Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
January 7, 2018
Reading: What If You Put It Down by Susan Frybort
Sermon:
Barbara Rohde tells a story of staying in a small hotel in Bergen, Norway. For the first two days of their trip, she and her husband took the elevator from the lobby to their floor and back down. There was a staircase in the hotel. They had seen the sign, but they thought by riding the elevator they would save time and energy for exploring the town. One morning, the elevator was slow in arriving and her husband decided to walk up. Here is the end of the story in her own words:
He was waiting at the elevator door when I – and the elevator – arrived on the fourth floor.
“Let me show you something,” he said, and led me back down the stairs he had just come up.
I was dazzled. Instead of the sterile, institutional look of most hotel stairways, this one had the warm beauty of an art-lover’s home. There were bright paintings on all the walls, and at each landing a rug in jeweled tones, a table with fresh flowers, an exquisite chair or two. When we reached the first floor, we walked up again, filled with energy, drinking in the beauty.
“We might have missed this,” I said.
“Have to be careful about saving time and losing life,” he said.[i]
Have to be careful about saving time and losing life.
This is how I am beginning to feel about new year’s resolutions. We have to be careful about setting resolutions and losing life.
One year my new year’s resolution was to eat more fruits and vegetables – seven servings per day or whatever one is “supposed to eat.” Another year, it was to exercise at least three times a week. Another, to begin each day writing for a set period of time. Things that are good to do, important for living a well-balanced life. Things I wanted to do. In truth, perfectly reasonable aspirations.
I’d like to tell you I succeeded. Oh, each year, I kept up my resolution for a while, like we all do. And then life would get in the way, like it does, and I’d find myself eating fewer fruits and veggies than I wanted to or not making it to the gym, my journal sitting empty on the bedside table. After a while, the resolution would fade altogether, and I would struggle not to feel like a failure.
Anybody else had that experience with new year’s resolutions?
I’m over it.
Because “what does it matter, the things you did not do in this blessed allotted time?”[ii]
Now, I’m not saying don’t eat your fruits and veggies or go to the gym or start a journaling practice. I am saying let’s reframe the way we think about how we want to live our lives and instead of setting specific resolutions for the year ahead, let us contemplate the intentions we want to bring to our “blessed allotted time.”
This year, our January theme is “intention,” and I see it as an invitation.
Because what if we put it down? What if we put down the desire to accomplish, put down the wish to make ourselves “worthy” (of what, exactly, I’m not sure), the need to achieve goal upon goal? What does it mean to start this year, this new year, with intentions rather than resolutions?
Journalist Kacey Waxler writes in Darling Magazine that “resolutions are ubiquitous and, quite often, plain stressful. The idea that once a year we have to throw our wellness, work and personal routines into upheaval for the sake of being [fill in the blank here – better, fitter, thinner, less stressed, more put together…] is enough to make us close the curtains and pretend that ball will never drop.”[iii]
In these times, these difficult, trying, times, when every morning brings a new disheartening revelation and a new tweet and a new potential threat to human existence, I know (because you have told me) that we are feeling, so many of us, like we need to be more active, more engaged, writing more letters, making more calls, creating more protest signs, taking to the streets. Some of us are, many of us are doing these things and that is good and true and vital, but for others of us, the pressure to resist in these specific ways has become a source of stress and guilt.
What would it look like to put that down? Put down the guilt, the stress, the “ought tos” and figure out what each of us needs to move into this new year resilient and renewed, ready to face what comes our way: personally, politically, and otherwise, ready to live with the wild abandon of the poet – finding the tour de force “within every treasured moment,” cupping “your worthwhile life inside the love of your divine hands,” kissing life “full on the mouth, all its cherished wonder.”[iv] Because, friends, we need calls and letters and street protests, and we need also not forget that living a life imbued with cherished wonder and savoring treasured moments are also powerful acts of resistance!
There are many ways to realize an intention. For example, what if, instead of resolving to eat a certain way, one set the intention to care for one’s physical body with love. This encompasses what we feed our bodies, it encompasses exercise and activity, sleep and rest, and, most important, approaching our relationship to our bodies with love as opposed to judgement and shame.
Or, instead of resolving to begin each morning a certain way, what if we set an intention to prioritize spiritual reflection. This might be realized by a morning writing practice; it might be realized by a deepening meditation practice; or it might involve something unexpected that comes our way because we have set this intention.
Other intentions we might set: to mindfully engage – this might change the way we consume news; to make choices – this might lead us to feel more empowered, to respond rather than react; if we intend to stay moment to moment – we could change the way we are in relationship with our children or the planet or an illness or challenge in our life; perhaps it is a person you are thinking of this new year, someone you wish to remember, to emulate, to honor — how might your daily living do that?
Each of these intentions, when we work to integrate them into our daily lives, manifest in myriad ways that open unforeseen possibilities.
Contemplation of our new year intentions is an invitation into spiritual and self-awareness, an invitation into our own search for truth and meaning, which is, in many ways, the crux of our Unitarian Universalist faith.
Just like that moment at the beginning of a yoga class (full disclosure: I haven’t been to yoga in quite a while, but I remember that moment), that moment when the teacher invites the class to set an intention for the next hour or hour and a half, not a focus on how well one will execute the poses or how powerfully one will maintain concentration on the breath, but how one wishes to be in the moment in which we find ourselves, who one holds in one’s heart as breath circulates throughout the body. Setting an intention on the yoga mat is the process of “choos[ing] an action, feeling or state of mind” one wishes to “cultivate over the duration of [the] practice.”
So, I invite us now, at the beginning of this new year, to set our intentions for the year ahead. What do you wish to cultivate in your life this year? Not what is missing, not what would make you a better person or partner or parent, congregant or citizen or child. But what is it you are looking for more of in your life – compassion, care, engagement, comfort, simplicity, vulnerability, action, even. There are no right answers. This is about what you need and what you want and what will enable you to find those “treasured moments,” to “kiss your worthwhile life” “full on the mouth” in all its “cherished wonder.”
This is spiritual work many of us may be accustomed to and for some of us it may be new. Let’s take a few moments now to work through our intentions together, in this sacred space, in this beloved community. I’ll ask a series questions and allow for space in between each question for contemplation and reflection. You may choose to close your eyes and let my voice drift over you. You may choose to jot down notes for further reflection later. However you choose to engage this time is up to you.
We begin by asking about our passions. What are you passionate about? What drives you? What fills your life with purpose and meaning?
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Second question: What do you want to cultivate more of in your life?
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What is going well in your life? What is working?
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And finally, what is not going right and where would you like to make some positive changes? How might you approach your life that would allow you to do so?
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Considering all these things, what are your intentions for the year ahead?
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May it be that the intentions you set here at the beginning of this year provide guidance and sustenance for the days ahead.
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As I contemplated today’s service and the theme of intention and especially Susan Frybort’s poem, I asked myself what our faith has to say about this idea of putting down our imperatives, our resolutions, our attempts at self-improvement or societal betterment. After all, here at USNH, we pride ourselves each year on the Wild and Precious Life service in which several of us answer the question: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” What will you do? Not how will you be? or what will you treasure? or how much will you love this life? But What will you do?
In fact, I think Unitarian Universalism is conflicted on this subject. On the one hand, the first of our seven principles is an affirmation of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” not every successful person, not every accomplished person, not even every good person. The inherent worth and dignity of every person means just that – every person, no matter who we are or what we have done or not done. We believe that each life is worthwhile. Period. We believe that you are enough, just as you are.
And on the other hand, we are a people who espouse faith in “deeds not creeds.” We believe that our faith calls us to service. We lift up those brave souls, our siblings in faith, who have gone before us – saving lives in World War II, speaking and preaching, marching and dying for religious freedom and civil rights and justice through the ages. We believe that we must answer the call of a radical love that embraces all people and all beings and this planet we call home. We believe that we are called to action, to a lived faith that works hard to create a more just world.
And so here on the cusp of a new year, we hold both of these. On the one hand we are, each of us, enough. Period. And on the other, we are called to act, to do, to be justice-makers and planet-savers.
The truth is: we need both. In order to be effective actors in our world, we must have a deeply resonant acceptance of our own inherent worth, our own enough-ness. Because I believe we cannot and will not affirm the worth and dignity of another until we can affirm our own. If we rush into action at every opportunity, if we fill our lives with resolutions and goals and tasks that must be done to accomplish what we seek, we run the risk of missing the staircase, of missing the opportunity to gather energy and substance from the beauty that surrounds us – sometimes in unexpected places.
So, friends, “let us rejoice that we are alive today, privileged to meet here in quest of life’s meaning.”[v] As we strive to live our lives at their best, to enjoy them and wisely use them, let us not burden ourselves at the start with lists of things we must accomplish in the year ahead. Let us, instead, carefully set our intentions for how we want to be in this world, how we want to live this life, how we want to treat our companions and ourselves along the journey and see what unfolds. Let us discover together the unexpected stairways, treasured moments, and, above all, life’s cherished wonder.
[i] “The Unexpected Stairway” by Barbara Rhode in In the Simple Morning Light, 1994.
[ii] “What if you put it down” by Susan Frybort.
[iii] “How to Set Your Intention for a New Year” by Kacey Waxler, Darling, December 24, 2017.
[iv] “What if you put it down” by Susan Frybort.
[v] “The Message” by Lewis A. McGee.