“Learning to See Differently”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
  Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
September 30, 2007

             When I first came to Washington State seven years ago, one of the things that I had to get used to was that there were different signs than in the Chicago suburbs.

            You see, when I first came to the Pacific Northwest, and I was driving along the interstate, sometimes I would see a sign that looked like this:

             Anyone who had grown up in this part of the country would know that this was a sign for a fire hydrant.

            However, back in the Chicago suburbs where I grew up we didn’t have this kind of sign. So when I first saw this sign, what did I think it was?

            This was clearly, unmistakenly, without any doubt - - as any person who had lived anywhere near Chicago in the 1980s or 1990s would certainly tell you – a silhouette of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan:

             “Why are there Michael Jordan signs all along the interstate?”  I wondered to myself when I first came to Washington State.

            My telling you this may lead some of you to conclude that I am not as intelligent as you once thought, and some of you to conclude that you were right in your initial assessment of me.

            However, I tell this story to make the point not only that different people see things differently, but that each of us learns to see things differently.

            Many of us, I suspect, believe that the way we see things reflects how things really are, but philosophers, spiritual teachers, and other thinkers throughout history have often suggested that growing spiritually is not about learning to believe differently or about learning to do differently but about learning to see differently.

            Sometimes they have talked about “learning to see differently” as a metaphor, and sometimes they have meant it quite literally.

            In Plato’s classic The Republic, the philosopher Socrates describes the allegory of the cave. Socrates asks his companions to imagine a cave in which shackled prisoners have lived their whole lives with their back to a fire at the mouth of the gave but with their heads facing the back wall. When objects pass between the fire and the backs of the prisoners, the objects cast shadows on the back wall of the cave. Since the shadows are the only thing the prisoners can ever see, they mistake the projected shadows for the real things.

            According to Socrates, the allegory of the cave describes how most people live their whole lives, mistaking illusion for what is really real. Only through the study of philosophy, Socrates says, can a person free himself or herself from the shackles of the cave, turn around, go outside into the sunlight, and see things for the way they really are.

            In the Gospel of Matthew in Christian scripture, Jesus tells his disciples, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Let’s remember also that when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven, he wasn’t talking about pie in the sky when you die. He was talking about the possibility of a beloved community of love and justice in the here and now.

            When comparing Socrates’ words to Jesus’ words, it may seem like they are saying very different things, and, indeed they are saying different things, but they both are telling their listeners that they must change the way they look at the world, that they must learn to see differently.

            Similarly in The Little Prince, from which our reading came this morning, it is how one sees a particular picture - - whether as a hat or as a boa constrictor digesting an elephant - - that the narrator uses a judge of a person’s character. Also from this story is the famous line, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

            Sometimes things happen to us in life, and as a result, the world truly looks different to us.

            This past summer I saw the latest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. One scene stood out for me particularly. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you know that as students arrive from London to Hogwarts, the English boarding school for wizards and witches that Harry attends, bewitched horseless carriages transport the students from the train station to the boarding school. However, in the latest film, when Harry arrives at the school, Harry sees that the carriages aren’t really horseless at all, but pulled by thestrals, winged, horse-like beasts that, as another student explains to him, are only visible to a person who has experienced the death of somebody close, which Harry recently has for the first time.

            The scene makes the not-so-subtle point that after we experience a death, the world truly does look different to us in many ways.

            I am also told that after becoming a parent, the world simply looks different as well. I heard about one man who recently became a father and upon meeting a stunningly beautiful but much younger woman at a party, the first thought that came into his head was, “I wonder if she babysits.”

            Other life events change how we see the world, too. After living for four years in Japan, I can’t go to the Seattle Aquarium without getting really hungry.

            So, as I said, sometimes things happen to us in life, and as a result, the world truly looks different.

            However, I think that most of the time if we want to learn to see things differently, we have to make an effort to do so.

            Of course, there are plenty of people who will try to help us to learn to see the world differently.

            The powers that be on Pennsylvania Avenue spend much of their effort to make us feel afraid and angry when we look at the world around us.

            The powers that be on Madison Avenue spend billions of dollars every year to make us feel unhappy and unsatisfied when we look at our own lives.

            But I don’t think any way of looking at the world that makes us feel afraid, angry, unhappy, and unsatisfied is the best way to try to learn to see it.

            How should we try to learn to see the world differently than the society in which we live teaches us to do so?

            There are so many possible ways to answer that question, but let me suggest one way we might try to learn to see differently, and forgive me for taking a round-about way in getting there.

            In August, we held a “Blessing of the Animals” service at the church, and during the blessing of the animals, one little boy asked me - - in front of all of you - - “What does ‘blessing’ mean?”

            All of the rest of you had been blithely, unquestioningly going along with this ritual, but leave it to a young child among us to ask a probing, profound theological question, and it was a very good question, one that I should have been able to answer better than I did at the time.

            When I look up the word “blessing” in my Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary it says that “to bless” means “to confer or invoke divine favour upon” something on someone.

            I claim no such power either for myself or for us as a community. I do not believe I cannot invoke the favor or the wrath of any deity with any word or ritual that I know, though in moments of frustration I have often at least attempted the latter.

            There is, however, another understanding of “blessing” that I like much better.

            In Marilyn Robinson’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel Gilead, the narrator is a Reverend John Ames, a Protestant minister, as was his father, and his grandfather, and in the novel he ruminates quite a bit on the ritual of baptism and describes how as a child he and some other children decided to baptize a litter of kittens.

            “I still remember,” Ames says in the novel, “how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For year we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance the sacredness, but acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

            I like that description a lot: “There is a reality in blessing…It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.”

            I think that’s what we were doing on that Sunday when we were blessing the animals. We were acknowledging the sacredness in each of those animals we blessed. It may not have changed them, but perhaps it changed us.

            In answering the question, “How might we try to learn to see the world differently?” one answer that I’d like to offer for your consideration this morning is that we should more often try to see the sacredness in everything.

            (This is why, by the way, at the end of services here, I often say, “As we leave this place of worship, may we do with more awareness of the sacred all around us and the sacred deep within us.”)        

            I do know the word “sacred” is a word with which some of us may struggle, but for me “sacred” is a word that is nearly synonymous with “precious,” and so I suppose another way of saying what I said before is that we might try more often to see the preciousness in all things.

            But what could a possibly mean by something as platitudinous and saccharine sounding as that?

            It is this…by learning to see the preciousness in everything, I mean learning to see the preciousness in existence itself.

            Abraham Heschel was one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the 20^th century, and Heschel didn’t use the word precious, but a central theme in Heschel’s writing is that of “radical amazement.” In fact, Heschel claimed that living our lives in “radical amazement” - - in wonder and in awe of our own lives, of all life, and of the mystery and miracle of creation - - was at the heart of what it means to be religious.

            There is such a danger, I think, in becoming indifferent to the wonder and beauty of life itself and the world, and if we ever do become so indifferent, if we ever fail to stop seeing the world as a miracle in itself, life loses its fizz like a bottle of soda that’s been left open on the kitchen cabinet overnight.

            By learning to see the preciousness in everything, I also mean learning to see the preciousness in every person.

            The Unitarian Universalist minister Scott Alexander tells a story about walking to church on the morning he was going to preach a sermon about Universalism and its affirmation of the worth of all people.

            That morning, Alexander says, he arose early and poured over his powerful and polemically perfect text. He was privately proud of the depth and passion of his message. As he walked the mile or so from his home, his head was down as he silently rehearsed to himself all the beautiful phrases he had crafted to make his sermon come alive. As he approached a busy intersection, he happened to glance up and see an incredibly large woman sitting on a bench waiting for the bus. Alexander admits always having had a personal obsession about his own weight, and he says in those years he was quite prejudiced and opinionated about people who weighed more than he thought they should. Before he could censor the unkind, judgmental thought, he blurted out to himself, "Oh, dear God look at that gross woman. She must weigh 400 pounds. How could anyone ever let themselves get like that and who could ever love that?"

            And at that moment, he says, as if it were a bolt of spiritual lighting aimed right at him, a skinny little guy sitting next to the woman looked lovingly into her eyes, leaned over, and gave her the most gentle and loving kiss Alexander had ever seen one human being bestow upon another. He says he was stunned and ashamed. And while he was still reeling from the jarring disparity between his petty and unkind judgment and the other man's pure and simple love, a voice came out of the whirlwind and said to him, "Don't you get it, you dope? Here you are, at this very moment going up the hill to preach your clever little sermon, and all you can do is sneer inside at someone who deem unworthy and unbeautiful. Don't you understand that, in the eyes of all that is sacred and beautiful and holy and true in this creation, she is as utterly lovely as human beings get? Don't you get it?"

            I wish I could say I am a much better person than Alexander, but I am not. His prejudices are not my prejudices, but I struggle sometimes too, to see the preciousness in every person. However, when I can, it makes the world seem like a much better place in which to live.

            By learning to see the preciousness in everything, I also mean learning to see every moment in time as precious, every moment as a moment to be valued, not something just to be gotten through.

            The time I usually have the most trouble with this is when I’m driving, especially when traffic is moving slowly. I think to myself, “I’d rather be almost anywhere but here.”

            I’ve tried various techniques to make myself more appreciative of those moments while driving.

            The other day I was driving on Pacific Highway South, and I tried a thought experiment. “Imagine,” I told myself, “that there is a possibility that you might die in a traffic accident before you get home, so that this might be the last 15 minutes of your life. Does this time seem precious to you now?”

            No, it didn’t.  It only made me more anxious about the idiot in the pickup truck behind me tailgating me and talking on his cellphone - - the precious idiot in the pickup truck behind me tailgating me and talking on cell phone.

            “Okay,” I said to myself. “Imagine instead that there is a possibility that an undetected meteor hurtling toward earth at this very moment, so that this might be the last 15 minutes of your life.”

            Since I couldn’t do anything at all about an undetected meteor hurtling toward earth, this - - in a very strange sort of way - - did help, to think that there was some small possibility that this might be my last 15 minutes on earth.  The insipid song on the radio didn’t seem so insipid. The ugly stores along the side of the road didn’t look so ugly. The precious idiot in the pickup truck behind me didn’t even seem like an idiot. The gray sky didn’t look so gray. In fact, it looked like it might turn into a bright, bright, sun-shiny day.

            How do you see the world?

            How might you learn to see the world differently?

            Is it by seeing the preciousness in all existence, in every person, and in every moment?

            Or is it by learning to see differently in some other way that will lead you to a deeper, fuller, richer experience of life?