"In Praise of the Hedgehog"
A Sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
October 24, 2010
READINGS: ANCIENT AND MODERN
Our Ancient reading this morning is Chapter 4 of the Tao te
Ching by Lao Tsu, who lived sometime between the 4th and 6th Centuries
BCE and was the founder of Taoism. Our reading was translated by
Charles Mueller:
The Way is so vast that when you use it, something is always
left.
How deep it is!
It seems to be the ancestor of the myriad things.
It blunts sharpness
Untangles knots
Softens the glare
Unifies with the mundane.
It is so full!
It seems to have remainder.
It is the child of I-don't-know-who.
And prior to the primeval Lord-on-high.
Our Modern Reading is from Chapter 5 of, Good to Great, a book
on organizational excellence by Jim Collins:
To be clear, hedgehogs are not stupid. Quite the contrary. They
understand that the essence of profound insight is simplicity. What
could be more simple than e = mc2? What could be simpler than the
idea of the unconscious, organized into an id, ego, and superego?
What could be more elegant than Adam Smith's pin factory and "invisible
hand?" No, the hedgehogs aren't simpletons; they have a piercing
insight that allows them to see through complexity and discern underlying
patterns. Hedgehogs see what is essential, and ignore the rest.
SERMON:
Way back last spring, our Associate Minister Judy Tomlinson came
across the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins. "I think it
has a lot of insightful ideas that might be good for us to think
about at the Board retreat this fall," she suggested in one
of our weekly meetings. So I read the book. It's about how good
organizations can loose themselves from the shackles of goodness
and go on to become something even greater. I agreed that it had
a lot of good ideas. I was especially intrigued by Chapter 5; The
Hedgehog Principle.
I suggested to our President Nick Lewis that we use Chapter 5 as
a working outline for the retreat. Nick and the executive committee
of the Board agreed. So in early September, when your Board of Trustees
held their annual retreat to plan an approach to their work on your
behalf for this year, they invited me to lead them through a sort
of hedgehog process. The goal was to discover a focused vision for
that work.
We began by reading the introduction from the chapter:
Are You a Hedgehog or a Fox?
The fox is a cunning creature, able to devise myriad complex strategies
for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. Day in and day out, the fox
circles around the hedgehog's den, waiting for the perfect moment
to pounce. Fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot, and crafty-the
fox looks like the sure winner. The hedgehog, on the other hand,
is a dowdy creature, looking like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine
and a small armadillo. He waddles along, going about his simple
day, searching for lunch and taking care of his home.
The fox waits in cunning silence at the juncture in the trail.
The hedgehog, minding his own business, wanders right into the path
of the fox. "Aha, I've got you now!" thinks the fox. He
leaps out, bounding across the ground, lightning fast. The little
hedgehog, sensing danger, looks up and thinks, "Here we go
again. Will he ever learn?" Rolling up into a perfect little
ball, the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing out
in all directions. The fox, bounding toward his prey, sees the hedgehog
defense and calls off the attack. Retreating back to the forest,
the fox begins to calculate a new line of attack. Each day, some
version of this battle between the hedgehog and the fox takes place,
and despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always
wins.
[Collins] extrapolates from this little parable to divide people
into two basic groups: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends
at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are
"scattered or diffused, moving on many levels," never
integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying
vision.
Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single
organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides
everything. It doesn't matter how complex the world, a hedgehog
reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple-indeed almost simplistic-hedgehog
ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to
the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.
Princeton professor Marvin Bressler pointed out the power of the
hedgehog during one of our long conversations [says Jim Collins]:
"You want to know what separates those who make the biggest
impact from all the others who are just as smart? They're hedgehogs."
Freud and the unconscious, Darwin and natural selection, Marx and
class struggle, Einstein and relativity, Adam Smith and division
of labor-they were all hedgehogs. They took a complex world and
simplified it. "Those who leave the biggest footprints…
have thousands calling after them…"
To be clear, hedgehogs are not stupid. (Extrapolation from Chapter
5 of Good to Great)
Jim Collins suggests that organizations, primarily businesses,
ask themselves three questions in determining their hedgehog principle:
1) What are you deeply passionate about?
2) What can you be the best in the world at?
3) What drives your economic engine?
Of course we are not a business. We are a religious congregation.
And besides, we are Unitarian Universalists and it is our nature
to adapt things in order to find a better fit. And so the questions
the Board chose to answer were these:
1) What are we deeply passionate about?
2) What do we do that is our best?
3) What fuels and nurtures our congregation's drive to be an excellent
and effective congregation?
To answer the first question, as Jim Collins suggests, we looked
to our 114 year history in order to trace the flow of our interests
and passions. We found three major streams that intertwined neatly
into an ongoing confluence which pointing towards our own hedgehog
principle. They were:
1) From before the charter of this congregation there has been
a determination for the spiritual and physical well-being and development
of our children - both those children within and without the congregation;
2) A deep hunger for spiritual, intellectual and moral experience,
exploration and expression;
3) An implacable, an unrelenting disposition toward an urgency for
justice for all of creation - everyone and everything included.
We talked about how the original Women's Alliance formed around
the idea of founding a liberal religious education for their children.
We recognized how the congregation, early on, reached out to the
children of the broader community to welcome them to our programs.
That's how we racially integrated our congregation decades before
the Civil Rights movement began. We talked about the congregation's
unrelenting efforts to keep our religious education curriculum pertinent,
relevant and salient, and its program structure visionary, professional
and sound. We talked about our After School Program and its commitment
to the children of our wider community and to the future of our
culture.
And then we realized that it wasn't just the children who have
been the recipients of the congregation's educational impulses.
It has been the adult community just as well. Our archives are bulging
with memorabilia from programs for adults that span over decades
-the Collegial Pulpit, Unity Concerts, various other musical programs,
and theatrical groups, book groups, poetry groups and Adult Education
opportunities by the dozens.
What are we deeply passionate about? The Board's answer and their
first part of our hedgehog principle is: We acknowledge the desire
of the members of our congregation to achieve and to provide opportunities
for transformation, empowerment and spiritual nurturance.
Looking at the same history, we see the deep hunger for spiritual
experience, exploration and expression - not just for ourselves
but for the larger community. Among us, that means a rich worship
life with relevant worship themes, and a vibrant music program.
It means enriching programs that reach beyond worship and education.
Beyond those of us who are already here. It means not only inviting
the larger community but welcoming that wider more diverse community
into our ongoing process of becoming who we are becoming, accepting
the many and rich gifts and resources that the wider community brings
to our gatherings.
To a significant extent, what we do here begins with our spiritual
experience, our exploration of that experience and then goes out
into the world as an expression of what we have found. We come here
looking to transcend in our lives the brokenness of the human experience.
In our exploration we find that our personal experience is intricately
bound in the web of existence that holds All-That-Is. We come seeking
the experience of divinely human love and healing, and we find them
inexplicably linked to the causes of justice in that web of existence
of which we are a part. Our expression is very often then towards
that justice.
A non-UU friend of mine recently suggested to me that many other
religions tend to focus primarily on a person's relationship with
a creator, with the divine. Unitarian Universalists, he suggested,
tend to focus more chiefly on a person's relationships within the
creation. "Yes," I said. "That is what we do."
And so our history indicates the life of this passion as it has
been lived out through decades of integration and civil rights,
the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Peace Sight Movement and Women's
Rights. In recent decades that same impulse has led to the vigorous
and rigorous support of gay, lesbian and transgender rights, and
to a leadership role in the struggle to attain marriage equality.
It has included many other struggles in many venues, as we will
tomorrow when some of us will go into the city to raise our voices
to the banking industry speaking truth to power. And always it has
been the spiritual expression of our spiritual experience and exploration.
What do we want to do that is our best? The Board's answer and
the second part of our hedgehog principle is - We will do our best
in offering and promoting a nurturing environment that supports
spiritual and religious growth in our community - within and without
the walls of our congregation.
Finally, what fuels and nurtures our congregation's drive to be
an excellent and effective congregation? Surely it is fueled by
our passion. Surely it is fueled by the growing body of experience
in what we do best. But just as surely it is more. We each come
here seeking an experience and a greater sense of healing and wholeness
and even of the holy. And in our experience, in our exploration,
and in our expressions, we find ourselves in a world where there
is so much that needs to be answered, where there is simply so much
need. And our compassion is stirred.
What drives the engine of this liberal religious community? It
is that compassion that will not let us live in isolation. What
fuels and nurtures this congregation's drive to be excellent and
effective? The Board's answer and the final part of our hedgehog
principle is - We will do our utmost to reflect the compassion and
spirit of our congregation and community in our collective actions.
To paraphrase motivational speaker Tony Roberts, "One reason
so few [organizations] achieve what [they] truly want is that [they]
never direct [their] focus; never concentrate [their] power. Most
[organizations] dabble their way through [history], never deciding
to master anything in particular."
We have a rich history here, one that has been guided by a passionately
focused mission - from its very inception. We are the heirs of that
mission, the beneficiaries of that passion. It is ours now to take
what we have been given, to hone our focus and to carry the mission
forward.
We are here to provide for ourselves and for others a rich environment
of opportunity for transformation, for empowerment and for spiritual
nurturance, so that we might grow and heal, bless and be blessed.
And if we pay close attention to one another as we go about this
work, we will be able to help each other to stoke and re-stoke our
fires of compassion, so that we might each be fed, so that we might
each and to gather help to provide a means of feeding a hungry world.
In short our hedgehog principle is summarized in the familiar words
of our mission statement of this congregation: "We are a liberal
religious community seeking transformation in our hearts, our homes,
our community and our world."
So then comes the question of assessment. How can we know if we
are doing this work of transformation? This is not a business that
we are running here; it is a religious enterprise. In answering,
I want to quote one of my favorite 19th-century Unitarian ministers,
William Channing Gannett. Here he is speaking about ethics but I
think it's quite pertinent to our topic, and to our orientation
toward the religious life. He said:
Ethics thought out his religious thought.
Ethics felt out his religious feeling.
Ethics lived out is the religious life.
How can we know if we are fulfilling our mission? The truth is,
I'm afraid, we cannot know for sure. But perhaps we can feel it.
We need to be able to feel that transformation has occurred. We
need to be able to feel that there's a difference in our lives,
in our hearts, in our homes, and our congregation, in our community
and in our world.
What does transformation feel like? I think that it feels like
hope. When we approach our lives, our homes and our world with hope,
then we might recognize that some sort of transformation has occurred.
We are in the business of transformation.
To attempt to do more than that or to do other things with our
energy and our resources would be to dilute our focus and our concentration.
It would be to diminish our power. To attempt to do less than that
would be to come up short of our own expectations and to squander
the investment of faith placed in us by those who have gone before
us. But to seek such transformation is high cause for our being,
and it is high cause for our being here together. It is high cause
for being a part of this religious enterprise and for being a part
of a force that pulses and pushes this stream onward in an effort
to serve the larger good.
"The Way," Lau Tsu suggested, "The Tao is so vast
that when you use it, something is always left. How deep it is!"
The essence of profound insight is simplicity. So may we employ
a piercing insight that allows us to see through the complexities
of our lives and the world in order to discern the underlying patterns,
so that we might do our best, so that we might do what it is we
have come here to do, in our lives, in our homes, in our congregation
and in the world.
Our Board of Trustees has adopted this hedgehog principle as their
guiding standard for the year to come. They invite you, and I invite
you, to join us in doing likewise. There is no more we should do,
and there is no less we can do.
|
