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A baby boy was born 11 days ago in Detroit, Michigan. By now, he is in his new home. Although he was born to a 13-year-old girl, he now has two new mothers. One of them is my sister, Erin. The other new mom is Erin's partner, Marianne. He has been named after my father, so his full name is now James Edward Aidan O'Connell.

He is unique in my extended family. He is the fourth grandchild on that side of the family. And the only boy. And certainly the only African-American boy in our family – that I know of. He will be raised by two caring mothers in Salt Lake City, Utah. I look forward to seeing how he turns out.

In his book, Freakonomics, Stephen Levitt tells us that how a child does in school affects how they will do later in life. And that babies like my new nephew who are born to 13 year old girls tend to have a harder time of it, even if they are adopted by older, wealthier, more educated parents. The good news is, that the effects of the adoptive parents will show up later in his life. Levitt says having books around the house will make a difference. Watching too much TV won't.

But what an adventure! To nurture a child, to embark on a great journey, to solve a complex mystery, requires a belief that the venture is possible. Believing comes before seeing.

It’s like the two people who were sent to a remote country to sell shoes. One wrote back, “I have terrible news. This is a godforsaken country. Nobody here wears shoes. I’m coming home.” But the other wrote, “This is a wonderful country. Nobody here wears shoes ... yet! Send me 5,000 pairs!” Rich L. Smith, “Some things must be believed to be seen,” April 18, 2004, westmorelanducc.org.

The 2^nd salesman may have made a leap of faith. Not all UUs are comfortable with terms like "faith." And we know that conventional wisdom can get in our way. Many UUs bring a healthy skepticism to questions of faith. And that helps them see what is true and what is not on their own religious journey.

Orthodox religion tends to conspire against independent thinking. By its very nature, orthodoxy is more interested in certainty, not freedom. But, by trying to see something clearly for ourselves, we can gain new insights not only for ourselves but to share with other people. This is the essence of the Unitarian Universalist spiritual journey.

I want to show you something. (Hold up graphic). It seems to say – Qopchedy qokedydy qokololy qokeedy qokedy shedy. And let me tell you, it gave my spellchecker fits.

It turns out that the best cryptologists in the world have been unable to decode a 400-year-old document from which those words, if indeed they are words, are transliterated.

Called the Voynich Manuscript, it’s 234 pages and hand lettered in an unknown code. There’s no punctuation, but there are watercolors of unknown plants, apparent astrological signs and constellations not known in our solar system, strangely proportioned people and intricate systems of liquid-carrying tubes.

During World War II, the Allied cryptographers, the experts who broke the Nazi ciphers, played with the Voynich in their spare time, but made no headway. Other professionals, including linguists, botanists, mathematicians, astrologers, medievalists and literary scholars have taken a run at the Voynich, too, but have all come up dry, as have numerous amateur puzzle-solvers.

Recently, British psychologist Gordon Rugg, came up with what is probably the solution. Working on the manuscript at home in the evenings, he finally concluded that it says — nothing at all!

Rugg proposes that it’s an elaborate hoax generated by an Elizabethan con artist to dupe a king into paying a large chunk of money to buy it from him. In fact, the first known owner of the Voynich was 16^th century Emperor Rudolph II– he's the guy who "collected" dwarfs and had an army of giants. He paid 600 gold ducats for it (about $30,000 in today’s money), believing it was the work of the 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon.

Although the possibility of a hoax had been suggested before, no one took it seriously because the document seemed too elaborate to be a fraud. Rugg, however, demonstrated how the so-called language of the manuscript was generated, and now many cryptologists are finding Rugg’s conclusion persuasive.

But more important than the manuscript, is the type of investigation Rugg brought to the riddle. He calls it the “verifier approach,” and it has promise for solving more important puzzles.

Here's how it works. The verifier approach looks for gaps in logic, research or experimentation, and then explores those gaps. When professionals investigate a brain-teaser, they tend to rely on their expertise. But often that means they miss the big picture, with the result that there are approaches that nobody examines. And sometimes the solution lies in one of the overlooked gaps.

Rugg says experts (whom he defines as someone with 10 years in a discipline), have no more reasoning power than anybody else, but they do have a lot of experience — experience that can blind them to things that seem to fit their expertise but are actually something different.

He argues that experience causes professionals to rely on what he calls “pattern-matching.” A doctor, for example, has seen many cases of chicken pox, and so when you present yourself to her covered with spots, she probably doesn’t use sequential reasoning to arrive at a diagnosis. You match the pattern her experience has taught her is chicken pox, and so she quickly labels your ailment, and usually she’s right.

But suppose you actually have something that looks similar to chicken pox but is actually more life-threatening? Then pattern-matching fails and this leaves room for the verifier approach.

With his approach, Rugg draws a map of the field, indicating what areas have been researched and what kind of expertise has been applied. Then he looks for what has not been considered. He solved the Voynich puzzle not because he was smarter than others, but because he went looking for what the others had not contemplated. In the Voynich case, no one had seriously investigated the hoax theory.

We can use this in our spiritual journey, too. By applying reason, experience, and ethical and progressive ideas to the world we live in, we can verify that conventional wisdom, or our own wisdom, is actually working.

The verifier approach is a new thing in science, but there is a sense in which it is also quite old. UUs have long pointed out that doubt and faith are two sides of the same coin. When you have a great deal of faith in one thing, you tend to have doubt in it's opposite. And vice-versa.

But experience is colored by what we bring to it, by our culture and training, by our upbringing, and so forth. And even the power of reason fails if we don’t stop to consider alternative possibilities.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a mother used an instant mix whenever she made mashed potatoes, and her son grew up thinking that’s what everybody did. Then he got married, and the first time his wife fixed mashed potatoes, she peeled and cut up real potatoes. He looked at them cooking on the stove and said, “Why go to all that work? Just use instants.”

But when they sat down to eat, he found the real mashed potatoes delicious. The realization came to him that there had been a gap in his culinary experience.

We may grow up with a religion that is the equivalent of instant mashed potato mix. And we may like it, or find it bland, or put up with it, until one day we don't.

And if anyone ever mentions potatoes to us, we think back to that instant mashed potato mix we used to eat. And it doesn't occur to us, that potatoes could be fixed another way. And it may never occur to us to go seeking for a new potato recipe. Because after all, we've had them before.

And then one day, someone wants us to experience some potatoes. And maybe, most of the time we would have turned them down. But for some reason, maybe to be nice, maybe because we are desperately hungry, we agree. And then we find, to our surprise, to our delight – there is in fact– a radically different way to experience potatoes. There is a radically different way to have a new experience with something we had given up on.

For many people, the limitations of their previous experience, prevented them from thinking that there might be a religion that could fit them like a glove. What if there was a religion where we could use our own "verifier approach" to move us further on/ in the discovery of the meaning of our life?

Perhaps for you, religion or spirituality has been like the Voynich manuscript. Religion or spirituality has been a mysterious book with incomprehensible contents, written centuries ago by an unknown author in an unidentified alphabet, and in an unintelligible language. Sort of intriguing but inexplicable, and therefore, of questionable value.

There have been many papers written & studies prepared about the meaning of the Voynich manuscript. But in the end, what may be a beautifully illustrated book to one person is gobbledy-gook to another. Sometimes we must choose where and how to seek our meaning.

We could even use the "verifier approach" when we think of our image of God. You could start with a conventional image of God. Sort of an authority figure with a borderline personality. As Annie Lamont puts it in her book, Traveling Mercies,

"It was like believing in the guy who ran the dime store, someone with a kind face but who was always running behind and had already heard every one of your lame excuses a dozen times before - why you didn't have a receipt, why you hadn't noticed the product's flaw before you bought it.

This God could be loving and reassuring one minute, sure that you had potential, and then fiercely disappointed the next, noticing every little mistake and just in general what a fraud you really were.

He was a God whom his children could talk to, confide in and trust, unless his mood shifted suddenly and he decided instead to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah." Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 7-8.

But we can look for other models. Another woman wrote about her childhood:

“In first grade, Mr. Lohr said my purple teepee wasn't realistic enough, that purple was no color for a tent, that purple was a color for people who died, that my drawing wasn't good enough to hang with the others.

I walked back to my seat counting the swish swish swishes of my baggy corduroy trousers. With a black crayon, nightfall came to my purple tent.

In second grade, Mr. Barta said, "Draw anything." He didn't care what. I left my paper blank and when he came around to my desk, my heart beat like a tom-tom while he touched my head with his big hand and in a soft voice said, "The snowfall. How clean and white and beautiful." -Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul (Deerfield Beach: Heath Communications, 1995), 211.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is more than one way to frame religion or the meaning of our life. Where one teacher sees only mistakes & faults, another sees possibility.

To really reach for your potential – sometimes we say it takes a leap of faith. But a leap of faith focuses on the action of the leaper. There is another way to look at this. Rather than a leap of faith, what about a leap to faith. This focuses on the reliability of the ground on which the leaper lands.

If we are constantly doubting, then we may not have much time for faith. And if we use the phrase "leap to faith" and if that phrase refers to the reliability of the ground on which the leaper lands, then what is the ground to which we are leaping?

A lot of times, when people are on a spiritual journey, they aren’t really sure to which ground they are ultimately leaping to. When people first come to Eliot, hopefully they get the sense that our job here is not to get everyone to believe the same thing.

There are a couple of other implicit assumptions here at Eliot Chapel. One assumption is that truth with a capital T or God with a capital G is bigger than any one person's perspective. Another assumption is that while we can travel our spiritual journey alone, it is easier, more fruitful, and often more fun, to journey in community.

Once upon a time, just a few weeks ago, just a few months ago, just a few years ago, and again, next week – once upon a time, a person decided to leave the cocoon of comfort or discomfort and set out on a new spiritual journey.

Perhaps they just got married. Or divorced. Or have just become empty nesters. Or maybe their kids are getting proselytized on the playground. Or maybe their kids are beginning to ask spiritual and religious questions. And they want help giving satisfactory, worthwhile, and truthful answers. And so they become motivated.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, they choose to believe that somewhere outside of the doors of their house there is a religion, there is a congregation, where they could not only be comfortable, but thrive. They said, "what if there were a church where I could be the real me that I really am right now, and where I could work on the real me that I am trying to become?"

And then, as long as we’re dreaming it up– what if they had great music? What if the children's program was so good my kids wanted to go back every week? What if a place like this was actually within driving distance? What if I had driven by it many times before and not noticed it?

And so, our intrepid pilgrim becomes a seeker. Like all modern pilgrims, they begin with the Internet. The Google a few things and end up over on belief.net. There they take a little test, and the test tells them they are 92% Unitarian Universalist. They have never heard of this term. They begin to wonder if perhaps they were aiming a little high in their desires.

But, they Google some more. And they come across the Eliot Unitarian Chapel web site. And they read a few sermons, they check out the site, maybe they get a little nervous. Maybe this looks a little too close to what it is that they are actually seeking. And the days go by, and now you are here. Welcome home.

Sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong, and we have to try new ways. We have to verify things for our selves. The free and responsible search for truth and meaning is the central Principle of the Unitarian faith.

Sometimes, we have to believe in something, before we can see it. My sister & her partner wanted a child of their own to love & nurture. They believed this child was out there or would soon be out there. And so they tried lots of ways to bring a child into their life.

And one day they decided on adoption, and then there was a phone call late in the afternoon, and scrambling with giddy feelings of hope and fear, they packed their bags and flew to Detroit, to meet their newborn son. They lived for a week in a hotel room with this newborn while the paper work was being completed. And now they are home.

This week a new multi-racial family is formed. And not next week or month, but shortly after that, there will be a new baby in the nursery at a Unitarian church. And that baby will grow up lacking some beliefs & holding others.

His religious education will tell him that he is loved & cared for by a whole community of people. That he is not a hopeless, depraved sinner in the hands of an angry god, worthy only of destruction & damnation.

His religious education will tell him that gays & lesbians can be fine people– parents, teachers, community leaders– just like anybody else. That if he listens, he may hear the call to make the world a better place. The challenge of verifying his own religious ideas in community.

That is the challenge we too, are up for. Let us rejoice and be glad. Let us sing to the Spirit of Life, #123.