The Recovering Rationalist, a Twelve Step Program

A sermon for Unitarian Universalist Congregations

by Mary K. Isaacs and Martin Bryant

delivered to the Comal County UU Fellowship

May 17, 2000

 

Martin:

Hello, my name is Martin Bryant, and I am a recovering rationalist.  Defying my First United Methodist Church of New Braunfels upbringing and my born-again Baptist High School sweetheart, I found I just couldn’t reconcile myself to Christianity and began a twenty year wallow in intellectual materialist atheistic rationalism. 

Recovery for me came about, as it does for many, from a different kind of recovery.  Just over a handful of years ago, as I approached forty, my eyesight, began to decay somewhat as it does for many approaching that big hump.  The major symptom was difficulty reading.  Of course, I just said “I don’t have time for reading” and ignored it for awhile, but finally a friend persuaded me to get my eyes checked and I got some reading glasses.

The result was that I dove headlong back into reading and in that first year I picked up some Emerson.  Well, that great Unitarian saint reached across a century and a half and lifted me right out of my self-satisfied intellectual wallow and I began to think like a transcendentalist.  I told my wife, whom I understood had been raised in such a cult that if this was the stuff they preached down at the UU church, we should give it a try.  

I must also say that contributing to my recovery was my rediscovery of music.  Though I had a youthful career as a musician, over the last handful of years - I’ve discovered singing and it is hard to deny the deep-rooted spiritual message that the song invokes.

Finally, there is an almost automatic spiritual instruction in parenting. Witnessing the miracle of birth and life first hand, and experiencing the innocent love of children is a time-honored path to spiritual awakening.  The hardened rationalist I was, it wasn’t until the third child that I finally “got the message”

 

Mary K. :

Good evening.  My name is Mary K., and I am a recovering rationalist.  I grew up Unitarian, in a fiercely rationalist household, with parents who scoffed at spiritualist hoo-ha.  As an adult, I married a wonderful rationalist man, and we celebrated our dysfunctional addiction together in distinctly UU-style late night verbal wrangles.  Years passed, we began having children, and I began to change.  I came to believe/realize there was more, that my life, understanding, and work had been limited, some of my energies squandered, and I undertook/welcomed an awakening which has changed my life.

I was extremely fortunate to have a spouse engaged in a similar course of self-discovery, admission, and recovery.  Martin and I have been blessed with each other’s love, support, and companionship through this sometimes difficult, often uplifting process of weaning ourselves of our debilitating reliance on logic and reason as the sole sources of truth.

We did not have the benefit of a 12-step program.  We have pieced this guide together from our own experience to help other addicts who are ready to acknowledge the savage hold that rationalism has on their lives, admit defeat, and embark on the road to a brighter future.

The first step, of course, is to realize you need help, and ask for it.  If there is something beyond rationality, beyond the reasonings of the human brain, then we must reach beyond our brains to find it.  We must reach to community, to human relationships.  We must make a commitment to other people in a self-selected community.  In other words, since you are here, you have taken the first step:  the first step to recovery is to go to church.

 

Martin:

The second step is to realize that the world has a good deal of inexplicable chaos left in it and that you are not in control.  Logic, formulae, and facts, cannot ever put in you in control of the things you believe to be most important - love and death. -- I’m not sure they can put you in control of taxes either, there doesn’t seem to be much logic there. --

Perhaps Einstein’s greatest gift to modern science was not the special theory of relativity, but a comeuppance.  With Newtonian physics, Euclidean Geometry, and finally, Darwinian natural selection, science was feeling pretty self satisfied at the prior turn of the century. Scientists were declaring “laws of thermodynamics” and such and felt pretty certain that science could explain everything

Then Mr. Einstein came along with pure logic that dispelled the certainty that all could be explained, by showing the limits of Newtonian physics.  In fact, a tenet of Einstein’s theories was uncertainty itself, a principal that has grown into chaos theory, one of the most active areas of science today.  Now we know so much more than we did before the Einstein dropped his bomb on the scientific world.  However, you don’t find scientists declaring too many “laws” any more and many of our discoveries, as they so often do, show just how much more we do not understand.

Einstein reinforced the truth that through science we know a great deal about a great many things that do not matter so much, through Religion we get only a glimpse of those truths which matter the most.

 

Mary K.

The third step can be a real challenge.  We must acknowledge that feelings are every bit as important as facts – that, in truth, feelings are facts as important as the Theory of Relativity.  We mourn our own deaths and rejoice in our own lives, and revel or wallow in dozens of other feelings besides, and these emotions are not completely explainable by science.  In spite of their mystery, however, feelings are irrefutable guideposts to living a successful life.  Unless we allow ourselves to become completely heartless and desensitized, it hurts to hurt people.

It feels great to make people happy.  Our regret and joy, and those of others, are messages we should listen and respond to, every bit as much as the cut we put a band-aid on.  And, of course, ultimate success can only be measured by how you feel looking back on your life when it nears its end.

 

Martin:

Now the fourth step may show you the limits of logic.  For the fourth step, I’m going to ask you to make a life-style altering commitment to an ethical decision.  Join the voluntary-simplicity movement and quit your job for less money but more time and simplicity, learn to meditate and practice it every day, become a faithful vegetarian, volunteer five hours a month to a charity social action cause, start a garden, take your tv out to the curb on garbage day.

The interesting thing you may find is that although you can construct logical reasons for doing any of the above - “I should behave in a way that maximizes human good, blah, blah, blah “- these reasons alone will not provide you the discipline necessary to stick with it.  What provides this discipline is the emotional satisfaction you’ll get from living your intellectually developed ethical program. In other words, it is your conscience that will keep you on track, your faith. 

At last year’s SWUUSI UU summer camp,  Rev. Dan Hotchkiss asked participants to make a lifestyle altering commitment to a faith “strong enough to hang a bridge on”.  If our UU faith is not strong enough to inspire us to change our lives for the good - what good is it?

 

Mary K.:

The fifth step is easier.  Many of us have done it already, but perhaps without thinking about its consequences.  Adopt a hero, some great woman or man who personifies what you consider excellence in a human being.  You can start with someone easy like Sagan or Einstein.  Then allow yourself to adopt new heroes over time … next might come Emerson or Lao Tsu … if you eventually take Rumi or Emanuel Swedenborg, you’ve really come a long way.  The people you choose to admire and emulate will change your very being.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

 

Martin:

The sixth step challenges us to broaden our new found inspiration and take it to one of the hardest places for it to go.  Back to the religion which drove us from inspiration into rationality.  For this sixth step, I’d like you to revisit the church of your youth, or a religious text from that church.  The one you may have rejected.  You are enjoined not to sneer!  Your goal is find some part of you that belongs there. 

Listen for the hymns that stir you.  See your grandparents and ancestors in those pews. Find those chapters that prick something deep within your psyche.  It is important to realize that what you are recovering to is not transcendentalism, or unitarianism, or universalism, or any other ism, but the true religion, which you may never completely understand, and that true religion is also at the core of Judaism and Christianity and Islam although it may be difficult for you to perceive it there. 

As you are recovering, you are returning to a faith of your forebears. 

 

Mary K.:

The seventh step hearkens back to an important part of the 12 steps of AA: acknowledging and making right, as far as possible, the harm done to other people through out-of-control behavior.  This is hard, hard to do.  It is also essential to the recovering addict’s internal process of becoming a better person.  This bitter, healing pill works like this for recovering rationalists:  If there are people whom you have hurt by diminishing their faith because they couldn’t explain it in terms acceptable to your rational standards, go to them directly, and apologize.  Even if it was long ago.  Even if they’ve forgotten all about it.  Committing to righting past wrongs will reaffirm the importance of kindness and compassion, even in the absence of understanding.  It will also serve as a beneficial reminder of our own limitations and the value of humility.  It will be good for you.

 

Martin:

Having recognized the seed of true religion in your past and in others whose religion you once diminished, the next step is to see this true religion in the ancient and in the future, and to experience it viscerally.  Now as challenging as this sounds, many of you will find step eight to be a good deal of fun. 

For step eight, I’m going to encourage you to go to one of those drumming and dancing events that are regularly made available to those of the UU community.  Now maybe you’ll need to go and stand around a bit the first time, but to truly complete step eight, your are going to have to drum or dance and really get into it.  You should probably take off some item of clothing (your shoes will do). 

Now henna tattoos, sweat lodges and fire walks can wait, but your recovery process would not be complete without giving your inspiration the chance to dance..

Now about step nine,

Some folks, even pagans and rationalist like Christmas the best, and some love Halloween, or Valentine’s Day, but my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.  Perhaps it is because a basic principle of everyone of the world’s sustainable religions is gratitude. To be thankful for life itself, the opportunity to be me. 

We receive so many blessings - we cannot drive down the road or buy food at the store, but for the good will of those around us. We live by simeltaneously the accident of our soul birth and the sweat of our ancestors in the most plentiful, culturally rich, and free society ever concocted by man. .Life itself, which we barely understand beyond the interaction of amino acids, delivers the food on our table, cleans our air, provides us this fascinating, diverse “garden” and our bodies, our being.. 

Now we often think of thanks as something we give - that is we say “thank you”… and that is wonderful, but gratitude is more than that. Thanks can also be something we “take” - like communion or medicine.  Without specifically thanking anyone or anything we can feel immense gratitude for these many blessings. And this feeling of gratitude is appropriate and beneficial.  It recognizes that all those  things which sustain us, develop us, please us, inspire us,  do not come from ourselves. 

For the ninth step, the recovering rationalist could adopt, as we have in our family a practice of saying “grace”. Of finding a regular time, daily at meals, in the moment of silence at church, on our regular walk, as we mow the yard, or lie in bed at night going to sleep, to contemplate our blessings, even if we do not understand their source, and take our grace – in regular doses…

 

Mary K.

We arrive at the tenth step.  A Buddhist student embarking on the dhamma, the path to enlightenment and ultimate freedom, is required first to clean up his or her physical life … so the student will not create mental disorder by misbehaving.  The rules are strikingly similar to the Ten Commandments – although not identical.  There are injunctions against stealing, lying, and killing – anything (vegetarianism is required).  There is one many Westerners don’t understand that prohibits sleeping in high, luxurious, cozy beds.

The advantages of this approach are several-fold.  It allows the mind to begin to be cleansed without the complication of adding more mess as you go.  It introduces purity to the body which translates directly to mental clarity.  It lessens distractions and begins the process of distancing students from former attachments, attachments being the primary source of human suffering in the Buddhist view.  And – and here we come to the kernel of the tenth step – following these rules of behavior simplifies people’s lives and gives them mental space, emptiness, which is essential to be able to perceive the truth we carry within ourselves.

Lao Tsu recognized the power of emptiness in the Tao Te Ching: “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.  We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”

The tenth step, then, is to recognize the inspirational power of stillness and emptiness, and introduce them regularly into your life.  With me, this takes the form of meditation, which I try to do every day.  Meditation clears my head and grounds me in this moment, which is, in the end, the only place truth can be found.  Walt Whitman wrote, “Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place – not for another hour, but this hour.”

A liberal religion, like our own, recognizes no religious authority outside oneself.  Each person’s truth is unique.  And that truth can only be discovered, or uncovered, if you let it be, by stilling the clamor of your own mind.

 

Martin:

Now the next step is one I still find hard - and I’m going to ask you to help me with it a bit later.   I don’t know why I find saying grace easy and praying so hard. 

Perhaps it is in the nature of prayer - like gratitude - we culturally feel that prayer is a kind of communication. And for many of us when we’ve tried to pray, we felt a little like trying to “Jesus on the line” and being left on hold for a very long time….

However I’d like you to look with me at another meaning of prayer and in this way we can see prayer a lot like we see gratitude - we could think of it as gratitude’s sister. 

Way back in step two we recognized that we are not in control - that all of our logic and rationality cannot put us into control.  And for this reason our future is uncertain.  Now the this alternative view of prayer is that it makes a statement of hopeful humility. As grace is about the past gifts to our present prayer is about our future.

Now, most mature folks know that a prayer is not a request for material goods or even for expected outcomes, but rather a humble hope that good will survive. I expect that many in this room believe as I do that there is not a white robed angelic figure who can swoop down from a multidimensional heaven and protect the good and deliver a bright tomorrow.  If you believe as I do, you’d better be prepared to do God’s work, because there is no one else to do.it.

Prayer is the promise we make to ourselves to sustain that good and deliver that tomorrow, but it comes with a humility, the knowledge that we may not be able to.

 

Mary K.

Now we come to the twelfth and final step.  The first eleven are to seek spiritual community, accept you’re not in control, recognize the importance of feelings, make a lifestyle change, choose a hero or heroine, reclaim your religious past, redress injuries of past condescending snootiness, dance and whoop a bit, establish practices of gratitude and stillness, and learn to pray.  If you progress through these eleven steps, even if a little reluctantly, it will change your life, making you a better, happier, deeper, kinder, more aware person.  Another way of describing this process of self-betterment and deepening awareness is as a spiritual awakening.

The twelfth step, therefore, is this:  Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of the first eleven steps, carry this message to others and practice these principles in all your affairs.  Discover your internal stillness sitting in a traffic jam.  Practice gratitude every time you think about it, with everyone.  Laugh a lot.

Live your church.  You are your church, after all.  It has no life but for the people in it.  And rationalists have it right in one way:  it is better, the more you know.  But rationalists sometimes approach life – I approached life – with the credo, “the one with the most facts and best logic, wins.”  This we now, in recovery, reject as a sad and unnecessary limitation on the remarkable possibilities of human connection, awareness, and love.

And rather than thinking that people with spiritual conviction are pitiable, soft-in-the-head saps, we’ve discovered that in our single-minded insistence on flawless logic and empirical evidence, it was we who wore the blinders, and as we continue to cut the blinders away in the patient process of recovery, we become happier, stronger, more alive, and more whole.

Go forth faithfully…

Prayer..

May we see beyond the towers of empiricism we have built in our minds to the mountains of inspiration in our hearts.  May we accept from and give to our church, family, and community abounding good will, and bravely peer through the windows they provide into the true religion we share.  May we practice what brings us inspiration, joy, and peace.

May we live faithful to our minds and hearts, in humility and hope, and dedicate ourselves  to sustaining the good in ourselves and our world.  Go in peace…

The Recovering Rationalist - a twelve step program

1	Go to church - realize that whatever spirituality is - you can’t do it alone.  If there is something beyond rationality - community and relationships will help you find it….
2	Realize you are not in control and that rationality cannot ever put you in control of the things you believe to be most important, love and death.
3	Recognize that feelings are every bit as important as facts.  Mourn (in advance) your own death, rejoice in your life - realize these emotions are not completely explainable.
4	Make a lifestyle-altering commitment based only on ethical considerations - voluntary simplicity - involvement in charity or social cause - vegetarianism.  Be faithful.
5	Adopt a hero
6	Revisit the church of your youth or a religious text you rejected.  Do not sneer… Find the part of you that belongs there - your heritage.
7	Recall someone whose faith you diminished because they could not explain it in terms acceptable to your rationality, and apologize for this, even if they have forgotten it.
8	Attend a drumming/dancing event - drum or dance -  give your inspiration the chance to dance…
9	Develop a regular discipline of gratitude - say grace.
10	Find the inspirational power of stillness / silence / emptiness - meditate in some form.
11	Learn to pray.
12	“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we will carry this message to others and practice these principles in all of our affairs”   Live your church.

Mary K.Isaacs and Martin Bryant,           www.ibfam.net