Quite a bit of laughter has been directed at President Bush for his clumsy approach to talking about vision, that picture of the future that gives us a idea of where we're headed. Actually, there are a lot better things to laugh at than that because the concept of vision, creating or perhaps merely articulating it, one of the present trendy strategies of the corporate world, is a lot more complex than it might appear. One of the things we try to do when applying this strategy is to distinguish between mission and vision. Articulating the difference is easy. Mission is your overall purpose - what you are established to do. Vision is what you wish to become within - in these corporate exercises - a certain timeframe. Strategies are how you are going to go about doing those things. It sounds simple enough, but as soon as you try to talk about one of those things, you are immediately immersed in talking about the other two. You can't talk about what you are established to do unless you know what your reason is for doing it, and you can't really say much about what you plan to become if there are no strategies available for becoming it. An awareness of those complex interactions has led some of the people involved to use mission and vision as one concept - almost one word, mission-slash-vision. (Mission/vision)
Unless you are active in a committee, you may not be aware that our Strategic Planning Committee has been working to get each of the other committees to articulate their particular three-year vision in light of the mission statement that was read earlier. Were it not for the fact that we are valiantly struggling to get our building program started which will create major changes in the way we are able to do things, I would have argued that that is much too short a time span, that vision is an ultimate rather than a timebound concept. Of course, religious and institutional goals are not usually the same thing, even in a religious institution, though they must not be in conflict.
This year at General Assembly, the annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association, they were trying out a new process called open-space technology in which they hoped to see a consensus emerge directing the board toward its mission, or perhaps vision, in light of the complexity of our contemporary society. It reminded me inevitably of an elephant laboring mightily and bringing forth a mouse. The small groups meeting in large rooms which effectively denied access to other programming came up with thirty statements. They were the predictable melange of mission, vision and strategy. The most popular one appeared to be the greater inclusion of young people in our congregations and programming, which is certainly something I can support, but I had hoped for something that would indicate why we wanted to do not just that, but anything. What, indeed is the purpose of our existence? What future do we envision for free religion? Or should it have a future other than the law of conservation of energy?
There are those who would argue that the purpose of any institution is survival. In The Denial of Death Becker asserted that human beings create and join institutions in order to be a part of something that will outlast them, which will somehow continue their existence by continuing to exist itself. If that is true, and I sincerely hope that it is not since I'm not even sure that human survival is important (that's something I'm going to talk about in another sermon) much less personal survival, then the whole goal of an institution is to keep itself alive. Too often, I think that's where we stop when we think about vision. What will we be like in three, five, ten years? What will our health be, our size, our budget? What can we tweak to make things healthier for us? How can we include more young people to guarantee our survival beyond this generation? Well, you can call that a vision if you want to, but I don't.
Some years ago I went to a district leadership conference which gave me furiously to think. The trainer was a nationally known trainer for corporations who said that over the last generation we had been teaching not leadership but management skills. We had been training people to take care of existing institutions very well - how to organize them, how to manage conflict, how to keep the people productive, all that. We had not, however, been teaching them how to lead. He then asked us to come up with the various characteristics of leadership, each of which he put on a separate piece of newsprint, and then he gave us ten little circle stickers and asked us to put them on the characteristics we thought were the most important. Then he read out the winners, first telling us that whatever characteristics a group named there were always four that were always chosen as the top requirements for a leader. He read out the first three: competence, trustworthiness, intelligence; then his jaw dropped. The fourth one was not the one he was expecting. I don't remember what it was, but it was not forward-looking. What it seemed to mean was that the leaders in that district not only had no vision, but didn't want one. What they wanted was good management of what they already had and were sure that tomorrow would be no different from today. (In case you were wondering, I did put one of my stickers on forward-looking.) I believe, though, that tomorrow is very different from today, and without a sentry box or sign in two languages we have already crossed over. The question is whether we are worthy to survive.
Proverbs tells us in one of its many contextless statements that "Without a vision the people perish." That is, I think, one of the truest statements in the Bible. We must know where we are going and why we need to go there, or we will stagnate and finally die.
Our mission statement that we read earlier is really mission, vision and strategy combined. The mission is the first statement: Our mission is to practice free religion. I think it should add extend, but with that addition it is quite clear. That's what we do here. The next part is strategy: how we go about it. And then there's the vision: to help ourselves and others create a world of beauty, justice, peace and love. Or is that just a dream, and do we really believe that our mission and our strategies can create such a world?
In a sense it can be said that that is the vision of all religions of all people who are not entirely self-absorbed. That is the world we want, the world that was described by the Biblical prophets, the world that we seek with greater or lesser hope. Yet it seems very far from us. When we begin what organizational trainers with their unchecked penchant for verbing nouns call "the visioning process," they tell us to dream - to dream huge dreams of the perfect place or program or institution. Another prophet, Joel, said, "Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions." I don't think dreaming and seeing visions are necessarily either gender or generationally related, but clearly he distinguishes between them. A dream is simply a castle in the air, a desire with no foundation. A vision is something more. It is a hope based on possibility. I don't think we should let go of our wonderful dream of a world in which there will be peace and plenty for all, that war and oppression, want and prejudice will be issues of the past that no longer plague us, but I think if we are serious about it we should try to imagine how that dream can become a vision. I do not even suppose that it can become a full reality in our time or that of our children or our children's children. We can hope only to approach it more nearly.
This, I believe is the first reality that we must understand in the world in which we live when the history is no longer continuous. We must understand ourselves and help others understand that the answers of the past are not the answers of today. Though human beings are the same as they have ever been, though the world is the same world, our understanding of it has undergone a profound shift. The board of the Unitarian Universalist Association asked for guidance in the complexities of today's society. Perhaps a better word would be ambiguities. I have suggested that our age be called the Age of Uncertainty after Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in which he showed that absolute truth is absolutely unavailable to us. Yet even as complexities imply the possibility of unraveling so does uncertainty imply its opposite. It is ambiguity with its maybe/maybe not, its on the one hand this and on the other that which is the spirit of our times.
Although the Uncertainty Principle is the appropriate metaphor for these times as the Copernican revolution was for the Age of the Enlightenment, it is not only in the world of science that we see this shift occurring. As the world shrinks in both time and space all our certainties come into question. Morality in one culture is immorality in another, and yet our cultures rub up against one another, merge and blend and create conflicts that seem irresolvable because they are based not on issues of goods or acreage but of value, of right and wrong and of identity. Our certainties fail us on all sides, and yet we hold on to them with both hands.
One of the most interesting presentations I attended at General Assembly was on cultural appropriation. Actually, they've decided to call it misappropriation because of a misunderstanding that appropriate and appropriate, though spelled the same are two entirely different words. The issue was whether it was ever okay to use music, dance, or other arts from other cultures. I do think that there is a real question here, since if we are using them only to show how broadminded and worldly we are or to entertain and amuse, we are, I believe, using them wrongly. However, cultures have always influenced one another when they came in contact, and that is happening more and more with the electronic communications that have revolutionized our world and a consequent increasing interest in our differences. Sometimes the influences are positive, sometimes less so, but they are inevitable. Yet it seemed to me that what was happening within our own movement was that some who identify themselves as different kinds of minorities were almost saying about certain things, "These are ours; they're part of our identity, and you can look, but you can't use them no matter how beautiful or spiritually fulfilling or even transformative they may be." You can understand what they're saying, even sympathize, and yet to refuse to enrich others through an insistence on cultural identity is worrisome. The issue was not resolved. I'm not sure there is a resolution that we can be comfortable with.
This ambiguous world is not a comfortable place to be. We seek certainty and control of our lives with all our strength. The rise of fundamentalism in every area of the world is a response to this discomfort. A retreat to the certainty of the past, a refusal to cross over creates danger and even violence. And yet there is danger at the other end of the spectrum, too. We can be so in love with going forward, with changing, that we dismiss anyone who questions change, who suggests that perhaps the old way is better, as blocks to progress. We even fear it in ourselves. We see a change that we dislike, and instead of saying so we keep quiet and label ourselves as being unwilling to change. It never occurs to us that in some cases we might even be right.
This is our new world, not just complex, not just uncertain, but ambiguous. Scientists with no objective proof have posited string theory for the unification of knowledge. Are they right? Maybe. Maybe not. I recently read that photons whose choices (choices?) of movement cannot be predicted may be able to be influenced. Maybe. Maybe not. We are often unable even to predict the consequences on the other side of the world of seemingly simple local choices. How, when we don't even know that for sure can we make choices, even decide between right and wrong?
It has seemed to me that free religion is in the place where these issues have real meaning, that we must first understand what is happening and then create a vision of the kind of religion that can help others understand and learn how to live unambiguously in this ambiguous world. Those characteristics that have made us what we are the very ones that can make us what we must become and help others do so as well. Our acceptance of the scientific worldview, of the value of evidence, of reason and of critical thinking, our respect for different kinds of people and different ideas can guide us on the path toward this world we seek even while we realize our own lack of certainty. The qualities we need most are as ambiguous as our age. We need the humility that tells us we can be wrong and with it an equal confidence that tells us we can be right. We must be willing to choose even when the consequences of our choices are unclear, but choose with all the information we can gather. Perhaps then we can get a little closer - however little - to the world we all dream of.