by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening Words

Good morning!

We come together this day

to give thanks,

to make confession,

to offer forgiveness,

to be strengthened in living

lives of integrity and purpose.

Come, let us worship together.

So you want to change your life?  A lot of us get to that point.  What are some reasons that make us want to change?  Maybe you’re feeling bored, just not interested in anything.  Maybe you’re just vaguely angry—or specifically angry.  Have you had a bout of road rage recently?  Have you cut somebody off in traffic and asked yourself, “Why did I do that?”  Maybe your life has begun to feel that it has no meaning.  In fact, maybe you’re beginning to wonder if it ever did.  You have values that you try to live up to.  Good values, strong values.  But somehow you’re just not living up to them.   Welcome to our culture!  You are an American citizen.  Our culture is not life-giving.  Rather, it is life-denying.  It saps life energy, seducing us with things and leaving us little time for what is most important.  We look in vain for some new way and yet each day brings with it pressures and troubles and so we trudge along in the same dismal path.

Not a happy picture.  But how do we change, in the midst of all of these constraints?  Well, let me begin by mentioning some things that don’t work, in my experience.  First of all, cheerful and superficial mottos, like for example: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”  Now, let’s look at that.  Yes, it’s true: today is the first day of the rest of your life.  But let’s face it, all the other days of your life are piled up there behind you and are influencing your new day.  Furthermore, you have a particular partner, particular friends, a particular job.   You had particular parents.  You live in a particular house in a particular neighborhood and you have a particular daily routine that calls to you.  So any personal change must take place in the context of your real life.  

Another popular source people look to for change is self-help books—you know, I think they’re mostly useless.  Their main purpose is to sell self-help books.  I once entered the home of a new friend and noted that he had a whole shelf of books with titles like How to Achieve Intimacy and Making Loving Relationships.  But you don’t learn how to be intimate and loving through reading—you learn that from people who know how to be intimate and loving.  Some books have changed my life, that’s true.  But they are books of profound intellectual and spiritual moment.  Obviously sources such as the Bible and Shakespeare and other great works of literature, and great thinkers such as Marx and Darwin.  There are contemporary thinkers who have moved me to a new place in my thinking such as Simone DeBeauvoir in her classic book, The Second Sex or Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism.  These are books that helped me think about myself and my society in a different way.  But self-help books?  No.  I think they’re mostly a waste of time. 

Another particular American approach to change is the trust we put in sheer will power.  “I quit smoking cold turkey,” someone says, and we admire that.  We are so much a culture of the individual.  You know, pull yourself up by your own boot straps.  How many times have you heard that?  Let me tell you something: nobody does this.  We all drink from wells we did not dig.  We all owe generations past, and we all owe our very lives every single day to others—everyone from the farmer to the street sweeper.  We are not independent creatures.  We are interdependent creatures.  Whatever success we have we owe to the grace of God and to the love and care of others.

Now where does that leave us?  What does help us change?  Well, very adverse experiences can do it.  Such as facing serious illness or death. 

A true story.  Picture this: a man is 99 years old.  He has been difficult all of his life.  He is critical of everything and everybody, including his grown children.  He is just a big grouch.  But in his 99^th year, as he faces the end of his life, he becomes ill and even grouchier, and his doctor discovers that this man has been depressed all of his life.  He is given an antidepressant, and then in the last six months of his living he is finally able to relate in a loving way to the children he has always been so critical of and to friends and family he has rejected.  He is a changed man.  Sad to say, but some of the sweetest and most tender and most deeply spiritual times come when people know they are going to die, and they no longer have anything to lose—so they ease up on themselves, and on others, they start forgiving themselves and others.  They are present in the moment as they have never been before.

But do we have to wait until the grim reaper pays us a visit before we decide to change?  That’s a little late in the day, isn’t it?  I mean, in your 99^th year?  There are other ways of learning and growing that sneak up on us when we least expect them to—and these are not always easy lessons.

Let me share with you the experience of a friend of mine.  This woman had a son who was enrolled in a tony high school populated mainly with upper-middle class white families.  The school hired a young inexperienced teacher who was black and gay.  This young man felt lost in this new setting.  He began doing inappropriate things in the classroom, like playing favorites and asking some of the students out to lunch with him. You see, he was lonely.  He knew he was struggling but didn’t know what to do.  This young man reached out to my friend and asked for help.  My friend felt sympathetic but she said to herself, why did he come to me?  I’m just one of the parents.  I’m not black.  I’m not gay.  And so, thinking it was not her place, she did nothing to help.  The weeks rolled by and Thanksgiving came along.  My friend considered inviting the young man to her home for Thanksgiving dinner but then she dismissed the idea, thinking that she didn’t want to make her family stand out as special to the teacher.  Some days later she was horrified to find that this young man had left town for the holiday to go who knows where and had been killed in an automobile accident.  She describes herself before this incident as a “reluctant leader.”  People would say to her, “We would like for you to lead this or that,” and she would say, “Why me?  Why should I be chosen?  Who am I to do this?”  But now, she says, she is no longer reluctant.  She doesn’t say, “Why me?”  She does those things that are hers to do. 

As for me, I have made many changes in my life but I’ve just about always been pushed to them.  I’m definitely reluctant to pull up stakes and go in a different direction.  I will stick with something or someone until my body begins to tell me I can no longer stay.  I simply become sick.  That was the condition I found myself in as a young wife of a surgeon and the stay-at-home mom of two young sons.  I wasn’t cut out for that role, and I felt my mind going to mush.  I badly needed some strokes, so I decided to study writing with Wendell Berry, the Kentucky essayist, novelist, and poet who was just then becoming well known.  Now some of you have heard this story before but it bears retelling, I think, as all good stories do. 

The writing class started out with about 20 people and by the second session it had dropped down to more like 12.  As Wendell said, he did not consider himself the school psychologist and so students backed away from the class early on.  But I found him a man of great integrity and gentle persuasion.  The first piece I wrote for him was a long discursive essay on examinations.  The next time class met, he returned our papers.  At the top of my paper, at the top of my graceful, perfectly punctuated sentences, he merely wrote, “Give me something of yourself.”  No grade, just that simple statement: “Give me something of yourself.”  I had come for praise, and I got this?  I just stood there, staring at my paper, as big tears rolled silently out of my eyes and down my face.  An inauspicious beginning.

All that semester I continued to write essays, articles and book reviews.  I gave Wendell nothing of myself.  As a matter of fact, I even reviewed his new book, The Memory of Old Jack.  Ha!  Take that, I thought.  But something in me was moving.  The night before the last class I sat up all night writing my first autobiographical essay on my old Remington Rand portable typewriter.  I finished it with my older son Kash sitting on my lap.  Having had no sleep at all, I had no time to edit the piece.  I got ready for class but then a major snag—the babysitter didn’t show up.  What was I to do?  It was snowing outside so I dressed the boys in their snow suits, put them in the back seat of the red Volvo station wagon, and took them to the 4^th floor of Good Samaritan Hospital where their father was doing surgery that morning.  I took them to the nurse’s station and I told the nurses, “Dr. Sewell will have to take care of his sons this morning.”   Now I don’t know what possessed me to do this because I am a good girl, and I’ve always been a good girl and I’d never done anything like this before in my life.  But I knew that at all costs I had to be in class that day.

Wendell began the class by going around the circle and asking if anyone had a piece to read that day.  I always sat just to his left, so he started with me.  “Marilyn, would you like to read?” “Well, I don’t know,” I said.  So he went all around the room asking everyone else but it was final exam time so no one else had anything.  Then he turned again to me and said, “Well, let’s start over again.  Marilyn, do you have anything you can read?”  “Yes,” I said, “I guess I could read something.”  And I read and read and read—nineteen pages worth.  For the first time in my life I had told the truth about myself.  I told about my failure as a teacher in Liverpool, about my depression, about my anger, my loving, my joy, my doubt, my fears, my caring, my faith, my lack of faith.  I was crying as I read and I never looked up from my paper for the whole 19 pages.  When I finished I threw the paper at Wendell and I said, “There!  That’s what you wanted.”

At that point I looked up and saw that others in the class were crying, too, and each one came in turn and gave me a hug and left silently.  Wendell looked a little uncomfortable, he had a tear edging out of his eye, and he said gruffly, “Don’t let yourself think of this as finished.”   No, things were not finished; things were just beginning.   I was just beginning as a writer and, more important, I was finishing a chapter in my life and beginning anew.  For the first time I understood that I could reveal who I was—the good and the not-so-good—and be accepted and loved for all that I was.  No secrets needed to be held anymore.  I was free.

Notice that in my experience in that writing class, no one judged me—no one said, “Oh, that was wonderful,” or “You could do better.”  They just listened.  They just witnessed.  Today we’re going to begin some new groups in the church, and they are going to be based around listening and witnessing.  

Let me explain what these groups are all about and how they will work.  The groups are for people who want to live with more integrity and sense of purpose in their lives.  We live in a world that does not value peace, cooperation, justice, caring and other values that we as Unitarian Universalists deem holy.  And yet it’s hard to live out of those values without support.  So these groups are designed to give that support.

The groups will be composed of people who simply want to live lives more in keeping with their highest values.  They will be facilitated by committed and qualified leaders.  They will have a guided structure but will be flexible according to the needs of the group.  This will not be a group in which we try to fix problems but one in which we listen and reflect upon the deep meanings of our lives.  This initial pilot group will meet 6 times, the first time to get to know one another and to decide which universal life issues they want to focus on in the next four meetings.  Then the last meeting will be a potluck dinner in which all the various participants will meet and share their experiences.  At that time those people who want to continue in an on-going group may opt to do so.  

So to further clarify, these groups are not about finding a job but rather about discerning vocation.  Or, these groups are not about getting over a divorce but rather how to live in right relationship with those closest to us.  These groups are not about solving specific problems, but about living lives of integrity and meaning.

Now this is how the groups are going to be set up.  This is a pilot project so there will be only 50 people participating.  If there is a lot of interest, we will create more opportunities at a later time.  There will be five groups of eight each, one of these being specifically for 30-somethings, and then a sixth group for five couples.  Now let’s define 30-somethings—around in the thirties but maybe a little younger or a little older.  If you have a problem knowing if you’re right for this group, you’re probably not.  And the couples group is for any two people who consider themselves committed partners.  Following the service today in Fuller Hall there will be sign-ups available at the Continuing Spiritual Growth table.  So if you’re interested, go right on down and sign up today.  We’ll have another opportunity to sign up next week but understand that the groups may fill up today.  The first group meeting will be at the beginning of October and will meet each week for six weeks.

Now, what are we going to call these groups?  We thought and thought about this and then we decided to call them Sustaining Circles. 

There is one piece of this element of change that I haven’t as yet have mentioned, and yet this is perhaps the most important piece.  You know that old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb?  Only one—but the light bulb really has to want to change.  You have to really want to change and that comes from something deeper than an idea, a book, a group or anything else.  It comes from your soul’s longing.  It comes from a desire to be the truest and most fully realized person that you can be. 

Personally, I think you need a partner to do this and I don’t mean a human partner.  I’m talking about partnering with the Holy.  I’m talking about getting up every day and saying to the Holy One, “I’m here.  I’m available.  What do you want from me?”  And then being open to that call.  Being open in little ways as well as big ways.  It’s about how you speak to your neighbor.  It’s about how you speak to your child when you’re tired and irritated.  It’s about saying “no” to a small injustice that is easily passed over.  It’s about putting your priorities in order, each and every day.  This is not about saving the world.  This is about saving your own soul. 

Whether or not you will be in one of these groups, I would encourage you to make this daily commitment to something greater than yourself and to get the support you need to become the person you were meant to be.  And you become that person each day with every decision you make because truly, one thing does lead to another—quite literally.

The fact is, we only have this one life and the days pass away so quickly.  You’re young, then you’re middle-aged, then whoops, it’s almost over.  And what did you do with that life?  I think we’re accountable for the days we’ve been given.  I think of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” as she muses upon the beauty and the brevity of life.  The poem ends like this:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

And that is the question I’ll leave you with this morning:  “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  Amen and amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we would have life and have it more abundantly.  And yet we find ourselves stuck and burdened—stuck in our everyday lives and burdened with our history.   Help us to find the holiness that is alive underneath the burdens that we carry and to live out of that spirit of holiness.  We are thankful this day for all those in our lives who have been catalysts for joy and peace and growth as we have gone our way, who have made our lives less lonely and have shown us a better way.   Be our true Partner as we journey through these difficult days.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

And now, as you leave this place today

My wish for you is that you would know

The beauty and goodness that you are

And that you would live out of

That beauty and goodness

All the days of your life.