I want to start with a quick voice poll. If you can answer yes to any of the following situations, just say "Amen!" OK, here's a practice question: If you've shown up at All Souls this morning, say "Amen!" [Amen!] Good! Now here's what I'm really interested in: If you've moved, either your home or your office, in the last ten years, say "Amen." If you've moved in the last five years, say "Amen." If you've moved in the last year, or even helped someone move in the last year, say "Amen." And finally, if you've moved in the last month, say a great big "Amen!"
Well, I can say "Amen" to every single one of those situations; in fact, my most recent move-and certainly what feels like the biggest move of my whole life-is now exactly two weeks and two days old. I've plucked myself out of a place that was just beginning to feel like home-because I'd only moved to New York from across the country four years ago, and I've only found a home at All Souls in the last year and a half-and now I've set myself down again in a whole new place to start a whole new life with a whole new set of friends. So I knew, early this summer when I first began to think about this sermon, that I would want to talk about "staying put and moving on" on this particular Sunday.
But I also hoped that I'd be coming to you full of inspiration and good cheer about moving on-you know, Whitmanesque: "Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, / healthy, free, the world before me. / Henceforth I ask not good fortune- / I myself am good-fortune ..." After all, I am in such a privileged situation: here I am, at midlife, with the chance to start fresh, and with a sense of calling to a vocation that I see as an honor-and on top of that I've landed in this quiet old neighborhood in Cambridge where the beautiful Victorian houses all have turrets and lilacs really do in the dooryards bloom, and on top of that, I'll be starting at Harvard Divinity School in just a few weeks-I mean, what's not to love here? How dare I find anything to whine about in this picture?
Well. As I sat down to write this sermon and began to notice what I was really feeling, I had to 'fess up: change is hard, no matter what. Whether we're moving toward something we love, or moving to get away from something we cannot abide, or whether life has dealt us one of its frequent blows, knocking us off our home base-as when someone we love leaves us, through death or choice, or when our work just doesn't work out and we are forced to leave it-whatever the circumstances, moving on is disorienting, disconcerting, sometimes tragic, always just plain hard.
A few weeks ago, right as I was starting to pack up all my belongings here, wrapping them in acres of bubble-wrap in hopes that they would remain intact, I also started reading Scott Russell Sanders's book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. It's a lovely, inspiring book, but it was essentially torture to read it right at that moment! So many of my favorite authors, the ones who most nourish my spirit-like Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Kathleen Norris, and now Sanders, too-all of them place tremendous value on staying put, on making a long-term (dare I say lifelong?) commitment to a place, a person, a community, a land. Because then we get to know them in all their seasons and moods, and we can love and honor and sustain them in ways that pilgrims most often cannot. Oh, Sanders's book set off such a longing in me-and this is not a new longing!-for a home, a place and a people to grow old with.
Yet I know that this move is the one I must make. So then the question became, What does "stay put" when we move on?
Well, the Buddhists have a very simple answer: nothing. Nothing stays put; we are all always "moving on," whether we choose it or not. "Even in a country you know by heart / it's hard to go the same way twice," writes Wendell Berry. Our very bodies are changing every moment: inhaling, exhaling, building up, breaking down; new cells are being born, old ones are dying. We have a whole little cosmos at work in here. What is that statistic, that every seven years we have replaced every single cell in our body? Not a single cell of me remains the same as it was when I was a child in San Antonio, let alone seven years ago when I was still married and living in San Francisco!
Now, this thought-that nothing at all stays put-is not very comforting when you are feeling unmoored and at sea, when you are yourself longing to remain intact in the midst of great change.
In my early twenties I read a book that was called, I think, Oceans and Beaches. I can't find it now, though I would give much to get my hands on it again, because it was a classic, explaining in this wonderfully lucid prose how oceans work, what creates the different patterns of waves-for there are as many different kinds of waves as there are kinds of clouds-and showing why beaches are both so similar and so unique. This book blew my mind. It was a revelation to me-do you remember the first time you learned this?-that the water in a wave isn't actually moving forward at all! All those little H2O molecules are really staying in the same place, at least horizontally; instead, they're constantly bobbing up and down, and as they do-now, don't quote me on the science here; just go with me for the sake of the image-as they travel within a narrow range of high and low, they're jostling up against their fellow molecules all around them and encouraging them to bob up and down too. When you look at waves in this way, their rippling motion no longer seems like a forward lunge, a galloping herd, but a rising and falling, like the breath of a baby-or of a giant, depending on the state of the seas. Everything in the ocean is indeed moving, but it's moving in a different direction than I'd thought before. It was a remarkable shift in perception.
And that's what I think it takes to ride the waves of change-a sometime subtle shift in perception. And this shift, eventually, helps give us choice about how we respond. I call this shift in perception an act of grace; I think, actually, it is a kind of miracle, but it's a miracle that is ours for the asking, ours if we choose to participate in it.
This past June, we held a monthlong workshop loosely based on Forrest's book Life Lines. Now, Forrest makes a great point in this book about how much happens in our lives over which we have no control. Things do happen to us. But when I polled the group on this issue, it was amazing-and quite moving-to me to discover that the vast majority of the participants felt they had a good deal of control. Not over the events of their lives-oh, no, all these people had suffered disappointments, losses, tragedies, changes that they would not or could not have wrought themselves-so it wasn't that they felt they controlled what happened. But they did feel that they had a lot of choice over how they responded. See, they've learned to "make intent of accident," as Wendell Berry's poem suggests. How transforming this shift is. "As a person thinketh, so is he or she"-that's one of the favorite Bible verses of my friend Rev. Leroy Ricksy. Often the biggest miracle, and the essential one-the one that's necessary before any others can occur-is not a change in circumstances but a change in perspective, a change ... in how we view change.
So, how do we invite this miracle, how do we participate in this act of grace? Well, you know that old admonition, "Don't just sit there, do something!" The therapist of a friend of mine tells her, "Don't just do something, sit there!" (OK, evidently this new version is already out on T-shirts and bumper stickers, and billboards for all I know, but I guess I just wasn't ready to hear it until last week.) "Don't just do something, sit there!" Which I take to mean, Be in it, whatever "it" may be in that moment. Set yourself down in the midst of what is and simply notice it-notice what's happening, within and without. See, when we ask that question about what does stay put when we move on, the Buddhists answer, "Nothing," but they also say, Everything. Nothing stays put, and everything does. Because change itself is the one constant in our lives; moving on is our true home-in fact, moving on is what we're built to do. "Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes," writes Jelaluddin Rumi. "If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed." Think about it: we actually have an innate capacity for change-just look at the changes that babies and toddlers must incorporate, literally taking it into their bodies. And they do it naturally, often unwittingly; oh, sure, each one has his or her style and pace of learning, of accepting, of doing-and that's good. So do we each have our own style and pace of learning and accepting, of responding and growing-and that's good. And even though it's "natural," all this constant change is tiring, for babies and for us. The thing to do-besides taking a nap, because naps are also good-but the thing to do is "just sit there," is just notice-how are you responding to the changes in your life right now; how are you feeling about moving on? When we give ourselves space, by not judging these initial responses, when we offer ourselves and each other lovingkindness and compassion as we sail these tumultuous seas of change, we will come to a greater freedom, a greater sense of choice and of peace.
Let me try to be a little clearer: first, I'm not suggesting, when change involves loss and grief, that by some miracle, by some slight shift in perception, the pain will simply go away and we will suddenly feel better, or recover more quickly, or just get over it altogether. No, in fact, what I'm getting at is almost the opposite. I'm not talking about a shift that's always in the direction, say, of cheerfulness, as much as my own nature wishes that could be so. See, it's exactly that kind of expectation-that change needn't be hard, that life "should" be easy or should "work out" in a certain way-it's that expectation that sets up a resistance in us to what our experience really is. And this resistance makes whatever's happening, whatever's changing, harder still. I believe this resistance seals off all the openings through which the miracle of relief, the miracle of redemption, may come.
"It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown," Pema Chödrön writes in her book called When Things Fall Apart. Feeling this fear, she says, "is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. [But] if we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid." We become more alive.
Let us be brave enough to sit there-not passively, but actively choosing to be kind to ourselves, to be patient and loving and compassionate with that fearful self so resistant to or so saddened by change. It's a lifelong process, this learning to know and love ourselves as we are, to understand how we respond in times of stress and thus begin to have some choice about it. But taking the time now to notice-this is a kind of prayer, the kind that creates a space into which grace may flow.
There's a story about such a moment of grace in a brand-new book, it's not even out yet, by California writer Anne Lamott. The book's called Traveling Mercies, and it's a series of essays about faith, about noticing the sacred in the everyday. Annie goes every Sunday to a tiny Presbyterian church in Marin City, which is a very poor enclave in the middle of the one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Now, this church is big on gospel music; in fact, singing and playing this music lie at the very heart of their worship, much as our music does here. Well, a few years back a young man named Ken joined them, and Ken was struggling with AIDS, and the community embraced him-except there was one long-standing member of the choir who held back. This woman-whom Annie names Ranola-just kept looking at Ken from a distance, kind of quizzical, kind of stand-offish, kind of cool. And then Ken got sicker and he had to miss church for a while, and when he finally made it back, he was so weak he could no longer stand to sing the hymns. So there they all were that Sunday morning of his return, standing and singing away while Ken was sitting in their midst, barely able to hold the hymnal on his lap. And the next thing Annie knew, Ranola had gone over and lifted Ken up. She had slung him up on her hip, kind of like a child, and he was draped across her shoulders, like a rag doll, and now the two of them were singing; they were singing together, and they were crying, and the tears were streaming down their faces and their noses were running and then, as Annie describes it, Ranola leaned her face right up against Ken's and let "all those spooky juices" mingle.
Now of course I can't say for sure what was going on in Ranola's mind and heart, but it sounds to me like she'd been scared, scared of something new, scared of something that definitely meant change, that surely meant moving on. But something happened: her perspective shifted, and compassion broke in like a ray of sunlight, and she opened her heart, and the next thing we know, two people have been joined across what used to be a boundary. Annie calls this a miracle, and so do I. Ranola sat there until that moment of grace-of acceptance-arrived, and then when that shift in perspective came, she stood up and she said yes to life, and to truth, and to love.
This week, about the time I was reduced to swearing at the top of my lungs because I couldn't remember where I'd put the scissors in my new home, or maybe it was about the time I was sobbing briefly but hysterically because I'd blown out all the circuit breakers in my apartment and I hadn't a clue where the circuit box was-anyway, it was about the time I was finally having to admit that no matter how fortunate or well chosen, transitions are hard-just about then, I reread Whitman's "Song of the Open Road." "The east and the west are mine," he crows, "and the north and the south are mine." "God," I thought bitterly, "he must have been young when he wrote that." Well, you know, he was actually 37, exactly at the midpoint in his life. Huh. A shift in perspective.
"Together!" Whitman says, "the inducements shall be greater; / we will sail pathless and wild seas; / we will go where winds blow, waves dash." Together, we can help each other, like molecules in the ocean, to do what we are made to do, and that is to move and change. Together, we can learn to ask for that miracle, a shift in perspective. Together, we can learn to say yes to life. "Whoever you are, come travel with me," Whitman invites us. And I believe this is the invitation of the Holy, the invitation to that "secret place where we have always been," at home with ourselves and each other, in the midst of moving on.
And to that I say, Amen! And, Alleluia. And, Let's sing! Copyright AllSouls 1998.