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Sermon Index

IN-BETWEEN TIMES

by the Reverend Phyllis L. Hubbell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 26th of August 2001

To every thing, turn, turn, turn,
There is a season, turn, turn, turn,
and a time for every purpose
under heaven.

Turn, turn, turn. Summer is a time of turnings. Children graduate from school and become teenagers. Teenagers graduate from school and become adults. Adults fall in love and marry. Others feel free to divorce now that children have graduated from school. People of all ages pick up their things and move next door, into the suburbs and back again, across the country. For some, it is a time to begin retirement. Later, still, perhaps, summer becomes the time to prepare to sell a home where one may have lived a lifetime to move into an apartment or a retirement home.

These are the times psychology and religion call liminal times. Times in which we stand at the threshold. We are neither child nor teenager; neither teenager nor adult. Neither employed nor quite yet fully retired. We are living in the in-between times. Such times may be happy or sad, but they are often filled with uncertainty. We wonder what the future will bring. We may face important decisions. Money may be tight. We may be lonely. We may worry whether we are making the right decision, and even if we are quite sure, we may find tensions from new relationships we never envisioned.

Kathleen Norris, poet and essayist, has written a new book, The Virgin of Bennington an autobiographical account of the years she stood on the threshold of becoming a poet. Norris led a sheltered life before she left Hawaii to go to college at Bennington, in Vermont. Books, music, and family had filled her life up to this point. Norris had chosen Bennington partly because its undergraduate school students were all women. There she planned to immerse herself once more in her studies, never considering that living in a dorm hundreds of miles away from her parents would require her to develop a life of her own. Norris also was unprepared for the pervasive culture of drugs and sex she was to encounter there. She felt totally alone, afraid. She writes:

I felt that I had died, and considered other people dense for not recognizing this, and for treating me as if I was still alive. One morning, in great distress, I rang the doorbell of the campus apartment of the admissions director. Finding me on her doorstep blubbering with tears, she appeared surprised that a young woman who had confidently quoted Emily Dickinson, Soren Kierkegaard, and Albert Camus in her application essay was just a homesick adolescent. She invited me in for a breakfast I could hardly eat, listened well, and then kindly advised me that the decision over whether or not to remain at school was one I might make on a trial basis every morning, in the hope that the way would be clear before me. Can I stay here one more day? Probably. Most likely. That became the mantra that got me through the next few months.

I have spoken of these threshold moments as though there were clear demarcations. But often they go on for years. Norris got through the next few months. But the larger threshold Norris faced at Bennington was the hallway before adulthood, discovering who she was and confirming her calling. It was the letting go of self-absorption caused by fear, loneliness, and lack of direction. It was developing a sense of relationship with others and the world.

These are tasks all of us faceCand, to some extent, continue to faceCall our lives. Indeed, the more I thought about this topic this summer, the more I felt that most of us stand at some threshold. We may not be facing an obvious passage marriage, divorce, children, new job, unemployment but inside we may already be confronting our next stop.. How apt are the words of an early Church theologian, Philo of Alexandria, who advises us, as quoted by Norris, "to always 'be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.'"

So what battles are you and I fighting this morning? If some of us would not concede to battles in our lives, perhaps then at least we would admit to some skirmishes? A return to school? Marriage? Having children? Changing jobs? Divorce? Moving? Taking in a parent? Retirement? Retirement home?

The gestation period for these decisions is often lengthy and filled with fears and regrets. Even if we believe a better future awaits us.

The promise of the church is that we need not make these difficult decisions alone. Our fundamental commitment to one another in our faith is to walk together. We may be miles apart in our religious beliefs. We may be struggling with the same issues or have resolved ours long ago. But our commitment is to try be here for one another. To share but not impose our own hard-earned lessons. To tell the truth in love. To listen. And it is to come together in worship week after week to create a holy place where we each can come in all our imperfections and be surrounded by grace.

The hook is that we cannot get all that out of church unless we make a larger commitment than attending once or twice a month for an hour. Perhaps I shouldn't say that. Some of us may find exactly what we need in that occasional attendance. We may have an epiphany on one particular Sunday. We may hear just the words we need to hear perhaps from the pulpit, but just as likely from something that comes to us during the music or the silence.

But many need something more, or maybe not more, but different. An epiphany can happen in an instant, but usually an epiphany comes only after we have prepared the ground.

After graduating from Bennington, Kathleen Norris moved to New York City. There she took a job working at the Academy of American Poets. This brought her into contact with the world of poets and poetry. By night, she lived the good life, which included experimenting with drugs and sex. But by day, she was developing a relationship with several women mentors. These women loved her through those tentative 20s. They gently called her again and again to consider what her life was about. What kind of life was good for her poetry? What kind of life was good for her?

She also had her poetry. Norris writes that when she came to New York she didn't know yet what she wanted. She believed that she would work for a few years, until she got "serious about making a living." Then she would "return to school and pursue a career." It was natural for a girl in her 20s to lack the confidence that she could succeed as a poet. It was natural for her to be attracted to a life of late-night parties. But her desire and her gift now helped ground Norris. One day, someone asked her why she was at a particularly troubled nightclub scene. She was ready for the question. She never went back. She began to make decisions that would support her work, pulling back from the late nights and the drugs.

Her poetry eventually led her to an unlikely move from New York City, full of restaurants and late night jazz clubs, to the quiet beauty of South Dakota, where her grandmother's house sat empty after her death. In South Dakota, Norris found community and roots that brought depth to her writing and her soul. Norris learned to knit and bake bread. A casserole she baked was a semi-finalist in a county fair. She began attending her "grandmother's Presbyterian church" and found she "loved hearing scripture read aloud" and singing the old Protestant hymns. Pulled from the rich diversity of New York's streets, she found a different kind of diversity. She writes:

In a single day I might converse not only with a neighbor's small children but with their great grandparents. I began attending baptisms, weddings and funerals on a regular basis ... [I inherited a ] generation of elderly friends ... along with the house. My grandmother had noted the seventy-fifth birthday of a neighbor on the kitchen calendar, so I took a bouquet of flowers my grandmother's columbines, which had survived my ineptitude as a gardener to help her celebrate the day. I was not prepared for the emotional reaction I received. My grandmother had been her best friend, the woman tearfully explained, and after she died she did not expect that many people would remember her birthday.

It is in this unlikely place, cut off from "culture" (as I have always identified it) that Kathleen Norris found her grounding. It is here that she found words to place on paper. It is here that she became or at least began to become who she is today.

Community, mentors and church provided Kathleen Norris with the grounding she needed to become the person she needed to be to become a writer. There were epiphanies along the way, but they came because the ground had been worked.

Church is a place that provides that grounding to move us over the thresholds of our lives, but it needs consistency and depth to work its best. Among its blessings are the possibility of finding and becoming mentors and friends. Friendships nurtured not just on Sundays, but in between. Columbines given and received. Late-night conversations about things that matter. Shared food. Bread broken. Church provides a community in a world where community rarely exists anymore. We may not miss that community when life is at its best, but when chaos enters our lives, it is the grounding that helps us continue in uncertainty if we must and find our way through in the end.

That's not all, of course. Church provides a setting for the holy to visit. It is true that the holy may come any time, any place. We may work toward experiencing the holy throughout our days. But in the midst of the tumult of our days, church makes us slow down and surrounds us with love. Church surrounds us with beauty in words spoken and signed, in music, in stained glass windows. And every Sunday, church calls us back to what matters, inviting us to be a part of something grander than ourselves, reminding us that we too are grand. Attending child dedications, weddings, memorial services. Laughing, singing, playing, and working with members of all the generations. Hearing the wisdom and the struggles of the young, middle aged, and old. The thresholds we face become less threatening. They become at their best opportunities. Now and then, they become holy. They become part of this mystery we call life.

To every thing, turn, turn, turn,
Th ere is a season, turn, turn, turn ...

May we approach each new season with curiosity and joy. Ready for growth. Ready for change. Searching for blessings. May peace rest inside us, while turmoil surrounds us. May friends accompany us. May the holy beckon us. May love sustain us.

Amen.