by James Kubal-Komoto, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 29, 1999

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

 Opening Words

“At every turn in the road a new illumining is needed to find the way and a new kindling is needed to follow the way.” --John Dunne

             A year passes quickly. Too quickly. It is cliché to say that it seems as if it were only a few days ago that my wife Hiromi and I were unpacking boxes in our new apartment, but that is really how it seems. That is not to say that this past year has not been a rich and full one, only that time’s pace always catches us by surprise, so it seems a bit unreal that we are once again packing boxes that we will soon load onto the rental truck we will drive back to Chicago.

 
            But it is a good time for me to leave Portland and get back to my Midwestern roots. I was thinking about this the other day, hanging out at a sidewalk cafe on 10^th street. I was dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, sipping a double espresso, munching on a Marion berry scone, reading an article on land use planning, and feeling just a little edgy because the sun had been out for three days in a row. If I stayed much longer, I thought to myself, I might go native.

 
            So once again, I find myself canceling newspaper subscriptions, calling utility companies, filling out a change-of-address card, and, of course, packing box after box after box. I really don’t like moving, though I’m getting good at it. In the past twelve years, I have moved as many times.

 
    Hiromi and I are truly looking forward to the day when we can settle in a place at least long enough so we can say to newcomers, “Well, you know, it used to be a lot different around here.”

            As good as I’m getting at the physical process of moving, I still struggle with the emotional process of saying goodbye—that process of disentangling oneself from a place where one has put down roots, felt connected, cared for people and in turn felt cared for by them.

 
            I have always been lousy at saying goodbye, and it those teary, gushy, handkerchief-soaking goodbyes that have been particularly difficult. I remember trying to say goodbye to a particular student when I was in Japan and teaching English. I often socialized with my students outside of class—it was a good chance for them to practice their English, and one day this particular student had an extra ticket to a Paul McCartney concert at Tokyo Dome and invited me. It was a surreal experience—especially during the finale, which was a sing-a-long to “Hey, Jude.” Picture Paul and Linda McCartney suspended above the crowd in a mechanical basket and 75,000 Japanese people on their feet, swaying back and forth, screaming at the top of their lungs “Na na na na, hey, hey!”

 
            After the concert, this student and I headed for a small Japanese restaurant where we could sit and talk. The student told me that she enjoyed the class she was taking, and I responded that I enjoyed the class, too. The textbook I had chosen for this class was Stories from Lake Woebegon, and twice a week the class met to listen to and discuss tapes of Garrison Keillor telling stories about his mythical hometown. These students from all-over Tokyo liked the quaint stories about small-town American life. I worried for a while that all of my students would end up speaking English with a Minnesotan accent, but luckily, this didn’t happen.

 
            “I hope you’ll stay at the school for a long time,” the student said. The school had recently had a rapid turn-over in teachers.

 
            “Well,” I said. I explained to her that, in fact, I would be leaving the school in a very short time because I had accepted a promotion and would be doing teacher training for new teachers at the school’s headquarters.

 
            “Oh,” she said softly as tears welled up in her eyes.

 
            “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll still come around the school a lot. I really want to keep in touch with all my students.”

 
            “But won’t you be too busy with your new job?” she asked, now wiping away a steady stream of tears with a tissue. I felt touched about how much I apparently meant to this student and felt terrible for leaving, and other people in the restaurant were beginning to give me really dirty looks as this woman sat across from me crying.

 
            “Listen,” I said, wanting to sound sincere about staying in touch, “why don’t we meet for lunch or something in a few weeks.”

 
            “That would be nice,” she said. So we met for lunch in a few weeks. And again, a few weeks after that. And again a week or two later, each time unable or unwilling to say goodbye to each other. We ended up doing this for three years. Then we got married. And it was only right before we got married that Hiromi told me that she cried when any teacher left the school, even the bad ones she didn’t like. “You could’ve told me that three years ago,” I said, but I was glad she hadn’t.

 
            All of our lives are filled with goodbyes. As Dickens said, “Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.” With every hello, there is, eventually, a goodbye, even if you end up married.

 
            We must say goodbye to people who are important to us, and often we say goodbye to the same person many times. Parents say goodbye to a child on the first day of kindergarten. They later say goodbye to the same child, now grown, as he or she leaves for college—apparently never to be heard from again until money is needed or until the child shows up at home with six bags of dirty laundry. They later may say goodbye again on a wedding day as the parents walk the child down the aisle of a church and briefly pause at the front row as the child gives a hug and kiss to the parents. This goodbye doesn’t mean the parents will no longer play an important role in the child’s life, but it does signify a change in their relationship.

 
            I want to suggest that any time we face any significant change in our lives, it probably involves some form of saying goodbye. Goodbyes to others and goodbyes to parts of ourselves. Growing up. Getting married. Getting divorced. Changing jobs. Moving. Giving birth and dying. All of these involve goodbyes.

 
            We say goodbye not only to people, but also to places and things in which we have invested ourselves and stored our memories. The writer Patricia Blakely tells about moving out of a house she had lived in for twenty-five years. “On closing day, my husband and my younger son Alexander and I walked through our house, room by room,” Blakely tells us. We said good-bye to each one, starting on the third floor and making our way down to the front door. We laughed and we cried over the little things we remembered happening in each room. At last my husband and I took down the Amish quilt that hung in the living room and folded it quietly. There was nothing left to do but go. Close the door. Lock the lock.”

 
            But we don’t like to say goodbye, not only because goodbyes acknowledge the end of a particular relationship but because they remind us of life’s transience. They remind us that as much as we would sometimes like life to remain just as it is right now, it never does. They remind us, as we heard in this morning’s first reading, that “only for so short a while [life has] loaned us to each other.” We struggle to find the words to say to one another, as the Chinese poet Huang Jingren, illustrates in his poem, “Departure.”

            At departure they have no words for each other;

            They only stand with backs to the light deep in thought;

            She does not raise her head for a long time,

            But her silk blouse is wet with tears.

 
            When we do find words, they often either turn out to be either overly serious or deceivingly jestful. I heard about a woman who flew across the country in order to be with her father who was dying. “Father,” the woman said, in a somber tone, standing in the door of the man’s hospital room. “I’ve come to say goodbye to you.” The old man, who was weak and dying but still relished giving his daughter a hard time, raised his hand to his chest, waved, and said to his daughter, “Toodle Loo!”

 
            I think, however, that many of us tend not to pay enough attention to our goodbyes. We are not so skilled in the art of leave taking. We pay much more attention to the beginnings of relationships—noting the importance of first impressions and getting off on the right foot—than to their ends. With goodbyes, there is a tendency among us, or at least this is a tendency of mine, not to dwell too long on them. We rush and hurry them or avoid saying them at all. We do not want to immerse ourselves for too long in the bittersweet act of parting. Let the past be the past, we think to ourselves. The optimistic, forward-looking people that we are, we are always looking ahead to where we are going, who we will meet, and what we will do there, rather than spending too much time reflecting on where we have been, who we have met, and what we have done. We forget, as one of you reminded me last week, that our beginnings do not truly begin with our arrival at some new place, but with our departure from the place where we have been.

 
            During the past week or so, I have found myself avoiding thinking about leaving this church and this city by concentrating on the details and the litany of things to do and by looking ahead to the coming year, worrying about the hundreds of details that will need to be sorted out, rather than dwelling on the present. This is much easier than squarely facing my feelings about leaving and reflecting on what this past year has meant to my life.

 
            Yet after having moved 12 times in as many years, I have learned a few things. For one, I have learned the importance of careful packing. There is always the temptation just to throw everything haphazardly in a box, quickly sealing it shut with packing tape with self-deceptive promises to sort through it later when I arrive wherever I’m going. I have learned how important it is, however, to sort through possessions, carefully selecting what will be wrapped, packed and taken, what will be given away, and what will simply be left behind. Otherwise, you end up hauling balky bulging boxes from one destination to another that never really get unpacked. Without careful packing, you end up getting weighed down wherever you go, and I’ve begun to wonder if saying goodbye is that much different a process.

 
            There is a story about two monks journeying home who came to the banks of a fast flowing river, where they met a young woman unable to cross the current alone. One of the monks picked her up in his arms and set her safely on her feet on the other side and the two monks continued on their travels. The monk who had crossed the river alone could finally restrain himself no longer and began to rebuke his brother, “Do you know it is against our rules to touch a young woman? You have broken the holy vows.” The other monk answered, “Brother, I left that young woman on the banks of the river. Are you still carrying her?”

 
            In a more modern version of essential the same story, a psychologist tells about working with a woman who was having a great deal of trouble letting go of her broken marriage. One day, in therapy, the psychologist handed her a brick as a symbol of her old relationship, and then instructed her to carry it around in her purse for the next week. As the week went on, and her purse grew heavier and heavier, the woman began to get a clear understanding of how burdensome the weight of her old attachment had become.

            In both of these stories, the story of the two monks and the story of the woman with the brick, the unsaid goodbyes that were becoming weightier and weightier were bad goodbyes. However, I think that good goodbyes that are left unsaid weigh us down even more.

 
            When we avoid saying our goodbyes, we not only run the risk of weighing down our futures, we rob ourselves of something else. We rob ourselves of the possibility of a sacred moment. Words spoken during goodbyes are demarcated from the rules of our ordinary interaction with each other and they give us a chance to say to one another things that we could never say to each other at any other time.

 
            For two summers when I was in college I worked as a teacher’s aide at a school for developmentally disabled students who also had emotional and behavioral disorders. On my last day working at this school, I had managed to say a personal goodbye to all of the students with whom I worked, all of them except the student to whom I was the closest, a 17-year-old named Todd. I had spent many hours that summer and the one before helping Todd learn how to read, which had been a difficult and slow because it involved a big first step, which was getting Todd to trust me enough so that he could admit to himself and to me that he couldn’t yet read. Oddly enough, after two summers together, I still wasn’t sure what Todd thought of me, but I had grown very close to him. When it was finally time for me to leave on my last day, Todd had left the classroom and was nowhere to be found. Other teachers and I looked all over for him, but couldn’t find him. We figured that he would come out from his hiding place as soon as I left. Sadly, I walked out of the doors to the school without having said goodbye to Todd.

 
            It was only as I was about to pull out of the school’s parking lot that I saw Todd’s face sticking out a clas room window and his hand waving to me. I put down my car window and waved back to him. “I love you, Mr. James,” he shouted. “I love you, too, Todd,” I yelled back, glad that we didn’t miss the chance to say what had been in our hearts for a long time.

 
            So how do we say goodbye to one another? What is it that we need to say? How do we say goodbye to someone so that we don’t carry an unnecessarily heavy load with us to our next destination?

 
            I think when we say goodbye to one another, there are five things that we need to say. First, we need to say, “Thank you.” We need to acknowledge how we have benefited from our relationship with another person. Second, we need to say, “I’m sorry.” Because we are human beings and imperfect, when we dance with each other, we inevitably are going to sometimes step on each other’s toes. We also each bring expectations to our relationships, and again, because we and human beings and imperfect, we will at least sometimes fail to live up to each other’s expectations, and so that we don’t carry these pent up hurts with us, when we say goodbye, we need to say, “I’m sorry.” Third, we need to say, “I forgive you.” Just as we may have hurt or disappointed others, they may have hurt or disappointed us, so we need to say, “I forgive you.” Fourth, we need to say, “I love you,” or at least find some way to express the feelings we have felt, still do, and always feel for the other person. Fifth, we need to say, “Goodbye.” We need to come out and say the words that acknowledge that however much we still may care for one another, our relationship will be different than what it was.

            And so, my friends, thank you. Thank you for providing me with a very full, very rich, very special year. When I preached my first sermon here in October, I said that I wanted to learn the things about ministry that one can’t learn from a book, so thank you for being my teachers, for allowing me to enter into this special and sacred relationship, for allowing me to share in so many of your joys and sorrows, your hopes and your dreams.

 
            And I’m sorry. Now this is rather awkward because, to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t done anything that has really upset anybody, and among Unitarian Universalists, with our many opinions about how things should be done, this is a particular achievement, and in fact has made me wonder if I wasn’t doing something wrong. Yet I’m sure that somewhere along the way I have stepped on a few toes or at least failed to live up to a few expectations, so I say, “I’m sorry.”

 
            And I forgive you. Again, this is rather awkward, because when I search my heart, there is very little to forgive. A few missed days off here and there, perhaps, but this is really my fault more than yours, but for what there is to forgive, I do.

 
            And I love you. This I truly hope you know. I hope to serve many years in ministry, but will only have one internship. As a congregation and as individuals, you are very special to me and will always hold a place in my heart.

 
            And, my friends, goodbye. Of course, I will stay in touch and let you know, through the church, how I am doing and I hope many of you will stay in touch with me. However, this year of sharing Sunday mornings and other times together is now over. In just a few days, Hiromi and I will climb back into a rental truck, and this time we will follow the signs for I-84 East. However, we’ve decided this time to swing south and drive back most of the way on I-80 instead of traveling on I-90. We’re really not sure which way is shorter, or easier, or prettier, but we decided that we didn’t want to go back the way we came.

 
            Of course, we couldn’t if we wanted to, that is, go back the way we came. It has been a transformative year for both of us. We are different people than when we came, and this is because that although we are saying goodbye, we are carrying pieces of all of you inside of us. Finally, words from the Chinese poet Kuan Tao-Sheng.

            Take a lump of clay,

            Wet it, pat it,

            Make a statue of you

            And a statue of me

            Then shatter them, clatter them,

            Add some water,

            And break them and mold them

            Into a statue of you

            And a statue of me.

            Then in mine, there are bits of you

            And in you there are bits of me.

            Nothing shall ever keep us apart.

            Each of us is on a particular journey. Some people may share the same road with us for a long time, and some may walk beside us for only a few short steps. No matter how long or how short, each of these meetings has the possibility of adding immeasurable richness to our own lives, if we only dare to let it. So may it be.

Prayer

Benediction

May each of your lives be filled with good traveling companions. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.

 
Copyright 1999, James Kubal-Komoto. All rights reserved.