Change, Transition and Resistance

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, January 29, 2006

Intergenerational Story:

Life is full of power, both sacred and secular.
Each day and night there are some experiences which touch upon our primal human fear.
We are afraid of careless drivers. We are afraid of germs and viruses.
We are afraid of the unknown. Sometimes we are afraid of our nightmares.
Small children are naturally- afraid of the dark.
Ritual can address our fears.
Ritual soothes and eases our transitions.
Young children love their bedtime rituals.
(Read to the congregation the children’s story, “GoodNight Moon.”)

Yesterday I was holding my 7 month old grandson, Noah, when the call came. It was Scott Alexander, my colleague at River Road calling to tell me that Dan Lewis had died that morning. I knew Dan was sick, but, still it seemed sudden. Dan was the wise elder of River Road. Everyone loved Dan, really, absolutely everyone loved Dan.

Sitting in my living after lunch, I looked at my beautiful grandson in his yellow outfit, his soft curls framing his sweet face, and I cried tears of grief for Dan.

We live in the midst of change. All of our lives we are adjusting to, re-orienting to, grieving, anticipating, relishing …change.

When Dave and I were married, we avoided the words “till death do us part”…even as we made a serious commitment to one another, we chose to leave room for change…We thought changes in our relationship would be inevitable, and we wanted to be intentional about it. We went so far as to recommit to our marriage every three years. We would make a positive space for change.

We were a bit idealistic in our realism.

Much of the beauty we enjoy in the world is a manifestation of becoming….a beautiful line of melody becomes a harmonic chord, becomes a symphony, becomes a choral work, becomes an opera, becomes a dance…becomes a work of art.

A seed falls to the ground, germinates, is nourished by sun and rain, sends down a root, sends up a stem, becomes a blossom, green becomes rose or pink or purple…a flower blooms, a field of flowers grow, a bouquet is sent to a family who have lost a beloved father…beauty consoles the human heart.

All life is change.

What is the story you tell yourself about change? Is it something you fear, something you welcome, something you surrender to, something you want to control, something you avoid at all costs?

What story do you tell yourself about change?

As a liberal faith tradition, we honor change as enlightened, optimistic possibility. We learn that change is desirable. That new forms hold more promise than old dead forms. As in all faiths, we learn that the purpose of religion is to be born anew. Personal transformation and spiritual growth are held up as virtuous. In liberal thought, change is good.

Our Unitarian Universalist martyrs challenged the status quo of the triune god, challenged the doctrine of sin, challenged the practice of empty ritual. All through our history, our liberal faith has stood on the side of renewal, doubt, exploration- changing ideas and beliefs.

Over and over we, liberal religionists, ask, what is eternal? what is trustworthy? what is authoritative? Over and over again, we come full circle to honor change as a value. The measure we often apply to these theological and philosophical questions is human experience. We don’t always understand the changes around us, or the mysteries of life and death, or the universe, but we have our own experience to go on. We trust our gut.

Our lived experience is that we can’t stop change. And there’s a lot of change that we can’t control.

Buddhist teacher, Jon Kabat Zinn tells us, you can’t stop the waves, so why not learn to surf. Buddhist practice teaches a life of embrace. My friend, Buddhist teacher, Tara Brach speaks of enhancing our capacity to relate to our passing…our changing, experience in daily life with deep clarity and kindness.

Life is change…how can we meet the changing consciousness and experiences of our life with clarity and kindness?

A step toward the embrace of our always flowing, always passing experience of living…is to name the change we fear…to name the fear.

We all fear change. Some of us meet that fear of change with denial. No, my body is not aging. I can still work out, stay slim, run 5 miles, work 60 hours a week- sometimes this denial looks a lot like optimism. Everything will be alright. Tomorrow this pain in my chest will go away. It could always be worse.

Some of us meet fear of change with panic. Oh my god, if Christmas Eve isn’t like the Christmas Eve of my childhood, it will be tragic for the whole family. If my child doesn’t get a degree from a top school, she will never be successful. If I lose this job, everything in my life will fall apart.

Let’s pause here…Tara always advises pauses….She calls it a sacred pause…when you realize that you are feeling either denial or panic…in the face of immanent change…just pause, she advises…and notice what you feel….name what you feel. Name your fear. Just naming it will move you closer to clarity and kindness.

Whatever story we tell ourselves about change, most of the experts that I have read agree… that change is always loss. Even if the change is positive…like having a new grandchild, or getting a new job, or buying a new vacation cottage…along with the new, something old, something familiar and trustworthy, is lost.

There is something in human nature and in our DNA that resists change. Our bodies, our psyche’s like patterns. If you’ve tried behavior modification or physical re-alignment- if you’ve tried to stop smoking, or if your spouse has re-arranged the furniture while you’re on a business trip…you know that we humans prefer familiar patterns. We don’t really like change…even liberal UU’s don’t really like change.

Patterns, rhythms, habits…bedtime stories do console…are healing to the spirit. How many of you like to sit in the same seat or nearly the same…every Sunday? How many of you like to begin and end the service with music? How many of you like to read the Sunday papers either before or after church? How many of you hate it when you come home late for dinner and someone is sitting in your chair?

And yet, even with all this denial and panic, we think change is good. We know that change in nature creates beauty. We believe that growth is healthy…that our children should grow up and leave home…that we should learn a language or a new skill.

Still, we fear the loss that change brings.

As a congregation we have undergone a lot of change in recent years. As a congregation we are facing new changes in the near future. Sometime soon we will move into our new sanctuary.

We will walk in there together and none of us will know where to sit. We won’t know where to put our coats, or where the name tags are, or how to get to the bathroom.

None of us will feel we belong. None of us will have the consolation, the assurance of established patterns.

Finally, we’ll take a seat, wondering whether this seat will really work for us…we’ll look out the windows and see the view, the astonishing view…for the first time. It will be unfamiliar. It may be beautiful, but we won’t have years of watching the changing seasons out of that particular window. The fall of light through the room will be experienced for the first time.

In that first service in our new sanctuary…I don’t expect anyone to hear a word I say. You’ll all be too busy adjusting. Getting comfortable. Identifying problems. Grieving your old seat…your old lovely view out the window.

After the service you won’t know where the coffee pot is. None of us will know how the flow of traffic down our new hallway is supposed to go. The sounds of feet on the floor will be different. The smells will be different. The meeting point between children and parents will be different. We might miss saying hello to someone if they go out a different door.

We won’t know where the lobby tables will be. We won’t even know where the lobby is…or what to call the new rooms…or whether the old rooms will still be called the same thing.

At this point some of us will be wishing…we never started this whole change in the first place…we might just want things to go back the way they were. We might feel angry, disappointed, confused, excited, relieved, happy, or any number of other things…as a group we’ll probably feel the gamut of human emotion.

So what do we do? I recommend a pause. I recommend naming our feelings with as much clarity as we can muster…I recommend a big dose of kindness toward ourselves and others.

I recommend some humor…realizing that we have all jumped off this cliff together….I recommend holding hands as we experience the dissonance of so much change. I recommend that we have fun and enjoy this new creation that our gifts and talents and commitments have built.

This congregation has dreamed an incredible dream…and it is coming to fruition. Our new building, our new sanctuary is huge. It’s grand and beautiful. It’s becoming, growing, blooming…it’s a work of art.

And it will be a big change. And it will cause us to change as a congregation. It presents so many new possibilities. And at moments it makes us afraid.

I try to imagine what it will be like to stand on the new very large pulpit area. To have the choir at my right hand, facing all of you. To speak into that much larger room. To be surrounded by the beauty of the woods. To have an uplifting ceiling overhead. It is clearly sacred space already. It will become ever more so as we live in it with all our joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams, and the space absorbs one by one our holy days. As we live into it, our new space will be blessed; blessed with our singing, our tears and our hopes.

How we make the transition to this new sacred space, to this new definition of who we are as a congregation really matters. How we carry our chalice to our new pulpit. The spirit with which we move our hymnbooks, our piano, our flowers and our offering baskets- all of this matters greatly. How we welcome visitors and new members into our new worship space really matters.

And how we say goodbye to this space, how we remember all that has transpired here…how we offer this worship space to our children and youth really matters.

Historian of religion, Mircea Eliade observed that the chief problem of the modern era was the disappearance of meaningful rites of passage. Our move into our new worship space will truly be a rite of passage. Let us pause to name our fear and loss, let us remember to be kind and gentle with one another…and let us create meaningful ritual to mark the events of this transition.

Some of us have a lot of experience in moving. Some of us have very little. Some of us have lived in this worship hall for 40 years, some of us just arrived.

I remember the day that Dave and I and our children left our home of ten years in Oak Park, Il for our move to Knoxville, TN. After all the furniture was moved out, and the cleaning done, we walked around the empty rooms, standing in each corner, silently rehearsing our memories, feeling the light, the life, we had shared there. I felt the physical connection I had to that space. I heard the cries of our fourth child still lingering in the walls of bedroom where he had slept. I wondered how so much life had been lived in these rooms that now looked so small and forlorn.

That change was huge. It was wrenching- we had been so happy there. We knew what we were losing, but we didn’t yet know what we were going to. As a family, some of us felt some denial of the magnitude of change we were facing…and some of us were definitely in panic mode.

The kids went outside to say goodbye to their favorite trees…especially to Roderickas. It seemed that the ritual of saying goodbye came rather naturally. As rituals often do.

Rituals can be small daily practices of sitting at a favorite window with a cup of coffee. Reading a favorite bedtime story. Or telling the story of our neighborhood block party over and over. Rituals can be formal or informal, private or collective. Ritual is an honoring of the overlapping of the secular and the sacred. Religion offers rituals to mark life’s transitions, rituals to contain our deepest sorrows and joys, rituals to celebrate life, and say goodbye to a loved one.

Deborah and I plan to guide the children’s worship committee and the adult worship committee along with the music committee in planning meaningful rituals for marking our transition to our new worship space. We welcome any ideas or suggestions you might have. Our expectation is that this transition will occur in early April.

This congregation has walked in faith toward the day when we enter our new sanctuary together. I expect that we will know what kind of ritual we need. That we will listen to our hearts, consider all of our congregation’s needs, and that there will arise a spirit of clarity and kindness that will guide us in this journey of love and celebration.

Our church belongs to all of us. Together we create worship. Together we create safe space. Together we work for justice and peace. Together we teach our children and watch them grow. Together we honor joys and sorrows. Together we care for one another. Together we grieve the losses of change. Together we welcome the new.

In the Jewish tradition speaking to God is considered an act of such power, that no man is to pray alone, but only with nine others…only in a minyan can the presence of Yaweh be invoked.

In the Christian tradition it is said that wherever two or three are gathered, there God is.

Let us declare that to cross the boundaries into our new sacred space, to cross the boundary of the old, and embrace the mystery of change, we go together, bound by fellowship, strengthened by the story of this congregation, in its fullness, in all of its changes… past, present and future.

Let us rejoice as we grow together into our future.

Amen/Blessed Be