presented Saturday 30 September 2000
at the Icaghowan Youth Conference Amery , WisconsinNOTE: The setting for this service was a weekend youth conference, attended by 150 middle school and high school age students from throughout the Prairie Star District. The presentation was about 75 minutes long. The charge from the Youth Committee inviting me to do it was this: Our theme for the whole conference is "Mysteries:" meaning mysteries of creation, but also secrecy, conspiracy, secret agent stuff, spying and government intrigues, etc. Please speak about mystery, and please do not be too boring.
The worship space was a large common room at a wilderness conference center. As participants entered, they found a circle of unlit votive candles in front of the stone .fireplace, where I was sitting. Ancient chants on tape were playing as prelude. It was 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
PRELUDE LIGHTING THE CHALICE
OPENING COMMENTS AND INTRODUCTION
I like your theme -- mystery. Top secrets. Intrigue. It's fun, but I think it's also theologically appropriate for us. I like to believe that Unitarian Universalists are at home in mystery, that we are people who are untroubled by unknowing. I like to believe that we don't spend a lot of time wringing our hands about whether God exists or doesn't, but wonder instead how we're supposed to exist, and co-exist, and what appropriate awe might look like either way. The folk singer Iris Dement has a song called "Let the mysery be"Everybody is wonderin' what and where they all came from.Everybody is worried 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.But no one knows for certain and so it always seems to me, I'll just let the mystery be.
Some say once gone you're gone forever and some say you're gonna come back.Some say you rest in the arms of the savior if its sinful ways you act.Some say you're coming back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.I think I'll just let the mystery be...
I like to believe that we're like that, though historically we haven't been. Typically, and traditionally, we've been empirical, analytical, scientific, scholarly people constantly trying to figure things out, especially on the Unitarianside and the humanist side. Even a hundred years ago, Emerson called it "corpse cold," intellectual religion and he left the church. But I like to believe we're changing. I like to believe that that wonder (and its counterpart, terror) have found their way back among us.
Yesterday I walked through one of the R.E. classrooms at the church I serve in Mahtomedi, Minnesota to see what the 1 st and 2nd graders had written about God. And there in their slightly mysterious handwriting were posters with wild pictures, some very literal (kings and queens and trees), and others very abstract. Their writing made me catch my breath:
At dusk when the light seems to come through the clouds, that's God
God is in my dog.
God is not near me.These are seven year-olds, little Buddhas, mini-mystics, and I thought, if we have to have sermons on Sunday, these are the people who probably should probably be preaching them. They know about mystery .
Your theme is also about secrets, mysteries that wouldn't be mysteries unless someone wanted to keep them that way. I grew up during Watergate, the era of missing audiotapes and the secret bombing of Cambodia, the hey day of the FBI and its wire tapping of left wing activists and ordinary people, the outrage of Agent Orange (a terrible secret still unfolding) and Karen Silkwood and all those assassinations that many people still believe were directly, or indirectly, or somehow remotely connected to the government's intention. It was an age of deep suspicion and it bred terrible cynics, people who expect that their govenrment will lie to them, spy on them, posion them, and regularly wreak havoc all over the world through clandestine murders, insurrections, and fake revolutions funded with our tax dollars. I grew up during Vietnam but came of age during Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua,Guatemala, Cuba, and all kinds of "mysterious" interventions.
I came of age in a time of terrble and justified cynicism, an age of secrecy and covert operations, and often I regret this. I want to be a mother who can smile at her six year-old so proud to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and not be totally conflicted every time the child says it with her little hand over her heart. But sometimes this sensitivity to intrigue, this alertness to the possibility of top-secret goings on, can serve me well. This week I was part of a citizens' panel called the Interfaith Alliance (we monitor the activities of the Religious Right) and a parent from a nearby high school came to see us for advice. His daughter had come home from a pep rally at which a group called POWERHOUSE MINISTRIES had been the entertainment. They'd been hired by the principal, who claims not to have realized that they are a militantly evangelical Christian group. Throughout their performance at the rally, with 2000 high school students in the audience, they began making all kinds of subtle inferences, bending metal rods into the shape of a fish or a cross, and inciting the crowd to frenzied cheering about Jesus. And then all of a sudden, they stopped their music and launched into an impassioned, homophobic diatribe, a vicious message of hatred and bigotry -- very ugly, very dangerous, very scary. The crowd went wild and seemed to love it, but we know that there were people there, students and teachers and staff, who were terrified and outraged.
The man's daughter said the event was videotaped -- she saw the students taping it, and heard that teachers viewed the tape the next day. But when her father called the principal to ask for a copy, the principal denied that any tape existed. And well he should -- because in hiring this group, he cetrtainly broke trust at his school, and there's good reason to believe he also broke the law. So our panel encouraged this father: explore the mystery. Crack it open, shine some light in there.But the real mystery is not whether this tape exists or not, or whether the principal knew what we think he knew or not -- the real mystery is where hate comes from, what section of the soul it breeds in. The real mystery is where courage comes from: the courage of that girl who told her father, and the courage of the father who told us,
I'm not anti-Christian. I go to the Lutheran Church. But I can't live with a school that breaks the human rights and human spirits of its students.
The msytery is, where do such bravery and imagination come from, what section of the soul?
These are questions for you to keep in mind now as I tell a story. In a moment I'd like to ask you to break into small groups to do some conjuring together, and then I'll invite you back to this large circle. But first the story.
SETTING THE STORY: THE ICE MAN OF TYROL
Found frozen in a glacier about ten years ago, in the Tyrolean Alps, was a perfectly preserved human mummy, 5,300 years old He still has hair, he still has skin (with strange tatoos up and down his legs), he still has organ tissue, and eyes and fingernails. His belongings were found next to him: a pouch, some shoes, and an enromous bow so heavy that scientists wonder whether anyone now would be able effectively to use it. He is thought to be a fairly young man, perhaps in his late teens or twenties.At the time of his discovery, there was great confusion about whether he was found actually in Italy or Austria, and he was shipped back and forth several times by angry and possessive scienitists. But now he has been pronouncedI talian, and this week [early Septemebr 1999] they began thawing him. Researchers intend to study a .fungus inhis lungs, explore bone samples, put an endoscope into his intestines to find out what he ate in his last days, and take a look at his DNA.
I want to play this story out a little more. Suspend what you think you know is true, especially those of you who are scientifically-oriented, and imagine with me if you can, that in the course of all this defrosting this week, not only the intestines and lung tissue of the Iceman softened up, but much to the shock and horror of the scientists in Italy, his brain and heart were found to be not frozen, but functioning. Imagine with me that in that laboratory they have discovered that the Iceman was not dead, but sleeping all this time, 5,300 years. Eight scientists are in the room, taking notes, observing, when suddenly the silence is shattered by a strange, thin groan. Eight women and men are witnesses as he slowly turns his head, opens his eyes.
Now, I want you to tell the story ofwhat happens next.
WORK IN SMALL GROUPS ON TWELVE QUESTIONS
Here we divided the large groups into their affinity circles, and each took one question to answer together.
QUESTIONS FOR SMALL GROUPS
#1. What do the scientists do? Do they issue a press release to the world? Do they cover it up? Are they unanimous? Do they allow him to live? Are they of one mind? Let's say they're from different countries, different universities... What's at stake for those eight people? Do they share the secret, and if so, how, and why? If not,why not?
#2. Assuming that somehow the secret is told or leaks out, how does the world respond? The second group will represent the U.S. govenernment. What's their interest, and how will they guard it and promote it? Is there a national security issue, or an economic one?
#3 .The Iceman is alive and well, but not very up to date. What are some things (say, 5- 10 things) that he would need to know about our life in the year 2000? What are 5- 10 things that have changed since 3,300 B.C.E? What are ten things this alien (who is a human being) would want to know about being a human being? This might be a panel of ethicists, or anthropologists, or clergy , or artists. ..
#4. How would we communicate with him? How could we possibly "speak" with him, or understand him? (I read an article once about contemporary scientists trying to make a symbol for a toxic waste dump that could still communicate danger after 15,000 years --the half-life of the nasty stuff buried there. Linguists assured them that no modern language will be remotely recognizable after that much time, so they employed artists and actors poets and others --people who deal in metaphor --to try to design a symbol for this site that would be frightening no matter what, or when. ) How could we communicate with the Ice Man?
#5. What would we not want him to know? Typically I don't believe in keeping secrets, or protecting people from ~ the truth, but here is a pristine person, an archteype, really, ofhuman possibility. Is there anything we would notwant him to know about our history so far , or our tendencies or habits, our nautre? If you had a blank slate andcould start over with someone's education, is there anything you would consciously omit?
#6. What would we want to ask him?
#7. What happened to him? Where was he going on the day he died? What was in this mind? What are thosetatoos about? What was he feeling there in the snow?
#8. What do you imagine would frighten him most, and what would make him feel safe?
#9. Back to the government again: a question about rights, and responsibility, which always go together.Who would be in charge of the Iceman? Who would have rights in his regard? In a "free" society, this is a questionwe don't ask of people unless they are children or wards of the state --but this man is an adult. Who would have a claim upon .him, take him home, make choices for him, etc. What, if any, rights would be granted him?
#10. Should he be allowed to father children? Who and on what grounds could prevent it? Tell the story ofwhat happens here.
# 11. Ultimately, the Ice Man dies. How? And at the international memorial service attended by world leaders, presidents, and thousands of ordinary people, what is said in his memory? Who presides? What music is played? What prayers (if any) are offered?
#12. What does it mean to be human?
CQNTINUING THE STORY
The large group returned, and one byone, the groups stood and told (or even acted out!) their responses to the questions. Because there were more than twelve groups, there were often several widely (wildly) diverse answersto a single question. As each group spoke, a candle was lit around the circle, and gradually a story was told.CLOSING WORDS
I said some words about mystery here, noting that the circle of light we'd made in telling the story was like the boundaries of our knowledge: that what we "know " for sure is often less, or more, than we think. In telling their stories, the groups had dared to proclaim, out of their own experience,. certain "truths " about humanity and the human condition, and though these (like the Ice Man 's own biography) were not provable, they were no less"true. " Sometimes mystery cannot be net withfacts and data (or not with these alone),. sometimes mystery mustbe met by imagination.In closing, I read Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day. "