"Embracing Transitions"
A sermon by Rev. Judy Tomlinson
August 23, 2009
READINGS ANCIENT AND MODERN:
Our Ancient Reading is Zero Circle by Rumi:
Be helpless, dumbfounded
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
that No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of any-thing,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
Our Modern Reading is The Journey" by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.
SERMON:
"His face and body are whitened with clay, and he is no longer
recognizable as the youth who left his village two months before.
The wounds of his ordeal-a circumcision and the parallel scars across
his cheeks-are healed now. But they will always bear witness to
what he has suffered. They mark him as one who has crossed the boundary
of childhood and has put that life behind him.
"He is alone. More than simply out of contact with his peers
and his elders, he is absolutely and radically alone. During this
time (or time-out) in his life, he is out of relation with all others.
There is no map to which one could point and say, 'There he is.'
There is no there, because he inhabits for this time a non-place.
"He is beyond the mediating power of roles and relationships
and social mores. Armed only with the rituals and chants taught
him by an initiation master, he wanders free and unattached through
the universe. Beyond the meaning-making powers of his everyday realities,
he stands face-to-face with existence.
"At night he dreams. His dreams in this primal non-time and
non-place are full of enigmatic hints and presences. Each night
he goes to sleep praying that this will be the night of the great
vision. It will be then and thus that he discovers his spirit guide
or his guardian elder. That voice will tell him his true vocation
and his real name. It may teach him a sacred chant to heal the sick
or to bless the newly planted corn.
"When this has happened, he will know the time has come to
return to the village and take up the rights and responsibilities
of his new status and his new identity. Marked by his scars and
empowered by his new knowledge, he will rejoin the social order
on a new basis. He is in a profound sense a new person.
"The person he used to be is dead. It died in the ordeal and
the mortuary ritual with which his rite of passage began. His parents
signified his death by burning the sleeping mat he had used throughout
his childhood. When he returns to the village, he will not recognize
them-at least at first. For he is no longer theirs.
"In the first weeks of his new life back in the village, he
will not remember his old name. He is reborn, and for a time his
behavior will recall that of a very small child. He will have forgotten
how to do basic things-washing and feeding himself, for example.
He will be unable to remember the old terms for familiar objects,
although during his time with the initiation master he has acquired
strange new names for many of these objects. To some degree, and
on some occasions, he speaks a new language.
"The youth has been renewed and enlightened by his ritual
transition. The time-out in the non-place was his gateway to the
original chaos from which the gods fashioned the world in the beginning.
All new form, his people believe, must begin in that chaos, and
any gap in time or space may provide access to it. Such gaps occur
at the end of any cycle. At the end of a year or a season, at the
end of the reign of a chief, and at the end of a phase in the individual's
own life, nature or the society or the person enters the gap and
dies.
After a time, each is reborn, and that is the way in which life
sustains itself. It is the way of withdrawal and return. It is the
way of forgetting and of rediscovery. It is the way of ending and
of beginning. In following it, the person crosses over from an old
way of being to a new way of being and is renewed." Writes
William Bridges
I attended our New Jersey Religious Educators Cluster meeting on
the first Thursday in June, as I do each month. Our District staff
people Andrea Lerner and Doug Zelinski were there and, as usual,
brought us a rich treasure trove of resources. I don't usually hesitate
to look them over and purchase the ones that look interesting or
that fit our program goals but, we were at the end of the fiscal
year and pretty much out of money in the RE budget. Still I trust
Andrea and Doug to bring us only the best so I decided to buy a
copy of abook. It was called Transitions: Making Sense of Life's
Changes, and it was written by William Bridges. I had never heard
of him. I had no idea what use this book might have in either my
personal or congregational life.
My husband Rob saw the book that day when I got home. Something
made me suggest that he take a look at it. He doesn't always follow
my suggestions, but in this case he began reading it immediately.
Soon he was tearing through it at a remarkable pace, making exclamations
and giving me reports on a regular basis. "This is amazing,"
he said. "This is great stuff!" Within a couple of days,
he had finished the book.
Lo and behold, two and a half weeks later Rob was laid off from
his job at a big pharmaceutical advertising company.
Why had he begun to read the book so avidly? It seems that he had
already been feeling that a major transition was happening in his
life. In recent months, Rob had decided that he wasn't really interested
in striving to reach the next rung on the corporate ladder. He had
begun to believe he was past all that; that he was okay with just
putting in his time until retirement.
Rob expected this decision to reduce the stress of work, to bring
him some inner sense of peace. But it hadn't worked out that way.
In fact, he was very antsy and much more uncomfortable than before.
On some level, he knew something was up - it was almost as if his
body was getting him ready for something his brain hadn't yet been
able to accept.
And so when his boss called him into his office to deliver the
news, Rob had a remarkable experience. He had a sense of "letting
go". He found himself smiling. He felt an extraordinary sense
of relief. In the next couple of weeks, as he finished his time
at the ad agency and people told him they'd never seen him so relaxed,
he began hatching an idea for something he never thought he'd have
a chance to do again before he retired. He'd begun laying the groundwork
for a new business venture.
Rob says that reading the Transitions book really made this possible.
He knows that being laid off at his age, in the middle of the worst
economy in decades, he should have been terrified. He should have
run back out into the job market and taken the first thing he could
find. But, with this book as preparation, he didn't panic. He understood
that he could look at the situation as a process. He recognized
that life was offering him a chance to make a major transition,
and to do something he'd really, deeply wanted to do. And once he'd
accepted that, he was able to give it the time and energy it deserved.
Because the book helped him so much, I thought, at this time with
so many going through changes brought on by this economy, that the
concepts might be useful to us all.
We all go through changes in our lives, whether a move, marriage,
children, careers, divorce, illness, loss and death of a loved one.
Some of these changes are built into our life cycle. In your Order
of Service, you might have noticed that the thoughts for the day
include the riddle of the Sphinx. In the story, the Sphinx asks
Oedipus, "What walks on 4 legs at dawn, two legs at noon and
three legs at sunset." The answer is of course a human being-a
child crawling on all fours at the beginning of life, on two as
an adult and on three, with the help of a cane, in our golden years.
Women have the biological transitions of maiden, mother and crone,
which symbolize our childhood, our child bearing years - whether
we have children or not - and the time following menopause.
These changes can just be changes and things we adjust to or they
may trigger or coincide with larger internal shifts going on within
us. William Bridges makes the distinction between a change and a
transition by defining the internal shift as a transition. We are
going along being who we are, and then, whether suddenly or gradually,
of our own accord or with no prior planning on our part, the world
turns and we find ourselves at the end of a chapter in our lives.
Bridges says that, "One of the most important differences between
a change and a transition is that changes are driven to reach a
goal. But transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits
or is adequate to the life stage you are in. . . .inner ending is
what initiates the transition."
Our culture thrives on change. We are a nation of immigrants and
we keep on moving. About 1 in 6 Americans move each year. On average,
an American moves about every 7 years over his or her lifespan.
Change is constant. Our work is always changing through mergers
and acquisitions, outsourcing, the expansion or collapse of our
economy. We have to keep up with the latest technology and the newest
clever gadget. How many of you have a new netbook computer or are
considering kindle? Our economy would be in even worse shape if
we weren't buying these things for ourselves or the young student
in our lives.
And yet many of us resist change or don't do it very well. We dig
in our heels and say, "I've already tried that" or "We've
always done it this way." There is definitely a fear factor
in change; a fear of loss, a fear of being perceived as incompetent
or obsolete. The fear and discomfort - the seeming weakness - of
having to grieve.
Yet letting go is the first step in the transition process. Bridges
asks the question, "What is it time to let go of in my life
right now? An attitude, a belief, a style of responding, a dream?
If we do not let go of what we've out grown, let go of that which
no longer serves us, we will carry that old habit, expectation or
attitude into the new. So we have to let it go. We have to accept
that something has ended and that something new is going to begin.
It's not always easy, but it is essential.
As the old is ending, and before the new can fully begin, there
is a second step. You might call this a time of confusion, of wandering
in the wilderness. In the Exodus story, Moses led the Israelites
out of Egypt. But he knew they were not yet ready for the Promised
Land. Moses knew that they would have carried their slave mentality
with them. He knew that they had to form a new identity as a people
before they were ready to form a nation. As you will recall, this
was not an easy time. Even though their basic needs were being met,
they were dissatisfied and disgruntled at their position. Confusion
and discomfort are the markings of this time. We can even feel angry,
or terrified. We need to try to really understand what we're going
through, get in touch with the process, talk to people who will
listen and help us think through real concerns at this vulnerable
time. Then, maybe we can trust that it will have something to teach
us. Maybe, with time, we may even recognize a gift emerging from
the pain.
So it's important that we don't hurry through it. It's important
to have the spiritual calm that will allow us to wander, until the
new identity is formed and the new path - or at least the next step
- is revealed or discerned. After Rob left the ad agency, he took
a month to reflect and plan before launching his new business. For
the Israelites, the transition took forty years.
There is a story that my spiritual teacher Jeremy Taylor tells
about the process of reincarnation in the Hindu tradition. The story
says that, when we die we are confronted with our worst fears. We
want to get away from these horrible images. So, if we did not achieve
spiritual discipline while we were alive, our soul will want to
be reborn so desperately that it will haphazardly dive between any
two coupling animals that it finds. In that situation, it is likely
to make a poor choice about its next life. On the other hand, if
we have practiced our spiritual discipline, we will have the calm
center to withstand the test of these intense fears and we will
be able to take our time in selecting our new life. Just so. Rather
than panicking and rushing headlong into the next job, relationship
- you name it - we need to maintain our serenity and some may even
find a sense of adventure while going through this unsettling time.
This is the time for us to ask a new question: "What is standing
backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance?
An idea? A fantasy? A note from an old friend" on Facebook?
This can be like a message to you from the universe waiting for
you to pay attention to it and invite it in.
Because - Eureka! - there will come a time when, if we have been
paying attention to the clues, hints, maybe even revelations, that
come our way, we will be ready, as Mary Oliver says, to come back
from wandering in the wilderness to feel and recognize the grace
to save the only life we can. Our own.
What do I mean by saving our lives? Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe
conducted a study about 40 years ago that correlated stress levels
with likelihood of illness. The average American has a stress level
of 150. That carries a relatively low likelihood of illness. But,
Holmes and Rahe found that with a level of 300, a person would have
a 90 percent chance
of being hospitalized in the coming year. Ninety percent!
You can find this test on-line and take it for yourself. Just Google
Holmes Rahe Stress Scale and find out if things are building to
the breaking point in your own life. Back in 1994 I had graduated
from college with my BA, separated from my husband leading to a
divorce, moved, changed some aspects of my work and applied for
seminary. That transition gave me a stress score of 287. So you
probably won't be surprised to learn that I spent the first week
of seminary in my dorm room sick as a dog. We have to take good
care when these changes confront us.
We need to take time. Maybe not 40 years or even 40 days, as Jesus
did before beginning his ministry, but are we willing to take 40
minutes, a day at the beach, a little time to watch the clouds or
to write down an important dream that could hold a symbolic message
to us for our waking life? It is important to honor the natural
course and cycle of things. We can't really fight, resist or ignore
Mother Nature. She is a powerful force and has her own ways of getting
our attention.
And the universe needs us to honor our personal development, for
us to follow our calling and to give our singular gift to the world.
Think of the quote from Mary Harrington, "Never forget the
world needs your precise gifts." Or from Howard Thurman, "Don't
ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go
do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
Endings. Transitions. Beginnings. Take a deep breath. Honor your
calling.
This is a process that will help you come alive.
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