The Certainty of Uncertainty

“The Certainty of Uncertainty:  Do you welcome the uncertainties of life or do they just make you anxious?”
Sunday Service January 17, 2009 by Merle Wenger

Chalice Lighting

by theologian, Paul Lakeland from Paul Rasor’s Faith Without Certainty.

The postmodern sensibility, let me suggest, is nonsequential, noneschatological, nonutopian, nonsystematic, nonfoundational and ultimately, nonpolitical.  The postmodern human being wants a lot but expects a little.  The emotional range is narrow, between mild depression at one end and a whimsical insouciance at the other.  Postmodern heroes are safe, so far beyond that we could not possibly emulate them, avatars of power or success or money or sex—all without consequences.  Postmodernity may be tragic, but its denizens are unable to recognize tragedy.  The shows we watch, the movies we see, the music we hear, all are devoted to a counterfactual presentation of life as comic, sentimental, and comfortable.  Reality doesn’t sell.  So here we stand at the end of the twentieth century, a century that has seen two world wars, countless holocausts, the end of the myth of progress, and the near-depth of hope, playing our computer games and whiling away the time with the toys that material success brings.

My “I Believe” statement

I believe in science and the inherent mystery of the universe.  I believe change and unsettled truth are two constants of liberal religious thought. I believe it is my daily religious task to prevent my senses from being numbed by the demands of cerebral information overload.  I believe great joy is borne out of the struggle to experience our feeling and thinking selves and at the same time to integrate with the living and non-living forms of our planet.  I believe a good life is inherently available when we see ourselves as good.  I find it fascinating that sooner or later we all become involved in doing less than good.  I experience great hope and fear and peace, but I choose to believe in peace.

Message:  The Certainty of Uncertainty

Raking the fluffy yellow-brown leaves in my sun-drenched backyard on this past Thanksgiving Day, I reflected on what I was really thankful for in 2009.  Putting my finger on one specific item was difficult, and my mind wandered to more philosophical and spiritual aspects of the past year.  It had been a difficult year: the economy faltered, my business followed suit; a relationship I was in ended, I felt lonely, and two friends of mine were dealing with difficult legal problems that worried me. I felt like the proverbial dingy lost at sea.  I struggled to find any contrasting events that made me feel grateful.  I was starting to feel a little like the grump pilgrim who stole Thanksgiving but really did not want to dwell on such negativity, and set about seeing if I might find some remote positive aspect of my difficulties that might be worth celebrating.

The leaves were really fluffy.  I notice this attribute because for some reason, the farm boy in me isn’t too keen on raking leaves.  It’s easy for me to observe the beauty of newly fallen leaves, contemplating, rather than raking, during the subsequent 30 day picturesque “fluffy period” and then watch guiltily as the leaves are transformed to a mat of brown, mulchy, slippery, organic thatch covering my backyard.  I look and see “protection for the lawn” through the winter: I imagine my neighbor sees a “lazy neighbor who doesn’t care about keeping up the hood.”  But I really felt determined to change my non-urban tendencies and move into a more urban lifestyle.  I was enjoying the raking: I was stymied about my gratitude.

Perhaps it was because it was just too fabulous a day for an optimist like me, with aromas of a sage-stuffed turkey and dressing roasting in the oven, but mid-yard, I stumbled on the quirky idea that perhaps I should be grateful for the seeming hardships that I had faced throughout the year.  Is that possible I asked myself?  Is this something I could actually share at the dinner table?  (For you see, one of the reasons this self-rumination was gnawing at my gut, was that I thought I might be the one to say a bit of grace before dinner, and I wanted to find something authentic to speak.)  I thought, will my dinner guests actually buy this “dark” existential gratitude, or will they find it a bitter condiment, more akin to too much radiccio in the salad or horseradish in the cranberry sauce?

Pensively I raked a few more bushels of leaves, working swiftly as the farm boy who knows the work is never done: more tasks are always at hand.  The pile of leaves was growing to some 12 feet in diameter and three feet high.  I thought wistfully about borrowing the neighbor’s children to come and jump in them but wormed back inside my brain instead.  What circumstances in life would people generally feel grateful about when in fact they were filled with darkness and uncertainty?

And then the seed for this talk suddenly and clearly sprouted in my brain:  we can and usually are extremely welcoming, grateful, and I would posture, craving of uncertainty.  I could feel secure in holding hands around that table piled high with too much turkey, cranberries and pumpkin pie, in thanking the universe for all the uncertainty that had created my year for I realized at once that it was uncertainty in fact that drove my year and appears to be driving my life.  I realized quickly that without uncertainty there can be no hope, no faith, no dreams, no markets, no growth in relationships, no change, no weather.  Without uncertainty, some of the most complex of human emotions would simply not exist.  Whether it be in the uncertainty of fully comprehending the motives of another person, city, nation, continent, globe, planet or universe or the simple uncertainty of knowing how much money was going to land in my cash register drawer the next day, (Black Friday), it is uncertainty that keeps us involved in living.

I concluded, as I finished raking my amoebic glob of yellow fluff through the backyard gate and into the street where the lumbering, cat-terrifying leaf vacuum would pick them up in the next week, that I simply would rather die and be raked away myself, were it not for the uncertainty that draws me forward in some patterned yet random line that crazily would come to be called my life.  But it would be called life: and a similar string of events strung together with the glue of certainty, feels to me to be akin to death.

Imagine for a moment if we positively knew who would be sitting in the seats that face me and who would be standing at this podium speaking in January of 2014.  Would you like to know who would come and go, who would lose their job in Harrisonburg and be forced to move away, or who would choose to move to China or India for a more promising career?   Would you really like to know who among us might decide that staying home and reading the paper, or attending another church might be more fulfilling then coming here and socializing with us for two hours?  Would you really like to know who might fall in love, get married and have a baby, and who might fall ill and pass from this life?

Would you really like to know where you will be in your career even if you might slip down a notch into some position that you could not possibly understand now.  For instance, let’s say you could see that you would be making $5,000 less but did not know that the average cost of living had decreased by $ 7,500?  Would you really like to know what hardship your child were going to suffer, what trouble they were going to face, what homework they “forgot to tell you” they needed to do when instead they went off to play.

Imagine as a parent if you could be certain of the direction of your child’s life.  All parents know what a real-life experiment child-rearing is, with you in a lab coat pouring a little bit of morality into one beaker and a bit of education in another, a healthy social life in a third, pouring them all together and putting them over the burner to boil for 18 years.  We know that one day we stand by and watch that beaker bubble, then boil and turn colors, even explode, and voila, our experiment is finished: out pops a mature adult.  Explain to me any part of this process that feels “certain.”  What if we were certain of the results?  Johny will be a straight-A student who at the last minute decides to get married, run off with his girl friend, breakup, later join the Army, and finally come back, go to college and establish himself with a happy family as a principal of the local school.  Would you really want to know all this?  Could you tolerate it?

What would happen if even one person in the world would be certain of the future?  For it appears that n spite of the foggy wavering direction of the news, astrological readings, diviners and seers we are all just “guessing,” or making “uncertain stabs” at knowing.  I have observed for the past 40 years my generation rebelling against the uncertainty of the American capitalist markets and  military industrial complex, then, for survival sake, putting their pot and drugs aside, along with their dreams, and buying into the whole capitalist package, hook, line and sinker.  Yet imagine the post-apocalyptic horror of 2009, when in a period of 6 months, in as stunning a proof as a mathematician could present, our generation watched as the capitalist system fantasy (along with our 401Ks), evaportated.  What, I ask, would the hippies have done, if after having forced America out of Vietnam, they could have forseen the insanity of the Gulf War and Iraq?  What would they have done if they could have known for certain that GM would fold and America’s largest banks, in fact her entire financial underpinnings would have collapsed if our government, supported by foreign banks, had not stepped forward to bandage up the blood gushing from a nation’s economy in triage?  Or if that is too tough a question, then let me ask it another way.  What would we do today—now that we know all this?  Of course, no one person does know the future.  The lottery keeps playing.  The keno tickets and blackjack tables give and take.  The counter-spinning Wheels of Fortune and Misfortune turn crazily as though the only certainty is that fate IS spun out.  To know the weight or pattern or color of the thread is impossible.

As much as the average American has come to despise the power brokers on Wall Street, can we imagine it any other way?  If goods and services are traded around the world, if Chile is to receive a fair price for her copper from China, not knowing in any certain way how much copper they or other countries will need next year, then how would one establish a fair and certain price for selling a contract of copper to China, say one year or two years before the ore is extracted from the earth?   We can only be certain that what one party pays another will affect our lifestyle: we can not be certain by how much.  We trust brokers and traders on Wall Street and in marketplaces around the world, to devise daily new and better systems to comprehend the certainty of the markets, yet as we have seen in the past year, uncertainty still rules the game.

What about life after death?  Certainly the traditional Christian theology of heaven and hell creates one of the driving uncertainties for more than a billion souls on our planet.  But come on, beyond ones arrival at either place, aren’t the age old choices of heaven or hell just a bit too certain?  I mean afterall: streets of gold with eternal happiness, Thanksgiving dinners everyday, no leaves to rake: Wouldn’t we miss the bickering, the anxiety, the depression, or the days that turn ecstatic with unexpected good news or eventually wouldn’t we just wanna die to see a pothole in an asphalt street?

Isn’t it just the surety of uncertainty that keeps us stuck on that issue?  Isn’t the fact that for most of humanity, the elusive veil of existence beyond  our last breath, keeps us pondering, figuring, imagining such un-imaginable scenarios as streets of gold, eternal life, bevys of virgins, both male and female, unending happiness, tables Thanksgiving-filled forever, cash registers always overflowing.  Does your version of the after-death episode include uncertainty or are you longing for eternal certainty?

Considering my argument, orphans in Haiti, is this an elitist stance.  What about the starving in the streets.  Is uncertainty elitist?  At first I thought this was a flaw in my perspective but the more I thought about it, for an orphan who dreams about not being an orphan it is that uncertainty that one day they might be claimed to live in a family that drives their hope and dreams.  The same can be said for the hungry looking for their next meal:  what is certain is hunger.  Uncertainty, on the other hand, prods the dream or lifestyle choice that might twist fate in another direction.

What lesson might we draw from this little spin through Merle’s brain?  The lesson I hope to leave, is that we savor and value the uncertainty in our life.  Let it feed your dreams and give you courage to extend your relationships beyond those that feel certain.  I see uncertainties falling round about me as perennially as fall’s colored leaves.  I intend to enjoy them, romp in them, and become familiar with them rather then letting them turn into some frightening, brown disgusting mulch.

You might risk telling someone you care deeply for that you love them.  Likewise take the risk of telling someone who is hurting you about how you feel.  In either case the outcome might surprise you.  When children stretch the limits of your thinking, politicians tramp on your best intentions, editorialists scream certainly, preachers assure you salvation, I challenge you to stand, noisily or quietly and thank the universe for all that you do not know or understand.  Bask in what Thoreau referred to as the gospel of the present moment. Be grateful for the grand mysteries yet to be revealed, honor your own biased observations with the certainty that what you don’t know, what we don’t know as a civilization, could be what actually saves us.  Celebrate this week, with certainty, that a complete life awaits those who build few fences ‘round their uncertainty.