Rev. Nancy D. Dean

September 19, 1999

Having the Symbolic Life: How Not to Get Lost in a World of Numbers

I used to play this game when I was six or seven years of age that was nothing more than tossing a small rubber ball against the side of the house and catching it. My mother hated this game and would chase me off to toss my ball against the barn, which, to me, was not as desirable as the front porch. The object was to toss the ball and catch it without the ball ever hitting the ground, and counting how many times I could keep the ball in the appropriate motion. This may seem a silly game to you.

If you think that is a silly game, let me tell you that I know grownup people who go out walking all over a beautiful park-like land, trying to hit a little white ball into little holes yards and yards apart. They work very hard at master their hitting technique; yet, paradoxically, whoever hits the ball the fewest times wins. The main difference between this game and the one I played as a child is that I never used foul language when I failed to catch the ball, nor did I throw the ball into the nearest pond. I just started all over again.

The joy in this game was finding out how high I could count. I must say that I was a very good counter, even at six. I could count all the way to a thousand, which I was quite sure was the biggest number anyone would ever want to count to. That was before I learned about dollars!

There were, of course, distractions. I had two younger brothers—need I say more. But sometimes I just got tired or confused, looked away at some passing attraction like a bird. Then I would drop the ball, or not catch it, so the counting had to begin again at one.

I don’t remember when I quit playing this game, but from time to time I will see a child out tossing a ball against a wall, and I assume they are carrying on a time honored tradition of finding out how high they can count without making a mistake or dropping the ball.

I enjoyed my simple game and had no great expectations of it. Sometimes I wish now that I could be more like that. I have learned that all too often I am, we are, living lives out of other people’s or society’s expectations. And a lot has to do with numbers: how much we have worked, how much we earn, the numbers of our accomplishments, how many of this or that we own, the value of our land or stocks. While a great deal of life is about such symbolism, the key is to know what symbols we, ourselves, are using; why we value those we use; what message we are transmitting out of the symbolic life that is ours and that is part of every human life.

One of the greatest surprises for parents is to find out what symbols we have given our children as markers for our own lives. I was distressed to learn that my daughter most remembered a sense of stress and tension from her childhood, as I rushed her to one activity and another; as I tried to manufacture a perfect home and parents… not the easy, joyful childhood I thought I was providing. I was trying to give her everything I thought a child could want. I had asked the question, yet I wanted to resist this evaluation—but this was her candid perception. She was not saying that she did not feel loved or have a good sense of childhood, but it was not what I thought she was experiencing. Often our children see us more clearly than we see ourselves.

I realize now that one reason I always liked Sunday morning services, was that I did not feel that same level of stress, even if I was teaching Sunday school. It was what I enjoyed, what I wanted, not what I felt I had to do in order to be a good mother.

I had some quantitative and qualitative perceptions about what was required of me. And I find this is just as true for most of us. We feel at some level that life is safer, more reliable if we can quantify and qualify it. Most of us really struggle with the idea of not doing, not counting out the hours, or, conversely, of living any sort of contemplative existence, because we want our lives to add up to something more. Notice the language. Counting, adding up, having a lot or some thing, getting, having, and so on. I do too.

The purpose of this sermon is not to talk about not doing or not having, but rather to talk about how we do live so that we understand the consequences of the way we choose to live our lives. The sorrow for any life is not the particular path we choose, but that we wind up on a path we did not choose and see far too late that we would have preferred another.

When my daughter was in her teens, I was encouraged to think about going to law school. My daughter’s father, who is no longer my husband, was encouraging me in this direction because he thought it would be useful for our business interests. So I bought the necessary books, and studied for the LSAT, took the test and sought admission to an area law school. I was accepted; then about a week after receiving the acceptance letter, I discovered that I was four months pregnant. After getting over the shock of the pregnancy which was not supposed to be able to happen—tell your teens about that—my next reaction was relief that now I couldn’t go on right then to law school. That’s when I realized that I was about to commit my life to a course of action that was not what I really wanted, but would have done to please someone else. It happens all the time.

Obviously, it is preferable to have better saves in life than pregnancy.

Writer theologian, Eliezer Shore, talks about the religious life as the symbolic life, a life "devoted to uncovering the truths that lie beneath the surface… " But the truth is that life is inherently symbolic. All human life, beyond the basic instincts, is taught as a set or series or a tangle of symbols. We are creatures of metaphor and number (which is really metaphor for quantity). We would be hard pressed to find any way to transmit our thoughts without the symbols we know as language and number. Symbols are how we communicate, and they are so pervasive that we cannot sense them most of the time. It requires a deliberate effort, a stepping back from our lives, to see them, which is probably why the idea of the symbolic life has come to be associated with the religious life. It is the act of stepping back, of pondering these ideas, these symbols, that is elevated in our minds to a place of spiritual significance.

My belief is that all life is spiritual; what makes life religious is the act of paying attention. Of being "here now" as Ram Dass encouraged us. Did you know that there used to not be any zero? I am always astonished to think about that. There was a time, human time, when counting meant, as the children’s story this morning indicated, 1-10, or some such base. There was no symbolic marker for nothing, naught, cipher.

Marie Mills writes: "The little circle which we call zero was known to the Arabs [from whom we get our system of numbering] around 950AD[CE]." The zero did not arrive in Europe until about 1150CE. She writes about how zero is a wealth of metaphor and meaning. The idea of nothingness, emptiness, void.

It is somewhat astonishing to us in this time that there could have even been such a long time before the numerical concept of nothing or absence of quantity would be created. But less so if we consider that it is the idea of nothingness, void, that most gets in the way of our spiritual act of making meaning. There has to be something for there to be meaning, we assume. But do we assume correctly?

Can we have anything if we have nothing? So we humans have occupied ourselves with filling any sense of void. We have become consumed by quantity, have often gotten lost in a world of numbers. The key is how to have the symbolic life without getting lost in a world of numbers.

This sermon came to me a few months back when I was being assaulted by numbers from the radio. I listen to National Public Radio every morning. I wake up to the news of the world. A shocking awakening when I consider the information that hits my consciousness first thing every day. Numbers are at the core of all the news. The numbers who have died in the warring in Yugoslavia, or the Sudan, the numbers of children killed by armed teenagers, the numbers of the Dow Jones averages, the numbers injured in a truck-car collision, the numbers won in the lottery. The whole enumerating of life is overwhelming once you become aware of it.

One particularly irksome world of numbers comes from statistics. I think it was Disraeli or Twain, probably both, who said, there are "lies, damned lies and statistics." Statistics rule the world in the form of polls and stock market quotes. Neither of which I am against, but both deserve our healthy suspicion and skepticism.

My husband teaches an evening statistics class at a local college, and he helps students see the malleability of these numbers. How very symbolic and elastic they are, but how valuable as well. He teaches this class in order to pay for his avocation, flying. He and I are often asked if we are not afraid of flying in small planes. Yet, the numbers tell us that we are many times less likely to be injured flying than driving to the airport. Last year sixty-one pilots died in plane crashes worldwide, while over sixty-thousand drivers died in car crashes in this country alone. Do these numbers take away all risk? Of course not, and I do in fact worry more about him being hurt in a plane crash than in a car, as is the common perception. Considering this is for me a clue about the nature of the symbolic life.

Our symbols do not, for the most part, arise out of thin air. Most of the symbols that fill out our lives came to us in our most formative years. These are also the symbols that are such a part of us that we cannot see them for they are so immediate in our thinking.

For example, because all language is symbolic as is number, if I say flower, a flower comes into your mind by way of the image-language pathway. Probably from an early experience, or one that has a direct pathway to an early experience, we each form a mental image of flower. And it is no accident that the game I told you about is the thing that popped into my head when I considered writing about symbols as numbers.

One of the mysterious things about symbols, though, is how they can both be so potent, yet eventually lose their potency for us as meaningful symbols. Remember when having a nickel or quarter was a big deal—how much does it matter now? I remember when a millionaire was the epitome of a wealthy person, yet I heard this week that Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars. Some people won’t bend over to pick up a penny on the ground, like I do. I wonder if Gates would bend over to pick up a $20 bill. It is symbolically equivalent. Ben Franklin said in his great language of adages, "Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves."

My twist on this adage is this: Take care of the soul and life will take care of itself.

Numbers provide a sense of safety. Like language, numbers give us something to mentally hold on to as we try to find ways to take care of the essentials of living and the spiritual essentials of making meaning.

Few people are willing to believe that life, their lives, are ciphers—nothing. It is very hard to have hope if we do not have a sense that there is something more than an evolutionary cycle of reproduction. Which is why people cling so strongly to the creation stories or other religious beliefs that give them a sense that there is meaning beyond what they can see or feel.

When I was a grade school teacher in the early 1970s, I saw a film called The Cipher. It was a powerful film about what some children bring with them—or fail to bring—to school. The story was about a nine-year-old boy. The first scene was of him getting off the bus at the school building. It is wintertime and he has on a jacket that barely seemed warm enough. He looked haggard, and dragging along. They showed him in the class, unable to answer the teacher’s question, but she just moved on to another child. They showed him standing alone in a corner of the building during recess. Then the film cut back to the day before, when he got off the bus in front of his house. When he enters the house, he is met with screaming as his parents are in a big fight—one that seems to be a continuation of an on going fight. He is completely ignored, except to get a cuff on the ear later when he walks in front of his dad who is watching television. No one calls him to a meal, no one sees he has a bath, no one tucks him into bed, no one reads him a bedtime story, no one kisses him goodnight. Nor in the morning does anyone wake him, get him clean clothes and a hot breakfast. The story cuts back to the child once more arriving home, once more confronted with a battle scene, yet this battle scene becomes much more violent so that as evening approaches, and one of the parents has been drinking which escalates the fight even more. The child rushes in fear from the house out into the road where he walks and walks. The next scene is the bus arriving at the school; the boy does not get off. No one seems to notice the child’s absence, and the final scene is a farmer driving along the road into town and seeing something slumped against a fence. What he discovers is the boy. Like the little matchstick girl in the O’Henry story, the child has frozen to death sitting out in the cold. No one seems to have noticed his absence. And as the story ends, it is as if he never existed. He was a cipher, a number that means "zero."

This story continues to touch my very soul, for I feel, as you must, that no person’s life should end so meaninglessly. We know that all too many lives are swallowed up in the concept of nothingness, of zero. At this we UUs rebel, and turn to our First Principle which we believe means that life should be more than that of this fictional child who represents the thousands. Life should be more than numbers or statistics—we want life to be more for the symbols that tell of joy and learning and expression, and not symbols that mean we fit into that group who ate too much cholesterol, lived with too much privilege or lived with too little. Numbers, of course, can also teach us to recognize the truth of this.

Having the symbolic life requires thoughtful consideration of our own existence, and in relation to other people’s existence. In this way we come to feel the symbolic life and not just live it. In this way we move beyond the numerical values into the spiritual values.

September 26, 1999 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

September 26, 1999

The Worst Things Adults Do To Children

There’s an old Milton Berle joke about kids: A couple of people are in a waiting room, one is holding on to a squirming two-year-old “How many children do you have?” that one asks. “None,” says the other. The first replies, “ Then, what do you do for aggravation?”

Berle also writes: “My mother used to say to me, “I want you to have kids just like you.” “I’ll never forgive her.”

Those of us who became parents or plan to become parents always think we will be good parents--assuming we gave it any real thought at all. I have never met anyone who planned to have children who said, “I am quite sure that I will be a lousy parent.” My belief is that anyone who gives this much thought to what sort of parent they think they will be and come to this answer, are not likely have children. A few people have said to me that they did not think they would enjoy being parents and had decided not to have children, and occasionally such people do have children and manage to be pretty good mothers and fathers. But for the most part, most people assume they will be good parents.

While this message focuses primarily on parents, we should remember that other adults have a important influence on children as well. Be they grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and we here as members of a congregation. And none of us set out to do things that will negatively impact kids.

Now contrast all that huge assumption that we all will be good parents with the fact that in everything I read on the subject of human psychology and counseling, my own experience as a pastoral counselor, what the media presents, too--in all that I read and hear, a great many people say that they had/have very difficult relationships with their parents. My arm chair guess is that far more of us than not in this room feel that we had less than wonderful parent-child or adult-child relationships in our own childhood.

What goes wrong between the wish to have children, or the wish to be good parents, and the reality that occurs? Well, there is enough material in that question to fill thousands of books, and a walk through any library or bookstore will produce a few hundred in print at the present time. Obviously, there is a lot more that goes into the business of being a parent than just the desire to be a good one. More is involved with what we have experienced as children ourselves than we usually believe. And, on the whole, we know less about the skills that make for good adult-child relationships than we realize.

At this point I have to make a disclaimer--I’ve long considered this a necessary aspect of Unitarian Universalist ministry. You should know that I am the mother of two children, an adult daughter, who is married and lives in New York, and a son who has just started his first year in college. These two children are almost fifteen years apart in age. I have been an loving, attentive mother, but I have not always been a good mother. I was a much better mother to my second child for obvious reasons--I learned a great deal about not only being a mother, but about being a human being in those fifteen years. Therein lies the disclaimer--that I am defensive about my efforts to be a good parent. 

Most parents are very defensive when it comes to this subject. It is one of the things that most gets in our way of learning to become better parents--no matter what age our children are. Accepting that we have not or are not always able to do the best we wish we could will take us further along than trying to justify our sometimes sloppy and ineffectual attempts to teach our children the things they will need to grow up into healthy, contented adults. 

So I do not claim to have all the answers, but I do claim some experience from which I have learned and continue to learn a great deal. Beginning with career as a teacher that spanned first grade to college, and now as a minister, I seem to have been studying about this subject almost all my adult life. I have gone to counseling when my own parenting efforts seemed inadequate. So, what I am presenting for you this morning is what I believe created some of my own difficulties as a parent, as well as those I have seen--continue to see--that create difficulties for parents now. 

Barbara Walters asked this question on an ABC News 20/20 program: “What could turn intelligent, independent-minded adults into virtual wimps?” John and Linda Friel, from whom the reading came discuss this in their book, The Seven Worst Things Parents Do. During this 20/20 segment, the viewers see a video tape condensed version of hours of the day with a mother, father, and little girl, in which the “child manipulated the mother, bargained, sabotaged and pretty much ran the show, and Mom just kept playing the game.” Viewers were shown how the child was given a constant array of choices. The child demanded soda for breakfast, and though the mother said no, the father gives the child the soda to get some peace. As the Friels, who are child psychologists state, it is hard to watch such “well-intentioned parents trying methods that seem logical on the surface--but don’t work. It is even harder to watch children who, if allowed to continue running the show, will be psychiatric basket cases by the time they reach adulthood.”

I am not so sure I agree that all such spoiled children will grow up to be “psychiatric basket cases,” but I do think such early experiences cause children to have to learn the hard way how the world really works. And, they do not feel any goodwill to the parents for such later in life learning. There is no doubt that such children do often become adults who cannot understand what “no” means, and go frustrated through life that often says “no.” Further, they make themselves pariahs as they demand more attention than the rest of the society is inclined to think is fair or right. I have seen these people suffering with a trying to make life work from the selfish, controlling urges that worked as children, but do not work for adults. So highest on the list of the worst things I believe parents/adults do to children is failing to give them the skills to be adults.

When I was a junior in college, I knew a girl who was pretty, quite bright, but an absolutely spoiled young woman. She decided that she did not want to take the four hours of physical education required of all under grads for some obscure reason. I don’t know why she decided she did not want to do the phys-ed, but she did. Now this requirement did not mean you had to take some strenuous athletic course, like soccer or competitive swimming, although you could. There was a wide variety of courses that would satisfy the requirement: beginning ballet, ballroom, and modern jazz dancing; badminton, a Jack LaLaine kind of physical fitness. In other words, everyone who was not seriously disabled could find something that their bodies were capable of doing. I took tennis and ballroom dancing, myself.

Rhonda began her campaign to get out of phys-ed by telling everyone she knew of her intention. (Which I understand now indicated she enjoyed the challenge of trying to control situations.) Then she started what can only be described as a regular harassment of the Dean. Practically every week she would corner the man, whining about how she could not take the class. I actually heard her in action one day as I sat waiting to see him on some real business. I still remember how shocked I was that anybody could make such a display of herself. Having grown up in an extremely strict household, where defying my parents never entered my mind, I was astounded. Later, I was mad, for after months of haranguing the Dean, he finally excused her from the phys-ed requirement, and let her take some other course instead. I was angry, even though I had no wish to skip the phys-ed classes; after all, the rest of us had to meet the requirements. It was a matter of justice. But, I think I felt at the same time that this was someone who would always be unhappy, for if her need to have her way was always going to come first, she would never have other people in her life that could love her and appreciate her. She was too spoiled, too demanding, to self-centered. All of which are major roadblocks to any sort of deep spiritual meaning in life.

Many religions address the issue of evil and sin, and I have yet to see a case of either that was not directly related to self-centered, or egotistical, behavior. Wanting to have our own way. Religions have long tried to help us deal with the inclination toward selfishness, which is related to our early survival, and their attempts have varied from absolutism to absolutism. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Leave them alone and they will figure it out. Neither approach has proven wonderfully effective over our long history. I believe that trying to find simplistic answers to complicated behaviors does not do anyone any good.

Being a parent is full of joys, and it is also the hardest work you will ever do. But, helping children become fully functioning human beings is also the most meaningful work we adults ever do. Still, parenting is the one job for which we receive almost no training--especially nowadays. What most of us know is what we experienced ourselves. Unfortunately, our own experiences may not be very helpful when it come to raising our own children.

The Friels write about the seven worst things parents do as follows:
1. Baby your child
2. Put your marriage last
3. Push you child into too many activities
4. Ignore your emotional or spiritual life.
5. Be your child’s best friend
6. Fail to give your child structure
7. Expect your child to fulfill your dreams


I generally agree with these seven, but I think if we look into broader categories we might find it more useful. Why do parents baby their children long after they are babies; or push their children into too many activities; or try to be the child’s buddy; or expect the child to fulfill their dreams? My belief is that we do all these things because we are trying to recapture or revise our own childhood. Somewhere in the recesses of our minds is a vision of what an ideal childhood would be. Maybe it comes from Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, or something on television these days that is the equivalent. Or our mental images could be from literature, or a neighbor who seemed to have the childhood we would want. I had two primary sources, one was the Louisa May Alcott book, Little Women, and the other was Tina, a girl on a neighboring farm, who had every wonderful thing I could imagine: a playhouse, a soda machine in her basement play room, her own TV, but mostly, a father who doted on her. I grew up with very strict, very religious parents, who did not have much to spend, nor would have if they had; nor would the tolerant, playful parenting of Little Women fit their beliefs about good parenting.

However we came to envision the ideal of parent and child, we may have an unrealistic vision of what good parents should do. If we are lucky, we begin to figure it out along the way, but just as often we do not.

Children do not need a perfect childhood. They do not need an absence of struggle. They do not need to approve of all that their significant adults do, so much as they do need to trust us.

We almost always have a good sense of what others ought to do with their children, even as we fail to do the same with our own. I used to feel this myself when I was teaching first graders. I understood clearly that these little ones needed structure, quiet for work, time for play, and some freedom within that structure, yet I did not see so clearly that my own child needed the same things at home. I would never have countenanced a child arguing with me in the classroom, yet I permitted my daughter to argue with me about things like bedtime, what to wear on cold days, etc.

We have that split between our rational mind and our emotional mind that Daniel Goldman wrote about in Emotional IQ. Our parent-child expectations come from our own unmet needs, which we are probably not even be aware of when we bring our own children into the world.

The other three things the Friels discuss: failing to give children structure; putting your marriage last; and ignoring your emotional and spiritual life, all fall into the realm of not accepting the responsibility for the hard work of rearing children. It takes a lot of gumption to admit we do not have all the answers and could use some help. It takes some courage to see that we are not always up to the multiple chores of being parents and need to share them. Parents often get at odds over the right way to bring up children. After all, each of the parents whether they are a man/woman, two men or two women, or parents who no longer live together, each had a different experience of childhood, and have different expectations about how to raise the children.

As a consequence, then, we do wind up neglecting our partners--maybe even resenting them; we cannot see the structure that needs to underlie any healthy childhood experience; and, we turn off our own personal and spiritual needs in frustration. All of which make us even less capable of doing the kind of skilled work that parenting requires.

No matter how much we bungle the intricacies of being parents, though, children do know if they are truly loved and wanted. That is the special gift that children have, their perception is much greater than we think. We forget that we too had this perception about the adults we lived with when we were small.

I believe with every part of my being that what children need most is to know they are loved, and that we are trying to teach them skills to last a lifetime. They may not see that in the moment, but they understand it over time. Good parenting, good experiences with children for all adults, is not what we can buy them at the toy store. What children need most, in every corner of the world is loving and loving instruction.

Well-loved children can endure very well some of the most awful circumstances from poverty to illness. Well-skilled children, that is children who have been taught the basics of the good moral life--do to others as you would have done to you--these children can deal with any number and kind of struggle and strife, and still find themselves grounded and emotionally strong.

There is a predictable irony occurring with this generation of parents, the baby-boomers who came of age in the late 60s and the 70s, during a great time of experimenting and throwing off the older generation’s beliefs and values. Many of these parents now are much more inclined to over-parent, or over-protect their children, for they fear their children will experience the problems, or the narrow escapes of their youth. These parents live out of the fears of what was or what might have been. But this is ultimately a futile. Children need broad decision-making skills in order to navigate the sea of life. We cannot know with certainty what they will have to deal with, only that they will have to deal with all kinds of people and situations that will challenge their morals and values, their sense of self-worth. Sometimes they will make poor choices, but we hope to give them enough strength of character that they can not make the same poor choices repeatedly.

The worst things parents do is not trust that they can learn how to be good parents, and not trust that children will ultimately appreciate the limits that they need in life. We adults are often guilty of wanting the peace of the moment at the expense of the peace of a lifetime for ourselves and our children. We don’t want to raise Rhondas just because we dislike saying “no.”

As it happened, at a gathering some years ago, I met a college acquaintance who had grown up and still lived near Rhonda’s parents. From her I learned that Rhonda had married and divorced, three or four times. There had been a session at an expensive clinic to help her get clean of some substance. She had moved from one job to another, had a child of her own, then left the child with her mother to go back to school in San Francisco, continuing, it sounded to me, to search for some fulfillment. Somehow I doubt she has found it yet. I wonder if she will ever know how to find it. The problem with Rhonda was that she learned to channel her intelligence toward getting her own way, rather than learning how to live with a variety of real-world circumstances. Her skills for living were just too limited.

Handling the vicissitudes of child-rearing is related in every way to our handling of our spiritual growth. We probably feel it before we know how to change whatever is not working. We know on some level when what we are trying to do does not work. 

To make any changes in ourselves or for our children, we have to be willing to see what we do that doesn’t work and give up expecting the process to happen without our participation. The life of inner strength we understand as desirable for human beings, comes from our willingness to change and grow. And how we do that for ourselves becomes the model for our children. By attending to the inner wisdom we call spirit, by talking to our children and with other adults we learn, by an acceptance that we may sometimes need help--all of these are pathways to being mentally and spiritually healthy adults who give their children those skills to meet their present and their future.

Holiness, for me, lies in that communication. That time we take to really understand our children as separate, distinct people from ourselves. I always keep this image a counselor gave me when I was struggling with wanting to give my daughter the kind of mother experience I felt I had missed, but she didn’t seem to want or appreciate. The counselor said consider the lifeguard who has to bring the struggling person into the safety of the shore; the more the person struggles, the tougher it is for the lifeguard to help. What we teach our children about limits and struggling has everything to do with whether they grow up to become the lifeguard or the drowning person in the water. What we want to do is teach them to swim, to appreciate when help is present, not just to yell for help.