First Unitarian Church of San Jose

Front-Page News
and Unitarian Universalist Values
Sunday, October 7, 2007, 11:00 a.m.
First Unitarian Church of San José
Worship Leader: Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones
Worship Associate: Frank Bosche

Reflection A UU and the News Frank Bosche, Worship Associate

"We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

These are our Seven Principles. Do you run them over in your mind as you pick up your morning newspaper or bring up its website and decide what to read first, later, or not at all? I don’t, but maybe in a way, I do. This morning I decided to wear this chalice pin in my collar as proof that I once memorized the principles and could recite them. Many of you may remember that challenge of a few years back. I earned the pin back then, but I confess I couldn’t earn it today without prompting. It would be the precise wording that I would have trouble with, not the worldview and the hopes, dreams, and resolve that the words express. Those, I brought with me when I came to Unitarian Universalism where I found a community that shared and affirmed them. I also brought the effects of my upbringing and life experiences to the mix. So I don’t explicitly checklist the Seven Principles when I look at the front page every day but just naturally use my own internal—unique unto me—UU perspective.

I listen to public radio a great deal during the day, but the news I hear there is presented to me without regard for my preferences and priorities. I can only edit what I take in by tuning out. Where my news-management habits come into play is in reading my hometown newspaper. I look at it on-line sometimes before I pick up a paper copy, but the experience is just not the same. I just can’t manipulate it the way I can good old newsprint.

I chose the front page of Friday’s Mercury News to focus on here. That day I had a bit over five minutes to scan it and start reading something between arriving in the parking lot and going into work. Dominating the page I saw, with much green ink and color photos, the BIG story: “Environment,” “Mayor Chuck Reed’s GREEN VISION For San José.” Excellent! A positive, Seventh Principle-related story to start off my Friday, about the mayor’s 15-year plan to transform the way my city sits on this planet. Great place to start reading, but I didn’t.

I could not avoid the headline at the top of the righthand column: “Mother accused of aiding son’s killer.” I don’t like crime stories. I regard them as sordid and small and seemingly endless and incomprehensible. My eyes flicker away from them in distaste in search of something of larger meaning. I hadn’t been able to look away from this story, though, since it broke days earlier, about a six-year-old boy who was beaten to death in front of his mother by her boyfriend; her role as a victim; her role as conspirator in covering up the crime. Such an extreme of pointless, squalid, deep evil is beyond my capacity to dismiss from my attention just because it doesn’t seem to relate to world or national issues. This is a real First Principle story for me. If these two people are guilty of such a vile and inexcusable negation of the humanity of the innocent child in their care, how can I possibly affirm their inherent worth and dignity? I know there is a way to do it, a way to come to it. People have told me there is and described it to me. I have not yet learned it, but I must because I do accept it as my religious duty as a Unitarian Universalist, not just to those two people but to myself and my fellow humans to learn to make actual that hardest of all the Principles. It is no easy religion that calls one to something so hard.

Well, I didn’t read that story first, either. Looking around the page I also saw: “Track star Jones to plead guilty for drug lies,” “Idaho Senator: I won’t quit,” “Secret torture memos surface,” and “Sharks fall in opener.” Only the last one doesn’t seem to call up multiple UU Principles, and the story was in the Sports section, anyway, and seconds were ticking away. What did I start reading in that last minute and a half before bolting into Petco to start my shift? I turned to Page 3A and read Mr. Roadshow, the daily traffic column. It, too, is fraught with ethical issues and can involve nearly all of our Principles. It deals with our immediate, daily interactions with fellow humans in a setting where life and death are truly in play every minute as we use potentially lethal machines to make our way around the valley.

I always start with Mr. Roadshow. I bet a lot of people do after scanning the front page. It’s something I can get my mind around as quickly as I can read it. I know that, two hours later, I’ll be back to the paper on my break, and, two hours after that I’ll have 45 minutes of lunch in which to finish it off and deal with the tough stuff I need to read and process.
My daily reward is to end with Dear Abby and the comics, which, come to think of it, constantly involve—at least—our first and second principles! That Luann! .......
AMEN!

Before I get started on the Wednesday Food and Wine section, let me ask you, please, to rise as you are willing and able, pick up your hymnal if you don’t know the words, and join in singing #298, Wake Now My Senses. Let’s keep our tempo brisk to really wake up our senses!

Reflection Curiosity, Compassion, and Critical Thinking
Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones

I googled “critical thinking” plus “Unitarian Universalist” this week, and I came up with over 17,500 results.
The most results came from various websites for Unitarian Universalist churches all over the country. These websites have all borrowed the same set of questions to help their visitors figure out whether Unitarian Universalism is the place for them. If your answer is yes to these questions, then you are almost certainly a Unitarian Universalist. Here are a couple of examples:

Here is the one that made these web pages show up when I did my search:
“Do you want children to be helped to develop their spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking?”
[repeat:] “Do you want children to be helped to develop their spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking?”

Notice that it doesn’t say “your children”; it asks about your desire for all children. We don’t have to be a parent or caregiver or teacher to want our children to grow in their spiritual curiosity, their compassion, and their critical thinking.

My only wish is that the very next question asked, “Do you want to continue to develop your spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking?” If the answer is yes, then you have come to the right place.
You know, when I first stepped into a Unitarian Universalist congregation a little over ten years ago, what I wanted most was probably healing for my broken heart and broken life. I wanted spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking, too, but I didn’t know until I got there that those things—the spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking—were what would help me heal.

So I’d googled “critical thinking” plus “Unitarian Universalist” because of course critical thinking was the first skill that came to mind when I thought about how Unitarian Universalism calls us to look at the news. Now, I know each of us may have a different relationship with the “news.” My spouse Kevin has a spiritual practice of getting up and out of the house early every morning so that he can buy a newspaper, or two, and a cup of decaf, and then sit and read the news before he goes on with his day. It’s essential to him. Reading the newspaper has been a part of his daily ritual since he was fourteen years old. He started because he overheard his dad and his uncle saying, “If our young people would just start reading the newspaper early, then by the time they’re adults, they’d be ready to be fully engaged in the world and in life.” (Kevin went into government and then into ministry, so maybe it really does matter what adults say around teenagers!)

As in most things, I don’t have as organized a routine as Kevin does; I get my news from—well, from Kevin—and from National Public Radio mostly, which I turn on as I’m getting ready in the morning or when I’m in my car. But lately, although for years I have automatically turned on NPR when I’m driving, I’ve now taken to listening instead to CDs of novels, and essays, even General Assembly worship services and workshops. They feed my hungry soul and make me feel hopeful instead of hopeless. The news is so depressing. Yesterday, for example, I heard Weekend Edition host Scott Simon ask long-time reporter and news analyst Daniel Schorr to comment on the news that Olympic gold-medalist Marion Jones’s admission this week that she had lied to federal investigators when she said she hadn’t taken performance-enhancing drugs. Dan Schorr said something like this: that it seemed to cap off a week when we heard about many people lying to us—and he mentioned the president (of the United States), and the Blackwater USA company, and then Marion Jones. He said something like, we seem to be surrounded by lying, as though it’s expected in our culture now, and I think he ended with a kind of dismayed verbal shrug: “and that’s the way it goes.”

That story suggests one of the reasons that so many of us these days have turned off or shut out the news altogether. To do so feels like our best sanity strategy.

Still, I’ve been thinking for quite some time and with increasing urgency, that what we need most of all in this country is a deeper and more widespread education in critical thinking. For our children, and for us adults. Now, some of us here may think we’re already pros at critical thinking—and some may think, Ugh, what a lot of trouble, it’s too much work—but either way, I wonder whether we remember the full breadth of what critical thinking really is. We usually define it as skepticism, don’t we, a finely honed ability to pull ideas or events apart, to “criticize” them by figuring out what’s wrong with them. But that’s actually a lopsided and ultimately unhealthy version of critical thinking. “Critical” really means the ability to separate or decide—to discern. I believe that if we lift up what critical thinking really is, and if we deepen our own critical-thinking skills, it will be a source of hope. We’ll stop giving that verbal shrug—“and that’s the way it goes”—and we’ll regain an aliveness and sense of empowerment that we desperately need.

So there’s this classic text called Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting1—it’s a book still recommended by my brilliant teacher of Adult Development at the Harvard School of Education—can hear you how I’m trying to buy your acceptance of what I’m about to say by name-dropping shamelessly? If you did hear that, then that’s good critical thinking! In this book, the author Stephen Brookfield identifies four components of critical thinking, and five ways we can recognize critical thinking in ourselves and others.
The four components are:

Now, so far, these elements are what most of us think of when we hear the term critical thinking. We can stand to be reminded of these components, especially since we want to grow, and we want our children to grow, in them, but still, no big surprises here.

But then Brookfield goes on to describe five ways we can tell that critical thinking is going on—in our lives, in the world around us. And this is where it gets hopeful and live-giving, if you ask me:
First, he says that “critical thinking is a productive and positive activity. Critical thinkers are actively engaged with life. They see themselves as creating and re-creating aspects of their personal, workplace, and political lives. They appreciate creativity, they are innovators, … they exude a sense that life is full of possibilities.” What’s more, they are aware of how many diverse views, “values, behaviors, social structures, and artistic forms” there are in the world, and this makes them humble. Ours is not the only way to live; ours are not the only values. Humility, creativity, a sense of confidence and hope, a respect for diversity—critical thinking is positive and productive.

Second, “critical thinking is a process, not an outcome.” We’re never “done”; we never have the final answer. For some folks, this is exactly why it’s not worth the effort, but I’d suggest that this is because they’ve never had the chance to experience the delicious freedom and empowerment this approach to the world can bring.

Third, critical thinking shows up in different ways in different contexts. Some folks undergo deep internal changes as a result of their critical thinking, which we can’t always see so dramatically from the outside; others wear their critical thinking on their sleeve. This means we need to be careful about judging whether critical thinking is going on. We need to look more closely, and understand others’ needs and strategies more deeply. We need to be critical thinkers about critical thinking!

Fourth—and I love this one—Brookfield reminds us that “critical thinking [can be] triggered by positive as well as negative events.” A peak experience—a “mountaintop experience”—may bring on the new perspective that critical thinking requires every bit as much as trauma and tragedy can. What they have in common is that we open ourselves to seeing things fresh.

Fifth, “critical thinking is emotive as well as rational.” Let’s get past the old stereotypes, the old divisions between thinking and feeling: “emotions are [actually] central to the critical thinking process.” Whether these feelings involve the anxiety of questioning old assumptions, or the resentment and confusion that can come up when we consider changing fundamental patterns in our lives, or the sense of release and joy, the growing self-confidence and excitement that we feel when we realize we can effect change—these emotions are a necessary part of the process. They point the way to change.

So what happens if we bring this understanding of critical thinking to the news? We will wake, now, our senses, our reason, our compassion, our conscience, and our vision, as we sang a little while ago. Do we want to develop our spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking? Then let us turn to the news, too, with that spiritual curiosity, which leads us to ask what lies at the very heart of the matter, what is at stake for the spiritual well-being of all involved. Let us bring to the news a lively compassion for whatever beings or things populate these stories, as well as a compassion for ourselves and our own responses. And let us continue to develop our critical thinking—challenging assumptions, examining and understanding the context, imagining alternatives, remaining skeptical but constructive and creative, knowing that no one “solution” to an issue will be the lasting one, relishing the emotions that come up because they are signposts to change, and remaining engaged.

Let’s try an experiment—just a brief experiment this Sunday morning. Take whatever news springs to your mind: the bicycle story [the Story for All Ages used the San Francisco Chronicle’s story on providing bicycles for a small rental fee to be used for short trips in the city, following Paris, France’s, example], or the Blackwater story, the war in Iraq or elsewhere, the news of Unitarian Universalism in Time magazine or the Mercury News; a tidbit or a front-page lead. And ask yourself:

I’ll ring the bell, and let us spend some time now in silence, thinking about a story in the news, and asking yourself one or more of these questions. And when I ring the bell again, I ask you to turn to a neighbor—make sure that everyone who wants to share has someone to talk to—turn to a neighbor and just share a thought or two, about what story leapt into your mind, about what happened when you tried to apply one or more of these questions to it. Each of you can have about two minutes to speak. Listen deeply to each other, and see how we help each other to learn and to grow.
“Wake, now, our senses, and hear the world call …”

Benediction
Do we want to continue to develop our spiritual curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking? I believe we do! May the week to come bring us many opportunities to grow. Amen, shalom, salaam, and blessed be.

1 The quotations that follow come from Stephen D. Brookfield, Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987). My teacher at the Harvard School of Education, by the way, in a class I audited in 2003, shortly after I graduated from the Divinity School there, was Robert Kegan, whose own books I highly recommend, too.

Reflection A UU and the News Frank Bosche, Worship Associate