Sharing Epiphanies

Link to the sermon above on YouTube

I am a Unitarian-Universalist lay preacher. I gave 12 sermons—annually from 2005 to 2016—to the Community Unitarian Universalists in Brighton. This post is my May 23, 2010 sermon “Sharing Epiphanies.” That brings to 10 those that are posted on this blog:

Below is the newly edited text. (It will vary somewhat from the video above.) At the bottom of this post are links to some of my other posts on religion.

In this sermon, I mention my son Spencer’s suicide at the age of 20. For background, you can read what my wife Gail writes and what my daughter Diana writes about that.

On the first ephiphany, see also “Five Books That Have Changed My Life.” On the second epiphany, see also “There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't,” How to Turn Every Child into a 'Math Person', “Shane Parrish on Deliberate Practice” and “Daniel Coyle on Deliberate Practice.”

Abstract: Some of the most important things we learn in life are those lessons that come as a surprise.  These surprises are what I mean by epiphanies. Sharing epiphanies with each other gives us all the chance to become wiser.  I will share three epiphanies in my own life: (1) how I learned to respect positive thinking, (2) my shock when I learned that intelligence is not primarily an inborn quantity and (3) discovering the joys of "cleaning house."

I appreciate your inviting me back to give another sermon.  If you are willing, I would love to come back every year for the next twenty years, if not more.  Yesterday, I was looking back at the five sermons I have given here in the last five years.   Last year I cribbed from David Foster Wallace to talk about “the egocentric illusion.”  In the two years before that I explained my commitment to Unitarian-Universalism as a religion that does not require belief in the existence of God and so gives me space for my worship of the non-existent God whom our many-many-times great grandchildren may someday bring into existence.  Then in my first two sermons here I gave my Credo—a statement of belief—and my “UU Vision”—a personal statement of the kind of world I would like to work toward creating. 

Today I would like to return to a theme implicit in presenting my UU Vision.   As you know, I am a refugee from Mormonism and do not believe that Mormonism is true.  Nevertheless, I think that, sociologically, there are useful lessons to be drawn from Mormonism.  At the congregational level Mormonism draws extra strength from a lay ministry in which almost every member of the congregation takes on a serious church assignment.  What is perhaps even more remarkable is that Mormonism has a largely lay pulpit.   On the first Sunday of every month, Mormon meetings are organized a bit like Quaker meetings in which anyone who feels moved to speak is encouraged to speak.  The other Sundays, speakers are prearranged, with the duty of speaking rotating gradually through the entire congregation.  Needless to say, the quality of the sermons is often not that high, but even the most dull of sermons allows people to get to know the speaker a bit better, and so helps to bind the congregation together a bit more strongly.  

I do not think this exact pattern would suit Unitarian-Universalism all that well, but I do think it would be a very good thing to gradually increase the set of opportunities and the gentle encouragement for members of a congregation to prepare and share their thoughts with the whole congregation. In addition to sharing Credos [statements of what one believes] and reports of congregational activities, I am advocating the invention of additional forms of sharing, such as sharing UU visions--and today what I would like to call “sharing epiphanies.”   

According to dictionary.com, one definition of epiphany is “an appearance or manifestation of a deity,” and certainly if anyone of you sees God, I hope you would share that experience, but what I have in mind is something much more modest.  A more workaday meaning of “epiphany” is “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.”  In other words, this kind of epiphany is a life lesson that comes by surprise, in the ordinary course of life. 

In order to keep things interesting, let me insist on one essential characteristic of an epiphany: an epiphany should involve a clear change from thinking one way to thinking another way.  Indeed, the most interesting epiphanies often involve a 180-degree reversal in thinking.  So, to identify an epiphany in your own life, it pays to look for cases where you used to think something that you now think is wrong, in an important way. 

Our former minister Ken Phifer [see 1, 2, 3] made a point of having exactly three subpoints within a section of a sermon. So taking that as my guide, I tried to think of three epiphanies in my life. 

Let me start with how I learned to respect positive thinking.  I was a very serious-minded child and as a teenager looked down on positive thinking because I felt it conflicted with facing reality squarely.  That is, I was afraid that positive thinking would make me an unrealistic Pollyanna.  Not a very macho image.  Then, among my mother’s many books on pop psychology, I ran across the book Psycho-Cybernetics, by the plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz.  Maxwell Maltz argued that imagining things going well is a way of practicing for good outcomes.  For example, he pointed to experiments in which people who imagined in detail the actions involved in sinking free throws gained almost as much skill as those who physically practiced. 

It is hard to get across the effect this had on me.  What I got from the book was that I could be a positive thinker and a flinty-eyed realist at the same time!  The key was to realize that the positive thoughts were not a description of reality, but only a way to exercise my imagination to help me ready in case something good happened.  Without contradiction, I could alternate between thinking like a flinty-eyed realist and thinking like a died-in-the-wool optimist and so be prepared for anything.  Fortunately, though I sometimes forget this, I have found that spending a small fraction of the time being a flinty-eyed realist is enough to be prepared for the worst.  Then I can spend the rest of the time being a cheerful optimist, and definitely be prepared for the best.  My ship may never come in, but if it does, I will be ready! 

For my other two epiphanies, fast forward to this past year.  This past year has been a big year for me, in a very bad way.  You may remember my son Spencer, who came with me on my last visit here.  Last September, Spencer committed suicide.  Needless to say, this was a big blow to us.  I am both consoled and urged to patience by my research on happiness with coauthors which suggests that in two years we will be most of the way back toward feeling normal.  After Spencer’s death, there were many nights I couldn’t sleep, so I built giant geometric shapes out of Magnetix—a magnetic building toy [now banned as being dangerous to children]. 

During the day, I increased my rate of reading books three or four times over.  Right before Spencer’s death, I had read the book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, by the University of Michigan Psychology professor Richard Nisbett.  After Spencer’s death, in addition to reading a fantasy novel and several books on Roman history, I followed that up with the two books with the titles Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin and The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown.  Here’s How by Daniel Coyle.  These three books all had the same basic point: intelligence, talent and skill are not fixed quantities we are born with, but are the outcomes of diligent effort and careful practice that focuses in on improving each weak point.

The thought that intelligence was more a matter of having opportunities and taking opportunities to do hard intellectual work than a matter of just being born smart came as a shock and a revelation to me.  Since I was young, my identity has been wrapped up in being “the smartest kid on the block.”  And there is no question that, like most Americans, but unlike most Chinese or Japanese, I assumed that being smart was something I was born with and only had to demonstrate.  As I look back now, I notice the vast number of hours I spent reading the World Book encyclopedia, working on math problems, reading Isaac Asimov books on science and history, and walking around trying to think deep thoughts.  But since I believed my level of intelligence was a quantity determined at birth, I was careful not to work too hard at my schoolwork, lest I give the lie to the idea that I was just naturally talented.  It was OK to spend a lot of time studying things that would come up in future classes, but I would lose face if I studied too hard for the classes I was actually in!  I say all of this just to indicate how firmly I believed that intelligence was a fixed inborn quantity. 

I remember how surprised I was when one of my locker partners, whom I had thought of as an ordinary kid, showed up as a graduate student at Harvard when I was studying economics there.  When his interests moved in an intellectual direction, he was extremely successful academically, and after being one of Stephen J. Gould’s students had a fascinating career digging up fossils at exotic locations and teaching geology. I am embarrassed now that I underestimated him back when I was in high school.

Believing that intelligence is a fixed inborn quantity causes many students to give up, thinking they can never learn.  The psychologists Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski and Carol Dweck went into a school and divided the students into two groups.  One group was taught that studying could rewire the brain and raise intelligence.  The idea that intelligence can be changed led these students to study harder and get better grades.  The effect was especially strong for students who started out believing most strongly that intelligence is genetically determined.  In Richard Nisbett’s words, “[Carol] Dweck reported that some of her tough junior high school boys were reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their control.”  Those boys had an epiphany. 

My third epiphany came from an unusual source.  After a child dies, many families feel the urge to move to a different house so they won’t be beset by painful memories at every turn.  I hate moving, so we didn’t even think seriously about that.  What we did do was clean house.  Before coming under my wife Gail’s influence, I was a pack rat, son of a pack rat.  Gail, while good at letting go and getting rid of things to begin with, gained extra inspiration from watching the cable TV show “Clean House,” in which the lives of pack rats are transformed on camera.  I can’t reproduce Gail’s pep talks about the virtues of slimming down our stock of things, but I know that it felt good to get rid of things. Our house is on a major street, so we were able to put things out front with a “Free” sign on them and watch them disappear within hours.  I carted many boxes of books to give to the library for the used bookstore the “Friends of the Library” run.  We took pictures of keepsakes we had been hanging onto for a long time and then gave them away or threw them out.  I brought everything down from the attic for critical examination to see whether it should stay or go. 

What has been most interesting about this whole process of cleaning house is the way the questions that come up in choosing whether to keep something or get rid of it are questions about what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Every time I decide to keep something, it is a reminder of something I want to do.  Reinforcing those reminders, I had a new determination in the wake of Spencer’s death to do more of the things I have wanted to, but haven’t gotten to.  Besides building geometric shapes with Magnetix, and reading regular books, I have made time to gradually work my way through a book on number theory, and for some reason I have been doggedly working my way through a stack of articles I had torn out of the Wall Street Journal to read later.   I am determined to learn French.  The theme for me is that everything that I have wanted to do should flow.  Nothing that I really want to do should be totally stopped.   I am at a point in my career where there is no reason to think that next year or the year after that will be any less busy than this year.  So if I want to do something before I retire, I need to build it into my schedule now. 

In a concept from the show “Clean House,” each object is a promise to oneself.  It is often hard to get rid of old things because unused things represent broken promises to do something.  Promises to oneself need to be resolved one way or another.  For each ancient promise, I need to either keep the promise, or reconsider and release myself from the promise.  No one is perfect.  More to the point, we are all finite.  We will never have time enough to do all of the things we might like to do.  This is one of those lessons that I resist so much that I have to learn it over and over again.  

I can express this third epiphany well by telling the story of my kindly neighbor from the street where I lived as a teenager.  He said (more or less) “When you grow up, you will be able to do anything.”  Naïve as I was, my heart misheard this as “When you grow up, you will be able to do everything.”  But there is all the difference in the world between “anything” and “everything.”  We have to choose.  We might be able to have a lot, but we can’t “have it all.”  What we do with the few years we have on this earth before we go to our grave determines, along with luck, which of all our dreams will become real and which of our dreams will remain only dreams.  Don’t let the dreams that are most precious to you slip away if you can help it.  As a first step, you need to figure out which dreams are the ones that are most important to you.  Then, most painfully, you will have to figure out which dreams you can let go.  

This same exercise of sorting through dreams and letting go of some needs to happen also at the collective level of families and congregations and nations—in ways that often affect in turn which individual dreams can be realized.  There is no easy way to make these decisions.  But they have to be made. 

For us who are lucky enough to be part of democratic families, congregations and nations, the more we share what is in our hearts, the more likely it will be that dreams widely shared will prevail in those collective decisions.  And in my own individual life, the more often I remind myself of what is truly important to me—and act accordingly—the more likely I am to get there. 

References

  • Blackwell, Lisa S., Kali H. Trzesniewski and Carol Sorich Dweck, 2007.  “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,” Child Development, 78 (January), 246-263. 

  • Nisbett, Richard E. 2009.  Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, Norton, New York. 

  • Colvin, Geoff, 2008.  Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.

  • Daniel Coyle, 2009.  The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born.  It’s Grown.  Here’s How. 

Other Posts on Religion:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass: