Being in Change
Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom, 21 October 2021.
When we were talking about the changes we were going to make for today, I've been sitting with a lot of other change in my life and was really excited about the opportunity to prepare a message and reflect on change. One of the things that stayed with me from Callid's message of a few weeks ago -- the many things that have stayed with me -- was the framing he gave us about early Friends and how Quakerism arose at a time of radical change and destabilization. And I have always appreciated that our form of worship is transportable, is not reliant on a space or a set of objects or anything that we don't carry within us, that our worship at its core resides within me, resides within you, resides in the space between us. As a young child the stories of early Friends that I most loved to hear about were the ones when the adults had been arrested or taken away and the children met for worship in the barn, in the field, in the woods. There was something to me that communicated the greatest sense of faith in those stories and that spoke to my sense of: this is it. Right? All we need to connect with Spirit, with God, is to open our hearts to be with one another in that open space. Nothing else is needed.
And as I think about all the changes that all of us have been put through in the last 18 months, of the bigger changes that we know are needed, that we can't go back to the normal that was, as much as we long for the familiarity of routines and ways of being -- it's hard. Change is hard, and I'm someone who swings between being really excited about change and incredibly anxious, depending on what the change is. And so when I fall into those places of fear or anxiety, I look to what our faith has to offer us. And Friends haven't always been on the just side of change, we haven't always been on the faithful side of change, and so sometimes i look outside of Friends for how we inhabit change in ways that are faithful, that are true to who we profess to be. One of the people that I look to is Adrienne Maree Brown, who is an incredible activist and liberator. And in her book Emergent Strategy, she talks about some basic principles that all successful life embodies. And they are being adaptive, opportunistic, tenacious, interconnected, and fecund or full of life. And she has many more smart things to say about each of those than I will share today. But in the Quaker tradition of queries I have tried to take those principles when I find myself in moments of anxiety around change, and ask and really look at, how am I being asked to adapt? And "adapt" isn't just accommodating, it is taking time to grieve what has been lost, it is being with the feelings that are coming up, and it is reforming myself, inclusive of those feelings, for what is asked of me in the current time. "Opportunistic" can get a bad rap in many of the ways it's used in capitalism, but what i understand Adrienne Maree Brown to be talking about is, what are the opportunities before us, and how do we make best use of them. Three Rivers has only ever existed in a space that I think three years ago none of us thought would be great Quaker worship. We took an opportunity before us and have learned things about accessibility, about connecting across time and space, about ways we can be together, that I think have so much more life to offer us, as we continue to pay attention to what is the opportunity before us.
When I think about tenaciousness in the capacity of change and being faithful, I have to ask, what is Spirit asking me to be tenacious about? That is often a hard answer to receive because it's often an uncomfortable one for me, but when I sit with that question, Spirit always has an answer and it is always about something that leads me to more faithful life.
We have lost many of the ways we are used to being interconnected during this time of pandemic, and we are growing new ones. I have never been more grateful in my life for the people in my life than during this time of separation and the new ways we have found to be interconnected. And this last principle of fecundity, of "full-of-life-ness," to me brings me back to the question of what is the life that Spirit is calling us to live into? I struggle, daily, with the longing for comfort and ease and normalcy against what I know Spirit is calling me to do, of how I have to radically change some of the ways I live and operate both externally and inside my head and my being, to be faithful. And so I just offer up these questions to us, in worship, with no great answer, with no deep wisdom. But how are we being asked to adapt with the space to feel all the things that adaptation requires of us? What are the opportunities before us to be more faithful? Where is Spirit inviting us to be tenacious in our witness as Friends? How can we continue to deepen our interconnection with one another? How are we being asked to follow the life that takes away the occasion for all war? And here I'm using war as a stand-in for all the ways that people use power to harm each other.
