“Leaps of Faith – One Step at a Time”
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
February 3, 2019
Seventeen-year-old Maggie Taraska had just taken off on her first solo flight when air traffic control came over her headphones to tell her that her three-wheel prop plane had lost a main wheel on take-off. Another pilot had seen the wheel come off and radioed it in. Thanks to the magic of the internet, one can listen to the conversation between Maggie and the control tower.[i]
The air traffic controller is calm as she informs the young woman of the fact that she is missing a wheel. And then she says matter-of-factly, “State your intentions.”
In a small and frightened voice, Maggie responds, “Can I circle back to land?” And then the air traffic controller realizes that Maggie is alone.
“Are you solo?” she asks?
“Yes, I’m a student pilot, flying solo,” Maggie answers and her voice waivers. She then responds to the controller’s instructions with barely audible “okays” that literally make me cry every time I listen to them.
She is trying so hard to be brave, but it is clear how scared she is – and has every right to be. She is facing a crash landing on her first solo flight.
So the air traffic controller tells Maggie to circle the airport until they can get a flight instructor into the control tower. Two other planes are guided onto the runway around Maggie. And soon an instructor she doesn’t know,
a man named Greg, tells her that her instructor is on his way. “How ya doing, Maggie?” Greg asks. And, stronger now, she replies, “As good as it gets, I guess.”
Soon, her flight instructor, John, comes on the radio and helps her guide the plane in for a landing. “Just follow your training” he says. “We’re going to treat this as much like a normal landing as possible.” You can practically hear Maggie steel herself as she prepares to land the plane on two wheels. She follows John’s instructions and her training, and she does it. She rolls off the runway into a grassy field and her plane is damaged, but she is uninjured.
This happened last fall. What strikes me about Maggie’s story is how much trust was required to make that landing possible. Maggie, first off, had to trust herself. She had to trust her training. She had to trust her brain, her knowledge, but also her body, her muscle memory, her hands, her eyes. And she had to trust the people on the ground who were trying to help her: the air traffic controller and Greg, the first flight instructor whom she didn’t know.
And John, her teacher, who carefully and calmly walks her through step by step how she is going to land the plane – but mostly he tells her: Trust yourself; trust what you know; you can do this.
Have you ever felt like you were up in the air missing a wheel?
Have you ever felt like you had to land a plane on two wheels?
Who did you trust to guide you?
What did it take to trust yourself?
We live in a time where trust is difficult and feels at times unwise, if possible at all. A recent Pew study showed that “public trust in the government remains near historic lows. Only 18% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (3%) or “most of the time” (15%).”[ii]
Many Americans collectively feel that we can’t trust the federal government to stay open, to pay federal workers, to honor our alliances, or to remain in existing nuclear arms treaties.
At the beginning of Black History Month in the year 2019, we are following news of the attempted modern-day lynching of the black and gay actor, Jussie Smollett, in Chicago.[iii]
Black and brown people in America still cannot trust that they are safe on the street or that they will be protected by police. We remember that parents of color often have very different conversations about police with their children than most white parents do.
A 2013 study showed that only one-third of Americans trust other people, down from half in 1972. The poll in that study “found that Americans are suspicious of each other in everyday encounters. Less than one-third expressed a lot of trust in clerks who swipe their credit cards, drivers on the road, or people they meet when traveling.”[iv]
We live in a time where trust in our institutions and each other is difficult, and we look back at our former selves and might think that we were naïve to trust anyone, to trust in progress, to trust that all would be well, to trust that we might emerge from an Obama presidency into a post-racial America.
We live in a time when it is difficult to trust and that is why it is all the more important – at the same time as it is counter intuitive and counter cultural, even, to do so – to trust each other, to trust ourselves, to be trust-worthy people.
But here’s what we also know: We know that, as Parker Palmer says, “if we are willing to embrace the challenge of becoming whole, we cannot embrace it alone – at least, not for long: we need trustworthy relationships to sustain us, tenacious communities of support, to sustain the journey toward an undivided life.”[v]
We need a “circle of trust” to support us, to sustain us, to help us land the plane – without a wheel, on our first solo flight.
Because that’s what it feels like more times than not – like we are like student pilots who’ve lost a wheel, and it’s our first time in the air alone.
Or we are Indiana Jones, standing at the edge of the abyss, the world counting on us to get across.[vi] We steel ourselves. We hold our heart, pray for courage. We trust our knowledge and our bodies and we take a step – a giant leap of faith that starts with one brave step into the unknown. We trust that something, something will hold our weight. And it does.
What is your abyss? What unknown are you standing on the edge of, too scared to move, scared to fall, scared to fail? What would it take for you to take the first step? What would it take for you to trust yourself?
Now, I’m not insinuating that we all head out to find the nearest life-threatening abyss to see if there’s a giant, invisible bridge across it. Or that we set ourselves up to be taken advantage of, or hurt, or put in danger.
We have struggled with this challenge here at USNH over the past few years. How do we balance our desire to be an open and welcoming place with our need to protect our community, our children, ourselves? How do we hold a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people and set up policies and procedures for how to manage disruptive or even dangerous behavior? What safeguards do we put in place to prevent abuse and violence?
These are logistical questions to be sure, but they are also theological questions. What are the limits we must set so that we can respect the inherent worth and dignity of all our members and friends and visitors? How much do we trust people? How much do we dis-trust? What is the appropriate level of suspicion that keeps our people safe but does not destroy our souls?
This is a national challenge for all houses of worship, and I want to especially thank our Safety and Security Task Force and Gwen Heuss-Severance and Jesse Greist and others for the work that has gone into developing our new Emergency Procedures. While your staff and leaders have been charged with asking and answering these difficult questions around trust and risk and safety for USNH, we all have to ask them for ourselves.
And how much we choose to trust – how much we are able to trust – depends on our experience.
We know that trust takes time to build – within ourselves and within a community. One cannot construct a “circle of trust” overnight and one cannot take a giant leap without taking one step at a time.
One of the things I love about researcher Brené Brown[vii] is that she takes what so many of us know instinctively and backs it with research methods.
She has done interesting work on trust, and she describes it this way:
Trust is like a marble jar. A what? A marble jar. When Brown’s daughter was young, her class had a marble jar into which the teacher would place marbles when the class was making good choices together and behaving well and when they were unkind or making poor choices, the teacher would take marbles out of the jar.
When the jar was full, the class would have a celebration.
Trust, Brown says, is like the marble jar. When people do things to build trust, it’s like putting marbles in the jar. When the jar is full, we know we can trust people. We might think that trust is built with momentous gestures, but, according to the research, it’s the smallest, simplest things that build trust in one another: remembering a name, showing up for a funeral, doing what we say we will.
Brown describes these trust-building components with an acronym: BRAVING.
B – Trust is about establishing, acknowledging and respecting each other’s boundaries.
R – It is about reliability – doing what we say we will, not once, but again and again. This means that each of us needs to be careful about what we say we will do and work hard to not overextend ourselves so that we can follow through on our commitments.
A – Trust is about accountability – knowing that if you mess up, you will take responsibility and if I mess up,
you will hold me accountable.
V – Trust is built when we keep confidence like a vault. In order to trust, we must know that what we tell someone will be kept in confidence and that they will keep the confidences of others. In other words, gossip betrays trust – even if you are talking to me about someone else. You are betraying their confidence
and the result is that I feel that I can’t trust you.
I – stands for integrity which Brown defines as “choosing courage over comfort, choosing what’s right over what’s fun and easy, practicing your values, not just professing your values.” When we see someone living with integrity, we know that we can trust them.
N is for non-judgement. When I know that I can fall apart with you and you can fall apart with me and we will not judge each other negatively for doing so, that is a relationship we can trust.
And finally, G is for generosity. When someone is generous with their time and their love and makes generous open-hearted gestures, trust is built.
When I heard Brené Brown break down the building blocks of trust – the marbles, if you will – into these components, I got to thinking about the community here at USNH. About how, in part, our goal here is to BE counter cultural, to build a circle of trust on which members of this community can depend on in a world in which that is becoming increasingly rare. And I got to thinking about how that trust is built over time with small gestures and simple acts, so that when the time comes to land the plane on two wheels, we know we can rely on this community to guide us safely in to land.
For the many of us who have found ourselves betrayed – by friends, by religious communities or other institutions, by religious leaders, or political leaders – building trust again – putting more marbles in the jar –
is challenging. It requires a huge leap of faith to even begin the process.
But trust is like Indiana’s bridge. It is built one step at a time. One marble at a time. One generous act, one non-judgmental moment, one act of integrity, one confidence kept, one mistake admitted, one promise delivered upon, one boundary upheld at a time.
May it be that we have the courage to trust and to be trust-worthy.
May it be that through our fear, we remember to trust ourselves and our circle.
May it be that we continue to build that circle, one step at a time.
May this be a “tenacious community of support”
And may our trust in one another and ourselves give us the strength to take ever bolder leaps of faith.
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B229-KLudTo
[ii] http://www.people-press.org/2017/12/14/public-trust-in-government-1958-2017/
[iii] https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/entertainment/jussie-smollett-statement/index.html
[iv] https://kval.com/news/nation-world/poll-america-is-nation-of-distrust
[v] Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness (adapted)