First Parish Sermon Archive

“Change Happens”

a sermon by ministerial intern Kevin Tarsa

delivered January 29, 2012

at First Parish in Wayland, MA

 

Reading #1: A Litany of Change

 

1. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”    - Charles Darwin

 

2. “Things do not change; we change.”     - Henry David Thoreau

 

3. “We change whether we like it or not.    - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

4. “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”     - Benjamin Franklin

 

5. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”       - Victor Frankl

 

6. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”       - Anatole France

 

7. “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”     

- Charles Kettering

 

8. “Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.”        - Shunryu Suzuki

 

9. “We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”       - R.D. Laing

 

10. “Know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.”          - Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

 

11. “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”   - Joseph Campbell

 

12. “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”    - Barbara Kingsolver

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading #2

 

Emily Perl Kingsley was asked to describe what it was like to live through and beyond an event that changed the course of her life. She wanted to help people understand and imagine how it might feel. She said, “It’s like this:

 

 

see “Welcome to Holland” at   http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

   © 1987 Emily Perl Kingsley

 

 

Sermon: “Change Happens”

by Kevin Tarsa, ministerial intern, First Parish in Wayland, MA

January 29, 2012

 

 

So… “Welcome to Holland.”

 

I don’t know where you expected to be landing this morning…or where you expected to be landing at this point in your life, but chances are at least a few times in your life, you found out quite suddenly that your flight plan had been changed mid-flight, and you landed in an unfamiliar land, where people spoke a different language.

 

“Welcome to Holland,” I say this morning, because I know that change happens, all the time, to all of us - change expected and unexpected, bidden and unbidden, in large doses and in small. For change is the very nature of existence and nothing escapes its reach. No matter what our age, we don’t have to look any further than our own bodies to know that change is perpetual in our lives, and that we must keep adapting to new realities. (I say, as I adjust my bifocals…)

 

As James Miller writes: “Infants turn into toddlers, children become adolescents, and adults mature in ways no less striking.” You’re supposed to go to Italy and then:  Your horse runs away, or your child, and therefore, you, are thrown by an illness,  “accidents happen, tragedies occur, … bodies, minds, and spirits are suddenly changed, either for a time or forever. Relationships [begin and] come to an end for all sorts of reasons. Jobs [start, change or] terminate with little or no notice. People die, expectedly or unexpectedly, and life is irreversibly altered for [those who love them] (Miller 13).”

 

But it is not only painful and difficult changes that throw us. Virtually all change is uncomfortable at some level, even the most positive or hoped-for change, because it disrupts the ways we are accustomed to being and to doing things.

 

Lea Anderson took Ken and Lisa Maria and me on a wonderful tour of the new Wayland High School. The new auditorium, the “Main Stage” they’re calling it, is beautiful and state of the art, but many people are lamenting the loss of the old “Little Theater.” The new commons where students eat is light and open….but several of the tables are round, and instead of facing a friend or two across the table, students now have to face a whole group of people, which some are finding uncomfortable.

 

 “The … radio comedian, Bob Burns, …used to tell the story of eating Army food for the first time after eighteen years of his mother’s deep-fat frying. A week of bland GI fare was enough to cure something that he had never known that he had: a life-long case of heartburn. But rather than feeling relief at this improvement, at the lack of pain, Burns said that he rushed into the dispensary… yelling, “Doc, doc! Help me! I’m dying. My fire went out! (Bridges 13)”

 

Getting married, having a baby, receiving a promotion, opening a business - all change, even the most happy change, incurs loss because with change, by definition something ends, something is no longer exactly what it was, and so neither are we. We have to navigate not only the external changes in our lives, we also have to travel an internal journey in response to those changes and the losses that come with them.

 

This morning, I’m drawn to speak of that inner journey, using the travel guides of James and John. Not the apostle brothers James and John of the Christian scriptures, but two deep friends who each studied grief.

 

James Miller, a one-time minister, speaks of the link between change and grief, writing, “Whether the change is minor or major, whether its effect is fleeting or enduring, somewhere at the beginning [of our transitions in response to change] will be a sense of loss. And where there is loss there is grief. The grief may or may not go deep, but it’s grief nonetheless (Miller 23)”

 

The late John Schneider, a psychologist and a mentor of mine, writes that we all have “significant losses…that result from the changes that are natural parts of life. They come from catastrophes and tragedies as well as from successes and satisfactions (xxvii). Every change,” he writes, “… has both a loss and a gain component. Grieving is how we [know their proportions] and decide what to do with them (Schneider 111).”

 

There are plenty of books and websites with all kinds of valuable suggestions on how to change yourself or how to adapt to change, but I’ve found …that first paying attention to the losses that come with change and attending to the internal grieving process have been most helpful in my own life. I’ve found that unless I first acknowledge and grieve the losses that come with change, later I have difficulty accepting… the nice things about Holland.

 

You know, I was supposed to go to Italy. I was. Instead, I landed …in Wayland. Now first, I would like you to know that I am very happy to have landed in Wayland. Wayland has several hundred years of history. Wayland has a Whole Foods Store (for now). Wayland has First Parish. Wayland has Ken Sawyer (for a few more months), and most important, Wayland has you!  I am very grateful to have landed in Wayland.

 

I was planning, however, to do my internship next year, after I finished classes, but there were several changes in the flight plan: my mother died, our minister resigned suddenly, I lived an unexpected divorce, sold our house, and moved five times within six months. In that same time, John Schneider, my grief mentor, died. As someone at his memorial service asked, “What do you do when your grief counselor dies?”

 

I turn often to John’s wisdom. With some of the changes in your lives in my mind and heart, and knowing the link between change and grief, I offer a small piece of John’ insight to you this morning in the hope that it might serve you in your journey.

 

John said that we have to make three discoveries before we can realize the transformative potential of grief. We must discover what’s lost, what remains, and what’s possible.  They are each important, but it’s the first discovery, in particular, that I commend, because from it, the other two follow, and without it, they can be lived only incompletely.

 

First, John says, we must discover what was lost.

 

To discover what’s lost, the need may be as simple as taking walks to consider what ended for you when you got married, when you took that job, or when your child started school. It may be making lists of what you’ll miss about your volunteer role, or the home from which you are moving, telling a friend what you’ll leave behind when you graduate or when you follow your dream in retirement. Taking time to notice and to take inventory of what you have lost or are losing or will lose, is the task here, however you choose to go about it. It’s not the most pleasant step, but it’s a very important one.

 

This is the step that’s often missed when a change seems positive – Why would we be thinking about what’s lost when something good happens? 

 

William Bridges ran support group for people in transition. The members of the group who had lost loved ones, or divorced or lost jobs couldn’t figure out why the guy who just got a promotion had anything to complain about. But with the promotion came a loss of time with his family, a separation from close colleagues, a lowered sense of competence in his new role. A woman in the group who just had a baby, lost all sense of a life that was her own. Her life was now tied to that of a wonderful, demanding infant. Understanding what they had lost, helped each of them to grieve and move forward.

 

This step of discovering what’s lost, the step that’s missed when everything seems positive, is the same step that can become overwhelming when a loss is deep and it seems that everything is lost.

 

John says that when we first respond to change, we are likely to cycle “back and forth between the extremes of making too much or too little of what we’ve lost (114).”

If the change in our lives is a painful one, we may rollercoaster up and down between “everything’s fine” denial, and debilitating despair. Up and down. John says that the truth in such times is in the middle, “Yes, things are as bad as they seem – AND yes, there is hope [you] can get through it,” though most of us can feel only one of those feelings at a time.

 

What comes next is a time of more “active grieving” in which little by little we face “the full impact of our loss.” Here we cycle back and forth between our coping strategies of either clinging to what we are losing or letting go completely, and our gradual awareness of the depth of our loss. As long as we don’t get stuck in our coping mechanisms, - clinging or letting go/fleeing - they are normal and helpful survival strategies. They give us respite from the pain, and allow us to “take in our loss one manageable bit at a time (116).”  Coping… touching a little more loss… coping… touching a little more loss…

 

Acknowledging, identifying and gradually feeling the fullness of our loss is the vital first step on the internal journey of transition that comes with all change. The size of this step for you, will depend upon the depth of the change in your life.

It’s the doorway to:

 

Discovering what remains.

 

This, I expect, you can imagine easily and I need only state it briefly.  In our own time and way, after honestly facing our loss, we gradually start to look around, and discover that not all is lost after all, and we start to take stock of what we do have. I have seen this remarkable journey many times in people who mourn. James writes, “In this time of discontinuity, …we start to remember our continuities.” Here’s the key: to remember that “No matter what has changed, some things have not changed, (at least not in ways that matter.)  We can “find reassurance [by] recalling those things. [By noting, consciously, what’s left. What’s still here.]

Whatever inner strength you’ve already known, you can draw on it again. However resilient you’ve been, [or] practical or determined, you can be that way once more, for you [already] know how. If someone you love is gone from your life, others remain…(Miller 29)” Recognizing and taking stock of what remains allows us to:

 

Discover what is possible. 

 

The spirit of this is not difficult to imagine.

Once we’ve faced our loss and then discovered what remains, we catch our breath, we look around and begin to notice not only what we have brought with us, but also …that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. Emily Perl Kinsgley, who wrote “Welcome to Holland,” was writing about giving birth to and raising a child with Down Syndrome.  That was her change in flight plan. Discovering what’s possible is when we find it in ourselves to go out and look at the new landscape in which we find ourselves. We find the new guidebooks, learn new languages, meet new people, see with new eyes - as Joseph Campbell put it, it’s when we “let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”

 

In the interim time ahead, as you search for a new minister, those of you from First Parish  will be asking yourself these questions about every aspect of cong life and your connection to it – What’s lost, what remains, what’s possible? I encourage you to ask them about the changes in your personal life as well.

 

For large losses, you will need to cycle through these three steps again and again, gradually carving your way through and grieving transforming loss one manageable fragment at a time. What’s lost, what remains, what’s possible?

 

You may someday reach the very final step of discovering what’s possible - which only happens at the very end of the grieving process, if ever, John says: it is accepting that the past cannot be changed and that we are who we are because of the past, not in spite of it; that we are who we are because of the changes and losses that came our way, not in spite of them; that we are who we are, because there was a change in the flight plan and we never made it to Italy. If we can reach that understanding, we will not spend the rest of our life in mourning, wishing that our life had been other than it has been.

 

For all this talk of loss and grief, my inspiration this morning is really hope. By acknowledging and grieving the losses that come with change, we best enable ourselves to see and appreciate what’s left, and open our selves to what is possible, so we can know in our bones, that there is yet more love to come for us, more peace, more hope, even more joy to come…somewhere, and we’ll free ourselves to appreciate and enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about …about wherever it is that we’ve landed for now.

 

So may we be.

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Bridges, William. Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Print.

 

Kingsley, Emily Perl. “Welcome to Holland.”  © 1987 at  

http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

 

Miller, James E. Changes and Possibility: Discovering Hope in Life’s Transitions. Fort Wayne: Willowgreen, 2005. Print

 

Schneider, John M. Finding My Way: From Trauma to Transformation: The Journey Through Loss and Grief. Traverse City, MI: Seasons Press, 2012. Print