In a world that seems sometimes to be spinning beyond our control, how do we maintain our own equilibrium, our sense of balance? Join us as we begin our exploration of our new monthly theme of Balance.
The Still Point, the Even Keel ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 4, 2018
Yesterday offered a powerful chance to see life from both sides all at once. As most of you know, I haven’t lived here in Cape Ann for very long. I’m a lifelong ocean lover who has very seldom seen the power of the ocean from close up, in the wake of a massive storm. And so yesterday I felt a pull that was almost magnetic, to go to the shore, to watch the waves, gasping out loud at the power and the beauty, trying to capture with my camera just the right moment of waves cresting and spindrift flying. It was exhilarating.
It was exhilarating, and I was transfixed, until I looked down as well as up and out. I looked down, and saw beyond the beauty, beyond the ice cream castles and the angel hair, and saw how the clouds were also blocking the sun. Of course I’m talking about the destruction. Suddenly what came into focus was the brand new little oceanside park at Cape Hedge in Rockport, destroyed. I saw the man standing in his yard filled with rubble, throwing the rocks one by one back into the ocean while a Bobcat piled up more. My view expanded so that I could see yards, and likely, basements, filled with water, and my mind’s eye could imagine how easy it would be for lives to be lost.
“Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.”
We look at life from both sides, now and every day.
If we look closely at life, if we give ourselves the time and the space to observe and to notice, we do see life from both sides. And perhaps it can leave us confused, as in the beloved Joni Mitchell song, and feeling as though we don’t know life or love at all. It can seem, in our crowded days and nights, in the cacophony of news and events and noise in our daily lives, that we just spin and spin and can’t make sense of life.
How do we find our center, our soul, our still point, and recognize it and hold onto it?
Our theme for the month of March is Balance, and the more I reflected on this, the more I understood how carefully this theme was chosen. Let’s begin with the season: in March we experience the vernal equinox – a day when the length of night and the length of day are almost exactly equal. Night and day are balanced, if only for a moment.
In addition to the equinox, we also are in the season of Lent. In the Christian tradition, Lent is the period of the 40 days before Easter, intended originally to be days of fasting, but which over time evolved into a period of general sacrifice and penitence. As Unitarian Universalists we can sometimes feel some discomfort with Lent as a spiritual practice, and it is worth exploring it a bit and coming to a deeper understanding of the meaning and the benefits.
As a child growing up Baptist in a mostly Catholic community, I was pretty mystified by Lent. Friends would demand to know what I was planning to give up for Lent. The emphasis was totally on sacrifice. The most popular choices for sacrifice seemed to be candy or television. But as a chunky kid whose parents seldom approved of what was on TV, I never saw much of either candy or television, so there never seemed to be much point in sacrificing them for 40 days. If I had really wanted to give something up that would have hurt, I would have had to give up reading, as I was a complete and total bookworm. But even at the age of seven or eight, not much of this made any logical sense to me. Clearly, even then, I was already a Unitarian. No one ever really seemed to know why they were doing this, or how it would benefit them or the world, and it felt shallow, like an empty ritual.
Well, I’m older now. And I have come to understand that Lent has a much deeper purpose: that it can serve as a period when people take the time to examine their lives, to assess what is going well, what might be missing, and what might need improvement. To pause to look at both sides. Lent, approached with intention and with depth, and with self-compassion and not just self-sacrifice, is truly a spiritual practice: a spiritual discipline. It is a time when we can look at ourselves carefully, to check our gyroscopes, as we heard in our reading, to make sure that we are on an even keel.
The practice of Lent began in the early Christian church during the first century of the Common Era. Many believe that the 40-day period of Lent is intended to remind people of the time early in Jesus’ ministry when he disappeared into the wilderness for 40 days. During that wilderness journey, Jesus fasted, and prepared himself emotionally and spiritually for the trials of his public ministry that were about to begin. He found himself tempted by Satan three times, and had the strength and integrity to respond with his core values in serving God. He steadfastly rejected each assault on his integrity and his readiness to serve.
In effect, what Jesus did, was – he went on a retreat. He fasted, or cleansed, he spent time in solitude to be able to focus and to center himself. It was a period of deep spiritual practice and discernment. Yes, there was sacrifice: the story tells us that Jesus went without food. And yet, by going beneath the surface of the ancient story, we see that there was a greater purpose in the sacrifice: the journey to the wilderness was a time of careful preparation, of stripping away the superficial in order to access the core, the center, within.
And perhaps the story of the 40 days in the wilderness is entirely a metaphor for a journey deep into the still point. That still point: what Thomas Merton called “the hidden wholeness”, and what teachers from many traditions call the soul. There are many other names for this still point: for example, the Quakers often refer to it as ‘the still, small, voice.” It is the essence of your being, this point of the gyroscope that stands still even as everything else is spinning around you.
And truly it can feel as though the world is spinning out of control around us these days. We are confronted, bombarded, really, with more information than humans have ever been asked to absorb. We struggle to keep abreast of the news, and even to make sense of it. Information comes to us 24 hours a day, from all over the world. We struggle to respond, to take it all in, and in the midst of this spinning, to keep track of ourselves. How do we feel about the events that whirl past us? What do we care about? What can we safely ignore? Are there things that we should give up that would benefit us or the larger world?
Another reality of our daily lives is that few of us can manage to go off into the wilderness for 40 days, or even 10. How many of us even want to confront that much solitude, that much time alone with just ourselves? It could be terrifying.
The late Universalist minister Gordon McKeeman offered us an alternative to the lengthy and solitary journey in the wilderness in his essay about the gyroscope. He wrote, “A regular pause in the day’s course to check my gyroscope is important to me.” A ‘regular pause in the day’s course…’ Does that sound more realistic than a 40-day retreat?
This pause for balance can take many forms: 10 minutes of meditation or prayer, a short walk, a break for a cup of tea or coffee. Not a race through the Dunkin Donuts drive-through, but an intentional pause in a comfortable spot where you can breathe deeply and let your mind settle down, to look at life from both sides, and listen for your still, small voice to emerge.
As I think about this way of finding balance, a practice of pausing to check in with ourselves off and on throughout our busy days, I find myself reflecting that this type of spiritual discipline and discernment is more like a yoga practice. I don’t know how many of you practice yoga. But in yoga, you are working to develop your core strength and to maintain your balance as you practice the various poses. And it can be very difficult to stay balanced. But what we do, as we attempt a pose on one leg, or to stretch out from our center, is to almost continually adjust our weight, moving an arm or a leg, shifting our position often in tiny movements in order to maintain our equilibrium. It requires constant attention, and frequent adjustment. The comparisons between yoga and our efforts to adjust our spiritual and emotional lives to maintain our balance are inescapable.
Tiny, continual movements. Brief pauses to make sure that we are balancing at our core. And, according to Gordon McKeeman, acknowledging at the same time that we need the rapid spinning for our gyroscopes to be able to stay on point. Without the spin of our daily lives our gyroscopes lose their balance. Here we have the great paradox of our lives: the need for engagement, the need for the stimulation and the activity, the relationships and the knowledge that add up to a human life. And yet, if we are not careful and attentive, the spinning will obscure our focus, and our ability to hear and understand the needs that are found at our still point. We can lose our ability to observe, to see both sides of clouds, and of love and of life, to feel that we know love and life. And this is truly a great sacrifice.
The poet Mary Oliver wrote, “This is the first and wildest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.“ (“Low Tide,” Amicus Journal, Winter 2001)
To live our lives fully and with wholeness, to become who we are truly meant to be, we must be attentive. We must listen to our souls, to the still small voice calling to us. It never stops calling, even if sometimes we cannot hear it.
My friends, the season of Lent lasts through the month of March. I invite you to encounter it in a new way, to see it as a time of opportunity, of exploring new ways to attend to your souls, rather than strictly as a time of sacrifice. Seen through new eyes, Lent can enhance our spiritual journeys, if we set aside time throughout this month to seek balance in our daily lives. Working for a few minutes at a time, making small adjustments, we can learn to balance all the demands and the desires, the wish to change the world and the need to retreat from it.
May you find ways to hear the calling of your souls, and to balance yourselves.
Blessed Be,
Amen.
