Martha Manning was seven years old when it happened. For years, she watched enviously as her older brothers and their friends glided on top of the water, defying gravity with balance and speed. "You're just not old enough," they said. "Water-skiing is harder than it looks." But she was persistent and finally they gave in just to shut her up.
The boys readied the boat and helped her into position. They handed her the towrope and instructed her to hold on tight. "Ready?" they shouted. "Yes," she replied. The boy in the back of the boat yelled "hit it" to Martha's brother, who was at the wheel. The boat lurched forward and Martha immediately flew out of her skis...but she kept hold of the rope.
Everything from there felt like a blur. Trailing the speeding boat, totally disoriented, she ingested mouthful after mouthful of salt water. Eventually her ears caught the sound of voices from the shore. She lifted her head, focused hard and finally pieced their words together: "Martha, let go! Let go of the rope! Let it go!"
It took several moments for her to register the meaning of what they were saying. And only then did she loosen her grip and fall back into the water, floating there shaking with fear and cold as she watched the towrope bob and dance and crash on the water, just as she had been doing a second ago.
As an adult struggling with whether to leave a damaging marriage, she looks back on this event and writes,
"I think of this image often these days: the frigid water, the brief flight, my arms almost ripped from their sockets, but still stubbornly holding on for dear life to that damn rope. The same rope that was causing me such pain. Beyond strength, beyond safety, beyond good sense. As back then, I hear voices in the distance, voices I so rarely heed, yelling, 'Let it go Martha. Just let go.' I want to do as they say. But there's a part of me that fears now, just as it did then, that if I let go, I will surely drown."
I wonder how many of us this morning can relate to Martha? I know I can. It's not the dominant part of me. And it's not always present. But there is a part of me over the years that has regularly feared letting go.
There are many, though, who say it's not about fear at all. It's about our love of control, they claim. That's the main thing holding our culture back, preventing us from thriving in this time of rapid change, cutting us off from the adventurous spirit that once made us great. We're spoiled, they say. We've all got a bit of the bratty baby-boomer in us, wanting and thinking we deserve it exactly our way. This is why we refuse to let the wind carry us, the experts claim-why we stubbornly hold onto the towrope even when all looks lost. We are adolescents in adult bodies who want complete and utter say over our lives.
I'm not a sociologist, but from my preacher's office this assessment about love of control just doesn't ring true. When we sit and talk together, I don't hear a lot of whining about not having enough say in our lives as much as I hear the fear that if we lose what we've got, there will be nothing left. It's in this sense that our story's image of standing at the edge of a desert is so apt. When transition and loss enter our lives, many of us feel as though we face not simply a choice between the old and the new, but between the little we've obtained and an empty desert.
Rachel Naomi Remen is a best selling author and nationally known doctor who works with patients rebuilding their lives after significant loss. Runners who lose their legs. Preachers and lawyers who lose their voices. Musicians who lose their hands. What sustains her in this work is her belief that every ending is accompanied by a new beginning. But, as she explains, she did not always have this faith.
After losing a precious ring-a ring that symbolized much of who she was and what she had accomplished-Remen was struck by how calm she was. Instead of feeling her usual devastation in the face of loss, she had a new and strange curiosity about what would come to fill the empty space. It was a major epiphany that arose from a minor event. "I realized," she writes, "that I was thirty-five and had never trusted life before. It suddenly became clear to me that I had never allowed any empty spaces in my life. Like my family, I had believed that empty spaces remained empty. Life had been about hanging on to what you had, and medical training had only reinforced the avoidance of loss at all costs. Anything I had ever let go of, up to that point, had claw marks on it."
As we end our month of looking at second chances and starting again, I think it is important to admit that Naomi Remen is not the only person whose life has claw marks all over it. Indeed, if it were easy to let go or believe in second chances, few of us would be here. We come to church because each of us, in our own way, needs help. Like Dr. Remen, we too have mornings when we wake up and realize how little we trust life. And friends, we have to be open about this, not to admit that we are weak or whiny, but so that each of us knows we're not alone. All of us have days when life feels like a minefield or a desert. All of us have days when the winds of change seem more a source of destruction than a generous vehicle waiting to carry us to a new and brighter day.
Our story of the stream is especially helpful in this regard because it doesn't ask us to deny or renounce the truth of these bad days. It doesn't try to talk us out of our fear that life is out to destroy and take things from us. It doesn't tell us we are wrong, cynical, depressed or unnecessarily scared. It doesn't try to tell us that life's fierceness is an illusion. No, its message of hope does the unusual: it incorporates and even celebrates that fierceness and tells us to trust it. It asks us to look at the loss and destructiveness of our lives in an entirely new way. It says, take a close look and you will see that destruction is never simply destruction alone; it is also and always-in some mysterious and unpredictable way-a passing over into new life.
Destruction is never simply destruction alone, says the story, it is also and always a passing over into new life.
I need to pause here and acknowledge how difficult this may be for Unitarian Universalists to absorb and accept. To say destruction and loss always leads in some mysterious way to new life sounds awfully close to the theologies many of us left behind. When the winds of change turned our lives upside down and left us facing a desert of emptiness, many of us remember being consoled with the words, "Trust in the Lord. It's all part of God's plan. He'll make it all work out in the end." For a variety of reasons, this language simply did not work for many of us. If we could believe that the Lord or the wind of life was personally looking out for us, we would. It's not that we don't like the idea of a wind that works on our behalf; it's just something most of us can't get our hearts and heads to embrace authentically.
But I don't think we need to believe that the wind of life is looking out for us in order to trust it. It seems to me that another option is available. Seems to me that one's faith in the wind can be rooted not so much in the wind itself but in one's belief in the fullness of life. Think about it: if life is packed full with grace and goodness, then it doesn't really matter where or in what form the wind drops us down-we'll run into new life no matter what.
Last week in my meditation, I said I hope we can always be people who notice and believe in "the nagging persistence of goodness and grace." This isn't just what I hope for us; it is also how I understand our spiritual tradition. Unitarian Universalists are divided when it comes to the idea of God. Some of us believe there is a conscious, invisible entity that acts on our behalf and some of us don't, with innumerable variations between these two extremes in the mix as well. But where we are united, it seems to me, is on this issue of grace. We may disagree about how goodness and grace got here, but we all agree that its being here is a pretty darn incredible thing!
Indeed, at one point I thought about titling this sermon "Life is Full of It!" And I should warn you, I'm still tempted to make a proposal to the Board that we engrave those words over our entrance door! Because if there is another belief that unites all of us more than this one, I simply haven't heard it.
Is there a God looking over us? Who knows? Are there guardian angels or sprits assigned to us? Who knows? Is life pre-programmed to work out well? Again, who knows? It's all guesswork. But what isn't guesswork, what doesn't require a leap of faith, is this nagging persistence of goodness and grace. It's like dandelions or rats: try as you might, you just can't get rid of it! It has this irrepressible stubbornness to it, refusing to be exterminated, popping up all the time when and where you least expect it.
I remember taking walks through our woods as a kid. No matter what trail I'd take, no matter how carefully I'd walk or how fast I'd run, I'd never escape those woods without these pesky round sticking burrs attached to my socks or pant legs. Goodness and meaning are like those burrs. It's not something that seeks you out; there's just so much and so many forms of it that you can't make it through any journey without running into it. And that's why trusting the wind is worth it. It's what should give each of us the courage to let go of our painful pasts or our broken presents and take a leap into new and unknown futures.
I mentioned earlier that Naomi Remen finds strength in her belief that there is no ending without a beginning. She even wishes we had words to capture and remind us of this. She's actually invented a word of her own. Instead of talking about the ending or loss her patients are facing, she engages them in conversations about their "endbeginning." I like this idea. "There are no endings, only endbeginnings," she says. It's a small way of reminding us how deeply dependent second chances are on our ability to keep our eyes open. If endings and beginnings really do sit side by side in the same room, then we've got to find a way to relate to the endings of our lives not only with a mourning process but also a looking process-a process that leads us naturally to ask not just, "What's been lost?" but, "What's been left?" or "What's new?"
A number of years back, a wonderful little book came out called, Tuesdays with Morrie. It became a best seller and I imagine many of us have read it. If you haven't, it's worth finding. It's a true story about Morrie Schwartz, a professor with Lou Gehrig's Disease. Written by one of Morrie's old students, the book records the conversations the two of them had during Morrie's last days. Mitch Albom, the former student who wrote the book, explains that one of the driving forces for him was to explore and articulate how Morrie could remain so in love with life despite the fact that life had burdened him with such a terrible and cruel disease.
Many of you can explain Lou Gehrig's disease better than I can, but basically it is a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system for which we have no cure. At one point in the book, the disease is described as working like a lit candle: steadily melting one's nerves, leaving one's entire body and muscles like a pile of molten wax. One becomes entombed and stays that way until his lungs become too tired to breath.
For years before his illness, though, Morrie had shocked all of his students by showing up weekly at their dances. He danced alone and wasn't very good, but those who knew him said that to watch him dance was to watch a human being completely immersed in joy.
Morrie's other great pleasure was engaging in animated discussions with students and friends. When he talked, his hands would go all over the place and his voice would move from whisper, to shout, to booming laughter.
His disease, though, slowly took all this away. As it did, Morrie says, every day became a matter of choosing whether to give up and resent the experience of living or to find a new means of experiencing joy. To compensate for his inability to dance, Morrie, despite the pain, forced himself to take walks in the park. When things became worse, he connected with beauty by looking out his study window.
In an especially moving passage, Morrie talks about how, although his house was constantly full of visitors, it became more and more difficult to communicate with them the way he wanted-the way he had before, with his hands flying and his voice filled with infectious energy. Explaining this in an interview for a TV program about coping with crisis, Morrie said this:
"There are days when I am depressed. Let me not deceive you. I see certain things going and I feel a sense of dread. What am I going to do without my hands? What happens when I can't speak? Swallowing, I don't care so much about - they can feed me through a tube, so what? But my voice? My hands? They're such an essential part of me. I talk with my voice. I gesture with my hands. This is how I give to people. This is how I have always given to people."
After a pause, the interviewer asked gently, "Morrie, how will you give when you can no longer speak?"
The question jarred Morrie for a second. Then he shrugged and said with a smile, "Maybe I'll have everyone ask me yes or no questions."
It was such a simple answer that everyone in the room couldn't help but smile. Morrie was then asked about silence. He mentioned a dear friend who was going deaf. The interviewer imagined the two men together one day, one unable to speak, the other unable to hear.
"What will that be like for you Morrie?" the interviewer asked. "What will that be like for you when life takes away your ability to talk with your friend?" "Well, when we can't talk," Morrie said after a pause, "I guess then we will just have to experience the goodness of life by holding hands."
There's a part of the Jewish tradition that says when God created human beings, God gave them a secret, and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again. This is meant to remind us that we are put here on this earth not so much to build a life, but to experience life by rebuilding and recreating our lives over and over again. Or to put it into the language of the story that was performed for us so wonderfully this morning: We are here to experience the wind.
And maybe even more than that. Maybe our most important task is to learn that on some deeper, mysterious level, we are the wind, that we are-each and every one of us-closer to the process of change itself, than to any of the particular forms we find ourselves taking along the way. Maybe that is why the story ends by telling us "deep in its heart, the stream had a memory of a wind that could be trusted... and in giving itself over to that wind it began to understand who it really was and what it meant to be a stream."
May all of us encounter a wind that can be trusted, bolstered and made meaningful by the ever-nagging persistence of goodness and grace.
So be it. Amen.
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