Sermon “Total Transformation”

The Rev. Rali Weaver

Easter 2009

First Church and Parish in Dedham

We are here together this morning on the forming edge of springtime. Haven’t you noticed it? The birds are getting louder each morning the temperature warmer and you can sometimes drop your hat and coat and gloves and begin to thaw.

There is a total transformation happening all around us.

What is Easter, or for that matter Passover (both of which are celebrated this week) if not recognitions of the ultimate transformation we are all capable of. Passover representing the Israelites transformation from slave into free persons while Easter represents the final transformation of death into life.

This raises the question of what it might take for each of us to totally transform?

There would probably be a wide variety of answers for each of us.

For instance, if I desire to transform into a thinner me it would require a discipline of exercising and eating right. If I desire to transform into a more organized, more intentional me, I would only need focus on the tasks ahead, attend to lists and calendars and clocks, put things away and in doing this spend time every day becoming so.

Our culture gives us the idea that all we need to do is set goals and if we prioritize and put our intentions behind anything we can become it.

Aristotle is quoted as saying “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Television shows such the one on MTV titled “Made” where a teen decides they want to be something different encourages this idea. A hip hop dancer, a cheerleader whatever the adolescent articulates as their heart’s desire --MTV sends a coach to help them become. Over weeks of struggle, with lessons and trials and a few uncomfortable temper tantrums they are usually (at least temporarily) transformed into whatever it was they wanted to be.

This how many people believe transformations happens. Transformation takes planning, lessons, struggle, intentionality. When we point ourselves in the direction we want to go and we consciously direct our energies in that way we eventually arrive.

I have spent most of my life living by this formula. Dream it. Plan it. Work toward it. Become it.

But today I actually believe we are here to celebrate the transformations beyond our habit or control.

The ones we can only wish and hope for. The ones we have no idea how to make happen have no roadmap for and which happen without our planning.

As Unitarian Universalists I believe our Easter and our Passover challenge us to this type of transformation. The one that opens our hearts to allow the space for our soul to slip forth to face the next journey of life-- whatever that may be -- with our hearts and minds open wide.

You might call these transformations of the soul or of the spirit.

Today, as we remember those who have helped us and those we have lost and hold up our hopes for the future we are in fact practicing the art that is required to unfetter our spirits. It is somewhere within the ambiguity that lies between our hopes and our losses that we find the space required to totally transform our souls.

One example of this ambiguity emerges from within the wilderness the Israelites travel for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land.

Another in the transition between the end and a new beginning that we find at Easter.

Both Passover and Easter begin with a death of some kind.

At Passover it is the death of expectations that takes place. The Israelites must leave behind everything that is familiar. They left behind leavened bread, comfortable bedding, recognized enemies to travel in the wilderness of uncertainty between the world of what they knew and an unknown Promised Land. In the stories that are retold every year we are reminded of that transformation from slave to a free people that cannot happen overnight but takes years to manifest.

At Easter it is a physical death of the body that takes place. From the beginning of Lent through to Easter we are reminded of the impermanence of every human life. Jesus dies upon the cross; there is the empty and grief filled night. Some accounts tell of the temple curtain mysteriously torn, some tell of the eclipsed sun, some of an earthquake. These dramatic events are followed by an empty tomb-- and then slowly emerges - new life. In the light of the Easter Story we are reminded of the final transformation of the spirit that takes place at the time of our physical death. The transformation from what is known of this earthly life to what is unknown.

Total transformation of the spirit requires both uncertainty and death.

What then must die within each of us for our souls to be totally transformed? What must die in us for our souls to live?

Lynn Unger in the Poem of the “Camas Lilles” points to one possible answer

…—what of your rushed

and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—

papers, plans, appointments, everything—

leaving only a note: “Gone

to the fields to be lovely. Be back

when I am through with blooming.”

Imagine allowing our timetables, our busy schedules, our plans and expectations to die to make the time necessary to allow our souls to bloom.

What wide-open spaces might be required to allow your soul to bloom?

This soul work requires the space of time. It requires some ambiguity between our deaths and our hopes being realized.

Albert Schweitzer wrote “I am the life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live.”

What is your life that is willing to live amidst the life you are already living?

Tending to your souls, and allowing it to rise above the cares of this world with no expectations higher than liberation, is what is needed for transformation.

We all do this in countless ways. Consider walking in nature with no destination in mind. Or sitting for hours talking with a friend with no agenda. Imagine knitting a scarf with no one in mind to give it to, or dancing to a favorite song without a witness.

The participation in life without the expectation of achievement or accomplishment or acknowledgement is what provides the necessary space needed to live beyond the daily expectations of our lives and free our souls to grow.

Stretching our spirits and learning to release all of the things that do not serve it is a way to prepare our hearts for the unknown journey beyond our preconceptions.

If I was born to love and my soul is enlivened by expressing that love, then whatever in my life that does not meet the call to be loving can fall away when I focus on my soul truth. Love everything.

How might you shift your focus, your thoughts, your plans to live in harmony with your own soul’s purpose?

It takes practice to live in this way, to learn to allow our expectations and plans to die and allow life to live though us.

Our souls are tender things, hardly used to being the center of attention.

As Mary Oliver reminds us

It comes and goes

like the wind over the water—

sometimes, for days,

you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,

after the multitude was fed,

one or two of them felt

the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight,

before exhaustion,

that wants to swallow everything,

gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,

Soul work is not easy and yet how could we ever prepare ourselves for the ultimate journey of our lives unless we open our hearts and make space for it and allow it time and the room to grow in ways we cannot even imagine now.

This Easter and Passover may we be encouraged upon our life journey to allow the space for our soul bloom. Let us face this challenge with our hearts open wide, our minds free and our spirits lifted. Knowing that without a timetable or a destination in mind our souls will grow and we most certainly end up in places we could have never imagined today. Blessed Passover and Happy Easter.