Change is a constant in our lives, bringing both challenges and opportunities for growth. Perhaps this is especially so because no change is perfect. This service will delve into the spiritual practices that help us navigate transitions with grace and resilience and an openness that welcomes imperfection.
Inviting Change and Imperfection,
Looking for Equanimity
Rev. Joe Cleveland
September 22, 2024
I suspect that it is not a good strategy to begin a sermon by talking about a fine point of grammar. And yet.
Verbs, the action words, change to reflect different tenses. The simple tenses are past, present, future. In English, there are also perfect and continuous tenses. Past simple: Last Sunday, I listened to the sermon. Past perfect: I reassured my Minister that last Sunday I had listened to the sermon. Past continuous: When I was here last Sunday, I was listening to the sermon. Past perfect continuous: When I nodded off during the service last Sunday, I had been listening to the sermon.
The English language doesn’t have an “imperfect” tense. Other languages, like Spanish, French, and Latin, do have the imperfect tense as a verb option. You use the perfect tense when whatever you are doing is finished. Imperfect tense means the action is not over. It’s unfinished or it’s been interrupted. The poet Michael Simms is mourning the death of his sister — he is mourning a life interrupted, unfinished. Trying to convey how he feels about the unfinished life of his sister, Simms laments that the meaning he’s trying to convey, the feeling he is trying to share, —he’s never going to be able to say what that meaning is because it is beyond the English language. In his poem, “Imperfect,” Simms makes one attempt after another to say exactly what he is feeling, to say how his world has been disrupted, and how that feels — all of the attempts fall short. All of them fail.
Has there ever been a time — maybe it’s right now—when your world feels disrupted, chaotic? You thought you knew how the world was going along, and then the world didn’t go along—have you felt that? The world is noisy and there is so much going on, way too much to keep track of. We are tempest-tossed. It feels hard to know what to do, and it can feel like our attempts are falling short. What I hope for you and for me is that we might sail with some equanimity in the face of all that.
Equanimity, speaking of language, is a really interesting word. There are two root-words that come together to make equanimity. One is ‘equal’ and the other is wind. If you have equanimity you have even breathing. What helps you breathe evenly?
The entrepreneur Sara Blakely says that over dinner, her father would ask her and her brother this question: How did you fail this week? Blakely says,
“He encouraged us to fail, and not to be afraid of it. … If we didn’t have something to tell him that week, he would be disappointed.”
When Blakely tried out for the cheerleading squad and was “horrible and didn’t make it,” he high-fived her. When she revealed that she lost her campaign for senior class president, he told her that was amazing. “I knew that the most popular girl was running and would win, but I had been trained by my dad to do it for the experience and the stories and the people you might meet by putting yourself out there,” Blakely said.
Practicing failing, and practicing sharing about her failures— I suspect that made Blakely breathe more evenly than lots of us when confronted by falling short.
We might not have a dad who asks us how we’ve failed, but we do have a faith that helps us gain new perspective on falling short. I gave out a nugget of UU theology from James Luther Adams last week, and I’ll give you another from him. One fundamental idea in Unitarian Universalism is that “revelation is not sealed.” Instead, we understand that “‘revelation’ is continuous.”
Adams describes it this way: “Meaning has not been finally captured. … At best, our symbols of communication are only referents and do not capsule reality. Events of word, deed, and nature are not sealed. They point always beyond themselves. Not only is significant novelty both possible and manifest, but also significance is itself inchoate and subject to inner tensions of peril and opportunity.”
Whether or not English had an imperfect verb tense, the meaningfulness of the death of poet Michael Simms’s sister Elizabeth is not sealed. Its significances and possibilities will continue to grow and change—the significance lives on.
Unitarian Universalism is a living tradition, a living faith. We invite change. We say, “Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”
We want to be perfect. We are conditioned to think of perfection as the only really worthy goal. But perfection is an incredibly intimidating goal, there is a lot of shame attached to failing at perfection, and it’s not realistic, is it? I mean, we are human, right? And life—life is only possible because of imperfection. The physician and writer Lewis Thomas points out that, “The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA.” Without the ability to blunder, there would be no evolution. The engine of evolution is error. And to err is human. Thomas says, “Biology needs a better word than ‘error’ for the driving force in evolution. Or maybe ‘error’ will do after all, when you remember that it came from an old root meaning to wander about, looking for something.” Feel like you’re wandering about, blundering, looking for something? You are manifesting the driving force of life. Breathe that in!
Living, we are necessarily erring, refining, looking for something. We are incomplete and in process. The writer and facilitator adrienne maree brown recognizes that this can feel like a lot to hold. She wants to help people hold change. Her work as a facilitator led her to the insight that “Holding change is a variation of holding space.”
Holding or creating space is one of the ways I understand what we are doing when we gather for a worship service on a Sunday morning: We are holding space for one another. We are giving space to one another. Space to feel what we feel, space for us to wander looking for something, space to err and space to gain perspective. The academic, researcher and writer Brené Brown tried to establish a meditation practice. But she was holding too tightly to the idea that to meditate means not to think any thoughts. She was trying so hard not to think any thoughts that she just kept having thoughts. It wasn’t working. She wanted some stillness in her life. Eventually she came to understand that, “Stillness is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.” [108]
We are tempest-tossed. It feels hard to know what to do, and it can feel like our attempts are falling short. So let us hold space, so we can hold change. Let that be who we are: a people who create and hold space so that we might hold change and honor life blundering and wondrous. Let us be imperfect, always pointing beyond ourselves, creating space for possibility. May we wander, looking, listening, feeling. May we create a clearing for ourselves and one another where we might breathe evenly even as the tempest roars.
The pastor Martha Postlethwaite offers this insight:
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue.
Amen.
Resources
Michael Simms. “Imperfect.” Academy of American Poets.
Lewis Thomas. “The Wonderful Mistake.” The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher. Penguin Books, 1995 (1979).
bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2018 (2000).
Brené Brown. The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden, 2010.
Martha Postlethwait. The Clearing.
Peter Mayer. “Japanese Bowls” from the album Heaven Below
Topics: Imperfection, Invitation, Transformation