Until We Meet Again Rev. Meghan Cefalu January 20, 2013 UUCM

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1 Until We Meet Again Rev. Meghan Cefalu January 20, 2013 UUCM Now that I ve been back here with you all for this short period of touching base I ve had time to reflect some on the new thoughts and ideas I ve had during my renewal leave thus far. The first six months of renewal leave accomplished what I d hoped it would. A fog of exhaustion I didn t even realize had been clouding my experience of the world has been burned away. I have been rejuvenated and transformed by all the new settings and new experiences I ve had. And in conversations with committees, and the Board of Trustees and with many of you one-on-one, it seems both individually and collectively in the past six months this congregation has also undergone some significant transitions. The Board has shifted to focus more of its time on visionary leadership on helping the congregation dream and plan its way into a bright and vibrant future. While several people in our community are grieving the loss of parent, a beloved pet or someone else close to them. Some marriages and partnerships have been mended, while others have begun to fray and come apart. Some in this room have had to cope with significant declines in health. While others have started kindergarten, learned to drive a car or fallen in love for the very first time. Transitions are often not easy. A life transition is a change or passage from one stage or phase to another. It is about motion, growth and a change in direction. Transitions are not about staying safe or keeping things the same. They require energy but they can also be times of high creativity. I love the ocean imagery that Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva creates in her essay Poets with History and Poets without History : The same water a different wave. What matters is that it is a wave. What matters is that the wave will return. What matters is that it will always return different. What matters most of all: however different the returning wave, it will always return as a wave of the sea. 1) The same water a different wave What matters is that it is a wave. We, like waves, are independent and transitory. Our individual lives have a motion of their own formed by the winds of fortune and all the myriad choices we make along the way. Throughout our lifetimes we grow and change and are transformed again and again. Most of the time we experience ourselves as distinct and separate from one another and from the collective body of life from which we have emerged. And yet, are we not each a part of something much larger? 1

2 The reading I shared with you during our meditation captures this idea that at the most essential level we are not as independent as we like to think we are. I especially enjoy the idea that we are each a differentiation of the Undifferentiated Form that some call God. And that everything is energy. Everything is vibrating. And that the Essence, this Life Energy, is manifesting itself in differing from through the elegant process of movement. And therefore nothing can be truly disconnected from everything else. 1 I find that thought both comforting and exciting. We are Life Energy become aware of Itself. And if that is actually true then it stands to reason that we are tasked the purpose of our lives - we are tasked with intentionally raising our consciousness. I believe that is our work right now on the planet: waking up, and realizing just how interrelated we are with one another and with all life and thereby increasing our capacity for compassion. We are different waves of the very same ocean. It is true that when I am unkind to someone I will suffer as well, and when I act lovingly towards another I also feel loved. When Jesus said, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, he was pointing to this sense of oneness. 2) What matters is that the wave will return. What matters is that it will always return different. Each day when we leave our house we go out and have an experience of the world we come back different. It is always happening. The changes may be tiny, almost imperceptible but they add up over the months and years and decades. It is impossible not to be changed by life. We are given opportunities in every moment, but especially in life s larger transitions, for development de-velop-ment an unfolding. And yet we resist all of the major transitions we face in our lives because it takes energy to reorient ourselves. We have to unstick ourselves, like tearing apart Velcro, to who and how we had been and what had been working. There is usually a period of disorientation before we figure out how to operate in the new way of being. In the 1960 s MLK boldly spoke his intolerance of the injustice caused by the inequality between black and white Americans. The idea of civil rights for all people regardless of color was a colossal change from the status quo. Many white people were very threatened, and rightly so, by the potential loss of power and status over black people. It was an unfathomable loss for many white people, especially in the south. I m sure it felt to them like utter catastrophe. And I can imagine how terrifying it must have been for the African Americans who challenged the system by putting their bodies on the line. People became enraged and violent at the proposition of such a momentous transition within our society. 1 Walsch, Neal Donald. Happier than God. Emnin Books: Ashland, OR P

3 But we survived the 60 s and we are a better nation for it. Things are far from perfect on the social justice front, but we have come a very, very long way. Sometimes the transition we face is not one we would choose. People we love die, we are watching as our planet is losing its strength and biodiversity. But it is how we respond, what meaning we make of the loss that shapes us in its wake. When our heart breaks open do we not connect with everyone else whose heart has been broken open? In the weeks following my dad s death I remember I would stand in line at the grocery store and marvel at how normal everyone was acting, as if the world had not just been turned upside down and my heart crushed. There are times now when I am at the grocery store and I see someone who looks angry, or unhappy or simply stunned and I wonder, might they be in deep grief? My heart goes out to them. Like the baby bird busting out of the shell going through a major transition can be very hard work. But it is good work, the work of being alive. If someone were to help the bird by breaking away the shell the baby would not have the strength it needs to thrive in the world. It needs to gather for itself the strength it takes to go through that transformation. It needs to build the muscle. And the bird needs to know for itself that it can do it! Fortunately we don t have to go through transitions alone. We gather up friends along the way to give and receive support as we share the journey. It can especially hard when we go through a transition that we choose to keep private. Some transitions can cause us to feel shame: deciding to have an abortion, getting a DUI, the admission of a problem with drugs or alcohol, a diagnosis of dementia. No matter what it is that life throws at us, no matter how hard and shattering the experience, I know that there are opportunities embedded within it for us to grow. Before I left in July last year I had been feeling restless. I was feeling like I had been doing nothing but yammering at you all about life for six years while not having many adventures of my own. I needed some variety, some rearranging of the thoughts in my brain. Basically, I needed to go get more stories to tell. I can tell you that it is a little scary to step into the unknown. Martin Luther King Jr. said, Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase. As we drove away from our house, our friends and family, this loving community there was just the slightest bit of trepidation. Inviting change to come and rearrange my life took some courage. Have you ever felt that sense of restlessness, as if something within you is nudging you to make a change? Have you heard a voice crying out saying, This isn t working anymore! What did you do? And did you take that first step not knowing where it might lead? Maybe that voice is being stirred up right now in this moment. Listen carefully. UU minister Jeremy Taylor has a ministry of dreamwork. He teaches people in his class that no matter the content of the dream, the dream is coming to you in the service of health and wholeness. It may be a terribly frightening dream but, he believes deeply, it is showing up in 3

4 our dream life in the service of our own growth, in the service of making us more integrated and whole. I think there is a way we can think of the events our lives in the same way. No matter how shattering they may feel at the time, it is how we interpret and make sense of them that can ultimately bring us healing. 3) What matters most of all: however different the returning wave, it will always return as a wave of the sea. At the end of the day, no matter what happens in our lives, no matter how may transformations or how deeply we are affected by the changes in our lives, there is a part of us that remains unchanged. The essence of who you are, and have always been, is inalterable. The poet Rumi writes: And if the sun did not travel on wing and foot all the night how would the world be illumined at morningtide? If the salt water did not rise from the sea to the sky, whence would the garden be revived by torrent and rain? When the [dust] departed from its homeland and returned, it encountered a shell and became a pearl. Rumi left off this last line: If your minister did not take some time away to rest and meditate and sing and take in art how would she bring back gifts of excitement and new energy to the congregation? I will be here this coming week and then the next phase of my renewal leave will begin. My time off in February and March will be focused on sitting with and integrating these experiences and new understandings and incorporating them into my life. In her poem, I Have Decided Mary Oliver captures the essence of my next phase of leave. She writes: I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where on learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I m not talking about a vacation. Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me? I will see you all in April when I am back for good. I wish you many blessings on the transitions in your lives individually and as a community. Until we meet again I love you. 4

5 Amen and blessed be. 5