Sermon
I've always felt more in tune with the Jewish calendar than the Roman one. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, usually falls in September or early October. And the coming of September (August here in Charlotte County) means time to return to school as Labor Day is the traditional start of the new school year. The rhythm of the Agricultural year is an important part of our cultural heritage at odds with our calendar. It is as if people reset their biological systems this time of year as the days get shorter, the summer begins to fade, and people return their thoughts from recreation to work. Labor Day weekend is a last chance for rest and renewal before facing the fall to-do list. Yes, September 1st really should be New Year's day in my book.
There is something tremendously nostalgic for me about this time of year. There is some sadness as the summer slips away that draws my thoughts back to Labor Days of years past. So often this has been a time of great excitement as I began each year of grade school happy to see all of my old friends from last year, meeting my new teacher, and beginning to master new areas of knowledge so someday I could be as smart as my dad and enter his world full of stick and spring models of molecules, elaborate formulas, and thick heavy textbooks with fine print. I remember the fear of going to Junior High with so many big scary older kids I didn't know, the excitement of picking my High School classes for the first time, the wonder and delight of my first year at the University of Delaware where my father taught and my mother worked as a reference librarian, the uncertainty of returning to U. C. Berkeley after a two year break in my engineering education and the thrill of my first year at Starr King School for the Ministry initiating a dedicated sabbatical year without employment. Each return to school built on the emotions of the past years deepening the feelings and increasing the anticipation.
The experience of returning extends beyond returning to school. For many, the return to their hometown, a high school reunion, visiting a favorite vacation or fishing spot brings back a flood of familiar memories which connects the past and the present in a moment of rebelling against, reluctantly conceding, perhaps even toasting the passage of time.
I find these experiences of returning very meaningful and satisfying. It is as if something inside me needs regular cycles. I discovered this when I began my ministerial internship in Western New York after a long stay in California where the seasonal changes are muted. I reveled in the glory of the maple tree's brilliant reds and phosphorescent oranges, the first snowfall and the crocuses breaking through the icy soil in early spring. One of my difficulties working in the computer and software development world was its lack of seasons. The work never paused in the relentless search for market windows of opportunity. The leaves do not change color in a typical corporate programmer's cubicle. If snow appears on his or her computer screen this indicates a hardware problem not a change of weather. Little distracts the hard working programmer or engineer from their project de-coupled from the natural world seeking to control it. The plain lines of the comic strip Dilbert seen in the Sarasota Herald Charlotte AM illustrates the disconnected insanity of modern research and development subtly revealing the austerity of information age monasticism. In the technical world, there is almost no returning as each wave of technology pushes past the last advancing ever outward - and rarely returning.
One way to get a sense of our need for living cycles which allow us to return again and again to where we have started is to consider the root of the word return which is turn. Turn is one very important word without which we could not function. Without it we could not deviate from the straight and narrow path to turn to the right or the left. Without it raw materials could not be turned into products for our consumption. Clay could not be turned into pots and wood into attractive chair legs. Without turning we could have no wheels, no knobs, and no screws. The key may fit the lock but it must turn to open the door.
Implicit in the word turn is both the idea of a circle and the idea of change. In the turning of a wheel there is seeming endless repetition whereas the turning of a rock into a statue is rich with transformation. The key to grasping the significance of turning is bringing together the seemingly endless turning of the globe from day to night to day again with the endless transformation with each new leaf of the book of life we turn over. With each new change comes an inner call to re-turn to the familiar, to step back before journeying on. Returning stabilizes and harmonizes the tremendous power of the new with the cyclical nature of existence.
Returning allows us to gain perspective on how our lives have changed. For me returning as we do just about every summer to Newark, Delaware, the town I grew up in, to see familiar sites and faces allows me to return to where I began as a kind of litmus test of the changes in my life. I also return to the Newark UU Fellowship in which I grew up reconnecting with a familiar sense of our religious tradition which shaped me. I return to an almost abandoned train station I used to visit as a kid to ponder the great questions of my life interrupted by the earsplitting, vibrating thrill of the Metroliner flashing close by at full speed. These foundational experiences seem to re-calibrate my sense of meaning, of what is important.
In this reflection on where we have been and where we may be going, we return to fundamental understandings. The compelling nature of our busy lives can disconnect us from the deeper knowings which keep us together and keep us centered. We need a time of disengagement with the frontiers of inner and outer change to find and confirm the center which holds us together.
I found a Taoist meditation[1] on the Chinese symbol for returning which I hope you enjoy:
The idea of returning is significant for all of us. We must work, explore, travel, and make our achievements in life. No matter how much we strain and how wide we wander, we all need some lodestone, some center from which to operate. For some of us, this is a place, a home. For others, it is merely withdrawal into our own hearts.
The process of return is not without illusions. In returning to a place of the past, or allowing our thoughts to return to a bygone era, we do not completely return. I thought of that this morning because I have been reviewing some videotapes I took when I came here to candidate in the spring of 1993. These oak trees in front our building have gotten a lot bigger over the last three years! The juniper beds we planted on the left side of the walk are approaching the fullness of the right side. Newark, Delaware keeps changing too as old buildings come down and new subdivisions go up. A favorite old theater had been taken down and replaced with an eatery. A favorite old tree had been cut down from the family homestead. Even my memory of who I was as a child playing on the asphalt in back of my old elementary school has begun to disappear. The pain of my loneliness and my lack of dating success in high school fade now that I'm married and have a child. The past I remember resembles less and less what it really was like back then, screening out the unpleasant and dwelling in memories still ripe with pleasure.
In reality, there is no "there" to return to. Nature seems determined to not stand still no matter how hard we resist change. We seem unable to prevent the ever moving shoreline from washing away the barrier islands on our coastline and depositing new ones in shipping channels. Any success in beach management is likely to be overwhelmed by the next hurricane. The fire ants, the killer bees, the Brazilian Pepper seem unstoppable. Conquered microbes even fight back against the antibiotics much to our consternation. The direction of change is irreversible. We can't return home again.
What is critical in the process of returning is grasping that the outer return to what seems less changeable and familiar engages the inner process of return to what is less changeable and enduring in existence. And dwelling in what is outside the realms of change is to find oneself in the domain of the religious. What most of us seek in our religious lives is what dwells outside the field of change. We seek what we can rely on to be there when our world is turned upside down. We want an intimate connection with truths which endure and stand the test of time. This is where we will find the peace which passes all understanding.
Returning here each Sunday morning is a return from the world of change to seek the enduring center which resides in this congregation and in us. My sermons lift up the insights of Christian, Jewish, Humanist and world religious traditions which point to eternal truths on which we can anchor our ship. For it is in times of troubled seas we need eternal truth the most. The special gift of Unitarian Universalism is to witness and proclaim the universality of the truth revealed in the great religious traditions. UUism focuses its attention on their agreement and passes over the particularities of the endless theological debate bound by the limited dogmatism of the past.
Just as there are laws of nature which do not change (and I'd never get on an airplane if they did) so there are laws of living which have little variation. There are laws of living which, when understood, experienced and embraced bring happiness, peace and serenity. These laws of living can lift us above the torments change can bring.
The process of returning closes the circle and allows us to begin again renewed through the connection of past and present by rediscovering our center. We can and do become distracted from the path which leads to what is best for us and for our world. There need to be times we consciously return to our center so we can bring our life back into balance and harmony.
The Taoist meditation on the Chinese character for return continues:
So as I return to this pulpit to begin another year of preaching, as the children return to school to begin another year of learning, as the snowbirds return to nest with us again this winter, may we find our center here in this congregation. May this be a place where people feel free to explore the depths of their lives seeking their own connections and understanding of eternal truths. May this be a place we share what we have found and support each other in returning to the source be it God, the Tao, the extinction of Buddhism, the One, or the matter-energy matrix of the universe - however we understand the center of the center.
So be it.
Copyright (c) 1996 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.
[1] Ming-Dao, Deng, 365 Tao: Daily Mediations, Harper, SF, (c) 1992, ISBN 0-06-250223-9