The Flip Side

Rev. Rali M. Weaver

First Church and Parish in Dedham- Unitarian Universalist

May 4, 2008

We are here together as Unitarian Universalists, bound by our mutual covenant to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, it is good and right that we should ponder the source of truth.

The main reason this question is mine is because I am dyslexic.

If you are not already familiar with the term dyslexia then let me explain.

Dyslexia, is a neurologically based learning difference that causes the brain to make letters, words and pictures appear reversed.

As a child I spent countless hours sitting next to my teacher trying to turn the letters around and put the ‘right’ answer on the page. The problem was that a backward letter or word always looked the same to me as a frontward one. The right and the wrong answers often looked identical in my brain. In the end the constant correcting and correcting and correcting from my teachers left me feeling pretty dumb.

What I did learn from my teachers though was that to most of the world, things have two sides. Like coins, everything is distinguished as having a head or a tail, a right or a left, an up or a down. While I understood this was the way my teachers defined the truth, to my jumbled brain the right answer was never absolutely clear.

In the book, The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell describes that opposites, are our cultural reality, but in mythology there is a singularity over which duality plays "like a shadow game." That is sort of what dyslexia is like. My mind does a kind of dance over things so that what most people see one way my brain sees another. Sometimes I can even catch myself seeing both the correct answer and it’s opposite and they always seem somehow connected.

Can you imagine that? The single connector where all our separations are really a whole? If you’ve got a coin in your pocket, pull it out and take a long look at it. Maybe you’ve got a nickel or a dime or a quarter. It doesn’t matter what your coin is. If you flip it over in your hand you see it has a head and a tail. Pretty simple right. A head and a tail both separate, both different, and yet they both make up one coin. Together they are a whole. They are different but joined together.

Which leads to the real question raised by my twisty brain.

What if all opposites are really parts of a whole? Male and female, wealth and poverty, black and white, sickness and health, backward and forward, right and wrong, what if they are all parts of the same whole? What if all the distinctions are just ways we have learned to classify and make sense of an indescribable oneness. Distinctions that help us make sense of an interconnectedness that cannot be described.

I am pretty sure that it was Newtonian Physics with its laws of cause and effect that started us breaking things down into measurable parts and Western Protestant Churches have focused on theologies of sin and salvation, good and evil, heaven and hell as though they were definite formations of absolute truths. Even our president George W. Bush has polarized discussions of war down to a simple axis of good vs. evil.

Even though my learning difference still has me going in the wrong direction sometimes and causes me to copy down phone numbers incorrectly the gift of my wrinkled brain is the absolute knowledge that things are never as simple as your brains perceive them to be.

Of course scientists have proven that what has matter and form to the natural eye, doesn’t exist at the sub atomic level but only shows "tendencies to exist’. Atoms like light can be both wave and particle and electrons are effected by their environmental circumstances.

In the same way what the human brain believes to be true, is influenced by environmental and cultural circumstances. In the poem by Marge Piercy I like the way she describes our brains, "Like a wrinkled slug that knows… like a computer… like a violinist…like a bloodhound… like a frog."

We all see things differently and we need each other to get the complete picture. Like I needed my teachers to show me the difference between backward and frontward, we all need different perspectives to see past our own individualistic truths.

Isn’t that the real beauty of Unitarian Universalism? And isn’t that what happens here in this church whenever a group of people gather together to discuss parenting, or social justice or even the budget?

James Luther Adam’s once wrote that: "What binds us together is at the same time the ground of our individuality and the ground of our common identity." We come together in this safe place, not, despite our differences but because of them. My own need to get a different perspective from my own was never so clear to me than it was when I was just a seminarian and two weeks before the war in Iraq began, I was asked to speak for peace at my sponsorship church, the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine.

In anticipation of the war I had titled my talk, "Make love not War" and as I began to speak I found myself feeling both privileged and incredibly anxious standing before the congregation. I timidly began to speak my concerns.

At the time there were ships lurking off the coast of Turkey. The government had begun its incessant color-coded warnings and I, like many of those sitting before me felt outraged at the prospect of war. Even with all my longing for peace and the impassioned words I had written in front of me, I found myself feeling small. I was nervous and it showed. I tripped over words and lost my place again and again and again. I felt increasingly more inadequate as the service continued. Old messages like, "I am too stupid to stand up here and talk about peace" and "who am I to take a stand?" raced through my head. I made it through the service though, and the congregation was comforting and supportive despite all of my mistakes.

But I had to wonder if I was cut out for the ministry. How could I, with my miss-wired brain ever make a good preacher?

I moped around unsure of myself for about a week until I gathered up enough courage to approach the Minister Emeritus at First Parish. The Rev. Fred Lipp was the first Unitarian Universalist minister I had ever seen preach. At the time he was the best preacher I had ever known. I admired the way he would spin an everyday event into a story that always felt like he was talking directly to each person listening. I hungered for his wisdom and longed to find his courage in the pulpit.

We met over tea and he shared the ways in which he prepared his sermons.

He spoke about how he practiced and he promised me that my confidence would grow with time. When we were through he offered me his phone number. He said if I ever needed support not to hesitate to call. But, while I was writing down the phone number I, as usual, reversed the digits.

He looked at my mistake and pointed out my error. When he did I said my usual, "Oh, I am sorry, I am dyslexic." To my surprise, he smiled and laughed and said, "I know, so am I".

I couldn’t believe it. Here was this man who I had admired for nearly twenty years, this man who I believed to be the best preacher I have ever seen. This man who I had so carefully listened to as he wove his spectacular stories and shared his ideas about the world,

This man I respect, has the same learning disability that I do. What I had thought was an insurmountable obstacle to my own success, he had already overcome. It was in hearing his struggle; I found my own strength.

And it turns out I am not perfect. Instead it is my imperfections that make me human. We all end up feeling different, misunderstood, and disenfranchised, sometimes.

When you feel stuck, or just can’t see another side to things, I hope you remember the coin and summon the strength to take a big step back. Look at the flip side. Gather different perspectives as though they were flowers. Embrace the perfect imperfectness of it all. Because I am quite sure that in our quest for the truth, our differences and imperfections are not the obstacles we perceive them to be.

Instead it is through our imperfections that we find our humanity and just as examining the coin from both sides, it is only in seeing our strengths and weaknesses as one whole that we can see our full humanity.

And it is only in the fullness of our humanity that we will find the truth.

-