The Myth of Centrality
A Sermon by Ken Langer
When President John F. Kennedy was shot, I was very young. I was in school at the time and when the news spread across the country everything kind of shut down. The news was playing everywhere and the only thing you heard that day was that Kennedy had been shot. My parents, who called me Kenny at that time, said that when they came to pick me up from school that day I came running through the halls screaming and holding up my finger saying “Kenny’s been shot. Kenny’s been shot.” I thought, of course, that the news had been about me. At such a young age you think the world is only focused on you.
Recall the story we heard about Narcissus. Why was Narcissus told that he could never look upon himself? As long as he never took a good look, he could imagine himself to be anything. He could see himself as the most beautiful, the most important, and the most central person in the world. In his own mind he was the center of the world. By the time he looked into the water he confirmed his own ideas about himself and fell in love with his own image.
Anyone who has ever raised or taken care of a baby or a very small child knows that such a child is the center of the world. They need constant attention and nurturing. Everything around them is focused on them. Food appears when needed and, hopefully, that child comes to feel safe and comfortable. As that child grows, however, it learns, sometimes painfully so, that it is no longer the center of the world. It has to gradually learn to take care of its own needs and create its own conditions for comfort and safety. It comes to learn that not everything is there for them. Young children and then young adults who mature come to understand that they are not the center of the world but are part of a complex society in a complex world.
This is all a natural part of the development of an individual. Without it a person can get stuck within an infantile personality that holds on to the belief that the world was made exclusively for them, that others exist only to serve their needs, and that they deserve to get whatever they desire. Such a person can become difficult or even dangerous when put in positions of influence or power such as, say, a teacher, or a judge, or a president of the United States, for example.
Sometimes you can look at the history of humanity the same way you can look at the development of a young person. There was a time when we humans thought we were the center of the world. Everything was centered around us. The sun circled around us. The stars circled around us. The rains fell down upon us. The plants grew up at our feet so that we could eat them and animals appeared for us to hunt. And the earth! The earth held us and provided us with so many wonderful things and it went on forever in every direction around us. We were at the center of everything and our home was at the center of the universe.
Imagine how shocking it was, then, to find out one day that we were wrong. A couple of guys named Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the sun did not rotate around the earth but that the opposite was true. The earth actually orbited the sun! Such statements were considered blasphemy by the church. But try as we might to resist, we eventually had to grow up and accept the truth that the sun was the center of our solar system, not our own planet. Well, ok. The sun is the biggest and brightest thing around so let it be the center but we know the sun was made exclusively for us and that its warmth and glow are all for our sake. Not so, said Thomas Wright. There are other suns out there many of which have planets swirling around them similar to our own system of planets. What we thought were just pinpricks in the night sky turned out to be billions of suns caught up in a swirling cluster of suns we dubbed The Milky Way.
At least we could take comfort in the obvious fact that our sun was the center of the galaxy and that all those other insignificant stars circled around us in an endless parade of devotion to our greatness. Not so, said Edwin Hubble, there are actually millions of swirling galaxies and that our tiny little speck of a solar system exists in some inconsequential distant outer arm of our own galaxy. But surely, our galaxy is the center of the universe. Wrong again! We are not the center of the universe because, as it turns out, there is no center.
In order to demonstrate how this is possible I have brought with me today an object that represents one of the many secrets of the universe. It is based on an ancient sacred symbol. I had to travel to a specialty store to get it and bring it here for you to see today. [remove doughnut from bag] Here it is - the donut. The donut represents the mystery of something called the torus. Imagine energy swirling in toward one end of the donut then swirling out the other and as it goes out it returns back to the other side. In such a whirlwind of energy there are only curves and flows without a center. You may point to the middle of this donut hole and say ‘there’s the center’ but, to the donut, no such space exists. If you could walk on the surface of this ever-revolving donut there would be no place you could call a center. You could walk in any direction and never find a central location. You might throw up your hands in frustration and say “There is no center anywhere” and you would be right. You might also throw up your hands and say “This is the center” and you would also be right. [put away doughnut]
The problem with the idea of centrality is that it creates a sense of uniqueness between a perceived center or the place we say is ‘in here’ and the rest of the world which is ‘out there.’ In other words, it’s another way to separate ourselves from others and the rest of the world. The people who are ‘in’ the ones who are centered are special while the others are not. Of course, everyone believes that they are the people at the center of the world. I have yet to come across a culture or a religion that says that the chosen ones are somebody other than themselves and it is always the chosen people who claim the moral authority to dominate and colonize the rest of the world.
The truth, as demonstrated by the doughnut, is that there is no center of the universe, there is no center of the world, there is no center of humanity, there is no true center of anything. This can be a difficult concept to grasp because we are used to having a central focus that supports everything else. We have created hierarchies that focus on a primary set of figures, we have created capital cities, central banking systems, prize winners, hollywood stars, shopping malls, the mediterranean, holy books, sacred sites: Jerusalem, Mecca, the Kun Lun Mountains, Mount Meru, the Delphic Oracle, the omphalos, the tree of Yggdrasil, the totem pole, the maypole, and on it goes. Without the anchoring of a central point we lose focus and we lose our bearings.
But, this is not a sermon on geography, or physics, or geometry. It is a discussion of spirituality. So, let’s pose the question: how does the myth of centrality affect religion? Consider this: if there is no “out there” out there then there can be no separation between humanity and the divine. God cannot both exist beyond the world and yet control and influence it because that would centralize the world. It would put us at the center and God “out there.” Instead, what we choose to call divine cannot be separate from the universe itself.
And consider this: if there is no center, there can be no central focus to the universe or to our own world. That means that no species is more important or more necessary than another. No being has been created for the sole purpose of sustaining another. No group of people deserve special status over any other groups. No individual is of more value than another. This can be a challenging idea for some who are used to focusing power and value on only a few select people but the equal worth and dignity of everyone is an important value for Unitarian-Universalists and is a major contribution of the heritage of our Universalist faith.
But what if the truth of centrality was even more challenging than this to understand? What if the idea that there is no center to the world is also incorrect and that it might be more correct to say that everywhere is the center of the world. Think about that for a moment. What if every point in the world was the center of the world? That means that you could claim to be the center of everything and you would be right - but so would the person sitting next to you and the person behind you or in front of you or the person sitting in a pew in Newton or Nebraska or New York or New Zealand, New Delhi, or Nairobe. All of them would be the center, the focus, the most important thing in the world. It would mean that everything must be dependent on everything else so that each thing can be equally valued. As the author of the Tao Te Ching, Lau Tzu said, a wheel is defined by its spokes but held by its empty center. A story of the Hopi people speaks about how Grandmother Spider weaved the world into existence through the strands of her web.
If everywhere is the center then those spokes are also everywhere just as the filaments of the cosmic spider web are everywhere connecting everything together. Everything exists in relation to everything else. Everything is defined by its relationship to something else. We are defined not just by our own thoughts and actions but by how we interact with each other and with our world. We have been shaped by our guardians, our siblings, our friends, the environment we live in, the creatures we encounter, the people we live with, the people we love, the people with whom we disagree, and even people we don’t know. If you are the center of the world, that means that what you do and how you do it matters. You might not notice it, or see it, or feel it, or even think about it but every action you take causes some small ripple in the strands of the spider web or the fishing net of Indra.
According to the one Hindu text, the god Indra hung up a great net–like a fishing net. Its lines reached across the expanse of the universe. At each intersection of the net Indra placed a beautiful and glittering jewel. When looking close into any one of those brilliant jewels you could see all the other jewels at once which means that each individual jewel is the center of the net and in that gem is contained a reflection of every other jewel. Each contains the whole or, as William Blake put it, to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. Every precious stone is connected to every other stone through invisible lines of connection and any light shone in one jewel–no matter how small–lights up the entire web. So it is with us. Though it may seem that what you do or say or feel or think is insignificant, it is not. The way you treat others matters, what you do matters, what you feel matters, your vote counts, your presence counts, your words make an impact, your life has meaning - for you are the center of the world.
Is that what Narcissus really saw when he peered down at that crystal clear stream? Maybe he saw not only himself but everything all at once. He had yearned all his life to see his own reflection but in those magical waters he did not see only his individual self he saw the beauty of everything. His eyes shone like stars, his hair gleamed like sunshine, and his cheeks were as smooth as the ocean. Maybe that creek was like a jewel in the net and he saw both himself and the beauty of everything at once. There is nothing wrong with seeing yourself as one part of a resplendent interconnected whole of nature. When you discover you are an equally important part of all things it can be a joyful and liberating experience but then you must live your life with the responsibility of knowing that what you do matters. The challenge for Narcissus was to get beyond the awakening experience of marveling at the beauty of his own centrality, to move beyond it, and to carry that lesson into his life. He was unable to do that and thereby sacrificed his chances for love and life.
There is no center because everywhere and everyone is the center. I invite you to peer into the water, gaze into the jewel, and see the invisible web but don’t stare too long for you have a life to live and lives to touch.
In the name of that which you hold in your heart to be sacred, may it be so.