“Endbeginnings”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

December 10, 2006

            “Change alone is unchanging,” the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote more than 2500 years ago, and though we live in a much different world today than Heraclitus, we can still affirm the truth of his words.

            And that’s what I’d like to talk about this morning, change or transition, especially the transitions that occur in our individual lives.

            Let’s face it. Our lives are one transition after another.

            We’re born. We grow up. We start school. We leave home. We fall in love. We get married. We fall out of love. We get divorced.

            We get jobs. We get promoted. We quit jobs. We change jobs. We get fired. We retire.

            We get ahead financially. We fall apart financially.

            We get sick. We get better. We have accidents. We recover.

            Babies are born. People we love die.

            We move to a new house. We remodel our kitchen. We buy a new car. We replace the VCR with a DVD player, but we still can’t figure out how to program the clock.

            Our lives are one transition after the other.

            I imagine that there’s not one person here this morning who is not experiencing some kind of transition.

            In fact, if you’re here this morning and you’re absolutely sure you’re not experiencing any kind of transition in your life, I’m terribly sorry to be the one to tell you this, but it’s very likely you’re dead.

            Here’s another thing I know.

            All transitions cause anxiety, even little transitions.

            Not too long ago, I was talking to a woman who attends a church in Auburn. She told the most incredible thing. She told me that in her church, the smallest changes could create huge anxiety within the congregation. She told me that moving a potted plant from one side of the sanctuary to the other could make half the congregation go crazy with anxiety, leading to flurries of e-mails, telephone calls, and meetings to discuss the issue.

            “Does anything like that ever happen in your church?”

            “No, never,” I said.

            I know that even transitions from bad to good can cause anxiety.

            I recently heard a story that was told by the old radio comedian, Bob Burns. Burns told the story of eating Army food for the first time after eighteen years of his mother’s deep-fat frying. After eating the bland Army food for a week, he was cured of  something that he had never known that he had: a lifelong case of heartburn. But rather than feeling relief, he panicked. He told his doctor, “Doc, doc! Help me! I’m dying. My fire went out!”

            Even the very best transitions cause anxiety. As Oscar Wilde said, “The Gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us - - the first is to deny our dreams, and the second is to grant them.”

            So, as I said, this morning I’d like to talk about the transitions that occur in our lives because while transitions always cause anxiety, I believe that understanding the dynamics of transition in our lives makes it easier for us to deal with them.

            A book I’ve found very useful in understanding the dynamic of transitions is a book by William Bridges titled Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. It was published way back in 1980, which makes it practically a classic.

            Bridges main point is pretty simple and straightforward, almost obviously straightforward. Most transitions in our lives have three stages. There is an ending, an in-between time he calls “the neutral zone,” and a new beginning.

            I’d like to say a little more about each of these stages, and let me start by talking about endings. Why start with endings?

            Let me first talk about endings.  Why talk about endings first? As Rachel Naomi Remen suggested in our reading this morning, endings and beginnings are often intertwined, or as T.S. Eliot said, ““What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” In other words, you can’t begin something without ending something else, and you can’t end something without beginning something else.

            In his book, Bridges says that one of the most important things to know about endings is that no ending is completely good or bad.

            But what does he mean?

            Well, let me give you an example from my own life.

            As many of you know, Hiromi and I are in the process of adopting a child from Colombia. By the way, thank you to all of you who have refrained from asking us whether we have any news. We don’t, and we don’t know when we will. We could get a telephone call tomorrow, and it could be several months or even longer. Please believe me when I tell you that as soon as we do have news, I’ll share it.

            Now Hiromi and I are both really, really excited about becoming parents. We’ve been looking forward to this for a long, long time. And its something we have very deliberately chosen. This will be an exciting new beginning for us.

            At the very same time, we realize that when we do become parents, a part of our lives will be over, a part of our lives that includes sleeping late, going out to a movie without finding a babysitter, having long, uninterrupted conversations with each other, and coming home to a house that doesn’t look like its been struck by a tornado.

            I know that as truly excited as we are about becoming parents, a small part of us will also miss these and other things. One of the ways we deal with our own occasional frustrations with the length of the adoption process is by explicitly recognizing what we’re giving up to become parents.

            I think it’s more difficult for many of us to affirm the possibility of a good new beginning coming out of a bad ending in our lives. It’s my observation that we’re often able to see this only in hindsight.

            In his book, Bridges talks about Eleanor Roosevelt - - in my opinion, one of the most remarkable women of the 20^th century, who went through a difficult transition in her life at the age of 35. Looking back on this transition, Roosevelt wrote, “Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life, not even you own child’s.” What she did not say, according to Bridges, was that she was only able to make this important transition in her life after she had discovered that her husband was having an affair with one of her most trusted friends. “It was out of the shattered dream of domestic safety,” he says, “that she emerged, struggling against her own shyness and self-doubt, to become an important public figure in her own right.”

            I’ve heard people say, “Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window.” I find this incredibly trite and even insensitive because the statement seems to ignore the real pain of some endings, and when I hear this I often feel the urge to push to person saying it out an open window - - an urge I have so far resisted.

            Nevertheless, when we are experiencing a difficult ending in our own lives, it can be helpful to hold onto those words spoken by John Banister Tabb, words which a printed in our hymnal and also on a plaque on Mt. St. Helens: “Out of the cold dead ashes, life again.”

            Unfortunately, we rarely go straight from an ending to a new beginning, from “cold dead ashes” to life again.” There’s always an in-between time, what Bridges calls “the neutral zone.”

            This makes sense to me. We don’t go straight from fall to spring. There’s winter, a fallow season, in between. In Hebrew Scripture, the people of Israel didn’t go straight from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. They, too, had an in-between time - - forty years, in fact, of wandering in the desert. In our reading this morning, Remen didn’t find an immediate replacement for the ring she lost.

            But in today’s world, there is a tendency for us to rush the “in-between time” of our transitions.

            Bridges says most people think about transitions in their life like they think of crossing a street. “One would be a fool to stay out there in the middle of the street any longer than was necessary, so once you step off the curb, move on to the other side as fast as you can. And whatever you do, don’t sit down on the center line to think things over.”

            And I understand the tendency to rush through the in-between time of our transitions. During in-between times, old ways of making sense of our lives and the world in which we live no longer make sense, but we haven’t discovered new ones to replace them, so it’s disconcerting.

            However, Bridges suggests and I concur, when we try to rush through the in-between time of our own transitions, we do so at considerable risks.

            Most of us know when people rush right into one relationship after ending another relationship, it rarely works out.

            The reason that churches have interim ministers is because experience has taught us that a congregation needs time between the end of one ministry and the beginning of another.           

            I’ve learned the value of not rushing the “in between” times of my own life, even when I don’t particularly like them because I don’t like having things undecided.

            Another story from my own life…When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had known what I wanted to do with my life a few years earlier. I had wanted to be a journalist. From my freshman year of high school through my sophomore year of college, this is what I though I wanted to do with my life. But one day, I realized that it wasn’t. I ended up graduating from college with a degree in philosophy, but still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and it was very unsettling.

            But I had always wanted to live overseas, and so I found a job teaching English in Tokyo. In deciding to do this, I didn’t think I wanted to live in Japan for the rest of my life. I wasn’t even terribly interested in Japan or Japanese culture, though I grew to appreciate it very much. And though I liked teaching, I didn’t see it as a career choice.

            In some ways, the four years I spent living in Japan were a self-imposed timeout, a self-imposed commitment to living in an “in between” time,” a commitment to being undecided and letting things be up in the air.

            It was in Japan that I discerned a call to ministry and decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life, a call that has been very fulfilling and rewarding, on at least two days out of three.     But here’s the thing. I doubt I ever would have been able to discern that call if I hadn’t allowed myself to stay in that “in between” time, that time and space of uncertainty, un-decidedness, and un-knowning.

            The poet Robert Frost talked about the necessity of becoming “lost enough to find yourself,” and that’s what needed to happen for me.

            And that brings me to talking about beginnings.

            I go back and forth on the question of how much control we have over our own lives. Are we really the authors of our own lives? Or are we more like improvisational actors doing the best we can with the random circumstances, opportunities and setbacks that life throws at us? At best, we have imperfect control over our lives and the directions they take, and I think that’s especially true with new beginnings in our lives.

            In his book, Bridges describes how beginnings often happen for most of us: “You bumped into an old friend that you hadn’t seen for years, and he told you about a job at his company that opened up just that morning. You met your spouse-to-be at a party that you really hadn’t wanted to go to and that you almost skipped. You learned to play the guitar while you were getting over the measles, and you learned French because the Spanish class met at 8 a.m. and you hated to get up early. You happened to pick up a book that totally changed you life because it was the only one lying on your friend’s coffee table - - and later you were astonished to find that you had once tried to read it before, but had found it dull and confusing.”

            Often, it seems new beginnings happen to us, but I think we do have a role to play.

            What do I mean?

            On the Christian liturgical calendar, now is the season of Advent, the time when Christians around the world prepare for Christmas, when they prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the coming of the Christ child.

In the Gospel of Luke in the Christian scripture, we are told about the angel Gabriel is sent by God to visit Mary. He comes to Mary and says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Mary is puzzled by this because she doesn’t know what this means. Gabriel then says, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.”

Now, to put it lightly, Mary is pretty shocked. She even asks Gabriel, “How can this be? I am a virgin!”

The scripture tells us that after Gabriel explains how she will conceive, Mary responds, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Now I don’t take this story literally, but I think it’s possible to take a story seriously without taking it literally - - something especially important to remember at this time of the year - - and when I do take this story seriously as having something important to say, what I take away from this story - - the metaphorical truth that I find within it - - is that new beginnings most often happen to us, like with Mary, when we say to life, “Here I am!, when we live with our hearts are open to the possibility of a new beginning happening to us.

To summarize…there are three stages to every transition: an ending, an “in between time,” and a new beginning.

I encourage you to think about what’s happening in your own life right now. If you’re experiencing a difficult ending, hold on for dear life to the possibility that in every ending are the seeds of a new beginning. Have faith in life. If you’re in an “in between” time, don’t rush it. If possible, face the uncertainty in your life with curiosity. And if you’re ready for a new beginning in your life, remember what Carl Sagan, wrote, “Somewhere something incredible is incredible waiting to happen,” and it’s waiting to happen to you, so let your heart be open to the possibility of it happening for you. Make room in your life for it now. Be ready for it.

My friends, may our eyes and ears be open to the possibility of wonderful new beginnings in this coming season and coming year.

So may it be. Amen.