Countless Small Actions ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 10, 2024
We had a good time talking about butterflies in our service last week. For those who weren’t here or watching online, I was talking about how personal transformation in our lives can begin in an extremely small way. I used the illustration of what happens that allows a butterfly to emerge from a chrysalis spun by a caterpillar. It turns out, as some of you may recall, that inside a caterpillar even before it hatched from its egg, are very specialized cells, known as imaginal cells, or discs. These begin to grow even as the caterpillar dies within the chrysalis. These imaginal discs gradually come together in clusters to form a body, wings, legs, and antennae. A butterfly is created, not from a caterpillar, but from something that isn’t visible to the naked eye.
Today we are interested in a different kind of transformation: not the personal, internal type of transformation that we humans experience throughout our lives, the kind of transformation that can begin as tiny whispers, invisible stirrings. Today, we are focusing on how to foster transformation that takes place outside of ourselves. Transformation of our society, whether a neighborhood, or a political system, or a way of life. And these large external transformations can also begin very, very small.
Since the 1800’s physicists and mathematicians have been studying something called chaos theory; the idea that, in a nutshell, not everything can be predicted. A random small event can trigger a change that has a much greater impact in the future, an impact completely out of proportion to the original event. To explain this, a scientist named Edward Lorenz coined the term: butterfly effect. Lorenz posited that if a butterfly flapped its wings in Texas, that tiny movement of air could, over time, build into a tornado in Brazil.
It doesn’t seem possible, does it? When we’re outside in the summer and a butterfly flits about nearby, we can’t feel a breeze at all. But the theory is that even a tiny disturbance could result in much greater impacts far ahead in the future.
It’s kind of like what might happen if a child were to stick a brightly colored drawing on a blank wall in her neighborhood. One thing can lead to another, to another, and before you know it, you have a coalition of people reimagining an entire drab, colorless streetscape.
The examples of how small events can end up having very large consequences are everywhere we look. Let’s look around this room for just a second and remember a courageous few people who discovered a book that imagined God in a new way; as a loving parent. This little group was inspired to invite a new preacher here to Gloucester, and helped to imagine a new American religion.
A few weeks ago we remembered the story of Rosa Parks, refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. History changed that day. And of course, Rosa’s life transformed just as dramatically as the country’s life transformed.
Such transformational events are certainly not always positive. I think back to the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which ended up engulfing all of Europe and the United States in the First World War. That one shot fired in 1914 led to 41 million casualties, and monarchies toppled.
A microscopic virus with no available treatment escapes into the nearby human population in China, and a deadly pandemic results. To date over 7 million people have died.
Of course, these are just a few examples of the kinds of small actions people take that can result in huge consequences. Sometimes the outcome is hoped for, or planned for. Sometimes it’s entirely unintended and unexpected.
Historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “Missing from [history] are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change.”
Countless small actions: the imaginal cells of societal transformation.
And not just small actions, but our individual small decisions: the very way we live our lives. As we read together a few minutes ago, if there is peace in the heart, there will be peace in the home, peace in the neighborhood, peace in the city, and so on throughout the world.
Can we believe that? Well, can we believe the butterfly effect?
adrienne maree brown, the author of our reading this morning, certainly believes that. “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale,” she wrote. “What’s happening in your own life, and in the relationships you have with your family and how you treat people when you’re upset with them?”
How is your soul these days? How are your imaginal cells holding up?
Healthy transformation emerges from good spiritual and emotional health. And so, the first step in making our violent, overheated world a better place is to start with ourselves. Are we tending to our souls? Are we practicing empathy and compassion, offering kindness to those around us? Do we feel able to offer even tiny acts of generosity to others?
This action might seem so small I’m almost afraid to mention it. But when I get a chance, I like to stop and let someone pull out into a line of traffic. As I said, it’s almost embarrassing to mention. But what if the person who I just let in is late to something, and very stressed? Might I have just helped them to breathe a bit easier for a moment? And might they then pay the favor forward a mile down the road? I will never know, but I hope so. If you’re like me, you feel that you never can do enough to fix all the problems that you see all around us. But maybe, just maybe, I made one person’s life easier for just a minute.
This year we are electing a President of the United States. I don’t have to tell you that the stakes are very high, and if you’re like me, you’re just the teensiest bit on edge. And so adrienne maree brown’s words that Karl just read really resonated with me. We can think that the right choice of a leader can fix everything. I remember my joy in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president. Was this finally America’s chance to move beyond racism? And as we have seen countless times since then, in the years since that moment we have often gone backward. The top level was all we had hoped for, all we focused on. The levels underneath, from Congress, to state legislatures, to local school boards have been resisting and undoing the good work ever since.
We focus so exclusively on the top layer that we can forget to keep an eye on what’s happening closer to home: our own health, our neighborhood and city, our church, and so on. If there is peace in the home, there will be peace between neighbors. If there is peace between neighbors, there will be peace in the city. And then in the country. And finally the world.
How do we care for the life close to home, and the life of our hearts? How do we balance protecting our own health, and stepping outward into the fray?
We start with awareness. Awareness of how small the actions can or must be that might set change into motion. Awareness of ourselves and our own mental and physical and spiritual health, so that we can work toward wholeness, for ourselves first, and then for our society and planet.
A commitment to grow into becoming the most whole and connected people we can is the work of transformation, and it begins in small, imaginal ways. And to accomplish this transformation, we need support along the way. In times such as these, our church and our religious beliefs can strengthen us.
From time to time this year I have been sharing information about our Unitarian Universalist Association’s proposal to amend the language to Article 2 of our bylaws. The intention is to replace our seven Principles with a new set of shared values, with Love at our center informing all the values. And one of the values we are proposing to live into is Transformation.
When we talk about transformation in the context of church and religious belief, we UU’s can get a little nervous. We’re afraid that the next stop might be standing on a box downtown with a megaphone yelling, “The end is near! Repent!” And that certainly would be a giant transformation for most of us, if not all, and in addition to transforming our religious beliefs would also completely transform our families, our relationships, and our social lives. Most of us are not looking for transformation on that scale.
But here is how the UUA is describing our shared value of Transformation: I’ll read it and let you think about it for a moment:
“Transformation: We adapt to the changing world.
We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”
Can you hear the key words? To adapt. To grow. To be open to change.
So much of the anger and vitriol and violence we are observing in our country these days is absolute terror about a changing world. Resistance to centering the voices of people who have long been pushed off into the margins of society. Resistance to change, resistance to an understanding that people might be asked to share power. Perhaps you noticed that the Republican response to the State of the Union speech the other night featured a young woman US Senator – standing in her kitchen. Such a comforting visual – a white woman in a kitchen. They stopped short of having her wear pearls in her kitchen, like June Cleaver, but of course she was wearing a tasteful gold cross.
Life moves us forward, never backward. And that is a hard truth; there are always changes that we fear, that we aren’t sure we can tolerate. We all know the feeling of wanting to dig our heels in and say, “This far and no farther.”
But our religious tradition is offering us a shared value and helpful language to help us navigate that path forward: “We adapt to the changing world. We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”
The activist Grace Lee Boggs once wrote, “Changes in small places affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.”
My friends, changes in small places matter. Small actions matter. A tiny movement, a flutter of a wing, in one place can maybe create a large effect somewhere else. Never forget how far butterflies can travel. Small changes: changes of heart, changes of understanding, help us to move forward in ways that connect us to others, and that build relationship. That is the work of transformation, and of a liberal religious tradition, of this church. Here, may we create a safe place to work together in growing and adapting ourselves, and then connecting with others to transform our world.
May it be so,
Amen.
