JUST SO LONG, AND LONG ENOUGH

© Rev. Joy Atkinson 2008
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
September 14, 2008

Opening Words by Danaan Perry (excerpted from his book, The Essene Book of Days)

Joy: Sometimes I feel that life is a series of trapeze swings. I'm either hanging on to a trapeze bar, or I'm hurtling across space toward another.

Drew: Most of the time I'm hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I feel in control of my life. But once in a while as I'm swinging along, I look ahead and see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It's empty, and somehow I know the bar has my name on it. It is my aliveness coming to get me.

Joy: Each time it happens I am filled with terror. It doesn't matter that in all my previous hurtles across the void I have always made it. Each time I'm afraid I will miss. But I do it anyway. No net, no guarantees, but you do it anyway, because to keep hanging on to that old bar is no longer on the list of alternatives.

Drew: And so, for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the void of "the past is gone, the future not yet here." Even with the fear, transitions are still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives. Hurtling through the void, we may learn how to fly.

Meditation by Vanessa Rush Southern, from This Place of Eden

Physics tells us there is chaos in the cosmos, in every atom, in the wanderings of every electron. Why should our existence be any different? So, here is our new life philosophy, or at least part of it: Expect, watch for, and embrace uncertainty; dance with the madness of the cosmos, not against it; leave your door open and your heart ready for anything. In this adult world, it may be the only way, not just to survive what is inevitable but to thrive in the midst of it.

Sermon: Just So Long, and Long Enough

Over 23 centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "All is change, and only change itself is changeless." How true that is! "All things pass," as the late Beatle George Harrison put it. The very earth moves under our feet, continents shift, galaxies swirl, the universe is in a continual state of unrest; it is one long unfolding process - always creating and destroying and re-creating. Even the seemingly static stars, which from ancient times were thought to be fixed points, that year after year remained the same above the constant flux of nature and our human world - even the stars were eventually discovered to be restless balls of gas, moving at great speed, and each with a finite life cycle of its own.

I have brought two posters today of astronomical objects - one of the Orion Nebula, a nebula of gasses from which stars are born, and one of the Crab Nebula, the gasses left over from a supernova - a star that exploded upon dying. So we have birth and death, and perpetual change represented in these cosmic images. I will let these graphic photos stand here as a symbol of today's theme of the changes and transitions in our individual lives and in the life of a community like this beloved UU congregation.

If you take a look at the self-help section of any book store, you will see a raft of titles on how to cope with changes and transitions in our individual lives - titles like Passages, Turning Points, Reinventing Your Life, Shifting Gears, Necessary Losses, How People Change, and so on. Self-help books like these rush in, I believe, to fill a void created by modern secular society - a void left by the disappearance of ancient rites of passage that helped people go through life changes. Many cultures of the past, and some present, have had specific guidelines for coping with changes in the form of rituals and rites of passage.

At the turn of the 20th century, Arnold Van Gennep, the one who coined the phrase, "rites of passage," analyzed the rituals that surround various life transitions, such as those for birth, coming of age, mourning and loss, and initiation into a religious order. Van Gennep found that these rituals commonly contain three phases:

1. A separation phase, during which the individual is separated from the community, often undergoes a ritual of purification, and becomes acutely aware that something out of the ordinary is about to happen.
2. The transition or ordeal phase, during which the person is left in the wilderness or some special, sacred space, to meditate, to receive inner guidance, and often to undergo an ordeal of some kind, a test or trial. In this phase, the person is open and vulnerable to self-doubt, questioning, re-evaluation and re-education, and he or she may experience feelings of anxiety, emptiness and loss, and a longing for the comfortable old roles, values or beliefs.
3. The incorporation phase, which is a symbolic rebirth. The initiate in the incorporation phase goes back into the community with perhaps a new status, often symbolized by a new name or new clothing, and the journey is complete.

We all go through similar stages, internally, when we make a personal life change, or when a change is thrust upon us. Sometimes these changes happen without the help of a supportive community, and often in our modern culture they go unmarked by the rites and rituals, which help people cope with their changes. So we turn to what inner resources we have, or to the therapists, or the multitude of self-help books, or maybe to a specific support group, hoping to get some clue about getting through it.

The danger, if we don't get the help we need from somewhere, is that we may get stuck in the middle phase, in the uncomfortable transition, and either remain isolated and depressed with our pain, struggle, questioning and self-doubt for an extended period of time, or we may retreat into old patterns of behavior, and become cynical and resigned. It is then, when someone reaches an impasse in a transition, that we may hear the "I can't" statements we're sometimes inclined to utter: "I can't stop drinking," "I can't change jobs," "I can't control my anger," or "I can't get past the loss and move on."

A whole culture or institution can get stuck on old patterns of behavior or practices that seem to take on a life of their own, and are sustained over years and generations, even when newer people no longer know the reason. I recently read about an experiment with monkeys that illustrates this phenomenon: Some monkeys kept in a cage together were given bananas, but they had to climb up a pole to retrieve them, which each monkey did quite readily - the dominant ones first, but eventually all of them got a banana. Then the experimenters rigged up a pail of water, so that the water would fall heavily on any monkey who tried to climb the pole to get a banana. The monkeys, once drenched, avoided climbing the pole, even with the banana lure. Even when the pail of water was removed, the monkeys refrained from climbing the pole to the bananas. Then one of the monkeys was removed and replaced by a new monkey, who'd never gotten drenched. This monkey began to climb the pole, but was pulled down by the other monkeys, who knew first-hand about the unpleasant drenching. Then the other original monkeys were replaced with new monkeys, who tried to climb the pole but were discouraged from doing so by the first replacement monkey, even though this one had never gotten drenched, and the pail of water was never replaced. This pattern of dissuading succeeding monkeys from climbing the pole to get the bananas continued, even to the next generation, although none of the monkeys had ever had first-hand experience of the drenching! Likewise, human societies and institutions have also been seen to continue old patterns and practices long after their original usefulness has ended.

It has been said that the best way to cope with change is to help create it. The key words that many of the modern books about personal transitions contain comprise a litany that speaks of the need to become active in working through life's inevitable changes and losses: freedom, choice, responsibility, decision, personal power, taking charge, self assertion, options, exploration, direction, action. I have certainly found in my own life, and in the lives of those I have engaged in counseling with as they go through a transition, that when we discover how to become active and intentional about the changes taking place - whether they are changes that come unbidden or ones we feel compelled to make - when we use the crisis as an opportunity to grow, we can cope with the transition more effectively.

The Chinese ideogram for the word "crisis" or "turning point" is very illuminating. It is composed of a combination of two other ideograms - the one for "danger," plus the one for "opportunity." It is helpful, and often even necessary during a personal crisis or transition, to acknowledge and accept the fact that it can be dangerous, an ordeal, a difficult trip through the birth canal - that there may be a period of pain, doubt, emptiness and a sense of loss before your life opens out into new possibilities. The wisdom of the ancient rites and rituals that facilitated a person's journey through life changes is that they acknowledged the necessity of an ordeal phase, with its death of the old ways, before one can come back to one's normal, but renewed and significantly different life.

The Psychotherapist Stanley Keleman has written:

Life can be described as a migration through many formative loops, many little dyings. Growth, change and maturing occur by de-forming the old and forming the new.

Turning points are the cauldron of our lives, the steps of our birthings, our self-formings. There are no turning points that are not accompanied by feelings of dying; no self-forming occurs without endings and loss.

Just as individuals go through turning points, crises, times of change and major transition, so do whole communities, whole cultures, even whole nations.

This congregation is now in an interim period between ministers, and I am here among you for the next year to help you navigate through the changes, to make this as fruitful a transition as we can together. This congregation is, in a sense, in its "ordeal" phase, when the old has died to make way for the new, but not without the accompanying feelings of loss, anxiety and questioning that are characteristic of this phase.

It was once the practice in our Unitarian Universalist congregations to use those who do interim ministry as merely fill-ins, ministers who would just come in when a settled minister has resigned to carry on "business as usual" - filling the pulpit, doing the counseling and marrying and burying and the usual organizational work. In recent years, there has been a shift in thinking about the interim period in the life of a congregation, not just in UU congregations, but also across denominational lines. We have become more intentional about working with a congregation in an interim period. Interim ministry is now treated by the Unitarian Universalist Association and by some other denominational bodies as a specialized form of ministry, requiring special training beyond the usual training for parish ministry.

Unpacking the Interim Suitcase

The Interfaith organization that provides some of the training we get for interim ministry, the Interfaith Ministry Network, has discerned five developmental tasks to be accomplished in an interim period, to make the most of this interim time and to help prepare the way for a new settled minister. By way of introducing you to those developmental tasks, I am going to unpack a suitcase filled with items symbolic of those interim year tasks.

First, I'm unpacking one of the stoles that I wear for preaching and other rituals - to symbolize the first task: Fulfilling the normal responsibilities of parish ministry. This task is obviously one that I as a minister - interim or otherwise - undertake. The next five are developmental tasks specific to interim ministry that we will work on together.