A Time for Balance, A Time for Gratitude ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
September 22, 2024

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend all along the shoreline here on Cape Ann in the past couple of years: perhaps you have as well. On many of our rocky beaches and coves more and more people are seeking out stones and stacking them into precariously balanced structures. Once a few are built, other people seem inspired to want to try it, until in a few places there are practically little petrified forests of different sized stacks of rocks.

Interestingly, only once have I ever actually seen someone working on one. Last winter, on a walk up in Maine, we came upon a young man working with really large rocks, attempting to lift and balance them. But typically, around here, the stacks – I don’t really think we can call them cairns – seem to spring up like mushrooms. I wonder how to interpret this activity. Is it just for fun? Or, in these difficult times we’re living in, are people finding ways to express their need for more balanced in their lives?

Today we find ourselves balanced on the wheel of the year. Every day the Earth moves under our feet, bringing us daily into periods of longer nights or longer days. We’ve known this since childhood, and while we might grumble about the shorter days of winter, we accept this motion as fact.

But on two days of the year, on the days of the spring and fall equinoxes, there is a balance between day and night; a sense of a pause, of having achieved a still point.

Today is the Fall Equinox, and we experience that time of balance. It’s a perfect time to think about balance in our own lives. It’s a goal we often talk about: a goal to achieve a life of stability, of equanimity. How often do we read advice about attaining balance between our work and our personal lives, for example? The ‘work-life balance’ we call it.

But truly, our whole lives are caught up in a balancing act. Think about all the different kinds of balance we attempt to maintain: caring for ourselves and caring for others, or experiencing both joy and sorrow. We are torn between action and acceptance. Between despair and hope.

This has been a struggle for humans since the dawn of our existence. As I thought about this the words of the teacher known as Ecclesiastes came readily to mind:

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die,
A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.” (Ecc. 3:1-2)

This led me to the old sung version by The Byrds:
“To everything, turn, turn, turn,
“There is a season, turn, turn, turn…”

We are turning, turning, even as we pause in this moment to honor stillness, and equanimity.

Attaining and maintaining balance in our lives may be a goal, but it is an elusive one. Let’s think again about the equinox: we say that today night and day are divided equally, but in reality it’s only for a brief moment. There is that still point, yes. But the Earth continues to move, and ever so slightly the balance begins to shift.

So it is with our lives. So it is with everything living. We live in motion: the earth that supports us rotates beneath us. We live surrounded by the rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the changing position of the stars in the sky. We live surrounded by the winds wafting around us, and the tides, ebbing and flowing, and the waves crashing on shore and receding.

So while we might strive to balance ourselves, the motion surrounding us, the changes occurring to everything around us, will keep us from actually balancing for more than an instant. We might take a step onto uneven ground and feel ourselves knocked off balance. And of course, when we feel ourselves starting to wobble, we instantly make a correction, we put out a hand or move in a way that stabilizes us. Sometimes we might fail, and we can fall over. And of course, sometimes, we can grab hold of someone nearby or they might reach out and steady us. But no matter how, we don’t stop trying to regain our equilibrium, to rise and steady ourselves anew. It’s a continual effort.

Today is not a self-help lecture: it’s not about self-care or yoga or learning to say ‘no’ to too many requests for our time, or our money. Today is about understanding that while we can learn as much as we like about achieving balance in our lives, our success will be fleeting. We are living and moving, within a system that is also living and moving. We cannot stay balanced for long.

What we are called to do, instead of reading all those self-help articles, is to be as aware as we can be of the moments when we feel balanced. Think of how finely tuned our sense of physical balance is. We know instantly when we are off-balance. The work for us, then, is to develop awareness of those fleeting moments when we sense harmony, equanimity, even stasis. Those moments come. When we are aware of them, those brief still points, when we feel them, we are given an opportunity to offer our gratitude. We know the stability will not, cannot last. But the more we notice, and the more we say thank you in those moments, the longer and more frequent they will seem to us.

Over the course of our lives, as our awareness grows, and with it our gratitude, we can begin to see how a whole life contains all the good moments and all those we would wish away. We shift between all that we cherish and all that we would forget. We are called to have faith in the balance over an entire lifetime, much as we trust that the tide ebbs and flows, and that even though the days grow shorter now, they will, in a few months, begin to grow longer again. We take our cues from the never-ending turning of the earth.

Turn, turn, turn.

Perhaps the lifelong work is not merely to feel gratitude for fleeting moments of balance. Perhaps the work is to learn to be grateful for all that we are given over the course of a lifetime: the lifelong balancing act of work and play, of night and day, of love and rejection, of joy and sorrow.

The poet Khalil Gibran gave us these famous thoughts about the balance between joy and sorrow, and how to be thankful for both:

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain…
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable…
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced… (On Joy and Sorrow, The Prophet.)
I visited Bearskin Neck with some visiting friends one afternoon this summer. The carefully balanced stacks of stones were everywhere; that tiny leafless forest. Those friends returned home and days later another friend arrived, and we visited the Neck again. The stacks were all gone. Had the wind knocked them over? Maybe children couldn’t resist?
A mystery, not to be solved. They were there, balancing, and then they were not; a reminder that even stones are in motion, even rocks are not permanent. I recalled my enjoyment of them, the photos I took. And now, there would be new opportunities for other people to try to balance the stones. And maybe I’ll enjoy them on my next visit.
We turn. And as we turn we lose our balance, and then we regain it. May we be open to all of life, the sunshine and the shadow, the turning, and may we be grateful.
Blessed Be.
Amen.