GAMES PEOPLE PLAY WHILE

WAITING FOR GODOT

A sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy

prepared for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

28 January, 2001

READING

Can I, imprisoned, body bounded, touch

The starry robe of God, and from my soul,

My tiny part, reach forth to his great Whole,

And spread my Little to the infinite Much,

When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,

And What I take indeed, I do but dole

In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl

That holds a million million million Such?

And yet some Thing that moves among the stars,

And holds the cosmos in a web of law,

Moves too in me:  a hunger, a quick thaw

Of soul that liquefies the ancient bars,

As I , a member of creation, sing

The burning oneness binding everything.

Kenneth Boulding

from There is a Spirit: The Nayler Sonnets.

SERMON

The title of this discourse is over 30 years old.  The content is not.

Those of you who were, like me, teenagers during the fifties, may remember a film titled, I think, Gamesmanship in which Alister Sims, in one hilarious scene after another teaches and practices the art of “one upsmanship.”  That comedy was an early application to psychology of a mathematical discipline created during world war 2 called “Game Theory.”

Later, in the sixties, Psychiatrist Eric Berne published a book titled, “Games people Play” and a new school of Psychotherapy was born. Transactional Analysis.  T. A. applied game theory to interpersonal relationships. We learned that each of us is really a committee: a “child”, an “adult” and a “parent” all within the same skin, each perpetually involved in transactions with the other two. And each of these internal “ego states” engaged in transactions with one or more of the ego states within other bags of skin, other apparently unitary but actually multiple persons.  We became familiar with games like, “Wooden leg,” “Schlemiel,” “Uproar,” “If It Weren’t for You” and my favorite, “Gee, You’re Wonderful Mr. Mergatroid” Many psychiatrists, psychologists, ministers and other mind manipulators paid large sums of money to become “certified Transactional Analysts,” I among them.  In workshops and conferences we mastered a whole new lexicon and learned how to draw complex diagrams to describe the internal and interpersonal relations of the “the child,” “the parent,” and “the adult.”

T.A. was an elegant and useful model, a new way to talk about and change our inner lives, what religion calls “the life of the spirit.”

By the end of the 60’s “I’m O.K. you’re O.K.” the title of another bestseller by, Tom Harris, one of Berne’s disciples, was the phrase on everyone’s lips.  But the “professional” literature of TA practitioners had become almost theological.  It seemed to me we were arguing about “how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.”  Bern’s simple model had mutated, taken on a life of its own and — for me at least — lost its utility as an instrument of healing.  So, I modified the model, with a little help from Fritz Perls, and used it for years in my counseling practice.  But that’s another story.  That was then, this is now.

Ten days ago, I attended the UU “spirituality” quest group here in San Miguel.  Our guest was a visiting “healer”who used the ancient Hindu concept of Chakra’s and a more modern “new age” jargon of “auras” and “energy fields” to describe our inner, interpersonal and transpersonal lives.  And she tied all this in with the metaphysical nature of the Universe.  In other words, “what’s really real.”

During one of the exercises – I won’t go into detail — she asked the members of the group, “Do you feel it?”  “Do you feel it?” Most answered, “Yes” but one said, “No not really.” To which our healer said, laughing “You don’t believe a word of it, do you?”

Now I don’t know whether chakra’s, and auras, and chi and chai or yin or yang or any of the other terms represent are really real or not. I do know that the “healer” was not only real but good.  She did not put down those of us “couldn’t believe a word of it.  She cared about us and used her belief to try to heal, never to harm.   Who among us can say, with absolute certainly, can say what’s “really real?” Not many.  But there are a few among us who find it easy to say, “Baloney” to many other persons versions of “what’s really real.”

I must confess I find many of the ideas that are popular among younger UU’s literally in credible — unbelievable.  But that is not what is important — and this is the whole point of this sermon.  What is important is not whether a belief is true.  What is important is what that belief does to a person. What is important is what that belief encourages, empowers, makes real in the life of the community to which that person belongs. Sophia Lyon Fahs said it much better.

“It matters what we believe.  Some beliefs are like walled gardens.  They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.  Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.   Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.  Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose ones own direction.  Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood.  They blight the growth of resourcefulness.  Other beliefs nurture self confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.  Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

These are the criteria by which I evaluate beliefs and not only to beliefs about the inner life, but beliefs about the world “out there” as well.

Which brings me to the second part of the title.  Waiting for Godot.

About the same time as Bern published his book, Games People Play, Waiting for Godot by Irish writer Samuel Becket, reached Broadway.  A merry and mysterious drama featuring two clowns who are, ostensibly, are waiting for someone named Godot. He never does show up, incidentally, but, while waiting, the clowns have long conversations about whether he is really coming, whether he exists, whether they are at the right place, whether he has come and gone before they arrived, etc., etc.  The play was of course really about everyman’s — and every woman’s — search for GOD.  Or to use modern terminology, Ultimate Reality The Really Real.   I think all of us, long ago, gave up the vision of God as a person.  But we still ask “What’s really real?”

Most of us would reply, “Whatever Science says is Really Real is Really Real: Energy congealed in various ways from Neutrinos to Galaxies with Stars and Planets and Earth and us somewhere between the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small. That’s what’s really real.”

For most of us it seems that scientists have finally answered the question that Job heard coming from the whirlwind which asked,

“ Who measured out the earth?  Do you know that?  Who stretched the builders line?  What were its pedestals placed on? Who laid the cornerstone, when the morning-stars began to shine, and all the angels chanted in their joy?”

The voice Job heard asked questions that were thought unanswerable 25 centuries ago.  Most people then responded to such questions, “Because the gods made it that way.”  Even today, that’s an adequate answer for many.

Do you remember the old camp song,

“Tell me why the stars do shine.

Tell me why the ivy twines.

Tell me why the sky’s so blue.

And I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,

Because God made the ivy twine

Because God made the sky so blue,

Because God made you, that’s why I love you.”

Last week I finished a delightful book titled:  “Galileo’s Daughter”.  It’s not really about Galileo’s illegitimate daughter who became a cloistered nun at 13, but it uses her letters to her father as a framework for discussing the transition from the medieval world view to the modern world view.

Although Galilee is credited by most with dragging the intellectuals of the seventeenth from the earth centered to the sun centered world view, the credit really belongs to Nicholas Copernicus a Polish Clergyman who, in 1543.  Published in Latin “De revolutionibus.”  It was the defense of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory 90 years later that landed Galileo in the hands of the Inquisition.

Dava Sobel, author of Galileo’s Daughter writes,

It is difficult today — from the [modern] vantage point of [our] insignificance on this small planet of an ordinary star set along a spiral arm of one galaxy among billions in an infinite cosmos — to see the Earth as the center of the universe.  Yet that is where Galileo found it.

The [official] cosmology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries founded on the fourth century BCE teachings of Aristotle and refined by the Second-century [CE] Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, made Earth the immobile hub. Around it, the Sun, the Moon, the five planets, and all the stars spun eternally, carried in perfectly circular paths by the motions of nested crystalline celestial spheres. This heavenly machinery, like the gearwork of a great clock, turned day to night and back to day again.” (page 49)

That was what was “really real” for nearly all educated Europeans in Copernicus’ life time.  Everybody who was anybody believed it.

Today we are likely to say Galileo was right and the Church was wrong.  But the fact of the matter is that both were wrong.  It is as inaccurate to say the Sun is the center of the Universe as it is to say the Earth is.

But the point is not that both the Ptolmeic and Copernican world views were incorrect. The point is that thanks — or no thanks — to Galileo, we homo sapiens sapiens were removed from the center of the Universe, reduced to insignificance, lost in the stars. “It matters what we believe.”

As Science took us farther and farther out — thanks to instruments like the Hubbell telescope; and as Science took us deeper and deeper in, thanks to instruments like the supercolliders, Science encountered a paradox: the theory explaining “everything,” can no longer, even theoretically, be tested or so claims David Lindly in his 1993 book The End Of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory. Lindly ends his book with these provocative words:

“That the world can be understood by pure reason, not by experimentation but by mentation alone, is a very old idea, reaching back to the ancient Greeks. For the modern advocates of theories of everything, as for the ancient Greeks, reason, logic, and physics are supposed to constitute the unmoved mover, the uncaused effect.   … This (modern) theory of everything will be, in precise terms, a myth.  A myth is a story that makes sense within its own terms, offers explanations for everything we see around us, but can neither be tested nor disproved.  A myth is an explanation that everyone agrees on because it is convenient to agree on it, not because its truth can be demonstrated.  This theory of everything, this myth, will indeed spell the end of physics.  It will be the end, not because physics has at last been able to explain everything in the universe, but because physics has reached the end of all the things it has the power to explain.” (Emphasis added.)

A myth?   Doesn’t Science tell us what’s really real?  No, it doesn’t.  That’s a common misunderstanding, a misunderstanding perpetuated by inadequate science teachers in our schools and evangelical science popularizers on television.

Two thousand six hundred years ago, Thales, the Greek, asked , “Behind the infinite variety of life, is there a common, immutable thread?”   Many of us believe that today’s nuclear physicists have discovered that immutable thread, the ultimate reality beyond which there is nothing more.  We forget whether it’s an atom, or a neutron, or a quark or a one dimensional string but we trust the Scientists to tell us what’s really real.

We reject the old testament myth.  We reject the Ptolmeic medieval myth. We reject the Mayan myth which Mark Taylor is describing in his Parochia lectures each week, but we trust the scientific myth.

Should we?  Should we trust the scientists to tell us what’s really real?  No, we shouldn’t.  What should trust them to do is to search for ever more inclusive generalizations of what they “see” as they look ever farther out into space and ever deeper in within the sub atomic world.  Science is the process by which we develop ever more inclusive myths.  But we should remember that the modern scientific word view is no less a Myth than was the world view of Job or of Ptolmey or of Galileo, of the Mayans of the ancient Hindus.  The Scientific world view is simply a better myth for explaining the kinds of things that Science can explain. Science is one more game people play while waiting for Godot.  Science does not tell us “what’s really real.”

So, what is really real?

Are the inner “child,” “parent” and “child”

as T.A. taught, really real?

Are quarks and black holes, galaxies and superstrings,

as the scientifically illiterate believe, really real?

Are God and Satan, Angles and Demons,

as the Fundamentalist Christians believe, really real?

Are Goddesses and Gods,

as the new Pagans believe, really real?

Are auras and chakras and celestial spheres,

as some new agers believe, really real?

Are ghosties and goblins and “things that go bump in the night,”

as most children believe, really real?

Well, all of the above and none of the above.

My contention is that none of these sets is really real.  Do I therefore come to the conclusion that nothing is really real; that each person’s “reality” is equally valid?  No.  I’ve come to the conclusion that Thales asked the wrong question.  Remember?  Thales asked, “Behind the infinite variety of life, is there a common, immutable thread?”  That’s the question that the Nuclear Physicists and the Cosmologists have been pursuing.  It’s an interesting question but the important question is this:

Given an increasing ability to explain, predict and control the non human world, how can that knowledge best be used in the service of humanity?    That is the religious question.

“How can knowledge best be used in the service of humanity?”    If we fail to ask that question we fall into what Pascal called, “Concupicense of the intellect”If we fail to ask that question, we become like him who Mary Shelly called “Dr. Frankenstein.”

For me the “really real” is not found in material things, those “things” which can be sensed and quantified.  For me the “really real” is found in non material “not things”- “not things” like Justice, and Mercy, and Humility and Forgiveness, and Gratitude, and Remorse, and Loyalty, and Grace, and Friendship, and Encouragement, and Peace and love; oh yes most especially in Love.  The religious person explores these realities with the same enthusiasm as the physicist pursues “the immutable thread.”

Our Hymnal is composed of many persons’ explorations of these realities.  Many different Myths, myths that have given and do give meaning to life for various persons, are represented in our Hymnal. What is he best myth for you?  I don’t know but, with Joseph Campbell, I give you this advice.  Choose the myth or myth that feeds your soul.  Or perhaps I should say choose the myths — plural — that feed your soul.  It may be that it is foolish to think that the same myth which explains the stars can explain the human spirit.  Consistency is useful servant but a dangerous god.  But whether you choose one myth or many never forget you are choosing a myth.    It only represents, it is not itself “the really real.”

So, practicing the polymythologism that I recommend, I close this sermon with a prayer. It uses the word God, but the Word Universe or Creator or Vital Force could have been used as well.    Let us now re-center and ponder these words of the poet Jaroslav Vajda:

“God of the sparrow,

God of the whale,

God of the swirling stars,

How does a creature say Awe?

How does a creature say Praise?

God of the earthquake, God of the storm, God of the trumpet blast:

How does a creature cry Woe?

How does a creature cry Save?

…..

God of the hungry,

God of the Sick,

God of the prodigal:

How does the creature say Care?

How does the creature say Life?

God of the neighbor,

God of the foe,

God of the pruning hook:

How does the creature say Love?

How does the creature say Peace?

God of the ages,

God near at hand,

God of the loving heart:

How do your children say Joy?

How do your children say Home?

Words:  ©Jaroslav J. Vajda, 1963

from the Methodist Hymnal