Transforming Experiences
Sermon by Emily Burr
November 4, 2001
My sermon this morning is titled "Transforming Experiences." What do I mean by a transforming experience? I mean an event or series of events that happen in your life that shift your way of making meaning in this world and your place in it. Do I think each of you has had one? Yes, in fact, I think you have had many, because transforming experiences do not have to be big major events.
Some are big ones, like a brush with death, but some are smaller ones, like turning thirty or forty or some birthday with a zero at the end. Some are all at once, like a parent dying suddenly, and some are actually a series of less noticeable events that happen over a longer period of time, like a child growing up and into independence. Some can even be non-events externally but still be transforming experiences like the feeling of oneness with the universe one can get encountering the beauty of nature or through meditation. Some are seen as primarily joyful, like the birth of a child, and others bring more loss and grief, but no matter how they manifest themselves, transforming experiences are all important events that we have to come to terms with in one way or another. That is what I will explore this morning, what way or another we deal with them.
They are the events and experiences that cause us to grow and change over the years, which we all do whether we want to or not and whether we are conscious of the changes or not. One cannot go through a transforming experience without being transformed, becoming, in sometimes very subtle ways, a new and different person.
The transformations that come from joyful events, although often dramatic, are ones we usually handle without too much difficulty. Events that cause loss, sometimes even unrecognized loss, are the events that can make us "moan more or less incessantly," as M. Scott Peck put it. We all know of people who have turned bitter and negative after certain events in their lives.
How can we constructively integrate into our concept of the world-as-it-should-be events like what happened on Sept. 11th, or the sudden, unexpected death of a parent or child, or a major medical event or on a less dramatic but no less important scale a child leaving home to start a life of his/her own or retirement that we thought we were looking forward to but find ourselves at a loss to accommodate ourselves to? How can we deal with such events without "moaning more or less incessantly" or becoming bitter? What is wrong with moaning incessantly anyway, especially if we think something terribly unfair has happened to us? Do we have any control over how we are transformed by experiences in our lives? If so, how do we exercise that control? These are some of the questions I have asked myself since my close call last winter. (For those of you who may be new to the congregation, my close call was a cerebral aneurysm followed by brain surgery.)
People who belong to religions with a personal God may be able to answer that God has control but then they have to deal with the question of "why bad thing happen to good people" that Rabbi Kushner addressed in his book of the same name. Most UUs do not have a personal God to rant at or blame or attribute such seemingly inexplicable events "to the will of," so how can we come to terms with events that seem to make no sense. Most of us grew up with an image of a world that we believed was "generally easy" or at least a world that "should be" if not easy, at least fair. The issue of a world where events often happen randomly is one that UUs have to wrestle with a bit differently than people who believe God his in control of our daily lives. We need to find a way to make sense of a world that isn't always fair without attributing difficult experiences to God's will.
People I trusted and believed knew about such things, minister-type people, had told me not to be surprised if I found myself with some tough questions as a result of my experience last winter. A couple of months into my recovery, I was priding myself with having dealt the tough part of this experience. I thought I had come to terms with the unfairness of my having a cerebral aneurysm and had a pretty good attitude toward the physical limitations I might be faced with as a result of my aneurysm. Then as one minister friend put it, I ran smack into my mortality. I realized that except for a twist of fate, luck, or whatever you want to call it, I really could have died. I could not exist anymore, right now, this moment. I began to question the meaning of my life up to that point. If I had died, what would be left behind? What effect or meaning would my life have had? I hadn't saved the world or done anything magnificent like invented a vaccine for AIDES or solved the global warming problem. What difference would my life have made in twenty, a hundred, a thousand years? Even if I had an effect on this earth, what effect would it have on the universe? I realized I was less than a blip on the radar screen of the cosmos so what difference did it make what I did or didn't do? These were not happy thoughts. My old ways of making meaning of my life weren't working any more.
One of the ways I have found to deal with things that are troubling me is to find someone I trust with whom I can talk them out. I took this problem to my friend and mentor Marcel Duhamel, the minister of the Concord UU church. When I told him my realizations and feelings he said, "Yes, Emily, if you had died this winter we here would have missed you and felt sad, but the universe would have gone on." This was not the response I expected to hear. I'm not sure what I did expect but that wasn't it. I continued by asking him how he helped people who came to him with similar concerns about their insignificance on a cosmic level hoping, I think, to get a different response. This time his answer was, "Accept it." At first this seemed a bit harsh but, with time, I understood it to be the kindest answer he could give because, if we are to have meaning in our lives, there often is no other choice but to do just that. As I have worked on giving up feeling sorry for myself and accepted that my one human life is transitory and insignificant on a cosmic level, I have turned to the good things about being alive and I find myself seeing everyday life from a new perspective.
Part of this new perspective is a realization that worrying about the future is futile. Knowing I was perfectly healthy one minute and could easily have been dead the next makes the future less rigid, less sure and therefore less important in some ways. There is a saying that I've read and heard a couple of times recently. I was unable to find the source or the exact quote, but it summarizes my feelings on this topic so I'll try to explain the gist of it.
The future is in the future and it will never be here. The past is past and it is over and done with. The present is all we really have. It is a gift and that is why we call it the present.
This is not to say that we don't need to plan for the future or learn from our past, both individually and as a culture, but it does mean, to me, that right now is what is most important and we can miss a lot of important moments in the present by spending mental time and energy in the past or the future.
Marcel's advice to "Accept it." is good advice for many difficult experiences. By this I do not mean have a "stiff upper lip" and push aside any grief you feel. Part of acceptance of the situation is recognizing and accepting the losses and sadness you are experiencing. Accepting that life isn't easy. But one can "look for the silver lining" even if it takes a while for it to come into focus.
One of the ways to accept such difficult events is to delay judgment of what effect they will have on your future. We all think and act like psychics at times. We think we know what consequences an event will have for us, but often we haven't a clue. 20/20 hindsight is wonderful at showing us how wrong our judgment of an event's "goodness" or "badness" was at the time of the event. It is often difficult to be like the farmer in the children's story and be able to say to oneself at the time an "awful" thing happens "Maybe it's good. Maybe it's bad. I don't know yet."
I have an excellent example of this from my own life. I was working for an environmental testing lab that went through reorganization and my job got shuffled out from under me. I learned in August of 1998 that I would not have a job by the end of the year. At the time this felt like a disaster. I was a single parent. I had grown into a job over five years and it was unlikely that I could find a similar job that would pay as well, since I did not have a recent degree in that field. I wasn't even sure I wanted to find a similar job. I started thinking about going back to school but wasn't sure what to go back to school to study. Should I go to law school? Get a Masters in Education? I even considered some kind of a Masters in Business. During this process of deciding what to do with the rest of my life, someone asked me where I found joy in my life. This got me thinking and I realized that when I wasn't at work or being Mom, I was either at church or with people from my church community. In the previous few years, when I had been on the governing board of the Concord UU church, a couple of people had asked me if I had ever considered becoming a minister. At that time it was the furthest thing from my mind. Well, I started to consider it and it is obvious from the fact that I am here giving this sermon that I decided to go to seminary ad pursue ministry as a career. I entered Andover Newton in January of 1999, a choice that feels like one of the best I have made in my life. 20/20 hindsight allows me to see that there was a wonderful silver lining to losing my job at the testing lab. An event that I thought was one of the worst things to happen in my life has turned out to be one of the best.
A friend of mine shared a metaphor that he said gave him a way to think about events that happen in our lives and the choices we have in the way we incorporate them into our outlook of the world. Although music has not been as big a part of my life as it has been in his, the metaphor resonated with me and has helped me see that I have choices in how I treat events. Think of your life as a page of sheet music. The experiences you have, the "things that happen" to you are the notes on the page. You cannot change the notes themselves but you can interpret them in a variety of ways. For example if the music is in 4/4 time, you can play the notes as a funeral dirge or as a wedding march.
I would like to share one last story as an example of how my transforming experience has changed my ability to read the sheet music of my life. I have always hated winter or at least the cold temperatures and darkness that are an integral part of the season. In the past, about this time of year, I would start a "more or less incessant moaning" about how much I hated winter. It was going to be cold and grey and dark for at least the next five months. I fear I was not always pleasant to be around as I griped and complained about the dropping mercury level in the thermometer and how hard it was for me to get warm and how much I hated winter! This year, somewhat to my surprise, I have changed my attitude. I still prefer to be too warm than too cold and I still don't like the decreasing daylight but I am grateful that I am alive to feel the cold and experience the shortening of the days that I know will eventually lengthen when winter turns to spring. I don't hate winter any more. Winter hasn't changed. I have. My attitude toward winter has changed. The notes are the same but I'm playing them differently. I do have a choice about how I perceive winter. Part of the transformation that happened to me as a result of my close call is a delight in every day, even winter ones in New Hampshire.
I now return to some of the questions I posed earlier. How do we make sense out of random, "unfair" or even "evil" events? If we listen to Marcel and M. Scott Peck we accept that life isn't always easy. That is just the way our universe is. Can we do this without "moaning more or less incessantly" or becoming bitter? I think so if we realize we have a choice of how we let experiences shape our view of the world. We can take control over our interpretation of events, of whether an experience is good or bad or even postpone judgment realizing that it maybe the best thing to do is say, "I don't know yet." What is wrong with moaning incessantly anyway? There is nothing wrong with grieving losses. It is essential that we do so, but we can waste a lot of energy and miss many of the wonderful parts of just being alive if we become bitter or constantly wish things were different than they are. I am enjoying fall far more this year than I ever have in the past because I am not dreading the 4-5 months of winter.
I leave you with this question, "How do you want to play the phrases that appear on the sheet music of your life?" You do have choices.
