Good morning, all. This is meant to be the place where I introduce myself to you, in sermon form.

This seems like a pretty simple task at face value, because I’m this well-educated competent adult who has been hired to learn and serve in this wonderful congregation for this next church year. I should be able to tell you all about my vision of ministry and the exciting things I look forward to us doing together. And, afterwards we could smile, and shake hands, and I’d get to learn your names and what this community means to you.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this. This introduction is a challenging one, because it seems like the very concept of simple and concrete tasks has gone out of the window in the past 18 months. How can I begin to tell you what this next year will look like together, when I’m not even sure what next month will look like? How do I introduce myself to a congregation that is congregating only virtually for now? I already miss your faces, and I don’t even know many of them yet.
In another year, in what feels like another life, I found it quite easy to talk about hope, and the way that humans can band together to do amazing things. But, in a month when we’re seeing record COVID-19 case numbers, decreasing vaccine effectiveness, and an end to a far-too-short reprieve from physical distancing measures, is hope really the right thing to talk about? When I imagine the future, hope is not one of the first feelings that arise, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a great number of you are in the same position. One of many tragedies of this pandemic is that we are having to navigate a life where we can’t count on any particular future, where we are not sure where or who we will be in even a couple of years, and there’s very little we can do right now to change that.

I had an experience recently that reminded me of another time in my life that felt this way, and I want to share it with you today.

So, first I have to out myself as quite young. I turned 25 this month, which is relevant because it means 2021 marks ten years since this story took place.

As a high school sophomore in a small town in North Carolina, I wanted so badly for the world to be a bright and beautiful place, defined by the deep bonds that humans could make together. I had tasted it for sure, but when I looked around me, I saw so much pain and suffering that I struggled to make sense of.

By the age of fifteen, nearly all of my friends had struggled with mental health, primarily depression and suicidal ideation. And, as a kid with a lot of love, I believed that love could hold them up through it.

I’d walk through the day like a zombie because I was staying up late talking with them, trying to fix them with my love. I had queer friends who had painful relationships with their families, and those who were too afraid of their families to come out. And, I was around some people who, at way too young of an age, were using intoxicants to numb themselves and get by in this hard world. To be clear, the vast majority of these beloveds are doing fine, but I lost a couple of them too, and years later the world still feels emptier without them.

But, don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of privilege and even joy at this age too. I became immersed in the world of the theater kids, and started taking on leadership positions in my UU congregation, and had loving parents who supported me through all of it, even when my bad self care led to my grades dropping.

But, I recently discovered a journal from that time period, and frankly, heaviness was the dominant feeling that I moved through the world with. In nearly all of its entries, I complained of not getting enough sleep, of feeling like my systems of morals were failing me. I was angry and sad, and the world felt so small.

So, in the past ten years I grew up and out of that age of intensity. I learned to set healthier boundaries with my friends, and also my friends got healthier! I learned to get enough sleep, and I rediscovered my love of learning, and found work that was meaningful. I moved out on my own, traveled, and gained a lot of confidence. It is part of the process of growing up, if we’re lucky. As we grow into adulthood, we work, stumblingly, to become more comfortable in ourselves and gain wisdom to help us navigate life’s often painful challenges.

When I found that journal this spring, it was startling because so much had changed, and I barely recognized the lost teenager who wrote it. But at the same time, it was comforting because a lot of how I felt then is how I feel in this pandemic world. I remembered that the world feeling scary is not something I haven’t encountered before.

There’s a heaviness to every day, and with every new loss we learn of, every awful news report, it becomes harder to concretely imagine a future where things are much better. And it feels like there’s not a lot we can do right here and now to change that.

But there’s something else in this journal I want to tell you about.

There’s a page where I outline a plan to become a minister, because the standard life plans I saw all around me didn’t seem to be working out for people. This was in 2011, as I witnessed the growth of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and wondered how to be part of a revolution. Surprisingly and improbably, I’ve essentially followed this plan to a T. I recommitted to my general education to learn more about the world, I went on adventures to learn things that can’t be taught in a classroom, and then I enrolled in Divinity School to get formal training. I even found companionship in many dear friends,and in my partner, kindred souls I was looking for, to live differently and more intentionally with.

Honestly, reading this page back, I am shocked at the level of detail that I planned for myself and eventually followed through on. Partly, this shock comes from the fact that I had no memory of this plan at all, but it’s also more than that.

This one entry abounding with confidence and hope are such a contrast to the weariness and frustration in the rest of the journal. And, to be frank, my high school culture was not one that instilled in us a sense of possibility.

It was the kind of charming place where some of the teachers were the same ones who had taught my friends’ parents, where it wasn’t assumed that people would move away and go to college. For me and many of my friends, the close steadiness of our small town community felt more like stagnation and claustrophobia, because we didn’t see many paths out of it.

I remember a friend coming to me to share a dream of moving to California after graduation, and I scoffed at the improbability of it. This is all to say that my imagination was small.

This journal entry is so shocking to me because while I was living in a world of limited possibility where so many of my days were defined by sad resignation, a single day of imagining a new possibility won out in the end.

Now I want to pause here again to acknowledge the vast amounts of privilege I’ve had, like the familial and economic stability to get me through my years of formal education, the freedom to uproot my life time and again for this calling, and the luck I’ve had avoiding serious mental health or substance use problems. It feels like sheer luck.

I want to be clear here: this is not a message about how we can all just be happy if we just learn the power of manifestation. Rather, it is a reminder that hope can arise even when we least expect it, and new possibilities can be created in the process.

One of my great teachers in life, author Frances Moore Lappe, is known for talking about hope, among other things. In her book, titled “Hope’s Edge,” she writes “hope is not what we find in the evidence; it is what we become in action.” A couple of years ago, as a bright-eyed divinity student who had never lived through a pandemic, among other things, this idea really worked for me. This quote became one of my catch-phrases.

Nowadays, I’m not sure our definition of hope should be wrapped up in bold action. In a time where we are being asked to stay home, be still, and do everything we can to just hold it all together, while the world outside seems to be crumbling, hopeful action sounds like a lot to ask of folks. The hope I’d rather talk about is the kind that speaks with a still, small, voice that can only be heard when we breathe, and let ourselves feel what we feel.

I know that my original calling to ministry, though it has grown and evolved, was rooted in intense and fiery love for this world and the people in it. When the people I loved were hurting, I hurt, and I felt so powerless against it. But, possibility rose up anyway, telling me that this love could be the structure in my life I was looking for, could lead to growth and joy and not just sorrow and loss. By being present to all that I experienced, I could find the wisdom and beauty in it to imagine something different.

Now, ten years later, I can’t exactly make a great case for why we should be hopeful in the face of all these overlapping crises we are experiencing and witnessing on a daily basis. There is a lot of bad evidence out there. But, friends, hold on anyway.

And more than just holding on, try your best to feel it. I want us all to get good at naming the losses big and small that we have felt in these past years, and those we are freshly encountering. We are here, living in this world and it is hard and there is so much hurt all around us.

It is so, so, tempting to try to numb it away, to plow forward and just keep checking off our to-do lists.

I am constantly seeing that tendency well up within me and I feel that witnessing it is the first part of moving out of it. But, I pray that we can get good at feeling it all, and naming it, out loud, to each other. We do not need to rank our losses in terms of their severity, or expect ourselves to be processing it all any differently than we are. Our presence is enough.

And, we should get good at feeling and naming joy too. The world may feel heavy and impossible sometimes, but that doesn’t take away moments of magic. It doesn’t make ripe blackberries less sweet, or laughter with loved ones less fulfilling. To be present to ourselves means to accept feelings of sorrow, and of joy, even when joy doesn’t feel like it should be allowed at a time like this.

In a blog post this past winter, one of my favorite writers, adrienne maree brown wrote: “if you’re good, say you’re good. it doesn’t negate reality, it weaves your reality into the fabric of this complex time.”

She goes on, saying:
“you can also keep your complex answers, of course – i for one am grieving and good. stretched and good. want to go to a beach, and also good. but the main news, the thing i have worked hard enough to claim, the way i can be of use to my beloved community, is to be honest that right now, today, i’m good.”

I love this article because it speaks to the way our wellbeing is constantly in relationship with others. It is important to honestly see and know ourselves, yes. And also, to use that same honestly to see and know one another.

This is why I’m asking you to practice presence today. This is a time defined by how we are putting limits on our physical shared presence as an act of community care. And even so, this subtler, fuller kind of presence is still possible, and it is more important now than ever.

It is the same thing that Tich Nhat Hanh is talking about in the quote I shared for our call to worship for this morning: to practice being present in ourselves and in our bodies, is to be able to experience the miracle of the other. We each contain multitudes, feeling things like grief, overwhelm, abundance, anxiety, resilience, and so much more, and each has wisdom to teach us! Do not try to set yourself aside just to push through another day, because that still small voice of Spirit often speaks to us from unlikely and hard places.

The UU minister Nancy McDonald-Ladd writes about hope in her book After the Good News: Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism. She says “Hope is different [from optimism]. Like faith, hope is the exact opposite of certainty. It does not presume an outcome for good or for ill. It lies in the waiting moment when the tug from both directions is not yet fully resolved and when a great many things are still possible. It moves in the humble spaces that open when we allow ourselves to be uncertain and thus not fully self-contained. It is the possibility, though not the inevitability, of a better way.”

We are indeed living in “waiting moments” of uncertainty. I appreciate her emphasis on humility, the truth that if we try to force ourselves into feeling “fully self-contained” we will be missing the openness necessary for Possibility to speak into that space.

So, I am amending my definition of hope, spinning off from Ms. Lappe’s: Yes, hope grows and is made manifest in the work of action, but it is born from presence, from getting quiet and listening, with openness and honesty to all that is there to be felt and known. When the seeds of hope can be witnessed, and held with love, we can know possibility.

And, this is my prayer for you, in this virtual worship service, though we are real people with real bodies full of life, inhabiting real space:

I pray that we may take time to practice really being present, in our bodies, in all that these days bring.

Can we practice this right now? Will you take a few breaths with me?

Take 3 deep breaths

How does your body feel right now, are you grounded in a seat, are your feet resting on the floor? I pray that your body may feel rooted.

And, how is your mind? Is it focused, or buzzing around, or dwelling somewhere away from here? I pray that your mind may feel stilled.

And, your heart? Is yours as heavy as mine right now? I pray that our hearts may feel lighter. But even more than this I pray that they will know love, that they will offer it freely and receive it with gladness.

Oh spirit of love, that abides with us in all of our beautiful and messy days, may we seek to know you, with humility and tenderness.

May it be so,
Amen.

Topics: Possibility