Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 11, 2001

You Never Step into the Same River Twice

Mark Twain once wrote in his notebook: "A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes." I certainly found this true of the time just devoted to my sabbatical. Though much of what I have to say this morning is reflective, I hope you will relate some of this to your own lives, for I know that all of us experience the deep chasm that often develops between our expectations and what really happens.

I am back at work after a three month sabbatical; thankfully, I will add. A wonderful benefit of ministry here at UUSMC is one month of paid sabbatical leave for each year of ministry, due at the end of six years, which many congregations now offer to encourage longer ministries. So, in August I had earned my first ever sabbatical, of which I now have used half.

Now, I know most of you think, as I did, that what a wonderful thing it would be to have a block of time, uninterrupted to use for study, rest, renewal, all those things sabbaticals are typically used for, and it is. Yet, while much of that did happen, so much happened that I had no way of predicting that the look, the feel, the very substance of my sabbatical took on a very different form from what I had planned. The fact that I did not anticipate that happening is not all that unusual, except, to my chagrin, I am always preaching about "the only thing that doesn’t change, is change," to paraphrase Heraclitus. This is a good example of being "hoist on one’s own petard." I am rather fond of that quote from Hamlet, and said it to a fellow who thought I said "toasted on one’s own batard" which is pretty much the same thing. To be raised up on one’s own weapon, which is the meaning of "hoist on one’s own petard" would be about the same as being toasted on one’s own chunk of French bread. Either way, I found myself doing that very thing that I preach we ought to be wary of doing; for, being overly wedded to plans for the future is a sure setup for disappointment, if—and I repeat, if—we are not prepared for the very likely need to change or alter those plans. But—I couldn’t help myself! After all, this was my very first sabbatical, my first opportunity to study, research, write, go on retreat, without having to worry about my work; so for months preceding my sabbatical, I planned carefully, using the UUA guide for sabbaticals, what I would do with those precious three months to make the most of the time. I pretended to myself that there might be some changes, but they were only minor in my mind’s eye.

Did I ever get a wake up call, in fact two or three, that changed my time so radically that by the end of October nothing of my plans really looked whole to me and I found myself sitting in meditation trying to make peace with all that gone awry.

Certainly some of the changes were far more wonderful than I could have ever expected. Echoing Twain: "A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes." For about the time my plans were taking shape, I was informed by my daughter, Stephanie, that she was pregnant with twins, and wasn’t it wonderful that they would be born in July right before my sabbatical? Well, it was wonderful, but it is amazing how much you forget about new babies! It turned out that I did spend a good chunk of that time helping my daughter during those early days when there was never more than one sleeping baby in the house at a time. Twins are not twice as much work, they are more like three times as much. Further, I was amazed by how much I love being a grandmother, a Nana. Change does happen dramatically over time.

Back in the very early 1980s, when my daughter was in high school, I used to tell her that being a grandmother was at the bottom of my list of things to be, but it is amazing what fifteen or twenty years can do to change the lists we make of good and bad, things preferred and things to avoid. I had hoped to spend at least three weeks at my favorite yoga-meditation center, the Kripala Institute in Massachusetts, instead I spent about that much time meditating while feeding babies in my arms, which, I might add, is a pretty good form of meditation. I pondered long and hard during those many feeding times about what made it feel so different to be a grandparent, for it was nothing that I had expected. I fell in love with those little girls, and began to see life afresh, for, in some mysterious way, they give you a whole new lease on life. The future is extended for grand-parents, we look further down the road than we might have otherwise. At least that is how I have come to see it for myself. I thought I had seen the last of Disney World, but, gee whiz, I have to go back there now.

The birth of the babies was one change that was to some extent expected, but at the same time not what I thought it would be; yet, much more than I would have ever anticipated.

Then, in dark contrast, there was September 11. While we might consider, contemplate, intellectually even realize the possibility of some act of terrorism, very few, if any of us ever expected such a horrendous event. How could we? After the fact, maybe some would-be clairvoyants have claimed to have seen it, but they were not telling us beforehand. How could we expect such evil acts? At no time in over one hundred years, in any of our lifetimes, had any such thing occurred on continental U.S., soil; there was an unspoken sense of invincibility that existed for the most part. The Cuban missile crisis certainly gave us pause, but most people felt safe in the States. We could watch the troubles in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Israel and Palestine, not to mention all the internal troubles of various poor and struggling countries around the globe.

Here we have had the dreaded hanging chads! We had no real sense of pending danger of the sort that we have felt since 9/11. At the same time, we never again can we not expect them, for in some subtle way, once the breach was made, once it was seen by the world that we could be acted up, we can feel sure that others may try to do the same. This is a change that we cannot deny, and it fixes a mark upon our very national character that we now have to learn to live with. The coming months are going to exercise our ability to adapt to such dramatic changes, and as we are beginning to see already, the tendency to polarize the population into the for-us-against-us extremes has been emerging in the country.

One reaction to this is nostalgia. We want to look back to the pre-9/11 days, or if it is other tragedies in our lives that have forced us to make changes we did not want, we also have the tendency to harken back to some sweeter, less hurtful time. We look backward through those 20-20 rose-colored glasses and recall when things we so much better, even if they were not. Mark Twain once said (I paraphrase): The things that I remember best, never happened. Well, perhaps there were things that were better about the past, but rarely everything.

Comedienne Beth Lapides once commented: "I was at a party where somebody was talking about the Good Old Days. I was like, "Which Good Old Days? During the McCarthy blacklist? Or when blacks couldn’t vote? When they burned women at the stake because they were herbalists? Those Good Old Days?"

We do need to adapt to change, to be able to believe in Good New Days, but there is no doubt we have a lot of different ways of doing so, some better than others. My question for you, for myself as well, is, how do you deal with change? How are we to take in the challenges that life is constantly placing before us without collapsing before the weight of immediate decision-making, adapting our pace to the new time, finding our depth—all those metaphorical ways of understanding the different ways we see, feel, know the stress of change. And, by the way, this is true even for change that we initially perceive as very good, like getting married, or having a baby, being promoted, or going on sabbatical. Transition/change is challenging under all circumstances, and we have a lot to learn from both the good transitions, those we would welcome, and from the undesirable ones, like Sept. 11.

There is an old saying from the 5^th Century BCE Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, which states: "You could not step twice into the same rivers, for other waters are ever flowing on to you." Or as we more often hear it, you can never step into the same river twice. That is, you may go to the same place on the river, step down at the same spot, but the river changes with every passing moment, so no matter how often you step into the water at that spot, you still step into a changed river. That seems fairly easy to comprehend, but what we find much less easy to understand is that we too, our lives, are also like the river. You and I are not the same people today we were a year ago, or even yesterday, for we have been changing physically in ways maybe that seem too small to notice, but changing nonetheless, and we have been changing mentally and spiritually as we see, hear, feel, touch the world and are touched by it from moment to moment. We realize this more distinctly when the big things, the great moments of wonder or tragedy occur, but in fact we are changing all along, even as the world is.

I am different in marked ways since I became a grandmother, all for the good I believe; and different because of the terrorism we are continuing to find ways to deal with, and I have a harder time finding good in that change.

We have always heard that people resist change, and I tend to hear this most as the summer wanes and autumn take hold. I hear people in markets, at church, all around say that they dread the cold, miss the summer already, hope the winter is brief, wish they could move to Florida for the winter, and so forth. Fewer people voice that they enjoy the fall weather. I happen to be one of them. While some dread this change of seasons, others like myself find this the best time of the year. In my case, I think it relates to my upbringing in Idaho, where my father was a fruit grower, and the beginning of autumn was the harvest time, the fulfillment of all the work of the winter, spring and summer, finally at fruition. Fruition: the time of fruiting, the culmination of the growing time. Aside from my agricultural leanings, I simply prefer the autumn weather, pleasant days, cooler nights, much less rain and cold than spring brings. I enjoy the movement of year as seen through the changing seasons, so much so, that I believe I would feel absolutely lost if I lived in equatorial or tropical place.

Change is not something we reject outright most of the time, but like the seasons, we have our definite preferences for the kind of change we find more or less comfortable.

I have talked recently with a couple of psychologist friends, both of whom have had a long-term, busy practices, and they shared that some of their clients who have had long battles with depression found themselves with a new lease on life following the Sept. 11^th disasters. Suddenly, they realized a greater meaning for their lives; they felt connected in special way with others who were grieving this national tragedy. It seems that for them, the change for the nation had a positive outcome, one that was totally unexpected. Certainly, there were some who had further feelings of fear and helplessness, but based on what I have heard from these friends, and since researched on the Internet, this change for the better was far more common. It seems paradoxical, doesn’t it? The unexpected often is.

I was reminded of the story about Dorothy Parker, a writer and humorist who led a very busy life. One day she was foolish enough to accept two baby alligators as a gift. She brought them home, ran a little water in the bathtub, and put them there until she could decide what to do with them.

The next day, the cleaning woman came by while Parker was out. When Parker returned that evening, she found the house not cleaned and this note: "Dear Madam, I am leaving. I cannot work in a house with alligators. I would have told you this before, but I never thought the subject would come up."

This is the crux of the matter with change. We never do know what will come up. Just think back on your own lives for a moment. I suspect that most of you, like me, had some sort of plan for your lives when you were young, certainly by high school. Did those plans work out like you thought they would? And, what things happened that you would have never been able to plan, to consider? I know that for myself, very few of the things that I planned with great care turned out the way I had wanted; furthermore, the things that did not want to conform to plan that I struggled to make fit the plan, usually went from bad to worse. On the other hand, when I let go of the plan, when I would "go with the flow" as we used to say, usually better, more interesting, often very special things happened that I would never have thought of either. Over my 50+ years, I have learned to believe in serendipity, for so often have really wonderful things been just around the corner when I let go of the old way of thinking, the old plan.

Like most pastoral counselors, I have seen my fair share of people who will not change, refuse to change, see change as the enemy, and fight with every fiber of their being to keep the status quo. You know people like these, too. They can find no comfort in difference, in the possibilities that can come with change. Sadly, some of the most embittered souls I have known fall into this category.

Back when we were children, we thought we would grow up into teenagers, then adults, and we had a suspicion that old age might also be part of the process. Yet, once we become adults, we often forget that we still have growing to do, and it is not just growing older, but growing better and wiser, and hopefully a lot more interesting.

There is a story of little Mary illustrates what I am getting at. One day in Sunday school Mary was asked, "Who made you?" After thinking for a moment the little girl replied, "Well, God made a part of me."

"Part of you?" asked the teacher was startled. "What do you mean part of you?"

"It’s like this," little Mary explained, "God made me very little, but then I grew the rest myself."

My sabbatical did not go according to my well-laid plans, so I had to let it happen anyway. I found myself fretting because this, that, or the other thing was not happening as I planned. Important changes were necessary: I interrupted my sabbatical to help my daughter when she had to go out of town, then to do the service at Mill Creek on Sept. 16^th, and then other changes were required as I put myself on a chaplaincy call list for the New York Ground Zero crews. And, so it goes. Life, real life, gets in the way of our plans. Sometime around the third week of October, I realized something had happened while I was not paying attention. The growth I had planned for my sabbatical had happened, it just happened in different ways than I had expected it to.

I remember when I heard that the World Trade Centers had been hit by those jets, as some of you have already heard me relate on Sept.16: I was in New York, about an hour north out of the city, sitting on the sofa at my daughter’s house, holding one of the girls. My daughter had received a call that notified us, and she switched the TV channels just in time to see the repeat of the second plane plowing into the building. In shocked disbelief, I sat staring at the television, momentarily unaware of the baby in my arms, when she began wiggling. I looked down at Haley, who has this big open-mouthed, ear-to-ear grin, and she was grinning up at me as if to say, "Hey, Nana, you’re not paying attention to me." As I have since shared with others, I looked up from that tiny, precious baby back to that horror on the television screen, and there was infinity between the two. I have come to look upon that moment as an epiphany in my life, for there exists for me no way of understanding how any infant could be "created" to become the kind of person who grows up to fly a jet plane on a suicide mission into a building destroying thousands of lives in the process.

I was reared in a devoutly Christian home where everyone believed that God intervened in the world to make things happen, and it was the evil in people that thwarted God’s will. There was also a strong flavor of Calvinism to suggest that everything that happened was part of God’s Plan. I never found myself in consonance with those beliefs, and have spent most of my life as a religious person, studying religion, working for spiritual growth, praying, meditating, trying to be a good person, and I have long since ceased to believe in any magic-man-in-the-sky who gives some people good things and smites others, often seemingly innocent, for no apparent reason. Looking into the innocence of that seven-week-old baby’s face, then immediately at that act of religious fervor, "righteous justice in the name of God" those men called it, their supporters call it thus today, and I felt deeply in my heart what my head has known for a long time: We are not born to hate and evil acts, we are reared to them.

I am, you are, we are all growing ourselves all our lives. We grow under the influence of our families, later of our friends, often of our faith. We are growing in some direction, be it towards love, understanding, and compassion, or towards hate, bitterness and despair.

So at the end of my sabbatical, the question I asked of myself was: How did I grow during my sabbatical, and did any of that growth happen because of my initial plan? Well, ultimately the plan was to grow, in spiritual ways and physical ways, too. I needed the rest. Ministry is hard, often unrelenting work, and no matter how much we love our calling, ministers put in far too many hours and are very poor at taking time away. Too many of my colleagues have burned themselves out, workaholics in the true and very negative sense of the term, and wind up being poor in body and spirit. I needed the rest, and I got some, for which I thank you. Even though I missed being with you, my congregation, I return much healthier as a result of having these past three months. I also needed to meditate, to take my mind away from all the cares and anxieties of my pastoral calling, and I did. I just learned yet another way to meditate, and, trust me, holding a little baby while she frets, eats, or sleeps is a fine form of meditation. I had intended to get my meditation through yoga, but sitting up all night with a sick infant, is as much focus as I ever found at Kripalu. I wanted to find meaning, and I did, only it was through what seems meaningless that I was able to solidify a belief long floating rather aimlessly in my soul.

What I did not get was a perfect ending to this first time at sabbatical. I wanted: to have a completed outline for my book; to checked off X number of research options; to be able to say I had spent my weeks at the mediation center. That did not happen.

Gilda Radner, that brilliant comic from the first Saturday Night Live crew in the 1970s, who died quite young from ovarian cancer wrote towards the end of her life:

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

"Delicious Ambiguity." I would have never thought of speaking about changing, life’s unpredictability, all the unknowns, unplan-ables, the sheer mystery of it all as "delicious." Yet, I suppose it is delicious, that pleasant, delightful, knowing experience of finding that the most wonderful thing in life is life itself.

So be it.

November 18, 2001 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 18, 2001

The Harvest of the Haggard Year

Here is what I know about how we came to have a holiday for gratitude, Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving is an annual holiday we in the United States celebrate on the fourth Thursday in November. It started, according to Gov. William Bradford’s journal, out of three days of prayer and feasting by the Plymouth colonists in June of 1621. It is also known that an earlier thanksgiving was offered in prayer, but no feasting, on Dec. 4, 1619, by members of the Berkeley plantation near what today is Charles City, VA. The first national Thanksgiving Day, proclaimed by President George Washington, was celebrated on Nov. 26, 1789. Then, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made it an annual holiday to be commemorated on the last Thursday in November. That may be how we came to have the holiday, but the history of Thanksgiving Day often tends to overlook the real sense of gratefulness that we are expected to understand about not only its origin, but the yearly celebration as a time to uplift the virtue of gratitude that we need in our lives.

We relate sometimes more to outward or physical signs in our rituals, which is not altogether surprising, for those are the elements that are concrete, that are much easier, especially in our youth, to recall. Like the great Thanksgiving Day feast, the various family traditions of chestnut stuffing or cornbread dressing, or Uncle Jimmy’s bourbon cranberry relish, with more bourbon than cranberry (this was a special treat for all the teens in a friend’s family). Further, we get wrapped up in the details of who is going whose family this year, who will make what food, what to do about the television, etc. Of course, how the turkey will turn out is often a big concern. One of my favorite stories came from the television food program "The Frugal Gourmet," aka, Jeff Smith, who one time read this letter from a viewer on the air: "I have had my turkey in the freezer for a year and a half. Will it take longer to thaw?"

Over the years I have been doing these Thanksgiving sermons, I have tried to look at different aspects of this wonderful day of feasting and celebration. I have preached about all the things we should be thankful for that we have, sermons about the things we should be thankful we don’t have; historical perspectives of our national Holiday, and I find this year a different sense of all we are wanting to be thankful for, while at the same time a sense that there is much we would just as soon avoid thinking about. This year it seems most appropriate then, to consider how it is that we locate our general understanding of what it means to be thankful, to be a thankful people, in light of the horrible things that have been happening in our country and continue to happen around the world today?

This is going to be a very, very tough Thanksgiving for so many people in our country this year. I know you have probably been thinking about the survivors, victims’ families, airplane crews that are indelibly linked in our minds to Sept.11. Wondering about how we imagine the survivors must be feeling, distant though that may be for many if not most of us. There are thousands of individual stories so sad and poignant that they could make us weep a thousand times over for their heartbreak. Just thinking of all the children who will have this no more Thanksgivings with fathers or mothers, is enough.

Further, knowing that there is retaliation going on in a war against terrorism, "Operation Enduring Freedom," and our worry for those young men and women, all those now in battle, victims, warriors, leaders, all who are in that far off war zone. Plus, all the people who are innocent victims of fools, power-mongers, and the regular, run-of-the-mill greedy, unethical and self-aggrandizing detritus of the human community.

What can we glean of this sad and haggard time to bring to our own Thanksgiving Day table blessings, to voice our sadness and despair, and yet still be able to be thankful in the joyous sense that Thanksgiving Day most often represents for us?

I believe it was the American poet, Edna St.Vincent Millay, who wrote the line: "God bless the harvest of the haggard year." That line of poetry speaks to the feelings that so many of us are feeling this year, for it is undoubtedly a "haggard year" for the nation: haggard; that is, worn, tired, gaunt, bewildering, and sad. Yet, even in the midst of all this terrorism, the on-going fears and concerns, there have been real joys for people, for us here. We go on with living, working, celebrating, going forward in spite of the fears and things that might be ahead, either good or bad. So while we may be feeling that the harvest of the year since last November has been pretty thin on the ground; last year, when our biggest concern was counting the Florida ballots, there still have been those good parts of life that we want to celebrate. Even with all that has happened, there have been good times, so we look for the blessing of that meager harvest in some ways even more, and feel the gratitude for it even more, as well.

Tuesday, the 7^th of March, 1944, a girl barely in her teens wrote something amazing, something we still read today as a testament to the human ability to find the harvest in however a haggard year. Here is what that girl wrote:

And in the evening, when I lie in bed and end my prayers with the words, "I thank you, God, for all that is good and clear and beautiful," I am filled with joy.... I don't think then of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.... My advice is: "Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine, go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God. Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!" ...I've found that there is always some beauty left--in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself: these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance.

Part of what captures our imagination about this young Jewish girl, Anne Frank, living a horrible life secreted in an Amsterdam attic with other, often less grateful people, was her optimism, her ability to look for the good in whatever corner she could. Sure, she sometimes complained about things, mostly about a couple of her relatives who were whiners and could not see as well as a 14 year-old girl the need to avoid whining and carping, for those were not a part of the virtues that would do anyone any good in war.

So, even for us, we look for that blessing of a grateful heart that often is only truly present in the stressful times we are currently experiencing.

One of the behaviors that has been reported most consistently as occurring throughout the population has been the need to know where your own people were following the Sept. 11 terrorists attack. I did this myself, and so many people have told me that the first thing they wanted to know was where their family members were, even though in most cases, such as my own, we knew that they were no where near any of the reported sites of terrorist attacks. But, this behavior lifts up this basic impulse we so often see in crisis: to gather our loved ones close to us. We instantaneously learn what we have been taught all along, that love is the most important thing. We may know it in our minds, but crisis seals this truth in our hearts—truly, nothing else matters so much.

No doubt you have experienced this yourself, or heard it reported, or witnessed this truth in some fashion. I am always touched by the stories of people who just escaped a tornado, or got rescued from a flood, or any disaster where they have just lost all their worldly possessions, but over and over you will hear the survivors saying: "As long as our family is safe, that’s all that matters." Or as I have also heard it put, "If money can replace it, then everything will be all right." We can find another place to live, another car to drive, another china cabinet, even if it was great-great-great-Grandma Rivere’s, just so long as the ones we love are safe. That is the spirit of blessing in the "harvest of the haggard year."

When I was pregnant with my daughter my concerns were great, I was abysmally ignorant about pregnancy having come from a family were such things were not discussed, so I read probably too much, and in the process became very afraid of all the things that might go wrong and expressed my concerns to my doctor, who should have been given an award for Unmitigated Bluntness. He said to me, "If you consider all the literally millions of things that could go wrong, it’s a miracle any babies are born normal." I think, at least I hope, he must have followed that statement up with some kind of, "Don’t worry about it," reassurance, but all I remembered when I left his office (and still do), was: "If you consider all the literally millions of things that could go wrong, it’s a miracle any babies are born normal." What I wanted to hear was: Millions and millions of women have given birth to normal healthy babies, and probably you will, too.

Gov. Bradford who initiated the first Thanksgiving Feast, did so not so much in light of the thankfulness for the bountiful year and the salvation for the Plymouth Colony as a result, but in the shadow of the horrible north Atlantic voyage that was miserable, and the first awful winter when so many died.

December 26, 1620, Bradford recorded in his diary:

Now the heart of winter, and unseasonable weather, was come upon us, so that we could not go upon coasting and discovery, without danger of losing men and boat, especially considering what variable winds and sudden storms do there arise. Also
cold and wet lodging has so tainted our people (for scarce any of us were free of vehement coughs) as if they could continue long in that state, it would endanger the lives of many, and breed disease and infection amongst us.

The Colonists real sense of thankfulness was a product of surviving some pretty horrible conditions, such as most of us could not possible imagine. That they survived was the root of their celebration, and has been for many of the years our nation has faced crisis over the 381 years since that first Thanksgiving feast.

This is a sermon about how we learn to feel truly grateful, for deep gratitude usually only comes within the shadow of the depths of fear, within the shadow of loss.

This is why Meister Eckhart could say with all accuracy, "If the only prayer you say in your whole life is 'thank you,' that would suffice." Meister Eckhart, a Dominican friar who lived in the later 13^th early 14^th centuries, was a German theologian and mystic. "Eckhart taught what has been called speculative or essential mysticism." He got into loads of trouble with the church for his teachings (perhaps that is why this Unitarian minister often finds him so appealing), and died under an edict of heresy by the Inquisition. Much of what he wrote came out of a deep sense of conflict between the teachings of the Church, and the truth of his own heart.

And so it often happens with you and me, too, that we never really know what is truly most important until it suddenly looks like we might lose it. We are not afraid of terrorists ability to destroy our tall buildings or bridges or any things; we are afraid of their ability to take our loved ones from us. So this Thanksgiving I expect that many people will look around their respective tables and be reminded that for all the horrors we have experienced in this haggard time since September 11^th, the harvest of family and friends we will see before us will be the greatest source of our gratitude.