| October 25, 2009 | The Sunday Pew and the Yellow Brick Road Reverend Don Vaughn-Foerster |
An issue I have encountered in every interim ministry I have served is a disparity between what many people want on Sunday morning and what actually happens in the service. So, today I want to talk about the role of expectations as well as the way expectations may or may not be met on Sunday morning.
Many of us arrive here hopefully expecting that what we may have experienced in other religious settings will not happen here. Many of us have been turned off by the superficiality of gullible faith and maudlin sentimentality. We come seeking a change from the plethora of difficult Sunday experiences that, for many of us, fell into that category to which Lionel Trillin, who is something of a gadfly poet for The New Yorker magazine, referred when he said: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
So, when we come into this room, we come with other, higher expectations. We expect an original meal. We expect something different to happen that will be meaningful to us – something, perhaps, that will even be inspiring. We come here certainly expecting to find something different from the rest of the religiously orthodox world. If we are humanist, we expect an 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 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 efforts at Transcendentalism, spirituality, and experiments in melding oriental and occidental approaches to religion.
In most Unitarian congregations we find all these things, although in different amounts and varying proportions. 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 what applies to us personally from the religious amalgam that is often slanted away from us in subtle ways. However, this is a “sorting” trick that only an accomplished “smorgasbord-ian” can bring off – to create a new term for the determined “diversit-arian ,” which is itself a new term I’ve derived from “Unitarian diversity.” [Here’s a conundrum for you. How can a Unitarian, who believes that, ultimately, all is One, also believe that, ultimately, all that is One is diverse? Perhaps, that’s where Universalism comes in somehow.]
This morning I will not attempt a thoroughgoing treatise on the contents of the smorgasbord, i.e. the nature and content of worship and the celebration of life. 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, our 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. This has always been a simplistic way, and somewhat arbitrary way, of thinking, of course, but, nowadays, we can draw on the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (the MBTI) which seems less simplistic in that it identifies sixteen possible personality types, although four of which seem to be basic, giving the nod to such luminaries as Plato, Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Irenaeus, Galen, and Paracelsus who, also, divided people into four different basic types. The way these four types are designated has changed over the years but the current nomenclature of these four types (or at least the nomenclature I like) 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 this typology places emphasis on certain characteristics that make the types 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.*
The Idealists speak of what they hope for and imagine might be.
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. 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. They’re willing to do whatever gives them a quick, effective payoff, even if they have to bend the rules. Mohammed and St. Francis – and James Bond (007) -- 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. I could also use four central characters from Star Wars, Harry Potter, or even the Disneyland categories of Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Main Street, and Adventureland. Surely everybody knows the story of the Wizard of Oz; 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 the security of 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 useful thing 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 sometimes 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 it 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 on this level is, ultimately, to begin to believe we are not valued, no matter how much we are verbally assured to the contrary.
In our guts, the proof is in the pudding. Either we get our fair intentional share out of the service, 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 Sundays is in the generation of warm feelings and every 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 services always seem 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. It isn’t so much what is done as how it is done. Sometimes the menu of our services seems somewhat lopsided, as if we were trying to balance double cheeseburgers and French fries with only a diet Coke.
The point is that it is the intentional agenda (i.e. the existential focus) of the planners and leaders of the service that shapes these relationships. It is inevitable that, whenever worship leaders follow only their own natural inclinations of what is worthy of celebrating and worthy of worship, a kind of religious tokenism easily occurs and, to outside or differing observers, the mind and heart of the congregation itself seem slanted. That people, whose basic life intentions have been only tokenly 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 intentions, 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 the 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 into “Johnny-One-Note” approaches as the planners become too focused on their own needs or tired and distracted – as if they’re trying to do something they really can’t do. Perhaps a fully balanced and focused worship service is too much to ask – like asking someone with a lisp to say the word “lisp.”
I think a better approach is for those with responsibility for creating the Sunday service in the context of emotional and personality diversity in which we find ourselves to pay close attention to what they are really trying to convey. My experience as a Rational/Scarecrow is that any individual, who is empathetic enough to grasp that different people really do have different religious agendas, can find ways to give those religious agendas due respect in most Sunday services. After all, we all have some Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion in each of us. 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 fairly on Sunday, empathetically asking for help when needed. After all, a fully developed Sunday service will, at some point, speak to the head, the heart, the hand, and the will to survive securely. That is, there will be something valid for the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy. This can be done without becoming a Smorgasbord-ian, but it takes skill and sensitivity.
Perhaps what I am outlining this morning 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, its own feeling tone, and that this is not only inevitable but good. After all, we cannot be all things to all people. But, if we are arbitrary here, we end by dis-inviting other valid Unitarians from joining us and this would require a redefinition of diversity as everybody being different in the same way.
However, this issue of accommodating a true diversity of emphases on Sunday morning is of primary importance. I suspect the way we actually handle diversity is one of the biggest factors in Unitarianism (and Unitarian Universalism) staying at such a low numerical membership -- somewhere around 260,000 members in the U.S. (about 8.5% of its population) and a bit over 5,000 in Canada (a little over 1.5% of its population ). At the root of our problem may be a lip service to diversity, which is often matched by only casual commitment actually to express diversity when diversity makes us feel 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 ways to help us all walk abreast. It is time that we realized that it is not just the goal of being diverse that is important but also how we pursue diversity. It is important that those who would lead into the future understand this. I hope you call a settled minister who knows how to help you do this – someone who can let his or her Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Dorothy all have a meaningful role when standing before you.
To conclude, may we be aware that the primary problem, not just for Unitarians but for the world itself, is how to express diversity without conflict and without estranging one another. In the world, beset by differing temperaments and, often, by the contradiction of black and white ideals and the conflict of ideologies, this seems to be, at times, an impossible task. Just wanting creative and mutually reinforcing diversity seldom makes it happen. Yet, somehow, wanting it strongly enough tends to create respect for those who differ from us. And since it is lack of respect that leads people to demean, dismiss, and be estranged from one another, let us begin by wanting to be around people different from us – and even respecting them for their differences.
*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 and to Montgomery’s own mentor, David Keirsey, who wrote Please Understand Me II, Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, Del Mar, CA 92014
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