“All Things New” – May 2, 2010
“All Things New”
A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 2, 2010
“What’s new?” we ask, not necessarily expecting an update on what’s happening in the Gulf Coast or Afghanistan or Arizona and not necessarily expecting a full update on what’s happening with the person we asked. Yet, that simple inquiry carries hope for a response that will satisfy even a glimmer of our fascination with what is new. I believe it’s our human tendency to move out of whatever we feel is the ordinary into what’s new, what is literally extra-ordinary.
It’s not surprising that our Easter hymns commonly include the hymn we sang earlier, “O Life That Maketh All Things New.” Not only does this hymn invigorate us as we begin a new day, it feels like a resurrection of spirit on a brand new day. AND, not incidental for Unitarian Universalists on Easter, it lets us bypass the challenging notion of physical resurrection.
As we moved into the third verse, we sang about “the joy of paths untrod, one in the soul’s perennial youth…” Again, the resonance of all things new. We celebrate a path not yet taken. We celebrate the idea of being “forever young,” however fleeting youth really is.
More than any other season, spring awakens all our senses to what is renewed. Nature itself breathes resurrection. Can we ever take it for granted in the aftermath of bone-chilling winters? No wonder we talk about the seasons of life, from infancy to childhood to young adulthood to middle age to old age on into death. With every death, something in each of us dies; with every birth, something in each of us is born all over again. So it is with this season. Writer Hal Borland understood the
“….temptation to say, as May spreads the leaves and opens the blossoms, that spring has come again just as it has come for untold aeons. But the fact is that no two springs are exactly alike.
….Another May, another spring, eternal but unlike any other that was or shall be.”
The ingredients of the cycle of the seasons are ever shifting, ever changing, no two seasons and no two moments ever alike. If we try to grasp a moment, if we try to hold onto it, it’s passed and we’re forced to let go.
How clearly I recall such a moment. On a seemingly ordinary day, I stood as a young child with my nose pressed up against the screen of our front door, gazing out at the gentle thoroughfare of North Adams Street….and wondering. The place was the front hall of our frame house across the street from the public school I attended in a small Iowa town. The year was 1948. There was a smoky, gently pungent scent in the air. Time stood still…..It is 1948. 1948 has never been. It will never be again. I am in it. Today has never been. It will never be again. I am in it. This very moment has never been. It will never be again. I know it. I feel it. I breathe it.
My epiphany of the “nowness” of time has lingered. It has also ripened into a consciousness of the fragility of time. It’s here and gone, briefer than a breath. All is change. Yes, there are recognizable threads of place, persons, feelings—even sights and sounds and smells and tastes. But no moment, no season, no May, no “now” is ever the same as any other. The “new” doesn’t last. In the blink of an eye, we are here and not here. In the blink of an eye, the universe shifts.
Awareness permits us to stretch the moment. Consider your most vivid memories. What allows them to be so? Immersion, full immersion into the moment you were experiencing. All your senses are heightened. Such a moment becomes a lifetime within a lifetime.
Consider the moments you’ve experienced in this religious community of First Parish. What lingers for you? Perhaps it’s not a pleasant memory. Perhaps it’s a euphoric memory. Undoubtedly it’s a transforming memory. You changed because of this moment that you’re remembering. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Breathe it in. Breathe in this memory, this moment. (Silence)
Now let it go. Exhale. That moment is gone. But you’re right next door in time to the moment in which you called it back as best you could. Like Borland’s experience of “another May, another spring, eternal but unlike any other that was or shall be.”
This moment that is now is new. (Pause) That moment that was now is past. It is an “old moment.” Which feels better to you, a new moment or an old moment? Would you prefer “all things new” or “all things old?”
What is it about our preference for the “new” when in a nanosecond, it’s not? Why is it that the Preacher of the First Testament Book of Ecclesiastes sounds like such a sourpuss in the very first chapter?
“What has been is what will be,
And what has been done is what will be done;
And there is nothing new under the sun.”
on into his claim that
“I have seen everything that is done under the sun;
And behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”
Is this really a guy you’d want to have to dinner? If your instant response is, “No!” my guess is it’s because he sounds like he’s been there, done that about everything that has crossed his path. God forbid, you ask him, “What’s new?”
Yet Hal Borland and even the little girl who is still part of me are suggesting that nothing is new and everything is new, that nothing is old and everything is old—everything, that is, except the moment we inhabit. I would guess that even the cynical sounding Preacher would accede to that. The moment we inhabit is new, BUT it’s fleeting.
So what do we make of it, this notion of the moment that is here and gone before we can take a full breath? What do we make of it?
“Bardo,” writes Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
“is a Tibetan word that simply means a ‘transition’ or a gap between the completion of one situation and the onset of another. Bar means ‘in between’, and do means ‘suspended’ or ‘thrown.’”
There is, what Rinpoche describes, “the ‘natural’ bardo of this life,” spanning the time between our birth and our death. It is the best time to prepare for the other bardos—the bardo of dying; the bardo of dharmata, meaning “the essence of things as they are;” and the bardo of becoming.
Ask an elder among us about the transitory nature of this life. Chances are she or he will give you a knowing look and speak of how fleeting it is, how quickly it goes, as my own mother did at the age of 95, just five years before her death. We arrive as newborns. We depart, if we’re fortunate, after a long life, looking and feeling quite different than we did as that newborn, yet holding the history that includes our birth. From the moment of birth, we were growing old, yet greeting new forms of identify. Flux, transition, change all describe the fluid manner of our living. My life and each moment of my life is a bardo. So it is for each of us. So it is for the earth of which we are a part. That interconnected web is a web of flux.
Transition gives rise to uncertainty and ambiguity. If every moment is a bardo, then uncertainty is ever with us. This might sound scary, but Rinpoche explains that the very nature of this uncertainty “creates gaps, spaces in which profound chances and opportunities for transformation are continuously flowering if, that is, they can be seen and seized.”
Not knowing, living with ambiguity lends a certain humility that is core to whatever wisdom we might claim. How is it that in the cycle of the seasons, March (at least for me) gives rise to the anxious uncertainty that spring might not come; it’s simply a season I remembered from times past. What choice do I have but to go with the flow of earth-time, of earth’s bardos, and with the onset of spring declare a knowing, “Oh, of course!” A more apt response might be gratitude and wonder. Gratitude and wonder accompany awareness that every single moment of our living, every single moment of life itself, is a bardo, a transition.
It is no less so with where you as a congregation are and where I as your minister for another two months am. We’re in transition. For some this raises anxiety. But we have a choice. You do; I do. We can flail in anxious uncertainty, like a drowning person; or we can move with grace and gratitude for what has been and what is across the suspension bridge we’re on.
I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of you have come up to me and asked with a somewhat nervous tone, “How are you doing, Jan?” I believe you really want to know, and I believe you also want to be at ease with yourself. There are perhaps some things to be at ease about and others that call for reflection. Overall, I’m embracing the transition; and integral to that transition is right now, this morning, the beauty of the earth, the connections that we hold, the community that we celebrate and that is ever unfolding. The only difference between the transition to which we’re all attuned and the transition that is every single moment is our level of awareness, our readiness to awaken—in the poetic clarity of Hal Borland and the wonder of a little girl pressing her nose up against a screen door.
Are all things new? Yes, and in a heartbeat all things are as old as the first breath of life.
Might we embrace the now? Might we embrace the now in which we abide as a community of faith and practice, because this faith really does take a lot of practice? Might we embrace the now that we are each navigating? Might we embrace the now of this moment, looking into each other’s eyes, hearing each other’s voices, attuned if we will be so to each other’s rhythms of heart and mind. In the moment that is, let us be here and together and thankful. And may our memories then hold this moment, hold it dear.
Amen.
Sources:
Hal Borland, “Spring: A Reiteration,” The Progressive 36, April 1972: 22; Torrey, ed., Writings of Thoreau: Journal, 12:400.
Ecclesiastes or The Preacher in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)
Samuel Longfellow (words), “O life That Maketh All Things New,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 12.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
