"Live It Forward" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

January 6, 2002 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

Look: this is January the worst onslaught
is ahead of us Don’t be lured
by these soft gray afternoons these sunsets cut
from pink and violet tissue-paper by the thought
the days are lengthening
Don’t let the solstice fool you:
our lives will always be
a strew of contradictions
the worst moment of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life

Reading: by Physicist Valentin F. Turchin “Determinism vs. Freedom,” (1991, on the web-page Principia Cybernetica Web):

The [scientific understanding of the] world of the nineteenth century was, broadly, as follows. Very small particles of matter move about in virtually empty three-dimensional space. These particles act on one another with forces which are uniquely determined by their positioning and velocities. The forces of interaction, in their turn, uniquely determine, in accordance with Newton's laws, the subsequent movement of particles. Thus each subsequent state of the world is determined, in a unique way, by its preceding state. Determinism was an intrinsic feature of the scientific worldview of that time. In such a world there was no room for freedom: it was illusory. Humans, themselves merely aggregates of particles, had as much freedom as wound-up watch mechanisms.
In the twentieth century the scientific worldview has undergone a radical change. It has turned out that subatomic physics cannot be understood within the framework of the Naive Realism of the nineteenth century scientists. The theory of Relativity and, especially, Quantum Mechanics require that our worldview be based on Critical Philosophy, according to which all our theories and mental pictures of the world are only devices to organize and foresee our experience, and not the images of the world as it "really" is. Thus along with the twentieth-century's specific discoveries in the physics of the microworld, we must regard the inevitability of critical philosophy as a scientific discovery -- one of the greatest of the twentieth century.
We now know that the notion that the world is "really" space in which small particles move along definite trajectories, is illusory: it is contradicted by experimental facts. We also know that determinism, i.e. the notion that in the last analysis all the events in the world must have specific causes, is illusory too. On the contrary, freedom, which was banned from the science of the nineteenth century as an illusion, became a part, if not the essence, of reality. The mechanistic worldview saw the laws of nature as something that uniquely prescribes how events should develop, with indeterminacy resulting only from our lack of knowledge; contemporary science regards the laws of nature as only restrictions imposed on a basically non-deterministic world. It is not an accident that the most general laws of nature are conservation laws, which do not prescribe how things must be, but only put certain restrictions on them.
There is genuine freedom in the world. When we observe it from the outside, it takes the form of quantum-mechanical unpredictability; when we observe it from within, we call it our free will. We know that the reason why our behaviour is unpredictable from the outside is that we have ultimate freedom of choice. This freedom is the very essence of our personalities, the treasure of our lives. It is given us as the first element of the world we come into.

SERMON: “Live It Forward” – Rev. Alison Hyder

Today I want to talk about a subject that on the surface seems highly intellectual, but that in fact has very interesting spiritual implications. I want to explore with you different concepts of the future, and how they affect our attitudes and beliefs.
For thousands of years, human beings have seen the world in a linear, cause and effect fashion. European and Western cultures developed a deterministic view of events. Determinism states, basically, that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes and events. The Determinism of the 18th century precluded the existence of free will and the possibility that humans could have acted differently than we have. In other words, all is ordained, whether by God or Kismet or physical causes.
This is a fatalistic world-view that denies the possibility of real change and creativity. It sees individuals as pretty much set – by their class, their personality type, their race. It is the basis for stereotypes. If you can’t change who you are, then you can’t change your fate, like families where generations of men work at the steel mill, or the expectation that tall people play basketball. Another problem with determinism is that in trying to understand our situation we often hit on the wrong answer. We think if we clean our room, or got good grades, our parents wouldn’t fight. If I were a better wife, he wouldn’t hit me. We look for explanations without knowing the whole story. And when our solutions don’t work, we feel even more helpless and fatalistic than before.
Determinism holds that everything arises inevitably out of past occurrences, whether it’s a landslide or a mugging. It’s like the idea that your days are numbered when you are born – and the Angel of Death will find you when it’s your turn to go, whether you’re hiding under your bed or somewhere in Timbuktu. There’s no escaping destiny. The poet Omar Khayyam reflected this view when he said, “And the first Morning of Creation wrote/ What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.” Christian thinkers wrestled with the implications of God’s omnipotence. How much control does God exercise over His Creation? Are terror and cruelty really a part of God’s plan? Or did God just set the world going, and walk away?
Many people held to this idea of creation: the world as a mechanism, running in order. Scientific determinism asserts that the Universe is rational, and ultimately, completely knowable, and that we can, therefore, make sound and knowledgeable decisions once we have complete information. So humans have duly set about trying to know more and more, in order to gain more and more control. And of course, we have achieved great success with this method. Increased knowledge has led to cures for venereal diseases, cancers, and infections, has identified pollutants and enabled us to send rockets to Mars. Society as much as science depends on the assumption that the world is largely predictable, following certain, fixed laws, whether in economics or medicine or psychiatry. If we only have the perfect conditions, everything will run just fine.
But thanks to professors Einstein and Freud and the like, we finally realized that not only are humans frequently irrational and arbitrary, but that the universe is not anywhere near as mechanistic as we’d thought. In fact, everything is relative. And everything is related. As VF Turchin says,

…all our theories and mental pictures of the world are only devices to organize and foresee our experience, and not the images of the world as it "really" is. … [F]reedom, which was banned from the science of the nineteenth century as an illusion, became a part, if not the essence, of reality. The mechanistic worldview saw the laws of nature as something that uniquely prescribes how events should develop, with indeterminacy resulting only from our lack of knowledge; contemporary science regards the laws of nature as only restrictions imposed on a basically non-deterministic world….

There is genuine freedom in the world. When we observe it from the outside, it takes the form of quantum-mechanical unpredictability; when we observe it from within, we call it our free will. We know that the reason why our behaviour is unpredictable from the outside is that we have ultimate freedom of choice. This freedom is the very essence of our personalities, the treasure of our lives. It is given us as the first element of the world we come into.

The fact is that the world is a pretty scary and capricious place. We have no idea what is going to happen to us, or what events – interesting, painful, fun - our actions will cause. The future remains shrouded. That’s the bad news. The good news is that what we do matters. Each one of us has the power to change the world, and our own lives with it.

Ellen Bass wrote:

I want the future to extend before me like the horizon
widening as I walk.

I want the blue sierra that I planted
squatting over the child in my womb
to grow into a thick tangled hedge
rich with blossoms and bees buzzing like crazy.
I want the smell to make someone’s great great
grandchildren
dizzy.

Imagine that we are all born
with the gift of time.

What would you do with the gift of time – if you had it?
Is this a big assumption? How much time do you think you have? Forty years? Ten years?
Eight months? Eight months would be about 240 days, give or take a couple. How many friends could you manage to talk to in 240 days? How many kind deeds could you perform? Of course, some would take longer than others. Still, even if it weren’t quite one a day, improving the world 200 times isn’t too shabby. A donation here, a hand there, one less piece of trash in the woods. A productive day at work. A tree for someone’s grandchild. One moment of forgiveness.
Maybe the only one you’re helping is yourself. But for some of us, that can be very hard. And that is because we don’t start out fresh every day. We get stuck in this pattern of habits and stale thoughts and limitations. We still think that our past determines our future. So if we were abandoned by our parents, for instance, we feel unlovable now. We didn’t finish school, so we could never write a book. How can we think about changing our life? That tape in our head keeps telling us that we’re a fake, a failure. It’s too late, too hard, absurd. We’re too fat to dance.
But we no longer have to believe in determinism. Because, in fact, people can change. And even if others don’t (even if our partner still leaves underwear on the floor and our brother remains needy and immature) we can learn to deal with it in a different, healthier way. We can choose how we cope and feel and act. We can stop living in the past.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard [in Journals] advised, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” I think I’ll say that again, I like it so much: “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” History is at best a cautionary tale, used to educate and inspire us. But nothing we can do can change it. We must live moving forward, looking ahead to what we want and hope to become. In this way, we become co-creators with God, with the universe, and not actors in a play. Instead of being locked into a script, we can innovate and invent something really dynamic and new.
In fact, says theologian Ted Peters, “God creates from the future, and not from the past.” According to Peters, we’ve been taught a linear view of creation. Our task has been just to keep in line with God’s aim. But, he says, our real sense of power and time is not oriented to what has been, but to what might be, to “the power of creativity for the future. Without a future,” Peters says, “things drop into non-existence. Without a future, the present moment becomes a death trap. And because we accept as axiomatic that all things are always in the process of changing, the future that sustains existence must be thought of as a creative future… To be is to have a future.... To lose one’s future and have only a past is to die.” [God – the World’s Future by Ted Peters pp 134-135].
And that is why the dying are often so very alive – people battling cancer or AIDS or ALS. They are being pulled onwards into the future, hyperaware of what still might be, and determined to make each moment count. You can live in the present with an eye to the future – there is no contradiction there. It only makes the present that much more sweet and urgent and precious: the soft gray January afternoons, a room filled with quiet breathing. One person sharing a moment of sorrow. And because there is a future, we have the power to change the now – to transform ourselves and the world itself.
In the book “Pay It Forward,” by Catherine Ryan Hyde, a teacher (in the book he’s an African American Vietnam Veteran) gives his students an extra-credit assignment: THINK OF AN IDEA FOR WORLD CHANGE, AND PUT IT INTO ACTION. Trevor, the 12-year-old hero of Pay It Forward, thinks of quite an idea. He describes it to his mother and teacher this way: "You see, I do something real good for three people. And then when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward. To three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven. "He turned on the calculator, punched in a few numbers. "Then it sort of spreads out, see. To eighty-one. Then two hundred forty-three. Then seven hundred twenty-nine. Then two thousand, one hundred eighty-seven. See how big it gets?” [from the “Pay It Forward” website: payitforwardfoundation.org]
When we begin to live it forward instead of being held prisoner to the past, we are excited by change. With fewer limits on our potential, the prospect for growth is enormous. Our dreams become blueprints. Anything is possible.
Ted Peters believes that God’s first act in creating the universe was to give it a future. And because it is not completed, the future is still open. Each one of us is an indispensable part of the whole. He says, “Each moment God exerts divine power to relieve us from past constraints so as to open up the field for free action, for responsible living. God’s creative activity [is] a pull from the future rather than...a push from the past.” [ibid]
We share in that creativity, in the sacred act of creation. Each one of us was born with vision and imagination. It’s an innate part of our make-up to be able to dream and plan. And when we limit ourselves, some part of us dies. It really doesn’t matter what our past was. It does not have to determine our future. When we tell ourselves that we’re unable, inept, unworthy, or old, we are not just restricting ourselves, but we are diminishing the world and holding it back from its full potential. There is less courage in the world, and less joy, and less honesty.
So each of us needs to ask: What am I doing for the future of my world? What will my legacy be? What will I do with the gift of time? Think about it. You have 2 minutes. And the rest of your lives after that. We will be silent together.

CLOSING WORDS: “Que Sera, Sera,” by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (with group participation)

“When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother what would I be? Would I be pretty? Would I be rich? Here’s what she said to me: “Que Sera, Sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que Sera, Sera. What will be will be.”

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