by
Rev. Joy Atkinson
Presented to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara
August 19, 2007
©2007 by Rev. Joy Atkinson
Santa Barbara, California
Readings before the sermon
By Vanessa
Rush Southern, This Place of Eden from Unitarian Universalist Meditation
book.
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.
By Danaan Perry(excerpted from his Essence Book of Days
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/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. B 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 fall back
and 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 get past the loss and move
on.”
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.
The
Interfaith organization that provides some of the training we get for interim
ministry, the Interfaith Ministry Network, has discerned 5 developmental tasks
to be accomplished by interim minister and congregation 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 a few of my vestments—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 minister undertake. The next five are developmental
tasks that we will work on together.
The first
interim developmental task is: Claiming and honoring the past, and healing
past griefs and conflicts. This box of Kleenex symbolizes this task.
Next, I
unpack this mirror, to symbolize the interim task of illuminating the
congregation’s unique identity, strengths and challenges. One advantage of
my being a temporary sojourner, and outsider, among you is that I can hold up a
metaphorical mirror to you, naming and assessing what I see as this
congregation’s unique strengths and the challenging areas that may need some
special attention.
The third
interim developmental task involved navigating the shifts in leadership that
accompany times of transition. Often, during an interim year, there are
many other changes in leadership besides the former minister’s departure. This
compass will sit on my desk this year as a symbol of this task. (It may also
help me get oriented to Santa Barbara, which has its north and south, east and
west in an unexpected orientation, from the point of view of a San Francisco
Bay Area person like myself. It will take me a while to get used to the fact
that the ocean is not to the west and the mountains are not to the east!)
Renewing
connections with resources within and beyond the Unitarian Universalist
Association is the fourth interim year developmental task. To symbolize
this task, I am unpacking the UUA District directory, and a few useful books,
among them one titled Temporary Shepherds, published by the interfaith
Alban Institute, the Janus Handbook—a book on interim ministry published
by the UUA, and Churchworks—a book on healthy church practices published
by Skinner House Books, the UU publishing house.
Finally,
the fifth interim developmental task that we will be working on together this
year is engaging the future with vision, strength, anticipation and zest. Several
of the functions of this congregation fall under this heading, including
long-range planning, financial stewardship, the building project and the
capital campaign. To symbolize this task, I am unpacking this little telescope,
representing taking the long view ahead.
As your
interim minister, I will be with you here just so long—just a year, but I hope
and expect that it will be long enough for us to accomplish these interim tasks
together, to work and explore and evaluate and change together, to navigate the
sometimes turbulent waters of change.
Closing words: from the poet ee cummings:
time
is a tree
this
life one leaf
but
love is the sky and i am for you
just
so long and long enough