Starting Over

Vicki Rao

12 September 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us be aware of who we really are. Not in the small sense, but in the large one. Who are the people, what are the relationships, what are the guiding ideals, that help define our largest selves?

Let us love those people, relationships and ideals as we love ourselves. For in truth, they are our largest self.

What high values and ideals have we served in our best and proudest moments? Let us keep those ideals before us always, in order that all moments have a better chance of being among our best.

When we become frightened, we tend to withdraw into our smallest and most scared selves, as though just surviving were all that mattered then. But the survival of our smallest selves isn’t what we or our world need. We need the survival of our largest selves.

And so let us be aware of who we really are. Not in the small sense, but in the largest sense possible. Let us remember who we are, and whose we are. And let us be inspired to serve that image of our very largest self, because if we serve it faithfully, we will become what we have served.

Amen.

HOMILY: Starting Over,

Vicki Rao

I am glad to be here, glad to be your new intern, the third in the last three years.

You are a teaching congregation. You have welcomed me here, right into your pulpit. Thank you. I am touched by your commitment to making possible such a unique learning opportunity. I am impressed with your courage and I hope I will be equally impressed with your forbearance. You could say you folks are starting again at being a teaching congregation with me’. starting over in the project of teaching someone like me what ministry is to you, does for you. I may look like a short bespeckled woman but you should really think of me as a sponge’ an eager sponge.

We are all always starting something aren’t we? Whether everyday, mundane starting overs like getting up on the right side of the bed, or getting another meal on the table, or magnificent ones like starting at being a partner, or parent, or grandparent, a widow or widower, our lives are always cycling through change. This time of year, kids are starting another school year, maybe leaving home to go to college. Parents then must start over too, letting go of the child, looking to find a new center of orientation for the next chapter of their lives. The natural tendency to continue holds the secret of eternity, so it says in the I Ching.

Each day is a gift. With this insight many of us try to begin our days consciously, maybe prayerfully, asking for help or strength or comfort to see us through the day. We go on. It is because we do go on that we need the resoluteness to keep at it. We try, we try hard to get things done, to get along, to move forward. If we had an argument yesterday, our need is to resolve the conflict, the try to heal whatever injury might have resulted, to clear the air and the tables, and start again. Starting over in relationships is the big league. The area where folks are compelled to grow with others or forced to face and outgrow relationships which are deadening to their spirits. Either way, growing within or between relationships, you’ve got to start over.

It’s a good thing that starting over is so natural to us human beings. Think of a newborn. Not much there in the way of words, ideas, or opinions. But that little one is alive and subject to all the regular discomforts of living. They will be getting hungry and thirsty, then they will be getting wet, etc. So they cry. In their cry is the call for help. It is the way, the only way, they can communicate their experience of need.

They cry and someone comes. Things get better. If they cry and no one comes, they keep crying. They cry until they exhaust themselves. When they wake up they cry again. They start again naturally. It is a creaturely thing. It is a simple embodied tendency to be proactive, giving expression to the will, held in common by all babies to be nurtured and cared for (well, maybe not snakes). Now if that baby’s cry draws no caregiver repeatedly, that baby’s impulse to cry, to start over again to call out its need, will diminish. That creature will learn that its cry is useless, its situation hopeless. And all that learning is without words or ideas or even an awareness of self.

So what? I just wanted to make a connection between the basic impulse to start again and the human experience’ to highlight the inherent wordless hope that gives energy to the impulse to start again. It is not a theological hope. It is not rooted in ideas of any sort. It is the stuff of beliefs. I believe I will be taken care of and that all is well and that others will help not hurt or ignore me. Or maybe I just don’t believe these affirmations or true. The process by which a person comes to such beliefs might be rational, but who is to say which set of beliefs is more rational? The point I want to make is that believing that all will be well, despite whatever difficulty or pain you may be experiencing in the present moment, really helps with the ongoing enterprise of starting over in life. If a sense of trust, or of faith, or bliss resides anywhere in your center, chances are, starting over is easier for you.

Starting over may be initiated from an inward awareness of need but it often comes from outward circumstances. Sometimes major life changes are absolutely imposed on us. A stroke victim is maybe grateful for the preservation of their life but it is nothing but hard work to learn to walk again, nothing but painful frustration to learn to speak again. Life regularly slows folks down to the point of utter stillness whether by accident or disease or crippling life-changing loss.

What about the folks in Florida? Devastating storms roll in off the ocean and uproot lives and plans and hopes along with trees and buildings. What to do? Insurance and federal aid sure help to fund the massive scale of starting over the people of the state must now face but what about the reckoning of each soul at the dawn of each of their new days? The experience of loss, shock, fatigue, discouragement, frustration, anger. The need to carry on remains. A hurricane wind just swept your life back a thousand steps, now you must start over one step at a time.

May there be a spirit of community and sharing to soothe the weary Floridians. Perhaps there are a couple of candles burning there in the window for them. But let us also remember that they are not the only victims of imposed devastation faced with the daunting and overwhelming need to start over. For all the people whose lives have been pummeled by the atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Russia, let us take into our hearts and minds a fraction of the abundant, overflowing pain they know. They are far away places but anguish is boundless. We strengthen our humanity by our willingness to witness ‘.. not so much by staying informed as much as by staying in touch with the human reality, the condition of folks who are innocent victims of impersonal forces of destruction. Folks who have before them years of rebuilding to restore the infrastructures of their lives, to reconcile, if possible, with the tragedy and inhumanity they have been dealt.

Considering the time and energy it requires to rebuild lives, you realize and more deeply appreciate what a privilege it is to be moving forward with plans for your own growth and learning. I have worked for and waited for and planned for this time of ministerial internship. I am ready for the new community, the new role, the tasks, projects and duties which go along with this training in the ministry of liberal religion that you are offering to me.

Ministry for me is about taking on the work to become oriented to the great mystery which binds us together in this life, to discern the priorities dictated by the affirmation of the sacredness of all living things. It is living for the sake of soul, mine, yours and the earth’s.

Where will it end? We don’t know, do we? But it has begun. Something filled with hope has just begun right here, between me and you, all of you. And perhaps that, just that, is enough blessing for one morning.

HOMILY: Starting Over,

Davidson Loehr

When things change and we have to start over, one of our strongest concerns is for taking care of ourselves, doing what’s best for ourselves ‘ or, if we have a family, doing what’s best for our people, our family. And as Vicki said, we’re always starting over at something, because things are always changing.

If there’s a science or an art to starting over, it might be summed up in the lines of a wise and witty little poem by Piet Hein, called ‘The Road to Wisdom’:

The road to wisdom?

Well, it’s clear and easy to express:

Just err and err and err again,

But less and less and less

Every time we start over, it’s a time to err and err and err again ‘ hopefully, less and less and less. This advice is so much more human and forgiving than expecting perfection at something we haven’t tried before, and beating ourselves up when we fail.

In some ways, starting over is the opposite of the ‘airplane’ ride. It drives us to remember our foundations, where we stand, the values and beliefs that have sustained and guided us so far, and which we will need to stay in touch with this time, too.

At first glance, it doesn’t sound like a religious issue. But at second glance, it is. Because the core concern of almost all religions ‘ and the key concern when things change around us and we have to start over ‘ is just who and what our ‘self’ is, just who ‘our people’ are. The biggest mistake we make is to define ourselves and our people in too small a way.

I first got this idea from a very unusual source, one of those books I can’t believe I ever read. It was a book on 13th century Chinese Confucianism, of all things (by William Theodore De Bary). The concept was called ‘Living for one’s Self.’ It sounds like a narcissistic self-help book from last month, but the key is in the way the Confucians understood the idea of our ‘self.’ The mistake we make, they say, is in defining our selves too narrowly, as though our self were just us, as radical individuals.

But no, as Confucians have said for centuries, we need to understand that our real ‘self’ is that huge combination of relationships, connections, friends, teachers, those we love, those who love us, and all the other lives our lives touch without our even knowing it. That, that big multiply-connected thing, is our real self, they say. And we should always live for that self, nothing less, nothing smaller. And when things change and we’re trying to move into new territory, we need to remember to take our whole self, not just the little scared part of it.

Confucian teaching is non-theistic, just concerned with who we should be and how we should behave in a world filled with others. But you find this notion everywhere, and I think it’s the most important thing to remember when things change and we’re starting over. And of course, things are always changing, and we’re always starting over, aren’t we?

Some Christians have another way of putting this, and I like it too. They say the important thing isn’t who we are, but whose we are. They mean we should see ourselves as belonging to God, and should live and act in ways that do honor to a child of God. So our bigger self, our real self, is as a child of God, loved and affirmed by God, and challenged in a sort of heavenly-fatherly way to act as though God were both watching us and supporting us. For some, that will feel much warmer and more personal than the Confucian way; for others, it will seem like metaphors you’d rather not use.

Well, if you’d rather not use them, then don’t. The point isn’t what you call this bigger self; the point is being able to call it forth.

Let me offer you some other pictures. The Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses that they used very imaginatively. But they also used images and teachings without gods in them. And one picture of this larger ‘self’ that has long been a favorite of mine is their image of the soul ‘ by which they meant the core, the essence, of a person ‘ as a spider in a web. All the rays of the web held the web and the spider to the world around it, and much of the spider’s time was spent mending the web, attending to her connections. Starting over is like that, too: taking time to attend to our connections.

Back to that theistic image of asking whose we are. That can sound spooky if you take it literally, and many of you might not find that image useful. But it can mean the people, the values, ideals, beliefs that define who we are most comfortable being, that have guided us well in the past, that we want to keep with us. For instance:

– Some of you speak of Reason in ways that make it sound as though you have capitalized the word. You want your life to be rational, clear-sighted, reasonable. All right, then you are a child of Reason, that’s whose you are. So you stop to examine a new situation and say ‘Is this really reasonable? What is the clearest, most sensible thing to do here?’ Then you’re acting out of a bigger sense of self, one in the service of Reason. Nothing spooky about it.

– Some of you speak, as Buddhists speak, of Compassion as your central concern. Buddhists often teach that when you must choose between doing the reasonable thing and doing the compassionate thing, you and your world will emerge in a healthier and more awakened way if you choose the compassionate thing. Your real self, then, is your most compassionate self, and you will make it through changes and starting over when you remember to find the road of compassion. If you like to put it in god-images, then the Buddhists would say you are remembering Kwan Yin, the feminine counterpart of the Buddha. She is ‘whose’ you are.

– Some of you do personalize it with a personal God, and it is natural for you to ask what God would want you to do, and to ask for God’s strength and guidance when you’re in tough places. That’s language that has been used by billions of believers for thousands of years. Then God is ‘whose’ you are, and this is another way of taking stock of your biggest self when you are starting over and want to make sure you take your best and biggest self along with you in this starting over.

– Or you may think in more naturalistic terms, and see yourselves as children of Nature, of the earth, of Mother Earth. And you need to check your connection with this Mother Earth to see that your new path doesn’t trample her treasures. By doing that, you take your biggest self with you, and Mother Earth as well. That’s great company! And see how much bigger it makes you, knowing you are acting as a child of the earth, caring for the world that has cared for you all these years? That’s whose you are: the earth’s.

And the image of ourselves as children of nature reminds me of another image I’ve always loved, that doesn’t come from religion or philosophy. It comes from stories I’ve read about those colorful decorative Japanese fish called koi that you will see in ponds at some Japanese restaurants and a few other places. The thing about koi is that apparently the size of their pond limits the size to which they can grow. If they stay in a fish tank, they will never grow very big. They are part of the world around them, and its size determines their size. Put them in a small pond and they’ll grow bigger. In a large pond or lake they grow even bigger. In that way, we are like koi. We grow according to the size of the pond we choose to live within, and starting over is often moving into a bigger pond, or at least new waters. That pond is like the Greek web containing all of our connections to the people who matter to us. It includes our gods, our guiding beliefs and teachings, all the evocative images we have to expand our consciousness and enlarge our souls. And, like the koi, the bigger world in which we seek connections, the bigger we become as human beings.

I love all these images, and move between them. The more ways we can say what we believe, the more likely it is that we really know what we believe.

We are always starting over. Always trying to look out for our selves, for our people. And when things change -which is every day – and we need to start over – which is also every day – let us be sure to take care of our self: our whole self. When we change, when we start over, let’s not go it alone. Let’s take our whole self. Nothing, and no one, any smaller than that.