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“I wish this wasn’t so difficult!” I
cannot tell you how often I have uttered this phrase. Anyone here ever
said those words? Yes? O.K. So, let’s get that out of our system, “I
wish this wasn’t so difficult!” Name the challenge, right? You might be
talking about a job situation, or the downturn in the economy, or
growing up, or walking the daily gauntlet of taunts and threats, or a
chronic illness, or an abusive relationship, or your compulsions and
addictions.
One of my
earliest struggles was around math. The concepts of what we were doing
mathematically were far less my problem – yes, addition, subtraction,
multiplication, division, calculus, geometry – all of those concepts
made sense. And the problems I was doing generally turned out
correctly. They just weren’t the problems that were assigned. You know
how some people struggle with dyslexia: when looking at a string of
letters, those letters aren’t in the sequence in which they’re printed.
Some people have dyscalculia, where the numbers seen are not the
numbers printed in the sequence people without dyscalculia will have.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know about my learning disability until
I was in college. Fortunately for me, I did encounter a teacher in
college who knew what to see and could teach me the tricks I continue
to use today in order to read the numerical sequences all of the rest
of you without dyscalculia read. He had to teach me a roundabout way to
the place where the numbers flowed and the specific mathematics
problems I was doing reflected what was actually assigned. But there
was a whole lot of “I wish this wasn’t so difficult!” along the way.
I can’t
say I came through my academic experiences with a great self-esteem. I
tended to see myself as stupid; but you know what true stupidity is,
right? It’s doing the same thing over and over expecting different
results. Sometimes you have to work against your expectations.
Sometimes you have to do things counter-intuitively. Sometimes you need
to go the roundabout way. As a consequence of my experience with
dyscalculia, I came through my academic experience with a great
appreciation for the roundabout way. I came through knowing that
perspective mattered.
Sometimes
the roundabout way is the most direct way to go, even when we run into
those exclamations of exasperation that signal we are nearly
overwhelmed. The roundabout way has its own lessons. The roundabout way
often creates new perspectives that help us control our terror and
bring it down into the realm of fear and not rise up in rage but
utilize our anger. The story of the liberation of a people, of
liberation of a community, of liberation of a person is usually the
story about how we go around our terror, and face our fears. It is
usually the story of how we do not rebel in rage, but harness that
energy of anger for the freedom road. This is the roundabout way:
going around our terror by way of our fear, going around our rage by
way of the impulse to change.
The
Exodus story tells us:
“When
Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the
Philistines, although that was nearer; for God thought: “If the people
face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God led
the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness toward the Red
Sea.”[i]
The
Passover story is a story about how to go forward when we are not yet
ready to go because we expect failure, because we are in abject terror
of failure. (And we know that wherever there is terror, some of us will
feel instead rage.) The Passover story is a story about the ambivalence
of the third stage of change – preparation – moving out of the
contemplative stage where we are lamenting (come say this along with
me) “I wish this wasn’t so difficult!” The Passover story is not
of difficulty and challenge passing us over: it is a story about the
power of passing over our terror to wrestle our fears and reach the
Promised Land. The Passover story is a story about how we handle
difficulties. The Passover story is about how we change, through
a combination of what we can envision and feel called toward and
external circumstances. The Passover story is a story of courage to
embrace the unknown.
One of
the things that tends to terrify us about change is that most of us
have the experience that change always brings things we didn’t expect,
things that challenge, things that are beyond our control. This is
especially true when we face change with more than our own individual
self is involved. I’ve mentioned before how much I hate to move. Early
and frequent experience with having to move from one community to
another, from one temporary living place to another, has not meant that
I learned to live not acquiring anything, recognizing that we’re all
temporarily somewhere, some of us for longer and some of us for
shorter. Every family move meant a new community, a new set of
challenges and opportunities, but remember, that for most of us, the
good is lost to the traumatic by a wide margin. Now changes undertaken
by loved ones usually require changes for ourselves. It has taken me
years not to grip my coffee cup with white knuckles of terror as I
listen to my loved ones describe how they
are changing. There’s no such
thing as personal change that doesn’t affect your relationships and
call them into a new configuration. Unilateral change that doesn’t
affect another person isn’t possible. That doesn’t mean you don’t go
for that change, especially when it’s a move towards greater health,
healing this injured and battered world, or creating more love in this
world. But it does mean we all deal with terror and change together.
You know
that folk saying, better the devil
you know? It speaks to a truth most
of us don’t like to recognize about ourselves. We stay with the job
that demeans and degrades us because it’s
a job, and with the economy
today, or insert another excuse here…We stay with the person who
abuses
us physically and emotionally because what
will happen if I leave? What
will happen to the kids? And the statistics of fear back us up: the
most dangerous time is that time of change. We pick up the chemical
upon which we are dependent again and again when we reach the threshold
of terror and demoralization, and choose anesthetization rather than
feeling life. Better the devil you
know. That’s what happens when we
let terror of change rule us. That’s the battle the enslaved Hebrew
people faced in the Passover story.
Our
expectations and our perspectives matter, because when our terror and
our reflexive rage surge due to those expectations, due to those
perspectives, we prevaricate about the necessary changes that will
enhance or preserve our lives. We delay the changes necessary to heal
and repair this world. We avoid the changes required to have a better
relationship with our family members or friends. We avoid the changes
necessary to improve our health. We may even avoid the changes
necessary to compensate for our learning disabilities, for being able
to see new perspectives that will actually make our lives easier. In
our terror and our rage and our expectations of having an easy life, of
rejecting the road of change, we avoid the changes necessary to save
lives of those in danger. To our greater detriment and to the greater
detriment of the world, caught up in our yearnings for there to be a
less difficult way, where we don’t even have to face our fears, we
avoid the changes necessary to make the dreams and wishes that have
been long deferred reality.
The
Reverend Wayne Arnason counsels us: take courage, friends, the way is
often long, and let me add that it is never easy.[ii] We need to
shift of expectations of our entitlement to the “easy button” of life,
to accepting that first noble truth articulated by the Buddha: life has
suffering.[iii] Life has its easy moments, to be sure. But an
interesting and adventurous life, a life of stories, a life of meaning
and making a difference, is a life with suffering, with dis-ease, with
un-easi-ness, and with
great courage to pursue the way to the world of
promise, to the world in which we actually wish to live.
Fleeing
slavery meant the courage not just to evade the overseer’s lash, but
let go of the familiar, the unhappy but comfortable, the frightening
but not the terrifying, the demoralizing, but the known. Marge Piercy
tells us of this in her poem Maggid
(the telling).[iv] She
invites us to imagine and enter into that place of the roundabout way,
of fighting the urge to stick with the devil we know, rather than go
towards freedom.
We become
strangers by walking into the strange. By embracing change, by moving
from precontemplation
(everyone else is wrong) to contemplation
(perhaps there’s something I need to do here) to preparation (if there
is, I need the perfect plan) to action (embarking on the journey), we
become strangers to our habits, our compulsions, our addictions, our
known, old, usual selves and ways.[v] When we meet folks we know
they may not recognize us. Coworkers will say, “you’re so different!”
Family and friends may find these changes bewildering, terrifying,
recognizing in them calls to their own change, calls to embrace their
own courage and embark on the journey of freedom. We may struggle even
to recognize ourselves without all those old familiar places, contexts,
practices, rituals that allowed us to stay in what didn’t work. But
death lies the other way. Sure perishing lies the other way in staying
stuck in the habits that demoralize, anesthetize, and destroy. To gain
the courage we need, we need a new perspective. We need to challenge
our habituated expectations.
It is
unlikely that Moses expected to be successful when he went to confront
Pharaoh. He stuttered. He wasn’t like his brother Aaron, whom people
respected and who was such a clear speaker. He had a severe temper. He
was a wanted man, twice dead for having been one of the castaway
children under Pharaoh’s orders who was yet hidden by his mother and
sister and adopted into Pharaoh’s household, and for rising up in rage
and slaughtering an oppressor. Two hundred and ten years had passed
since the Hebrew people had been pressed into slavery. There was no
experience of empowerment for the people to base their faith upon.
There had never seemed to be a way before. They adapted and they
accommodated. They worked and they lived the best lives they could
live, making do with the space they had, worshipping in the way they
could figure out, assembling and disassembling, moving here and there,
creating rituals to act like emotional structures to hold themselves
together, living with addictions that allowed them to endure,
struggling with pain and depression and fear and loss over and over
again. While tyrants tend to be paranoid, we can guess that Pharaoh had
legitimate reasons to be afraid as the numbers of the Hebrew people
soared and rumors of rebellion increased. There is no way in the
world that the Israelites could have expected the Red Sea to part.
But there
they were: behind them the approaching Egyptian army to drag them back
into captivity, and in front of them the sea. The Talmud tells us that
the sea did not at first part. Moses struck the sea with his staff, but
it did not part, until one of the Israelites made the move for change
into the action stage, and stepped out into the water. Until Nahum’s
foot touched the sea as the free action of a free person reaching back
to the outstretched arm to raise the people out of slavery, the sea
didn’t part, the way didn’t open. And then the people sang praising the
Name: in your steadfast love you led
the people whom you redeemed.
The
Passover story reminds us that there are two kinds of spirituality: emunah (faith in
the known/the experienced) and bittachon
(trust that
there is a way, no matter what, with no experience).[vi] Just as
we affirm unconditional love – that just to be born we are loveable,
loving, and loved – we also are called to affirm unconditional trust,
that there is a way, no matter what, even when our experiences of the
roundabout route seem to relate that there is no basis for such trust.
This is not an easy spirituality to develop. It means traveling the
circuitous route, the route not imagined in business and development
plan, the route that may be counterintuitive, the route that may work
against the faith in something. Most people struggle with this kind of
faith; most Unitarian Universalists want to follow only what we can
see, have learned to count on, and consider a logically direct route.
Our spiritual growth lies in learning unconditional trust that there is
a way, no matter what, and we have indeed, the courage to take it, no
matter that the way is often long and difficult. Our need for signs and
symbols we can interpret is no different from most people’s need for
these signs and symbols. Our labor is in undertaking the way of trust.
If we can accept the premise of unconditional love and make that truly
part of ourselves – just by being born we are loveable, loving, and
loved and there is nothing
that we can do that changes that fact, then
we can also go the way less traveled, less visibly sure. Show me the
road that I must travel, the Psalmist sings, to your heart. [vii]
And the
people sang their praises: In your steadfast love you led the people
whom you redeemed.
The
Israelites’ terror was held by steadfast love, by the courage to be in
the midst of everything, by holding onto what was not seen and trusting
in what was promised and unfolding. This, too, is not something they
expected. They had to experience it before they could believe it, but
they first had to walk out with a few in the lead who were walking on bittachon, on what
they had not yet experienced. There is a Chasidic
story where a woman asks her rebbe to pray with her, calling on the
rebbe to walk with her.[viii] At first, the rebbe refuses,
but then the woman reminds him that the Torah tells us the people
believed after the Holy had
saved them. Only a few can believe before
the experience of redemption. The rebbe then joined the woman in
prayer.
For the
one who had already practiced the other perspective, the one who had
engaged this wrestling already and found a way had to walk beside the
one who had not. The leadership of this congregation, as we go forward,
may have different perspectives about the apparent way. And some may
feel the way doesn’t make business sense or is roundabout. Some may
feel the time is not right. These are common feelings to the terrors
that beset us in this third stage of change, preparation. We may wish
for an easier way. We may sigh for life’s “easy button”. But that has
never been the way of the best story, of the most interesting people,
of the ways of changing this world for the better, of creating and
sharing greater hope, greater love, and greater joy. Take courage
friends, the way is often hard and it is never easy. Our work is
to
stay with the trust of being together, and as we face our own Red Seas
– as we will in this journey together, as we most assuredly will – is
to have some with the courage of Nahum in stepping forward and the rest
of us with the courage of the Israelites in following the circuitous
route to freedom.
Once upon
a time, I could not find my way through the wilderness, through my
expectations of failure and my hopelessness. Once upon a time, another
person stood beside me and insisted there was indeed a way and we could
get out of that trap. Once upon a time, I struggled to learn a new
pattern of seeing the world, to embrace the changes needed. Once upon a
time, I was terrified and demoralized. Once upon a time, steadfast love
showed up demanding steadfast trust. I set my heart on freedom from
that terrible demoralization. This meant I set my mind on freedom and
my whole being on that path. This is the pattern of spiritual growth.
For us,
this Passover reach toward freedom through the roundabout way means
four things: to know we are terrified, to know we are loved, to know
there is a way, and to know the change begins here and now. But in our
terror, it is difficult to reach toward change. Repeat after me: the
change begins. We’re on our way. We have the power as a
congregation to
do what we cannot do alone. And: the
change begins. We’re on our
way. This is where the real miracles begin: in our hearts.
And: the change begins. We’re
on our way. This week, when you find yourself
between the army and the sea – reach out your hands to one another –
and say together: the change begins.
We’re on our way.
Our
steadfast trust connects back to this steadfast love, this being held
and holding on to change: the way that is found and wrested toward
freedom. This is the road we travel to the land we will build. We will
leave captivity behind. We are loveable, we are loving, and we are
loved. No matter what. There is a way, no matter what. The change
begins now. We are on our way.
Miriam
raised the song on the other side of the Red Sea: steadfast love
brought us out of slavery; steadfast love brought us through the
perishing times; steadfast love made us; steadfast love claims us;
steadfast love redeems us. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has
and ever will. The change begins. We’re on our way. We will have fear.
We will wonder about the route. My friends, we’re wading in the waters
of change, the waters of hope, the waters of promise, the waters of
life. This is the road we must travel; let us carry on. Amen.
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