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	New Beginnings

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
	January 2, 2000

Reading:  The Beginning" from The Hungry Tigress by Rafe Martin

I want to begin this beginning by asking you to breathe.  Exhale all
you can, let the breath keep coming out until you can't find any more
in your body.  Then when you've done that, breathe back in some new
air.  Taste it as it goes in.  This is the air of the new year, and
depending on who's counting, of the new century and the new millennium
as well.  It's not the same old stale tired air that you hacked to
smoke, that you sweltered in, that you exhausted the possibilities of
before the turn of the year.  This is new stuff that you're putting in
your lungs.  Doesn't it feel like it?

The year stretches before us at this point like a clean writing-slate,
like a blank canvass, like a new snowfall on the front lawn of our
lives, and the question we need to be asking ourselves this bright
morning is what fresh words will we write on this slate, what
brushstrokes will we paint on this canvass, what footprints will we
leave on the broad white expanse of snow.  The world is open to us,
and that opportunity is thrilling and scary at the same time.

Now to many of you, what I have just said is nonsense.  It feel like
the same world as it was last week, the networks of computer-driven
devices that supply our every material and informational needs have
not crashed - yet.  The sun still rises in the East and the problems
we were wrestling with in 1999 have not magically gone away.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm the only one here that felt that this
turnover of the counter we use to measure our calendar, this
potentially fatal lineup of digits portended some real changes, some
new alignment of the possibilities of life.  I have certainly tried to
act on that assumption.  A few weeks ago, I wondered whether the
coming change was any more significant than the coming 100,000 mile
mark on the odometer of my battered Geo Metro.  I passed that
milestone shortly after I preached the sermon, and now we've all
passed the 2,000 year mark on the calendar and it may be too early to
tell, but I don't think the most feared consequence of either event
has come to pass.  The world has not run out of its warranty; I have
faith that the manufacturer still stands behind the product.

But I must admit that in spite of my doubts about the inherent meaning
in the change of date, I did all I could to invest it with meaning.  I
approached it in the spirit that an observant Jew approaches the High
Holy Days.  I consolidated my address and date books on my computer
and the new Palm Pilot I got from my law office, and this gave me a
great excuse to call old friends, people to whom I hadn't talked in
years, as well as some people who were difficult and problematic.  I
didn't make any specific breakthroughs in terms of atonement or
forgiveness, but I had several wonderful conversations that gave me a
much needed larger perspective on what I am doing now in the context
of my life up until now.

That set the stage, spiritually, for the most significant thing I did
before the Big Changeover which, as I've already told you, was to
propose marriage to Jacqueline, and that is undoubtedly the principal
driving force behind the sunny optimism I bring to this topic this
morning.  I feel as if I have settled a large aspect of my future, and
this rosy outlook may color my attitude toward the whole question.

It may be that the change of date has no significance in itself, but I
was certainly struggling mightily to bring meaning to it.  Obviously I
could have proposed at any time, but something in me was determined
that it would be on the last day of the year.  That might have been
purely strategic, since the anniversary of my first marriage is on the
30th, and it is handy to have a pleasant date to counter an unpleasant
one.  But I think there was something more.

At times the goal looked unattainable.  A thousand schemes for when to
make the proposal went through my brain, as our plans for the evening
of the 31st kept shifting.  Finally about midweek, it appeared that we
were going to be on our own for the first part of the evening on New
Year's Eve, and I proposed dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant.  She
demurred; she had a lot of paperwork to do at her desk.  She was not
being cooperative.  Finally I prevailed on her to go, but by then it
was too late for a reservation, and the only seat that Lucia's could
give us was in the bar.  I tried to envision kneeling beside a bar
stool and I said "no way."  As we drove around considering our
alternatives, Jacqueline, who had no idea what I had in mind, kept
saying, "why can't we have a nice dinner sometime when it's less
crowded?"  This echoed inside me, and I asked myself, why am I so
driven to accomplish this on this night?

The only alternative we could find, given our time constraints for the
evening, was the fine but not fancy Thai place in Arlington Center.
We were wedged between two sets of women, all of whom wanted to be
talking loudly about their divorces and broken engagements.  They
were, of course, responding to the time, and in the context of their
lives it probably made a lot of sense.  But for what I was trying to
be about, their conversations did not form an auspicious backdrop, to
say the least.

Well, not to keep you in suspense, I did pop the question, after
dinner, at home on the sofa, which is where I should have planned it
all along.  Given the intensity and intimacy of the moment, that was
clearly where the conversation needed to take place.

And in this I recognize a pattern that persists with me through my
life.  I often don't get what I want, or what I think I want.  But as
the Rolling tones song has it, I get what I need.  What happens is not
what I overtly want to happen, but what needs to happen.  I did ask
Jacqueline to marry me, she did say yes, and all this happened in the
waning hours of the year that is numbered 1999 in the Gregorian
calendar.

That calendar and that date may not have eternal, universal or
supernatural significance.  But it is the calendar under which I will
live for the rest of my life, and its dates roll around relentlessly
year after year and there just seemed something fitting about a giant
step toward the rest of my life being taken in as the last sands of
the hourglass disappeared down the gullet of the old century.

Some of you may have seen James Carroll's column on the millennium
last Tuesday - one of the finest pieces by a former priest who is, in
my estimation, the Globe's best columnist and a great reason for
getting out of bed on Tuesday mornings.  "All your life," Carroll
writes, "the year 2000 has loomed ahead as the very definition of the
future."  That certainly rings true for me.  I can remember as a child
in the 1950's wondering if I would be around to see the century's end
and what I would be doing.  I could never have predicted that I would
propose marriage on the eve of the century's end.

Carroll also observes that when we are at our most happy, we don't
notice the passage of time - we are so taken up with love or work or
play that we don't notice its passage.  But Unhappiness is when time
presents itself as a problem, and to solve it you resolve, variously,
to honor the past, savor the present, and build the future.  But in
truth, time is the zone of broken resolutions.  The ever mounting
sequence of [daily] chores is a wall between you and the person you
would be if only, as you always say, you had the time."

This is a serious put-down of the idea of making resolutions.  Time,
Carroll seems to be saying, is always going to mock your efforts to
change.

But I think this is too narrow a view.  It is true that you can't
control everything.  In the story this morning, the king can't control
the rogue elephant.  The elephant is going to get away and do what the
elephant is going to do.  Our lies have this quality.  Sometimes they
are just going to go where they need to go, and what happens is going
to be what needs to happen.

But the king realizes that controlling himself is more important that
controlling the elephant.  And here is, I think where real change is
possible.

I remember interviewing for an internship at a certain church, and the
minister, a recently-divorced man ten years my senior, looked at me
with a world-weary sigh and asked, "do you think people ever really
change?"  I responded "no, I don't guess they do," but a few minutes
later I realized that I didn't believe that answer myself, and I had
just given it to him because it was what he seemed to want to hear and
I told him this and said, "No, I do believe in change; I have to
believe in change; I choose to believe in change."

That answer is still valid for me here as I stand on the threshold of
the year.  I am not the same person who started out on this ministry
track five years ago.  I sometime imagine a conversation between
myself as I am now, call it Edmund Version 4.0, with myself as I was
then, Edmund 2.1.  2.1 would probably not want to admit that there was
any room for improvement.  4.0 found the room and knows that there is
a lot more.  2.1 would resent being patronized by 4.0 telling him that
he had to get more in touch with his feelings, to stop trying to prove
that he was smarter than anyone else around.  4.0 is wiser in the
sense that Socrates meant in his death speech, that he knows how much
he does not know.

You have probably all heard the first part of this joke:  "what does
the guru say to the hot dog vendor?"  Answer:  "Make me one with
everything."  But how many of you heard the second part, where the
guru gets the hot dog and gives the vendor $5, and waits and waits and
waits?  Finally the guru says to the vendor, "what about my change?"
to which the vendor replies, "you're supposed to be a guru; certainly
you must know that change only comes from within!"

Change must come from within.  No one can change you until you want to
change.  This is an insight from Eastern and Western religions,
psychology and psychiatry.

Change happens, it is a fact of life.  What we can control is not the
fact and only occasionally the direction of change.  What we can
control is our own understanding of it, and of ourselves in relation
to it.

This is what I take to be the foundation of psychotherapy.  Your
conscious is not in charge; your subconscious desires and drives are
always subverting what you say you want, and this manifests itself in
behavior which you know is destructive or counterproductive, but you
find yourself doing it anyway.  The goal of therapy is not to directly
work on stopping the dysfunctional behavior patterns, but ideally to
give you insight on the drives and urges that make them happen, so
that you can find a different way of satisfying or dealing with the
underlying motivators.  If you understand what makes you hit your head
into the same brick wall over and over, you have a least a shot of
figuring out some other, less painful and possibly more successful way
of getting what you need.

Much the same thing is implicit in the Universalist conception of
human nature.  You may remember these words of Albert Ziegler that I
read to you in my Christmas homily two weeks ago, "Man [sic] is not
evil, in the sense that he enjoys the fruits of wrongdoing; nor is he
helpless to do right.  His only desire is to do good, but he must do
it as he sees it to be.  He sins, i.e.  does wrong, does less than the
best, because he himself is incomplete."  In other words, what appears
to be an evil act is only one which is short-sighted.

This is why we believe in the value of education, and why I have
insisted to the R.E.  Committee in this church that every activity
which goes on here is imbued with education in some sense.  In
striving for the good, we are striving for more and more complete
knowledge of ourselves and of the world in which we act.  As we
understand that world and understand ourselves better, our actions
will more and more tend to exemplify goodness, truth and beauty.

So if there is an "ought," if there is a resolution which we should
undertake at this time, I submit that it is not to do any particular
thing but to grow in wisdom and knowledge, in what the Buddhists call
mindfulness.  Depending on your spiritual orientations, there are
various disciplines that will help you start on the path to
mindfulness.

But I don't think resolving is what we need to be about in this
moment.  The date is mainly a milestone, and the use of a milestone is
for assessing where you are on your journey, how far you've come.
Look backward to the beginning of your life, individually, and look
back to when you first joined our collective life here in this church.
How have you grown?  What knowledge do you have now?  Now turn around
and look at the road ahead.  Where do you want to grow in the future?
What words will you write on the blank slate, what brushstrokes will
you paint on the empty canvas, what footprints will you leave on the
new-fallen snow?The world awaits your actions.

Amen.