Simplicity, Complexity, Simplicity Again: Values, Calling, and the Crucible of the Hot Mess by Eric Hepburn

"For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have." - Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

What is the simplicity on the far shore of complexity? Why brave the treacherous seas of complexity to get there?

The sermon traces a single arc — simplicity, complexity, simplicity again — across three scales: the situations of our lives, the developmental arc of a single human life, and the story of communities and nations. Along the way: why you can't skip developmental milestones (object permanence and the physics of peek-a-boo), why skipped development produces caricatures of maturity rather than the real thing, Kesha's "Praying" heard as a plea for companions through the messy middle, Aiko Bethea's insistence that we can't stay in the hot mess, Robert Frost's harder path, Brené Brown's two-core-values exercise, Parker Palmer's letter to his granddaughter, and Archimedes' formula for moving the world: a place to stand — your values — and a lever — your calling.

The earned simplicity on the far shore isn't naive — it's what remains when everything unnecessary has burned away.

https://youtu.be/fJ5BoFP4XjA

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Full Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the thirty-third episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Simplicity, Complexity, Simplicity Again." Let's begin with our Great World House segment.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

Now we pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part.

This week, federal projections confirmed that Texas will generate more electricity from solar than from coal for the first time in history.

The simple truth is that the sun has always been Earth's primary source of energy. The messy complexity was — and is — humankind's century-long entanglement with fossil fuels. The simplicity on the far shore is arriving. The sun was always the answer, and it took a hundred years of messy climate complexity to come back around to what was obvious all along.

What's remarkable is that even here, in a state whose leaders have actively resisted it, the simple truth — that the sun provides energy — didn't need anyone's permission. It just needed enough people to stop getting in its way. Sometimes the simplicity on the far side of complexity arrives not because we choose it, but because reality is more patient than our resistance.

A Voice of Wisdom — Eric Hepburn

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

We have two short quotes this morning. The first is from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.:

"For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity — for that, I would give you anything I have."

The second quote is from Aiko Bethea:

"Emotions — the soothing ones and the jolting ones — are part of the process, and they can be hard to watch and experience. But we can't stay in the hot mess. We gotta move through it."

The Sermon: Simplicity, Complexity, Simplicity Again — Eric Hepburn

From breath to word, from silence to speech — we enter the Unfolding in Word.

Simplicity. Complexity. Then simplicity again.

Before we dive into the meat of this, I want to invite you to consider that if we're thinking about this simplicity-complexity thing as horizontal motion, it might be happening at different elevations for you. You've walked into this space today with some things on your heart, or some things in your life.

So one scale on which this sermon might resonate for you is the situation scale — the something-that's-happening scale. A relationship in your personal life; a relationship or situation at work, or with your family. That's one scale at which the idea I'm going to share today might be useful to you.

Another scale is what we might think of as the arc of your human life. A lot of the concepts I'm sharing today come from developmental psychology, which is concerned with how the arc of a single human life plays out from early days to end days. A lot of people think developmental psychology stops around age twenty-six, when the brain finishes developing. I personally think — and spiritually believe, faithfully — that the arc of human development doesn't properly end until you are either dead, or a wise elder, or a little bit of both. So another scale that might resonate with you today: you might be at a point that feels like an inflection point on your life journey — growing and maturing and deepening. That might be what's on your heart.

And the third scale: if there's the scale of the event, and the scale of us individually — the I scale — then there's the we scale. The we scale might be this community. It might be Georgetown, or Texas, or the United States, or the history of humankind, or the history of life on this planet.

One of the interesting things that comes out of wisdom traditions is this idea that when we map out true processes — processes that give us real insight — we can see them reflected at all of those scales. That's what we're going to try to get into today.

Like I said, the framework comes from developmental psychology, and it looks like this: you can't skip developmental processes.

If I start out as a young child with a simplistic view of the world — which children have — think of object permanence. I hide the stool behind the paper: the stool doesn't exist. This is well documented; at a certain toddler age, it's just true. It's why young children love to play peek-a-boo. If you're not sure whether a kid has object permanence yet, make eye contact with them, cover your face — and you'll know in about three milliseconds. Because if they look at you like you are super boring, they already know you're still behind your hands. But if they light up — "that was a cool magic trick! Have you guys seen this? That person can disappear!" — that's amazing to them.

Developmental milestones are like that. Before we hit the milestone, there are parts of the world that are opaque to us — aspects of our own reality to which we are blind. And being able to play peek-a-boo with someone, and find joy in it, after object permanence is part of your reality — that takes a different skill set. Because it's not magic anymore. But it can still be fun. It can still be a game you choose to play, a source of joy and engagement and interaction, even when you're playing it with somebody you know has object permanence — partly because it echoes the remembrance of a time when it was magic.

And that lends itself to this understanding: to do something once we've been through the crucible of development is not the same experience as it was before we went through the crucible. And we can't skip the crucible. We can't skip the messy part where we're figuring it out — because to do that is to deny development and then pretend that we've matured. We skip the developmental step, we pretend we're mature, and we show up acting how we were told to act — how we think an adult is supposed to act — without having earned the wisdom that informs it. And therefore we become a caricature of maturity, instead of actually mature. Does that make sense? All right, cool.

So this is the arc: simplicity, complexity, simplicity again. On the micro scale, it might be a relationship conflict. On the human scale, it might be you hitting some developmental milestone — cognitively, emotionally, spiritually, physically — that you hadn't crossed before; and you, earnestly showing up to that Rubicon moment in your life and deciding to go through it, instead of trying to get around it or backing away from it, is your opportunity to deepen yourself. And on the macro level — I don't know. I'm hoping for an election where I don't have to wear black again. I'm hoping a critical mass of people have developed enough wisdom in the intervening four years to see through the charade of false bravado, and to recognize wisdom as a necessary leadership capacity. I don't know whether that dream is going to come true. But that's what I'm hoping for — for all of us: that enough wisdom has been garnered by watching the real world unfold that people will see the difference between truth and falsehood; that they'll see the difference between fake courage, which is cowardice, and real courage, which is human vulnerability.

So I'm going to circle back now. We watched this Kesha video — "Praying." I just want to do a litmus test: that video, for some reason, I found deeply, emotionally resonant. Will you raise your hand if you're with me on that? I just want to get a sense. Okay, cool. So I didn't miss most of you — we're running about fifty-fifty. It just happens; it just is.

In that song, she strikes me as someone headed through a messy complexity, but whose vision of once-again-simple is starting to crystallize for her. She's grappling with the hard realization that the upfront promise of simplicity from her Christian upbringing didn't stand up to the scrutiny of lived experience. Now — this is just my interpretation of the video. Who is she asking to pray? God. The church. And why is she asking them to pray? To go deeper. To get into the messy complexity. When I listen to this song, I hear her begging the church to go deeper with her — begging God to go deeper with her. She's begging for companions on a journey through the messiness, toward a version of spirituality, a version of religion, a version of God that's willing to engage the complex messiness and still hold the value of relationship — the yearning to find the simplicity on the other side.

Simplicity. Complexity. Then simplicity again.

Like in the video, Aiko's work — which you heard a little of — points to the truth that we can't stay in the hot mess. That's often most obvious at the micro scale. But here, in the place where we are politically in the United States: also a hot mess, pretty obviously. And it feels like we probably shouldn't hang out here too long — it's going to get worse before it gets better, and the longer we stay, the worse it gets. But we can't stay in the hot mess. Tough emotions and experiences are part of engaging real complexities. They aren't things to be avoided in search of comfort and fitting in. They are invitations to the deeper journey.

You remember — the path less traveled thing. Emerson, I think? Emerson or Thoreau — I'm going to forget — [Congregation: "Frost!"] Frost! Thank you. I had an itch in my brain that said, "you are off base, sir; please check yourself." Luckily, I've got some good literati in the crowd who keep me straight.

The path less traveled is harder. The land and the rocks have been worn smooth and flat by fewer feet. The invitation to take that path isn't an invitation to comfort. It is an invitation to your own self-discovery — and that should take more energy. That should be harder. But we live in a culture that glamorizes ease and comfort to such an extent that we start to wonder why anyone would choose the hard way. "Well, this path was good enough for most of the other people — why not that one? Surely that would be okay." But the thing I'm trying to communicate — maybe I'm succeeding; you'll have to send me an email afterwards and tell me — is that taking the path around the hardship is not where the fruit is. It's not where the fruit of your own life — the fruit that's beckoning you — lives. Avoidance isn't the path your own heart and soul want for you.

Simplicity. Complexity. Simplicity again.

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the pro forma version of simplicity isn't worth a fig — but that he would give... no, wait. He didn't say "a lot." He didn't say "many things." He said: I would give everything. Everything I have. To find the simplicity on the other side of that complexity. This was a Supreme Court justice — a man trained in the meticulous use of words and meanings. When he says everything, I don't think it was a figure of speech. I think he was trying to tell you how much it's worth.

But what is it? What is this thing that's worth everything?

The hot mess is a crucible of complexity. It is a crucible for getting clear about our own values. Let me say that again: it's a crucible for getting clear about our own values.

I've used this metaphor before, and I'll use it probably a bunch more times and confuse y'all, because every time I use it I tie it to different things — and one of my literati is going to tell me who did this one. If you want to change the world — to move the world — you need two things: a place to stand, and a lever. Anybody know? ... It's a real thing, I swear. [Congregation: "Archimedes!"] Archimedes! Thank you. Going real old school, all the way back to Archimedes: a place to stand, and a lever.

Our values are where we place our feet. For the note-takers among you: if you've never engaged with Brené Brown's boil-your-values-down-to-two-core-values exercise, I encourage you to Google it and take some time and do it. Because then you know where to put your right foot and your left foot — your two core values. That is where we stand. We stand on our values. [The work I do] is all about: when things get messy, how do we get through it? Well, the first thing is, we have to know where to put our feet.

And the second thing is that we have to know what we are called to be in the world. That tells us where to push the lever.

One of my favorite pieces of wisdom comes from a couple of different traditions, but it's this idea that one of the most toxic stories of modernity is "you can be anything you want." Why is that troubling to you, Eric? Well — before I was a father, it was a lot less troubling. But one of the things fatherhood taught me is that whoever wrote that tabula rasa thing didn't have children. Or didn't pay them much attention.

We had a quote a couple of weeks ago, on Mother's Day, from Parker Palmer — talking about a letter he wrote to his granddaughter, because she showed up as herself from the earliest days. His job as a grandparent was to be a faithful witness to who she was, so that he, as someone who loved her, could mirror her back to herself — so she could find her way in life more easily than he had. He said, in effect: I don't want you to wait until your fifties or sixties — your midlife, post-midlife crisis — to figure out what you were put on this earth for. Maybe, while you're still in your twenties, I can mirror back to you what you've been since your earliest days, and you won't have to wait as long as I did.

I know that's a contentious idea for those among us who get a little squidgy about metaphysical things. Some of us in here are a little scientistic — we get squirmy about metaphysical things like a purpose for your life. So I'm not going to claim, metaphysically, that there's a secret great book somewhere with a phrase written down, and if you discover that phrase you'll unlock the key. But I will say this, from my own personal spiritual experience and my reading of a great number of wisdom traditions: I think your life's better if you answer, for yourself, the question — what am I here for, and how does that align with my talents?

For example: my son could choose to be a professional musician, because he has native talents that lean heavily that way. I feel very confident that even if I had decided at age four that that's what I wanted to be, I would still not be very good at it. I do not have those native talents. Now, I could have put in my ten thousand hours and become reasonably competent — that's what the research shows; you can become reasonably competent at almost anything. But that is a different thing than asking where your gifts are, and what those gifts were made for, in terms of what they offer the world.

If we stand in our values, and we acknowledge our gifts, it tells us how to push the world.

That's an earned simplicity. It's not naive, because it's been through the fire. It's not simple because it's shallow — it's simple because everything unnecessary has been burned away in that crucible of complex messiness. We say it every week: the light of truth that burns all else away. This is what it's pointing at. Going through the mess to distill what your values are, and what your call in this life is — that's the thing that makes things simple again. And it's not the same naive simplicity that those of us lucky enough to have a relatively carefree childhood experienced some number of years ago. It's a different kind of simplicity: oh no, the world is a hot mess — but I know where I stand, and I know what my lever is for. I know, for me, where I stand and what my lever is for. And I know how to be in a community where we aren't all standing in the same place — but we can talk to each other, and collaborate about how to use our levers together: to change bigger things, or sometimes just to navigate smaller crises.

The hot mess of complexity demands that we get clear about why we're here — not as some abstract theological notion of grand human purpose, but as a deep curiosity that aims at discovering our individual calling in this life, and a willingness to engage hardship when it arrives. Learning to live that calling in cooperation and community — with each other, and with all life.

Amen.

[00:24:17] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew this week was Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you next time.