I and Thou
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 15 February 2009 00:00
- Written by Angela Herrera
{player 2009-02-15-11am-sermon.mp3}
I’m preaching the word today. Probably not the one you’re thinking of, the one that actually contains nearly 800,000 words: the Bible. Not exactly. I’m talking about preaching the basic word. What the theologian Martin Buber called the basic word-pair. The words “I” and “You.” The words that are fundamental to our covenantal faith, as Unitarian Universalists. But listen carefully! Your very existence depends on these words, Buber says.
Think about this: One cannot say “I” without also automatically indicating “You…” or at the very least, “it.” If there were nothing but me, why bother? Why say “I” unless there is something present that is not me? “All actual life is encounter,” Buber said. All actual life is encounter.
Margie’s reading this morning drew our attention to the usefulness—the necessity—of empty spaces, spaces between and within. Buber focused on the space between ourselves and others—on relationships. He wrote his essay called I and Thou in the 1920’s in Austria and it’s one of the texts that has leapt out at me in my studies on the path to ministry. It’s philosophical, it’s theological. It’s hard to follow: Buber wrote like he was in a trance. But it’s beautiful when it hooks you in.
In it he describes three ways we relate, three places where we encounter things that are other than our selves, where we encounter either a You or an It: with nature, with people, and with “spiritual beings.” In nature, he said, we only encounter the “it.” Not a You.
He wasn’t thinking of nature the way Emerson or Thoreau thought of nature, the way many of us might think of it today. Not “the church of the great outdoors,” as we call it in the Pacific Northwest, where I’m from. He was thinking of it as a realm in which we analyze and conceptualize things. He wrote, recall, in a time in which science was blooming, full of promise to answer so many of life’s big questions by mapping every corner of it. But as long as one is thinking about things, and not experiencing them simply and purely with one’s being, Buber maintained that we could only know them as “it.” Furthermore, what he called “nature” he felt belonged to the realm of language. It was describable. Namable. It fit within our ability to conceptualize it.
The spiritual, on the other hand, lies just beyond the boundaries of language. This is something UU’s grapple with. Even among UU’s who share a basic theology, there can be stark differences in the language we use to describe it. The thing is that even as we acknowledge words cannot do justice to that which we can only feel, that which we can only know on a level deeper than language, even so we are born with the irresistible urge to name things. There’s a short poem by Lucille Clifton that goes:
the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job./p>
It’s a human impulse, but according to Buber, gets in our way. The You of God, of the mystery, is only encountered. It cannot be sought out, analyzed, or described. For centuries the West has been conceptualizing God as if God were another being, as quantifiable as any object; objectified. When language becomes fixed, and the mystery behind it is forgotten, religion becomes about itself, and loses the transcending mystery that sparked it in the first place. For a long time, humans have forgotten that language is inadequate. And so we came up with categorical versions of God that have lost their appeal for many people. God the father. God the judge. God the master of epidemics, and finder of parking spaces.
We humans stand in language, Buber said, and we speak out of spirit, not about it. Spirit is what gives us that impulse to reach out in awe. And in return? “We hear no You and yet feel addressed.”
We hear no You and yet feel addressed. Those are Buber’s words.
If nature is where we categorize the most, and Spirit is where categories fall apart, Buber seems to have thought our relationships with other people were somewhere in between.
We see this play out all the time. A few weeks ago I was waiting at a crosswalk in Harvard Square, and it had snowed recently. There was a narrow passage carved out between two snow banks, leading from the sidewalk into the crosswalk to cross the street. It was a crazy intersection, one where you hesitate to jaywalk because you never know what’s going to come at you. So I was waiting there for the light to change, when all of a sudden I felt a shove from behind and I heard a man say, “Get out of the way!” I was an It to him.
Another day, I shared with the staff here at First Parish that I wasn’t feeling well. Before I knew it, Margie, our minister of pastoral care, was thrusting a dinner from Caring Connection into my hands, and all that week people were asking me if I felt better. I was so touched, and it is a good example of being a You.
Whenever we treat one another as the means to an end, we are “itting” each other, encountering each other as merely an “it.” We do it unconsciously. Often it is pretty harmless. The cashier at the grocery store who you never get to know. The person who cuts you off in traffic, prompting you to call them a name that probably does not sum up their whole selves. But I think most of the harm we do happens when we are thinking “it” and not “you.” It’s hard to do harm to someone you are encountering as a whole You. In fact, there is something sacred about You encounters.
Buber believed that God, the eternal You, was present in every one. Humans are always directed toward the eternal You, through every meeting engaging one’s whole being. In every I-You relationship, God “is always there, always addressing us, but…we are continually turning aside.”
And love? Yesterday was Valentine’s Day after all. When we meet each other as an I and a You, love arises. Buber called love is “a cosmic force.” The responsibility of an I for a You.
And he said, “Feelings accompany the…fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. [In the New Testament of the Bible] Jesus’ feeling for [a] possessed man is different from his feeling for [a] beloved disciple, but the love is one…Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love.”
But he also acknowledged how slippery is our ability to stand in the I-You relation. “It is the sublime melancholy of our lot,” he wrote, “that every You must become an It in our world.” It is “torturously dual.” In other words, it is impossible to maintain this standard 24-7. As humans, we are in between nature and spiritual beings, we are both.
Martin Buber was a mystic, you must realize by now. He wasn’t perfect though. It is said that the man known for his theology of authentic encounter would not allow others to call him by his first name; that he resented the noise of children playing in his home; and that some of his most admiring students were ultimately frustrated by the conflict between their teacher's exceptional ideas and the reality of trying to put them into practice.
And as I reread I and Thou this week and thought about what to say this morning, I also had to pause and ask myself what meaning it has for us here in Concord, Massachusetts, in February.
It is a beautiful thing to gaze upon the universe with all our soul, to become a “transparent eyeball” Emerson would have said. But we must also file our taxes around this time of year. We must worry about working or not working. We have to buy fruit and bread, which might be spiritual enough but we also need pickles, diapers, and athlete’s foot cream, which is getting a lot less romantic. The You’s closest to us--the human ones--we sometimes love as the beloved disciple, and sometimes as though they were possessed. They give our lives meaning. They make us who we are. They love us in return and this is amazing, when we think about it, when we assess ourselves and aren’t too generous about it. We aren’t perfect. But our beloved ones also chew too loud. They blurt things out sometimes. They don’t think like we do, and they can’t read our minds. They throw their laundry over the edge of the hamper without it quite going in, and on a day when we aren’t feeling mystical, or even reasonable, these things can add up.
Or maybe your problems are bigger than these. Maybe from your vantage point, the little things that get on our nerves sound wonderfully normal, and you wish you were so lucky as to be absorbed in those, instead of the heaviness you bear, which may seem so large as to be visible to others in the silence of this sanctuary. And perhaps when no one does see what seems so unavoidable to you, you wonder whether you are even visible.
You are. You are visible.
What I’m getting at is the search for meaning. What does it mean to you to hear no You and yet feel addressed?
There are no simple answers, or maybe it’s more true to say there may be many simple answers, but no single answer that sums up the relationship with God—or what is ultimate--for everyone. As I said, we are a diverse bunch when it comes to such things. Nevertheless, by grace we gather each week in common worship.
I think Buber’s definition of God is striking. He calls God “that [source] out of whose abundance, welling up close by, every earthly You emerges.”
That source out of whose abundance, welling up close by, every earthly You emerges.
It is also my experience, it is what I have witnessed, that God-the-source is close by.
I think of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, and that’s how I’ll close this morning. Here it is:
God Speaks to each of us as he makes us,
Then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing,
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.