As early as I can remember, my father used to involve me in working on the machines he worked on. My father was a mechanic. There was almost always an automobile or other machine in our driveway or garage in one state or another of being repaired. My father was one of those mechanics that people brought their car to. He would listen and then, still in his Sunday white shirt, roll up his sleeves, lift the hood and fix it. Sometimes he had to tear half the engine out. Then, when it was finished, he wouldn't even bother to start the engine to see whether it was working again. He knew it was. And there would not be a speck of grease on that white shirt.

I spent a summer working as my father's assistant at a large construction company and we had these white coveralls. At the end of the day, Dad's white coverall was still in pristine shape and mine looked like I had spent the day working in a coal mine. That skill I never was able to learn from him.

The skill at issue, and why I tell this nostalgic tale, is a different one. When he was working on one of those machines, I, of course, would be poking around, looking to see what he was doing, and looking at--well, playing with--all those neat tools he got to play with. He would ask me what I thought was wrong. The pattern of asking was at first he would show me how the thing was supposed to work and then ask me to figure out what I thought might be wrong with it. That way of thinking, that pattern recognition logic that he taught me in this rather Socratic fashion, has stayed with me. I realized only much later that this is a major part of how I approach stuff generally, but also of the way in which I have approached issues of theology and religion.

It's quite true: You know a lot more than you think you know. This is what most people mean when they talk about intuition. It is not a way of finding out what you didn't know. It is rather a way of recognizing and re-calling the things that you do know. Most of the time, what you know is in the pattern, just the way my father tried to teach me. You may know bits and pieces of the pattern and intuitively sense where the holes are. You know what to look for, what kinds of questions to ask and what the answers will look like. Sometimes, if your experience is like mine, I do this and then I realize that my intuition has played me false. The whole pattern that I thought I understood so clearly not only had holes in it but they had holes that nothing fit in. I was way off the mark from the outset because of the initial basic assumptions I had made.

I started out as a Baptist. The basic assumptions that I made were the assumptions that came with going to Baptist Sunday School. It was an interesting exercise to be in the Sunday School class when the teacher is telling us about how the prophet Ezekiel predicted the destruction of Tyre and Siddon. I had made what was from the teacher's point of view the mistake of having actually read the Book of Ezekiel. I noticed that Ezekiel did something rather interesting. He did, indeed, predict Nebuchadnezzar was going to take Tyre and Siddon. Except that he couldn't. So Ezekiel says, "Because Nebuchadnezzar tried so hard to take Tyre and Siddon, God is going to give him Egypt." And so Nebuchadnezzar went off and took Egypt instead.

I raised my hand and asked the teacher, "Well, but Ezekiel said, 'Thus sayeth the Lord: Nebuchadnezzar is going to take Tyre and Siddon.' How could he not?" I wasn't very popular with that Sunday School teacher.

There was a hole there for me--a piece missing in the pattern. It wasn't until many years later, as I began to study the Old Testament with some seriousness, that I began to realize that it was not my intuition that was off. My intuition accurately saw the whole. What was off was the assumption that the Prophets were fore-tellers of the future. They were not. In fact, ironically, trying to foretell the future is contrary to Jewish Law!

There were many other false assumptions and patterns with unfillable holes in them in the religion I was being taught.

Changes often happen in our lives because finally we can no longer go down that path, no longer make those assumptions. We take the rather courageous step of breaking with the pattern and looking for a new paradigm, a new pattern.

If your experience is like mine, the new one also ends up with a bunch of holes in it. I have realized there is probably no pattern out there that my father's very efficient teaching of me can't find a hole in. Does that mean that there's no such thing?

Many of us hope for, wish for, look for, have spent some time in our lives seeking for at least a few pieces of nice big capital T "Truths". If you're in a Unitarian Universalist church, at least more than twice, you are probably one of us who have found that every time you thought you had one of those big T, capital T "Truths", something happened that made you look at it a second time and shift the pattern one more time.

I was also taught in school that whole way of thinking that involves the "scientific" approach. I thought, surely this one was going to give me some solid stuff. Of course, all the scientific approach ever gave me was quantum mechanics which is about as unsolid a stuff as you can possibly end up with. That, and the frustration that nowhere in my own experience was there available to me anything that I could call solid stuff, capital T, big T "Truth".

One of the pieces that is peculiar in my history was involvement, even before the hippies got hold of it, with a psychedelic drug. I was a part of the last legal experiment done at Harvard University by Tim Leary and Richard Alpert. The experiment has become famous as the "Good Friday Boston University Marsh Chapel Experiment." In the middle of the drug experience, while I had my brain full of psilocybin, I had to go to the bathroom. Now, there was another part of the vision that occurred that day that was significantly more important than this. But this one turned out to be a rather interestingly profound experience all by itself.

I went into the john. This is in the basement chapel of March Chapel, Boston University. There was a little window open to the outside, below street level. I could hear automobiles going by in front of the chapel. Mind you, I'm smashed out of my gourd and I am hearing these noises and I'm trying very hard to integrate them into the weird stuff that's going on inside my head. Suddenly I realized, "Those are cars going by outside." In my drugged mind I said to myself, "I can't tell whether the sound of the cars going by outside is happening inside my head or outside my head." And then I realized I can't tell whether the rest of this stuff is happening inside my head or outside my head. You'd be amazed, with twenty of us together, how much of the stuff going on inside our heads was confirmed by checking with each other; so even consensus checking of information didn't work all that well.

From going to the bathroom on psilocybin, it penetrated my brain that the experiences that I have had in my life that have been so important for shaping what I thought was capital T "Truth" were things going on inside my brain. Oh, I'm sure there are events going on out there --I really do think you all are real; you are not all in my head. But the judgments that I make, the meanings that I make out of my own life experiences, that is going on in here. And I make them with the accumulating furniture of my own mind.

At first, that was a frustrating conclusion to come to. For there is a place on my insides where I want to live in a world of certainty, where things are nailed down, where I know what's probably going to happen next, where the meanings of things are clear and I can manage not only to get some consensus but to gain allies.

From the very beginning of my ministry, even before theo-logical school, I have always worked interfaith. This has largely been because I'm well aware that there aren't all that many Unitarian Universalists in the world. If we're going to do anything that's going to cut any ice, we really need allies. So many of the things that I have done as a minister have involved working with people from other religious traditions. The strangest experience happens when you are on the lines, literally or figuratively, with Baptists and Congregation-alists, Catholic nuns and priests, and Episcopalians and Jews and atheists; even, believe it or not, right-wing nuts, and conservative Christian Evangelicals. I discovered that what we held in common was none of the capital T "Truths". What we held in common was a commitment to some basic human values. We had told ourselves wonderfully different stories, from person to person, from religious tradition to religious tradition, to justify, to describe, to make meaning, to give substance to those basic human values we held in common. When we worshiped together, as we often did, in all of the various interfaith activities over the 40 years of my ministry, even there, we were talking in different languages about the same human experiences.

There is still a part of me that wants to get you all to think critically, to not assume that because an idea seems to fit the hole in the pattern that you're aware of, you can go running off following your intuition. I, of course, wish that you would come follow my intuition. I want that capital "T" Truth some place in my life, and at the same time have learned by now deep into my bones, that it is not available to me. No matter the conceptual models that you and I and those people out there find, what is so much more deep and important are those commitments to basic human values. These, not theologies, let us work together to make this community and the larger community that we share something that cherishes, increases, feeds, nurtures behaving toward one another as if we were indeed one, indeed extensions of one another, indeed family, indeed intimates.

Over the next few sermons I'm going to be wrestling with some of the pieces of both sides of that paradox. It scares me that the level of science understanding in the community out there, the larger one we share, is so abysmally low. The stuff we get fed by the media that parades under the label of science information is dumbed down to the third grade level at best when it isn't absolutely wrong. We are living in a world that is incredibly technologically complex. We seem to be willing to be victims of that technological complexity without learning the language, learning the way of thinking that matches it.

The same thing is true of religious illiteracy. Biblical religion permeates our culture. Its thought forms profoundly shape and influence so many aspects of our lives. Yet, most of us have at best a third grade Sunday School knowledge of it. I dearly love to teach the Bible. Whenever I do, I have to ask myself, "How do I make this make sense when people coming into that class are unaware of the rich scholarship available." When I meet ex-Christians, most of them don't know that the material their ex-Pastor taught was not what he or she learned in theological school.

That's one side. The other side is what keeps me attending the meeting of the clergy in the Nuuanu Valley planning the Thanksgiving Eve service, keeps me looking for allies in the community from other religious traditions to fight the human rights battles that must, from time to time be fought; the recognition that for all those differences it's those commitments we share that matter.

A few weeks ago we had our service at the park. We stretched out the yellow tape and read off a list of questions. You all stood on the yellow tape depending upon whether you agreed with one side of the issue or the other. We've done this before and it always cracks me up. The congregation was scattered all up and down that yellow tape. You were NOT standing where I think you should. Even within the confines of a relatively consistent religious tradition, the differences between us in what we have experienced and the meanings we have given the events in our lives are as various as the various religious heritages out there. Even within our own congregation we need to learn to listen louder to each other, not for the beliefs but for the basic common human experiences of dignity and its loss, of hope and its crushing, that we all share together. For those are what lie behind all of the differences. We are indeed truly one.

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