The Spider Theory

Today I attended my Unitarian Universalist church's service. The minister for this service authors the Auspicious Jots blog, covering a wide range of interesting anecdotal material. She gave a sermon entitled, "Why Should We Even Care?" about an incident that she had as an instructor for a World Religions class.

Today, as she was beginning her service, she said there was a spider on the pulpit. She interrupted her reading to try to get rid of the presumptuous arachnid. She flicked her hand holding a piece of paper, and then said, "Beat It!" She gave her sermon, on caring and concern for the things that greet us in life; in her case, being questioned as to whether she accepted Jesus Christ to be her Savior.

I am not sure if she was pleased when I told her that I thought the highlight of her service was the spider. But that's what I feel. When you do the best you can to do something worth doing, your plans can be disrupted by an itsy bitsy spider crawling all over your sermon. Well, that's life, AC. Das is das Leben, und Arbeit macht das Leben nicht süss. C'est la vie. Spiders are a part of life.

That, in fact, is a central part of my beliefs. In particular, I believe in the Beyond theory, which says that there is always something beyond anything you mention. If there is a Theory of "Everything" describing the four forces of nature, that's when we discover a fifth force. When the Unitarian Universalist Association draws up a list of 7 principles for its denomination, that's when an eighth principle becomes evident. When the polls predict that Obama will win New Hampshire, that's when Clinton wins it. It implies that there is an afterlife, a supernatural, but no God, because you can always go Beyond God.

This theory can be reformulated as the "spider" theory. When you think you have the answer to life, the universe and everything, that's when the 42 spots on a pair of dice gyrate and land, and that's when a spider comes up to your answer and ruins it. To me what that spider means in AC's service is that no matter how well you prepare your sermon, the spider can come and ad lib your service, and you can't always say, "Beat It!" She knows this very well as a UU minister, as she believes in the 7 principles, the fourth of which calls for a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. To me, the spider is a symbol of the Fourth Principle.

NOTE: I have gotten a commenter, Robin Edgar, who has told me that the spider is more of a symbol of the Seventh Principle. That it is, since spiders spin webs, like the Interdependent Web of All Existence. So this means now the Spider symbolizes two of the UU Principles - numbers 4 and 7. It symbolizes the Fourth, as the Spider that gets in the way of your sermon. It symbolizes the Seventh, as the Weaver of the Interdependent Web. Who knows? Maybe the Spider will some day symbolize all seven principles, and so the symbol of UUism will be the Spider.

By the way, I have to type this in this way. I have enabled this blog to print comments, but it doesn't do it. It does it with my other blogs. This is a serious problem with Blogger.