Blind Guides
Text:
Luke 6:39-42
The parables of
Jesus, like those of the rabbis or the Buddha, often depend on some patent
absurdity invoked with a few swift strokes. The text from Luke is a great
example. The joke is self-contained in a mere pair of words: "blind
guides." At once you feel you have seen an old-time Vaudeville skit. You
can imagine any number of hilarious, though crude, slapstick
possibilities.
The idea is pretty
much like the joke in which a nervous patient is about to go under the
knife and says to the doctor, hoping for some comfort, "You know, Doc,
this is my first operation." "That's funny," replies the young doctor,
"It's mine, too!"
You put yourself
into the hands of an expert precisely because you don't have expertise in
some matter--only to find that he doesn't either! You're headed for
disaster. No one would do such a thing in ordinary life, Jesus intimates,
but that's what we do all the time when it comes to religion! We'll throw
ourselves into the arms of any Tom, Dick, and Harry, any Jim Jones, any
Dave Koresh, and Jim Bakker that happens to catch us first.
Why does this
happen? A career in teaching Bible and Theology has convinced me it is
because most religious people fear education. Secretly they must suspect
that their beliefs will not stand up to scrutiny. So they want teachers
and preachers who will simply cheer-lead for the same old Sunday-School
certainties they believed when they were 3 years old. Religion is one of
the few areas in which people fear and shun expertise.
Thus they prefer
blind guides: they really don't want to go any where anyway. They're happy
enough, for all their talk of spiritual growth, to stay perched right
where they are.
And yet I don't want
to deny that certain things you learn in childhood can profit you all your
life. I remember an issue of The Fantastic Four comics. In it the
super-heroes had lost their powers at the worse possible time. They were
facing deadly supervillains--empty-handed! Lucky for them, another hero
happened by: Daredevil, who had extra-sharp senses but besides this relied
only on his wits and some clever technological gimmicks. He was already
without impressive super abilities, and so he could give the Fantastic
Four some pointers. One other thing about Daredevil: he was blind. His
extra-sharp senses made up for that. And the title of the issue was, in
Stan Lee's best pseudo-biblical style: "And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them."
If the lights go
off, the blind man has the advantage. He's playing on his home court. He
knows the territory better than you. It's as if he has already come to
accept and adjust to a limitation which you never dreamed of. So you have
something to learn from him. And in this case you can have a case of "the
blind leading the blind."
And we certainly
have a great deal to learn from a particular group of blind men, those in
an old Buddhist parable. Let me read you a poetic version of it. I don't
know the source or the author.
In the Bible
blindness is used as a metaphor for spiritual or moral obtuseness. In the
Iliad, blindness means something else: Teiresias the seer is blind for the
same reason legend makes the Prophet Muhammad and Joseph Smith illiterate:
to say that his human capabilities do not get in the way of seeing with
the divine second sight. But in this parable, the blindness of the six men
stands for something else again. The men begin acknowledging their
ignorance of the truth of the elephant, but as soon as the sense of touch
provides a bit of data, they prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing. They are instantly arrogant and dogmatic. Each, he is sure, holds
the whole truth and is quick to denounce his fellows. Ironically, having
what knowledge they have, they have sunken into a deeper blindness than
before! As the Gospel of John says, "It is because you say, 'We see' that
your sin remains."
But then they
discover that they have failed to connect the dots. They realize each has
merely touched a mountain peak of what is a vast continent. The lion's
share, or rather the elephant's share, of the truth remains unseen. As
Paul said, "Now we see in a looking glass darkly." So the blindness of the
six blind men comes in the end to stand for a kind of Socratic humility,
where the great thing to know is that you really know very little. That
thoughtful uncertainty is better than cocksure ignorance.
The original point
of the parable seems to be a bit more specific than that. The parable
teaches religious pluralism by means of humbling human arrogance. The
Divine is like the huge and unseen elephant. (As you may know, Ganesha,
the Son of Shiva, was pictured with an elephant's head, so this was a
traditional image.) And you and I, with our limited apprehensions of the
divine, are like the blind men. When will we learn that, as H. Richard
Niebuhr said, we may be quite right in what we affirm and
yet wrong in what we deny? If another's faith appears
radically different from yours, have a care lest you be found blaspheming
the divine spirit!
The parable, I
believe, has genuine persuasive power. I have seen students influenced by
it. They had a restrictive religious background, but they knew it was good
in a general way to be broad-minded, and this parable seemed to give them
permission to be religiously broad-minded, too. It showed them how it was
possible. The story shows us that as religious people, spiritual seekers,
we ought to cherish what we do not know as much as the precious
things we think we do know.
I count it as proof
of the parable's power that we find it reproduced not only in Buddhist
documents, where it appears to have originated, but in Jainist and Sufi
writings, too. Living proof of this attitude of mutual humility of the
different faiths before the tacit immensity of the Holy.
But I believe the
parable of the blind men and the elephant still has something to tell us
even when we have learned its primary lesson. It is relevant not only
between different religious believers, but even within a single
religious soul. In brief, the parable warns us not to be too hasty in
streamlining our religious beliefs and experiences. In your long process
of spiritual evolution, have you ever found that, however reluctantly, you
had to discard some spiritual experience or practice because it no longer
fit in consistently with your beliefs? Prayer, for instance? Mysticism?
The more seriously you found yourself taking Bertrand Russell, the more
guilty you felt appreciating Buddhism. The more you went along with
Bultmann or Tillich, the less you felt you belonged in a liturgical
church. You began to sense that your practice of devotion ill-comported
with the concept of God you were developing. And so you felt compelled to
jettison one or the other. You did it for intellectual honesty's sake, but
you couldn't help feeling that you were somehow impoverished by it.
I'm no longer sure
you have to do that. You may, after all, be dropping the tail because you
just touched the leg for the first time. Your head is not big enough to
hold an elephant. If there is a God, if there is such an Entity as the
Divine, it must be far grander than your miserable concept of it. You can
build an idol with words and thoughts, and it will be just as much an idol
as if you had hammered it together and gold-plated it like they used to
do. And that is what you are doing, building an idol, when you start
trimming down your experiences to fit your latest favorite theory.
If you have ever
enslaved yourself to a jig-saw puzzle, you may have been tempted at length
to simplify the solution by throwing out half the pieces and taking the
scissors to the rest. But that's cheating. But its what we do with
religious experiences and ideas. If you find two competing ideas
appealing, don't flip a coin between them. Wait till you have a reason to
reject one. If you wait long enough, you may discover that they are the
twin poles of a true paradox, or the tusk and the ear of the same
elephant.
If you suspect your
spirituality won't fit your new understanding, wait a second before
cutting either of them loose. You might regret it. You may never be
able to reconcile them. You may find you will have to get used to living
in that static zone that lies between the two stations on the dial. And I
for one am willing to bet that's where spiritual growth happens: on the
boundary, as Tillich said.
I remember puzzling
over Harvey Cox, one of my favorite theologians. He certainly claimed a
Christian identity card, and yet his Harvard office was festooned with
sitting Buddhas and books by various Marxist theoreticians. How, I
wondered, did he, could he possibly, fit all these things together? The
answer: he didn't. He saw that the goal was not to have the
truth but to seek the truth. And he sought it from all quarters. He
didn't care if he never saw how to connect the dots. Any glimpse of truth
was so precious that he dared not pass one up.
Cast nothing aside.
Let the sundered shards of truth reflect each other, and not least your
own face, in their concave mirror surfaces. Let each sentiment, each
theory, every insight, hold counsel with the other, though they may never
come to any consensus.
Whence the rush to
judgment? Why be haunted by the hobgoblin of little minds? I took a
doctorate in the field of systematic theology. The first axiom of
systematic theology is that all your beliefs ought to fit together. I now
reject that whole approach. I am less eager to butcher the elephant and
walk away only with a couple of tusks. All that is not theology, but
rather psychology. It is the implication of a low threshold of ambiguity.
You become anxious
when you are not sure of a set of directions, or of a lover's affection,
or your job status. You want the matter settled as quickly and as
definitively as possible. But you are just going to have to wait. Waiting
is what you need to learn. And if you will not wait, if you press
for an answer now, you may abort the whole process and get the very
outcome you dread. That's the way it is with the spiritual life, too. It
is not a definitive answer you need, and that is good, for none is
available. When will you learn that it is the patience, the
tenuousness, the acceptance of the lack of security that constitute
spiritual maturity!?
A final word about
our parable and the relevance it has for the life of a congregation,
especially a Unitarian congregation. In any pluralistic church you will
find something like a government with several factions lobbying for
influence. How is the pastor to cater to the very different beliefs and
approaches of Humanists, Theists, Liberal Christians, Feminist Pagans?
One's spirituality is rank superstition to another. If the minister sides
with one more than another, even out of sincere conviction, there is going
to be trouble. This is so obvious that it makes some call the pluralistic
experiment a failure. Fundamentalist "church growth" experts, from whom
some in our ranks are, it seems to me, a bit too willing to learn, assure
us that birds of a feather must inevitably flock together. But is that so?
I happen to know six
guys who say it isn't. The minister and the congregation need to realize
how much bigger the spiritual reality is than any of us. We ought not
close our ears to the accents of Humanists and Rationalists, to
Transcendentalists and Mystical Theists, to Pagans, to Channing
Christians. Because each has caught something of the Real that the rest of
us have missed. There are some experiences, some insights, some truths
that we are just going to have to use the various different languages to
say.
I am a New Testament
critic, and when I read certain Bible tales, such as those of Ananias and
Sapphira, stories which plainly mean to scare readers into cowed
submission before church authorities, I have to speak, as the old-time
free-thinkers and village atheists did, of "priestcraft," of religious
hokum and hoax, and I have to exalt human nature and reason instead, like
Feuerbach. But this Humanist, Rationalist perspective doesn't help me at
all to account for mystical experiences like those of Tennyson, Nietzsche,
Shankara, or Hildegaard. For that, I need a different box of conceptual
tools. I just can't describe the elephant's tusk with terms drawn from
touching his ear.
My head is small: it
can wear only a single hat at a time. But the Divine is the whole hat
rack, the whole store. So I expect to have to switch hats often if I want
to cover the whole inventory. Depending on what subject I'm addressing on
a particular Sunday morning, I'm going to sound like a Humanist, a Theist,
a Christian, a Pagan. I have to. But I try not to "be" a Humanist,
a Theist, a Christian, a Pagan. Why should I? Each is a window I can look
through and see some angle I would miss otherwise. Each is a language in
which I can say certain things. I am not going to call one of them my
favorite and exclude the rest. It is better to be a pluralist than an
narrow exclusivist: "I'll live with my view: you live with yours." But it
is better still to be truly plural, inside: "My name is Legion, for
we are many." At the very least, we are six, six with an elephant between
us.
Robert M. Price
June 27, 1995
Copyright©2009 by Robert
M Price
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