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Sunday Pew and the Yellow Brick Road |
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How many of you came this morning expecting to hear a presentation on avarice? I would ask how many stayed away because of that expectation but I those folks are not here to tell us about it. Nor can they tell us whether they would be here if they had known I was going to talk about stuff from The Wizard of Oz in relation to what happens in Sunday services. It seems that two different topics for today’s service have been variously advertised in the newspaper, last Sunday’s order of service, and in both the September and October editions of The Beacon. A brief explanation of how this mix up occurred is in order. After the September Beacon and before the October Beacon, I changed my mind as to the appropriate timing of these topics. I moved the avarice one closer to Thanksgiving and the yellow brick road one to today which seems to be a time more relevant to circumstances at this point in this second interim year. There is, however, a silver lining in this cloud of communicative confusion is this; at least there is for me. It demonstrates a bit of what I want to talk about today. It highlights the role of expectations and the way expectations may or may not be met on Sunday morning. Regarding expectations many of us arrive here hopefully expecting that what we may have experienced on TV, in news media, movies, family get-togethers, and especially in other religious settings will not happen here. Many of us have had enough of religious dogmatism. We have been turned off by the superficiality of gullible faith and maudlin sentimentality. The unctuous expression of interest in us growing from someone else’s feelings of guilt or inferiority began to wear. We have become weary of demeaning prejudices and holier-than-thou judgmentalism. We have come to want something more real and near at hand than ostentatious preening before some divinity. We need something more respectful of our personal integrity than arbitrary authoritarianism. So, when we come into this room, we come with other expectations. Some of our expectations are unclear, but others are clear enough. We expect something to happen that will be meaningful to us -- something perhaps even be inspiring. We expect to see friends or to make new ones. We arrive here with at least a modicum of faith in good outcomes, or else we would not come. That is, we would not come unless, after having been out in a world driven by its own negativity and inadequacies, we are driven by some foreboding sense of fate or by the stronger will of a friend, a parent, or a significant other. We come here certainly expecting to find something different from the rest of the orthodox Christian-oriented community. If we are humanist, we expect something of a secularized approach to religion that emphasizes the human capacity to deal positively and effectively with life. If we are theist or unitarian Christian, we expect a dedication to ethics and things of the spirit that helps us transcend day-to-day muddling through. If we are earth centered or nature centered, we expect to be enveloped by a deep respect for the infinite value of the web of life on this planet and of human participation in that web. If we are mystics or New Agers we expect openness toward our new efforts at Transcendentalism, spirituality, and experiments in melding oriental and occidental approaches to religion. And in most UU congregations we find all these things, although in different amounts and varying proportions. But this is getting to what I want to talk about today. What we quite often find is something of a mix-master approach to religion -- an approach that is more of a smorgasbord than a balanced meal. We come with sincere expectations that in many ways are rewarded -- if we can sort out that which applies to us personally from the religious amalgam that is often slanted away from us in subtle ways. This morning I will not attempt to do a thoroughgoing treatise on the nature and content of worship and the celebration of life. There are too many philosophical and theological factors, too much to know about the psychological dynamics of how elements of the service may be fitted together for desired outcomes. Besides I doubt that you want me to identify a series of alternative liturgies and how religious liberals may use them. However, I do want to highlight some aspects of what we individually may expect when we come here on Sunday morning. To do this, I want to approach the subject from the standpoint of temperament. When I say “temperament” I am speaking of our emotional mode of response -- our habitual inclinations, the mindsets with which we encounter one another. Since Plato (and before), human beings have been thought to be of four basic kinds: the artistic, the sensible, the intuitive, and the reasoning, to use Plato’s designations. Today we can draw on the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (the MBTI) which identifies sixteen possible personality types, four of which seem to be basic, giving the nod to such luminaries as Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Iraneaus, Galen, and Paracelsus who, also, divided people into four different types. The way these four types are designated has changed over the years but the current nomenclature of these four types is: Rational, Idealist, Artisan, and Guardian. None of these four types has only its own characteristics that it does not share with others. What is significant is the way they individually place emphasis on certain characteristics that make them distinct. For instance, if you are an Idealist, you tend to think in terms of what is possible and to try to do what’s right. If you are a Rational, you tend to think in terms of what is possible but strive to do what works. If you are a Guardian, you tend to affirm the present situation of what is and, in the name of what’s right, to do whatever protects the present situation. And, if you are an Artisan, you tend to recognize what is the present situation but, rather than try to protect the present situation, you try to do what works. [This paragraph and much of the following two paragraphs is indebted to People Patterns by Stephen Montgomery, Ph.D., Archer Publications, Del Mar CA, 2002.] The Idealists speak of what they hope for and imagine might be, and they want to act in good conscience, always trying to reach their goals without compromising their personal code of ethics; Jesus was probably an Idealist. The Rationals speak of what they want to learn and plan to accomplish and they act as efficiently as possible to achieve their objectives, brushing aside rules and conventions, if need be; Buddha was probably a Rational. The Guardians speak of what they can keep an eye on and take good care of, and in getting things done they’re careful to obey the laws, follow the rules, and respect the rights of others; Moses and Confucius were probably Guardians. The Artisans speak of what they can see right in front of them and can get their hands on, and they’re willing to do whatever gives them a quick, effective payoff, even if they have to bend the rules; Mohammed and St. Francis were probably Artisans. An easier and more entertaining way to keep these different types straight is to match them to the four central characters in The Wizard of Oz. Surely everybody knows this story; it has been around since the early 20th century in either book or movie form. These four -- Dorothy (a tornadic refugee from Kansas), the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion – all set out on a yellow brick road that is to lead them to their heart’s desire. (Sounds like what people expect when they go to a Sunday service, doesn’t it?) Dorothy was trying to return to the security of her lost home situation. The Scarecrow wanted to attain an ability to think which he only thought he didn’t have. The tin Man, suffering from rust and thinking nobody cared, wanted to be able to care for himself and others. The Cowardly Lion thought he had lost his courage because it made him nervous to do courageous things. If you are a Guardian type, you approach the yellow brick road to Sunday service like Dorothy looking for home; if you are a Rational type, like the scarecrow trying to discover his mind; if you are an Idealist type, like the Tin Man seeking to find a way to bring love and empathy into the world; and, if you are an Artisan, like the Cowardly Lion, looking for the courage to respond imaginatively to the needs of the present situation. The wonderful ting about looking at human beings through the eyes of such a typology is how it underlines how much we have in common but use differently. It also points to the root of many of our interpersonal difficulties inasmuch as what we do differently distorts our view of what we have in common. It also helps us understand that what we most earnestly seek is usually something we already have, if we will only acknowledge it. But what does this mean for how our Sunday services function? How does it illuminate the dangers of a mix-master approach to religion – the dangers of creating a mushed-together smorgasbord rather than a balanced meal? First off, it should disabuse us of the idea that there is such a thing as a perfectly balanced Sunday service. Such a thing may exist in the minds of any one of the four types. It is only natural that an Artisan would believe the most important thing about the service is to encourage good feelings and to stimulate the imagination. And is only natural for a Guardian to believe that the most important thing is to protect the way things are so they will not disintegrate or swirl us all somewhere over the rainbow. For the Idealist building the service around what is hoped for would be natural, as it would be natural for a Rational to center on intellectual analysis and the pragmatic. For any one of these approaches to predominate is to place the others in a subordinate position. And being subordinated, these others are subtly reminded of their relative unimportance in the overall scheme of things. To be placed in a subordinate position is, ultimately, to begin to believe that one is not valued, no matter how much one is verbally assured to the contrary. In our guts, the proof is in the pudding. Either we get our fair share, or we don’t. Either our approach to religion and life is given its place in the spotlight or it isn’t. If our conception of that good which we seek on Sunday is in the generation of warm feelings and the service is slanted toward what we take to be arid intellectualism, we may wonder why we came. If, on the other hand, the good we seek lies in increasing our knowledge and ascertaining new truths and the service seems slanted toward doing the good works of social justice and community building or toward expressing the good through art and song and poetry as the higher values, we, equally, may feel ourselves out of place. The point is that it is the agenda of the planners and executors of the service that shape these relationships. It is inevitable that, whenever one follows one’s own natural inclinations of what is worthy of celebrating and worthy of worship, a kind of religious tokenism easily occurs and the mind of the congregation itself seems slanted to outside, differing observers. That people whose tokens have been displayed oftentimes disappear can be explained to some extent by this phenomenon. These folks have been allowed to walk the yellow brick road, of course, but to the side and a few paces back. The issue is what can be done to accommodate such a diversity of points of view and expectations. Will the problem be solved by having an Idealist/Tin Man oriented service once a month, to be followed on subsequent Sundays by services oriented around the Artisan/Lion, and then t he Rational/Scarecrow, and finally by the Guardian/Dorothy? Perhaps this would work for a while if someone of each type, who understands liturgical dynamics, would set the tone for such services. Actually, such arrangements tend to dwindle away as the planners become tired and distracted. I think a better approach is f or those with responsibility for creating the Sunday service to begin to pay more attention to what they are really trying to convey. My experience as a Rational/Scarecrow (MBTI won’t let me off the hook on this) is that anyone, who is empathetic enough to grasp what a differing person’s religious agenda is can find ways to bring that religious agenda into focus in a Sunday service. Usually, all it takes is to know that there are differences in emphasis, then to know what those differences are, then to acknowledge these differences as valid and worthy , and then to set about highlighting these emphases on Sunday, asking for help when needed. Perhaps what I am outlining this morning seems too far out in left field to be of practical use. Perhaps it doesn’t seem necessary. Perhaps it seems that all I am describing is the inevitable tendency of a congregation to develop its own personality, its own type, and this that is not only inevitable but good. After all, we cannot be all things to all people. However, this issue of truly accommodating a diversity of emphases on Sunday morning is of primary importance. It, I suspect, is one of the biggest factors in Unitarian Universalism staying at such a low numerical membership (no more than 260,000 members nationally). At root, the difficulty has to do with our pride in our diversity but our casual commitment actually to express diversity on Sunday morning, especially when it feels uncomfortable. But, the reality is that our Sunday morning is quite like a yellow brick road leading, we hope, to our heart’s desire. And we are traveling it together. When it successfully leads us where we want to go, we find within ourselves the very human qualities that we seek. Let us find was to help us walk abreast. |
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