Cliff Jumping
Many years ago, when I began to prepare for a life in the ministry, I took the suggestions of my friends and mentors to heart - and alongside my academic studies and my experiential, skill-building learnings - I started to work with a therapist. It took me a while to find someone that I clicked with in the overwhelmingly large city of Chicago but when the time was right and the student was ready, one more of my teachers appeared.
During our first meeting together, this woman who would soon become my therapist handed me a sheet of paper. Read this, she said, and let's talk about it. When you understand everything on the sheet of paper and feel comfortable with it I want you to sign it, and then we can begin our work together.
The piece of paper, as I remember it, was titled in extremely large and bold letters - "The Risks of Therapy," and it said something like this:
As with any treatment option, there are risks as well as benefits associated with therapy. You should think about the benefits and risks when considering any treatment option. For example, there is a risk that clients in therapy will, for a time, experience uncomfortable levels of sadness, guilt, anxiety, anger, frustration, loneliness, helplessness, or other negative feelings. Clients may recall unpleasant memories. These memories may bother a client at work, school, or at home. Some people in your community may mistakenly view anyone engaged in therapy as weak or perhaps as seriously disturbed or even dangerous. Also, clients in therapy may have problems with people who are important to them. Family secrets may be told. Therapy may disrupt a marital relationship and sometimes may even lead to a divorce. Sometimes a client's problems will temporarily worsen after the beginning of treatment. Most of these risks are expected when people are making important changes in their lives. Finally, even with the best of efforts, there is a risk that therapy may not work out well for you.
I read over this list and paused, wondering who in their right mind would sign up for a journey that carried so many risks - and I have to wonder now, too, what it says about me that after reading that list of risks I was more excited than ever to begin.
And I hate to admit it, especially as I offer a sermon on the value of risk-taking in pursuit of our spiritual growth, well I hate to admit it, but the truth is that just about each and every one of those risks on that sheet of paper came true for me - and the next few years were at times a hard and difficult road.
During one of the lower points in those years of therapy - I walked alone each morning along the shore of Lake Superior on the north side of Chicago. It was a beautiful walk - with the sun rising and the wind washing over me - and each morning I would walk south passing a long line of concrete benches all connected and curved to match the outline of the lake, all of which had been painted by members of the neighborhood one afternoon many months before. There were images of kites and dogs, kids names scrawled in barely legible red paint, splashes of color that only an abstract artist could love, and on one of those benches - the one you had to search out a little more intentionally as it began the bend back away from the beach and toward the inland park - there was a painting of a seed cracking open and a short poem by Anais Nin - it's a poem that I memorized those mornings and took as my mantra - an unexpected and undeserved gift from the universe that arrived just at the right moment - the poem, titled "Risk," read:
And then the day came
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. It was a risk, that poem reminded me, it was a risk to stay the same, to remain tight in a bud, to refuse to change even when I could so clearly hear the world calling me forward. There was a risk in maintaining the status quo - that short poem reminded me. There is the risk of never fully blossoming, the risk of living half asleep in a beautiful and challenging world, the risk of falling in to the lies of a culture that dulls us into drowsiness with all of its mind-numbing mechanisms and overflow of food and money and stuff and activity. There is a tremendous risk in living in the status quo - not just for us as individuals, but for our world as well.
When we lean away from the spiritual risks in our lives - there are consequences, there are real life costs that we pay. When we stand at the death-bed of a friend or family member and we shy away from the words that rise in our throats - words of comfort or reconciliation, words that mark the true importance of this time and this passing - when we look around a table filled with friends or family or simply when we sit alone with a sandwich - and we forge ahead, missing the opportunity for deeper connection with those around us - with the farmers and workers and wonders of our body that could be felt by just a few simple words of thanks - when we hear words come out of our mouths or the mouth of another - words that demean or sting with the pain of prejudice and injustice and we are silent - when we dodge these spiritual risks that life presents us with each and every day - there is a larger danger mounting, too - the danger not only that we will miss those moments of opportunity for connection and possibility sure, but the larger danger exists that we may no longer be able to hear the calling of our hearts, the longing of our imaginations, the danger becomes that we may no longer recognize the constellation of gifts and talents and curiosities we carry, we may no longer feel the fire and the longing in our hearts that can lead us into lives of meaning and depth that give back not only to us as individuals, but to the larger world of which we are a part as well.
The real danger comes for us, I believe, not in taking too many risks, but in taking too few risks with our lives and our hearts and our spirits.
My colleague, Forest Church, puts it this way. "This advice may return to haunt you," he writes. "This advice may return to haunt you, but I commend you to ignore life's dangers as readily as you protect yourselves from them. Even as an overexamined life is not worth living, an overplanned life lacks wonder and spontaneity. The harder we work to get things exactly right, the more cautious we become, the more careful not to fail. Risking nothing, we stand to gain little beyond the security of a battened-down existence. We miss the sea breeze and the ball. We will know little failure, or only little failures, but consider the cost. Any sure thing is almost sure to be so carefully packaged that when we unwrap it, the size of the box will turn out to be so many times larger then the size of the gift that we cannot help but be disappointed."[1]
And who wants a life filled with only small, over packaged gifts? Who wants a life, that when you come to the end of your days, whenever that time may come, when you look back and can only say, I wonder what would have happened if...
The real danger in our lives and in the lives of our spirit, I believe, lies in taking too few risks, rather than too many.
And I want to be careful this morning. I want to be careful that as you hear me encouraging you and me to take more risks with our lives and our spirits, that you do not hear me saying that I think we should take risks just for the sake of the risk itself. Sure, there is a high that can come from taking risks. Sure, there is that feeling of being fully alive, fully awake and aware as the dual sense of fear and possibility comes into sharp relief once we take our leap. But there is a danger that comes in taking risks just for risks sake, too.
"Out door education leaders," my colleague Christine Robinson reminds me, "Outdoor education leaders who specialize in helping people who don't have enough risk in their lives climb towers and hang from mountain cliffs by slender threads; they know something about the risks of risk-taking. They remind each other that if their clients start thinking that they have 'conquered' their fears or worse, that they have 'conquered' a mountain, the Ego is there, sometimes crowing like a rooster, sometimes bathed in addictive adrenalin, sometimes thinking itself better than all others, sometimes all too willing now, to take foolish risks for the sheer high of it."[2] Disaster lies this way, she tells us, disaster, I add, because what could be more damaging to our spiritual lives than the sense that we've got it all wrapped up, thanks. What could be more damaging to our spiritual lives than the feeling that we have the world at our command, that we have conquered the mountain or completed the journey.
There is hardly anything more dangerous to the spiritual life than an overdeveloped ego, the missing ingredient of humility, the deep knowledge that this road is not to be walked alone even under the best of circumstances.
So I caution us, this morning, against the taking of risks for risks-sake alone, and I encourage us, instead, to carefully consider the risks that lie ahead, as that therapist of mine did at our initial meeting - and then to keep reading, to turn the sheet of paper over - as I did later in that hour - and consider the list of benefits as well.
When I finally turned that sheet of paper over - that sheet of paper that listed all of the risks of therapy in bold, big type, you see, I found that there was another paragraph to be read, a paragraph that I had missed the first time around and this one, titled, in what seemed to be smaller and less bold letters - read, The Benefits of Therapy.
While you consider these risks, it said, you should also know that the benefits of therapy have been shown by scientists in hundreds of well-designed research studies. People who are depressed may find their mood lifting. Others may no longer feel afraid, anxious, or angry. Clients' relationships and coping skills may improve dramatically. They may get more satisfaction and fulfillment out of family relationships. Their personal goals and values may become clearer. They may grow in many directions - at work, at home, in school, and in their ability to enjoy their lives.
Hmm, I thought on that first day of our work together. This certainly was a shorter list - this list of benefits - but as I considered my options I quickly discovered that I wanted that short list of benefits on the other side of the paper more than I was afraid of any of the risks. I wanted more satisfaction and fulfillment from my family relationships. I wanted to grow at work and at home and I wanted to enjoy my life more. I wanted my personal goals and values to become clearer, and I wanted more than anything to be able to move in the direction of my dreams, to do the spiritual work of aligning my life with my values. So, being fully informed of the potential risks that might come my way, I took a deep breath and jumped off that particular cliff, trusting that this woman and this universe would hold me, trusting that these risks would be worth the danger and hoping that ultimately I would grow and change in ways that I could not yet imagine.
The journey of the spirit requires courage, a careful sense of timing, the willingness to make mistakes and to appear the fool from time to time, spiritual risk-taking requires the willingness to place a higher priority on growth and discovery than on repetition and monotony and the status quo - but the benefits - the benefits, even though they may be smaller in number than the risks ahead - the benefits are always worth it.
Spiritual risk-taking asks us to take a leap of faith and lean toward the light, as the leafbud unfurling into the open airshaft on Upper Broadway did in this morning's poem from Adrienne Rich. Spiritual risk-taking asks us to do as she did, to look at her hands and see that they are still unfinished - to look at the vine and see the leafbud inching towards life - to look at our face in the glass and see there a halfborn person.
We lean toward the light and we lean in to the life-long journey of our spiritual lives when we look in the mirror and see there a halfborn woman no matter what our age or accomplishments - when we look in the mirror and see not only who we are, but the possibility of who we might still become. We lean toward the light and we lean into our spiritual lives when we see the necessity of beginning again in each and every moment of our lives, the necessity of continuing to risk, and continuing to grow and develop no matter who we are or what we have accomplished, no matter how many years we have been lucky enough to grace this planet with our presence.
We lean in to the light and we lean in to our spiritual lives when we embrace the fear that cannot help but join us on this journey, when we turn to one another for encouragement and support and sustenance from time to time, when we allow our courage to lead the way.
Spiritual risk-taking requires courage, of course, and this journey of aligning our lives with our values is not for the faint of heart. We need one another if we are to make our way along this dangerous but beautiful path. We need one another if we are to know the day when it comes - the day when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. We need one another if we are to hear the voice of the poet calling us out, again and again.
Come to the pond, she writes. Come to the pond or the river of your imagination or the harbor of your longing. The past is the past and the present is what our life is and we are capable of choosing what that will be. So come to the pond. Come to the pond or the river of your imagination or the harbor of your longing and drink. Put your lips to the world and live your life.
Put your lips to the world and live your life - that your own unfolding might make room for others, that together, as we blossom, as we do the difficult and demanding and oh-so-rewarding spiritual work of aligning our lives with our values we might create the conditions for all to unfold - creating the beloved community of love and justice we so long for in this beautiful and broken world.
May it be so, and Amen.
August 24, 2008
- Forrest Church. Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, (Boston: Beacon Press: 2008), 48.
- Christine Robinson, "Imagineers of the Soul," Berry Street Essay 2008, 19-20.