Ch-ch-ch-Changes

Chris Jimmerson
December 28, 2014

Each time we approach the coming of a new year, we tend to be more open to new possibilities. We are more likely to embrace change and even make resolutions about what we would like to change. What if we were to view life this way all year? What if we thought of everything as continuous change – as ever-unfolding possibilities? We explore limitless “Ch-ch-ch-changes.”

Is it just me or is this a very strange time of the year? To me, it always feels like the year should have ended with Christmas, and yet here we are with several days of the year left before New Years Day, and even at that, the New Year will not really get started until everyone gets back to daily life somewhere around January fifth.

It is an in between time – a liminal time. A time when it is still darker for more hours, and we are reminded that like it or not, change, it will come – a year closes out and a new one springs forth, and sometimes, in this liminal space each year, perhaps we are more open to change, more willing, even, to initiate it.

How many of you plan to make New Year’s resolutions or have made them in the past? That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Raise your hand if you have. Now, how many of us have made such a resolution and broken it within a few weeks or months? It’s OK to raise your hand. There’ll be no shaming here this morning. See, my hand is way up.

Change can be difficult. Old habits can be cantankerous. And this is true not just for us as individuals, but also for families, groups and institutions.

And churches.

Sometimes, we just don’t like change, and we don’t always even know why or even realize that we’re resisting it. Haven’t you ever heard someone, when someone else was trying to change something, even if it might be for the better, haven’t you heard someone say, “but that’s the way we’ve always done it”? Have you ever said it yourself (or at least caught yourself thinking it)? (Hand up) My hand goes way up again.

And yet, as I said, change will come. This morning, there are likely many folks here who are going through some sort of change in their lives. Others may be thinking about initiating some sort of a change. Our world around us is both changing rapidly and in need of changes that would bring about more justice, more love and compassion.

Often, our church is one of the resources we look to help motivate and sustain us in such times, and yet the church too is ever changing. Our voting membership list this month included 621 people. That’s growth of about 200 in just 3 years. If we add to that folks who are who don’t meet all of the requirements for voting, which is more difficult to quantify, the rate of growth has probably been even greater.

On top of that, we just completed a highly successful three million dollar capital campaign. All of that is great – it means we’re living that mission we put on our wall and say together every Sunday, AND it also will mean that our building will change and some of the ways we do things will likely have to be adjusted along with it. At some point we’ll be coping with construction and the disruption that goes with it for a while.

And if that makes some of you feel a little nervous, a little queasy inside, that’s OK. It’s human. I feel that way sometimes too.

So this morning, since we are in that liminal space in so many ways, I thought I would share with you some ways of thinking about change – even of finding spirituality within uncertainty – which I have found particularly helpful.

It turns out that there may be some truth to the old adage that we can experience greater difficulty adapting to change as we grow older. Until sometime in our thirties, our brains are highly malleable. We easily lay down new neural pathways that allow us to learn and to adjust to change. As we age, we can start to lose some of this “neuroplasticity” as it’s called. That’s why, for instance, as we get older we may experience more difficulty adjusting to moving to a new residence. Our brains want to keep looking for things where they were at our former residence.

Now, losing some neuroplasticity is not entirely a bad thing. Laying down new neural pathways uses a lot of energy that the body could otherwise use for other purposes. And, it doesn’t mean there’s no hope for those of us who may be a bit past our thirties; it just means we may find ourselves more challenged by new life situations sometimes.

And it turns out that challenging ourselves by intentionally experiencing difference through multicultural interactions, travel, and varied forms of music, for instance, can help. Some studies also found that meditation, ritual and other spiritual practices can help keep our brains remain more open to change as well.

And if you are in your thirties or younger, – these types of experience can also be advantageous for you because they allow you to build up a sort of plasticity reserve, so to speak, that will help you stay more neurologically flexible as you age.

Now, the neuroscience is a bit more complicated than my quick summary, and the research is ongoing, so our understandings of how the brain functions are changing at a rapid pace. We are offering a five session adult faith formation course on the subject beginning on the first Sunday in January. It’s fascinating stuff, so I encourage you to attend and learn more. Plus, then you can come back later and tell me what I didn’t get right!

The book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, borrows a metaphor for how our brain works from psychologist Jonathan Haidt and uses it to develop some really useful advice on how to deal with change.

In this metaphor, the rational part of our brain, the part that uses reason, is a small rider sitting atop a giant elephant. The elephant is the emotional part of our brain and the part that contains our innate desires and survival instincts. The problem when it comes to change is that we tend to rely too heavily on the rider. We think we can use our reason, our rider, much more so than is actually possible. The thing is – the elephant is so much larger and stronger than the rider, that when the elephant wants to go a different way, the rider can only keep it going in the reasonable direction for so long. The rider wears out. The elephant takes over.

The book says that to create change we can do three things: direct the rider; motivate the elephant; and shape the path. My favorite example they give is of “Clocky,” an invention by an MIT student. Clocky is an alarm clock with wheels designed to address the scenario wherein the alarm clock goes off but our elephant really wants to keep snoozing under our nice warm covers.

And our rider uses our reason to rationalize hitting the snooze button or just shutting the alarm off by thinking things like, “I can sleep a few more minutes if I just skip breakfast” or “It really makes more since to go to the gym before work tomorrow morning anyway.”

Clocky short-circuits this process by rolling off our nightstand when the alarm goes off and proceeding to scurry around the bedroom floor, alarm still blaring.

Clocky lets us direct the rider by providing a way to set up the whole scenario before snuggling underneath the covers and by leaving no other logical choice the next morning but to get out of bed, capture the thing and shut it off.

It motivates the elephant by being so annoying that it overrides the strong desire to keep snoozing.

It shapes the path because, well, now that you’ve gotten up to catch it and shut it off, you might as well stay up.

Now, I’ll admit that my elephant might be tempted to stomp Clocky into a gazillion pieces, so I’ll never own one, but hopefully you get the idea anyway!

Another book, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, adds what I think is an important conceptual framework by distinguishing between technical change and adaptive change. Technical changes involve altering things like the technology we use or our policies and procedures. They usually can be solved using knowledge that already exists. Adaptive changes on the other hand involve changing how we do things at a more fundamental level. They require examining our values and purpose. They require experimenting and learning.

The problem is, we have a tendency to concentrate on the more tangible technical change when what is called for is really adaptive change. Adaptive change can be harder, and oftentimes, a little of both are required.

I think the relatively recent history of this church provides a great example of people working to make change on both levels. In the just over a couple of years before the church called Meg Barnhouse as Senior Minister, the interim ministers and church leadership worked with the congregation to begin a new form of governance and to create the policies and procedures that would support it. The church also wrote a covenant of healthy relations and went through a process of discerning its values and mission.

The establishing and writing of all of this involved a good deal of technical work; however, it also began the adaptive work of examining our values and purpose and how we wanted to be together as a religious community. And then, Meg and the church leadership expanded the adaptive work even more by making the mission central to all church decision making and activities, as well as by creating a culture of mutual accountability and covenantal relationship.

Leadership on the Line also points out something else important about change. We often talk about how people are resistant to change itself. We can gain more empathy and understanding, including for ourselves, if we understand that we are really resisting is loss. If you think about it, any transformative change, any creative act, involves the destruction of something existing in order to create something new.

And this is closely related to a way of viewing the world that, for me has fundamentally altered the way in which I view change – process-relational philosophy or process-relational theology when applied to religion.

Process theology grew out of the philosophical work of a British mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead. Later, others, including Charles Hartshorne, a professor at the University of Texas here in Austin and a longtime member of this church, developed this theology further. I am currently reading a book by Dr. Hartshorne titled, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Don’t you just love that? Doesn’t it just sound like a Unitarian? “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” He lists six of them, by the way.

Anyway, process theology views humans, and indeed everything in the world and universe, not as discrete, unchanging, static things, but as processes that are always becoming, experiences that are always unfolding and evolving, so to speak.

In this way of viewing the world, right now, in this moment, I am not a being or an object, but a series of events unfolding – my experiences of the past, the possibilities available to me in this moment and the choices I make of those possibilities.

But even as you have been listening to this, I made choices and became something new, and the Chris that spoke that prior sentence perished within the continual process of becoming, and so did the “you” who heard it! The physical world is like this also for process theory. The cells in our bodies, the molecules, atoms and particles in all things are themselves ever changing processes – mixing, dividing, perishing and being replaced.

Buddhism has a similar concept called “no-self” or “no thing” which says that what we think of as the self is really an unfolding series of conscious experiences and events. There is no actual object there, just as the flame in our chalice appears to be a thing but is in reality an ongoing process of fuel being burnt.

Likewise, some Hindus hold that Brahman, the ultimate, divine reality, is expressed through three Gods: Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu the Maintainer; and Shiva the Destroyer. Again, all is ever changing in this continuing cycle of creation, change over time, destruction and new creation. Birth, life, death, new birth.

In these world views, change is not something outside of ourselves or our reality; it is the essence of reality. Our task, then, becomes to choose wisely among the creative possibilities, the change that will come.

And for some process-relational thinkers, this is where we encounter the divine.

Several times each week, I go to a park or natural area and take a meditative hike. It’s a spiritual practice that I find particularly sustains me and reinvigorates me.

Sometimes, though certainly not every time, the meditation takes me into an experience that some psychologists would call a peak experience. It’s what the first of our six Unitarian Universalist sources calls the “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

They are extremely difficult to describe with words, but here’s a try.

A couple of summers ago, I went for a meditative hike at Mayfield Park. It is one of my favorite nature spots, and I had earphones on so I could listen to some music that I find particularly moving and beautiful.

At some point during the hike, I found myself simply standing in this lush valley with a creek running between two limestone hills. I had no idea how long I had been just standing there. Time seemed to have stood still, or perhaps to have somehow blended all times into one moment.

I felt somehow spread out, connected with and a part of all of the beautiful life and creation around me – paradoxically, standing there alone in the wilderness, the experience was as if I was interconnected, in ways that are normally beyond understanding, with all of humanity and all of creation’s continuous unfolding.

These experiences, these glimpses of the enormity of that continuous unfolding of our universe – the ever changing, always becoming nature of all creation – they can drive a sense of awe and humility that we are such a small part of it. And yet, they can also bring that sense of spreading out, of ever expanding connectedness, a sense that our own becoming is an integral part of the ultimate becoming.

For me, they are also a reminder that change is how we know we are living – that we are fully alive – both literally and metaphorically.

Benediction

May your heart sail on warming winds to new heights of exhilaration.
May your thoughts embrace all that is ever unfolding within and around you.
May your spirit discover new depths, new understandings, an ever-growing sense of peace and right place in the world.
May you know that this beloved community holds you and is with you not just today but throughout your days.

Blessed be. Amen

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