"Crossroads"

Dr. Gary Jackoway
May 23, 2001

In the thesaurus, one will find the word "Crossroads" referenced in five different sections. First, in the section "Way or Road". Second, as a circumstance or condition: "Russia at a crossroads," for example. Third, under "Focus or Place of Meeting". Fourth, in the section on "Union or Joining". And last, in the section on Divergence. It is interesting that crossroads is to some extent its own antonym. A crossroads can be a coming together or a parting of ways.

Lets begin by considering a "Crossroads" as a gathering place. One will often find the word Crossroads used as a description of special places, such as the Middle East. The Middle East is the Crossroads of Africa, Europe and Asia. For thousands of years so many people have fought and died to control that Crossroads. A Crossroads can be a boiling trouble-filled place. But it can also be an exciting place, a place of great promise. It is at the crossroads that ideas are exchanged along with goods. A church, too, is a crossroads where ideas are exchanged. And a church, too, can be an exciting place to be.

When used in the sense of a circumstance or condition, it is not uncommon for a church to find itself at a crossroads. My home church, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Newark, found itself at just such a crossroads when our minister resigned under less than auspicious circumstances some five years ago, which made our church life exciting indeed. As a member of the ministerial search committee, I was assigned the duty of locating new leadership for the fellowship. Before we could begin in earnest looking for a new minister we needed to understand not just where we were but also where we wanted to go: which path we wanted to take at the crossroads. A key part of the process was developing this book which describes both who we the UUFN are and also who we want to become. This book acted both as our description to potential ministers and also as a guide for us in the selection process.

One aspect of our fellowship that is clear from this book is that even as our membership has grown to 200, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Newark has always had an intense desire to maintain fellowship status - that is, our laity is involved in all aspects of the church - but it is undeniable that the minister is still the most visible and essential leadership position in our church. Imagine then, we were without our key leadership position, so what do we do? We take eight other key lay leaders and hole them up in the search committee. Just keeping the fellowship going through that trying time was quite a struggle. I know that you're church is also in need of a settled minister, and I'm here to tell you that we have made it to the other side and we are stronger for it. That challenging time created opportunities for individuals to step forward and take responsibilities they otherwise might not have considered.

Having faith that you will find yourselves soon enough on the other side, let me warn you about one or two traps that await. One trap is expecting your new minister to know your expectations. An example. Our new minister did the flower communion in the spring two years ago, but he did not use the hymn Mother Spirit, Father Spirit. Now in my fellowship the flower communion and that hymn are synonymous. As head of the worship committee, I was asked by various members, what WAS our new minister thinking? Well, when we talked about it in our worship committee meeting, our minister said that his previous church never used that hymn as part of the flower communion, and why didn't we tell him it was so important? My response was twofold: first, it never occurred to me he wouldn't use the hymn, and second I hadn't realized how important it was to us until it was missing. A little understanding on both sides, I assure you, will go a long way.

Another trap was that having found our new minister we arrived at a completely different crossroads. Just keeping it together had become our modus operandi, our way of operating. But now that we have our settled minister, we need to stretch our wings - to become the fellowship that we envisioned ourselves to be. I call it moving from "survive to thrive". I'm just completing service on our Long Range Planning Committee, which I hope will provide the framework for propelling the UUFN forward in its mission.

It seems surprising to me anyway that I find myself in so many roles within my fellowship. I can't help but think that some of the skills that make me useful in these roles are based on my birth order. I am a middle child; and Dr. Alfred Adler found that middle children tend to be mediators, integrators. We bring together diverse interests and try to create a peaceful whole. The intersection of various ideas is a Crossroads. For it is at the Crossroads that synergy - a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts -- is possible.

What originally caused me to consider the concept of a Crossroads was a much-ignored movie of that title, starring Ralph Macchio - you know, the Karate Kid. It was made in '86 right around the time of Karate Kid II. Ralph plays a musical prodigy who is drawn to the Blues. On the surface, the Crossroads in the movie is that place where one makes a deal with the devil, selling one's soul for fame and fortune. But what I found intriguing was that the lead character is told by the "legitimate" musical authorities at Julliard that Blues music is worthless; and he is told by the Blues musician he teams up with that the fancy licks he learned at Julliard have nothing to do with the Blues. Yet what transforms the lead character and what literally saves his soul, is his ability to integrate these two art forms. He is not complete until he brings the two together. For me, the ability to combine disparate ideas is a strength I feel I embody primarily due to birth order. Being the middlest of three brothers, I often found myself in the role of peacemaker, of mediator. I use that capability at home, in my job, and at my fellowship.

But the middle child's psychological role of "crossing guard" at the Crossroads is only one aspect of what Crossroads means to me. A Crossroads can also be seen as a major decision point in one's life, a crisis, a "dangerous opportunity".

When one comes to a Crossroads, one has to make a choice: go left, go right, continue, turn back, or even stop at this juncture. What appears to be a small decision may have radical consequences.

In 1983, my wife Ingrid and I were in graduate school in North Carolina. We arrived home on a rainy October evening to find a cold, wet, flea-infested puppy on our porch. We took her in and cleaned her up. I remember feeding her hot dogs that night, not having any pet food in our graduate school basement apartment. We put up signs and contacted the Humane Society, but after a week it was pretty clear that no one was going to come forward. The choice was clear - take her to the pound or adopt her. We decided to keep Carly and she was with us for 14 years. I believe that our caring for Carly not only helped prepare us for having children, but may also have helped save our marriage. Carly arrived at a difficult time for us, exacerbated by long school hours and forced separations for graduate internships. Carly's care and feeding was something we could safely cooperate on. It is hard to imagine what our lives would have been like without Carly, but there is no doubt that that one decision to keep Carly profoundly affected who we are today.

But the aspect of Crossroads that finally hooked me, and that helped me define my theology was this: every day, every hour, every second, every instant is a Crossroads. We make a choice at every moment. For example, I could stop right now, mid-sermon as it were, and walk out the door.…

And I could make that decision at any moment.

The impact of that decision would be far-reaching (for me anyway). The funny thing is that it doesn't seem like we have options continuously, but we do. We live our lives like an out-of-control truck bombing down a mountain road - intersections come and go so quickly we cannot even read the signs. But this is not reality. The reality is that we choose to keep going. We choose the path we are most comfortable with.

Let me tell you an old Buddhist story.

A student is talking with a Zen master. In the middle of the conversation, the Zen master says, "There goes one." A few minutes later, the master says, "There goes another." And a few moments later, "There goes another". "Master," the student asks, "what is it you see going by?" The master replies, "Why there goes another one - another moment when you are not enlightened."

Every moment is an opportunity, a chance, a Crossroads.

Many of these Crossroads are small things. We rarely have the fortitude to completely change the way we live in a single instant. Instead, we move in small, incremental steps. We turn a little bit at each step until we are going in quite a different direction. My involvement in worship services is a good example. A dozen years ago, having only recently joined a UU in Colorado, I was a participant in a group worship service. Then I worked on a service with our minister at the UUFN. Then I developed a service that the minister and I gave. Then I worked on a service with a worship partner. I also helped ministers who came to the UUFN to speak. A few years ago, I presented a service on my own. And now I have the chance to take my services to churches even a thousand miles from home. Step-by-step my confidence grew, and, hopefully, my abilities with it. It is said that the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

I believe that our lives are defined by the choices we make, by the way we handle ourselves at the Crossroads we see and at the continual Crossroads we miss. There may be nothing we can do about our genetic makeup, or about the way our parents raised us, or about the accident that could be waiting around the next corner, but there is something we can do about the vast majority of decisions we make every day. We are in control of our decisions, and if there is a more traditional God, a God who sits in His big chair and judges us, let Him judge us on the basis of our decisions. And all I can say is that I hope He grades on a curve.

My view of crossroads and choices are hardly in keeping with my familial background. My father, a philosopher by training, has a mechanistic worldview. He believes we could no more change paths than a dropped anvil could suddenly decide to go up rather than down. Our path is predetermined, turns and all. Certainly many modern philosophers and scientists since the time of Descartes have found this philosophy appealing, but I find it sterile and uninspiring. To follow the analogy, the anvil can be made to go up. To change the direction of the anvil takes determination and support, but mainly it takes energy. It takes energy for us to defy the training of socialization, but we can do it. It takes energy to break the bonds of our genetic programming, but we can do it. It takes energy to risk giving up the safety of the known, but we can do it. It takes energy to turn away from the path of least resistance, but we can do it.

I know that I could do more to make this world a better place. But I also know that I am making an effort. I am trying to help others in ways that I can. I am attempting to raise a pair of responsible children who understand that we individually can have an impact on this world. I took my son Alan to Hope Dining Room, a program the UUFN supports, that serves lunch to anyone who needs it. I wanted him to see that we can, through our own hands make a difference. That there are needy people and that he can help, even if just by dishing out meals. I'm proud of the fact that I belong to a congregation that makes a commitment to help those in need.

Let me quote from "Ethics for a New Millenium" by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama:

"Education is much more than a matter of imparting the knowledge and skills by which narrow goals are achieved. It is also about opening the child's eyes to the needs and rights of others. We must show children that their actions have a universal dimension. And we must somehow find a way to build on their natural feeling of empathy so that they come to have a sense of responsibility toward others. For it is this which stirs us into action."

While some religions are about heaven and hell, about where the paths lead, I think Unitarian-Universalism is about the path itself, the decisions we make at each Crossroads. UU is about personal responsibility, not personal salvation.

Some conservatives claim that "liberals" don't believe in personal responsibility. My take on UU is that it puts personal responsibility front and center. Our movement should not let others define what we are about - our movement is about helping people so that they are able to assume responsibility. It is about removing the blockades that keep people from asserting their own unique gifts, removing the blockades that trap people. Only when one is free from societal racism, sexism, homophobism, ageism, and other impediments, only then can one be expected to achieve what one is truly capable of. To take hold of the opportunities available.

The process of life itself takes energy and reforms it in new ways. And it is this reforming, this reshaping, this choosing among options, this selecting of directions, that defines who we are. A few years back I came upon the process theology of the mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead.

Let me tell you a little about Whitehead. At the turn of the century, he and Russell worked for years on the seminal work Principia Mathematica. This tome attempted to develop all of mathematics from first principles - a task not undertaken since Euclid and the Greeks tried it two thousand years ago. After his masterwork was published, an Austrian named Goedel pointed out in a simple proof (the proof took me one college quarter to complete - simple is relative), that there was this vast and overarching hole in Whitehead's work. The goal is in fact impossible. In any consistent mathematical system, Goedel showed, there are some statements that can be neither proved nor disproved. Though Goedel's theorem takes some of the shine off Whitehead's work, Principia Mathematica is nonetheless an awe-inspiring accomplishment.

Whitehead saw an object as being defined not by its mass, position and velocity, not by its physicality. He saw an object as being defined by what it did, how it behaved. Further, Whitehead found that God is not inconsistent with this process view. God is "The One Who Calls" us forward. "The One Who Calls". This is a view of God I respond to. Not a clockmaker God who sets the world in motion and watches it spin; not an intrusive God who interferes on a constant basis. But a God who calls me forward, urging me to become the best "me" I can.

I should warn you that Whitehead writes rather like the mathematician that he was. His text is not an easy read. As such, I'll not try to bring his words forward to today's standards of gender neutrality. Let me give you some of the flavor of his main philosophical work: Process and Reality:

God is the organ of novelty, aiming at intensification. He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act… constitutes him the initial "object of desire" establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim. Apart from the intervention of God, there would be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world… The novel feelings derived from God are the foundations of progress.

The wisdom of God's subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be - its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy - woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by relation to the completed whole. The image - and it is but an image - the image under which this operative growth of God's nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost. The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.

If science tells us the how of evolution, The One Who Calls explains the why. We are called forward to evolve and improve by that inexorable voice. Let me quote from a website devoted to process theology: "God is the energy event who calls all other energy events forward to greater complexity or beauty. Beauty equals variety and intensity... There is ground for hope, because God is constantly at work seeking to lead all of reality toward a better tomorrow."

Let me give you a practical application of this philosophy. I needed some dental work done -- two appointments, one for each side of my mouth. After the dentist finished the right side I felt terrible. I got in my car and had to just sit for a few minutes before I could drive to work. Two weeks ago, in the midst of working on this service, I went in to have the left side done. I decided to concentrate on The One Who Calls during the appointment. I thought about the purpose of pain in encouraging us to move forward, to recognize and deal with problems, to empathize with others. I told myself that this procedure was just a process, that it too would pass.

Now I don't know how much this attitude affected the result, but all I can tell you is that, while not pleasant, it really wasn't that uncomfortable. Maybe my left side wasn't as bad as my right. Maybe the dentist was in a better mood and performed better -- I noticed him humming while he worked. But the net result was that I left the office humming too. I was actually in a better mood when I left than when I arrived. And I believe that my decision to focus on "The One Who Calls" during the appointment changed the atmosphere for the good.

We all live our lives in a swirl of decisions, never knowing what the results would be if we chose differently, never knowing how large our role in the results really is. This conundrum has inspired many films. Its a Wonderful Life answers the fundamental question, What would happen if I were never born? The less-highly acclaimed Back To The Future revolves around one kiss that occurred twenty years earlier. A personal favorite of mine, Groundhog's Day gives Bill Murray the opportunity to try one day over and over again until he gets it right. And another favorite: Sliding Doors, in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays a woman whose life takes a dramatic turn depending on whether she catches a subway train.

Unfortunately, we are trapped with the decisions we have made - we don't get even a glimpse of the path not taken. Dayton Duncan, whom you might remember from the Lewis and Clarke series on PBS put it this way, "History is the series of choices that we make." But I prefer a quote from a song by Moody Blues, "With your arms around the future and your back up against the past". This image has haunted me for many years. With our arms around the future but our back up against the past. That is how we typically live our lives. Desperately trying to grab the future, desperately trapped by the past that was only in part of our making. And never noticing the present that is the only aspect over which we have any real control. As Whitehead puts it:

The world is thus faced by the paradox that, at least in its higher actualities, it craves for novelty and yet is haunted by terror at the loss of the past, with its familiarities and its loved ones… The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is "perpetual perishing".

We appear, and I say we appear, to be trapped with our arms around the future and our back up against the past. The answer to the conundrum is in the title of the Moody Blues song from which the quote comes. The song is titled: "The Voice". The Voice is, I believe, Whitehead's "One Who Calls". I believe that we all know in our hearts what is right and what is wrong; we all know in our hearts how we should behave; we all know in our hearts when we are living up to our potential; we all have access to the truth - the challenge is hearing that truth. And hearing that truth is very hard work.

To hear the truth we have to break through egocentricity and self-hate. To hear the truth we have to break through materialism and altruism. To hear the truth we have to break through bad and good. To hear the truth we have to break through hate and love.

We need to listen to the voice - The One Who Calls - for within the voice we will find our own truth. When we hear the voice we know which turn to take at each and every Crossroads. The Voice calls us forward on our path. What may seem difficult becomes clear and obvious when we hear the voice. Let me ask you, when you have a difficult decision to make, is it easier to make in the swirl and confusion of the voices around you, or is it easier to make when you are able to step back, calm down and listen to that inner voice. The One Who Calls. This philosophy is truly Universal. Every one of us has that inner voice; all we need do is listen. There are many ways to achieve a state where we can listen. For some it may require praying, for others meditation, for others sitting zazen, for others mowing the grass. But whatever the mechanism, we all have that voice waiting to be heard.

When I listen to the Voice, when I am truly able to hear, the message goes beyond just making difficult decisions. The message that I get when I really listen is both simple and beautiful: We Are All One. We are not just connected. We Are One.

My reality of being a separate being trapped between the future and the past is an illusion. When I really listen to the Voice I understand that I am part of something greater. And that something is all of us - all of life. What harms one harms all because we are one. What helps one helps all because we are one. Compassion is as natural as your left and right hand working together.

The Dalai Lama says it this way:

"If the self had intrinsic identity, it would be possible to speak in terms of self-interest in isolation from that of others'. But because this is not so, because self and others can only be understood in terms of relationship, we see that self-interest and others' interest are closely interrelated. Indeed, within this picture of dependently originated reality, we see that there is no self-interest completely unrelated to others' interest. Due to the fundamental interconnectedness which lies at the heart of reality, your interest is also my interest. From this, it becomes clear that "my" interest and "your" interest are intimately connected. In a deep sense, they converge."

Teilhard de Chardin, in "Science and Christ", puts it like this:

"Hitherto, the prevailing view has been that the body (that is to say, the matter that is incommunicably attached to each soul) is a fragment of the universe - a piece completely detached from the rest and handed over to a spirit that informs it. In the future, we shall say that the Body is the very Universality of things, in as much as they are centred on an animating Spirit, influenced and sustained by it… My own body is not these cells or those cells that belong exclusively to me: it is what, in these cells and in the rest of the world, feels my influence and reacts against me. My matter is not a part of the universe that I possess [in total]: it is the totality of the Universe possessed by me [in part]."

And Whitehead says:

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is a true to say that God transcends the World as that the World transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.

We Are One with The One Who Calls. That is what The Voice is saying to me. What is the voice saying to you?

References:

Ethics in the New Millennium by His Holiness The Dalai Lama. Riverhead Books, 1999.

A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality, edited by Donald W. Sherburne. The University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Teilhard de Chardin's quote from Science and Christ was reprinted from Process Theology - An Introductory Exposition, by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin. The Westminster Press, 1976.