by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given January 13, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Come into this house of worship, this community of fellowship, this community of love.

May these walls provide shelter from the storm.

May this be a place where there is laughter and joy.

a place to hold memories and hopes,

a place where we are the people we hope to become.

Come now, and let us worship here together.

A little over ten years ago, I was in the midst of a major transition in my life. I had been living in Duluth, Minnesota, and working at a newspaper as a copy editor for six years. I liked the work and I liked the place where I was living, but I had also come to sense that I was supposed to do something else with my life. Over time I came to discern a call to ministry. For a while I didn’t tell anyone about it—hoping that it might go away—but it didn’t.

I applied to Starr King School in Berkeley. After a couple months of waiting, the school invited me to come. I was very excited, but in almost the same moment the reality of the move set in and I was filled with fear. I might actually be doing this. Now, even though some people in Duluth call their city the San Francisco of the north, I knew that I was in for a major move.

I had a number of months to make my transition. I had my farewell lunches with friends. I went to the favorite sites one last time. I sold off most of my furniture. In August I sold my car and rented a small U-Haul truck to make my way west. I remember all of the mixed feelings. There was the sadness of leaving, the relief that all the goodbyes were finally over, the excitement about this amazing new place I where I was going. And with all of it the fear and trepidation and the questions, “what am I getting myself into?”

In planning the trip, I gave myself plenty of time to make my way across the country. The plan was to see things, to have a good number of days to make the transition.

So I left Duluth, and made my way across Minnesota and into the Dakotas. But it wasn’t long before my visions of a good transition were replaced with impatience and nervousness. Now that I had left and was in the middle of country that looked very different from what I was used to my fears about what I was getting myself into seemed to grow. When I would stop somewhere I would not be out of the truck long before I felt compelled to get back in and get back on the road. I was too restless to stop for very long. I was much more concerned about the destination than the journey.

As I continued on, and the territory looked increasingly unfamiliar, my anxiety just kept growing. It seemed as if my life was a lot more up in the air than it had ever been before.

The low point came somewhere in Wyoming. Somehow I had made my way off the interstate and thought it would be good to see more of this area. I didn’t really have a plan, just a thought that it was something I should do. Wyoming is a beautiful place, but it was so very foreign to me. It had an amazing vastness to it, but for me it was just vast and isolated. It was the middle of August, and it was over 100 degrees outside. And there weren’t hills here, but mountains with long winding steep roads, and the little U-Haul truck was struggling. It wasn’t able to go more than 20 or 30 miles per hour. I looked down at the temperature gauge and could see that the truck was getting hot.

There I was. There was not a tree to be seen. Just brown landscape. I was hot and tired and frustrated—actually kind of scared. I seemed to be a long way from where I had started and a long ways from where I was going. I was in the middle of nowhere in a truck that was about to blow. At that moment my trip seemed to be anything but some romantic pilgrimage across the country to a new place and a new life. Right then I was just miserable.

The next chance I had, I pulled over at a gas station. I stopped the truck and got it checked. I got something cold to drink and I looked at a map. I steadied myself and looked carefully at where I was and where I needed to go. I recharted the route and got a little more focus again. I decided that I needed to get back to the interstate system. I then figured out where I would go each day. That, too, seemed to help. I slowed down and figured out just how far it was going to be before California was in sight. The miles went by. I got to the destination a day and a half earlier than expected.

Not all transitions we make in life put us in Wyoming in the middle of August in a U-Haul truck. But is that not the way it is sometimes, when we are between one place and another, when we have our feet in two worlds and it seems as if the two worlds are moving in different directions?

Transitions are happening all the time in our lives. They happen to us, personally, they happen in our families, they happen at work, at church, they happen in our country and the larger civilization. It happens when we realize that something in our life is gone. It may happen suddenly when we lose someone. It may happen over time when we realize that we are growing apart from some part of our life and don’t quite know what that means. It comes when we see our child going off to the first grade and we know that a period in their life and in our life has ended and that another part is beginning. It may come in our later years when we realize that we can no longer care for ourselves the way we used to and we need to make changes in our living arrangements. It is something that can simply happen with the passage of time. As another year begins we are aware of how quickly the years go by. Some birthdays are more routine than others. But as we age they seem to come faster and faster.

Transitions happen in all kinds of ways—some we choose, some we have no say over. Through it all we come to see ourselves in different ways. We come to see our lives changing. We try to make sense and look to the future. And with it comes all kinds of emotions. Sadness and fear, joy and hope, frustration and anticipation. We each approach change in our own way. We may not deal with it like the person next to us. Some of us will do a lot of outward processing. For others, it happens and we are hardly aware of it.

But we are aware that something in our lives is changing, something is ending, and that something new is coming. But we’re also not there yet. We’re somewhere in between and that somewhere isn’t all that comfortable of a place. There’s a gap and we want to make our way over it. But it is not always that easy.

That gap is what William Bridges would probably call the middle period, or the fallow period, in a transition. Bridges is considered a guru in the field of transitions—both on the personal level and on the institutional level. He articulates three stages in any life transition. First comes the ending part. This is when we are aware that something is changing. That something can happen suddenly, it can happen over a long period of time. It happens when we realize that we are not what we once were.

What happens next is called the neutral place, or the fallow place. It is where we are leaving something and making our way towards something else, but we may not quite know what that means. Bridges describes it as “the zone between the old and new … when nothing feels solid.” 

This middle time is what finally gets us to the last step in transition, the new beginning.  This is where, as Bridges writes, we take hold of some new reality. We are no longer in the old place and now start to feel comfortable in the new one.

Where I’d like to focus today is on that middle part. That part about the gaps. When I look back on my trip across the country, I realize what an important time it was. I was making a major, major change in my life and at the time, I can now see, did not appreciate how big it was. It was the angst of the middle period that prepared me for what was coming. I could not wait for that transition to end, but when I look back, I also realize that it was something that I had to experience. It is something that helped prepare me for all the changes that were coming up for me. That part of the transition was just the beginning of many changes that would happen in my life.

Not all transitions are hard. Some come easily. They are welcome. But when they are hard, it is not easy to stay in the discomfort of the neutral zone. Bridges says that most people don’t actually resist change. What we resist is the transition. But it is the transition that helps us get to that place of acceptance.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t resist. We want things in life to be settled and stable, but that is not how they are. This is a time filled with uncertainty. It is filled with doubt. It can be filled with fear.

In theological terms, we could call it going into the wilderness. It is when we are challenged. We struggle. We may find ourselves in the depths of despair. We know where we have been but don’t necessarily know where we are going. It is when we are vulnerable. We bargain with God.

But just as there is danger in the wilderness, there is also possibility. It is a place that can be very fertile. It is when we leave behind what is most familiar—but also what keeps us in the patterns that are hard to lose. It is in this very place that we are able to begin to see ourselves and our lives in a different way.

We are asked to let go. We are asked to let go of the ego. To let go of our expectations about what will be. We are asked to listen and to be patient. We are asked to simply look and to pay attention to what is in front of us. We are asked to see what is emerging for us. We are asked to trust. We are asked to see ourselves as part of a vast and complicated and mysterious universe.

When you are first in the desert, it looks as if there is no life at all. But of course when you are there for a while it starts to look very different. When you are there for a while you start to see all kinds of life moving around.

And in life, it is when we find ourselves out of our familiar patterns, when we are no longer with the people we have been with, when we are no longer in the routine that has become like a rut, that something new starts to emerge. As Annie Dillard would say, it is when you see the back parts of God. It may not be that we have chosen it, but it is what we have and it is what we are called to live with and to grow with and change with.

Jesus did not choose to go into the desert for 40 days. It was in the desert where he suffered, he struggled, where he was tempted by all kinds of things. But it was also during that time that he was called to go out into the world to preach his message.

I once read a story about Vaclav Havel as he struggled to live under the Communist system in Czechoslovakia. He was a writer but was not able to write what he wanted to. It was as if he and his country were pinned under a boulder. He did not know what to do in response to the oppression. He fell into a deep depression.

He sat in his despair and finally, one day, he wrote an open letter of protest to the head of the Communist party. The letter got him thrown in jail, but it also became the text of an underground movement that eventually led to the nonviolent overthrow of the government in 1989. Havel would later say that writing the letter was an act of self therapy, an alternative to suicide. It was his expression, out of the midst of his confusion and depression, that he would not live divided anymore. In confusion and despair, he knew that he could not sit in silence anymore. He knew that if he did that, he would destroy himself from within.

In the middle place, we can know fear, we can know despair, but we are asked to listen to what the spirit is saying, we are asked to not give in to fear but to be patient and let where we need to go emerge.

“In the darkness the eye learns to see," said poet Theodore Roethke.

Waiting for the future to emerge, of course, is not a solitary endeavor. It is something that each of us does in our lives in all kinds of ways. But it is also something that happens to us in church, in the larger culture, in the world.

Last Friday evening, Joanna Macy spoke here in our sanctuary. Macy is teacher, a scholar of Buddhism, who works to empower people and groups toward social change. She was one of my teachers at seminary in Berkeley. She spoke of what she calls the essential adventure of our time, the Great Turning. It is what she calls the transition we are in from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

It compares in significance with two other watersheds in human history: the agricultural and the industrial revolutions. While the first required centuries and the second generations, this revolution must occur within years. And that, despite all obstacles and uncertainties, is what seems to be happening. Macy called the system we are in a suicidal system, one where we are consuming more goods than we need, and in doing do, destroying the planet. At some point we will have used everything up.

This is a liminal time, where we are between past and future. She calls for a different way of being, when our focus will be on relationship, and not profit. It is a time when we will have learned to live gently upon the earth and when what we do will respect other living things. That we can use of technology and resources in such a way to have plenty for ourselves and for generations to follow us.

For Macy, we are very much in a period of change. We are in some in-between place and we are not sure exactly what the future looks like.

But she was clear that we don’t need to have all of the answers before we trust ourselves to be in that middle place. We have to first have the courage to move in that direction and to be open to what will come. She said these words that have been in my mind since I heard her speak: “You give yourself to life as life gives itself to you.” She said that we are called to ride the wave.

And she offered some advice for staying with the uncertainty of these times and finding our way into the future.

She tells us to come from a place of gratitude, to pay attention to what we see and to be aware of all that it is we have. To be open to all that comes.

She advises to not be afraid of the dark. She asks us to trust in what we can’t yet see, but to have faith in what the future might be.

She tells us to link arms, to be in relationship with others. That we must be connected, that we must be supporting and caring for each other in these times.

She tells us to act our age—that we have in us the heritage of billions and billions of years and that we can bring that knowledge to what it is we are doing in this life.

And finally she says that we need to invite the future. We need to let the future into our imaginations and let a new world arise out of that imagination. We cannot know exactly what it will be, but we can imagine what we want it to be.

This is the fertile time we are in. It is ripe with possibility. And it all comes out of the growing awareness of what is not right. In the mistakes of the past and present we need to see the future. We are asked to stay in both places and to live in the uncertainty, in the fear and in the hope of this time.

Words of Rilke:

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

It has its inner light, even from a distance –

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which hardly sensing, we already are;

a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave …

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

The road is sometimes long, it is often uncertain. It is filled with possibilities, it can be filled with fear. The most important thing through it all is to hold fast to our values, to hold fast to what is most important to us. To know that where it is we can find our grounding. It is this that will give us what we need through whatever comes our way. It is this that will get us to where we want and need to be.

May we, in this year and in the years ahead, feel the wind in our faces. May we know life in all of its wonder. May we have the courage to be in the world. Even when we are in the wilderness. May we know that no matter where we might find ourselves, we are held in love and that that love will help us know the way. Amen.

PRAYER

Great spirit, give us courage for the journey. In all of our days help us to live fully in the midst of many changes, many deaths and many births. Wake our senses that we might hear the call of the earth. Give us hope. Give us patience. Help us to be open to what love calls us to do in the world. Amen. 

Give yourself to life, as life gives itself to you, good people. Go this day in love and in hope. Amen.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.