“Surprise!”: Healing from Sudden Loss

Sometimes the sermon I prepare to give turns out not to be the most obvious or maybe even the right one for the day. Lots of folks in my congregation were celebrating the decision overturning Prop. 8 here in California that came last Wednesday afternoon, just as I was finishing up a writing process that because of other commitments needed to be finished. I wondered this morning, would it still be OK to preach what I had, which was something darker? But this is what came forth and I reminded myself, you never know what will speak to someone’s deepest need. May the secret alchemy of words and breath and presence of the gathered community be what is needed here and now.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

“Surprise!”: Healing from Sudden Loss

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
August 8, 2010

The poet Mary Oliver has told us,
in those words we just shared together:

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.
(Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods.”)

And this is hard enough, isn’t it?
This is the work of a lifetime,
and I’m not sure it ever gets easier,
though, with grace and practice, we may get better at it.

It’s harder still when the loss takes us by surprise.
I want to speak today about the losses and challenges and struggles
that come when we are not expecting them, without warning—
the moments of “Surprise!”
that aren’t fun like a birthday party is fun,
or a phone call from a long-lost friend,
or whatever else might bring us delight in that moment of surprise.
Because sometimes we do get surprises that aren’t so fun.
Maybe we find out we’ve been furloughed or laid off from our job.
Or we get our property tax assessment in the mail
and find out our home has lost even more of its value this year.
This has happened to a lot of folks in our community.
Not so fun.
Maybe we are diagnosed with a serious illness.
A relationship ends.
Someone close to us dies suddenly.
This is the kind of surprise that can shake us to the core.
We’re thrown into disequilibrium.
That which seemed to be stable
is revealed to be profoundly unstable.
Change happens,
and all of a sudden fear may be present in our bodies and our minds:
fear of loss,
fear of separation from what we love,
fear of our own death.

Questions well up out of shock and loss
and demand with a desperate urgency to be answered:

What can I really trust?
Where am I safe?
How can I stop this hurting?

And this is where religion comes in,
because the heart of all religions is to try to answer those questions
that all of us have to struggle with
at those times when the phone rings
with bad news on the other end of the line,
or when we wake up alone in the dark of night,
shivering with nameless fears.

I’ve thought a lot about what our Unitarian Universalist religion
has to offer us when we need it most.
We have come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
and many of us still take very deep comfort in faith
in a God who loves us and will never leave us:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
(Psalm 23)
This is a heritage that belongs to us as much as anyone else.
I think of our familiar benediction that begins,
For all who see God,
may God go with you.
And even those of us who are no longer able to be
in that place of faith in a God of infinite love—
we may still reach out to a presence we can scarcely name
to be with us even in the hardest and scariest times.
We may intuit that beyond this world of change and loss
there is something more real than anything else,
something that lasts, a presence we can rely on,
to which we belong forever and always in love.
And here is true safety,
no matter what is happening around us.
Here we are safe.

***

Yet, for many of us, perhaps at different points in our lives,
this may not be a path we can walk with integrity.
We may find no comfort in turning to God or a divine presence.
It’s not our fault or the fault of the universe;
it just is.
And where can we turn then?

For me, what’s been most helpful
has been turning to the Buddhist tradition,
which has looked so deeply into suffering and liberation
and which doesn’t ask us to believe in God,
or not to believe in God.
It simply asks us to practice and pay attention to what happens.

Thousands of years ago, the Buddha taught
that everything in life is always changing.
Nothing lasts, nothing is stable; everything changes.
We live our lives in this world where nothing lasts,
not even that which we love most deeply,
and so we have to learn how to let go.
This is not easy.

So, with enormous compassion for all of us
who are suffering and struggling,
the Buddha taught that we can start to free ourselves from suffering,
we can learn how to live with the pain of shock and fear and loss
and find openness and relief and the most beautiful peace,
with a practice that is so simple, you could hardly believe it:
We sit quietly
and practice simply noticing what is happening
in our mind and body,
not judging, just noticing and naming and accepting.
If we feel fear, notice where the fear is manifesting in our body.
We can pay attention in a kind way;
we can be calm and curious and ask ourselves,
what’s happening right now?
Is our chest tight? That’s fine. We don’t have to judge that.
We just name it with a sort of friendly curiosity: “Chest is tight.”
We ask: what else is happening?
Our heart is racing: we name it: “Heart beating very fast.”
Our arms are rigid: we name it: “Arms rigid.”

We feel our emotions: waves of fear radiating, pulsing:
and again we name them with kindness and acceptance:
“fear radiating through my chest.”
Anger, sadness. We name them.
We may notice these sensations and emotions ebb and flow.
They may be very intense for a time
and then back off,
and then come back, and so on, always changing.
We may start to notice that even our pain and suffering
is always changing. It comes and goes. There are moments of ease.
Everything changes, and so this pain will not last either.
We will not always feel the way we are feeling now.

As we sit quietly and pay attention,
we can also begin to speak to the suffering inside of us.
We might say gently to ourselves,
I care about you.
I care about this suffering.
I embrace this pain with compassion.
This can be deeply healing,
especially for those of us who are prone to judge ourselves
for whatever it is we’re feeling.
[This section was deeply inspired by my reading of Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (New York: Bantam, 2003).]

All this is not the work of a minute or an hour.
When we get a really bad shock,
we get thrown into confusion and fear and instability.
It takes time for us to take in what’s happening around us
and feel it and help ourselves adjust.

But with time and patience, a new way forward may emerge.
If you can stay with it, keep paying attention to what is welling up inside of us,
keep an open heart,
eventually something will be revealed,
some way that you can live creatively with what is now.
When something big changes,
I think you have to sit with the new reality, the new situation,
and allow it to reveal itself to you.
It has to let you know how it would like to be in your life,
how you might work with it with grace.
And that takes time, but if we can be in that waiting space
with compassion and love for ourselves,
something may shift inside you.
Some kind of new direction, some kind of solution may be revealed,
and all of a sudden something clicks
and your life is whole again.

And maybe we have learned to trust more deeply.
As we experience more deeply
the truth that life is always changing,
as we connect with our own ability
to work in a brave and loving way with what is now,
we may see that this new equilibrium we have found,
this new wholeness and right path will not last forever,
but it is here now
and you can dance with it now.

I say “dance,” and that surprises me a little, maybe,
but then again not really.
Years ago I spent a lot of time ballroom dancing,
and one of the most important things I learned
was how to follow a lead.
When I first started dancing,
I tried to predict what my partner was going to do.
I would try to anticipate and do the right step,
and what often happened was, I would step on my partners’ toes
and crash into them.
As I learned and became more proficient,
I found I had to clear my mind
of expectation about what was going to happen,
so that I could be available to react in the moment
to what was actually happening.

And I have found this to be true of life in a deeper way too.
If you clear your mind of expectations
about what is going to happen,
you become available to react in the present moment
to what is actually happening.
Quiet the mind.
Become aware and available to what is.

And what may emerge is a sense of peace, comfort,
expansion, and safety within your own heart.
You are your own refuge, your deepest place of safety—
and I don’t mean the small and separate you,
but that within you
which is our heart open and soft
and connected to the Great Compassion that dwells in us all.
And so we can say, because we have lived it,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me and within me.

In our teaching story today,
we heard the story of a young person who learned
that happiness is the union of all that has been given us.
[“The Zither,” retold by Margaret Silf in One Hundred Wisdom Stories from around the World (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003), pp. 49–50.]
This is a strange teaching
when what we have been given includes a full measure of pain.
But Behold, I tell you a mystery.
We have sung it together many times:

For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise,
for all life is a gift.
For sorrow we must bear,
for failures, pain and loss...
we come with praise and thanks
for all that is our life.
(Singing the Living Tradition #128 For All That Is Our Life.)

We sing because we know this is true,
and we know it because we have lived it,
and we have lived it because everyone has to,
because this is what it means to be alive.

The words of Mary Oliver that we shared together
come from a poem that also speaks of mystery. She speaks of

the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation...
(Mary Oliver, "In Blackwater Woods.")

So, through dislocation and loss—
through the fire of suffering,
when everything is stripped away
but that which cannot be taken from us,
we discover
infinite compassion
an open heart
our deep and holy connection to all that is
love.

***

The sermon time concluded with a guided meditation
called “Meeting Fear,” adapted from Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance.

Namaste: the divine in me honors the divine in you.
Amen.