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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
August 22, 2012
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Even in relatively good times, it can be hard to envision the possibilities that lie before us. We can get caught in routines and set ways of thinking. In difficult or tragic circumstances, it can feel like our possibilities have been taken away from us. Yet, even in such times, new possibilities often emerge. How do we learn to embrace them?
Chalice Lighting
We now kindle a fire as a passion for justice burns in our hearts. Its light gives us glimpses of the many creative possibilities that surround us. Its warmth radiates into our very souls, connecting the devine spark within each of us, binding us together in beloved religious community.
Call to Worship
“Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up, when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts, embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders, teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies, recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire: Another world is possible.”
– Roque Dalton
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature. What we have been forced to leave behind we needed to leave behind. What is getting us through is what we will need to take forward, all the rest is up to us. DREAM. While have so much time. DREAM of the life you want. DREAM of the world you desire to exist in…. from there we can add to the collective weaving of whatever it is that is next. if we are gonna heal, let it be glorious.”
– Sonya Renee Taylor
Sermon
There’s a story about two salespeople who were sent to a remote tribal village in the 1900s to find out if there was any opportunity for selling shoes there for their company. Well, they both sent back telegrams to the company. One of them wrote, “Situation hopeless. Stop. They don’t wear shoes.” And the other one wrote, “Glorious opportunity. Stop. They don’t have any shoes yet.”
In September, we’ll be exploring the topic of Embracing Possibility in several of our classes and other church activities. I think that story illustrates how even in relatively OK times and situations, it can sometimes be difficult to perceive and embrace the possibilities available to us. Now, the second salesperson clearly was very open to possibility. But like the first salesperson, so often we can get into sort of a rut – sometimes just due to the necessary routines of daily living. We can develop restricted ways of thinking and of experiencing our world that limit our creative potential. Well, fortunately, studies have found that there are fairly simple ways we can open ourselves to possibility.
Just as they benefit us in many other ways, music, dancing , exercise, the arts, story telling, movies, reading, etc. can help us perceive and embrace possibilities. They take us out of the routines of daily life. Religious community and spiritual practices can also.
Research has found that practicing gratitude is one of our strongest ways to enhance creative thinking. Meditation and other spiritual practices can also help us grasp the potentialities that lie before us.
In spring of 2014, I was taking the last required class before I could graduate from seminary. My seminary was a long distance program wherein we did most of the classwork at home. Anyway, the work for the class had this routine pattern. Read a lot. Read some more Read. Read. Read. Read. Read a lot more. Write a paper. Rinse and repeat for a second and third time. The routine had pretty much stifled my creativity by the time I had to write the third paper. And suddenly, I realized I had also written myself into a corner in my first two papers.
All three sets of readings for the papers addressed pretty much the same themes, and I had written the first two papers so broadly that by the second paper I had already addressed all of the major themes from all of the readings. I had no idea what I could possibly write about for that third paper.
Finally, I went out into our backyard. It was a beautiful, cool spring day. I walked all around our backyard, over and over again, meditating, forcing myself not to think about that looming paper. Of course though, eventually I had to go back in and get back to it. I sat down at my computer, and suddenly it came to me that though the third set of readings addressed the same themes, they did so in ways that could be read as a critique of the theses I had chosen about those themes for my first two papers. So, I wrote the third paper, basically as a critical examination of my first two. Well, my instructor was a Unitarian Universalist, so, of course, they just loved it that I would be argumentative, even with myself! I got an A+ and graduated seminary.
So these are some things that can help us embrace possibility even in times that are relatively OK. And when we find ourselves in situations that are difficult, they become even more vital. Really, really tough, even painful situations like, oh, I don’t know … living through a pandemic … can make it very hard to imagine new possibilities, so we need these experiences and practices to help us through. And we may also be able to awaken ourselves to not yet imagined potentialities by asking ourselves what we have learned from the experience, as difficult as it has been.
Researchers have been asking people what they hope for after the pandemic. Here are just a few of the common responses:
- More caring and kindness.
- Deeper relationships
- Really living my experiences.
- Treating health as more than what happens at a medical facility.
- Finding ways to love more deeply than before.
- Doing for others and the planet.
These from folks across the ideological spectrum. Likewise, I think we can now envision a lot of possibilities about ways of being and doing:
- A much deeper sense of how truly interconnect we are.
- New ways of imagining work and the workplace.
- Greater comfort with stillness.
- Realizing that love is still possible, even from a distance.
Those are just a few possibilities we might now embrace.
And early research has begun to find that the pandemic and months of sheltering in place have begun to awaken more and more people to issues such as global inequalities, as well as inequities within individual nations. People are awakening to systemic racism and other forms of oppression. They are beginning to recognize the extreme weather events we have been witnessing as being due to global climate change.The pandemic has revealed the brokenness of our educational, health and criminal justice systems to a lot of folks.
Again, these are just a few examples. And I know there are still many who haven’t had these awakenings. But more and more are. In recent conversations with some of my politically conservative loved ones, I have been pleasantly surprised at how they expressed a new awareness of one or more of these. And as more people awaken, we can begin to cast a vision for change, creating a better and more just world – a world reset in the after times because of the possibilities awakening within more and more folks.
I want to turn now to how even our worst times of loss, grief and sorrow may contain the seeds of possibility in our future, if we find healthy ways to carry them with us.
On October 3, 2014, Nora McInerny suffered through a miscarriage. On October 8, her father died. Then, on November 25, her husband, Aaron, died of brain cancer. Devastated, part of the way she began to heal was by forming ways to help others who were grieving losses. She discovered, like for her, one of the things they found most hurtful was when others advised them to just “move on”. I want to let her tell you her response to that and how moving forward with her loss opened up new possibilities.
Video
I’ll close with how in extremely difficult times, we can help each other find possibility. Some of you have heard me talk about the time in Houston I spent doing HIV/ AIDS treatment research. At first, there just were no effective treatments for the disease. We lost so many.
Raul was one who was especially difficult for me. Raul had moved to Houston from Puerto Rico and took a job with me as our office administrator. He was kind and smart and talented and funny and did such great work for the organization. We shared an office together, so we got to be very close. Raul had HIV. Eventually, his immune system began to fail, and he started getting sick.
My spouse Wayne was his physician at the time. For awhile, he was able to help Raul recover from a number of various AIDS- related illnesses. Eventually though, Raul came down with an infection for which there was no treatment. Eventually, he became so ill and weak that he went into a hospice, where they could at least try to alleviate his suffering.
I went to visit him just before he died. I wish I could tell you that it was a beautiful death, whatever that means. It wasn’t.
He was suffering, and he had lost control of his bodily functions, and he kept fighting it even there in the hospice, and he was angry. He had every right to be. He was 26 years old. Mercifully, the pain medicine they were infusing into him eventually helped him fall asleep. But I sat there with him in that quiet hospice room and thought to myself, “I can’t do this any more”. The sense of loss suddenly seemed too overwhelming.
I could not imagine any possible way I could keep doing AIDS research work. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. I wanted to forget the devastation happening all around me. Eventually though, I went home and fell into Wayne’s loving arms.
Eventually, I talked with other folks I loved who were doing similar work. And they helped me begin to perceive the possibilities that would allow me to keep going, which largely involved letting myself slow down – take time to feel the emotions and take better care of myself. And together, we, all of us, held onto our love for each other and a vision of the day when we would find effective treatments. And eventually, eventually, that day came.
Still, like with Raul, we lost too many shining souls along the way. But as in the video we watched earlier, we didn’t move on without them. We moved forward with them. Raul and so many others are a part of who I have become.
And despite this time when I cannot get to be with you all in person, still, you are a part of who I am becoming even now, as I hope I am in at least some small way for you. You are part of who your fellow participants in this religious community, even through virtual space, are becoming, as they are for you.
The return of the pandemic surging because of the delta variant has been so very difficult, especially after the vaccines becoming available had offered us our first glimmers of hope, after so many long, hard months of living in pandemic isolation. So many of us were just beginning to be able to visit with family and loved ones after so being separated for so long. We had begun to dream of returning to in person worship services and activities here at the church. Now, all of that has been called into question, put on standby, by a virus resurgent. It’s a terribly difficult time.
There are moments when I am having to find ways to keep from slipping into despair. So, I know it can be so hard now to even imagine the possibilities that still lie before us. It can be so difficult to hold on to that vision for the after times – that dream of making a better world based at least in part on what we have learned from living through a pandemic.
My beloveds, we will need each other and all of those we love – we will need to help each other be able to see the possibilities that do still exist for us. So, hold onto all that you love and all of where you find love in your lives. Hold onto your love for one another and all of those who are dear to you. Hold onto your love for humanity and for all of life and creation.
Hold on to love, for within it, possibilities still abundant are calling you forward.
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