Dealing with Uncertainty: Quakerism in a Post-Modern World

From WildWiki

“Dealing with Uncertainty: Quakerism in a Post-Modern World” Message at First Friends Meeting August 17, 2008

In 1993, Greg Mortenson was descending from an attempt to climb K2 an 8000-meter peak located in remote Pakistan that most mountaineers consider the most difficult and challenging climb in the world. Only 300 people have ever stood on top of K2. By contrast, in the late nineties, over two hundred climbers summited Mt Everest… on the same day. Mr. Mortenson was descending after experiencing what most climbers who attempt K2 experience… extreme hardship and failure. A storm blew his team off the summit ridge a mere 600 feet from the summit and in the tempest, he was separated from his teammates and was picking his way down the complicated and dangerous glacier fields with only one Pakistani guide as his companion. He was a physical wreck from all his time spent at high altitude- what climbers call the “death zone” because the oxygen is one-third less than the amount you would find at sea level. In the descent, Mortenson lost his Pakistani guide (who was carrying his pack) and found himself disoriented, cold, alone and without a tent or sleeping bag as darkness descended on the Karakorum mountain range. As he watched the magnificent stars emerge on a rare cloudless night in this remote part of the world, he faced a night of uncertainty. Would he survive the freezing temperatures? Would the light of day bring more clarity as to his location? In his weakened state, would he be able, even if he survived the night, to navigate down the rest of the glacier and to help?

This morning I would like to share a message about dealing with uncertainty. For those of you who peaked at the program before we started, you may have noticed that intimidating and academic phrase “post-modern” in the title. Rest assured, I will only be giving a short 2-hour lecture on that term before I get to the rest of my sermon. I remember sitting in a seminar in graduate school and asking my professor for a definition of post-modernism and waiting, with pen posed, as he leaned back ready to pontificate. “Post-modernism,” he began, “signifies the period after modernism.” I put my pen down… I was paying $10,000 for this??! But in the end, I learned my professor was right to keep it simple. There are many competing definitions of post-modernism and different intellectual traditions use the term in different ways. For the purposes of my message this morning (and this is the end of my “2 hour lecture”), let’s take post-modernism to mean a skepticism and critique of one of the central ideals of the Enlightenment: the quest for certainty. Through the power of human reason, the Enlightenment ushered in a modern period where the central questions of the day could be answered by an objective, reasoned approach to problem solving. This was a hopeful and optimistic time. Science was answering big questions about the nature of the world. Technological advances were solving significant problems and increasing productivity. Progress was both evident and seemingly inevitable. In short, the modern period was a time period of optimism in terms of the power of human reason and it brought about a sustained quest for certainty, for foundations, and for the essence of things.

Then, toward the middle of the twentieth century, along came post-modernism, which questioned these values, assumptions, and ideals. We moved from an age of certainty to an age of uncertainty. Advances in virtually every field, from Physics to Philosophy, from History to the Humanities, began to push back on the idea that we can, in fact, come to the final truth about a thing. Suddenly, uncertainty seemed to be everywhere. Dynamic change, and not firm foundations, could be found everywhere in the natural world. Evolutionary theory in Biology, chaos theory in mathematics, quantum theory in Physics- all these developments pushed the limits of what was known and knowable about the world. A post-modern world is an uncertain world. It is a world where truth is replaced by uncertainty, where optimism is replaced by skepticism, and where inevitable progress is replaced by a strong sense of our limitations. It is a world perhaps best represented by the classic poem by Yeats, Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeesh. Kind of depressing huh? Let’s take a break and return to our mountaineering story for a moment. So we left Mr. Mortenson looking forward to a lonely, cold night stuck on the side of a mountain a long, long way from home. He managed to get through the night and, revived by the light of day, he found a trail leading down the mountain towards the village that would be his salvation. But, somehow, he missed a key turn in the trail and found himself, with darkness about to fall again, lost and disoriented once more. Just as night fell, he was relieved to hear voices and see the flicker of lights on a hillside below him. He stumbled, disheveled and incoherent, into a small village that had never seen a foreigner, let alone a strange, smelly white American before. Nonetheless, as their Muslim faith instructs them, they took this man in and nursed him back to health over a two-week period of time. During his stay, Mortenson was moved by their kindness and hospitality and wanted to do something to give back. He was shocked to learn that there was no school for the 50-odd children of the village. The children would sit together in a dusty flat space just outside the village and complete their lessons using sticks to mark in the dirt. They had no textbooks, no desks or chairs, no roof over their heads, and they shared a teacher with the neighboring village, a full-days walk down the valley. At that moment, he surprised himself by looking the village elder in the eyes and promising that he would return to help the village build a school.

So, what do we do in this age of uncertainty? We know what the typical responses have been. On one side, we fall back on firm foundations. We grow defensive and insular- surrounding ourselves with the things we want to hear or that we agree with. On the other side, we grow cynical and detached. We stand aloof, spectators to the problems of the world, and refuse to commit to anything. John Dewey, one of the single most important thinkers in American history, saw this for the false choice it is. The world wasn’t either one of firm foundations and clear truths or one of infinitely shifting opinions and values. In a way, to Dewey, it was BOTH. He liked to talk about what he called “the indeterminate situation” where we are presented with a problem without foregone conclusions or answers; situations where the outcome was uncertain. To Dewey, these were the most engaging situations; the ones where we could be most fully human as we addressed the problem at hand. And we can see this in our everyday lives. It is why we love sport, performance of any kind (whether it be an opera, a pick-up basketball game, or even a game of cards). We don’t know the resolution. The only way to find out is to play, to watch it unfold, to participate. And in doing so we combine the foundations of past experience with the dynamism of the present and changing moment to create a future resolution. It is both relative and constant.

The parable of the sower that Winnie read this morning for scripture speaks to this as well. In the parable, Jesus talks about what ground is best for the seed. If it is dropped carelessly it can be blown away in the wind and never take root. But conversely, if it is dropped on hard rock, it also cannot take root. Only the seed dropped on good, fertile ground survives and thrives. Good, organic soil is dynamic, interactive, and changing. But it must also begin with a solid foundation. And the plant itself is both constant and relative by the nature of the seed and the plant it will become. Planting is, in fact, another indeterminate situation. What is the essence of a plant? Is it the seed? Well, maybe, but doesn’t the seed “die” to become the plant. And when the plant reaches maturity doesn’t it wilt and return to the earth? So, maybe the foundation, the essence, the “truth” about a plant lies in its potential- what it can do, what it can become.

Greg Mortenson left Pakistan and returned to the U.S. By all accounts, he could have dismissed that promise to that village elder in remote Pakistan as a romantic delusion brought on by too much time at altitude and a few too many cups of strong green tea. How was he going to begin to do this? He had no fund raising skills, no organizational support networks, and no one in the U.S., in 1994, could be bothered with such a remote and insignificant place such as the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan (ooh how times have changed!). But, Mortenson chose to live with uncertainty and act anyway. He worked tirelessly for two years, living out of his car and a storage unit to save money and finally found a donor willing to help him. It took him another two years of administrative red-tape and cultural hurdles to finally get both the bridge and the school built. But today, Greg Mortenson is the director of the Central Asia Institute, a book about his work, Three Cups of Tea is a New York Times best seller, and, since that first promise, he has built over 53 schools in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, mostly for girls in these conservative Islamic states. He has befriended members of both the Afghan and Pakistani governments, conservative Muslim clerics, and thousands of Pakistani Shia whose only other impression of the U.S. has been what they hear from anti-American extremists like the Taliban and Al Queda. Congresswoman Mary Bono has called him a great American hero and the Bloomsbury review had this to say after reading his book: “In an age when every politician and talking head is full of empty rhetoric and the world is awash with the conflict in the middle east and Islamic territories in Central Asia, Mortenson’s book is a stunningly simple model of how to make peace: build schools for girls.” His success has shown that there are certainly other ways we might fight a war on terror.

Greg’s story is inspiring and amazing, of course. We often look at such hero’s and wonder how they do it. When I read the New Testament and consider the work of early Christians like Paul, I, too wonder how they managed in such an uncertain world. But it needn’t be that daunting. In fact, I’ll give you my easy, 4 step plan for dealing with uncertainty (and if you act now…)

Step one. Celebrate it. Uncertainty isn’t going anywhere. It is likely here to stay (some say it never left). Indeterminate situations, in fact, can appeal to our highest selves. As the poet Rilke wrote:

“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Step two. Act anyway. The story of Greg Mortenson and certainly the stories of the New Testament remind us that we won’t always know what to do but we still have an obligation to act in good faith. George Fox famously declared that he wanted to know God “experimentally.” It is at the center of our faith to engage the world experientially- to both celebrate the indeterminate nature of things and to realize that it also obligates us to engage, to participate, to play. We learn by acting and reflecting. In fact, we might argue that Quakerism, with its experiential theology, is ideally suited to the uncertainty of the post-modern age.

Step Three. While your acting, be comforted by your faith. We are not perfect and so our actions will not be perfect. We are fallible beings. God knows this of course. And, mistakes and errors will be expected along the way. God loves you anyway as Winnie read in that wonderful opening passage to worship.

And Step Four: don’t give up on hope. While post-modernism may have rejected optimism, it does not, in my view, reject hope. The American philosopher, Cornell West, once wrote about hope:

“Anyone who has the audacity to adopt a democratic vision cannot be optimistic, though I do not conflate optimism with hope. Why? Because democracies are rare in human history, they are fragile, and historically they tend not to last that long…And America has been so privileged because there has always been a prophetic slice across race, region, and class, and gender, and sexual orientation, a progressive slice that says we are not going to give up on this fragile democratic project, it is incomplete and unfinished, but we are not going to give up on it, even against the grain of so much human history.”

So, to me, Quakerism in a post-modern world is also fragile and incomplete. Like a seed in good soil it must be nurtured and tended to. It will also keep changing and growing. It has neither fixed foundations nor is it hopelessly unrooted. But our faith will constantly aspire to be something better. Its strength is its potential- what, if we have the conviction, we can become. As we settle into open worship, I would like to leave you with a poem by Wendell Berry, titled The Real Work.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do We have come to our real work And that when we no longer know which way to go We have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”