A Dual Hunger ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 8, 2023
There is a moment, when we are watching the swinging of a pendulum, when there’s a slowing, a pause, before the pendulum begins to move back in the other direction. Picture this with me for just a moment; envision that movement, and then that hesitation, that almost imperceptible space for a fleeting second when nothing happens.
This week I’ve found myself thinking about divers, especially high divers. We watch them compete, maybe during the Olympic Games, and we see them walk out onto the platform, get into position, and then pause. And as we watch, as the crowd goes silent, they gather themselves, and then fling themselves out into the air. Hold that image in your head; we are going to come back to that.
Our spiritual theme this month is Finding Our Center. We think and talk quite a bit about the idea of Centering in our faith tradition. We see the value in learning how to quell the noise, how to practice calming ourselves, quieting our minds, practicing going deep within ourselves to find truths about ourselves. Centering is important work, and valuable, even for its own sake. In this noisy, busy culture that surrounds us, with all the demands on our time and our attention, it serves us well to practice creating a safe and quiet space within. Our center.
Often, we think that the exploration of our Center, the act of Centering, is the end in itself. We feel accomplished during those rare moments where we feel we have broken through the noise, been able to quiet the monkey mind of random thoughts that so readily come to the surface as soon as we sit and close our eyes. “That felt good,” we think, as we savor the momentary sense of peace. “I’ll try that again tomorrow. Or maybe Thursday. If I can find the time.” Regardless of our intentions, we do love the idea of simply sitting at peace.
Now, let me ask you this: what if the high diver simply walked out to the end of the platform, and stayed there?
What if the pendulum stopped at the end of its swing?
What if the practice of centering ourselves is not the end, but rather, the means to an end? For the diver doesn’t stay there, perched at the end of the platform. She takes a moment to gather her muscles and her thoughts, and then launches herself. And a pendulum doesn’t stop: it changes direction.
Ultimately, we work to center ourselves, not simply to live with equanimity, to float along in a state of calmness and wisdom, but rather, so that we are positioned to respond to the forces of life that are always swirling around us. Like the winds here on Cape Ann, shifting, coming from different directions, life will make conflicting demands of us. We are not meant to hide in our centers, to rest there, but rather, to use what we learn there to know how to respond.
“I rise in the morning torn between the desire
To save the world or to savor it—to serve life or to enjoy it…”. (Richard Gilbert, “To Savor the World or to Save It,” from In the Holy Quiet)
When do we serve, and when do we rest? When are we satisfied with what we see around us, and when do we respond to the pricking of our conscience, to a call to leap off the diving platform, to change direction and swing?
As Karl read a few minutes ago: “Like pendulums we swing from hunger for cosmic imperatives commanding us to expand ourselves, to hunger for immediate and authentic inner promptings urging us to be ourselves.”
(“Like Pendulums We Swing,” By Don Vaughn-Foerster)
Centering ourselves, then, is more than just an attempt to steady ourselves. It is an inquiry, a search for a call, and for what drives us forward. It is finding balance between the different demands, finding a place to be whole.
Centering, finding our center, is also about finding purpose. In the story we heard earlier, we learned that different objects respond differently when placed in boiling water. How do we respond to those uncomfortable plunges? Circumstances vary, certainly, and so we find ourselves responding differently as a situation requires. But how do we know in each instance what our purpose is, what our next right action is? How do we remember in the heat of the boiling water, what our purpose is?
I had a challenging day yesterday. Nothing dire, but for a variety of reasons throughout the day I was unable to stay in a calm, centered place, or to get any work done. We’ve all been there. As sometimes happens, as the day wore on and the sun started to set, I began to worry about whether I would be able to prepare this morning’s service. A voice in my head started helpfully suggesting that you wouldn’t mind if I decided to substitute an old sermon, or some poetry. “They’d understand,” said the helpful voice.
And you are a kind bunch, and I think you would understand. But I had to tell the helpful voice to quiet down. In the end, my own values wouldn’t let me stay standing on the diving platform. I needed to dive in.
I’m sharing this with you to explain the kind of centering we’re talking about here this morning; the search for a way forward, the response to a call or to a situation, and the effort to find balance between competing paths. Our responses, our convictions and our callings, and our purpose, comes from our deepest values. When we seek our center, what we are actively doing is connecting with our core values. What drives us forward; propels us off the diving board? The concept of being centered that we are most familiar with implies rest, quiet, and balance. But in fact, being centered is what allows us to make decisions, what propels us, to choose how to move, not to stay in that calm space we all crave, the still point, but how to move through it.
Can you name your deepest held values? I realized yesterday that one of mine is that I will not stop trying. What might be your top five? Can you usually live by them? Do you hunger more for peace, or for action in the world?
I’m going to invite us all to spend this week exploring these questions. If you want, I can offer you some resources to help you with your inquiry. And then next Sunday, after coffee hour, I hope anyone who wants to can get together and we can have a conversation about some of what we have discovered.
Our author wrote, “We have this dual hunger: to serve the cosmos that commands us to become more than we would and to be our genuine selves, content with what we are. So we ride this pendulum in hunger for life. We ride from (the) Truth that calls us out to truths that call us in.
And all because the gravity of life pulls across our hunger, never allowing us to stay on one side or the other, always moving us into new urgency for the wholeness that would bind both the cosmic and the personal.”
We are riding a pendulum. A pendulum that pulls us across our center, over and over, but doesn’t allow us to stay in that center. We are surrounded by shifting winds, and sand, and tides. Life, we know, is a process, always changing, always calling us forward. We do not get to choose whether or not to move with the winds, with the pendulum, but we do get to choose how. Does the situation call for us to respond like a potato, like an egg, or like coffee beans? Any one of these requires us to transform, in different ways. Do we become softer, or harder, or a different substance altogether? We can’t know until we are confronted with the need to shift, to move. But what we need to know, what each one of us needs to know for ourselves, is what we hold at our very core, what motivates us, what urges us to take a step, first one, and then the other.
What is your center urging you to do? How do you know if it’s right?
This is the work of a lifetime. And here, we can engage these questions, and seek to ride the pendulum together. I hope you’ll join me.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
