I’ve noted that there seems to be a good deal of resonance for many of us with this month’s spiritual theme of resilience. This is one of the new themes for this year, and perhaps part of it is just how timely it feels for right now. It might well be an understatement to say that these days, living in the world takes, well, a good deal of resilience.

Now I should say that I came into the month with a sense of resilience as a very individual thing, something that springs from within us. I came into the month with a sense of resilience as something that some people have and others just don’t. A luck of the draw sort of thing. Take those stories of the children who seem to rise above very difficult circumstances to accomplish something—often something extraordinary. There is some force that allows them to overcome in ways that others just don’t have.

The piece the choir sang at the beginning of our service uses the text from “Invictus” by the poet Wiliam Earnest Henley—written back in 1875—and speaks to that sense individualism:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Indeed it can so often feel as if it is us against the world. Indeed it can feel as we need to be the captains of our individual souls. But perhaps this month I have also come to understand resilience as something that is not only individual but also something communal. That our own resiliency is something that is also connected to what is around us. That indeed resiliency is not so much a gift of grace as something that takes attention and awareness. That perhaps it should be We are the masters of our collective fate. We are the captains of our collective soul…

In a book published a few years ago entitled Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, writers Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy define resilience as the capacity of a system, enterprise or person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances. They say if we can’t control the volatile tides of change, we can at least learn to build better boats.

They point to things that are characteristics of that better boat, things like tight feedback systems—how to better know what’s going on around us. Imagine a world full of sensors that gives us as much feedback as possible and therefore make it possible to adjust things as we go on. The writers also say we should strive to make systems that are as diversified as possible. If one part of the system fails are there others that can be adapted to keep things going? Are there networks of people who have as broad a range of skills as possible and therefore bring a variety of life experience that can be relied upon? If the system has a diversity of experience and awareness it is more likely to be able to adapt and to survive.

The book looks at all kinds of systems, whether they be economies, businesses or ecosystems as well as individuals. It takes on the tone of a training manual—do this for optimal success. A kind of a guide to achieve pique physical performance. Or maybe for our purposes here in this spiritual community as a guide to achieve some kind of fitness for the soul. Just like exercise it takes regular practice and training. And paying attention.

A story.

Rachel Naomi Remen is a medical doctor and a writer. She tells the story of a cancer surgeon named Josh, who came to see Remen because he was depressed. He had become disillusioned and cynical and he was thinking about early retirement. “I can barely make myself get out of bed most mornings,” he said. “I hear the same complaints day after day. I see the same diseases over and over again. I just don’t care anymore. I need a new life.”

Remen writes that sometimes the spiritual task is not necessarily seeking out new places but seeing the place where we are with new eyes. So she assigned Josh a task. Every evening, she asked him to take 15 minutes and review the events of his day and to write down the answers to three questions in his journal: What surprised me today? What moved me or touched me today? What inspired me today?

Josh was dubious but he agreed to try. She talks with him on the phone a few days later and he sounds irritated. “I have done this for three days now and the answer is always the same; “Nothing, nothing, and nothing. I don’t like to fail at things. Is there a trick to this?”

She laughs and says, “Perhaps you are still looking at your life in old ways. Try looking at the people around you as if you were a novelist, a journalist, or maybe a poet. Look for the stories.” There was a silence. “Right,” he said. That was the end of the call.

The journal doesn’t come up in their conversations for several weeks. Their sessions focused on relieving some of his stress and reducing his workload and he seemed to be getting better. And then, six weeks after the phone call where he questioned the journaling exercise, he came in with a small bound book and began to tell her what he thought was really helping him.

He had trouble with the journal at the beginning. He wondered how he could be so busy and living such an empty life. But slowly he had begun to find some answers to the three questions. He opened the journal and began reading.

At first, the most surprising thing in a day was that a cancer had grown or shrunk two or three millimeters, and the most inspiring thing was that a new or experimental drug had begun to work. But gradually he had begun to see more deeply. Eventually he saw people who had found their way through great pain and darkness by following a thread of love, people who had sacrificed parts of their bodies to affirm the value of being alive, people who had found ways to triumph over pain, suffering, and even death.

In the beginning he said that he would only notice the things that surprised him or moved him or inspired him several hours after they happened, in the evening, in the privacy of his home. “It was like I could only see life by looking backwards over my shoulder,” he said. But gradually this lag time became shorter and shorter. “I was building up a capacity I had never used. But I got better at it. Once I began to see things at the time they actually happened, a lot changed for me.”

She asked him what he meant. He said that at first he just wrote everyone down but that as he started to see things differently his attitude seemed to change, that maybe it started to show in his tone of voice or in some other way. He said that people seemed to pick up on it because their attitude seemed changed, too. He said that after a while he just began talking to people about more than their cancer and its treatment. I began talking about what I could see.”

Over time he found himself asking his patients about more than their cancer—questions he had not been taught in medical school. “What has sustained you in dealing with this illness?” or “Where do you find your strength?” He found that people with the same illness had very different things to say. Things that he found he really wanted to hear about. And in some way what they said could be true for him, too, as he struggled to deal with difficulties in his own life. “I knew cancer very well,” he said, “but I did not know people before.”

A funny thing happened. As he related to people differently, they started to relate to him differently, too. He noticed that people started to thank him for his work, in ways that they hadn’t before. One gave him a stethoscope engraved with his name. When asked what he did with it, at first he was puzzled, and then he laughed out loud. “I listen to hearts,” he said. “I listen to hearts.”

To the extent that a spiritual practice has a goal, it might be to listen with heart, or to listen to hearts—ours and others around us. It might also be to sustain ourselves for the haul, especially when it comes to work for justice.

I recently read an interview with Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, one of the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She said that her work moves out of a place that asks what does it take for humans to live in our full humanity and allow for others to live in their full dignity? She said, “I don’t believe spirit is this thing that lives outside of us dictating our lives, but rather our ability to be deeply connected to something that is bigger than us. I think that is what makes our work powerful.”
She continued, “People’s resilience, I think, is tied to their will to live, our will to survive, which is deeply spiritual. The fight to save your life is a spiritual fight,” she said. And she says that it is “a political choice to try to build a new way of fighting. It’s not just about changing policies. It’s not just about changing lives. It’s about changing our culture and changing how we fight.” She continued: “We can change policies all day but if the fight to get there was full of trauma, was replicating oppressive dynamics, abusive dynamics, then what is the point?”
She said that it is easy in justice work to be so focused on the cause that you can burn out. She says you need to take care of yourself first if you are ultimately going to advance your cause. “My being alive is actually a part of the work,” Cullors explained. Even rudimentary things like eating healthy and exercising “are essentially taken from us, black folks in particular. To reclaim our bodies and our health, is a form of resistance, a form of resilience.”
“The fight to save your life is a spiritual fight,” she said.
Perhaps it is in our complex world that we are asked again and again to be present with all the complexity, to see our own survival as linked over and over again with the survival of everyone else and even to the planet. One of the dynamics of what we call White Supremacy culture or patriarchy is to see our lives as up against some other lives, as being in competition for position and power. What we have needs to come at the expense of someone else. That we can’t all get our needs met. Someone has to be on top.

Part of what we are asked to do is to recognize just how interdependent we all are and how our own fates are so very connected with everyone else’s.

I think of what Rev. Sofia Betancourt said here a few weeks back when she presented our seminary for a day. She was asked about global warming and what that meant for all of us. And her response was to say that yes, we do need to pay attention to what is happening with climate change but perhaps what is most important is that in our responding that we don’t continue to replicate patterns that got us here in the first place. The patterns of dominance and the need for a few to have so much more than everyone else. That our first task is to work for change that is constantly trying to hold up the needs of us all and not just a few. That our survival begins with the recognition of our interdependence and moving and living out of that place. Of seeing our own survival as being connected with the survival of the whole.

We live in times when there are lots of distractions out there. Actually moving out of that place takes work and attention and time. There are so many things that would lead us into a place of isolation and despair. Our task is to take the stuff of our lives and to make meaning. And to move out of that place in our living.

It asks us to notice. It asks us to pay attention. And maybe that is where the spiritual practice comes in.

Some questions we might ask:

Just what does resiliency look like for each of us in our lives right now? What does it look like in the lives of those around us? In our community?

Are there lessons in our history we can call upon? Ancestors who, in their living, might show us the way?

What are the tools we have at our disposal? Which ones are helpful? Which ones are not?

What are the new tools we need to acquire? What is it that we need to learn?

What kind of spiritual practice would help us do that?

We are asked, I think, to see our lives in the context of some greater whole. To see ourselves in relationship with that whole. Sometimes it means coming face to face with our limitations. It means failing, letting ourselves or others down. It means living without meaning and finding ourselves searching. It means learning lessons and changing our ways. Sometimes it means just slowing down and paying attention.

And hopefully as we are able to do that we find too that our own capacity for resilience grows. Hopefully we can be sustained for the longer haul.
Life has a way of calling us into life. It has a way of pulling us out of some place of isolation and bringing us to someplace else, a place where we may not even know we needed to be.

Part of our job is to do our part to show up and live out of that place. To take risks. To keep reaching out. Sometimes we are just too comfortable and are so surrounded with things that we stop paying attention to what is really important. But that can also keep us from the holy.

The truth is that we are all in this together. The truth is we are all learning and growing and fumbling and failing and succeeding together. Resilience, too, is something we can draw upon—and help create—together.

The universe—just like our lives—continues to unfold every day, in every moment, and we are part of that continuous unfolding, that continuous evolution. As we grow and change so does the universe, in ways, we can only attempt to understand. Asking us to bring what we have to the table and to be of use, over and over again. May that be our practice. May that be our prayer.

Amen.

Let us pray: Spirit of life, we give thanks for this day and for our lives. Help us to acknowledge and celebrate goodness and beauty. Help us to see the wonder in each day, in each moment. Help us, too, to be aware of so much we may not want to see. Help us to be aware of how we are connected to all of life, how it moves though us and in us and among us. Help us to trust in that mystery we will never fully know. Grant us wisdom and courage on the journey. Always, always, grant us hope. Amen.

Benediction

As you go into the world, good people, practice resilience. And may we find it—each of us, all of us together, as we build our way to the beloved community.

Topics: Resilience