by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Welcome to this community of faith,

A place to be through all the seasons,

during the cool rain of winter,

the hot days of summer,

of spring and autumn and all the days in between.

It is good that we are here together.

Come now, and let us worship.

You may have heard of a book entitled Who Moved My Cheese? written by Dr. Spencer Johnson. In the book we meet two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and their tiny human-looking counterparts named Hem and Haw. They all live in a giant maze and they are in search of the thing that makes them happy and their lives complete—magical cheese.

Sniff and Scurry, the mice, use their animal instincts to run through the maze to find and enjoy the cheese. Right away they learn to pay attention to the quantity and the freshness of the cheese. Hem and Haw also find the cheese, but unlike the mice they don’t pay attention to how much cheese there is and whether there will be enough for tomorrow. They just settle in and get comfortable. They stop looking for more and even come to see the cheese as their own. “This is great,” Hem says. “There’s enough cheese here to last forever.”

Hem and Haw eventually become arrogant and selfish with the bounty of cheese. They become so content that they forget to pay attention to the changes around them. But eventually, the cheese is gone and they have no plans for what to do next. They get angry, cast blame, get depressed, nearly die while suffering the great loss of cheese.

Meanwhile the mice, Sniff and Scurry, were prepared for the end of the cheese. They have already run off looking for more cheese. But Hem and Haw have to think about it for a while. Haw finally decides to go off in search of new cheese, but Hem just stays put, gets hungry, gets angry, feeling the sting of injustice because his beloved cheese, the source of all happiness, disappeared without a sign. Haw eventually learns how to search effectively for new cheese and learns how to spot the signs of change so that he won’t be so surprised by new developments in changing cheeses.

Haw discovers something important in his search, that imagining new cheese helps him to find new cheese. He learns that letting go of old cheese helps him to move on to new cheese more quickly. He acknowledges that holding onto old beliefs interferes with discovery of new cheese. When Haw finds the new cheese, Sniff and Scurry are already there, of course. He tries to help his friend Hem to move on, leaving writing on the wall to guide him. These are some of the key things to remember:

Change happens (They keep moving the cheese)

Anticipate change (Get ready for the cheese to move)

Monitor change (Smell the cheese often so you’ll know when it is getting old)

Adapt to change quickly (The quicker you let go of old cheese the sooner you can enjoy new cheese)

Change (Move with the cheese)

Enjoy change (Savor the adventure and enjoy the taste of new cheese)

Be ready to change quickly to enjoy it again and again. (They keep moving the cheese)

You may see yourself and how you deal with change in one of the characters. I can see myself in most of them. There are times when I can see change coming and move with it and accept it and find myself in a new place and it is just fine. But there is also a strong part of me that reacts to things like Hem. I hold onto the past and I don’t want to move forward. I get downright cranky when things change, especially when I have been perfectly content with they way they have been.

I think that most of us are all of the characters at one time or another in our lives. Change, of course, is the one constant in our lives. The old cliché about change being the one thing we can count on is really true. We may even know all those things that help us to live with change, but depending on the thing that’s changing, we might or might not do very well with it.

Change is happening in many forms. There are the big changes: new job, new community, new child, new partner, loss of someone important, illness, you name it. But then there are all the things we deal with: the reality of getting older, our children getting older, change in a relationship. There are changes at work, changes in our community and in our state and in our world. There can even be changes that happen at our church. And we are reacting to all of it on some level.

And sometimes it is the little things that are the most difficult. When I worked at a newspaper some years back, the thing that drew the most complaints was the decision to drop one comic strip and add another.

There are the things that we decide to change and the things that seemly decide to change us. Through it all we come to see our lives constantly in flux. Most of the time we do okay. We live with what is happening. We figure out how it is we will make our way in the world. We learn to accept that we can’t predict when we will have a day or two when it gets to be a hundred degrees outside, but even if we have an air conditioner to turn on, it is something we can adjust to and live with. We don’t have much choice.

But sometimes it is a little harder. A change is coming or has come and we have to try to make sense of what this means and how our lives will be in the future. With it can come all kinds of emotions. Sadness and fear, joy and hope, frustration and anticipation. We bargain, we deny, we fight it. And sometimes we just don’t want any more of it. Sometimes we just get tired.

Each one of us brings our particular constitution to any change that comes our way. We approach things in our own particular way and we may not deal with it at all like the person next to us. For some change seems to happen and we are hardly aware of it. Some people seem poised to accept the next challenge. They like to rearrange the furniture all the time, they are ready to see what might be coming around the corner. And when it comes they are ready to deal with it.

For others, any kind of change throws their whole world into chaos. Their routine has been upset and it is going to take them a long time to adjust. Without enough time to plan, change is going to be anything but easy.

No matter how we might approach it, there are some definite stages that happen as we go through change. First of all something ends or you see that something is going to end—a job, a relationship, a chapter in our lives, you name it. The final stage is something new. And in between those two comes the tough one, the middle stage. It is sometimes called the fallow period and it isn’t always a comfortable place. There’s a gap between where we are and where we hope to be. We are no longer in one world but we may not be in the new place yet and the in between place is where the discomfort comes in. It has been said that it isn’t change that we resist as much as the transition to that change.

And that is why the middle place is hard. We may not know what is coming next and we may not be ready to leave what has been. We want our lives to be settled and stable, but of course they seldom are. We can’t know what the future will bring, and are asked to live in that space of unknowing, open to what will be coming. People who have lived with cancer have told me it is not always the news of the diagnosis that is hard as the period of waiting to know what the diagnosis will be. Once there is a diagnosis, they can make a plan and move forward from there.

Living in the place of change and chaos calls us to be open to what that time will bring. We are asked to honor what has been, but not to cling to it and to be open to where we will be in the next step. We are asked to let go of our ego, to let go of our expectations about what the future will hold. 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.

A story.

In a small village in China a farmer and his son go into the mountains searching for wood. They come upon a marvelous stallion and capture it. They take it home and the whole village comes to see the wonderful horse. The people of the village congratulate the farmer on his good fortune but the farmer will only say, “maybe good fortune, maybe not.”

One night the stallion escapes. The people of the village all come to console the farmer on his misfortune. Again the farmer only answers, “maybe bad fortune maybe not.”

A few days later the horse returns with many other horses. The poor farmer now has many horses. The villagers come by and praise him on his good fortune. But the farmer will only answer, “maybe good fortune maybe not.”

Later that month, the farmer and his son are breaking the horses when one of them throws the son. His arm is broken and he can’t work the horses. He might not be able to work the horses for the rest of the season and the farmer can’t do it himself. The people of the village come and offer condolences on the farmer’s bad fortune. The farmer answers, “maybe bad fortune maybe not.”

A few weeks later the Emperor’s soldiers come to the village conscripting the young men of the village. The Emperor is raising an army for a great campaign. The farmer’s son is passed over because of the broken arm. The villagers come to the farmer to share his good fortune. But the farmer will only say, “maybe good fortune, maybe not.”

We can always count on change in our lives, we can’t always know what will be good fortune and what will not be good fortune when we can see any given event with some perspective. In the moment we can’t always know what that will be, but we can have faith that whatever it is, it will be all right. We are asked to let go of expectations and outcomes and have faith that in the end we will find ourselves in a place where we can be. Maybe, over time, we step back and see how something that seemed so difficult brought us to a good place in the end. But at the time, it may not look that way.

These are times that can feel very unsettled, but they are also times that are filled with great possibility. This is a time when we leave behind what is most familiar—but also when we leave behind that which 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 called, in all of our days, to be open to what is coming our way and ask what meaning this has for us. And no matter how it is we deal with change, to be able to accept that change is a necessary part of life and that we need to be open to where we might be finding ourselves, even when we may not necessarily be eager to make the change that life is calling us to make.

Change is not always easy, but it is part of life that calls us to always be growing and always to be opening to new things. No matter our age, no matter our circumstance. More often than not, that change can bring us to new life. As a minister I’m constantly amazed seeing people, however reluctantly, being open to what needs to come next. We do make our way in the world.

I came across an interesting quote from James Schuyler: “It’s time again. Tear up the violets and plant something more difficult to grow.”

Most of us can probably look back at our lives and see things that at the time didn’t seem to be good changes at all, but in hindsight we are able to see things that came out of them and in fact they were good things, it just took some time to be able to see them.

Sometimes we find ourselves lost. Our lives don’t seem to have a point. And it is not at all clear where it is we are going. We feel alone amid all the change that is happening and we don’t know where we will land. That is when we are most called to know who we are, where we stand, to know what is constant. To hear what the spirit is saying and to be open to what that voice within is calling us to do. It means that at times when our lives are most out of order, being able to trust that we are very much part of the larger order and that in that trust we will find our way and that we will not get lost. God, spirit, whatever name you might use, is there, is present, is constant.

And it is right when we don’t quite know where we are going that something new starts to emerge. We have to show up and pay attention and hope that we can see it or hear it, to be open to what will come our way next.

Writer Victoria Stafford, a Unitarian Universalist minister, tells the story of a man who was in a bad place. His partner of many years was leaving him, his four teenage children, whom he’s loved and held all this time had all but stopped speaking him. He was a baker and an artist and his business was in tatters. Life was not going well for him at all. He asked the writer, “Did you know that disaster literally means falling star?”

Well one night, in the midst of all this change and turmoil in his life, he calls to tell about a note that somebody sent him. They weren’t at home, so he leaves a message: “Hey guys. Listen to this note that someone sent today: ‘Sir. You have saved my life with bread. Thank you. An old friend.’”

Stafford writes: “Our friend was silent for a long, long while. (We had a machine that allowed deep silences; it would not disconnect a caller lost momentarily in reverie or caught in contemplation.) Then came his voice again, asking, as if we could answer through the tape, ‘What do you think of that?’ He was quiet, then said, ‘It makes me think of that old Ojibwe song, the “Song of the Bird”: Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while the wind is bearing me across the sky.’”

That was the whole message and apparently not long after that things started to go better for the man and his life, step by step, got back on track.

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.

Change is constant. It may be unwanted. It may be irritating. It is a welcome gift. It is part of the unfolding creation that embraces us and moves through us. As we are changed so is the world, and as the world changes so do we. Justice, love, peace: they happen step by step in our lives. They are grounded in the knowing that a greater love will hold us even when we are afraid. It is up to us, most of all, to trust that the wind, all the while, will be bearing us across the sky. And we will, in the end, find our way home. Amen.

Prayer

Great spirit, give us courage for the journey. In all of our days help us to live fully in the midst of so many changes, all the things that make life possible and alive. Through it all may we hear music and may it call us to sing joyfully. Give us hope. Give us patience. Help us to be open to what love calls us to do and be in the world. Amen. 

Benediction

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 2004, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.