As we mark the Autumn Equinox, and also recognize the Jewish festival of Succoth, and as we look back on the highs and lows of the past year, it’s good to celebrate the relative tranquillity of this season. I say "relative," because I recognize that for some of you this may not be a tranquil time at all – a crisis can come at any time of year – and that you may not be celebrating serenity so much as desperately wishing for it! I hope that whatever your challenges you can find a glimmer of hope, this morning, for some balance in your life – and sometimes a glimmer of hope is all that we need to sustain us.
I predicted, in my newsletter introduction to this talk, that we’d be experiencing "no severe extremes of temperature," by this date. We’ve certainly had unusually warm and beautiful September days, but it’s true that the extremes are fading into the past and yet to be experienced in the winter – may it not be yet! I was on safer ground in predicting that by this date there would be "no difference between the length of days and nights" – that’s just a reliable astronomical fact. And what a comfort it is to know that we can rely on this with full confidence – there are so few things we can count on, aren’t there!
Living in this part of the world, we can even be fairly sure that whenever we have a prolonged period of rain or drought or cold or heat it will end eventually. You know the proverbial reply when someone says, "Do you think this weather will ever end?" "Yup; always has." It’s harder to keep faith in that if you live in drought-plagued places, particularly, but even there you can count on the hours of day and night keeping their appointed rhythms. And for us this is the time of balance, of equal daylight and darkness – though tempered, naturally, by the knowledge that it won’t last and that the nights are drawing in!
I mentioned the Jewish festival of Succoth in my introduction, too. This is a fairly minor celebration in Judaism, but not insignificant and it lasts for eight days. It’s overshadowed by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but it’s a "pilgrimage feast" which echoes the legendary wanderings of the Israelites in the desert. Its name comes from the practice of building little booths or "Sukkot" in the fields during harvest, and from the temporary structures in which the Israelites were said to have lived following their departure from Egypt. Sukkot is basically a harvest festival; it varies in date and this year it happens to have begun yesterday, coinciding with the Autumn Equinox – "equal night." There’s nothing like a successful harvest to give one a feeling of serenity, is there? -- the feeling of "All is safely gathered in/ Ere the winter storms begin." But what if the harvest has not been good? Where do we find our serenity then?
Perhaps there are clues in the thinking of Philip Simmons, whose words about "falling" I read earlier. Simmons wrote an article, Learning to Fall, which some of you may have seen in the Unitarian World magazine a few months ago. He tells us how he was an avid mountain climber for most of his life, especially on a peak in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. But, he writes, now that he’s living (in his forties) with Lou Gehrig’s disease, he’s had to limit his climbing to what he calls "the minor triumphs of getting my socks on and making it down the stairs." He says,
I set out to discover ........... what I might say about climbing and not climbing. About remaining upright and learning to fall. Actors and stunt men learn to fall: as kids we watched them leap from moving trains and stagecoaches. Athletes learn to fall, and devotees of the martial arts, and so do dancers and rock climbers. Mostly, though, we learn to do it badly. ...... But one has to start somewhere. Is not falling, as much as climbing, our birthright?
We have all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls: the fall from youthful ideals, the waning of strength, the failure of hope, the loss of loved ones, the fall into injury or sickness, and late or soon, to our certain ends. We have no choice but to fall, and little say as to the time or the means.
Perhaps, however, we have some say in the manner of our falling, some say in matters of style. As kids, we all played [such games as] leaping from a diving board and striking some outrageous or goofy pose ....... Maybe it comes to no more than this. But I prefer to think that learning to fall involves more than posing, more than a chance to play it for laughs. In fact, I would have it that in the way of our falling we can express our essential humanity.
This is paradoxical, isn’t it? I had suggested that this reflection would be about using this season of balanced light and darkness to rediscover or reaffirm some balance in our lives, and now I’m suggesting that this is somehow related to falling, or losing balance! You might well ask me to make up my mind – balance or falling: which is it? Well, all paradoxes are about truth in opposites, and this one is no exception: we may be able to find our true balance, serenity, equanimity, by learning to fall. I guess that’s what my title’s about – Falling into Equilibrium. Let’s think about how it may work, and I think it has something to do with trust.
Philip Simmons says that the main point of his essay is to present his agreement with the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who tells us that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be accepted. This may perhaps go a bit against the grain with some of us capable and competent Unitarians who’ve become so used to solving problems. As Simmons observes, we tend to apply problem-solving to everything in our everyday lives, so that we have magazine articles telling us the six ways to find a mate, the eight ways to bring greater joy into our lives, the ten elements of a successful family, the twelve steps toward spiritual wholeness, and so on. You’ve seen the titles: "Three Weeks to Thinner Thighs;" "Seven Successful Women Tell What They Really Want From a Man;" "How to Make Your Home a Haven;" and the kind that always has me hooked, "Growing a Glorious Garden in Stony Ground." We see a problem, or a challenge, and find an answer. We see life as a technical matter, with a technical solution.
And that may be where we go wrong. Isn’t it possible that at its deepest levels life is not a problem but a mystery. Problems are to be solved, whereas mysteries – except the most prosaic, non-mysterious kind – are not. At one time or another, Simmons suggests, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous or terrifying that it defeats all our efforts to see it as a "problem." Each of us is brought to the edge of some kind of cliff. We can either back away in terror and confusion, or we can leap forward into mystery. We can participate in the mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling, and the hardest. It offers the possibility of a true equilibrium. But it’s scary.
Part of the scariness is built into us as instinct, I believe. A fear of falling is supposedly one of the two fears obvious in babies from the beginning, the other one being a fear of loud noises. Then we develop more fears as we mature, rather than fewer – or at least more focuses for them. Fear of humiliation (falling flat on our face), of not meeting standards (falling short), of aging and dependence and, ultimately, of death. I’m reminded of the story of a Sunday School – if it was Unitarian, it was a long time ago – where the teacher was asking the children,
"If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale and gave all my
money to the church, would that get me into Heaven?
""NO!" the children all answered.
"If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would that get me into Heaven?"
Again, the answer was, "NO!"
"Well, then, if I was kind to animals and gave candy to all the
children, and did everything I was supposed to, would that get me into Heaven?"
Again, they all answered, "NO!"
"Well, then how can I get into Heaven?"
A five-year-old boy shouted out, "YOU GOTTA BE DEAD!"
Well, I hope it’s not necessary to be dead to achieve balance, but it may need something even more frightening to many of us – the willingness to let go of the search for solutions to an imaginary Problem of Life and to simply let ourselves fall into the mystery of what is. It’s not always, or even often, a life-and-death matter in the usual sense; it may be as simple as joining in the dance of life when we don’t know the steps. Thandeka, who is Minister and Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Meadville/ Lombard Theological School, tells of when she met a Catholic priest who had spent several months in Ethiopia doing famine relief work with people from a local village.
The priest was a tall, middle-aged American man whose body weight and size seemed more suited for the gear of a football lineman than the willowy garments of a man of the cloth. ..... [He] described a personal experience in Ethiopia that had changed his life. He had participated in a dance in which members of the devastated community spent countless hours moving rhythmically in a circle to the beat of a drum. Without food to forage for or land to cultivate, the members of the village could do nothing except wait for their next shipment of food. but instead of simply waiting, they danced a slow step that consisted of something that, by his count, seemed to the priest to have a "
one-two-three-jump" sequence. The villagers did this for hours.Wanting to be accepted as a full member of the group, the priest joined in, which immediately brought him face to face with a seemingly insurmountable problem: he was dance-impaired. He could never jump at the right time. He jumped too soon or too late, or sometimes he simply forgot to jump at all. Needless to say, these missteps provided the rest of the members of the group with countless hours of laughter. The children, quite frequently, were so amused that they would fall out of the circle onto the ground in fits of giggling delight. ...... Hour after hour the priest laboured to learn to count and then jump in just the right way. How many times did he move into and then out of step with the group’s rhythm? Too many to count, he confessed, but as time wore on, something happened that took him by surprise.
Tears now welled up in the priest’s eyes and he was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice seemed no louder than a whisper ..... "
You know," he said, "until that experience I thought that I had known [the Spirit of Love] all of my life. But only as I danced with the other members of the group did I actually feel [Its] presence ....." He felt the unconditional love of the members of this group who accepted him with open arms even though his style was so very different from their own.Thandeka ends her essay in Quest magazine by suggesting, rather as Philip Simmons says, that a full life, a true equilibrium, means counting one, two, three, and then jumping into the middle of things. She says, "Let us hop, skip, and take other leaps of faith, hoping that other persons ..... will see in our [klutzy] step a ..... sign that life itself is present, ..... ever renewing."
What might it look like, this balance, or equilibrium which we could perhaps fall into if our trust were great enough? I think it might literally have a look to it, a look that most of us have seen in people occasionally and that a few of us (not me, alas!) see in the mirror. It’s a look of serenity, of clear-eyed non-anxious being, of trust that whatever happens, though perhaps painful and difficult, will be ultimately all right. The look can be misleading – perhaps the person who seems so serene is simply on a strong tranquiliser – and it probably comes and goes in the best of cases; no-one can be expected to maintain equilibrium when totally thrown-for-a-loop by disastrous circumstances. You probably know the Zen parable about the man being chased by a tiger who escapes down a cliffside, only to see another wild beast below him – and the vines he’s clinging to are about to snap. Serenely he reaches out his hand for the wild strawberry growing within reach, and exclaims, "How sweet it is!" That level of appreciative mindfulness is, I suggest, somewhat unusual, to say the least. And yet it holds up to us an ideal which we may approach more nearly as we learn to fall. And the ideal may be encapsulated in this anonymous "Druid vow of friendship" – I’ve been thinking of pagan ways especially this week:
I honour your gods.
I drink from your well.
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting placel
I hold no cherished outcome.
I will not negotiate by withholding.
I am not subject to disappointment.
Whew – "I am not subject to disappointment"!! I could go along with most of this, theoretically at least – honouring your beliefs, not to being on guard with you, letting go of expectations about our relationship, and so on, but promising not to be disappointed – how could one possibly do that?
I think it’s probably related to letting go of outcomes and is about not letting disappointment affect our basic stance of hope and trust, not being subject, subservient, to it. As one of our good hymns says, "Disappointment pierced me through/ Still I kept on loving you." How I wish I’d known more about this when my children were small – I was certainly attached to outcomes then, and so easily overcome by disappointment when things didn’t turn out just as I hoped. It was death to equilibrium – I was, you could say, high-strung and easily unbalanced. Clearly, things haven’t entirely changed, and yet I can see that the more practice I have in falling – the more I do it and the more conscious I am of what’s happening as I fall from grace, fall short, fall flat – the more balance I can detect. It’s odd, but I can remember with great clarity the first time I was really aware of how this was happening: I was writing my Master’s thesis in Religious Studies, and my theme was the Biblical story of Adam and Eve anxiously discovering their nakedness. The full story, you probably remember, is usually called "The Fall." At the time, my personal and family life seemed to be falling apart; I remember thinking as I was crossing the McMaster campus in Hamilton one day, "I’m living out my thesis," and although I felt deathly afraid, I also knew that it was somehow an absolutely vital thing to be doing.
If you’re interested in exploring mysteries such as these in more depth, I have two suggestions for you. The first is a television series that was brought to my attention by a colleague, Rev. Wendy Perkins, who happened to sit next to the producer of this series on a train one day – he was raised Unitarian, it turned out! The title is "The Sacred Balance," and it will run on CBC television beginning on Sunday, October 13 at 9 pm. My second suggestion is that you consider signing up for the course in Mindfulness Meditation which is being offered right here at Unitarian House – sign up on the sheet downstairs.
In closing this reflection, I offer you three thoughts which express in varying ways the concept which I’ve tried to hold up to you this morning. First, Philip Simmons finishes his essay on Learning to Fall with these words:
We are all – all of us – falling. We’re all now, this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water’s surface shimmer. And so let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God, let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death, let us also fall toward life.
Second, the poet Denise Levertov writes in her 1992 poem "Evening Train":
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The "everlasting arms" my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted
.Some of you with sensitivities to the word God may have squirmed at the use of the word in those two pieces. It recurs in this last one, and I ask you to please make your own translation into "goodness" or "love" or whatever the highest is for you. This one brief sentence is what Denise Levertov was referring to when she mentioned her sister’s favourite quotation; it’s from the ancient book of Deuteronomy, and I offer it especially for those who, when they’re falling, find comfort and strength in well-loved phrases:
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.