I don’t usually pay a whole lot of attention to Groundhog Day. Truth be told I have generally been kind of confused by the day—growing up I remember seeing images of the groundhog somewhere in Pennsylvania—a long way from where I was—and not being at all clear whether he was seeing his shadow or not. And it wasn’t always clear what this meant in regards to the arrival of spring or continued winter. No matter what the groundhog in Pennsylvania did, where I was in Wisconsin, winter was going to be around for a lot longer, shadow or not.
So I was a little surprised this week when Groundhog day seemed to have more resonance for me. It may have been because I found myself thinking about the film called Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who keeps living the same day over and over and he can’t escape. Somehow, in this COVID year, that sense of waking up every day in the same reality and things not changing… well, I couldn’t help but feel some of that. Here we are again, another gray Northwest winter day, starting things over again. So much of it can seem exactly like the day before. … I don’t know about you but does that sometimes feel like a description of life in these COVID times?
As the one-year anniversary of when things shut down for COVID comes on the horizon, I think about all the ways our lives have been changed. Some of us have lost our livelihoods. Our children have lost a lot not being able to be in physical contact with peers and teachers. And especially for kids who haven’t had the technology or internet connections they need, they have lost the most ground in their learning. Some haven’t had the basic need for enough food to eat. Parents try to work from home and be at home teachers. And even those of us with relative privilege has learned that while there are some advantages to working from home and not going out much there’s a way that work time and non-work time kind of get balled up together. For some of us the isolation has been very hard to bear. And a lot of us, generally, are just feeling kind of stir crazy. I’ve noticed that my sense of time isn’t like it used to be. Sometimes days go by quickly. Sometimes they seem to take forever. But one day can come to seem like all the other days, one after the other. That’s that Groundhog Day feeling.
No, I don’t think I could have imagined a year ago before all this just how much our lives were about to change. I couldn’t have imagined all the disruption. I couldn’t have imagined such a sense of loss. I couldn’t have all the things we’d be learning about ourselves and those around us. What a year it has been.
Our spiritual theme this month is wholeness. Wholeness. Whole. Just what does it mean to be whole? Where do we find wholeness? Those are some big spiritual questions.
And I wonder to what extent some of those questions have been amplified for us these last few months. What assumptions have we perhaps been carrying that make that sense of wholeness what it is? What are some of the assumptions that have come into question in the last year? I wonder if one of the things we have learned in these times are some of the things we are good at and maybe too some of the things that we don’t do so well. Like spending time alone or not spending time alone. Like the ways we tend to distract ourselves or not. Like the things that bring us pleasure that we didn’t think much about or just simply took for granted? About the ways we are privileged—or not.
And that may well extend to the loved ones around us. We may have discovered just how important people are in our lives. Or maybe we have learned that being around each other has its limits. It may be we have become all too aware of our limitations and their limitations as well.
So back to the theme of wholeness. It is perhaps when children enter the world that we can most easily identify that sense of wholeness. That we are perfect just as we are in all of our innocence. I think of the words we use in our child dedications here at the church calling for each child’s life to unfold like the beauty of a flower.
But that sense of wholeness may get a little more complicated with time. We come to learn the ways that we fit—or don’t fit in. We come to get messages about who we should be or not be. Who we should hang out with or not. What success means. We may get messages about all the ways we could improve. Maybe lose a few pounds or maybe dress a little differently. How we should be careful not to stick out too much or how we need to stick out more. Or maybe to be like our older siblings or the neighbor kids next door.
Any maybe we come to carry messages that can cut a lot deeper. Messages about whether we are lovable or not. Whether the particular gifts we bring good enough. Whether we ourselves are good enough or not.
And then there are those messages that come from the larger culture. On some level we may take on messages that come from the sins of racism and sexism and ableism, of how our bodies should or shouldn’t be, or how they conform or don’t conform to whatever the perceived standard might be. We may come to see how some qualities are valued more than others.
Sometimes we may come to see wholeness as perfection. That in order to be whole we need to be perfect. And of course eventually we will all learn that none of us is perfect. That life, no matter what message we might get to the contrary isn’t going to be perfect.
We are each our own unique composition of life experiences, some for good and some for ill, that all come together in some wonderful and mysterious package. It is one of the privileges as a minister to see some of those things pop out from time to time. I’m sometimes surprised that it might be the person who, on the surface, seems to have it all together only to find a person who has all kinds of self doubt, that they are nothing like the public face they wear.
There are times when I want to be able to go back in time and see a person when they were four or five or six years old and know what their world was like, how they did or didn’t get what they needed in that moment. And how is it that this person seemed to thrive despite those circumstances and another seemed to never quite get through.
Yes, I think we are each the results of all those experiences, all those blessings, all those challenges. How it is those experiences come to shape us is as unique as the persons we each become.
And sometimes those experiences that we think are long hidden can suddenly come to the surface. The other day I was in meeting on zoom, something I do quite a bit these days. The person leading the meeting invited everyone to check in. And we would do that by her inviting a person to check in and then they would invite another person to check in. Tag, you’re it, kind of thing. Well it turned out in this particular meeting that I was the last one chosen to check in. Now that doesn’t seem like such a big deal but on this particular day being the last person chosen took me back 50 some years to elementary gym class. I noticed a little tightening in my gut. In that moment I was back in that gym class, the last kid chosen. Now I can’t say I was always the last person chosen but I will say that I was usually in the bottom quartile.
And I was surprised at how quickly all of the emotions of that experience of being chosen last came flooding back. All of a sudden I was the overweight kid feeling vulnerable and alone. All of a sudden I was that kid who wanted to be just about anywhere but that gym class.
I think it is important sometimes to be reminded of those experiences that have shaped us, for good and for ill. So many of them that we think have been forgotten a long time ago. And hopefully we can look back on them from that place of wholeness, to be able to recognize how they shape us along with so many other things. How we made it through, even if in the moment it wasn’t not so easy at all.
And it may be the perspective that time can offer. For me it is also recognizing how the awareness that I wasn’t good at sports led me to explore art and music and drama. How not being good to sports made a space for me to explore books and reading and writing. How my life was more than elementary gym class.
Life, I think, is about taking our experiences and the relationships in our lives and making meaning. But it can also take time. Truth is many of us likely come to see ourselves as anything but whole and perfect. We may come to carry those voices from somewhere deep inside, those voices of parents or teachers, of bullies and defenders. Those wounds, even when healed, can still be there. All of that becomes part of our story.
And sometimes the lessons we need reminding of are about the people who guided us along the way, the people who said, yes, you can. Sometimes we may have to get reacquainted with those voices. Those voices that say no matter what you are whole just as you are. Just as you are. And part of that story becomes the ways that things like forgiveness and grace can come into play. The ways that we might find ourselves in the place where we need to be—even if we didn’t even know that was where we needed to be. To look with some awe and some humility about all the things, all the people who have accompanied us along the way.
It is perhaps in times when some of the norms around us get shaken up that we may find some of those old assumptions get shaken up too. It may be a renewed sense of vulnerability about our own place in the world and how it is we are known. It may be discovering some part of ourselves that has been lost, or at least pushed way back in the background. But we may also meet some new part that we didn’t even know was there.
Wholeness is about finding that place of acceptance in the place where we find ourselves. Too often I think it can come to mean a return to some place in the past, to some kind of ideal. But sometimes it is about coming to a place of wholeness that isn’t about what we have known. I’d like to offer a metaphor that comes from the natural world that perhaps can offer a perspective on what it means to find wholeness.
The writer Parker Palmer talks about one of his favorite places of earth was the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern Minnesota. It is over a million acres pristine wilderness. Parker says that at first going there was simply a vacation but that as he returned time and again to that elemental world of water, rock, woods and sky, his vacations came to feel more like a pilgrimage. An annual trek to holy ground driven by spiritual need. How that place came to represent to him how life looked when lived with integrity.
All of that changed in the summer of 1999 a devastating storm with hurricane force winds tore through the Boundary Waters. Over 20 million trees were felled in just 20 minutes. It was a scene of complete destruction. It would never be the same.
Parker writes how his trip there a month later was heart breaking as he witnessed all the devastation. He even questioned whether he wanted to retuned the next year. But Parker writes how that has changed with time. How he expected that this beloved place would never be the same. But he writes that with each visit since, how he has been astonished to see how nature used devastation to stimulate new growth, how it manages, slowly and persistently, to heal its own wounds. How the wholeness that was there is being replaced by something that in its own way too, is whole.[1]
And I think it is that way for us humans too. The spiritual journey is about seeing ourselves in relation to the whole and how that begins with seeing all the parts of ourselves in that whole. It is starting in the place where we find ourselves.
I’m struck how in our culture illness is so often framed in terms of a battle that we either win or lose. But how is it we come to recognize that illness as part of our wholeness too? How is it we come to define ourselves not just by the illness but by the whole of who we are?
Life asks us to take what life brings and to make meaning, even it feels like something has been taken away, even when any sense of meaning can seem far away. Maybe it comes in the recognition that life has not always been fair and that anger that rises up is also something that needs to be named. But hopefully under all of that we are able to go to that place where we know we are loved and held. Hopefully we can find that place where we know we are part of something larger.
And maybe part of that larger whole is seeing ourselves in the lives of others. How we come to see our own brokenness, our own need for healing, as connecting us to the healing of the world. How we come to recognize brokenness in other people, their vulnerabilities, their struggles. And as we see something of ourselves in them, maybe we are a little less judgmental of others too. Maybe in witnessing to the ways another person is critical of themselves we see a mirror held up that lets us know that we should cut ourselves a little more slack too.
Maybe that recognition is a call to be aware of the ways we are privileged or not privileged, or to be aware of the ways others have been there for us. To recognize the ways that we have been blessed and to ask what responsibility comes with all that. That in the recognition of how we may have survived gym class comes a responsibility to recognize the ways in our present world that hate that comes at kids who identify as transgender right now and to see in their lives our own lives. To recognize in our privilege the need to recognize the impacts of racism and misogyny. To not be silent. To recognize how we are all vulnerable when any one of us is vulnerable. To answer that call to move out of our own wholeness.
But before any of that is possible, I think that recognition of wholeness needs to begin inside of us. I can tell someone I see them as whole all I want but if they can’t get to that place themselves that makes for a much steeper climb. Sometimes claiming that for ourselves is the hardest job of all.
To see in our own fragility, in our own vulnerability, our own wholeness, the fragility, the vulnerability, the wholeness that is all around us.
Words again of poet Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
May that we so for all of us good people. Amen.
Let us pray. Great spirit of life and of love. Remind us of the beauty around us. Remind us of the beauty within us. Remind us of all the blessings we know. Remind us of who we are, of all the places and people, the communities who have helped us along the way. And remind us, spirit, of how we do not make this journey alone. Hold us. Guide us. Ground us as we find our way. Call us to the work of love, the work of justice. Call us to liberation, when all of us, together, will know we are part of that community worthy of the name beloved community. Amen.
Benediction
Remember, good people, that through these complicated and difficult and amazing times may you recognize your beauty, may you recognize your wholeness. And out of that wholeness, may each of us, all of us, bring our share of love into the world.
[1] “A hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life,” by Parker Palmer, Jossey-Bass 2004, pp 4-5.
Topics: Wholeness