OUR JOURNEY TOWARD WINGS: SAYING YES TO TRANSFORMATION Talk at Unity Church by Rev. Diane Berke July 2007 this is an awesome community you are an awesome community. I wanted to begin this morning by sharing with you and excerpt from a wonderful book by the poet Mark Nippo, called the Book of Awakening, and in that book he writes, The Polynesians say that the world began when Taorah, their name for the creator, woke to find himself growing inside a shell. He stretched and broke the shell and the Earth was created. Taorah kept growing and after a time found himself inside another shell. Again he stretched and broke the shell, and this time the Moon was created. Again Taorah kept growing and again found himself contained by yet another shell. This time the breaking forth created the Stars. In this ancient story, the Polynesians have carried for us the wisdom that we each grow in this life by breaking successive shells. That the piece of God within each of us stretches until there is no room to be, and then the world as we know it must be broken so that we can be born anew. In this way, Life becomes a living of who we are until that form of Self, can no longer hold us, and like Taorah in his shell we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next Self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world. Not that any of them are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time, until we grow and they no longer serve us. So all of us are in this room because we care about our spiritual lives, and a committed spiritual life is about growth. The great Russian novelist Tolstoy said, Grow spiritually and help others to do so, that is the meaning of life. And certainly that has been the focus and heart of my own personal and professional life for the last twenty plus years and it s at the heart of everything we do and teach at One Spirit. Sometimes the experience of growth is easy and joyful and exciting. But there are other times, especially times of real transformation, when the process of growth feels much more arduous and demanding and even terrifying. It can feel as if, like Taorah s shell, our entire world, outer or inner, is breaking apart. And in one sense it is because with real transformation an old Self dies. An old sense of identity is discarded. An old way of being which has served us for a time must be let go of, and maybe even shattered. These are the times that the piece of God inside of us has stretched until there is no more room to breathe and to move inside our old structures of identity, and we must break the confines of the old shell in order to create something miraculous and wondrous and new. I know that this community was born exactly that way, as was One Spirit. I also believe that the same thing is happening now on a global scale, and I will talk more about that later this morning.
In his book Illusions Richard Bach writes, What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly. But while we still believe we re the caterpillar, that s a very, very scary time. One of my favorite cartoons shows two caterpillars walking along and suddenly a butterfly flies overhead and one of the caterpillars turns to the other and says, you re never gonna get me up in one of those things. Not that any of us have ever felt that way. But still there comes a time, when, even if we re afraid we need to let the piece of God inside of us stretch. Because as Anais Nin has said, A day comes when the risk of staying tight in a bud is greater than the risk that it takes to blossom. So what I d like for us to look at together this morning is the Process of Transformation. What I call Our Journey Toward Wings. And the transformative journey begins with deep listening. A Native American elder named Sock Edge Henderson points out that, To truly listen is to risk being changed forever. And the journey begins when something inside of us starts to stir and we begin to sense that something wants to and needs to change. Thoreau wrote that we are constantly invited to be what we are. And the invitation that we re asked to pay attention and listen to may come either from inside of us or from the world around us or both. It may come in the form of discomfort or discontent. In Unity teachings that s called Divine Discontent. It may come as the stirring of creative possibilities. It may come as an inner prompting. Or it may come as outer challenges or demands. The invitation may come as synchronicities or opportunities, even crisis. And, we might resist listening for a while, because as E. E. Cummings pointed out, It takes great courage to really grow up and turn out to be who you really are. I learned something really interesting this year about the actual process of metamorphosis in which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. And that is that some caterpillars put it off. They put it off! Sometimes for a matter of days, sometimes for a matter of weeks, sometimes for as long as a couple of years. And there is actually a name for that time, its called The Diapause. But I m sure you ve noticed that in your own times of Diapause, that if we don t listen to those inner promptings, if we don t pay attention, if we don t answer the invitation; those quiet, sweet, gentle whispers have a way of getting louder and louder until they simply cannot be denied or ignored, and so eventually we do say yes. But even after we do, the process can still feel very scary because our old way of being and the old identity that we re being asked to let go of -- even if it s painful and limiting -- has provided us with a sense of security. It has defined the edges of our comfort zone and given us a sense of safety. I once read about an experiment done with some fish who as babies were kept in a corner of the aquarium with a
glass barrier, and they could only swim within the small confines of that barrier. Once they were grown the barrier was removed, but they continued to stay in that same little corner. They never ventured out, even though now the entire tank was available to them. How often in our lives are we just like those fish. To go beyond the familiar, to go past our comfort zones, and to let go of and old identity that no longer serves us, can feel like an enormous risk and even sometimes a threat to our very survival. We may have this absolutely inscrutable sense of anxiety and have no idea where it is coming from, and very often that is an indication that an old Self needs to die. So what does it take to give ourselves over to that? First and more than anything it takes Courage. And Courage is a quality of Strength and real bigness of heart. It comes from the same root as the word in French for heart. So to be courageous is to be full of heart. And real Courage, as opposed to bravado, always finds its origins in our capacity to Love. I don t know if any of you have seen the movie The Mighty Heart with Angelina Jolie. It is the story of Marianne Pearl, who was the wife of Daniel Pearl the Wall Street journalist who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan. It s a very moving film. At the end of the film Marianne who was pregnant with her and Daniel s son when all of this happened; there is a scene when she described where she forced herself to imagine, in detail the last moments of her husband s life before she gave birth, because that was the only way she could allow her inner landscape to not be defined by fear. And the only way that in her great love for this child she was giving birth to, she could actually share with him Joy in life and Joy in this world. Incredible, profound Love that gave rise to extraordinary Courage. A much lighter scene is one that takes place in the old Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade movie, and in that film Indiana Jones father, played by Sean Connery, is wounded and in order to be healed needs the grail -- which is on the other side of this vast chasm. The only hope he has is for Indiana Jones to be willing to step out into the void. And again out of love for his father.you see him and he is shaking in his boots literally but he steps out. And at that point the scene also shows us the quality of Faith, that side by side with Courage, is needed for the transformative process to move forward. And what happens is that when he takes a step, a bridge appears. But, it doesn t appear all at once! With every step he takes, another piece of the bridge shows up. You know so often we want guarantees before we take the first step we want to see the whole bridge. But real faith doesn t work like that. Real faith is not that God will make it all turn out the way we hope it will. The real God is not our ego s personal cosmic bell hop. Real Faith, mature Faith, trusts that God s will for us is that we grow into the fullness and magnitude of who we are created to be, and that we are always given everything we need in the way of support and resources and learning situations in order to fulfill the very purpose of our lives. So true Faith, is as the saying goes, that when we come to the end of all that we know, we will trust in one of two things -- either there will be ground for us to stand on, or we will be given wings to fly. And it is often not until we step out that
we find out which it s gonna be. I also learned this year that when a caterpillar climbs and begins to spin the chrysalis -- that the name for the place where it attaches itself to the twig it s almost a little piece of Velcro that comes out of its abdomen and anchors the chrysalis to the twig or the branch is called a Chromaster. And in the same way when we are in the process of transformation, it s essential that we focus on our spiritual Chromaster. We need to anchor ourselves to our spiritual connection. As the psalmist said, We need to find ways to cleave to the Divine. And we do that of course in prayer and meditation and also through opening ourselves to genuine spiritual community, and again more about that a little later. The process of transformation also asks of us a quality of Patience -- the willingness to hang out in the unknown with all of its inherent discomfort and uncertainty. One of the primary archetypes we have in Western consciousness for the transformative process is of course the Easter story. The transformation from Crucifixion to Resurrection. And a key part of the story is the time in between, the time in the tomb. And it literally is in the fertile darkness that the mystery of transformation unfolds. In womb time. And the Easter story teaches us that tomb time, seeming tomb time, is in fact womb time. The same thing of course happens when the caterpillar has to hang it hangs upside down in the dark in the chrysalis for real transformation to occur. And this is a process that happens in its own time. It can t be forced and it can t be rushed. Now obviously we don t live in a culture that puts much stock in waiting. We want instant everything. And so we typically are not taught the quality of patience that is grounded in deep trust. And as a result when we find ourselves in that in-between space, we are often tempted to try to alleviate the anxiety we feel by either retreating back to the old way of being or trying to circumvent the real steps we need take to give birth to the new. But neither one will work. Neither one will work! The old way is too small to contain us anymore, and we cannot skip the steps necessary to birth the new. Which brings us to a final essential quality to real transformation, and that is the quality of genuine Effort. I think that one of the most unfortunate ideas to come out of some New Age teachings is idea that life is always supposed to be easy, and that if something takes hard work, it means we must be doing something wrong. Now at best that idea is just silly. At worst, it actually undermines our capacity to develop real mastery in life. Because real mastery of anything we value enough to want to get really good at it, takes hard work. No matter how talented they are, artists and athletes of real caliber actually work hard at what they do. No matter how much they love each other, couples that have happy and enduring marriages work hard at growing beyond self centeredness and at stretching in their capacity to really know how to love another person as themselves. Even the Dalai Lama still gets up at three or four o clock every morning to study and meditate, and uses everything that happens in the course of the day as an opportunity for spiritual practice.
It literally is the Effort that the butterfly makes to break through the chrysalis -- the hard work of beating its wings against the confines of the cocoon -- that pump the fluid into its wings. Without that Effort the Butterfly will never fly, and neither will we. Unless we re willing to do the hard work to commit to the process of spiritual labor, we re not going to give birth to our new Self. The great Sufi mystic poet wrote, Work! Keep digging your well. Don t think about getting off from work. Water is there somewhere. Submit to a daily practice. Keep knocking! Keep knocking, and the Joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see, Who s there? So the last thing I want to share with you this morning is something that I mentioned earlier, and that is that I believe that we are in a time when humanity as a whole is being called to this transformative process. The work that each one of us is willing to do in our own lives is a major part of supporting that effort. But there is one additional piece that I think is really worth mentioning. The evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Satouris has written about this metamorphosis from the caterpillar to the butterfly as a metaphor for where we are collectively in consciousness. And one of the most interesting things that she writes about is that when the real transformation is about to begin, cells begin to appear in the caterpillar that don t carry caterpillar DNA they carry butterfly DNA and these cells are called Imaginal Cells. Isn t that amazing? Imaginal Cells! And when these Imaginal Cells first begin to appear the immune system of the caterpillar reacts to them as if they are the enemy and attacks them and destroys them. But they continue to appear and then, this is the most interesting part -- they begin to cluster together. The Imaginal cells begin to come together with other Imaginal Cells and in that way they continue to grow in strength and number until they overwhelm the immune system of the caterpillar which breaks down and literally the old form the old life form dissolves into a kind of soup inside the chrysalis that contains all the nutrients that are needed for the butterfly to form. Communities like this, I believe, are the coming together of the Imaginal Cells to support the emergence of new ways of being together Collectively, Globally. Higher expressions of consciousness that can give birth to a new planet -- to literally the kingdom of heaven here on earth. Prayer We are so blessed! As we recognize that whenever there is some aspect of our life that seems confining; someplace where we are asked to go past our comfort zones and become more of who we were created to be -- this is truly the movement of the Divine, in us, and in our lives. We recognize that these places may be large or small. God must be asking some of us to learn to say, No, and others to learn to say, Yes. God may be asking some of us to learn to speak up, and some of us to learn to be quiet and listen to others. God may be
asking some of us to tell ourselves the truth about a job or a relationship. And calling some of us to stand up publicly for something we really care about. Whatever it is, we recognize this Edge as the place where God within us wants to stretch to break the shell of our limitations and fears and birth a fuller expression of Life. We are so blessed, to know that God gives us the capacity for deep listening. Gives us the Courage, the Faith, the Patience, and the Strength and Willingness to do the inner work, so that our own Transformation may support the healing and the awakening of the world. And we are so blessed to come together in spiritual community in a wonderful converging of Imaginal Cells to support the larger Transformation ready to be birthed on this planet. We are so Blessed. We are so Blessed!! We are so Blessed. Thank you God, Amen. OUR JOURNEY TOWARD WINGS: SAYING YES TO TRANSFORMATION Talk at Unity Church by Rev. Diane Berke July 2007 Page PAGE 8 of NUMPAGES 8