"Change and Resiliency: A Sermon for Mother's Day"

As you heard in our time for all ages, I have been returning to the beginning this week. Returning to my breathing, returning to my sense of center, of grounding. In a city as big as this one, as I know we’ve talked about this week, it can be tough to find that center, especially at first. So it’s been a busy time for me, as through events all week I have had a chance to meet many of the members and friends of this congregation, from the board to the social justice committees to the youth in the coming of age program, as well as those of you who were able to come up and introduce yourselves after the Sunday service last week.  In between events, I’ve had a chance to take out my walking shoes and head for the ocean. Back home, I usually head up a bike path near our house and go to Spy Pond, which is actually a small lake. In the winter, which as you may know in Boston can last a good seven months of the year, the pond freezes over and kids from the neighborhood go ice skating on it. I’m told that the ice on the pond gets to be about ten inches thick. I think that is about how deep the blooming garden arbors of bougainvillea are in some of the neighborhoods I’ve walked in this week.

It’s quite a change.

As I’ve spoken with some of you this week, I’ve had a chance to hear how you came to be here, how you made that change, if it was a change at all. Many of you, more than I expected, are here because your families came here. You grew up here, some of you even grew up in this church. You were dedicated as a child here by the congregation’s seventh settled minister, Ernie Pipes, or the eighth, Judith Meyer, officiated at your wedding. You came to California years ago, you have parents and grandparents here. You have a history in this place.

Others are newer arrivals. Some of you are making a home here after other homes and lives in Georgia, Ohio, Washington, D.C., upstate New York, Chicago, Mississippi, Brooklyn. At one event this week, someone came up to me and said, You know, the real story of this city is about immigrants. It’s about making it in a new place, a foreign place, it’s about following your dreams and doing what you can to make a better life for yourself and your family. And if you go back far enough, we’re all immigrants. We all came from somewhere.

We all came from somewhere. It seemed like something worth repeating on Mother’s Day, for sure. We all come from somewhere.

There’s a new movie coming out this weekend about where we come from, actually, about where we come from in very general sense. It’s called Babies. Have you heard about this movie? It was timed to come out on Mother’s Day. A French filmmaker has made a documentary of four babies over the course of their first year of life, four babies from four different countries and cultures: Japan, the U.S., Mongolia, and Namibia. Of all of the movies I don’t need to see this year, you’d think this would be the one: after all, I’ve had a front-row seat to all year, as I’ve cared for my own baby, Miriam. Miriam, as many of you know, will celebrate her first birthday at the end of the month.

And today, as I think about change and resiliency, about where we come from and where we are headed, about what I have learned from the people who’ve raised me, and what I am passing on to my daughter, it makes sense to me to start at the beginning, at our common humanity, with our shared beginnings. After all, either we are babies, or, as A.O. Scott writes in his movie review, we are ex-babies. That is one place we all come from.

In this film, before our eyes, we watch four babies from four different cultures do what babies do: cry, and learn, and sleep, and grow, and just maybe, as Scott writes in his review, “remind the rest of us of the astonishing power that is our common birthright.” After all, he writes,

We are cast into [this] world as a bundle of reflexes, unable to focus our eyes, control our limbs or influence our environment in any way. Twelve months later we can walk, kiss, utter basic words and comprehend complicated utterances.

Please know that I speak with they eyes of mother of a one year old when I say to this gathering of former babies, you’ve come a long way!

It’s astonishing to me to think about all the changes Miriam has been through this year, from birth to nearly one year old. Yes, there is much more on the way – in the words our choir shared, A Change is Gonna Come in all the learning and growing to come in her life – but this should not eclipse in our minds the changes she’s already seen. The changes we former babies have all already seen.

Yes, we’ve come a long way since our first years.  I remember late last spring, when I was still very pregnant, riding the subway in Boston and just taking a moment to think about all the folks on the train with me.  Perhaps here in LA it would be thinking about all the drivers in all the other cars on the freeway – and taking a moment, and looking around, and wondering about what all these drivers in all these cars were like as babies, and the mothers that carried them, and the parents and neighbors and friends that raised them.

We all come from somewhere.

This morning I wanted to talk about change and resiliency. I wanted to talk about what it takes to weather changes big and small, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the changes this community has already weathered – how far this congregation has come to be at this point in its history, considering calling its ninth settled minister.

And to talk about managing change and crisis in Southern California is to quickly enter the realm of earthquakes. Some of you have asked me about my earthquake experiences this week, and shared a memorable story about your previous minister’s installation the day before a big earthquake. Since I grew up in Japan, another part of the world subject to earthquakes, I can remember as a young child participating in earthquake drills. As I recall, we would go to the side cabinet in our classroom, get our bright yellow hard hat helmets, and then quietly sit beneath our desks.  This seemed quite orderly to me. I don’t remember ever experiencing an earthquake at school, however, so I asked my mom if she had any earthquake advice. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and here is what she wrote:

[My first earthquake in Japan was not] long after our August arrival in 1974, two weeks after our wedding, hoping that I don't blow up the place learning how to turn the gas hot water heater on and off, hoping that I might someday be able to communicate in this strange new language, and wondering what I have done marrying this man I think I'm in love with whom I've barely spoken to in international phone calls over the last several months. [Your father] laughs that the first real turning point in knowing that we were capable of learning and growing together was when yet another minor earthquake shook the flimsy little building and I ran over to steady the spider plant I'd hung in our bedroom instead of grabbing him.

I'm not a big fan of earthquakes-- for tornadoes, you can hide out in the basement, but gradually I developed a philosophical approach. Either it's not The Big One, and it's going to be OK. Or it is the Big One, and we'll find out soon enough if it's OK or not. It's really not worth much extra anxiety, but it's a good idea to fasten bookshelves to walls and not put valuable things in high places.

We all come from somewhere, and I come from a family that eventually learned how to steady the spider plant and reattach bookshelves.  In some ways, resiliency, managing hard times, managing change, for me is all about coming to understand what I can control and what I can’t. It’s about the changes we’ve already seen, and how we’ve faced them, and what we’ve learned.

Perhaps some of you have discussed where you’ve been in your life, what you’ve survived – and I think we are all survivors of one kind or another -- in the Building Your Own Theology class that was recently held here, and I’m glad to hear it. Because it is hard work to opening up a space in this community for people who come from so many different places, for viewpoints and life experiences all along the religious spectrum. In our liberal religious faith, we are called to create a sense of spiritual spaciousness, and this requires us to be willing to walk alongside one another even when we don’t share a common theology, or a common philosophy.  Our differences can draw us together as much as our similarities do, but it’s not easy. 

It’s not easy, because we all come from somewhere, spiritually, religiously, theologically, and some of those places are pretty painful. Some of those stories are hard to share. But my commitment -- our shared commitment, as Unitarian Universalists -- is to learn how to listen, learn how to offer compassion, and learn how to make room at the table for one another, no matter where we come from.  This is how we can come to understand the changes we’ve already been though, and the changes that are gonna come, as a part of life, of being human. And this understanding, this compassionate listening and telling of important stories, is the beginning of how we can become resilient, not only as individuals, but as a community.

And this is important, my spiritual companions, this is important because not only do we all come from somewhere, but we are also all going somewhere, too.

In the 1600s, when the Puritans who are our spiritual ancestors first arrived on the shores of Massachusetts, they wrote a covenant, a set of religious promises they made not to a higher power, but to one another.  Among other things, they promised to “walk together in mutual love and affection.” Their promises are in an old document from a different time, but they continue to shape our congregations to this day. Maybe you are new to this community, as I am, or maybe you have been a member for more than a half century. Almost certainly you have seen a lot of change in your life, changes in yourself, changes in the world around us.  No matter where you are, where you come from, or where you are going, there is an invitation here for you to walk with this community, to bring all of who you are, your similarities and your differences, your questions and your convictions, into this conversation about what is truly meaningful about our lives, about who we are, who we are to one another, and about the kind of world we want to build.

This community has already faced many changes. And because change along is unchanging, more will certainly come. But I believe that when we decide to walk together, when we challenge and support one another in living out our values and honoring our commitments to one another and the larger world, when we stay in conversation, when we speak honestly and listen loudly, our lives are immeasurably richer.

Today you have my gratitude for opening your homes and your hearts to me and my family this week. Today I celebrate how far we’ve come, and the adventures of the journey to come. It is the beginning of what I hope will be a long and rewarding conversation, and an adventurous and enriching journey.

In the words of our Puritan ancestors, across the centuries and across the country, from the rocky shores of Massachusetts to the sunny beaches of Santa Monica, my hope is that we too, may learn to walk together.

May it be so.