Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
May 5, 2019

Reading: From Becoming by Michelle Obama

Sermon:

I’ve been thinking all week about the song our guest musicians, The Afro-Semitic Experience just played: The Creator Has a Master Plan.

I’ve was thinking about that line: the Creator has a master plan.

And what came next, in a moment of great hubris was the thought: I’d love to see that plan.

Such a human thing to say.

But I’ll tell you, there are times that I long for it to be true that the Creator has a master plan.

And there are days that I believe that.

And, if I’m honest, there are days that I do not.

I am curious, of course, about how it will all unfold, plan or not.

I can’t wait to see.

And I struggle, as I’m sure many of you do, to remain in the present moment, to feel myself grounded here, to remind myself that God is now, not past or future, but now, in this moment, and I can be too.

This grounding is useful, effective even, in staving off the anxiety of an unknown future.

But it’s also not exactly accurate.

Because, even in this moment of now, each of us is in the process of letting go of the past and becoming our future selves.

Just recently a friend lamented growing older, which is, for sure, as my mother says, “not for sissies.”

And our companion in that moment responded in a way that might be considered invalidating, but was also profound.

“We were growing older when we were ten years old,” they said.

We were growing older when we were ten years old.

From the moment we are born, our past is falling away, and our future is unfolding.

At every moment, no matter how “in the moment we are,” we are becoming something new.

This is true for the 10-year-old and it is true for the 100-year-old.

It is true for the human and the plant and all the beings with whom we share this world.

“The process of becoming happens on every level,” theologian Monica Coleman writes in her book “Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology.”

Coleman works with both Womanist Theology – the work of female-identified theologians of color, mostly Black women – and with Process Thought, a strain of philosophical and theological thought that emphasizes the ever-changing nature of reality and claims that God is both affected by and affects temporal process.

“Whether an atom, a plant, an animal or a human being,” Coleman writes, “we are composed of units of energy that are influenced both by the world around them and by available possibilities.
We all undergo this process of becoming,” she says.

She offers an example: that of a chair. (stay with me) “The molecules of a chair,” she writes, “do not vary greatly from one moment to the next. We expect this when we go to sit down in the chair. Imagine, however, that the chair is made of wood and placed out in the sun. With more factors influencing the chair, it may slowly change color.”

“Some organisms,” Coleman says, “have a central system that grants them more unity, complexity, and harmony—and hence, more stability in the midst of change. This is the case with some plants, animals, and human beings. But all aspects of reality have an experience of becoming. Not all entities are conscious of this, but we all experience the world and possibility
with some degree of freedom and with the potential to change.”

Each of us responds to the world and to possibility differently. For some of us, unknown possibilities are extremely anxiety provoking. Others approach the unknown with a sense of adventure and openness. How we respond has a lot to do with our life experience. If we have been harmed or traumatized in our life, the unknown can be deeply unsettling. If we have experienced the unknown as mostly harboring good things, we are more likely to look to the future hopefully.

Given these differences, what tools might we need to approach our individual and collective becoming with grace, and provide ourselves, as Coleman says, “stability in the midst of change”?

The tools I’d like to offer today are:

Spiritual Practice and Mindfulness
Self-Compassion
and Participation in Community

Unitarian Universalist minister Susan Manaker-Seale writes in her essay in the book Everyday Spiritual Practice that “we can practice spirituality in our daily lives, in our daily activities, by remembering to pause, to pay attention, and feel appreciation for what is before us.”

It is, of course, not for any one of us to tell another what sort of practice to engage in, but it is our work together to encourage each other in the deepening of our spiritual practices – whether they be mindfulness meditation, centering prayer, walking or running, building model airplanes, or carving out space as a busy parent for a moment of appreciation.

The more deeply grounded we are in a practice that engages our heart, our mind and, if it works for us, our body, the more profoundly we can connect with that which is larger than us – by whatever name we call it: Love or God or the Universe or Beloved Community or Spirit of Life.

When we tap into our spiritual depth, we gain the sense of unity, the perspective of complexity and the deep peace of harmony that enables us to stabilize ourselves while change swirls around us.

~

The second tool is self-compassion. I’m not talking about “self-pity.” Self-compassion is grounded in Buddhist notions of compassion for all suffering beings, including ourselves.

Researcher Dr. Kristin Neff writes that self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness vs. self-judgment, common humanity vs. isolation, and mindfulness vs. over identification. She expands on these saying that “Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.”

Neff goes on to say that to resist the isolation that comes with suffering, we can remember that “suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience – something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to “me” alone.”

And finally, she writes that “we cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.” While we do not ignore our pain, Neff says, we can also use mindfulness to observe negative thoughts and emotions rather than become over identified with them. This allows us to be responsive but not reactive to negative feelings and thoughts.

This can be easier said than done, but it can be done!

Self-compassion enables us to be gentle and kind with ourselves without getting lost in our suffering. We remember that suffering is part of being human; we gain perspective by observing our thoughts and feelings and not getting sucked into the rabbit hole of self-pity or self-flagellation.

~

The final tool in our tool box for weathering the constant state of becoming that is being human is participation in community. We are not alone.

Many of you have expressed to me your reservations about next year at USNH. “Without knowing who the minister will be,” some of you have said, “I don’t know if I’ll want to be involved.”

I will remind you again, a religious community is not the minister. Who the minister is is an important aspect of congregational life, to be sure, but let us remember that the community, not the minister, is the congregation. The connections you forge with each other are as important as the connection you have forged with me or those you will forge with my successors.

You are USNH. You will be USNH, no matter who is standing in this spot.

You have each other, and you are not alone.

That said, it is also important to acknowledge that this community itself is in the process of becoming. With a new cohort of new members joining today, USNH is already different than it was yesterday. Each year, we say goodbye to members through death or moves or intentional choices to resign membership. Each year, we welcome new members in the fall and the spring, and the face of USNH is different. This is wonderful, and natural, and, at the same time, can be unsettling.

Change is never easy, but change – becoming – is the way of the world. And the way of religious communities. And the way of our lives.

And so, we look to each other and within ourselves so as to have compassion with our struggle with change, to ground ourselves in spiritual practice and community, to be mindful of our feelings without being swept away by them.

So doing, we as individuals and as a community have the strength to remain steady in the midst of change, to welcome the positive and weather the negative aspects of change in our individual and collective lives, and to remain open to the process of becoming as it unfolds.

A useless question, Michelle Obama says, to ask a child “what do you want to be when you grow up,” “as if at some point you become something, and that’s the end.” It is never the end.

We have been growing up since we were ten years old – truly, since the moment we arrived in this world – and we are still.
Each of us, no matter how old we are, is becoming – finding our voice, knowing ourselves, figuring out how we want to spend our days and where we fit. We are, all of us, becoming.
Aspects of this journey are solitary, but we are not alone. We become together, in community,
learning about each other as we go, becoming more together than we are separately.

Michelle Obama concludes her memoir, Becoming, by saying this: “Let’s invite one another in.
Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end.
There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me,” she says, “is how we become.”

There may be a master plan.
There may not be.
We cannot know for certain.

We can only be present as life unfolds in each moment.

And so,
May we use our authentic voices.
May we own our stories and hear the stories of others.
May we know and be known.
May we love and be loved.
May we love ourselves and each other with a compassionate love
that enables and encourages and empowers each of us in our becoming.
May we face the future with curiosity and find strength in community.
May it be so.

Amen