What Urgency Calls You? ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 3, 2022
It struck me, re-reading David Whyte’s poem that Mern read for us a few minutes ago (What to Remember When Waking) is how often the poets urge us to make sure that we are trying to live life to its fullest. “You are not a troubled guest in this world,” David Whyte reminds us. “What urgency calls you to your one true love?”
Mary Oliver also puts this question to us: “Tell me,” she wrote, ‘What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (The Summer Day)
And Dawna Markova states, “I will not die an unlived life.”
Here we are, now in the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are tentatively stepping back into our normal lives, or what we remember them to be. Even as we take off masks and begin to say yes to dinners and concerts and movies, we are aware that there is a dark cloud on the horizon, the specter of yet another Covid variant that is beginning to take hold here in the United States. We feel unsure – do we dare fully emerge into the wildness of our lives?
For just over two years we have been on hold, waiting, suspended and not fully living our lives. I have this image of us as trapeze artists, sitting carefully on our swings high above the nets, gently rocking to and fro, unable to use all of our skills, to take our chances, to let go, and fly through the air. We’ve been sitting, and waiting.
Our story this morning resonated with me as I thought about these past two years. Our lives have been something like the king’s diamond. We hold our lives very dear; we have hopes and dreams, and aspirations. And one day, our lives suddenly developed a deep scratch – a crack – much as the king’s diamond did. Suddenly our lives were not what we had cherished; very little of what we had taken for granted was available to us. We have lived with this flaw, this crack, for two years.
We’ve talked a lot about the pandemic and its impact; it’s been part of all of our everyday realities, and part of the life of this church, and every institution worldwide. It’s tempting to put it behind us, to say, “Let’s look forward, let’s stop dwelling on the hard times. It’s time for some fun.” And all of that is completely true. It is time for some fun.
But as with so many of life’s hard times, if we don’t take a close look, if we don’t surface our feelings, allow ourselves to feel our losses, then we will never truly be able to return to wholeness and fully live our lives. The feelings don’t go away, they just remain hidden from view. As I so often say to people, “If you just keep sweeping all this under the rug, all that happens is that it gets really lumpy under the rug.”
It’s been a hard time, a sad time, a frightening time. It’s OK to feel that and to speak it out loud. We have been isolated, and sometimes lonely, and often depressed. Those are scratches in the diamond that we need to be able to touch, to run our fingers over, to explore the shape of the flaws and the hurts. I hope everyone is taking the time to do some of that work, and to not feel that we should jump straight to a party. You might not yet be feeling like celebrating. And let me say here that if depression really has taken hold of you, if you are feeling despair, I hope you can reach out and name that, and ask for help. There is a great deal to feel sad and depressed about.
Right now we are in the Christian season of Lent – the 40 days that precede Easter. It is intended to serve as a time of preparation. Lent is intended to mirror the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, preparing himself to undertake the public ministry that ultimately led to his death. This can be a very valuable time; a time when we can intentionally think more deeply about our lives, and how we want to live them. It’s a time for prayer, or contemplation, or meditation; time to listen to your deepest feelings in whatever way serves you best.
I’ve been engaging in some of this work throughout this season. It’s been a time of taking stock, checking in with myself to see how I have weathered these past two years. And with my sabbatical in the near future, I have been using this time to plan, to listen and discern what I most need from the three months that you are so generously granting me. To paraphrase our poet, I will not waste an unlived sabbatical. In this time of discernment I have come to understand that I most need a more intentional spiritual life. That sense of urgency is guiding my planning and choices. I’ve been setting up some programs and some practitioners to help guide me. I have come to understand that I cannot achieve my desires alone – that I need some help along the way. I am feeling excited and energized, and ready. I’ve been remembering, as Howard Thurman wrote, that to which my life is committed. And I am refreshing my highest resolve.
This is a time for everyone to revisit their highest resolves, to freshen them. Our theme this month is Awakening. So often when we consider the spiritual practice of awakening, we associate it with finding paths toward enlightenment. Then, too, we see the need in our daily lives to awaken to the voices and the experiences of our siblings of color, to do the work we need to in order to become more ‘woke’.
But the Awakening I am thinking about this morning is an active awakening – actively revisiting, and assessing our daily lives to see what we need to restore our energy, our zest for life, to set out on our journeys again with hope, and excitement.
As spring returns, and the earth awakes, what feels urgent to you? Do you sense what you are missing, and what you need to restore your heart, your spirit? The answer will be different for everyone; there is no right answer.
It’s a little daunting, perhaps, to leap back into action. We all have different risk tolerances, different health concerns, so there is no one answer for how to restore your lives, to awaken. Everyone must make their own decisions. We are sitting on the trapeze swings, some of us still sitting still, some beginning to pump hard and to start making those wild and breathtaking arcs of motion through the air. Some have already begun to let go of their swings in midair – some travel, or concerts, or dinners out.
I mentioned my sense of urgency around deepening my spiritual life. But I also feel an awakening of urgency in another direction as well. These days, I am so aware of our energy when we manage to be together, and how much I need that.
Now, I am not complaining about how we have managed during the pandemic. We have been so blessed to be able to use Zoom and YouTube to continue to offer our services, and I don’t want to think about what would have happened to our church – all churches, really – in the past two years had we not been able to experiment with being together while being alone. It worked. But I think over time we began to forget what it was like to be together in a room, as we adjusted, and accepted the new normal. As Howard Thurman put it, “there crept into my life the dust and grit of the journey.”
Lately I’m being joyfully reminded of what happens when we are together. Some of our committees here at church have returned to in-person meetings, and the difference is palpable. There is energy present that we each bring into the room when we gather. I was very aware of this yesterday, when the Worship Associates met for an in-person meeting for the first time in a very long time. The way the conversation flows is so different when we are all seated together, with the give and take, the brainstorming, the laughter. It is life-giving to be together. The meeting gave me energy, offered me new ideas for improving our church services, and helped me awaken.
Many of us are introverts, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel that they navigated the pandemic well, that they didn’t mind spending a lot of time alone; didn’t miss being with other people frequently. And there is certainly truth to that. And of course, for too many of us, it still does not feel safe to gather indoors, and you are still waiting. There is truth there, too, and I see you. But there is a larger truth; that humans are meant to live in communities, meant to connect, and to share our lives, and to offer our energy to one another. Community life sustains us, helps to keep us whole, and centered. It awakens us. We had an amazing example of that here in our service a couple of weeks ago, when I invited people to share their thoughts about their lives during the pandemic. The insights, the trust, and the openness created something for us; it wove our community back together and lifted our spirits. There was joy.
“There is no life apart from life together,” wrote the Reverend Rebecca Parker. (A House for Hope, p. 33.) We are relational beings, and we depend on one another not just for companionship, but for understanding ourselves as well. We identify ourselves often based on our relationships; we think of ourselves as friends, as parents, as lovers. Those roles, those identities, cannot exist without relationships.
Our relationships, our life in community, feel urgent to me these days. Of all the many things we have to restore in the coming months and even years, strengthening our communities should be a priority. Sure, we managed, over the past two years. We stayed afloat, we stayed organized and took care of our affairs. Our energy went toward problem-solving, and innovating, and we demonstrated, over and over again, that we are remarkably good at that. But the source of that energy is in the togetherness; in those casual connections we make over coffee or a potluck out on the lawn. That is our motivation for carrying on; both within this institution, and outside of it. We need one another, often in ways that we cannot easily name.
We cannot restore our wholeness without our togetherness. This, for me, is where urgency lies.
My friends, for two long years we have existed as troubled guests in our own lives. We have shared a challenging experience; one that will be with us for the rest of our lives. We have shared it, and at the same time, we have often gone through it completely alone. The losses have mounted, and we have swallowed our fear, our sadness, and our isolation. But life is calling to us again, to awaken, to emerge, to join the earth as it returns to life all around us. How will you answer this call? When you study the scratches in the diamond of your life, what can you imagine emerging from them? Can you recall the moments of your highest resolve?
Please join me in a moment of prayer:
Spirit of Life, be with us as we struggle to know the best way forward: to stay safe from illness, and yet find ways to once again be people deeply connected to community. Help us to imagine again, to dream, and to hope, and to find our way forward. Amen.
