First Parish Unitarian UniversalistCircles, Convolutions, and Change
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
September 30, 2007
Opening Words
As the days become noticeably shorter and daybreak dawns later each day, we store summer’s pleasures in our minds and hearts like the squirrels store acorns for the winter. We welcome this fine day, with joy in our hearts, ever thankful for the welcome we give and receive here in this holy place in which worshippers since 1825 have noted the changing seasons, the changes in their lives.
First Reading
Change Alone is Unchanging by Heraclitus of Ephesus
Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In search for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.
Second Reading
from Jayber Crow: A Novel by Wendell Berry (page 133)
Subtitle: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William, Kentucky Membership as Written by Himself ( Washington DC, Counterpoint Publishers, 2000)
If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils and snare, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals; but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.
Sermon
“Life is change” I was fond of saying in my younger days. Back then, in the sixties and seventies, we said it with a certain kind of smug enjoyment. Not that it was an original insight. As we just heard in the first Reading, Heraclitus of Ephesus said it very well twenty five centuries ago, “Change alone is unchanging.”
Young people change rapidly, in any era. But when those of us who are baby-boomers were young, the culture was changing rapidly too. In those times— we felt we were making change, changing the world. Change, we were sure, was good. In any case, it was surely coming, “the times they are a changin’.”
The times they are a changin’--that’s just what was on the radio, serendipitously, as my daughter and I turned into a shopping center parking lot six years ago, in search of sheets to fit the extra long twin bed in her freshman dorm room. She was going away to college. Singing along quite joyfully, both of us, I pulled into a parking space. “Come mothers and fathers through out the land…your sons and daughters are beyond your command.” We both had to laugh! Yes, soon she would be farther than ever from my command!
The times they are a changin’. Everywhere, all the time change.
My son, now a college senior, called while I was hoping to write this sermon. But, his reason for calling fit right in with my theme and anyway it’s always a pleasure to be interrupted by grown children far from home. He has his whole future looming ahead of him, I realized, as he spoke about a job possibility, for after he graduates, about which he’d learned earlier that day. First with excitement, and then with questions, he weighed it against other options. Who knows what change he will choose and where he will be a year from now? Not he, nor I.
Life is change. Even the meaning of “life is change” changes as we get older. From choosing colleges and first jobs to now, being middle-aged, it’s more often about how I respond to unbidden change, as it is about choosing changes or changing the world. The unexpected opportunity, the unwelcome news: these are the changes middle-age brings.
Many of you, I know, are now responding to unbidden and difficult changes: a job gone awry, a needed job not offered, a child in trouble, a cancer diagnosis, a loved one refusing hospice care, a parent newly unsteady on his or her feet…and there are likely others you’ve not shared with me yet: a habit that’s become an addiction, an unwanted pregnancy, onset of the familiar signs of depression, a lump as yet not diagnosed…
People vary so much as to how we cope with such difficult changes.
I see myself as someone one who is open about my difficulties with friends and family, to get support, or perhaps just to be real.
However, some years ago when our son was maybe seven, he developed a suspicious lump on the back of his neck. I knew by the look on the pediatrician’s face what I then heard her saying, “it could be one of three things and two of them aren’t good.” She arranged for the appropriate tests and in all the time that we waited for the results, my spouse Don and I never said a word about it to anyone, not even each other. Separately in our own minds, we each hoped for the best and prepared for the worst, even as together we just kept going with our daily lives. Thankfully, the lump went away with the antibiotics.
So I can empathize with those of you who don’t say anything until after the biopsy, after you’re out of treatment, after you land a new job.
But, my experience also tells me that love and trust flourish most when we are open with each other about our needs.
In the autumn of my freshman year in college, my mother had a serious car accident, landing her in the hospital with head and other injuries. My parents decided not to tell me about the accident until my mother was able to call me herself, which wasn’t for a few days, a week maybe. “You couldn’t have done anything about it anyway,” they said, “so why tell you? We didn’t want you to worry, or want to come home.”
“I could have prayed,” I said. “I thought you folks believed in prayer!?”
Being a teenager, self-centered as they usually are, it didn’t occur to me to see it from my father’s point of view: that with his wife in the hospital and three other teenagers, a six year old and a toddler at home, he figured I was the only one he didn’t have to worry about.
However, from my hurt feelings I learned that love thrives most in the give and take, the needing and the being needed, and it deepens when tested and found to be true. If we close ourselves off from others by hiding our needs and troubles, we deprive them of the chance to show their love. Allowing others to help us, if our need is not imposed upon them, is a gift we give them.
Many of us will remember someone in our lives-- a family member, friend or maybe parishioner here at First Parish-- who gave us that gift. Someone who allowed us to somehow help them, and how we felt grateful for the opportunity to do so and to learn that we do indeed care about one another.
One of you, who is now going through the heartache of a loved one’s sudden and likely mortal illness, wrote in an email (and gave me permission to share), “We are managing okay though the last few days have yielded some experiences that we were not quite expecting. But I guess that's the nature of how lives go. Today I was talking with Aunt Rosemary (my very elder aunt) and as we talked about what is going on, she said something about how life happens in convolutions and evolutions; sometimes things go smoothly for a long while and then there is a convolution of change, often unexpected. Then there are times when change happens over time, just like an evolutionary process. We are now in a convolution [she said], and though sometimes we think that evolution is more gentle or kinder, it really is… just different.”
Like Aunt Rosemary, who says we live our lives in cycles of evolution and convolution, the poet farmer novelist environmentalist Wendell Berry says we live our lives in cycles of circles. In his Opening Hymn words [#342 “O Slowly, Slowly, They Return”] tracing the life cycle of trees, in his poem about the circles of our lives (set to music by Dave Brubeck and sung today by the choir), and in the passage from his novel Jayber Crow from which I read earlier, Wendell Berry conveys the sense that we are held, cradled even, in the arms of the cycles of life. Or in the arms of God’s love, some might say.
Not that there is no hardship or horror, no evil, no suffering, no death—all those are part of our lives. As long as we live, there is change--the changing of the leaves, the changing of the seasons, we are changing. And when life ends and death comes, even death is part of the cycle of life’s changes. Death serves new life even as at a cosmic level if we remember that life as we know it came from the death of a star!
Both Wendell Berry and Aunt Rosemary suggest: If we could but allow ourselves to be held by this cycle of life and to trust ourselves to it, we could be present to the moment, not worried about the next. We could be present to the moment, not worried about the next, if we could but allow ourselves to be held by this cycle of life…
When we were planning this service, Jim Chubet (our Music Director) asked me what I thought of the line about music in the anthem, to which Brubeck’s composition calls our attention over and over again: Only music keeps us here, each by all the others held. In the hold of hands and eyes we turn in pairs, that joining joining each to all again.
I replied that it struck me as being out of place in the poem. I’d even looked the poem up to see if maybe the composer, being a musician, added the reference to music! But, no, it is original to the poet. Berry wrote it that way.
In rehearsal, Jim told me, a choir member exclaimed, “What do you mean, “only music keeps us here?”
Of course, it might be only music that keeps a musician here, but to the rest of us—it could be art, nature, our loved ones, the solace of silence, our work, physical exercise, or the rising sun… that keeps us here, gets us up in the morning, and holds us through all our changes.
“Could music,” Jim suggested, “could music be simply a metaphor for all that is creative that we do together? For all that (in Berry’s words) “joins us each to all again?”
This joining together is what we do here in the sanctuary Parish every Sunday and in the other ways in which we come together—canoeing, committees, Covenant Groups, potlucks, in Religious Education for our children and youth, in Religious Exploration for adults, serving dinner to the homeless, at Earth Day Fairs, and in signing petitions for peace.
All of this joining “each and all again” is what makes us a religion, for the word religion, at its roots, means to bind together. We hold each other.
But here we do more than “hold each other” in acts of kindness and caring, and in creativity whether it be music or otherwise, as crucial and holy as all that is. What I have in mind is what we say at the start of our worship each week, “Welcome to First Parish where it is our intention to deepen our faith…” and in our Mission Statement when we say “We are a caring and diverse faith community that seeks to nurture and inspire each person’s spiritual journey…”
We hold each other, for sure, but we also nurture and inspire each other’s spiritual journeys and encourage one another to deepen our faith. We encourage one another to allow ourselves to be held by and to trust the cycles of the seasons, the love of our loved ones, the love of God or the Goddess or whatever name we worship.
This deeper, trusting way of experiencing life allows us to be present to the moment, even through the difficult changes we face. Our spirit runs through it and through us and if we cultivate our inner life, we can know that deeper place, and it will provide us with the inner strength for making changes in our lives, and the inner strength to respond with grace and energy to the challenging changes we do not choose, to the convolutions that come unbidden.
In the closing hymn, we will sing of that grace and energy and how, when we live in this deeper, trusting way, our intuition, our spirit does move us along. But, let us first just pause for some moments of silent reflection…
How and by what do you feel held? What is it that you trust, through life’s changes? Pause.
Amen.
Closing Hymn
And now let us sing #1024 in the new songbook, “When the Spirit Says Do.” This is what they call a “zipper song.” One word changes in each verse. The choir will be leading us and Ellen will be prompting us with those word changes.