Sermon: Beginners Luck

When I was pregnant with our twins, my husband Jeff and I decided to not find out the sex of the babies. Relatives and friends, even progressives, found this bizarre. “How are you going to prepare for the arrival of these babies if you don’t know their gender?” they would ask. “How will you know what color to paint their room? How will we know whether to get them the spider man onesie or the bunny rabbit onesie? The Mickey Mouse or the Minnie Mouse?” They figured that having two girls, two boys, or one of each were entirely different projects requiring entirely different preparation on the part of everybody from before they even came out of the womb. We didn’t see it that way. As we saw it, the project of caring for newborn boys or girls is basically identical. They need milk, they need sleep, they need their diapers changed, they need to be held a lot and that’s basically it. Gender and all the social baggage that it carries comes later. And we felt strongly that the person best equipped to determine their gender was not us and not our friends, but them.

So friends would say, “Okay fine, so don’t tell me if they’re boys or girls, but don’t you want to find out for yourselves? Aren’t you curious?” And we were curious. Because of course their sex would make a difference later in their lives and in our lives. But we wanted to keep that information from ourselves as well. Because we knew that being creatures of culture, despite all our best intentions, as soon as we knew the babies’ sexes, we would begin formulating an idea of who they were. We would begin assigning all kinds of characteristics to them. We would begin crowding their space of growth and self-discovery. We would lose the openness of what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” And we didn’t want that to happen one minute sooner than absolutely necessary.

The moment in any relationship when we are most able to allow the other person to be who they are is when we don’t know who they are – when we are in that open, curious, welcoming state of what Shari called “unknowing.” Some of us have experienced this in the beginning of romantic relationships too. The beginning can be the most beautiful part of a relationship because we have few preconceptions of who the other person is and no need for them to be anything in particular. We don’t know them. We’re not invested in them either keeping or leaving their job, we don’t care whether they do or don’t intervene in that family conflict, we don’t expect them to buy or not buy that new computer. We may be curious about what they’ll do but we don’t already have the answers pre-written in our heads. And so there can be a golden era, as if the whole relationship itself is anointed with “beginner’s mind.” We haven’t yet become experts at the relationship. And so there’s a spaciousness to the relationship that’s hard to recapture once the other person is more familiar.

There can be a real cost to the other person when we try to impose our image of who they should be. Now that my children are out of the womb – very much out of the womb at 6 years old – they seem to be on board with the idea that others have of them that they are a boy and a girl. But a few weeks ago, they decided to switch clothes right before they left for school. My daughter wound up dressed in a shirt and pants not much different from what she would usually wear, and my son wound up wearing a skirt and a pink top – quite different from his usual attire. They thought nothing of it – it was just the kind of lark that twins like to do. But my son’s classmates thought that his clothing was the most consequential and problematic thing that had befallen their classroom all year. They teased him, they were mean to him, and he ended up so upset by it that he switched his clothes back with his sister mid-way through the day. He has since been hyper-sensitive to appearing too “girly.” His classmates’ narrow image of who he should be damaged his playful spirit of exploration. We might say, “Well, kids are like that. They’re cruel, they’re conformist, they can’t handle difference.” But if we’re honest, we adults can be like that too. We’re more subtle about it, but we can be like that too. It can be really hard to let the people in our lives be who they are, experiment with who they are, and change who they are.

How can we hold on to that spaciousness of our first encounters with our baby or our partner or a new friend or a new job? One approach is Zen. Zen meditation is designed to practice exactly this – returning to a perception of the world that is somehow original, “unknowing,” and making no assumptions based the past. I remember reading about an experiment done with Zen monks where their brains were hooked up to all kinds of monitors and a sound was played for them at regular intervals over and over. Most people when you hooked them up and played the sound, their brain waves would show a reaction the first few times as they were hearing something new and then as the sound kept repeating, the brain’s reaction would diminish over time until they were barely registering the sound at all. The monks’ brains, however, responded as if newly surprised by the sound every single time. They didn’t assume that the same sound was going to happen again just because it had before. They didn’t assume that they were experts. And so they were able to hear it fresh every time. Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” Unitarian Universalists tend to be a pretty intellectual bunch – we respect experts in every field and want to be experts ourselves. But expertise is often unhelpful in the field of our own relationships.

If Zen meditation isn’t your thing, it can be very powerful to simply set an intention to let that expertise go when it comes to our loved ones. I still feel that my best moments of parenting are when I’m able to recapture that initial commitment to not define my kids – to let them be who they are at any given moment. And my worst moments of parenting are when I try to corner them into an image that I’ve developed of them based on who I think they should be or who they were in the past. “But you liked broccoli yesterday” is always a failing proposition. So to Shari’s “Unknow thyself,” I would add “unknow thy child,” “unknow thy partner,” “unknow thy friend,” “unknow thy parent,” “unknow thy congregation,” “unknow thy country.” Let’s set our expertise aside and give our loved ones the gift of spaciousness and curiosity. If we wait long enough and openly enough, anyone might surprise us.