Engaging our Fourth Principle: The Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning

Martha Hodges - 2007-02-04

We covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

If there is one sentence that explains what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist, this one, our fourth principle, may be it. Our commitment as UUs is not to a creed, a set of beliefs, but rather, to a process of continual discovery, an unhurried journey. As I wrote these words, I found the words to a familiar poem by Robert Frost coming to me. Maybe just because it’s so cold out, but this poem that I’ve always thought to be about something else, speaks to me about the search for truth and meaning.

Stopping By Woods on A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. We know that in the woods we will find peace, rest, oblivion. But it is not yet time. We must journey on.

We hesitate, our eyes and ears are open to signs of the right way to go, the way home. We think we see a glimmer of light through the trees and we follow it, eagerly or gingerly, as the case may be, only to see it fade or disappear behind unexpected obstacles. We turn back and take another route. But we are not afraid. There is no sense of urgency or threat, but merely a feeling of curiosity. Yes, we seek to get home, but there is no hurry. The woods are lovely but the snowy path between the woods and the frozen lake is also lovely, and full of wonders.

In Unitarian Universalism, the thing that we rely on as being of permanent and transcending value – that “thing” that is at the heart of our faith – is not the destination. We don’t know – can’t know – what that destination is, although we catch glimpses of it from time to time. The object of our faith – the thing that we love and give our lives to – is the very process of discovery, the search, the path-finding. The path is not straight. Sometimes it doubles back and we seem to arrive back where we began. Other times it seems to lead us in circles. Other times it leads us to a dead end; other times to a place of danger; and still other times to sights of indescribable beauty. We often stop and rest along the way, in tears and fatigue or in delight at the loveliness and peace of our surroundings. But we continue. For we have many miles to go before we sleep.

This is the heart of our Unitarian Universalist faith: that the wandering, the search, is, if not all-important, then at least all we can know in this life, and therefore, to be valued and loved, to be lived with courage and commitment and as much integrity as we can muster.

For this is the nature of a “responsible” search for truth and meaning. The “free” search? That part of the equation is easier for us to understand, coming as we do out of a Jewish and Christian tradition that tells us that, because it is written, it is so. We get that part. The free search for truth and meaning is the refusal to submit to the authority of text or priest, tradition or teacher, to tell us what is true – especially when the evidence of our minds and hearts and senses tells us otherwise.

But what does it mean to be responsible in this search?

For one thing, it means to be honest with others and with ourselves. Easier said than done – especially that last part – being honest with ourselves. This means being willing to start over when the path dead ends or leads us in the wrong direction. It means being willing to reevaluate experiences that we thought we understood, to go back and re-examine them in the light of new evidence. If the compass we have relied on proves faulty, throw it out and rely on the stars for guidance. That’s hard work and it can be frightening. Sometimes exhilarating and liberating, but also disorienting and confusing. Admitting to ourselves that we are mistaken may cause the unraveling of all kinds of meanings that we had assigned to the world, that we thought we could rely on. It certainly demands that we change our behavior toward others, that we make different choices.

The Jesuit priest and pastoral counselor Anthony de Mello tells a story about the need for this kind of humility: To a visitor who described himself as a seeker after Truth, the teacher said, “If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.” “I know,” answered the student, “an overwhelming passion for it.” “No,” said the teacher, “an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.” The search for truth cannot be called responsible without this kind of humility. Humility is the sister of honesty and it is the foundation of intellectual integrity.

If we could practice this kind of humility, this kind of responsibility in our search for truth, imagine how different our world would be. It’s easy to accuse religious zealots of lacking this kind of humility. Religious liberals are quick to point out the arrogance of those who claim to have found the truth – the exclusive truth – and who proceed to pass judgment on all who do not adhere to this truth. We are right to criticize this kind of arrogant claim to the truth.

But what about our own tendencies to think we have a corner on the truth? As human beings, no one is immune to this kind of self-righteousness. I know I’m not. That “unremitting readiness to admit you might be wrong?” That’s a hard discipline to practice. To be perfectly honest, it’s a discipline I’m not sure I even want to attempt. There are a few things that I’d like to cling to as non-negotiable. For example, that gratuitous cruelty is wrong. It’s wrong to torture animals. But what about cruelty that serves a purpose other than self-gratification? What about the torture of laboratory animals in the service of medical research?

This is the kind of question that makes me want to run screaming from the argument, because neither answer is acceptable to me. If this is the measure of the responsible search for truth – that one must confront one’s internal contradictions – then I admit that I often fail the test. My gut tells me that this kind of experimentation is wrong. That lessening human suffering does not justify inflicting suffering on non-humans. But do I want to defend that position? Not really. Am I willing to admit that I don’t know? Or that I think I know but that I might be wrong? You bet.

How hard it would be for people on all sides of the question to take an agnostic position on abortion or stem-cell research or capital punishment or the war in Iraq! But how it would change our national conversations and our relationships with one another, if we could admit to the possibility that we might be wrong. To admit that we make the best judgments we can, based on the understanding that is available to us, but to acknowledge that this is true for our opponents, as well. To admit that we’re all stumbling in the dark. That we have to make a decision to proceed along one path or another, but that someone else may carry the lantern that will shed light on that path. Perhaps that person is the last one we would expect to enlighten us. But that person may show us that we need to change course, that the path we are on leads off a cliff. We are free to march bravely off the cliff, but the responsible search, the mind that remains open, even if by just a crack, will call us back from the edge.

Humility should not paralyze us. It should not prevent us from making a decision or taking a stand. But at the very least, it should bring a level of civility and mutual respect to our debates that is virtually non-existent, at least in our public life. I’m not talking about a superficial politeness, a conventional regard for tact and the appearance of listening to each other. Although, come to think of it, that would be an improvement in our political behavior, and in many cases, our in our personal lives. What I’m really advocating is a leap of imagination. A willingness to truly hear others from a position of non-defensiveness. Defensiveness makes us deaf to the perspectives of others. It’s the result of our fear of being wrong. But if we begin from an openness to that possibility of being wrong, then we can hear each other. And if we can hear each other, together, we might just advance the cause of Truth, with a capital T, as well as the infinite smaller truths that we encounter every day.

This humility that is at the heart of the responsible search for truth also calls us to critically examine our sources and to question ourselves, our biases, shortcomings, motivations and fears. To be responsible demands that we acknowledge that we are not objective observers of the evidence. We are not disinterested interpreters of reality.

You’re familiar with the sources of truth that we acknowledge as Unitarian Universalists. They’re printed on the back of your order of service every week, right below the seven principles. Not all of these six sources are of equal value to each one of us. Some, we may reject outright, and that’s okay. But more importantly, this list barely scratches the surface. An accurate list of sources would be pages long and would be different for each one of us. Mine, for example, would include my parents and sisters. It would include every book I’ve ever read, including the ones I disagreed with. It would have to include poetry, art and music. It would include novels, nature, history, depth psychology and existentialism; life experiences of my own and of friends and of fictional characters, Shakespeare and Greek mythology, children and world cultures, rock formations and animals and architecture.

These are sources of wisdom, not because everything they say can be taken at face value, but because they challenge me to evaluate, to look for connections and analogies, to peel away layers of metaphor and interpretation. The sources that have formed your intelligence, in all its many facets, will be different from anyone else’s. It’s important to understand what they are and how they have informed us and through what lenses of circumstance and need if we are to be responsible seekers.

Something your teacher told you when you were seven or eight may continue to form your expectations of life, your understanding of what it means to be human. For example, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Snyder, taught me that there was virtue in poverty – that a family with six kids was more deserving than mine because they never had enough money and that that made them better people. What I learned, through my seven-year-old’s sense of right and wrong, was that having a new coat when you needed it was something shameful. She told us a story of how she had sent her little girl to her room as punishment for comparing her spaghetti to worms. Her daughter died that night and she always regretted that her last words to her daughter were cross ones. The moral of the story was that someone you love could die at any minute, so you should always be nice to them. If they die, it just might be your fault. At least that was the moral that I heard at age seven. She taught me that a classmate who knew his Bible stories would go far in life, and what I understood was that a Unitarian child was at fault, wrong in some fundamental way. She taught me that I was bad at math and, in her words, “almost as stupid as Tommy Tracy.” What my seven-year old self learned was that if you weren’t quick and perfect in everything you did, you would be humiliated and punished. That there was no room for failure and that being wrong was unacceptable.

Now, it took me a few years to figure out Mrs. Snyder was full of it. That she was a bitter person, limited, as are we all, by her pain and prejudices. I did eventually figure it out. But the fundamental message, that I was not okay, that I should be ashamed – that lesson was absorbed by my seven-year-old self and was not so easy to shake. Was Mrs. Snyder a source of wisdom? Absolutely. But her value as a guide to truth derives from her example of human shortcomings. We must consider our sources with care and be prepared to learn from their inadequacies as well as their wisdom.

It’s easy to be critical of a teacher who was so blatantly misguided. It’s harder to critically examine our own prejudices and formative life experiences. To say, yes, that made sense at age seven, but I know better now. Now I can choose to accept or reject those teachings, based on what else I’ve learned of life.

To be a responsible seeker of truth requires that kind of discipline. To look at how our fears and our needs make us see one thing and not another. At how our opinions and prejudices were formed and to re-evaluate them in light of new evidence and greater maturity, experience and judgment. To be a responsible truth seeker means never settling for the truth we have, but always seeking a deeper layer, a new perspective, a more authentic encounter.

It also calls us to patient with ourselves and with each other and to do the best we can with the limited and temporary truth we possess. In religious community, we can piece together the fragments of truth that each of us clutches and, in this way, enlarge our shared and separate understandings.

I want to close with a story about how two truth-seekers had such an encounter, as told by one of my colleagues. She writes:

I was working in my church office and the only one in the church this morning, when a great big young man walked in. He was dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a Bible. I was a bit taken aback because people don't usually just walk in off the street here and it made me a little nervous. He said he lived nearby and asked if I had a minute to talk. I said, "yes," and he sat down.

He said that he was an evangelical Christian and that he was beginning to read things in the Bible that didn't support the views of the evangelicals he was associated with. His whole viewpoint was changing and he didn't know where he fit in. We are in NC and he was just finishing up a theological degree at a Southern Baptist seminary.

As we talked it turned out he had seen the church and read our website. He said, "I knew you wouldn't reject me anyway!”

I find this story deeply moving. We are the place that won’t reject you for questioning the beliefs of your upbringing, your peers and family—the beliefs of the majority. We are the place that welcomes doubt.

May we all have the courage and humility of this young man, to reach out to others with our questions even when they call us to re-examine everything we have trusted in the past. May we be fearless in our search for truth, patient and self-aware. And may we be truly grateful for this place where freedom is tempered with responsibility, where we can ask the questions that matter, where we can learn to listen for the answers, wherever they may come from.