom line isn’t productivity. Here the things we do must reflect our principles and values thus the process of engaging together as a learning community will create growth and change in every participant. You know what this feels like. There have been times like that here – a facilitator comes, there’s sharing and talk. When you leave you’ve found some new insight, an aha – sometimes you’ve discovered something that will serve you in your daily life. And there are times of deeper learning. Just as we once learned to walk, talk, reach for food, and interact so we later and further keep learning – emotionally, physically, intellectually, materially, and spiritually.

But – a learning community not only grows and changes the individuals in it – the community as a whole learns and changes. First because as the people in the community change, learn, grow – the community as a whole becomes wiser – actually exponentially wiser because every one is learning from every one else.

Some learning happens as slow as the growth of tree roots and other learning happens in great shifts of awareness. One example of learning over time took place at that same meeting that I just mentioned. Some time ago this congregation met in focus groups to discuss visions and hopes for the design of the new church. So when this recent meeting took place there was already much collected wisdom. People reached back to retrieve all that they knew from the earlier meetings and then imaginations began to play – just play. It was a conversation in the past and the present about the future. There was a sense of excitement – people answered one another with enthusiasm.

And – as Dennis Campbell said: "The healthy congregations of the 21^st century will be those that … create the behavioral patterns, structures, and values that will naturally position them for a continual cycle of renewal. These congregations will never be finished with their learning." This is the learning community – vibrant and flexible – responsive to forces in the world as well as to changes in the community within – this is what arises when that quality of being alive in learning becomes the character of the community.

So how is a learning community formed? Well - truth is – if the learning community works it will continually find new ways of being -- built on a firm foundation. Senge offers that there are five what he calls disciplines that shape that foundation. I like the word discipline – it brings to mind the notion of a spiritual or mental discipline – like meditation or journal-keeping or running regularly or whatever. A discipline gives form and this can be useful to groups and to communities. Senge’s disciplines – which could each be the theme of a sermon – are these:

Most important is the practice of thinking in systems – of the whole. This changes how we’ll approach everything else. An example. A number of years when the holistic health movement got off the ground we began to think that our feelings and our lives could affect our health. That was pretty fresh – more revolutionary was the idea that physicians might look at a whole person in order to understand what was happening – it still means we clean a wound, treat an infection – all of that but it also means that we think of our whole lives – even our environment when we think of our health. And this is so for a family, a workplace, a church human groups are built in systems of relationship that include history, vision, relationships, patterns, rules, and history – but I said that twice. In a community like this one seeing systems shelps us to see all that we are doing more clearly – to see the connections in the system. For this community, like any other, is a system. There are ways to bring health to a system and to bring dis-ease, ways to enable it to grow and ways to block real growth.

The next discipline is called personal mastery and it has to do with our continual cultivation of ourselves – our individual disciplines. My dad at eighty one is still my best source for current reading recommendations. In a learning community the mastery is not only individual but guided in part by the direction, the vision, and the interactions within the community. We strengthen and deepen ourselves and make our church stronger.

The third discipline is that of mental models. Mental models are like myths that shape how we see the world – they are dangerous when they become boxes or prisons – I love that passage of Robert Ingersoll’s when he talks about the prison walls crumbling. But those walls exist when people say "we never" or "we’ve always done it this way". When habits of mind limit the imagination and anxiety prevents creativity from taking place. Senge says that it is in the gap between vision and current reality that creative energy is generated – moving beyond a mental model that may no longer work to a healthier one. I’ve noticed a shift in a mental model here – so many members of this congregation say: "Oh this thing is different because we are moving from small pastoral-style church to a mid sized program-oriented church." This is not a bare fact this is an understanding about the character of a church that has consequence. It is like when we drove to Chicago this week James, who’s twelve, wanted to play the Alphabet game with Maeve, who’s seven. We knew that James would win – because of his age and skill level. Just so – when we understand what sort of church we’re becoming, what things are needed, and what things tends to happen in that sort of church, we understand so much more – about everything from space to hymnals to seating to staff. The more that that sort of learning is shared, the more flexible and wise, the clearer we are about where we are, how we got here and how to get where we want to go. We stop getting in our own way and start smoothing the road. And that makes the next learnings easier. Of all religious folk I’d think that we Unitarian Universalists would be least inclined to fall into habits of the mind.

The next discipline is one that has had a good beginning here – it is the discipline of building shared vision. Now this could be a buzz word for let’s share what we think and then do what I want – but this involves real openness to one another – letting the creative process build together – to receiving another person’s inspiration and letting oneself perhaps even be moved by that. Vision is key to future building. "Without vision the people perish." One of the most vivid images of this is the story of Hebrews wandering in the desert after their release from slavery. They drifted whining and lost in the desert when vision might have saved them.

And the last discipline is team learning. Peter Senge asks – how can a group of committed individuals with IQ’s above 120 have a collective IQ of 63? To be able to think together is an outcome of both commitment and the ability to see systems, to be personally skilled, to see new mental models, and to have a shared vision, and to good facilitation. Senge says the art of team learning is dialogue rather than a percussion of ideas. It is much like the process idea of creative interchange – purposeful and shared. It requires in a community like this one, team learning takes place in small groups, sometimes at large meetings, and every time that we intentionally meet and explore hoping to learn and to be transformed – even in some humble way.

These five disciplines are the foundations of the learning community. And learning communities create and support leaders, find and are faithful to vision, flourish when there is challenge, and build strong relationships that create greater and greater health for every participant.

Senge’s book has value – perhaps we could study it together. Or maybe the shorter book by Campbell that speaks more directly to churches. The five disciplines seem as though they were tailor made for a UU congregation: unleashing the power of people learning and growing together, the will to think and create free of dogma and decree, the structure of a UU congregation as a community of those sharing a ministry – co-creating the life and work of a church. This speaks of fulfillment for individuals and for a whole community – of a community developing sight and insight about itself.

So often I read literature from churches that have dense hierarchies – churches with presbyteries, churches where they do not call their own ministers, churches where the organizational structure is decided by a synod – though, in all fairness, the hierarchy must be easier than it was in 1562 when the Pope could pick the calendar for the world. So, I think with fondness of the Feast of Fools. Here, where the decisions come from within and not from on high, we have a very different value system and structure – just watch at the informational meeting after church today. But it takes purpose and cultivation. We have so many tender rootlets of the learning community here – and we value so many of its fruits that it seems natural that we would cultivate it – and we have begun to – as we search for the future, brainstorm, hold informational meetings, share planning retreats, perhaps form covenanting groups to further our learning together.

One of my favorite quotes is from Auntie Mame who said "Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving." When I think of our churches I think of them as banquets. I think of the learning community as that place where people are truly feasting – truly reaching for the most profound nourishment and renewal. Settling neither for crumbs nor for prepacked food. We know the expression welcome table – this table is the feast of living and learning – the Feast of those who choose to be free and equal, who dare to create more of that IN the world – who are fool enough to gather and to work make that happen.