Make New Mistakes

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 8, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

“Make New Mistakes” If you can’t be the good witch, can you be the good-enough witch?

Meditation
Rev. Dr. Maureen Killoran

Let us tell the stories of mothers … stories that could be true.

Let us tell of warm mothers, soft and round, likely to be found with flour on their nose, and always ready to pour you a glass of milk to go with the cookies on your plate. These mothers are increasingly rare.

Let us tell of mothers who are like bubbles of champagne: they surprise your senses, leave you giggly, but when you least expect it they erupt with an unexpected ‘pop.’

Stories that could be true.

Then there are grouchy mothers, stressed mothers, exhausted mothers, faces lined with worry and spirits tired and grey.

Other mothers are wise and reliable; not prone to many words or to a lot of noise – but you know that when you need them, they’ll be there.

Let us tell of fierce mothers, the ones who’ll love you even when you’re wrong.

Let us tell also of absent mothers, whose memory shimmers at the edges of your heart.

Let us tell of distant mothers … cruel mothers … loving mothers … giving mothers. There are walk-away mothers … save-the-world mothers too-busy mothers … mothers you cry because you lost them, and mothers who make you cry because you can’t …

Stories that could be true.

May we hold in our hearts the mothers we have known; those who loved us-and those who tried.

May we forgive the mothers who didn’t get it right, and try to release the knots of disappointment … anger … grief … pain.

May we hold in our hearts the truth that mothering-nurturing-is a task that belongs to us all.

However old or young you are, whatever your gender, may you make extra room for nurturing in your life this week.

May you say something real to a harried store clerk, give a co-worker a genuine compliment, take time to listen deeply to a friend.

In our shared silence may we remember, and reflect, and create anew, the stories of love and nurture, from this point forward, stories that can be true.

Sermon

I worked for around 15 years as a therapist, and I heard a lot of people talk about feeling like a failure. When we explored that feeling, it seemed that anything less than perfection felt like failure to some people. They felt they had disappointed their parents. “What did your parents expect from you?” I asked “They wanted me to be perfect.”

Many of us are more critical of ourselves than anyone else could be. Our mistakes glare at us when we survey our lives. Things we’ve said, things we hadn’t thought of that we should have thought of. Damage we’ve done. Businesses we’ve attempted that didn’t make it. Relationships that didn’t last. Times when you yelled at your children when you had resolved not to yell.

Speaking of that, happy Mother’s Day. Parenting is a minefield of mistakes. Mother-guilt is the worst, as you look around and imagine that every other woman is a better mother than you are. You try to teach good values, manners, conversational skills. You wonder sometimes if your kids are already damaged by something you did while you were still building them in your body, or by something you forgot to protect them from, or by something they are doing that you should have known about even though they were trying with all their skill and might to keep it from you. For your own protection and peace of mind.

I’ll tell you how to be a good mother (and father.) Understand that they are watching what you do, along with listening to what you say. Be the person you would want them to be. Don’t only talk about your values, live them. Heal yourself. Ask what you would want them to do in the situations in which you find yourself, and then model that.

Back to my therapy office. I had a cartoon on the wall (and I’m not a big cartoon person) that showed Glinda in her psychiatrist’s office. She’s saying “Everyone wants something. This one wants a heart, that one wants courage …. It’s too much.” The caption underneath reads “Glinda learns just to be the good-enough witch.”

Some of us will go to great lengths to avoid making a mistake. It can keep you from trying new things. Mostly it’s the first borns and only children. Some of us grew up with people who would joke “I’m never wrong, except for this one time in 1993, when I thought I was wrong, but it turns out I wasn’t. … ” The family joked that the headstone on my grandfather’s grave should be engraved with “Often in error, never in doubt.” Sometimes people do the same things over and over, even though they’re not working, just because to try something new would be scary and odd, and these, at least, are familiar mistakes.

The world’s best wisdom says mistakes, even failures, are generative, they are necessary for growth. Mistakes are how you get to new knowledge. Thomas Edison said “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Danish Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, says, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”.

The drive to avoid mistakes can lead to a certain kind of success. There is nothing wrong with this. Out of the 23 first NASA astronauts, 21 were first borns. This is not the case for inventors, though, many of whom are people who are more sanguine about trying things. They are more ok with making mistakes, doing things that turn out not to work. My older son and I were playing around with a puzzle. Nine dots in rows of three, making a square. The challenge was to draw a line, without picking your pencil up, connecting all nine dots. We had worked on it for about ten minutes, trying this or that, and my younger son came over to see what we were doing. He picked up the pencil, drew a line that ran, shockingly, out of the square, and then back down to connect the rest of the dots. They hadn’t said not to move out of the box, but we had imagined that rule for ourselves.

This congregation is vigorously living our mission, trying to figure out whether we want to be a Sanctuary Church, or just be a church that does sanctuary when it’s called for, and works with several refugees at a time trying to keep them from being in a situation where they have to leave their homes and families and go into sanctuary. We might make a mistake. We might have to say “Hmm. This isn’t working. We made a mistake. Let’s do something different.” You’re not irresponsible if you make a mistake doing things no one else is doing nor knows how to do. You’re not an idiot. You’re just trying a new thing.

We are moving forward on a building expansion and renovation project. We are using the best expertise we know how to use. We raised money at the top of the range of what churches can raise, 5 times our annual giving. You all are a tremendous success. Will we spend it all perfectly? We’re going to try. Might we make a mistake? What if we do?

What do you do when you make a mistake? You see what part of it was yours. You take responsibility and let go of the self-defense.

Then you say you’re sorry.

Then you try to learn and heal that part of yourself that led to the mistake. And you try to make amends.

“I’m sorry. I love you.” Repeat. To the universe. As you heal yourself, you heal others.

I made a mistake this week. I know better. I said things that hurt someone I like and respect a good deal. I realized I’d caused hurt, and I apologized. I was laughing about something just because it made me uncomfortable, I said, which was the truth. I was understood and forgiven on the spot. I didn’t forgive myself, though. That takes longer. Looking at what happened, I made a plan to get more comfortable with that issue. In order to say fewer hurtful things, some people try to watch what they say. That never works.

The beauty of working on yourself, on the thoughts and love level, is that you don’t have to watch what you say if you see more clearly, if you judge less and understand more.

“I don’t know what to say to these people,” I heard someone say.

Well, first of all, there is no “these people.” There are just people. There are those of us who are Democrat and those of us who are Republican. There are those of us who are comfortable financially and those of us who are struggling. There are those of us who are straight and those of us who are gay, and a lot of people on the continuum in between. There are those of us who are male and those of us who are female and there are those who move in-between on the continuum. The wider we draw the circle the less we have to wonder what to say to “those people.” They are us.

Go ahead and mix with folks you don’t know what to say around. You will make mistakes. Look forward to it. It’s the way we learn, and we love learning.

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