If Change Were Inevitable

"Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes."
-- Hugh Prather

Joys and Concerns

This is our time on Sunday mornings, to light candles of joy and concern.

We take this time to stop for a moment, take a breath,

and think about this week in our lives, with all of its ups and downs. 

Think about the people you know and love. How are they doing?

One concern I would like to share: Yesterday we learned that Kent Conrad, our Music Director passed away suddenly and unexpectedly the day before. Kent shared his gift of music with us for the past ten years. He was loved and admired by many of us. Plans for a memorial service at this point are incomplete. Many of us are in shock and disbelief. His loss is deeply felt. Please keep Kent, his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.

Reading:  by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron from Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (p. 3) 

As human beings we share a tendency to scramble for certainty whenever we realize that everything around us is in flux. In difficult times the stress of trying to find solid ground – something predictable and safe to stand on – seems to intensify. But in truth, the very nature of our existence is forever in flux. Everything keeps changing, whether we’re aware of it or not.

What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we’re part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

So this is where we find ourselves: right in the middle of a dilemma. And it leaves us with some provocative questions: How can we live whole-heartedly in the face of impermanence, knowing that one day we’re going to die? What is it like to realize we can never completely and finally get it all together? How can we make friends with unpredictability and uncertainty – and embrace them as vehicles to transform our lives?

Reading: by Judith Sills from The Comfort Trap (p. 1)

In the high-wire act that is life, most of our time is spent huddled on a comfortable platform of our own creation. We could stay safely snuggled there – busy, preoccupied, suffering, or delighted. It is a familiar and confining harbor, and its only exit is a tightrope stretched to the next haven. Eventually, uncomfortably, the spotlight of promise moves to that next platform and our own grows painful and empty. When it does, we freeze in place. Can we risk that tightrope of change?

What will you do?

Many will look determinedly away from the tightrope. Who knows, after all, where it [really] leads? Some few will fling themselves forward, while others will inch out and back and farther out again, making wobbly, determined progress toward the light. Most will listen as hard to their audience as to their own hearts, drawing courage or caution from the chorus around them.

Of those who risk the tightrope, we know for certain some will fall. The rest will make it to a new platform, larger, richer, more satisfying than the old one. They will bring with them an enduring pride for having made the leap and a degree of pain from their loss of what was left behind. Much of what was left behind were people who were unable or unwilling to make a similar vault. They stayed stuck. What about you?

Reading: a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “In Blackwater Woods”

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over 

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able 

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

If Change Were Inevitable

A Sermon Delivered on September 7, 2014

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

If life is indeed a high-wire act, we may want to consider the story of Philippe Petit. 

Forty years ago, on the morning of August 7^th, 1974, the twenty-four year old Petit emerged from his hiding place on the 82^nd floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. He climbed to the very top, walked to the edge of the building, gazed out at New York City in the morning light, stretching out 1350 feet below. Then he stepped off the roof… and onto a wire. First one step, and then another. 

He walked the entire distance from the south tower to the north tower. Along the way he stopped and looked down at the crowds gathering far below, he kneeled, he even laid down on his back and watched airplanes pass overhead. When he reached the north tower, he turned around and did it again. He walked back and forth between the towers eight times. The whole act took forty-five minutes. Then he safely got off the wire.

* * *

Any person’s life invariably involves a certain degree of risk and danger. Every morning the alarm clock rings and we get up, we run the risk of getting up on the wrong side of bed. Driving our car across town, riding our bicycles, or even walking, we run the risk of getting into an accident. With each step we take we risk stumbling.

But stepping off the side of the World Trade Center is simply crazy. Why would anyone choose to do such a thing? It seems crazy, reckless and foolish. It would certainly be crazy, reckless and foolish if I tried a similar stunt. Even if all I tried to do was walk on a rope tied from our upstairs window at home to the garage in our back yard, I would probably lose my balance in a heartbeat, and end up breaking a leg, or worse. 

Sometimes I like to go for walks around town, strolling along the train tracks that crisscross our cities. And sometimes, on a whim, I step up onto the rail for a wobbly stretch, just to see how long I can keep my balance. I teeter unstably for only a few feet, before jumping off, just before I fall. That’s about the closest I come to a tightrope walk at this stage of my life. My “high-wire” runs solidly about six inches off the ground. And even so, it feels daring. And the moment when I lose my balance and am about to fall never fails to send a shot of adrenaline through my veins. 

* * *

Stepping out on a high-wire is what it feels like when we deal with change in our lives. It feels scary and daring. It feels risky and maybe more than a little reckless. It certainly isn’t a pleasant, comfortable feeling. That’s why most of us, if we have choice, tend to avoid change. 

It is part and parcel of human nature to continually seek out a sense of emotional comfort. And the best way to find this sense of comfort is by sticking to our familiar routines and our favorite habits. Our routines define us, Judith Sills says, 

“carving our lives into little mini-zones of emotional comfort - my coffee shop, my preference for [coffee] black, one Sweet’N Low not Equal please, my parking spot, my nightly ritual of walking the dog or stalking the bars. The soothing balm of routine defines and confines us all. We always do what we always did, unless we make a conscious, focused effort not to. This is true whether what we did felt good or bad, because in some essential way it feels like me.” (p.6)

But the sense of safety and comfort we find when we stick with the familiar has a catch: it comes with an electric fence. As long as we avoid pushing our limits, we will be blissfully oblivious to the walled platform we unwittingly create around us. But once we stretch past our comfort zone, we get an unmistakable jolt of anxiety.

As Judith Sills puts it, 

“Anxiety is the invisible fence that bounds all of our lives. It is what we would do almost anything to avoid. Anxiety is the opposite of comfort and, when it comes to change, it is the heart of the matter. We always do what we always did because doing something new doesn’t usually feel good. “New” may feel anything from slightly strange to agonizing, but there are all the flavors of anxiety.” (p. 13)

Anxiety makes us uncomfortable. Choosing to change goes against our grain. There is something about the very idea of change that seems scary, if not downright crazy and reckless. 

* * *

While the act of stepping off the roof of the World Trade Center may seem both crazy and reckless, for Philippe Petit it was neither. It was risky for sure, but it was a calculated risk that followed years of meticulous planning and diligent practice. 

Petit was born in a small village fifty miles south of Paris. His father was an author and a former Army pilot. As a boy, Philippe was drawn to magic and juggling. In his teens he discovered the tightrope, and soon learned how to walk, jump, and do somersaults on a wire.

As he tells the story, he was barely eighteen years old in 1968, when, while sitting in a dentist’s office nursing a toothache, he happened to catch sight of an article in one of the newspapers lying on the waiting room table. The article was about two skyscrapers to be built in New York City, which, when finished, would stand over a hundred meters taller than the Eiffel Tower. 

Recalling that day in the dentist’s office, Petit writes, 

“Although I have been practicing only a few months, I have already announced my intention to become [a] high wire artist supreme, and wire walking has already become my obsessive, nearly fanatical new passion. So it is as a reflex that I take the pencil from behind my ear to trace a line between the two rooftops – a wire, but no wirewalker.” (Man on Wire, p. 6)

In the years that followed, Petit practiced and planned. In 1971 he walked on a wire between the two towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The towers are 226 feet tall. Two years later, in 1973, we walked between two pylons of the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia. The bridge is 440 feet tall. In the months leading up to the World Trade Center “coup,” he visited New York several times. He carefully studied the buildings’ blueprints, and even rented a helicopter to take aerial photographs. 

The cable he designed, secretly lugged to the top of the towers and then installed, weighed 450 pounds, and was stabilized by additional “guy-lines” that minimized how much the wire would sway in the wind. The long balancing poll he carried – an essential tool for a serious wirewalker - weighed 55 pounds. 

To the crowds gathering below, the sight was breathtaking and unbelievable. A person walking on a wire a quarter of a mile above their heads seemed in equal parts miracle and madness. For Philippe Petit it was the performance of a lifetime, the highpoint of his acrobatic career. The reward for years of single-minded effort and devotion to his chosen calling, the work and art he loved. 

* * *

For the Buddhist, change is not simply a risky course of action we may or may not choose to follow. Change is not a step only the most daring among us are likely to take, from the safety of solid ground to the dangers of a high-wire act. 

The solid ground is an illusion. In reality the world around us and we ourselves are constantly, continuously changing. And, yes, in Buddhist belief change is also linked to anxiety. “Whether we are aware of it or not, the ground is always shifting,” Pema Chodron writes. “Nothing lasts, including us. There are probably very few people who, at any given time, are consumed with the idea “I’m going to die,” but there is plenty of evidence that this thought, this fear, haunts us constantly.”

And that is another reason we cling so dearly to our habits and routines, our beliefs and our biases. “We grab onto a position or belief as a way of neatly explaining reality, unwilling to tolerate the uncertainty and discomfort of staying open to other possibilities,” Chodron says. “We cling to that position as our personal platform and become very dogmatic about it.” (p. 7)

But no matter how desperately we hold on to familiar habits, no matter how fervently we pray for the world to stay the same, and for the people we love to always be with us – change happens.

Or as Judith Sills puts it, “most of us will linger on the platform of our comfort zone forever, unless it collapses beneath us and life forces us onto the tightrope.” Then we have no choice but confront change. The question then is not whether we will change, but how we will change. 

In order to travel safely across the tightrope, we need to take several difficult steps. The steps are tricky and demand our attention, but with practice and persistence, any of us can learn them. Judith Sills describes seven steps. (1) First we need to face what hurts, we need to acknowledge what is painful or missing in our life. (2) Then we need to create a vision of where we hope to go from here. (3) Then we need to decide when we are ready to move forward. (4) We should examine our past, our personal history, and see what it reveals about what we need to do next. (5) We need to acknowledge what is holding us in place, what is keeping us stuck. What are we afraid of losing, and how can we minimize our losses? (6) We need to face our fears. We need to name and then overcome our anxiety. (7) And finally, we need to take action. We need to do something different. We need to choose something new. 

* * *

Change is inevitable. It is unsettling. And it invariably leads us into the unknown. This is our predicament, the Buddhist tells us. And so the question for us is, “How can we make friends with unpredictability and uncertainty – and embrace them as vehicles to transform our lives?”

For each of us the path we need to take will look different. No matter what we do, the path before us is risky. We know for certain that some will fall. And yet we must move forward.  

And move we will. We will move forward on our path of life as certainly as the sun will move across the sky. We will move and change as certainly as summer will be followed by fall, and winter, and spring’s rebirth. 

If we live well, we will learn to move gracefully, hopefully, and even joyfully toward a life of compassion, kindness and love. If we live well, we will move through the black river of loss, whose other side is salvation…. whose ultimate meaning we may never know. 

To live well we may need to learn seven steps, or maybe just three: (1) to love what is mortal, (2) to hold it against our bones knowing our own life depends on it. (3) And when it comes time to let it go, to let it go.

May we have the wisdom to honor and cherish the true love we have known.

And may we have the courage to forever move toward a deeper love.

Amen.