Sermon: This Is Water – Rev. Eric Banner

Our reading this morning is from a graduation address given now 20 some years ago, titled “This Is Water,” to the graduating class of Kenyon College. The title of the address is a reference to a joke about “two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Perhaps you’ve had the experience.

But I’ve been wanting to come around to this particular graduation address for a while now, and if you’ve been here a few years, you might have caught on that once a year, in late May or early June, as a source text for reflection I invite us to go back to a notable graduation address, and ask, as lifelong learners, what we might take from some of the wisdom that has been shared to new graduates.

It is, I think we can all acknowledge, a tricky genre of public speaking. Generally you want to be thoughtful, and encouraging, but not trite or cliché, and the challenge is that like so many things in life, it’s probably true that just about everything that needs to be said has been said by someone else, somewhere else, before. Having listened to a few such addresses, I can tell you I cannot remember a thing about what was said at any of the ones I attended, both my own, and those of the people I love, which might be preferable to being one of the speakers this year who made themselves all too memorable by trumpeting an AI future to students who live in fear of finding any job because of AI, and booed the speakers for their apparent cluelessness.

But looking back to “This Is Water” now just over 20 years on, it’s striking to both see what has changed, and consider whether the challenges those graduating seniors faced in their 20s have morphed into something even more so in their 40s.

Wallace wanted to remind the new graduates of the power of attention, directed, thoughtful, attention, to guide their days, without sounding like he was sermonizing, or finger wagging, or even, to use his own phrase, speaking “about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.”

But much of his address was focused on what we do with our boredom. About the daily life of adulthood, which he assumed most of the graduates had not yet fully experienced, but that their parents and grandparents were all too familiar with. The waiting in line at the grocery store, the being stuck in traffic on your way to and from work, the assumption that you were the center of the universe, if not literally, then at least as you thought about the inconveniences that surrounded you and left you encountering people who seemed to in your way. The water, he called it. The water of daily life, so ever present as to be entirely invisible.

Now for some time I’ve been meaning to get around to addressing the question of what AI means to us, as Unitarian Universalists, as people of this particular faith tradition that have often been on the bleeding edge of progress. Heck, even the guy who literally invented the world wide web, Tim Berners Lee, is one of us. But the topic is big, and complicated, in ways that I’m not even sure I know what to think about. Just yesterday I saw a UU elsewhere in the country got a religious accomodation to not use AI at work, based on her sincerely held religious beliefs. Even still, I was struck this spring when I ran across an article about the leaders of many of the largest AI platforms in the world arguing, without knowing it, against the very thing that Wallace was arguing for in 2005.

In that piece, the author, Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, highlighted the way that Marc Andreessen, who helped create one of the first major browsers, Netscape, said in an interview that he engaged in zero introspection, to which the podcast host he was speaking of not only agreed, but said that he’d read hundreds of books about entreapeneuers, and as far as he could tell, they didn’t engage in introspection, either.

Williams also wrote about Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPayl and Palantir, who “suggested that introspection was the stuff of hippies, who derailed American technological progress when they “took over the country” in the late 1960s.”

And then Williams said this –

“None of these men seem to have considered the possibility that self-examination is valuable in itself. The goal has never been simply to stew, but to correct our motives, desires, and actions to avoid delusion and live ethically. Indeed, extending empathy to others isn’t even possible without first understanding ourselves. A world devoid of introspection would resemble a schoolyard full of children picking fights forever, unable to perceive how their actions affect one another.

 

The people who seem least interested in introspection are also those whose work is most profoundly shaping our collective reality. These are the supposed visionaries whose insatiable demand for data has disenchanted the world. They are the funders of opaque new forms of intelligence that could upend the economy or possibly exterminate us all. These are the people who most need to understand themselves.”

Which brings us back to David Foster Wallace, and what has, and has not changed in the last 20 years. Back then cell phones were, well, phones, and you might recall that you had to pay extra to send those little missives of 140 characters or less. Facebook existed, YouTube existed, but our ability to distract ourselves was light years away from what lives with us every day. I know, because I live it. I no longer stand bored in the grocery store checkout line, I look to see if I’ve missed an important email, or a headline on my news feed that would let me think about, worry about, and generally distract myself with someone, something, somewhere other than the people right in front of me.

Unlike Wallace, I’m not against sermons, but like him, I don’t want you to hear this as some kind of jeremiad against you, personally. Rather, I wanted to come back to his words because of their openness to the way in which we all might choose intentionality, choose to notice the water in which we swim, and then to think about the question of what we want to do with them.

If, 20 years ago, it was “extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head,” then in 2026 it is even harder to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the abundance of distractions outside our heads. If “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think” and “being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience,” then how much more difficult is it to make those choices and to construct meaning when our very attention itself has been commoditized with every waking hour of our days.

If you were to crack open one of those gray hymnals beneath you, you’d find one of a set of quotes I’ve come to refer to as “true, no matter who said them.” Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but definitely not written by him, the passage reads “A person will worship something — have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts — but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

And this is Wallace’s point, as well.

“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship… If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough… Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…

 

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

 

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

And so it behooves us to think, and think deeply, about the good life, a life worth living, and what it means, and holds, and centers. I don’t mean the kind of rummination that leads to depressive episodes, where you spend all your time thinking about what went wrong, or could go wrong, but instead the kind of introspective quality that asks you to become familiar not only with yourself, but with those around you. To understand, and imagine, how someone might think about what is most important to them, and maybe even to give them, and yourself, the benefit of the doubt. If rumination creates self-perpetuating cycles that harm our mental and emotional well being, introspection invites us to think about what we want to think about, and what to do with those thoughts. Not why did this happen to me, but why do I spend my time thinking about this, and not something that matters more?

Maybe you had a rough morning before you got here today. You woke up feeling tired before you even left bed. You spent all week working on a project, only to realize it was broken from the beginning, and you have to start over again tomorrow. Maybe you rushed to an event, only to discover the parking all taken, and were late in spite of your best intentions. You can choose to chastize yourself, you can choose to focus on the brokenness of it all. Or you can make a different choice.

I’ll never forget Dorothy, a member at All Souls in Tulsa, who would get up every Sunday and say in her welcome to the 11:30 service, “We’re all included in God’s love.” And I’ll never forget the day I was talking to her, and she told me about how she was cut off on the highway earlier that week by a car that was swerving and speeding, and at first she was angry, and then she remembered her own words, and said to the car as it sped away, “You’re included in God’s love, too.” She made a choice about where to give the force of her attention. She made a choice to center love instead of fear, possibility instead of anger. She didn’t say it quite that way, but I think what she meant was that she chose how she wanted to feel, and what it would take to feel that way, and she did it.

We aren’t animals, bound only by desires beyond our control, or forces we cannot influence. To be human is to have agency, and to lose that agency is to lose something important, even essential, about who we are, and who we can be.

From time to time I talk about this congregation in an old fashioned way, as part of the free faith tradition, as part of the liberal tradition, and what I mean by that is that we are part of a long heritage of people who said it wasn’t good enough to just take what was handed to us by someone else, that it wasn’t good enough to just go blindly along in a world that didn’t know us, or care about us, but instead to recognize that we have the freedom to believe not what we want to believe so much as to believe what we must believe, based on the totality of all we know, and have known, and to change when we learn something new.

I mean to be rooted in the idea that freedom is so precious, so valuable, that it is worth living our whole lives in support of it, not just for ourselves, but for all people. It’s a tradition that doesn’t just welcome your questions so that we can offer you canned answers to them, but invites us, one an all, to sit, or walk, or roll, with them, until we come up with answers that are worthy of our lives. It is a tradition that says, no matter what the world outside says, what you think, and feel, and believe, and experience, they all matter. You matter. And we should live our lives with that in mind. We should choose what to do with our time, as much as we are able, in the world that is convinced that time is money, and money is all that matters, that we should choose what we do with our time, and our attention, and we should know the water we are swimming in.

Near the end of that graduation address at Kenyon College so many years ago, David Foster Wallace brought it all back around. He said –

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

 

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister