Sermons of David Leonard
THREADS OF CONTINUITY
Rev. David Leonard
Despite my philosophical affirmation of the primacy of change over permanence,
spiritually, the reverse is the case for me: I usually value the security and
definition of permanence over the excitement and uncertainty of change. Of
course, as always, it depends, and what I just said is more impressionistic and
a matter of guesswork than it is documented observation, but clearly I am aware
of the tension. To put it succinctly, what makes sense to me about the nature
of self, life and world is not always what I would like to have make sense
about them! To put it even more succinctly, sometimes reality sucks.
My hunch is that not much of this is foreign to your experience either, though I
may come at it from a different angle. From a variety of angles, really, since
I come from a variety of places, which, as my life has unfolded, has proved to
be a major issue with me. My father was a Methodist minister. I grew up knowing
the exigencies and chaos of parsonage life, the sense of living in a fishbowl,
and when I was sixteen I decided that the ministry was the last thing I would
ever do as a career. And while it looks as though I was right about that in
terms of work, spiritually, it was the frequency of change and the lack of
continuity that drove me into myself.
I talked a little about this last September. I have packed up and moved 27
times in my life (so far), and here I am doing intentional interim ministry.
Hello! How much sense does that make? Well, intellectually, it does make sense:
life is change. But emotionally and spiritually, I have come to value
permanence and continuity and I don't much like it.
The question becomes then, where do I find continuity? And it's a meaningful question for us all, since you, like I, have to come to terms with change, loss, aging and all those other characteristics that mark the unfolding of our lives. In fact, sometimes the word "unfolding" itself seems misplaced. We may instead experience our lives as a process of closing in upon ourselves, as we move toward the ultimate isolation of death. Change makes us aware of this flow of life, whichever way we may view it, and merely philosophically affirming its necessity and reality is not always enough to bring peace to our souls. We need some sense of continuity.
One of the places we might find it is in discerning a direction to our lives. While it's not really geographic relocation that is the issue for me, I thought it might be fun to plot out all my moves on a map. There is no constant direction or pattern among all those changes, but something like a picture did emerge. With the exception of two excursions to the south, the map of all my moving about defines an area roughly between the Vermont/New Hampshire border on the east and the Illinois River on the west, and above the Mason Dixon Line and south of the Great Lakes. My father was from Massachusetts and my mother was from Chicago, so culturally (which is a big part of feeling at home in a place) my life overlaps the Northeast and the Midwest. When I think about putting down roots, whatever that means, I should bear this in mind.
Our upbringing and acculturation, therefore, have something to do with setting our direction and whatever patterns we may see. When life isn't happy for us, we may imagine what it would be like to live someplace completely new to us-the prospect of novelty can excite us-but in so far as some direction has already been set, I think it's better to accept that direction and experiment from there. Whatever radical changes we make in our lives, we can never escape those dissatisfactions we carry with us.
Someone recently did a study of people who won large amounts of money in lotteries or sweepstakes. Those of us who never seem to win anything may believe that a million dollars would solve our problems, but in fact, when joy and satisfaction in life are the measure, those who win riches go back to the same spiritual and emotional (and sometimes economic!) states they were in before winning-in an average time of ten months or so.
Not that I would object to ten months of being fooled, but what I'm suggesting
is that continuity and peace of mind (if you want to call it that) are within
us, if they are realities at all, and we do not generally find happiness and
fulfillment in how the world treats us. How the world treats us can break the
pattern or render continuity invisible, but we need to look to our selves for
meaning.
This is not easy. Some of us cannot seem to find direction or continuity. We
strike off in different directions, try different things, change careers or
feel that our lives are fragmented, and we get lost. To find threads of
continuity in these circumstances means we need to examine our lives even more
closely, not asking ourselves necessarily why all these different directions,
but asking of what theme they might all be variations. In other words, as
disparate, fragmented and inconsistent as they may be, there may be some aspect
of life and self that holds them together and helps us to see their
interrelationship. Change and difference can distract our focus from what is
more fundamental.
In my experience, the most consistent and continuous strand of life and being that ties together all the meaningful events and circumstances of my existence is my sense of self. As I said in a sermon last fall, I feel that I am the same person looking out at the world through my eyes (and through my other senses) now, as I was when I was a child. It feels the same. Intellectually, I know that in many ways I am a different person than I was at age five-that imaginative and magical sense of wonder is more difficult for me to experience nowadays, for example-but it seems more that these kinds of changes have happened to me than that my fundamental self has changed on its own, if that makes any sense.
Others report a different experience, however. Some persons claim to be almost wholly different persons than they were as children. And while I cannot truly comprehend what that would feel like, I cannot dismiss it, so I resist the temptation to claim that my own experience of self is universal. A sense of self may be one of the strands of continuity for me, but it may not be one for others.
In all likelihood, these differences of perception and interpretation reflect differences of personality type. Some experts theorize that there are certain combinations of personality types that simply cannot understand each other (like, men and women?), but I would have to know the personality type of the experts to grapple with that! My hunch is that even those who experience themselves as changing have had that same sense of discontinuous selfhood their whole sentient lives. It may be built into us from birth, part of how we are individually wired.
So like so many other aspects of living, some part of the definition and continuity we look for in life is not so much to be found in life outside ourselves, but within. This is a hard thing to accept for those of us who seem to be in constant search for meaning out there somewhere in the cosmos. It can't be very satisfying merely to believe that the main thread of continuity in our lives might only be a question mark or our own shifting exploration of various possibilities of meaning. Of course, it is sometimes said that the only constant in life is change, but I have to think that our quest for continuity and permanence is something that is part of our natures, and despite what we know about the world, intellect and emotion do not always walk hand in hand.
In so far as the threads of continuity are what give us a sense of identity and meaning, we will need to accept the paradoxical condition that we ourselves are the ones who weave these threads, but that we are also merely finite human beings who will never know much of this for sure. We are in the strange position of needing to know ourselves to find meaning, but not having the capacity to know ourselves completely enough.
Thus we talk about faith. I do not mean faith in the sense of knowing something about the world that we cannot know in any other way, but faith in the sense of taking a chance on meaning. That too may be a thread of continuity for us, and as we search our own hearts and minds and as we reflect upon the vast diversity of our experience and the seeming fragmentation of the lives we live, putting all of it together is an act of faith. It is a spiritual decision. While we can never be absolutely certain or secure along our journeys, we do find some healthy measure of assurance in our commitment to pick up the strands we do in fact find within us and weave them into a life of wholeness and beauty.