Balance/Equinox

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 23, 2014

How do we keep our balance as life around us swirls? Is balance something to be desired, or should we just enjoy the roller coaster ride?

Sermon:

BALANCE

The Equinox is a time of balance in the earth’s year. The nights and days are of equal length. It is the still point in the great ebb and flow of light into dark and dark into light again. The light and the dark are among the first things created, according to the Hebrew scriptures. They are both good. They continue today, millions of years later, in the same pattern as when they began. Ancient people noticed four special sun events: the two solstices: the first day of summer, when the days are longest and the nights are shortest, and the first day of winter, the winter solstice, when the nights are longest and the days are shortest, and the two equinoxes, when night and day are the same length.

These four sun holidays are symbolized by a four-armed cross within a circle, called a solar cross. It looks like a wheel, and that is no accident. The turning of the seasons is the turning of the wheel. The wheel of the year turns, IIspring to summer, autumn to winter, and from winter round to spring. II The light and dark are in balance for a day. A moment. The turning of the wheel is continuous, and has been so from the beginning of time. The first turn of the wheel WAS the beginning of time. The first day, the first night, and the wheel has been steady ever since.

The equinox is about the balance of light and dark. Things that are not alive can balance in stillness. Things that are alive must balance in the midst of movement. In the midst of the movement of our lives, we look for a moving balance. A living balance.

Many of us are seeking balance in our lives. We try to balance acceptance and action, sternness and sweetness, talking and listening, taking care of ourselves and taking care of others, confronting things that bother us and ignoring them, trusting and worrying. I get frustrated when we have an idea of balance that has to do with stillness or steadiness or equal parts of this and that. Balance does not mean stasis. I learned in martial arts training that you need to spring into action from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. You need to accept attack from a place of balance, otherwise you fall over. This is true physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes I am good at balance, and other times. I am horrible at it. Hey, maybe that could count as a kind of balance…. No?

We all know that balance is a temporary thing. So many things take our balance away. Being rejected, being chewed out, doing something wrong, losing financial stability, failures, loss, change. Finding ways of regaining a moving balance makes us more able to take what life brings.

STANCE

Your stance in life is how you approach life, how you let life approach you .. Are you going to have an adversarial stance toward life? Are you going to act as if everyone out to get you? That your luck is bad, you don’t believe compliments, people can’t be trusted, things are likely not to work out, you’re going to have to work harder than anyone else for things to work out for you?

Are you going to have a fixed, open stance, where you stand all open and vulnerable, not taking care of yourself, allowing others to decide your fate? What happens, happens… you can’t control anything. You don’t try to make anything happen for yourself…. Your mind is open, but you don’t close it on anything, you say “I have my truth and you have your truth” which kind of makes there be no truth.

Where you are trying to be all things to all people. “I can do that!” “I can be what you want me to be” “I can tolerate any behavior you choose.” This makes you easy to knock over.

Too narrow a stance might mean you have a small range of things that are acceptable to you. You have a picture of how things should be, and you don’t handle it well if they don’t turn out that way. It could be that you cannot let yourself make a mistake, so your perfectionism limits you.

Another factor in being physically and emotionally hard to knock over is to lower your center of gravity. When you have soft knees (assuming your knees can still do that) you can sink the center of your body a little closer to the ground. This is one of the things that makes you grounded and more stable. Emotionally, having your center of gravity low might be this; that you are willing to make a mistake, that you are willing to let other people talk, that you seek to understand others before you seek to have them understand you. That you might start a sentence with the words: “I could be wrong.”

We all only balance momentarily. Since we are alive, we are always losing our balance and coming back to it. No one is perfectly balanced all the time. Some people balance carefully, others more gracefully and freely.

One image of balance within movement I love is that of a pot on a wheel…. As we rest in that stillpoint within, we have a better chance of finding our balance in our shifting and frenzied lives. We can become clear about where to hold on and where to let go. When to feast and when to be frugal,when to speak and when to be quiet. When to come close and when to keep a distance. And we can find our balance. For a while. Until the wheel turns again.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776