First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThe Centrifugal Force of Life
Rev. Cricket Potter
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton
January 24, 2010
Reading
This morning’s reading is from Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her book Gift from the Sea. Struggling to figure out how to cope with the many demands in her life as a wife and mother of five children, Lindbergh took a week and went on retreat alone along the Maine coastline. Written in 1955, this book still speaks to the essence of our struggles to find peace and wholeness amidst our busy lives today.
She writes:
The problem is…. How to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues…. I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life …. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between… solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life.
Sermon
In my sermon two weeks ago, I did a call to action.
I spoke of your heritage as a congregation with almost 300 years of history in Canton and of our heritage as part the larger Unitarian Universalist tradition.
I said that you as a congregation have developed a list of worthy goals as part of our interim work together, and now was the time to sign up to bring those ideas and programs to life.
Many of you came to the Open Forum after worship and then signed up to help with things.
In fact, a good bunch of you are already leaping into action on the tasks you signed up for.
(You’ll hear more about that in the February newsletter.)
But for now, I want to say a huge thank-you for the commitments you have made for this community.
Since that Sunday, a lot has happened in our communal life and in the larger world.
We had a sudden death in our midst with Bud Potter’s passing two weeks ago.
Bud had been here worshiping with us that Sunday right before he died.
It was a shock to us all.
And now another loss as we face into the sadness of Bill Wymer’s passing.
Again, we were not prepared.
A fall that caused bone fractures, the ambulance ride to the hospital, complications arising, and finally Bill’s body could not fight the battle any longer.
I know that we hold Barbara and all of their family in our thoughts and prayers even as we struggle to cope with the news ourselves.
And from my visits and conversations, I hear how many of you are struggling right now pulls and pushes in your own lives.
Whether it be the challenge of parenting exuberant young children; balancing work and family; giving of your time to worthy causes yet feeling weary from the sometimes invisible and thankless work of it; or, caring for a loved one whose health is failing slowly but steadily.
And I haven’t even begun to mention all that weighs on our hearts and minds in the larger world.
Put simply, there is so much that weighs on us and needs our mindful attention.
So, it was with a deep awareness of all the stresses and emotions we hold right now as a community that I sat down to write this sermon.
I needed above all to pause, take some deep breaths, and simply be with it all.
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find the right topic to get focused on.
There was simply too much in my heart.
I wanted more than anything to just breathe.
As one of our lovely meditative hymns says, I wanted to be able to breathe in peace and breathe out love.
I then realized that if I needed this, most likely what you did to –
an opportunity to pause and regain your balance,
a time to simply breathe in and breathe out together as a way of making
space for all that is our lives.
Thus, what was a call to action two weeks ago is now a call to rest here together.
It is a reminder that we need to balance the doing with the being.
From my understanding, only by taking time to renew ourselves can we truly be present to life both in the giving and receiving.
We simply aren’t machines that can run 24/7.
In a class I am facilitating right now, we are reading a book written by Phillip Simmons, a man diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in his mid-30’s.
He writes this book in the last year or so of his life.
With a wife and family, a strong community of friends, and his work as a writer, and this death sentence hanging over him, he is definitely trying to sort out how to be present to it all and not dissolve in fear or depression.
He begins the book by saying, “Life is both more and less than we hoped for.”
Think about that.
Life is both more and less than we hoped for.
We are blessed with so much by the very fact that we are alive.
And yet, life can throw us some nasty curve balls and drop us right to the ground sometimes.
Mostly, we can’t change what comes our way and we wouldn’t want to.
However, we can learn to center ourselves so that we don’t get knocked over or knocked out.
With intention, we can make space in our hearts to take it all in without feeling so overwhelmed.
In the most simplistic of terms, that is what Buddhism and its spiritual practice of meditation is about.
Taking intentional time to literally sit and be with all that is swirling around us and pulling at us.
And in taking the time to be with it without judging it, we do come to a place of peace and understanding.
We see that we mostly can’t change what is happening around us, but we can change how we handle it.
What is key here is that this kind of practice – any kind of spiritual practice that asks us to pause, breathe, contemplate, pray, open up to the voice within us – is not about escaping the world.
Done authentically, it is not a luxury of self-indulgence.
Rather is it an absolute necessity if we are to face into all of life’s ups and downs well.
As Phillip Simmons writes in his book Learning to Fall,
“We (engage in such spiritual practice) not to escape our lives but to go more fully into them, to dwell with deeper awareness and acceptance of all we are and all that befalls us.”
Remember, “Life is both more and less than we hoped for.”
And now I think of Anne Morrow Lindbergh writing some 55 years ago at a time when she and other westerners had no sense of Buddhism.
She writes of the same challenge many of us have today – of feeling pushed and pulled, even if it is by things and people we love.
She shares,
“The problem is…. How to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of
life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center…”
That image of centrifugal forces so resonates with me.
I am reminded of a ride I used to go on as a kid whenever the carnival was in town.
I think it was called “The G Force,” and it was all about centrifugal force.
It was a big circular contraption that about 20 or 30 people could fit in.
You stood around the periphery with your back against the wall as you faced to the center.
Then slowly the ride would start to spin faster and faster as you felt more and more pinned to the wall by the centrifugal force of it all.
The ride would spin so fast that you literally couldn’t move, with your hair flying, things coming out of your pockets, eyes almost bulging from the pressure, and hopefully no one getting sick.
It was an amazing feeling to be so propelled against that exterior wall and feel so incapable of pushing back against that g force.
Sometimes as an adult, my life feels just like that ride - yet not in a fun way - with parts of me being flung everywhere.
Physically and emotionally, I can feel so scattered and stretched thin.
From your stories, I know that I am not alone in this.
And we certainly can’t go on like that, at least not for too long.
We will become depleted and of no use to ourselves or those we love.
Body and soul will suffer, all the studies tell us.
And we know it intuitively.
Anger, depression, impulsivity, inability to concentrate, and chronic fatigue are just a few of the consequences of a nonstop life.
Even God had to rest on the seventh day after creating everything.
The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it this way in describing the importance of what in his tradition is called the Sabbath:
“(It)“ is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and
becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. (It) is … for the sake of life.”
For the sake of life.
It is for the sake of peace, mindfulness, compassion, acceptance, courage, and love.
All these qualities we seek for life itself need our time and attention to take seed and grow in us.
They can’t blossom in us if we don’t give them time and nurture them.
The great Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his book Being Peace,
“If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can blossom like a flower, and
everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.”
And, who doesn’t want that?
So, I would say that we are called by the gift of life itself and all the world to find peace for ourselves.
We are called to find a balance that will sustain us and others.
This is the balance Lindbergh talks about in our reading for today.
This alternating rhythm of action and stillness, engagement and reflection, helps us to experience what I believe we all long for:
being present as much as possible to what each day has to offer;
moving toward peace and gratitude and away from fear and anxiety;
finding meaning in the joys and the challenges;
experiencing the connectedness of all of life;
and experiencing love in its fullness.
So, while part of our faith journey, both together and as individuals, is about growing and stretching and committing to things, part of this journey also needs to be about taking time regularly for reflection and renewal.
I wouldn’t presume to tell you what that should look like for you.
It could be meditation, prayer, journaling, riding your bike, walking your dog, time sitting quietly with your children at bedtime, some creative outlet that offers you a time of quiet and peace.
And, coming here as well.
Whether it is Sunday worship or a Tuesday night meeting or a Friday afternoon covenant group, let us take the time to pause in all that, be still and simply breathe together, and really be mindful of what it is we are ultimately seeking.
It is all about being more at peace with oneself and with one another.
It can only begin with each one of us before we can bring it to those we love and all those we want to reach out to.
So, as we delve into the interim tasks we have agreed to work on and as we seek to build even stronger community, let’s also remember the importance of just being together and of just being.
Remember, this is for the sake of life.
For the sake of this beautiful, powerful, and wondrous life we share.
May it be so.
Amen.