Leave It ... You're Fine

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, June 16, 2019 to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A woman is doing some painting in her kitchen.  She bumps into a small table and then, in that horrified slow motion way, watches as the jar of paint falls off. When it hits the floor the jar shatters, paint spray hits the wall, and a mess of bright blue glossy enamel spreads across the floor.  Looking on this scene the woman says, “Good God …!”

I’m going to leave the story there for a minute, because we’ve all had that experience, haven’t we?  Oh, maybe it wasn’t spilled paint, but was, instead, knocking over a display in the grocery store.  My kids will never let me forget the year I totally, seriously burned the Thanksgiving turkey.  (I mean, the year I made the intentional decision to serve Caribbean blackened turkey.) If ever they think I have forgotten, they pull out the pictures they took. In my defense, I will say that once you cut through the half-inch or so of char, the turkey was pretty moist.

Have you ever meant to save something but somehow accidentally deleted it?  Or maybe hit “send” before you meant to?  I read about a guy who sent a group text to his friends and co-workers in which he spoke rather unflattering about their boss and told of his plans to pretend to be sick so he could go home and start the weekend early.  Unfortunately, he’d forgotten that his boss was part of the group.  He ended up with more than a long weekend.

Anybody here not have a story of some monumental screw-up?  Back in February I talked about how the theological concepts of “sin” and “grace” are so often completely misunderstood, that the one English word, “sin,” comes from eight different Greek words, many of which are, essentially, acknowledgements that we are prone to making mistakes.  “We are all sinners,” then, isn’t a judgmental condemnation.  It’s just a statement of fact: we all tend to screw-up. And that means we don’t have to put so much effort into, waste so much of our psychic and spiritual energy, trying to come off as something that we’re not: perfect.  We’re all just trying our best, bumping into things, making mistakes, making messes that have to be cleaned up.

So let’s go back to that woman in her kitchen.  This story comes from a song by the singer-songwriter David Wilcox.  When we left her, she was looking down at the mess on her floor, saying, “Good God …”. But I tricked you.  So doesn’t just say, “Good God.”  She says, “Good God, look at that pattern!  I’ve never seen that before.”

And then she lets the paint stay there on her floor.  When it’s dry she paints a white frame around it, installs gallery lighting, and gives it a name: “Kitchen Blue.”  And Wilcox tells us that, “rich folks come over for dinner, [and] they all want one of their own.  They say, ‘how much?’ ‘‘Who’s the artist?’ and, “My what a beautiful home.’”

The chorus is,

“Leave it like it is.

Never mind the turpentine.

Just leave it like it is.

It’s fine.”

Leave it like it is … it’s fine.  And you, and me, we’re fine.  Our messes?  Our mistakes?  Our failings and failures?  They’re just part of being human.  We don’t have to try to be perfect.  We don’t have to try to hide our mistakes.

I’m not saying that there isn’t room for improvement; this isn’t an invitation to keep all of our bad habits. There’s a saying, “God loves you just the way you are … and loves you too much to let you stay that way.”  Those of us who, for example, identify or are identified as white — the way we are it isn’t “just fine.”  Same, too, for us men.  The mess of misogyny needs to be cleaned up.  We can’t recognize that we participate in and perpetuate the systems and structures of white supremacy (whether we want to or not) and simply say, “we’re really good people, we’re fundamentally okay and, anyway, we aren’t as bad as those guys carrying tiki torches and waving Confederate and Nazi flags.”  No … there are some messes, some mistakes, some “sins” (if you will) that need to be addressed; that do call for the mental, emotional, social, spiritual turpentine. It doesn’t matter how old we are, how set in our ways, how many other good things we’ve done — when we see or are shown the way our mistakes hurt people, it’s still true that we’re “fine” just the way we are.  We can’t, though, be content to stay that way.

But let’s look at that song again.  The woman doesn’t just notice the spill and decide not to freak out about it. No. She highlights it, frames it, names it, shines a light right on it.  And when the “rich folks” come over for dinner she doesn’t throw an area rug over it to “keep up appearances.” 

What would that look like?  The peace activist, poet, and Buddhist monk the Venerable Tich Nhat Hanh described in one of his books the way interpersonal conflicts are handled in Vietnamese monasteries.  When a monk feels hurt by something another monk said or did, the two come together, kneeling face-to-face, very close. The rest of the monks gather around in witness.  Then the aggrieved monks began to recount the story of what happened … with each monk focusing on what they themselves did wrong.  One might say, “The other day I intruded on your meditation,” and the other might reply, “When you tapped me on the shoulder I shouted at you rather than asking what you needed.”  The first could go on, “I should have apologized for the interruption, but instead I started to insult the strength of your practice.”  See?  One says, “I did …”. The other says, “I did …”. They go on like this, alternating back and forth, until the entire incident has been described, with each person focusing on their own faults first.   

Now, the monks could begin by each accusing the other of wrongdoing, each one telling “their side” of the story in order to show what the other person did wrong.  That’s how our dominant culture teaches us to handle conflicts — come out swinging, shine a spotlight on the other person’s failings while simultaneously trying to hide or at least minimize our own.  Well … how well does that usually work out?  That aggressive posture, which is really a defensive posture, almost always just reinforces the differences.  We tend to dig in when we feel we’re being attacked. Often, and maybe most often, we’re so busy inventorying the other person’s faults that we don’t even notice our role in the situation. Jesus is remembered as asking,“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in [the other person’s] eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own […]?”

So, the song (and virtually every real spiritual tradition I know of) tells us that we don’t need to get entangled in the paralyzing worry of what other people will think of us.  And we don’t need to try to hide our mistakes, our flaws, once we’ve seen them.  It points to the truth that being willing to show them to others is the only way we have any real chance of addressing and correcting them … of making the changes in ourselves that are necessary for real healing.

Now … if that’s all the wisdom to glean from that song, that would be enough. But there’s one more thing. The last verse is:

“Most folks suffer in sorrow,

Thinking they’re just no good.

They don’t match the magazine model

As close as they think they should.

They live just like the paint-by-numbers,

The teacher would be impressed.

A lifetime of ‘follow the lines,’

So they’re just like all of the rest.”

“The mass of [people] live lives of quiet desperation,” is how our Unitarian ancestor Henry David Thoreau put it. To a large extent that’s because we’re trying to stay within the lines, conform to the expected, to behave — and be – the way we’re “supposed” to.  There’s a scene in the movie Avengers: End Game (which, if you haven’t seen it yet, first, shame on you, and, second, don’t worry, no spoilers here), after one character confesses with shame to another that they’re really just a failure, the other character responds, “Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be […].  The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are.”

It takes courage to buck the system, to take the risk of standing out, to be who we are instead of who the world wants us and expects us to be, to, “march to the beat of a different drummer,” quoting Thoreau again.  In our bones we know the truth of the Japanese aphorism, “the nail that sticks up is hammered down.”  And this thing of openly acknowledging our faults and failings, of paying more attention to them than to the faults and failings we see in others, to, keep clean, “our side of the street,” (as the 12 Step movement puts it) … well … that would make us stick out in a world where we’re encouraged to do anything but.  Yet being who we are, who we really are, with all of our follies and foibles, daring to publicly name our “growing edges,” is the key to living a full, rich, and authentic life.  All of the great religions of the world assure us of that.  And so does David Wilcox.

Oh!  One last thing.  It turns out that there are people who really have framed and highlighted their mistakes!  This is a photo of a hole a man put in the drywall when he fell down the stairs during the first Thanksgiving he and his love spent together.  In case you can’t see what’s at the bottom of the photo, it’s a small plaque that reads, “First Thanksgiving, 2015,” and he describes his medium as, “hand, drywall.”











Pax tecum,

RevWik

Let's Not Keep From Singing

These are the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve on Sunday, May 19, 2019.  They had just a few days earlier received the news of my decision to bring our eight-year mutual ministry to an end, as well as the decision of our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, to resign.  This was my first opportunity to talk with them after they received the news.

In case anyone's interested, I sang, instead of read, the two verses of the hymn at the end of these Reflections.

What can I say?

Many of you received an email on Friday from Adam Slate, the President of the Board.  For those of you who are new here, or may not have gotten it for some reason, the email was an announcement of my decision to step down as Lead Minister effective at the end of this church year (June 30^th).  It also shared the news that our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, has also made the decision to resign.

For some I know this is a shock; some have no doubt been anticipating it.  Since the email went out I’ve heard from a lot of folks who call this their spiritual home.  They’ve shared with me expressions of their sorrow, their confusion, their anger; their feelings of loss and grief; their fears for the congregation’s future.  I know all of those emotions, because I’m feeling them too.

And, though no one has said this to me yet, I am certain that there are people who are feeling something of a sense of relief, hoping that the painful divisiveness of, especially, the past couple of years may soon come to an end.  If I didn’t admit that I understand this feeling too, I wouldn’t be telling you the truth — it’s been a hard few years.  And while I do not share these feelings, I have no doubt that there are some people who received this news gladly, happy that the goal they have been working for has finally been achieved.

All of this is to say that there are undoubtedly a wide array of emotions in our community, our church family right now.  In this sanctuary right now.  There are undoubtedly a wide array of emotions within any one of us, individually!  Emotions are so rarely clean and simple; most often they are convoluted and more than a little tangled.  Complicated, to say the least.

In the days and weeks ahead, and in the months and maybe even years after I’ve left, it will be important to remember that everyone has a right to their own feelings about this.  Not only do we not have to think alike — as the well-known maxim goes — to love alike, we don’t have to feel the same way as one another either.  Yet if we stay in covenant with one another — not something we’ve always been able to do, of course — then the words of the late 18^th and early 19^th century Universalist preacher and theologian Hosea Ballou will hold true:

If we agree in love, no disagreement will do us any harm;

Yet if we do not, no other agreement will do us any good.

"If we agree in love, no disagreement will do us any harm; yet if we do not, no other agreement will do us any good."

Christina and I are writing letters in which we’ll share our stories about what led us to the decisions we have made.  Those should be going out early- to mid-next week, and I am sure that after you have read them both Chris and I will be open to talking with you.  We always have been.  It is, after all, part of our covenant with each other.

There will be opportunities for you to talk with one another, too, beginning after this service when there’ll be gatherings in several locations —  The Parlor, Lower Hall 2, and right here in the sanctuary.  Choose the space that works best for you.  These meetings were designed in a particular way to help facilitate the immediate sharing of feelings, the first asking of questions, and the initial expressing of hopes for the future.  There will be other gatherings, designed in different ways, aimed at serving different needs, in the days and weeks ahead. 

I want to say another word, to be clear about today’s sessions — they are designed to gather questions, not provide the answers.  The Board will take these questions and incorporate them into the FAQ they’re developing that will go out mid-week as part of the materials for the upcoming Congregational Meeting on June 2^nd.  At that meeting the congregation will be asked to support the Separation Agreement the Board and I have negotiated (with the help of staff from the Southern Region of the UUA, and other consulting religious professionals).  Throughout these negotiations we kept asking, “How do we stay in covenant with one another?” and, “What does Justice look like in this situation?”  It took a while, to be honest, yet we finally came to a place we all could agree was fair and in keeping with our values.  I hope you’ll come to that meeting on Sunday, June 2^nd (following the service), and with those two questions in your heart and mind I hope you will vote to ratify this Agreement.

When people have asked me what I planned to say today, or even why I thought I should talk at all this morning, I’ve repeatedly said that I believe times like these need a sermon — times of change, times of a sudden shift in our lives, times of loss.  Even when the loss is anticipated, even welcomed, it still can be so very hard when it comes.  When someone we’ve known and loved is in hospice, for instance, or has been struggling with an illness for a long, long time … we know that our parent’s, partner’s, sibling’s, friend’s, child’s death is coming, maybe even coming soon, yet when it does it is still so very often a shock.  Their death was expected … but not expected that day, or in that moment.

The suddenness of most (actually, maybe all) major life changes catches us off guard.  A pregnancy lasts roughly 9 months, yet after the delivery first-time parents often find themselves feeling as though the whole world just changed in an instant, that moment they first saw or held their child.  Even women who have labored mightily for hours to bring their baby into the world have told me that there’s still a moment after all that when they suddenly feel the reality of now being a parent, as if a switch was flipped.  And they tell me that even with all that preparation they’re still shocked and knocked off their feet a bit by it.

Anyone who’s ever changed a tire knows the experience of pulling, straining with all of your might, trying to loosen a lug nut that seems to have been welded in place.  You know the thing’s going to move at some point, but … until … it … does …  Andthensuddenlyitdoes!  Wham!  I’ve smacked my knuckles more than once when that nut finally let go.

Sudden change can hurt.  It can hit us upside the head, kick us in the gut, knock the wind out of us, or make us weak in the knees.  Sometimes it’s all of the above.  Even when it’s a change we’ve been looking forward to, its sudden arrival can leave us feeling disoriented.  Because change — even welcome change — is hard.  And hard change — change we didn’t expect or want — is even harder.

The change we’re in the midst of here is even more complex to navigate because there are so many moving parts to it — so many people involved, so many different understandings of just what brought us here, so many different responses to it.  Some people see things this way, others see those same things that way, and others aren’t looking at those things at all but are looking at different things altogether. 

And there are so many tempting places to place the blame.  “We wouldn’t be in this situation if only you hadn’t …” or, “… if only you had ...”  It’s human of us to want to find a cause, to identify a reason, to, in short, seek a place to place the blame for the change we wish we weren’t in, and all the cacophony and chaos, all the pain that comes with it.  A week or so ago I heard about a tee shirt that says, “I’m not saying that you’re responsible.  I’m saying that I’m blaming you.”  Right?  I’m seeing more than a few heads nodding.  Of course we get it; it’s so human of us.

It doesn’t do us any good, though.  There’s hardly ever — and I think I’ll go so far as to say that there isn’t ever — one person who is entirely at fault, or even a group of people who are entirely in the wrong.  It’d be nice if life were that clear cut, but it’s not.  It really isn’t.  This is not to say that none of us should be accountable for our actions — people do make mistakes, and people do consciously make decisions and take actions that are … problematic … and cause harm.  I’m not saying that we should always accept every kind of behavior in the name of “getting along.”  I am saying that blaming people is not helpful.  In fact, it can make it harder to hold them accountable. 

Blame is easier, of course.  We get to distance ourselves, create a comfortable buffer of righteousness around ourselves.  Lovingly holding someone accountable, “lovingly calling them back into community” (when that’s possible), is harder and infinitely more uncomfortable because we have to stay engaged, have to bring our own selves right there into the midst, the mess of it, have to acknowledge that there are no angels and no devils.  Not even us.

In the days and weeks, months and years ahead I encourage you to stay engaged, to stay connected.  Don’t write anybody off.  Don’t give up or give in.  This won’t be easy, but living authentically in covenanted community never is. 

There’s one other thing I’d recommend — don’t let this become everything.  This morning had been scheduled as far back as the beginning of the church year to be our annual Music Sunday.  When it became clear that Adam’s email was going out this past Friday there was discussion about whether we needed to postpone Music Sunday to some future Sunday because people would very likely want to and need to focus on … this.  In those discussions the words of a hymn kept echoing in my head.  (It’s #108, “My Life Flows On In Endless Song,” otherwise known as “How Can I Keep From Singing?”)

My life flows on in endless song

Above earth’s lamentation.

I hear the real though far-off hymn

That hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife

I hear the music ringing.

It sounds an echo in my soul.

How can I keep from singing?

What through the tempest ‘round me roars,

I know the truth, it liveth.

What through the darkness ‘round me close,

Songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm

While to that rock I’m clinging.

Since love prevails in heav’n and earth,

how can I keep from singing?

As a congregation, as a community, a people … as individuals … we have just received news that even if we kind of expected it, even if we wanted it, signals a sudden shift from things as they’ve been to … something else.  And some of us are sad, or confused, or angry; feeling the pain of loss and grief; fearing for the congregation’s future.  (Or all of the above.)  These feelings are real, and we should pay attention to them.  Yet we should not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by them.  Through all this tumult and this strife, though we may feel a tempest ‘round us roaring, let’s not keep from singing.  For, my friends, love does prevail “on heav’n and earth.”  The Love on which, in which, this congregation is grounded is stronger than any disagreement, any discomfort, any struggle, any loss.  That Love calls on us — each of us individually and all of us collectively — to be our best selves, to bravely follow where it leads, and … whatever else we do or don’t do … to keep on singing.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Fear Never Fixed Anything

This is the text of the reflection I offered on February 3, 2019, to the congregation I serve  in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sam Keen is, as I said during the Story time, a fairly well-known author within a certain niche of readers.  He’s written books like, Your Mythic Journey, Fire in the Belly, Inward Bound (exploring the geography of your emotions), To a Dancing God, and The Passionate Life.  He’s particularly well known to people interested in what’s been called the mytho-poetic movement.  He’s written that we are, “bio-mythic animals.  The true double helix that makes us human is an intertwining of biological mechanisms (IDNA) and cultural mechanisms (or myths).  We are fabric woven of chemistry and narrative, biology and stories, flesh and dreams.”

It’s not too unexpected, then, that he would not only be intrigued by the physical elements of learning the flying trapeze, but it’s mythology-poetic ones as well.  The subtitle of the book Learning to Fly, is “trapeze — reflections on fear, trust, and the joys of letting go.”

It’s a commonly accepted fact among preachers that a lot of adults pay more attention to, and report getting more out of, the story for the children than they do from the more “adult” sermon that is ostensibly written for them.   With that in mind, it’s my intention to give now essentially the same reflection as I did then (with a lot more quotations and, hopefully, a bit more depth).

Keen had, as I said earlier, a lifetime dream of being a trapeze flyer.  But, like most people, as he got older the dream faded into the more quotidian realities of daily life.  [That’s one of the differences – I didn’t so “quotidian” to the kids.]  By pretty much every measure, he had a very successful life.  And yet, there was a point in his life, his career, his marriage, that he found himself troubled.  He asked, “Why was my spirit so heavy?  Why was I so frequently depressed?  So earthbound?  So grave?”  Whether he was conscious of it at the time, he was asking himself questions that made use of the metaphor of the flyer.

“[W]e all yearn to fly.  We are creatures of longing.  We do not need to climb the long ladder to the pedestal or grasp the fly bar to be airborne.  What I call the aerial instinct — the drive to transcend our present condition — is the defining characteristic of a human being.  We are restless animals, eternal travelers who are forever in the process of becoming.  Consciousness itself is a flight from the here and now and to the beyond.”

We are creatures of longing, and Keen still longed to fly.

So, as I also said during the children’s reflections time of this service, one day, when he was near his 63^rd birthday, he saw an ad on television announcing the opening of a new school in San Francisco to teach ordinary everyday people the skill and art of the trapeze.  He went to watch, and found what he described as “an alternating current of fear and fascination.” Interest turned into engagement, turned into a passion.

As with most people who develop a new passion – whether a new intellectual interest, a new spiritual perspective, a new lover, a new hobby, a new passion of any kind, really – he talked about flying all the time.  His friends felt it more than a little odd that this man so known for his insightful intellect would become so passionate about something so physical and so dangerous.  Especially because he was nearly 63 years old.  But about passions Keen has written:

“[A]ll passions are strange passions to those who do not share them.  The passions that animate individuals thrive in the most unexpected nooks and crannies.  There are people who are ecstatic about collecting stamps, old motorcycles, vintage Levis.  Or painting pictures of barns.  I know otherwise normal people who are wildly enthusiastic about riding around on manicured lawns in electric carts and hitting little white balls into holds in the ground.  [I have to digress here for a moment.  I recently read somewhere that golf is the only sport in which the goal is to play less of it.]  I have met numerous cabdrivers who can’t keep their checkbooks balanced but can give you the batting average of everyone who ever played in the World Series.  And many a [person] has kept the smell of the salt sea in [their] nostrils while building a sailboat in a backyard in Iowa.”

He acknowledges that, “Passion is seldom rational and usually blind.”  He says that he has learned, though, that, “it is hazardous to ignore passing fantasies and emerging passions.”  He writes, “[I]n the degree I cease to pursue my deepest passions, I will gradually be controlled by my deepest fears.  When passion no longer waters and nurtures the psyche, fears spring up like weeds on the depleted soil of abandoned fields.”  Hear that again:  “in the degree I cease to pursue my deepest passions, I will gradually be controlled by my deepest fears.”

Many of us would no doubt feel more than a little fear if we were climbing up a ladder to a platform – the pedestal – that’s only six feet long and 18 inches wide, even though it’s 25 feet off the ground.  And that’s a lot of what Keen learned – both literally and figuratively.  He learned about fear.  In fact, as he titled one of his chapters, he became, “a Connoisseur of Fear.”

He’d always been something of a risk taker.  He tells the story of spending an afternoon with the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel.  (Keen had done his doctoral dissertation on Marcel’s work.). At one point they were going through Harvard Square, and Keen was “dodging through the traffic.”  His wife said to Marcel, “Sam likes to take risks,” to which Marcel replied (and Keen remembers there being a twinkle in his eye as he said this), “Only take interesting risks.”

Interesting risks.

Facing our fears, living into our fears, is something that most of us try our best to avoid.  He notes, “It is reasonable to play it safe, not to leap — but it is not always reasonable to be reasonable.”  His begins that chapter about, “Becoming a Connoisseur of Fear,” with an epigraph by Aldo Leopoldo — “It is a poor life in which there is no fear.”  Keen writes,

“As nearly as I can figure, the rock-bottom truth is that life is both wonderful and terrifying.  The German philosopher Rudolf Otto said that our confrontation with that ultimate reality within which we live and move and have our being (which, for lack of a better name, we call the Holy) is always a mystery that evokes both fascination and fear. […]

[T]o ask, ‘Why face danger?’ Is the wrong question.  The right question is ‘What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?’ If ‘security’ and ‘safety’ become watchwords by which I live, gradually the circle of my experience grows small and claustrophobic.”

What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?

“Death says, ‘Play it safe.’ Life says, ‘Risk it.’  At the vital edge something dangerous calls my name.  What will I risk to stay alive?”

Keen says that there are three basic, instinctual fears which all humans share.  Only three:  “the fear of falling, the fear of being imprisoned in a tight space, and the fear of loud noises.”  He adds, though,

“I have noticed that once the fear of literal dangers has been mastered, a more complex fear of symbolic danger emerges.  I am afraid of failure.  I am afraid of what others will think of me.  I am afraid I will embarrass myself.  I am afraid I will lose control.  I am afraid I can’t trust you.  I am afraid I will be abandoned if I do not measure up to your expectations.”

Do any of you know anything about any of that that?  I do.  Oh how I do.  And I know, too, that what Keen says about the limiting nature of a life ruled by fear is true.  And I know, I know, that if I let my life be ruled by my fears I will not really be alive.  And I know that that’s true for each of us.

It’s true of institutions, too.  Groups, communities, organizations, (churches), can become ruled by fear, afraid to make that leap of faith from what we know, from what is safe, into the void of the unknown, because “it is reasonable to play it safe – not to leap.”  We risk – again, our institutions, and us as individuals – we risk so very much when we let go, not entirely sure that we will be caught. And yet, as Keen asks, so should we:  What happens if I, if we, if all of us try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?  (Even the “interesting” ones.)

It is a poor life in which there is no fear. 

This doesn’t by any means mean that we should be foolhardy and leap at every opportunity.  One of the things learning the trapeze taught Keen is that you should only take risks that you’re ready for.  Every time he went too far beyond his ability, trying to do something that really was beyond his grasp, he hurt himself.  Every time.  And, really, only at those times.

Part of that preparation, as I said to our kids (and to those of you who were listening), is to practice falling.  Notice how similar the words fall and fail are?  Before trying a new trick he learned to practice missing the trick, to practice failing, to practice falling, because the ability to fall correctly is essential.  Fall wrong, and you can hurt yourself seriously.  It’s imperative, then, to recognize our propensity for failing, for falling, to embrace the fact of its inevitability, and to prepare oneself for it.  There is, “a fundamental principle — learn the fall before the trick; prepare for failure.  From the moment when a fledgling accomplishes the first free fall, progress in flying and falling go hand in hand. […] the great flyers have always been great fallers.”

It stands to reason, then, that if you should you prepare for the falls that are unavoidable, you shouldn’t try to avoid them.  Keen writes, “If you aren’t failing frequently it is because you are too timid or too stuck in your rut to try anything new and risky.”  I have heard it said that clergy and congregations need to get better at doing memorial services for ideas, things tried that didn’t work or that have simply run their course.  We too, individuals and institutions, can become stuck in our own ruts.  Too intent on playing it safe.  Too focused on staying safe.  We can make a priority of making sure that we protect what we have and our sense of who we are.  It is, after all, reasonable to play it safe.  It is only sensible to not take that leap. And yet, it is not always “reasonable to be reasonable.”  We can limit our ability to grow, to change, to evolve.  These things always involve a fairly sizable amount of risk.  It’s dangerous.

Keen writes, “If I get stuck in who I am now, I will never blossom into who I might yet become.  Today’s identity is tomorrow’s prison.”  If we get stuck in who we are now, who we have been, we will never blossom into who we might yet become.  This reminds me of something the Catholic priest and Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton wrote, “If the you of five years ago does not consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.”  How many of us here this morning think our self of five years ago would be shocked at who we are today?  Would find it heretical?  Scandalous?  Couldn’t imagine in a million years that we are where we are?  Or would that us-from-the-past be unsurprised, comforted to know that we’re still safe and sound, that nothing much has changed?  (What would the church of five-years ago think of who we are and where we’re going today?)

“No footbridge leads from reason to faith, from doubt to trust.  Prior to the leap, fear seems more justified than trust, isolation more fundamental than communion, and the flight of the spirit an impossibility.

The short leap from the trapeze to the catcher is a flight from primal fear to basic trust, from I to thou, from autonomy to communion, that can be made only by a total commitment of the self.  Flying, like faith, hope, and love, is an existential act that cannot be accomplished by a spectator.”

This is what it means – part of what it means, at least – to be fully and truly alive: not to be mere spectators of our lives.  We are called to live them.  And all living things must change and grow lest they stagnate and die.  This is as true for you and me as for a pond, a butterfly, or a seed.

As Sam Keen learned the skills and art of the aerialist, he learned about more than the need to let go, prepared for falling while simultaneously willing to fly into the unknown.  He also learned about the net.

“Initially, I thought of the net as nothing more than a safety device that would protect me if I could manage to fall correctly on my back, seat, or stomach. As I gained skill in twisting, turning, and landing, however, I realized it was more than a concession to human fallibility; it was also a platform to launch new flight. A modern nylon net is essentially a large trampoline that invites a flyer to convert a fall into a rebound trick — a somersault, a suicide dive, a high balletic leap. Professional trapeze troupes always end their acts with dramatic dives or somersaults into the net. In fact, the trick, that seems to delight audiences more than any other is one introduced by Tito Gaona [of the Flying Gaonos] in which he plummets to the nets, bounces very high, somersaults, and lands seated on the catcher’s trapeze.

Gradually, I am learning to enjoy the creative possibilities of the rebound. I suppose there are exceptional men and women whose lives are an unbroken series of successes, but for most of us the ascending path is punctuated by times of descent, downfall, and depression. My failures have taught me there is always a second chance. What I have managed to create after falling has often turned out to be better than the trick I planned. Failing gives fallible human beings the chance to start over. This is why every man, woman, and society needs a safety net.”

My friends, we can be that net for one another.  We can catch each other when we fall, and help to propel us to new, and perhaps as yet unimagined (and even unimaginable), possibilities.  We can, when we do this “community” thing right, trust one another so that we can more easily let go of the known in order to take the leap into the unknown because we know there is this net before us.  I know that we can do this, and be this, because we have been.  Because we are, now.  (Yes, even now.) 

As we move into this still-new calendar year, and round the corner on the second half of our church year, let us be brave, be bold, in looking for the “interesting risks,” that abound around us.  Let us not live from a place of fear, knowing that fear never fixed anything.  Let us, instead, live within the fundamental and omnipresent realities of faith, hope, and love.  Let us live with courage, boldly, so that we might blossom into who we might yet become.  So that we might fly.

I used the following passage as the Closing Words for the service:

“Paradoxically, when we invite our fears into the hearth of our awareness, they cease to be an undifferentiated mass of terrifying demons and become tolerable guests.  Each day befriend a single fear and the miscellaneous terrors of beading human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious.  We learn to fly not by becoming fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.”

I used the following words to introduce the morning's Closing Hymn -- #1019 in Singing the Journey – “Building a New Way”:

“[W]e have become captives, driven by the demands of our corporations, the market economy, and the pressures of globalization, which exist side-by-side with the escalating violence caused by tribalism, nationalism, and anarchy.  It is a hot and heavy world.  Not much joy in high places. […]

We are in the grip of the spirit of seriousness, which Nietzche equated with the devil. ‘When I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn; it was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.’”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

An illustration for Learning to Fly