Dr. John Young                                                                                              5/24/09

UUCJ

Transitions

            What major transitions have you made in your life? These passages or crossings from one life stage to another are the turning points, black holes and roads not taken or taken, that in poet Robert Frost’s phrase “make all the difference.” How well we cope with these major changes become central to who we are and what we accomplish or fail in. They can be as abrupt as a nuclear explosion or as gentle as a musical modulation. These transitions vary from random movements, to systematic developments, to natural evolutions from one stage of life to another.

            At 18, I discovered the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who argued that “nothing endures but change, that a man’s character is his fate, that since all things are born through strife that from things that differ can come the finest harmony, and that you cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” In other words, reality IS continuing transitions.

            My first conscious transition was when I was 5. My younger brother was new-born and my older sister had married and left home. I perceived myself to be more on my own and needing to make my own way by hard work and taking responsibility for myself. Yet, my growing up was easy and sheltered compared to many others: same parents, home, neighborhood, and schools through high school, still living with my parents through college graduation, abet in a larger city. This combination of stability and a personal commitment to responsibility and hard work allowed me to become independent and self-assured, but also gave me a strong desire to live in intimacy with other people and in nurturing communities, and the will to find them and commit myself to them. By the time I left home at 21, I had already become an activist, a scholar, and a Unitarian Universalist.

            In the next three years of graduate school I caused ripples as an activist, dated a bunch of women, developed close friendships, and got through a graduate program, living in five different environments in three years, but my next transition was not chosen or planned but forced upon me. I failed my doctorate exams and was told to stop trying at that school. I got married anyway, but proposed again as a would-be seminary student instead of a successful professor. As with the end of my undergraduate love affair, others had gotten in the way of my dreams, and I needed to work through my disappointment, anger, and grief, and go on with my life. Fortunately, I had a woman who saw me through my failure, and I found a viable alternative quickly. In three months, I was a married man and a dedicated member of a new professional community, and this new program and career-track worked. I had learned from my graduate school failure and my earlier failure in love, and I made friends with my seminary professors and exceeded their expectations, and I made the compromises that I needed to make to see that my marriage worked.

            The transition to full-time minister and then father happened rather naturally, and I chose to leave my first full-time ministry in Bloomington, Indiana, as an appropriate step in the progress of my career after six years. However, what I had not bargained for was that I had been tremendously fortunate in the growth of deep friendships there, and I was, in effect, choosing to abandon those friendships because of my ambition. I discovered then, the agony of self-inflicted wounds.

Most of us have times in our lives when we make choices that seem right for facets of our personality and vision, but fly in the face of other needs and dependencies. You moved away from birth family and friends for a career. You gave up some of your central principles to preserve an intimacy. You chose love over career or children over spousal happiness. It’s wonderful when we can advance in harmony on all fronts, but such is rare and often fleeting. Life is full of hard choices and necessary sacrifices. You may be able to ‘have it all,’ or much of what you want, in a life-time, but rarely all at the same time, or accordingly to your youthful dreams or hoped-for schedules.

The next fourteen years in New Jersey mostly appear in retrospect as natural evolution. My children grew up; my marriage settled into a limited but usually bearable comfort-zone, and I poured myself into being a competent minister, activist as citizen and denominational leader, and very involved parent. My spouse and I were good partners and happy parents, and my career and my children and family seemed worth the sacrifice of a fair measure of my personal happiness. Perhaps there are people in this room who have not felt the need to make significant sacrifices of what they dreamed for or felt the need of in their lives, but probably not many. Most of us have years, perhaps generations where we give up some central dreams or severely limit them in order to approximate some of our other central goals.

In California in the 1990s, I got to help a good-sized congregation grow into a big one, have some exciting citizen achievements, and see my children mature into successful adults, but I finally could not bear my first marriage’s limitations, and I separated and then divorced. It was the most painful transition in my life. I chose it; I felt a great sense of failure, but I also, eventually, felt a tremendous sense of relief. As poet Mary Oliver says: “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” My life had taught me to love and to hold on for dear life, trying my hardest, being determined and persistent, but only in maturity am I beginning to learn to let go when it is time. Fortunately for me, Kathleen rescued me from confused isolation. I am not good at living by myself. I can do it, but I simply don’t enjoy it for long. I like being independent and self-directed, but I want and need to be so in community. So, I respect people who live alone, and I see the surface advantages of choosing to stand outside of community, but I do not choose either for any longer than circumstances force these states of being upon me.

These last 10 years in Jacksonville have once again felt like natural evolution, and our chosen transition to retirement in California close to the children and our first grandchild is a happy and planned choice. The economic turmoil certainly make us wonder how much we will need to cut our dreams down-to-size, but we will find ways to still live those dreams, they will just need to be more modest and mediated by part-time employment and fewer trips or other extravagances.

Novelist Edith Wharton provided an excellent prescription for maturity in her A Backward Glance, A Last Word: “In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

This has also been my experience. Be unafraid of change. Respond to change as an opportunity and a reoccurring form of grace, particularly when you feel devastated. Nurture your insatiable curiosity, particularly when you are surprised by changes. Why did you fail to see it coming? What was your part in what happened, and what can you learn from this disappointment? Particularly when life is not going well for you, get beyond you to the big things, look outward instead of obsessing about your own troubles and turmoil. And when your days are darkest, quietly insist on spending serious time in savoring all that remains to savor, which is abundant: nature, music, art, literature. There are still people who will help and communities that will care if you, too, will stick with them through thick and thin.

Spiritual maturity is developing daily practices that work, work in the bright sunshine of success and joy, the boredom of routine and feeling stuck, and the traumas of illness, failure, betrayal or abandonment. Successful spiritual practices help you to remain aware, alert, empathetic and involved. They give you daily happiness in small ways, even on your darkest days.

For me, the intimacies of a primary love relationship, family involvement, the embrace and commitment of a UU congregation and caring friends are essential constituents that empower my own faith, responsibilities and commitments. So, not long after I left my marriage, I went looking for a new love relationship. When the Sacramento congregation chose to abandon me, I went looking for a new congregation to serve. While I was in the midst of my agony and despair, I exercised, did my yoga, meditated and prayed, and kept active and involved with the people who stuck with me despite my failures. There are always people more in need than you; so, I taught adults to read, and I worked with dying people in hospice as a volunteer. When you are at your lowest point, I urge you to go looking for some one who is facing grief that you cannot even imagine bearing. It helps you to get perspective. Life is full of tragedy, but people in the worst possible circumstances still can find joy and seize hope. As Reinhold Niebuhr proposed, we do need the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, but almost every thing can at least be modified, and we need the courage to do what we can do, and the wisdom to distinguish between one and the other, and then, as Mary Oliver added, to have the grace and maturity to let go.

There are people who never can choose; who fail to ever commit themselves. No lover or friend is perfect; no community is without obvious faults. So, they drift through life, sometimes as sharp skeptics but usually successful only at effectively cutting themselves off from community and commitment and suffering from their largely self-inflicted wounds. In this 21^st world, changes come at the speed of light; so, we must carefully decide how much change we can successfully cope with, and shut out the excess and extraneous noise and chaos. But by mistaking mere difference for transformative change, these non-committers get, as Martin Luther said, “bees for flies and then hornets for bees.”

            As Percy Shelley had Prometheus say our human quest needs: “To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite; to forgive wrongs darker than death or night; to defy power, which seems omnipotent; to love, and bear, to hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates; this is to be joyous, beautiful and free; this alone is life, joy and victory.”