“When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!”

A sermon about transitions in our lives

by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, September 30, 2001

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Readings:

Three Fables on Letting Go

From “Kitchen Table Wisdom,” by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

I.

For many years I tried to persuade my father to buy a new living room couch. Year after year, the old green couch grew shabbier and shabbier. Finally it was no longer safe to sit on. Embarrassed, I told Dad that I had ordered a new couch from Macy’s by phone. I was sending a photograph of it for their approval. If they liked it, it would be delivered on Friday. They loved it. Saturday I called. How did it look? Shamefacedly, my father told me he had canceled the order. It turned out that he didn’t know what to do with the old couch. I suggested calling Macy’s and telling them to take it away. He told me that they did not do that in New York.

“Then how about the Salvation Army?”  Apparently they only took away the things they could still sell. Who would want our couch? With a sinking heart, I suggested looking in the yellow pages for someone who does hauling. But Dad didn’t want a stranger to know how to get into his house.

Finally I was silenced. My father, unaccustomed to letting go of anything, could not find his way to accepting my gift. Several years later, in the night, the old couch collapsed in on itself. It stood in the living room that way until my father died and I brought my mother to live with me in California.

II.

The house I own is a little A-frame cabin in the foothills of a mountain outside of San Francisco. When I bought it, it was so cramped and shabby that the first friend I brought to see it blurted out, “Oh Rachel, you bought this?”  I started throwing things away the day after I moved in, and for the next few years I threw away all sorts of things: light fixtures, toilets, staircases, doors. Eventually, I even took out some ceilings and a few of the walls.

The house had belonged to a man who was proud of his ability to fix things. If there was a hold in the wall, he picked up the first available board and nailed it there. If his wife wanted a shelf or a door or a deck, he put one wherever she pointed. I threw all these things away.

Oddly, the more I threw away, the more I seemed to have. Over time, I rented four large grange boxes and filled them with everything that did not belong. As I let go of each of these things, I could imagine my father saying, “Just a minute, that still works, you never know when you’ll need one of those.” Gradually, the house became simpler, more empty, and the beautiful structural lines of its basic form began to emerge. It became a container for the light. In the end, all that was left was the wholeness. I painted in white.

III.

Jane’s dog was never more than two feet away from her. Gentle, brown, and devoted, it even slept on her bed at night. Its devotion was returned full measure, and when it died of old age, my friend said that she doubted she would ever have another dog. She didn’t have another dog for several years.

During this time I visited her often in the small town where she lived. Sunday afternoon we would walk down to the beach together. In those few blocks, she would stop to pat dogs on leashes, and strays would come up joyfully to greet her. Each got a moment of tenderness and a dog biscuit from her pocket.

Once I asked her if she missed her dog. “Yes,” she said, “very much.” But then she told me something odd. When she had a dog there were two kinds of dogs: her dog and all the other dogs. Now it seems as if all dogs are her dog.

I’ve had some help in writing this sermon.  Our parishioner Dennis Ahern says, “When I come to a fork in the road, I take it.  Tine and tine again.” 

The Sermon:

I feel quite inadequate in addressing what I think needs to be addressed this morning.  On September 11^th, something huge happened in the history of America.  Two weeks and five days out, we are still too close to assess its meaning, and yet we cannot avoid trying; and yet we wish to move on, and yet it seems everything must be assessed in the context of recent events; and thus we are both obsessed with it all and sick of it all.

I’ve chosen, therefore, to focus on the subject of “transitions” — forks in the road — and though September 11^th remains “Exhibit A” I think we may productively reflect as well on all the other transitions in our lives. 

There is a kind of — mournful, apprehensive, eerie, anticipatory— hush that continues to hover over our lives.  I’ve been in a lot of meetings lately where people said they got nothing done in the week after September 11^th.  They watched TV instead or procrastinated or slept or diddled.  I was supposed to go to a conference in Colorado last week, but it was cancelled.  A lot of supposed deadlines slipped.  Stuff didn’t get done.  Meetings have been postponed.  And when asked or asking, “How are you?” I and everyone gives an equivocal answer, “OK…considering.”  And so, if you’ve lately been feeling depressed, you’re not alone — a lot of adults and kids are clearly having a hard time also.  More than a few couples have told me that they’ve had some exceptional fights in the last week or so.  I speak not just academically.  Emotions are raw or subliminally significant.  We’re in a topsy-turvy time.

So let’s talk about transitions.  Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says that when, in Genesis 1:1 it says, “In the beginning,” it really should be translated as “In a beginning.”  All beginnings come from situations that are “without form and void” — in other words, situations that beat the hell out of what they mean to us.  “Confusion,” said Henry Miller, “is a word we have invented for an order which we have not yet understood.”  Lately, I think, we’ve all been rather confused.

I have a friend, by the way, who says that Unitarian Universalism is a form of Confusionism — not Confucianism, we’re not followers of Confucius — but we’re practitioners of Confusionism…which is my friend’s way of saying that we are believers in new beginnings.  This is accurate:  in times of confusion, Unitarian Universalists do not turn immediately to the Bible, or to history or tradition or ritual, or to our priests because we believe that, in every circumstance, we really must wrestle with the angels to receive the blessing of new meaning.  You may have come here seeking comfort, and I do hope and expect you will find some comfort; but what you really receive here are wrestling lessons.

The world is forever beginning again, “in every beginning the world is without form and void.”  “The truth is that renewal comes neither by taking a rest nor changing the scenery, nor by adding something new to our lives, but by ending whatever is, and then entering a temporary state of chaos when everything is up for grabs and anything is possible.”

In thinking about transitions this morning, I have relied largely upon the thoughts of a man named William Bridges who has spent his life analyzing and writing about transitions.  He first wrote a self-help book titled Transitions; then he wrote another about business and organizations titled Managing Transitions; and lately he has made it into the religion and spirituality aisle of the bookstore by writing another book titled The Way of Transition.  Bridges — an interesting name for a fellow writing about transitions — Bridges’ key insight is that there is a distinction between change and transition.  “Change is when you have to do better what you already know how to do.  Transition is when you have to do what you don’t know how to do.”

“It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions,” he says.  “Change is situational: the new home, the new baby, the new boss, the new policy.  Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation.  Change is external, transition is internal.”

Bridges says that there are three stages to transition:  an ending (transition always begins with an ending), a neutral zone (that the Confusionism), and ultimately a new beginning.

Rarely are the endings planned or expected.  Bridges tells a great transition story that took place on a four-day Outward Bound rafting trip on the Green River in Utah.  In the group were three couples and, challenging them to have as individual an experience as possible, the guides asked all the couples to split up in separate boats.  Two of the couples, including Bridges and his wife, agreed; but the husband of the third couple argued.  His wife was shy and fearful, he said; she wouldn’t be comfortable being alone with people she didn’t know; he wanted her to experience something new and exciting but there were limits to what he wanted to put her through.  His wife sat there silently in her not-very-outdoorsy clothes and smiled gratefully.  As part of the experience, as well, each person was to captain each raft for half a day so that everyone could navigate some rapids.  But to this also the one husband objected:  The Little Lady would pass on that one too.  It was just a little too scary.  The trip was a big challenge, and he was real proud of her (he looked at her proudly) for doing it at all.  But captaining down a rapid…No, they’d skip that part.  And again his wife just smiled deferentially.

Well, by the last day of the four-day trip, everyone had captained except for The Little Lady.  Bridges says, “Just before we started down that final rapid, an argument broke out on that couple’s raft, but since theirs was the last raft in our group, we soon were out of earshot and couldn’t learn what was going on.  My raft was the one directly ahead of theirs, so when we pulled up to the other rafts in the quiet water after running the last rapids, I turned back and saw an amazing sight.  The final raft was coming down — not always pointed forward and hitting a lot of rocks as it barreled through…but with The Little Lady calling out commands in a surprisingly loud voice.”

Everyone was speechless.  As the raft drifted up to us, we sat there silently as she called on her crew to back-water.  The raft turned slowly and bumped to a rest against ours.  The Little Lady was breathing heavily, although her husband looked as though he had stopped breathing some time ago.  “Well!” she said in the voice of someone who had just made up her mind about something.  “When we get back to the cars, I’ll be looking for a ride back to Denver!  Any offers?”

Transition starts with an ending — paradoxical but true.  Test this fact in your own experience.  Think of a big change in your life:  your first job, or the birth of your first child, or the move to a new house….  With the job, you may have had to let go of your old peer group.  They weren’t peers any more….  Perhaps you had to give up the feeling of competence….  With the baby, you probably had to let go of regular sleep, extra money, time alone with your spouse, and the spontaneity of going somewhere when you felt like it.  Here too your sense of competence may have come to an end as you found yourself unable to get the baby to eat or stop crying.  With the move, a whole network of relationships ended.  Even if you kept in touch, it was never the same again.  You used to know where to go for what:  stores, the doctor, the dentist, and the neighbor who’d keep an eye on the house when you were gone.  You have to let go of feeling at home for a while. 

Even in “good” changes, every transition begins with having to let go of something.

For a number of years Bridges’ wife Mondi lived with cancer and, ultimately, she died.  This is an entry she wrote in her journal:

Cancer is OK if you like beginnings.  Every day I have a new beginning.  Every day I exchange who I thought I was for who I am now.  I thought I was healthy; now I have cancer.  I thought I had a treatable local recurrence; now it is most likely incurable metastatic cancer.  For over 25 years I was a full-time therapist; now I am a part-time therapist.  Today I’m writing a paper to become a Jungian analyst; next week I may have to go on a leave of absence to have a bone marrow transplant.  Today my body feels strong and pain-free; in a month I may have the torture of chemotherapy.  Today I’m a vigorous and involved grandmother who likes to take grandchildren to Disneyland; next year I may be a grandmother who mostly looks on and delights in her grandchildren by watching and listening to them.

On the subject of death, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass once said that at least in many cases death is not so bad.  Death is not the enemy.  Death is more like taking off a pair of too tight shoes.  Every beginning starts with an ending.

The second stage of transition is the neutral zone.  In the aftermath of September 11^th, that’s where I hope we are now as a nation.  “Now is not the end,” said Churchill in 1942.  “It is not the beginning of the end.  But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”  Knowing now what happened in the years after 1942, it again may seem that war is inevitable; but I hope not.  Neutral zones are uncomfortable, often painful, and yet they are the times of creative incubation — the gap of time between the old life and the new, a time of disintegration and reintegration.

Our cultural tendency is to treat transition as one treats, say, crossing the street:  I’m here; I want to be there; and when given the opportunity I’m going to go there as quickly as possible; and I’m certainly not going to go halfway, sit down on the center line, and think things over.  And while that makes a great deal of sense when crossing the street, it is not the way things work in deeper emotional or social or spiritual changes.  There was a Dutch sociologist named van Gennep who coined the term “rites of passage.”  Human beings need ways of acknowledging change — when we are born, when we come of age, when we wed, when we die — and van Gennep said:

Although a body can move through space in a circle at a constant speed, the same is not true of biological or social activities.  Their energy becomes exhausted, and they have to be regenerated at more or less close intervals.  The rites of passage ultimately correspond to this fundamental necessity.

He’s saying that change must be given its due.  There must be ceremonies, rituals; and in our national life today we see that in the flag-flying and the quasi-religious appearances of Rudy Giuliani on Saturday Night Live, and no doubt we will have memorials for years to come.

The key to the neutral zone is that it cannot be rushed.  Often it involves time alone in the wilderness; a time of introspection and even doubt; a coming of age requires some solo vision quest; even a wedding requires a honeymoon.  And, so, as I said in my sermon two weeks ago, I am not anxious to see the quick return of Gary Condit or Jennifer Lopez or action movies or violent video games or any other of our distractions, anesthesias or bromides.  And while I wish our economy no ill and have some concern for my mutual funds, isn’t it a little odd to hear all these pep talks about getting back on the planes, getting back to work and — most importantly — going shopping?!  And while I’m all in favor of freezing their assets, and utilizing our special forces, and bringing perpetrators to justice, I’m sorry but I’m not chomping at the bit to bomb, pillage or widen this war.

In his work on transitions, Bridges says that the way to navigate all neutral zones — and again remember that we could be talking about transitions in jobs or homes or relationships or illnesses or deaths or national disasters or the time after any loss or ending — the way to cross the neutral zone is, first, to spend some time alone.  I find this interesting, by the way, because I am forever emphasizing the value of community and saying how important it is for us to be together but the truth is that this ought never be at the price of our solitude and time for reflection…we need both.  In addition to spending time alone, Bridges counsels that the neutral zone is also a time to notice — to notice how you’re feeling and what’s going on now.  Feeling sad and disoriented and confused and uncertain — and angry and determined and apprehensive — all these may be exactly what we’re supposed to be feeling.  Don’t suppress it. 

In one of his books, Bridges says:

For I had discovered that the future is part of the present, like one of those children’s puzzles in which strange objects are hidden in the everyday details of the drawing:  A swan is cruising up the living room curtains, an airplane dives into a woman’s wide hat, and George Washington’s head is right there in the rose bush outside the window.  The main thing to do is not to hurry up and figure things out, but just to center yourself and wait watchfully. 

The neutral zone is also a time to pause and remember who you are, what you stand for, what your values are, where you’ve been up to now.  The neutral zone is also a time to discover what it is you really want.  This is far less clear than we usually imagine.  What do you want, anyway?  And while we’re in the neutral zone, it’s the perfect time to ask ourselves, “What would be unlived in your life if it ended today?”  A tree or a building falls on you; you drop dead of heart failure.  It happens.  Awareness that it happens is a chance to open a new chapter.  And a final piece of advice for crossing the neutral zone is to literally take a few days to go on your own version of a passage journey.  Call it a retreat, a honeymoon, a vision quest, a vigil…but some time away to re-collect yourself, re-assess, re-new. 

There were six strategies for traversing the neutral zone in there:  spending some time alone; noticing what’s going on now; remembering who you are; discovering what it is you want; realizing what is unfinished; and, finally in some way, taking a journey.  Bear those strategies in mind when you’re in transition; when you’re in some neutral zone; bear them in mind now.

So, after Dennis Ahern sent me an email saying that he takes the fork tine and tine again, I told him to “keep writing that sermon, Dennis.  I need all the help I can get.”  And so he emailed me back:

I’d be glad to help you out.  Which door did you come in? Sheesh, I sound more like Groucho Marx every day.

(And Dennis continues…)

I’ve been thinking about roads taken and not taken.  It occurs to me that UUs are so often inclined to take the road less traveled, we may do so out of habit when perhaps we should be following the herd.  Who can say what was the right path on September 11th?  Or now?  Are we heading full-tilt for another Vietnam?  Should we bomb them back into the Stone Age when every picture we see makes it look like that would be an improvement on the present conditions?

After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up the houses of Parliament, the mob howled for Catholic blood.  Now we hear of self-proclaimed “Americans” attacking anyone who looks vaguely foreign on the off-chance they might be Muslim.  400 years and we are still plagued with ignorant bullies.

(And Dennis concludes…)

I wish I could help you out, John, but I’m a little tired these days.

Dennis’s mom died — of old age — a couple of weeks ago too.  He’s entitled to be a little tired.  So do we all.

And in the 37^th chapter of Genesis, it says, “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.  And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.  And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.  And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.  And he said unto him, What is thy name?  And he said, Jacob.  And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.  And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.  And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?  And he blessed him there.  Jacob named the place Peniel, ‘Because I have seen God face to face,’ he said, ‘and have survived.’”

Though tired, may we wrestle with our angels through the night even unto the break of day, seeking ever to call things by their true names and to know our own name.  So may we be blessed and — in every travail and transition — survive.  Amen.

Closing Words:

In a Norwegian fairy tale, the hero came to a crossroads where there are three signs:  “He who travels down this road will return unharmed;” “He who travels this path may or may not return;” and, “He who travels here will never return.”  Of course, he chose the third.