by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given January 4, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Out of the wind and cold,

come into the warmth of this sanctuary.

Out of the noise of the busy city,

come into the quiet of this holy space.

Out of the busy-ness of our lives,

come into this place of reflection and renewal.

Come, let us worship together!

For thousands of years people have been making New Year’s resolutions.  This practice was in fact started by the Babylonians more than 4,000 years ago.  At that time the most common resolution was to return borrowed things.  Oh, how easy that would be!  Just get that book back, or that CD, and wipe the slate clean.  A new person for the new year.

But today I want to talk about changes that go deeper than that.  I want to speak of changes that come not from the outside in, but from the inside out—because that truly is where lasting change occurs.

For me, change starts with a vague uneasiness that grows and grows until it becomes a gnawing discomfort.  That’s when I have to pay attention.  It is likely to come at a time of stasis, when there is not enough stimulation in my life, or when my life is unbalanced.  I begin to be irritable and restless.  But because change is hard and because the status quo is easy to maintain, I try to ignore these uneasy feelings and to distract myself with busy-ness or food or movies.  I would say these are my three favorite distractions.  Not that there’s anything wrong with any of this, per se—it’s good busy-ness, this working to save souls; it’s good healthful food, by and large, with the exception of my Krispy Creme Donut addiction; and the films are of high quality—I wouldn’t waste my time going to shallow movies.  No, I’m not drinking or cramming myself with fast food or frittering my time away.  No, nothing like that, I tell myself.  But nevertheless, I know when I begin to use distractions to escape from myself, from the inner voice that’s saying I need a change.

We all need both stability and novelty, of course—in fact, change is better done in the context of stability.  That stability can come in both big and little ways.  When I leave home on a trip, I like to take a cloth and a meditation bell, to make a little altar that will remind me of my loyalties.  We can do things like keeping the same car for 10 or 15 years; we can use cloth napkins over and over again instead of throwing away paper napkins; we can resist fashion trends and wear longer lasting classical garments.  We can gather around us friends that we keep through the years. All of these things stabilize our lives, so that we can venture into new territory, having that support.   

Still, there are formidable barriers to change.  Sometimes we tell ourselves, well, I’ve tried, and I can’t change.  I’m always going to be X, Y, or Z.  It is true that we are who we are, and that the past determines much of the present.  We can’t deny that.  But there is a measure of decision-making that is always possible—always.  So we need to have faith in ourselves and faith in the universe.  Opportunities come.  Grace falls upon us.  And intentionality itself has a way of creating a future.  One of our congregants told me the other day that I preached a sermon like this a few years back, and this sermon led her to begin violin lessons.  And she’s still playing.  She says her family is not so pleased, but she is. 

A minister friend of mine made a surprising change in her life.  She got a call at her church one night several years ago—it was from a visitor to this country, an African of the Muslim faith, asking about a teach-in she was conducting on globalization.  Fearing that he could not find the church, she picked him up for the meeting.  They fell in love, he asked her to marry him within a matter of days, they married a few months later, and now they spend time on two different continents.  She is in her 60s, he is in his 40s, and gorgeous.  You just never know what the universe will turn up, and then you are called upon to respond.

Another barrier to change is the understandable fear that we might make a mistake.  Well, yes, we might.  You perhaps heard the story about the searcher who went to the spiritual teacher and asked, “How do I find happiness?”  “Through making wise choices,” said the teacher.  “But how do I learn to make wise choices?” asked the searcher.  “Through making foolish choices,” answered the teacher.

I am reminded of the real-life story of the man who was to become my teacher and mentor when I was studying to become a psychotherapist.  He said when he began his own journey of learning, he went to study with the great founder of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls.  My teacher, Neil, decided to buy a motorcycle and ride from his home in Michigan to Esalen, in Big Sur, where Perls was in residence.  Well, it was the 1960s.  He got the biggest, blackest, shiniest motorcycle he could find, and then suited himself up all in black leather, even to the huge black motorcycle gloves with silver studs.  Talk about studs!  Then he gathered his friends and family—a wife and five children—all together for the big leave-taking.  He said he put on his fearsome helmet, waved goodbye, kicked up the kick-stand—and the motorcycle promptly fell on its side, pinning him to the ground.  An inauspicious beginning.

Sometimes we’ll make bad choices—or get caught in our own ego-tripping.  Every day will not be rosy.  That’s not a reason to become a passive observer of life instead of a player.  One question that I find useful to ask is this:  what would you do if you knew you wouldn’t fail at it?  Fear of failure can paralyze us and whittle down our dreams or keep them from even being considered.  Remember this:  virtually everyone is afraid of failing when we move into unknown territory.  But what is failure, really?  Failure is not trying and finding that we’re headed in a wrong direction—failure is letting our fear get the best of us and never really trying at all.  It is saying, “I can’t,” before we even venture out.

But how do we know what we really want?  Sometimes our hesitancy comes from uncertainty.  This matter of discernment is a challenge.  We have to somehow get to the heart of our real desire, and that desire almost always lies in the realm of the spirit.  In a society that is so given to consumerism, so lost to materialism, we are easily thrown off the path.   I was appalled recently to read that some women these days are actually having foot surgery so that they can fit into the new fashionable shoes with the triangle-shaped toe box.  It’s called “toe cleavage” and “deboning.”  One surgeon who does these operations talks about it as “style surgery”:  “It is simply fulfilling a need, a need to wear stylish shoes.”  As columnist Ellen Goodman commented, “That’s a sentence that should make you raise your eyebrows, if your forehead hasn’t been paralyzed with Botox.”  These women say that high heels make them feel powerful.  Think about it.  Powerful, when you can hardly walk in these stilettos?  No, the makers and sellers of these shoes are getting at something much more basic—it’s the same longing that makes women have their bodies cut to gain bigger breasts or smaller tummies: the desire to be wanted, to be loved.  Slicing off parts of your feet would not be a way to solve this problem.

But how do we get under the surface and get in touch with our truest desires?  It’s kind of like sugar—we can think we need it, even crave it, but the nutritional value is nil.  How do we leave the addictions, which draw us with a kind of desperation, and instead get to the nourishment that really feeds us, nourishment that is steady and sure, nourishment that is grounded in spirit?

Last spring I had an experience that pushed me deeper—for the first time in my life, I did a fast.  Now this wasn’t any big deal fast of 6 or 8 days, or even 3 days.  It was a liquids-only fast from sun-up to sundown on one day.  But since I had never fasted before, I was apprehensive.  Food is important to me.  Eat to live.  Well, on the appointed day, I was at a meeting out of town, and so I did fine during the meeting, with all of the stimulation to distract me.  And then on the long ride home, I was all right, because again, I had people to talk to.  But when I got home, I realized that it was only 4:00 p.m. and the sun would not set until 8:00.  And I was really hungry by then.  I tried to just be with the hunger and not distract myself, and to my surprise I got in touch with feelings I didn’t even know were there—deep feelings of loneliness.   I became acutely aware that, though I eat to nourish my body, I also eat to distract myself and to comfort myself.  Loneliness is an occupational hazard—ministers are with people so much of the time, but in the role of leader and helper.  We need to seek relationships outside of the church setting, with people who are not our congregants—which is one of my goals for this New Year.

Mostly what pulls at us to change has to do with relationship or with call.  The most basic relationship is with ourselves and our God.  We can’t feel easy in our own skin if we are hurting ourselves by not taking care of our bodies or if we are behaving in ways that we can’t respect, or if we are out of right relationship with others we care about.  Sometimes some task is pulling at us, something that will not let us go. In each case there will be a nagging, a pulling, that we must pay attention to.  Truthfully most of the time I change because I just have to—this heavenly nagging gets to me, and I become depressed or miserable or just plain sick.  I don’t have much tolerance for unhappiness.  If I step out of line, God picks me up like a mother cat and moves me where I need to go, generally shaking me a bit in the process.

Now to get practical for a few minutes. This is the self-help part of my sermon.  It’s one thing to know you want to change—it’s another to actually do it.  A few helpful hints—I’ll give you three p’s to remember.

The first p is for plan.  Get a plan.  For example, if you’re going to walk 2 miles a day, when will you walk?  Where will you walk?  What will you wear if it’s raining, which it sometimes is, in Portland?  Are there companions who would make a walk more fun?  Going from the abstract notion of change to the specifics of change—the how—is necessary if you are to carry through.

The second p stands for people, people to support you in your wish to change.  As St. Paul said, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.  Be around people who care about you and who will encourage you when you begin to doubt yourself, people who will remind you that you are a good person and deserving of the very best that life offers. Depending on the kind of change you’d like to make, you may need to get a therapist or a spiritual director or a coach or you made need to join a group.  You’ve always wanted to write?  Join a writer’s group.  You want to get back into tennis, as I do?  Sign up for tennis lessons.

It’s easy to get thrown off course—you will need to hold on to the true desire, to the need, that drew you to change in the first place.  So maintaining a spiritual practice of some kind is very important—that’s the third p:  spiritual practice.  Choose a practice that feels right for you, whether it’s meditation or prayer or devotional reading or whatever, and go back to it every day, even if just for five minutes.  During this time you can renew your promise.

So—get a plan, be around people who support you, and maintain a spiritual practice.  Plan, people, practice.

But even if we do all these things, some changes just seem impossible, out of reach, too hard.  You begin to realize it’s not in your power to go where you want to go.  That’s when your relationship with your God comes into play.  God, your highest value, whatever—don’t get hung up on the nomenclature.  You just have to know that you, by yourself, are not sufficient, that you need a partner, a spiritual partner, to see you through these hard changes.  You need to give up control, because frankly you don’t have control anyway.  When you finally admit you need help, as hard as that is on the ego, then miraculously, help seems to come.

We are a society that chases after happiness like a dog chasing after a car—we have no idea what we’re chasing and we wouldn’t know what to do with it if we caught it.  We have so many quick fixes in this culture—food, alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping for something new, as though the newness of the outer clothing could shift the pain of the inner spirit.  But the aching of the soul will not be so readily eased.  Said St. Augustine, “My heart is restless, until it rests in thee.”  May we finally stop long enough to heed the voice within, which will call us to the real desires of our hearts.  May we find the humility to stand unashamed, in our need.  May we have the courage in this New Year to unfold in our true beauty and become the person we were always meant to be.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we come today in fear and in expectation.  We fear that we can never let go of our demons, that they will hold us forever.  And yet we carry within us a secret sense of hope, a voice that says to us over and over again, “You can, you can!  I will be with you.”  We ask today for your blessing, for when we are truthful with ourselves, we know that we are not sufficient to the good that we would do, to the person that we would become.  Grant us peace for this day and courage for the journey.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

In this New Year, may you know the true desires of your heart, and may they be fulfilled.  Go now in love, and go in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All right reserved.