ARE WE THERE YET?

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 16, 2003


It seems like this past week has pretty much run the “full spectrum” of ministry for me. This morning’s child dedication service has been scheduled for a month, but you can never tell when someone is going to be critically ill in the hospital, and then there was also a couple who wanted to talk with me about possibly officiating at their wedding next summer, while on Wednesday it seemed like I spent the entire day on the bus to and from New York City with Bob and Ernie and Tom and the folks from Religious Witness for the Earth, so that we could learn more about what we might do to help prevent Global Warming. But it gives me particular pleasure to share the service this morning with our Coming-of-Age candidates and their mentors.

I think I was probably about 13 or 14 myself when my family stopped attending the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California on a regular basis. Sometimes when I tell this story I like to make it sound a little more dramatic than it probably was, but basically my father (who first started attending University Unitarian Church in Seattle after hearing the minister there, Aaron Gilmartin, speak at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956) decided that he’d had enough after a handful of long-haired, bare-footed anti-war activists came down from Berkeley to conduct the service one Sunday morning because our regular minister was still in jail after being part of a group who the previous day had tried to stop a troop train bound for the Oakland Alameda naval air terminal which they thought was filled with soldiers on their way to Vietnam. And although it was never really clear to me whether it was their politics or their grooming (and hygiene!) that my father really objected to, after that Sunday he simply stopped accompanying us to church, and what at one time had been a delightful family activity (often including pancakes afterwards) became just another chore for my busy mother...so when we moved back to the Seattle area again a year or so later, we just never got back into the habit.

Which was fine with my two younger brothers, both of whom still like to sleep late on Sunday mornings. But I was just getting to the age where I was starting to become curious about spiritual matters, so I was thrown back on my own devices, which basically consisted of whatever I could find on TV (which, thankfully, in those days wasn’t much), and a Gideon Bible stolen out of a motel room during a High School debate trip, and an occasional pass past the booktable at the Eastshore Unitarian Church, which was only a few miles from our home, and just so happened to be about half-way between my house and my girlfriend’s, where I would sometimes ride my bicycle on Sundays, timing my ride so as to arrive at the church just as the services were letting out. And to make a long story short, I eventually ended up going to Divinity School and spending a total of 17 years in college and earning five liberal arts degrees, all because I missed out on going through the regular coming-of-age program in my home church when I was younger.

So parents, take note and be forewarned -- if you want your children to end up as architects or investment bankers (like my younger brothers), or perhaps in some other respectable profession, instead of becoming outspoken, overly-educated, poorly-dressed political radicals like myself, either let them sleep late, or else make certain that they get the whole course of treatment here, rather than simply letting them catch the bug and then allowing that spiritual “dis-ease” run its course. And while I could list a whole lot of other reasons why it’s best to bring them to church than to let them sleep, remember also that it doesn’t hurt to take them out to eat afterwards either. Because the really important thing is that you are doing it together, as a family.

In any event, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to speak directly to the youth of our church this morning, since you are a very important of our larger church community, yet we don’t really see you here on Sunday mornings as often as we might like to. And this is only normal: teenagers are naturally a lot more interested in one another than they are in hanging out with a lot of geezers like me, as all of us who were ever teenagers once ourselves will readily remember. In America, at least, adolescence is that period of our lives when we stand on the threshold of adulthood, exploring for the first time an identity and a relationship to the world which is NOT fundamentally defined and constructed by our parents. And in this transition from Dependence to Independence, there typically comes a phase of rebelliousness, or “Counter-dependence,” when we test for ourselves both our own limitations and those limits we sometimes believe have been arbitrarily imposed by others. And when we have finally sorted out all those issues, and feel at last like we know who we are, and what we stand for, and what we can and want to do with our lives, there’s an even bigger challenge ahead of us, which is the realization of our Interdependence -- the acknowledgment that we all rely on one another in more ways than we can possibly know, and the task of learning how best to become responsible members of a much wider community.

So if you sometimes hear your parents, or some other adult complain that “youth is wasted on the young,” I hope you will have the presence of mind to remind them that it is also “never too late to have a happy childhood.” Because remaining “Young at Heart,” even as we grow in years, is something we should all aspire to all our lives. And this is something far different from compensating for advancing age through immature behavior. Remaining perennially young at heart has to do with retaining that child-like fascination with discovering new things, and being able to delight in them. Which is, of course, profoundly different from simply acting childishly. Childish individuals never seem to learn to take responsibility for their own behavior. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else is always to blame. And yet somehow they never seem to get what they deserve either.... But people who can remember how to remain young at heart all their lives are grateful for every new day. They just seem to know, intuitively, how to take innocent pleasure in simple things, and both their innocence, and their pleasure, are contagious.

There is a second quality I would encourage you to cultivate as well, and this is the ability to be “Wise Beyond Your Years.” Someone once told me that the biggest difference between Life and School is that life gives the test first, and teaches the lesson afterwards. The older we become, the more lessons we must learn through trial and error, and failure often becomes our greatest teacher, because it FORCES us to look at ourselves in a more “critical” light. One of the key struggles of becoming an adult is determining how we will respond to failure and disappointment. Do we respond childishly: growing frustrated and throwing tantrums, blaming everyone and everything but ourselves, and then expecting sympathy? Or do we pick ourselves up, take a good long look around us and within ourselves, figure out what we did right, what we did wrong, what we might have done differently, and then try again? Talent is great (as far as it goes), but no one is ever so talented that they never come up short. Persistence and tenacity are the indispensable keys to our eventual success in almost every endeavor; simply “sticking with it” until, over time, we learn how to work both smarter AND harder, and with more efficient effort, avoiding the big mistakes and leaning from the little ones, while concentrating on doing those things most likely to give us the best results.

The trouble is that life generally doesn’t give us enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make in order to know everything need to know. And so we also need to learn how to learn from the mistakes of others, and this is what I mean by becoming “Wise Beyond Our Years.” The great blessing of youth is that it feels as though we are discovering the entire world for the first time, seeing it with fresh eyes as though it has never been seen before. And yet, we are what’s new; the world itself has been around for a long time -- long before any of us were even born -- and it will continue to be here long after all of us are long gone. A lot of folks have been here before us, and their wisdom -- the lessons learned from countless lifetimes of triumphs and failures -- is a gift to us, a legacy from our ancestors that can save us all a lot of suffering if only we can discover for ourselves how best to draw upon it.

The good news is that the same quality that allows us to remain young at heart also helps us to become wise beyond our years. And this quality is our capacity for Empathy, and Compassion...the ability to feel what another person is feeling and to sympathize with them, without losing touch with who we are and the differences or boundaries between us. It’s the most important lesson we can learn: how to live in that place where our Independence and our Interdependence come together, so that we know that we can depend on those around us, and that they can depend on us...how to love and be loved, how to be a part of the whole, and yet whole within ourselves. So practice it as much as you can. Learn to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, try to see things from their perspective, imagine what it would be like if you were them. Or better yet, learn how to ask others what they are thinking and feeling, and learn how to listen to what they say. No matter how smart or clever you may be, everyone you meet knows something that you don’t; and if you can just learn how to listen, how to pay attention to what they are really saying, they just might teach it to you. And then you will be able to share in their success, or at least avoid making the same mistake twice. And this will make you wise beyond your years.

I know I’ve said a lot this morning, and a lot of it has probably sounded both really obvious and maybe a little cryptic too, but there’s one last thing I want to say to you this morning, something which almost goes without saying. But one of my favorite books is called “Wherever You Go, There You Are” -- which is a clever way of saying that you can travel anywhere in the world: to New York or Hollywood, Paris or Rome, even Zanzibar on the Far Side of the World...but when you get there, it’s still the same old you. So learn how to Be Here Now, and to be somewhere else later, and you’ll do fine. My old girlfriend, the one whose house was on the other side of the Unitarian Church, used to call this being “Intimate With the Moment” -- being totally alive in the here and now, without thinking so much about what happened yesterday, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. And yes, there’s a difference -- an important difference -- between living IN the moment, and living only FOR the moment...but I’m afraid you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourselves, just like all of the rest of us. But while you’re working on that, I just want you to know, on behalf of everyone in this Church, that we’re glad you’re here, and we’re on your side. We’re all very proud of who you are, and we’re all very excited to find out what kind of persons you are going to become.


PRAYER (by Bonnie Greer & Chris Eutizzi, RN)

Margie's Prayer (final version)

Divine Love. You have given the gift of Nurture to humankind. We pray now that you would help us to take the time to nurture our own bodies, and minds, and spirits. We have all lived long enough to realize that unless we pause in the busy-ness of our days, we have little left to give to others from our stretched, and stressed, and impoverished souls. We know that we are spiritual beings, and that the spirit cannot die. So help us to feed all that would make us whole. And may our time of quiet energize us to accept life as it comes to us.

Spirit of Life, we ask for Strength, for Wisdom, for Courage, for Healing that we may use our days to show our appreciation for the many gifts we receive from Your presence in our lives. We thank you for the gift of friendship, and pray that You would encourage us, and heal each one of us, wherever we most need Your healing touch. We ask especially that You would heal Margie of her discomfort and her pain. Take away her worry and her anxiousness, and help her to look to You for everything that she needs.

God our Creator, we know that this life is just a brief moment in time. Help us to live "eternally-minded," knowing that our greatest pleasure and desire in this world is to be reunited with You. We praise You for the love that binds the McCormick family together. Thank you for Bill's devotion, commitment, and abiding love for Margie. Margie's enduring love for Bill has been a constant source of comfort and joy in her life. Thank you for the dedication that Bill and Margie have for their children, Erin and Shelley, and for all the loved ones in their lives. And thank you for Margie's warmth and love. ---------Nov. 20, 2003