Now is the time of turning, began our responsive reading today.
Autumn officially arrived at 6:04 this past Thursday evening. But for a while now, even with our warm days of late, there have been signs of the changing season to notice. The beginnings of leaves turning color, ever so slightly. And the shortening days for sure. And those warm days have been followed by cool nights.
And there are other forms of turning. The rhythm of school beginning once again for our young people. Even if we are no longer in school ourselves anymore there is something about this time of year that is about going back to school, about turning into a new season, a new year.
And at sundown this evening we’ll mark another turning with Rosh Hashanah and the beginning of the Jewish High Holy Days. They begin with the new year but before that year can really commence come these days leading up to Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, which begins at sundown a week from Tuesday. And it is in this period in between that we are asked to take stock of our lives and to look at the places where we have fallen short in the last year, where we need to make amends. Or, as our responsive reading this morning asks, where it is we need to make a turn. How for us humans the turning may not come as easily as it does for the earth around us. How for us that turning takes more intention.
And somehow this year that invitation to turn, that invitation to begin again, feels especially important this year. The need to mark both where we are and have been and also where we are going. What it is we want to leave behind. What is being asked of us in this time of that is new. How it is we hope to begin once again in love.
We have been living in a time of disruption for a long time now it seems. Covid has certainly been part of it. Lives lost. We have missed time with loved ones, with our friends at church. Lives have been disrupted in so many ways. That has included our sense of what is safe and how it is we are able to move in the world. What can we trust and what can’t we trust? And for all too long it seems as if we have been living in a world filled with rage and violence and so much that seems to be broken. A time when it has been hard to imagine how it is we might find our way forward. All of this taken together has been, continues to be, a lot to hold.
President Biden said in an interview recently that the pandemic is over. We’ll see. I sure hope that at least we will continue to be the path we are on, moving to something called a post pandemic time. And yet in so it feels as if there are so many layers to all of this, so much that needs to be healed, so much that needs to be fixed.
It feels as if we are living in paradoxical times right now. There is so much that would call us to live out of a place of seperateness, out of a place of fear and anxiety all around us. Fear of the other. Fear about our very existence as a planet. Fear of just about everything.
And yet with all that uncertainly this pandemic has brought home just how interconnected our lives are, just how dependent we are on each other. Of just how interdependent we all are. How the world seems a lot smaller than it did just a few short years ago.
No, these are complicated times. There is a lot to hold. And too often I think that can leave us in a kind of stuck place. In fact stuck can often feel like a good description for the world right now.
And maybe that is why that invitation to turn feels especially important. How is it we need to turn? What is it that we need to see with new eyes? How are we being asked to live in these days?
A story.
Rachel Naomi Remen 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. 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. The three questions were: What surprised me today? What moved me or touched me today? What inspired me today?
Josh was dubious but he agreed to try. Three days later they talk by phone and Josh 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 journaling does not come up in their conversations for several weeks. Instead they focus 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 reports having 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 one of those fairy tales,” he said. “Like being under a spell. I could only see life by looking backwards over my shoulder.” 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. “Well, at the beginning I couldn’t talk about it and I just wrote everything down. But I think when I began to see things differently, my attitude started to change. Maybe that showed in my tone of voice or in some other way. People seemed to pick up on it because their attitude seemed changed, too. And after a while I 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 over time. 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.”[1]
What is it that we are being asked to listen for in these days? How is it that we are being asked to see the world with new eyes?
Part of the invitation that comes with the holy days we are in is an invitation to be in relationship with something larger. Call it god. Call it spirit of life. Call it community of beings. For that doctor it was with the patients he cared for. As he was able to see them in their humanness, he was able to begin to see a fuller dimension of his own humanness as well.
And what of our lives?
As you have navigated this time of covid are there learnings that you can identify? Like people and things that are important in ways that perhaps they weren’t important before? Or are there things that you haven’t been able to do that have made you all the more aware of just how important they were for you? Or not so important? Are there endings you can identify from this time? What about new beginnings?
Part of the spiritual task, I think, is to keep opening ourselves to what the spirit might be asking of us. To stay present to the stuff of our lives. To stay present with the world around us. And to know too that that turning may take time, it isn’t always something that happens with the snap of a finger—even if we may expect results in an instant-results culture.
Making a turn when it comes to some of the core messages we have about ourselves and about the world takes time. Maybe lots of time. Maybe some tapes have to be erased before we are able to record something new over them.
The message of these high holy days is that the world is recreated every day and it is up to us to be fully alive and fully aware. The message of these days is that the invitation is there, waiting for us, all the days of our lives.
What are the questions we might be asking ourselves? Might it be what surprises us? Might it be what touches us? Or inspires us? Or maybe it is what turn am I wanting to make? Or how am I called to live out my values in the world?
We are asked over and over again to take the stuff of our lives and make meaning, to make life, to be aware that we are not isolated beings, but connected in something much larger.
These days our hurting world has a way of offering us plenty of opportunities to learn and to grow. But sometimes it feels like there is so much hurt we may not know where to begin. It may start by recognizing our own brokenness and our own capacity for healing is how we begin to heal the world. Perhaps it begins with that noticing—our own humanness, the humanness of others. Noticing how this piece or that piece moves. Noticing when a door opens and with it comes an invitation to journey through.
The changing season is a time for us to be reminded that all of life flows together, that as the trees turn, as the days get cooler, as the light gets shorter, it is all part of the order of things and that they are all connected together and that we are connected with all of that life. That out of the brokenness of our lives comes new meaning and new life. We are reminded of the ways that we fall short, but also that before us always is the invitation to have a fresh start.
Words again of poet Louise Erdrich:
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
Don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.[2]
In these days may we find clarity about what is necessary and what is not. May we make a space to hear what life is asking of us and what it is not.
Amid the confusion and the cacophony of these days may we find that center that is our place our grounding, our place of clarity. And may we move from that place, that place where we find ourselves at one with all of life.
Making a turn in a new direction isn’t always easy. And sometimes we have to turn more than once. No matter the season, no matter the circumstances of our lives, the important thing to remember is that we never, ever, travel alone. The important thing to remember is that in the end, all of us together, we will find our way home. Amen.
Prayer: Spirit of life, call us to be always mindful of the blessings in our lives. Remind us that we do not live as isolated beings, but are part of something much larger, a mystery none of us will ever fully know. As the seasons move from one to another, help us to pay attention to the cycles of our lives, to where we are going and to where the spirit might be calling us. So be it. Amen.
Benediction
Every day, remember how your story is part of a much larger story, a story that holds all of our brokenness, and also all of our possibility. Remember always how you are held in the arms of love. This is the day we have been given. Let us rejoice in it and be glad. Go in peace. Practice love. Amen.
[1] Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfathers Blessing: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging, Riverhead Books, 2000, pp 116-119.
[2] https://wordsfortheyear.com/2016/05/04/advice-to-myself-by-louise-erdrich/
Topics: Interdependance