New Beginnings Rev. Edmund Robinson Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield January 2, 2000 Reading: The Beginning" from The Hungry Tigress by Rafe Martin I want to begin this beginning by asking you to breathe. Exhale all you can, let the breath keep coming out until you can't find any more in your body. Then when you've done that, breathe back in some new air. Taste it as it goes in. This is the air of the new year, and depending on who's counting, of the new century and the new millennium as well. It's not the same old stale tired air that you hacked to smoke, that you sweltered in, that you exhausted the possibilities of before the turn of the year. This is new stuff that you're putting in your lungs. Doesn't it feel like it? The year stretches before us at this point like a clean writing-slate, like a blank canvass, like a new snowfall on the front lawn of our lives, and the question we need to be asking ourselves this bright morning is what fresh words will we write on this slate, what brushstrokes will we paint on this canvass, what footprints will we leave on the broad white expanse of snow. The world is open to us, and that opportunity is thrilling and scary at the same time. Now to many of you, what I have just said is nonsense. It feel like the same world as it was last week, the networks of computer-driven devices that supply our every material and informational needs have not crashed - yet. The sun still rises in the East and the problems we were wrestling with in 1999 have not magically gone away. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the only one here that felt that this turnover of the counter we use to measure our calendar, this potentially fatal lineup of digits portended some real changes, some new alignment of the possibilities of life. I have certainly tried to act on that assumption. A few weeks ago, I wondered whether the coming change was any more significant than the coming 100,000 mile mark on the odometer of my battered Geo Metro. I passed that milestone shortly after I preached the sermon, and now we've all passed the 2,000 year mark on the calendar and it may be too early to tell, but I don't think the most feared consequence of either event has come to pass. The world has not run out of its warranty; I have faith that the manufacturer still stands behind the product. But I must admit that in spite of my doubts about the inherent meaning in the change of date, I did all I could to invest it with meaning. I approached it in the spirit that an observant Jew approaches the High Holy Days. I consolidated my address and date books on my computer and the new Palm Pilot I got from my law office, and this gave me a great excuse to call old friends, people to whom I hadn't talked in years, as well as some people who were difficult and problematic. I didn't make any specific breakthroughs in terms of atonement or forgiveness, but I had several wonderful conversations that gave me a much needed larger perspective on what I am doing now in the context of my life up until now. That set the stage, spiritually, for the most significant thing I did before the Big Changeover which, as I've already told you, was to propose marriage to Jacqueline, and that is undoubtedly the principal driving force behind the sunny optimism I bring to this topic this morning. I feel as if I have settled a large aspect of my future, and this rosy outlook may color my attitude toward the whole question. It may be that the change of date has no significance in itself, but I was certainly struggling mightily to bring meaning to it. Obviously I could have proposed at any time, but something in me was determined that it would be on the last day of the year. That might have been purely strategic, since the anniversary of my first marriage is on the 30th, and it is handy to have a pleasant date to counter an unpleasant one. But I think there was something more. At times the goal looked unattainable. A thousand schemes for when to make the proposal went through my brain, as our plans for the evening of the 31st kept shifting. Finally about midweek, it appeared that we were going to be on our own for the first part of the evening on New Year's Eve, and I proposed dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant. She demurred; she had a lot of paperwork to do at her desk. She was not being cooperative. Finally I prevailed on her to go, but by then it was too late for a reservation, and the only seat that Lucia's could give us was in the bar. I tried to envision kneeling beside a bar stool and I said "no way." As we drove around considering our alternatives, Jacqueline, who had no idea what I had in mind, kept saying, "why can't we have a nice dinner sometime when it's less crowded?" This echoed inside me, and I asked myself, why am I so driven to accomplish this on this night? The only alternative we could find, given our time constraints for the evening, was the fine but not fancy Thai place in Arlington Center. We were wedged between two sets of women, all of whom wanted to be talking loudly about their divorces and broken engagements. They were, of course, responding to the time, and in the context of their lives it probably made a lot of sense. But for what I was trying to be about, their conversations did not form an auspicious backdrop, to say the least. Well, not to keep you in suspense, I did pop the question, after dinner, at home on the sofa, which is where I should have planned it all along. Given the intensity and intimacy of the moment, that was clearly where the conversation needed to take place. And in this I recognize a pattern that persists with me through my life. I often don't get what I want, or what I think I want. But as the Rolling tones song has it, I get what I need. What happens is not what I overtly want to happen, but what needs to happen. I did ask Jacqueline to marry me, she did say yes, and all this happened in the waning hours of the year that is numbered 1999 in the Gregorian calendar. That calendar and that date may not have eternal, universal or supernatural significance. But it is the calendar under which I will live for the rest of my life, and its dates roll around relentlessly year after year and there just seemed something fitting about a giant step toward the rest of my life being taken in as the last sands of the hourglass disappeared down the gullet of the old century. Some of you may have seen James Carroll's column on the millennium last Tuesday - one of the finest pieces by a former priest who is, in my estimation, the Globe's best columnist and a great reason for getting out of bed on Tuesday mornings. "All your life," Carroll writes, "the year 2000 has loomed ahead as the very definition of the future." That certainly rings true for me. I can remember as a child in the 1950's wondering if I would be around to see the century's end and what I would be doing. I could never have predicted that I would propose marriage on the eve of the century's end. Carroll also observes that when we are at our most happy, we don't notice the passage of time - we are so taken up with love or work or play that we don't notice its passage. But Unhappiness is when time presents itself as a problem, and to solve it you resolve, variously, to honor the past, savor the present, and build the future. But in truth, time is the zone of broken resolutions. The ever mounting sequence of [daily] chores is a wall between you and the person you would be if only, as you always say, you had the time." This is a serious put-down of the idea of making resolutions. Time, Carroll seems to be saying, is always going to mock your efforts to change. But I think this is too narrow a view. It is true that you can't control everything. In the story this morning, the king can't control the rogue elephant. The elephant is going to get away and do what the elephant is going to do. Our lies have this quality. Sometimes they are just going to go where they need to go, and what happens is going to be what needs to happen. But the king realizes that controlling himself is more important that controlling the elephant. And here is, I think where real change is possible. I remember interviewing for an internship at a certain church, and the minister, a recently-divorced man ten years my senior, looked at me with a world-weary sigh and asked, "do you think people ever really change?" I responded "no, I don't guess they do," but a few minutes later I realized that I didn't believe that answer myself, and I had just given it to him because it was what he seemed to want to hear and I told him this and said, "No, I do believe in change; I have to believe in change; I choose to believe in change." That answer is still valid for me here as I stand on the threshold of the year. I am not the same person who started out on this ministry track five years ago. I sometime imagine a conversation between myself as I am now, call it Edmund Version 4.0, with myself as I was then, Edmund 2.1. 2.1 would probably not want to admit that there was any room for improvement. 4.0 found the room and knows that there is a lot more. 2.1 would resent being patronized by 4.0 telling him that he had to get more in touch with his feelings, to stop trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else around. 4.0 is wiser in the sense that Socrates meant in his death speech, that he knows how much he does not know. You have probably all heard the first part of this joke: "what does the guru say to the hot dog vendor?" Answer: "Make me one with everything." But how many of you heard the second part, where the guru gets the hot dog and gives the vendor $5, and waits and waits and waits? Finally the guru says to the vendor, "what about my change?" to which the vendor replies, "you're supposed to be a guru; certainly you must know that change only comes from within!" Change must come from within. No one can change you until you want to change. This is an insight from Eastern and Western religions, psychology and psychiatry. Change happens, it is a fact of life. What we can control is not the fact and only occasionally the direction of change. What we can control is our own understanding of it, and of ourselves in relation to it. This is what I take to be the foundation of psychotherapy. Your conscious is not in charge; your subconscious desires and drives are always subverting what you say you want, and this manifests itself in behavior which you know is destructive or counterproductive, but you find yourself doing it anyway. The goal of therapy is not to directly work on stopping the dysfunctional behavior patterns, but ideally to give you insight on the drives and urges that make them happen, so that you can find a different way of satisfying or dealing with the underlying motivators. If you understand what makes you hit your head into the same brick wall over and over, you have a least a shot of figuring out some other, less painful and possibly more successful way of getting what you need. Much the same thing is implicit in the Universalist conception of human nature. You may remember these words of Albert Ziegler that I read to you in my Christmas homily two weeks ago, "Man [sic] is not evil, in the sense that he enjoys the fruits of wrongdoing; nor is he helpless to do right. His only desire is to do good, but he must do it as he sees it to be. He sins, i.e. does wrong, does less than the best, because he himself is incomplete." In other words, what appears to be an evil act is only one which is short-sighted. This is why we believe in the value of education, and why I have insisted to the R.E. Committee in this church that every activity which goes on here is imbued with education in some sense. In striving for the good, we are striving for more and more complete knowledge of ourselves and of the world in which we act. As we understand that world and understand ourselves better, our actions will more and more tend to exemplify goodness, truth and beauty. So if there is an "ought," if there is a resolution which we should undertake at this time, I submit that it is not to do any particular thing but to grow in wisdom and knowledge, in what the Buddhists call mindfulness. Depending on your spiritual orientations, there are various disciplines that will help you start on the path to mindfulness. But I don't think resolving is what we need to be about in this moment. The date is mainly a milestone, and the use of a milestone is for assessing where you are on your journey, how far you've come. Look backward to the beginning of your life, individually, and look back to when you first joined our collective life here in this church. How have you grown? What knowledge do you have now? Now turn around and look at the road ahead. Where do you want to grow in the future? What words will you write on the blank slate, what brushstrokes will you paint on the empty canvas, what footprints will you leave on the new-fallen snow?The world awaits your actions. Amen.