Ignorant `hic's: an address at the memorial church

This week, I gave the address at the unitarian church in Cambridge. Here's what I said:

Ignorant `hic's

I quite like indian food, so I enjoy going out for a curry from time to time. But I have a slightly embarrassing problem when I eat hot food; it always makes me hiccup. Of course, everyone has advice on how to cure the hiccups: their own special method. My personal favourite recommendation, which is absolutely guaranteed to work, is `Hold your breath for 20 minutes'.

The problem with hiccup cures is that they often rely on the user not being used to them, so after a while you can't use them any more. Sometimes our religious practices can end up like that, too; we get so used to them that they lose their value. We go through the motions, singing hymns but not worshipping. That's a huge problem, which I won't attempt to address today. One thing I'll do instead is suggest my own spiritual `hiccup cure'; it's a trick, or hack, to help you see the sacredness of ordinary things. Hopefully it will be new to some of you, so that you'll be able to use it. I'll also give a diagnosis of what I think is a key feature of the spiritual hiccups, and why it is such a bad thing.

I came across this `hiccup cure' by accident just under a year ago. The way it happened is a simple enough story; there is almost nothing to it. But it remains strong in my memory. There was a film night, here at the church. We watched a Japanese animated film called `Spirited Away'. It is a magical film; I recommend it. But it is not the story of the film that I want to talk about; it is the credits. There is nothing very unusual about them. The names of those involved in the making of the film are shown in turn against a neutral background; in this case the background was a patch of ground; dirt with some stones on it and a couple of scrubby plants. However, since this was an animated film the dirt, stones and plants had been drawn rather than photographed.

Whoever had drawn this picture had lovingly filled in a lot of detail: the shading on each rock, and the gentle changes in the colouring of the ground. I was fascinated by this process of creation. Why had this stone been placed just here, rather than a little to the left? How did the artist come to settle on this colour for one patch of dirt, and on that for another? Maybe it just felt right. I know that inscrutable feeling of rightness a little, but it is shy and mysterious. And perhaps the artist's mind and hand were guided by something else entirely. Perhaps some detail hides a mistake, so expertly that I cannot tell. Perhaps the whole thing was sketched inattentively, during a conversation or in a meeting. To be honest, it wasn't specific questions like these which fascinated me, but something they can only serve to hint at: a sense of a subtle story of which I could only see an accidental trace, the foam on the tip of the wave.

I don't want to dwell too long on the details of this experience, but rather to point out something a little odd about it. The picture was a picture of stones and dirt, which are not unusual things. I encounter them beneath my feet every day as I walk about. But even when my eye does, occasionally, rest on them, they do not strike me in the same way as that picture. It's just a bit of ground, after all. It's not as if somebody took the time to choose where to place each pebble.

But if I do look at it like that, as if it had been carefully arranged, then I suddenly do notice all sorts of fascinating oddities, and my mind no longer slips away onto other concerns. That's the trick, the `hiccup cure'. To encounter their sacredness, try looking at the ordinary things you come across as if they had been created by a person; an artisan. The aim of this practice is to help us stop, sometimes, and pay attention to the world.

There's an episode of the TV detective show Columbo in which Columbo's investigation takes him to an art gallery, where there's a lot of modern art hanging up; canvasses with just a single diagonal line and so on. Columbo goes to look at one; a white plastic square which is set into the wall, with some vertical slits in it, through which you can see that there is a hole in the wall behind it. `How much is this piece, ma'am?' he asks the gallery owner. `Which one?' she replies, `Oh, ... that's the ventilation system'.

When Columbo thought of this system as art, he was curious about it, but when he was told it was functional he lost his curiosity. This wasn't because there was less to be curious about. Most of us have little idea of how ventilation systems work, how to install them, what can go wrong with them and so on. But these are the kinds of question we normally just avoid thinking about. We're all immensely ignorant about the world around us, but we don't usually notice this. We think about the things that we reckon we do know about and subconsciously edit out those features of the world that we don't understand.

The practice of encountering things as if they had been created can help us to recognise and acknowledge this vast ignorance. When I was talking about this with my brother, he pointed out something which drives home just how much we naturally ignore. Imagine if you were to go out onto Christ's pieces, pick a chunk of grass, and examine it as if were created. In the words of the poet Lew Welch, you might

Step out onto the planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside are three hundred things nobody understands, and, maybe, nobody's ever really seen. How many can you find?

Well, maybe you would find a couple of hundred. But now imagine if we were all to do this, with the same patch of grass. I reckon our collections of mysteries would barely overlap, and this would still be true even if there were a hundred of us. So each of us, straining to see a hundred mysteries, would miss ten thousand. That's how ignorant we are; how ignorant even of our own ignorance. Of course, being reminded of this ignorance is always helpful when we need a dose of humility.

What we encounter when we allow ourselves to see the world this way aren't simply riddles to be solved, but mysteries, even sacred mysteries. That is, in seeing the everyday mysteries of the world, we see the sacredness of ordinary things and the boundary between sacred and mundane blurs away. As Gordon Atkinson speculates in the second reading we had earlier, maybe we should `build a shrine to everything', at least if it weren't for the fact that `the mortar is worth as much as the saint'.

One reason it is great to be reminded of how much our minds filter out is that so much of it is fascinating and wonderful. We find it amusing when small children are as fascinated with the wrapping paper as with the gift inside, but secretly I think we all mourn the loss of the childish fascination which would reveal to us once more how magical wrapping paper is. To put it in more biblical language, our minds are often so focused on the treasures we have on earth that we completely forget about our treasures in heaven. Conversely, perhaps if we paid attention to what treasure we do have in heaven we might cling a little less fiercely to what we've managed to scratch together on earth. You cannot serve both God and mammon.

Of course, in drawing attention to this mystical way of seeing the world, I don't want to give the impression that it is always the most appropriate way to engage with things; that we should be continually exhausting our stores of `hiccup cures' to pull ourselves ever deeper into this vision. Sometimes, we do need to filter out our ignorance. When you're driving, you don't want to be fascinated by the unexplored territory on your right; you want to keep your eyes on the road. In an art gallery, you do want to spend a fair amount of your attention on the official artwork. I just want to suggest, or remind you, that sometimes dropping our filters can be of immense value.

So, where is it most important not to glide over our ignorance? I think one of the most important areas is in dealing with other people. I know myself better than most of you know me, and I know that I have all kinds of quirks, some rather endearing and others much less so, and that occasionally my reasons for acting run untraceably deep. I also know that this isn't some special fact about myself - we're all like that, we just find it harder to see it in one another. We have the annoying habit of overlooking our deep ignorance of one another and working with pictures of each other based on first impressions or even flimsier things like sex or appearance. I include myself in this; I know I make this mistake all the time. It's part of who we all are that we do this, and it is a tragedy, something we should be actively fighting. We should remember how we all shape ourselves day by day, crafting ourselves in small ways into the people we later become, and we should respect the artistry of that.

A second key area is in our encounters with God. Let me take a deeply stereotypical example. I went on holiday with my family to northern Scotland a few years ago - right up away from the bright lights of civilisation. The first night we went outside and I saw the stars, properly saw them, for the first time. I guess most of you know how that whips your mind away from under you. We don't have a good way to talk about what is encountered there except with religious language.

Thinking in terms of creation can recall to our minds the grandeur of it all, as in the first reading today where thinking about `who created all [the stars]?' leads to thoughts about `bringing out the starry host one by one' and `calling them all by name'. There's an important caveat at this point. For this thought experiment to remind us of the vast mysteries we like to leave in the wilderness, we don't have to actually believe that there is, somewhere, a being who actually knows the name of each star. Approaching them through the lens of creation is enough. And after all, don't they all deserve names? `You know, out of respect.' Just like every mote of dust that dances in every sunbeam, and in every starbeam on every distant planet.

We can't take it in; we must refer such knowledge to the mind of God. But there's a huge danger here. The danger is of using this language to cover over, rather than explore, our ignorance: of dismissively saying `God knows'. We can take God's name in vain to pretend that we understand more than we do. So often the word is used as a stopper, an unquestioned answer, rather than as an acknowledgement of the depth beyond our questioning. We think if we have a neat enough signpost to the sacred grove we don't have to go visit. But it doesn't have to be like that. We can find ways to remind each other why the signs were put up, with small `hiccup cures' and with broader frameworks of religious language and ritual. I pray that we will constantly find new ways to refashion the word of God from heavy chains back into a`two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit'.