"Great Expectations"

Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon | Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland TX | Sept 15, 2019

AUDIO

OPENING WORDS

“Recognition”

It is so difficult to see this flower**
because the countless others
we’ve seen before
cloud the view,
along with how we expect it to look
and how it might be improved.

Even the faces of the ones we love deeply
hide like buried treasure
behind histories of expression.

In order to see
what is right in front of our eyes,
we first have to recognize
we have gradually
become blind,
and then begin
the slow work of forgetting.

** Substitute with any noun: beach, stone, bird, soap bubble, house, grandmother, beef stew, homeless person, celebrity, potato, dollar bill, construction worker, politician, drug addict, child, teacher, report card, mail order catalogue, boss, swimming pool, dog, towel, onion, computer, neighbor, planet, pine cone, cigarette, airplane, spam subject, fork, mountain, etc
– Daron Larson [1]

Come into this space, where today we will consider how our expectations affect our realities. Let us open ourselves to this moment, to newness, to surprise, to wonder. It is good to be together.

SERMON

Imagine I were to bring a rat in here – an ordinary rat… long tail, pink ears. And we invite that rat to go through a maze. And then imagine I asked you: “Do you think that the thoughts that you have in your head about this rat affect how that rat moves through space?”

I imagine most of us would say no.

But we’d be wrong.

Back in the 60s, the researcher Bob Rosenthal did an experiment. He asked researchers to send groups of rats through a maze. But first he labeled one of the groups of rats smart and the other dumb. They were all the same in reality. All ordinary. But the supposedly “smart” rats ended up going through the maze faster and with more accuracy. [2]

It turns out that the researchers’ expectations about the rats led them to handle the “smart” rats more like pets: seemingly subtle but ultimately quite meaningful differences in interaction.

Other scientists replicated his results.

A school teacher in San Francisco saw his study and asked Rosenthal, now a lecturer at Harvard, if he could test expectation effects on her students. Within two weeks he was on a plane with a plan.

In the study, teachers each received a made-up list of students in their class who were expected to “bloom” academically that semester, supposedly based on the results of a test. During that year, reasoning scores of the “bloomers” tended to improve more than those of other students.

Now, some 500 studies of expectancy effects have been conducted in numerous contexts, and the conclusions are confirmed. When managers believe workers to be highly productive, they often are. What drivers expect of other drivers on the road tends to come about.

When I first approached this sermon, I was thinking about how what we expect of people shapes how we see them, how we experience them.

But it actually goes much deeper.

It turns out that what we expect of others actually can create their reality. Our expectations of them cause us to relate to them, in usually unconscious, sometimes very subtle ways that have real effects.

But, okay…where’s the line, right?

Like for example, we can’t just expect a blind person into being able to see…right?

Wrong.

Daniel Kish, profiled in NPR’s podcast Invisibilia completely lost his sight when he was 13 months old. Both of his eyes were removed due to a rare cancer. [3]

Daniel Kish, completely blind, is now famous for his ability to ride a bike on busy city streets. He does this through echolocation: continuous clicking that allows him to sense the objects around him – like a bat.

He cringes, though, when he receives praise for this “trick” – it actually offends him a bit when people experience this as sensational. He still does the trick though because, like batman’s bat signal, he hopes that the attention helps him reach some blind kid somewhere who needs his help.

People’s low expectations about blind people’s abilities, he says, is actually what limits them. His organization, World Access for the Blind, works especially with children to teach them echolocation.

But he finds that more of his work involves helping the sighted people around the blind person to step back – to stop with their well-intentioned efforts to hover, to protect, to do things for them.

Most children intuitively begin clicking to echolocate, but the people around them tell them to stop because it’s not socially acceptable – it makes others uncomfortable.

Daniel Tish’s mother, on the other hand, had different expectations for her son. She says that when they brought him home from the hospital as a toddler after having his second eye removed, “My mom thought I should put him in cotton…so he wouldn’t get hurt.”

But Daniel loved to climb. So she says she “put away” her fear.

She put it away, and she kept putting it away.

Police officers and neighbors would show up at her door saying, “you can’t let him climb fences and trees, he could get hurt”. Teachers said: “You have got to get him to stop that strange clicking he does, it makes people uncomfortable.”

But she stuck with her gut. Daniel walked to school by himself, he made his own breakfast, he participated in extracurricular activities. And he did get hurt sometimes…riding full speed down his favorite steep hill on his bike when he was in elementary school…he slammed into a pole. He lost a couple of his teeth.

There were lots of injuries.

His mother knows it seems extreme, but she kept allowing his full freedom – a new bike was under the tree that Christmas.

Daniel says, “Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster. … If our culture recognized the capacity of blind people to see, then more blind people would learn to see.”

To see?

That feels like a stretch… right?

Nope.

Daniel swears that he actually experiences images.

And neuroscientists are starting to back him up.

Neuroscientists have studied blind people like Daniel and found that when Daniel is echolocating, the vision regions of his brain light up “like a discoball.”

Now you probably learned this in biology class, but most of us forget that an image may feel like it’s out there in front of our eyes, but it is actually constructed by our mind behind our eyes.

And of course our minds are constructed by all the messages in our culture.

Thus the famous quote: [4]

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Our minds, in part, create the realities we experience, and the realities those we interact with experience – whether it’s the “dumb” rat or the blind boy or someone very different from us.

Our member Victoria Duran told me this story. She was going to Pinkies to get a beer after work. As she pulled up in her car, she was blasting some Swedish folk music.

I’m not sure what Swedish folk music sounds like but I think I can imagine. She noticed a white guy (Victoria is Latina) staring at her with a quizzical look. He said to her, “Uhhhh…what was that music you were playing?” She said, “It was Swedish folk music.” He looked totally flummoxed and kept staring at Victoria. She just smiled back. He said, “Uhh…it wasn’t rap or Tejano…” …You could almost see the gears turning in his brain, trying to make sense of this new thing.

Then he concluded, “I’m going to buy you a beer!”

Now unfortunately, especially when it comes to things like race, we haven’t so easily been able to unlearn our expectations.

Terrence Roberts is one of the Little Rock 9 – the first 9 students to integrate the Little Rock school system.

Roberts talks about social psychologist Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule. If you spend 10,000 hours practicing something, you become an expert. Once you become an expert, about 70% of that action becomes relegated to your unconscious. It becomes automatic – something you don’t even have to think about or aren’t even aware you’re doing. [5]

Terrence Roberts applies Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule to our country’s experience with race. 1619 is the year that black people were first brought to our country as slaves. 1954 is the year of Brown vs. Board of Education – the case meant to integrate our country. Now imagine that case magically worked and integration happened and race relations were healed. They weren’t, but just for now, we’ll say they were.

During that span of 335 years, our country practiced the “dehumanization of, abuse of, exploitation of, and segregation from black people.” That’s 294 10,000-hour units. So, as Terrence Roberts says, our country became an expert 294-times-over on the dehumanization of, abuse of, exploitation of, and segregation from black people.

Remember that once you become an expert, 70% of that work becomes unconscious. So if we look around and wonder why racial tensions are still so high…If we trust our automatic responses, we’ll only be able to give you 30% of that answer.

Maybe we are only able to see 30% of that person.

And if we can’t even see them, what do we expect of them?

“It is so difficult to see this flower… the view is clouded…

As the poem we’ve now heard twice reads:

In order to see
what is right in front of our eyes,
we first have to recognize
we have gradually
become blind,
and then begin
the slow work of forgetting.
Daron Larson

But now that we know of Daniel Tish, we know this poet shouldn’t have used the metaphor of blindness!

It’s not the blind people who can’t see. It’s the people around them. It’s us.

As Daniel says, it’s our wider culture’s “impressions about blindness that are far more threatening to blind people than blindness itself.” [6]

Our wider culture shapes us with so many expectations that keep us from really seeing each other, from really allowing each other to be free.

I’ll close with a story from the Christian tradition, from the book of Luke:

Jesus went to eat dinner with some people, and a woman in that town who the text says “lived a sinful life” came to Jesus, and began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. Those who witnessed were appalled because of the kind of woman they thought she was.
Jesus said to them… “Do you see this woman?”
—Luke 7.37, 44

No, we do not see.

No, we do not see. To one of Jesus’ most arresting questions, we have to answer: we don’t see her. We see our prejudices and stereotypes. We see our fears and projections. We don’t see this woman; we see what we think of her. We see a sinner. We see someone disrupting our dinner. We see someone who makes us uncomfortable. Which is to say, we see our judgment, our expectations, our discomfort. We see our own stuff. We don’t see her.
Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes [7]

Whether you think Jesus was the Christ, or a prophet, or an amazing enlightened person, Jesus saw her.

Our Unitarian ancestors didn’t think we should worship Jesus because that might keep us from thinking we could emulate Jesus. That’s how highly they thought of him.

So let us strive to see her – whether it is the person beside us, or our child , or our cashier, or our coworker.

We come to this place to invite meaning, truth, & mystery to enlarge our expectations – to break open all our small thinking, all our stiff, conditioned relating to one another.

May we continue breaking it all open, lifting the veil, allowing our lives to be illumined. May it be so.

– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon

BENEDICTION