Anticipation

Important Notice from A Small Heaven by Jane Ranney Rzepka

The newsletter editor of the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts, recently ran her favorite New Yorker squib:

“IMPORTANT NOTICE. If you are one of the hundreds of parachuting enthusiasts who bought our Easy Sky Diving book, please make the following correction: On page 8, line 7, the words ‘state zip code’ should have read ‘pull rip cord.’ Adv. in the Warrenton, (Va.) Fauquier Democrat.”

I worry about things like this during the Christmas season. Had I been a parachuting enthusiast, and had I breezed through Easy Sky Diving during the month of December, I’d still be flying through the air, picking up speed, shouting my zip code.

Zip codes aren’t important. Rip cords are. During the Advent season, it’s all too easy to confuse one for the other. The “zip codes” of the season—the replacement bulbs, the four sticks of butter, the fruit-by-mail catalogs, the party shoes—have our attention, and before we know it, we’re picking up speed and shouting out those “zip codes” without ever asking why.

Perhaps we should look to our rip cords. Our lifelines, in December as always, are our inner quiet, the love we exchange, and our efforts to make the world more whole. We can slow the descent. We can take in the view. And we can anticipate a gentle landing on the twenty-fifth.

From The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne

“It’s a comforting sort of thing to have,” said Christopher Robin, folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. “Come on, Pooh,” and he walked off quickly.

“Where are we going?” said Pooh, hurrying after him, and wondering whether it was to be an Explore or a What-shall-I-do-about-you-know-what.

“Nowhere,” said Christopher Robin.

So they began going there, and after they had walked a little way Christopher Robin said:

“What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?”

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best—” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have; and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying, ‘Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

“I like that too,” said Christopher Robin, “but what I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh again.

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Oh!” said Pooh.

Sermon:

This is such a different year for me. Usually by now, I’m looking at houses covered in outdoor lights with snow on the ground. The trees are just skeletons against the dark skies. The high, if we’re lucky, gets into the 40s. I love the sound that snow makes when you walk on it, and it’s so easy to estimate the temperature by the different sounds it makes. Back home this morning, there’s a wintry mix of sleet, snow and rain.

But this year—this year I know, in those infamous words of Dorothy, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!” Well, in my case, Michigan. It’s been in the 60s at least once every week, not at all what my body knows as late fall weather. It actually took me until the beginning of November to realize that my sense of time was totally out of whack. Then I realized I thought it was still September, and now I still think of this as mid-October. My psyche just can’t take in the more subtle shift of seasons here. Give me freezing rain. Give me snow fall. Give me sub-freezing temperatures. Then I know it’s coming on Christmas. Then I know that I should be scurrying about getting ready. I should be shouting out my zip code, buying presents and wrapping paper and the like. But my mind keeps yelling at me: you don’t do that in September! Thank goodness the young people are selling Heifer animals—that way I’ll get something done even though I don’t think it’s the right time or place.

I keep trying to tell myself this weather shift isn’t important, but then I realize it is. Because there is that moment, as Pooh so soundly reminds us, that moment before eating honey that is better than the honey. And for me, there is that point before the winter holidays that is better than the holidays—when the anticipation and expectation rise in me, when my heart opens up to the incessant playing of Christmas carols, when trees stand ready for decoration—all of that, sometimes, is slightly better than the taste of the holiday itself.

I love this anticipation time. When I close my eyes, I can imagine the smell of the turkey (or ham, if I’ve lost the “compromise”). I can see the glow of faces lighted by candles as we sing Silent Night. I hear again, in my head, the solemn words of the old stories, and hear the laughter at the silly sharing. Anticipation is more than just a Carly Simon song, or the soundtrack of a ketchup commercial. Anticipation is what catches up with us this time of year. Anticipation, watching, wondering, dreaming, dreading.

Yes, dreaming and dreading, both. Because I don’t know about you, but sometimes the reality of this holiday season doesn’t measure up to the dream and delightful imaginations I have running through my brain. The picture-perfect celebration, with the picture-perfect family, where no one says the wrong thing, and every present fits right, where the turkey doesn’t get dropped on the floor, and the football games all turn out with the right teams winning and never interfere with dinner, and where we truly know that our families are the places we want to be—this picture-perfect celebration hardly ever really comes to be. Even when we love everyone, and everything we receive, there are always tired and whiney people. The ideal day of one person collides with the dreams of another. Even when we try our best, sometimes real life and mixed up sentiments intervene and we find ourselves disappointed, distraught and disabled by the so-called holiday cheer. We scale back our dreams and desires, we paint the world smaller in our mind’s eye so that we can keep things—particularly our disappointment and loss—in manageable sizes.

We scale back what we imagine. I remember, years ago this same weekend, I went to a silent retreat at the Jesuit run Eastern Point in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

That weekend, Fr. Joe and Sister Dorothy led the retreat. Dorothy began talking about the people who come to her for spiritual direction. Most of them are in the helping professions—clergy, religious, teachers, therapists. They come out of an aching need, a need to connect deeper with their sense of god and the divine, with the holy, in order to ground their selves in the work they do. Seeing so much of the world, and trying so hard to be there with and for others, they know that they need a mooring stronger than their solitary selves can provide. Dorothy always begins the conversations with a simple question: “How is your heart?” “How is your heart?” And, she says, they usually answer, “I’d like a little peace. I’d like a little love. I’d like a little comfort.”

And then Dorothy asks, “Why a little? Why only a little?”

When Dorothy told this story, I laughed a laugh of recognition. I realized how little it is I—we—often settle for. We feel grateful if we get noticed, if we devote a bit of ourselves to something, if we get just a portion of our needs met. We scale back our expectations, our dreams and desires. If we feel peace for a whole ten minutes, then we feel grateful. We scale back the imagination.

Yet is this as good as it gets? I realized right then that too often we live with the belief that peace, love, security and happiness are scarce items, that there isn’t enough to go around. We unconsciously apply economic theories of supply and demand and planned obsolescence, theories that tells us that if we’re really going to get our peace, love, security and happiness, then we have to beat someone else out to the sales tables at Costco, Target, Walmart and Trader Joe’s.

In that instant I felt the folly of what I had so inadvertently learned to believe. Peace, love, gratitude, and fulfillment are not subject to this scarcity theory. If I’m at peace in this moment, it doesn’t mean that I’ve used up my quota for the month. Or that if you’re at peace, there’s none left over for me. If I love you, it doesn’t mean that I can’t also love other people. If you love me, it isn’t a diminishment if you love someone else too. Love and peace and gratitude and fulfillment don’t stand inside the competitive model, except in the cramped parts of our hearts. We aren’t competitors, seeking out the last bit of fulfillment on the bargain tables of the Christmas Eve last minute sales. We do not need to live in fear that next year someone will invent even a better model of peace or love, ones that come with more options and gadgets, so that we need to refrain from “buying” it this year. Unlike computers, love and peace and gratitude and fulfillment do not become obsolete the moment you load the boxes into your car.

All of these thoughts raced through my head as Dorothy spoke, and in the quiet that followed. By candle’s glow, I realized how often we fool ourselves into believing all we can have is a little—a little peace, a little love, a little life. Too often I realize how much we scale our dreams back—we take away the possibilities, and see instead only what is missing in the world, not realizing that the lack of dreams of the possible in our minds is part of the problem.

All of this went through my head, and then I asked myself Dorothy’s question: How is my heart.

How is your heart? What is it that I, you, seek? What is it that you find? A little love, a little peace? Do we find sorrow and loneliness? Is there joy and contentment? This time of year can be a difficult one. Christmas around the corner, and garlands and reindeer crowd almost every vista. Carols of joy and love and peace pumped out over Muzak, at concerts, in church, on the radio. Everywhere we turn, visions of sugarplum fairies and Norman Rockwell pictures dance in our heads.

But is this how you feel? Underneath the tinsel and the glitter, there is often loneliness, sadness, regret, remorse. At this time of year, estrangement and distance from family and friends looms larger than during the ordinary days of our lives. We feel deeply the absence of loved ones now gone from this world. We find ourselves separated by miles or other distances from those we care about, and from those we believe we should care about. Images of Christmases past—those wonderful and those not—leap to the fore, and we find ourselves, like Scrooge, scrutinizing the past for clues to ourselves today. Sometimes we are grateful things have changed, other times we long for happy days of Christmases past. Uncertain of what will come this year, we wonder if even the dream, the hope of a little peace, a little love, is just too much to hope for.

Yet in the height of the coming season, we don’t often take the time to recognize these feelings beneath the mistletoe. We go racing around, yelling our zip codes, forgetting to ask ourselves how it is with our hearts. Other simply presume we should be happy, and leave no room for our sorrow. No wonder we sometimes feel off kilter—the world outside rarely matches the unspoken longings of the heart. And so we blame ourselves for not catching the season, for being miserly, Scrooge-like. Rather than listening to our hearts, and understanding what we find there, we get angry, admonishing ourselves for not being with the season.

So, how is your heart? What is it you seek? What is it you are waiting for? Often we don’t ask the questions because we fear the answers. We fear that uncovering the loneliness, the longing, the pain, will only bring heartache. We believe that we cannot get our hearts’ desires.

Yet why? Why do we believe this? Sometimes, we feel that what we long for is too precious to have in large quantities—that if we had them, we’d just forget how important it is. Peace and love and caring concern feel so incredible, when we let ourselves know we have them, that we don’t believe they are meant for all times. Other times, we settle for too little because we feel that there must be an external cure—someone or something out there will provide the answer, take away the pain, take away the loneliness, the chaos inside. We wait for the stranger to come and kiss our bruises and make the world all better again. We keep expecting someone else to perform nothing short of a miracle. And yet other times we feel that it’s not time for our hearts’ desires. We haven’t sweated enough, or worked hard enough, or it’s just too soon. Still other times we believe we are incapable of feeling love, peace, gratitude, fulfillment. Events in the past lead us to believe things will always work out badly, because that’s what’s happened in the past, right? I’ve never been successful at love before, so why should now be any different? And sometimes, we don’t believe that we are even worthy of feeling peace, love, fulfillment.

Yet these reasons that we give, they are more excuses than reasons. They are the things we tell ourselves in order to protect ourselves. Believing we are not worthy, or that peace, love, gratitude, and fulfillment are limited, or that we’re not ready—all of these are excuses to keep us from breaking our hearts. They are part of the stories of our lives that we tell, when we’re afraid that not getting what we want will break our hearts. We misfile the past into the future, believing that whatever happened before has to, of course, happen every time in the future, too. Who we were in days of old, when things did not work out is not necessarily who we are today. When we respond with these excuses, we make our dreams small, hoping to make small the disappointment we fear will come if we find out that reindeer really don’t fly.

So much of life, after all, is what we expect from it. Just think of Pooh. This came clear to me that weekend when Joe spoke. Joe recounted how he always dreaded his mother’s words, “Company’s coming.” For him, that meant too much time cleaning the house, and having to put away his plans for the day. He’d get into a state, imagining that none of his cousins would want to do what he wanted, that he wouldn’t get to read or listen to his favorite music. When he entered the day that way, that’s often what turned out. His sour imaginings came true. His expectations, imaginings and anticipation came true.

Yet he also realized that it wasn’t always like this. For when he prepared his mind for the possibility of something exciting, or different, or new, then often that something extraordinary happened. Sudden snow changing the backyard into a wilderness full of snowballs and snow people and sliding down the hill. New books brought by these visitors that opened up new worlds and amazing vistas, the realms of dreams and stars. When he was ready, new and exciting things could happen. His imagination took flight. When he was resigned to boredom, to cleaning, to drudgery, nothing could bring light into his world and he was miserable.

Joe, as a young lad, is like listening to our own hearts. When we believe we know what we will find there, then the ordinary and the usual is probably what we will find. When we fear what we will find there, fear is probably what we will find—our inward glances will illumine fear, sorrow, loneliness and pain. We’ve all had this in our lives, and each one knows which corners of the heart carry sorrow. We’ve all had times when we have not known why we bother, or who could ever care for us. It’s there, and when we look for them, it doesn’t take long to access these old experiences, these old feelings. They are there, lurking beneath the surface.

But if we dare to look beyond this, if we dare to open up our hearts, if we dare to look with a joyful anticipation at what we might find, if we dare to suspend the certainty of what we think is there, then we dare to open ourselves instead to possibility, to the anticipation of finding something different, and then we may well find something that will change our very selves. Rather than storing our past in the future—expecting every encounter to be a certain way, or every answer to be a bad one—we might be able to find room to admit the truth of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Each of us is worthy, each of us is holy, each of us is deserving of the love of god, the love of whatever it is we define as holy.

And if we dare to believe this is true, if we dare to look beneath the worry, the fear, the sorrow, the loneliness, we can find possibilities that we never thought were there before. Listening to our hearts may bring pain and hurt, but a deeper listening—a hearing past the old stories, the old tapes, the old noise—may also bring us new songs for our spirits. Songs of hope and love and possibility.

And this, my dear friends, is what is at the heart of advent, this season of waiting, this season of anticipation. It is a deep listening to the self, to the heart, to the spirit. A deep listening that tells the old stories, the old tapes, the old worries and fears to be still. Does it always work? No, not always. There are fears and worries and doubts that sometimes are too strong, too close, for us to shake them away so easily. But one thing I do know, is that if we do not try, if we live always in the expectation of the hurtful, the fear, then there is no possibility for something else to come into our lives. We must listen, every time, with the possibility that this time, this time it might be different.

Yet what is also true is that if we wait in anticipation of someone else coming along and making our days bright, we will wait long and in vain. No matter how wonderful and magical are Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and all these other creatures who inhabit our world, they cannot wave a magic wand that makes all the bad times go away. Neither can your interim minister. We cannot conjure up the perfect person to come into your lives and make everything all better. Life is just not like that, and if we fool ourselves into believing that this is how life works, then we lose all the more.

For chances are, even if we were to wait for that magical person to come along and wave their magic wand, chances are we wouldn’t believe them anyway. We human beings are tricky. We want to hear so much from others that who we are is loved, is valued, is wonderful. But at the same time we hear the words, we don’t believe them, because we think if only they knew the real me, they wouldn’t feel that way. If they could only see into this heart of mine, they would know better.

And so it circles back around, doesn’t it, to that question of Dorothy’s. How is your heart? How is your heart? How is it? What I learned, so many years ago, and what I am learning still, is that it is in the listening, the listening past the hurts, past the old messages, past the things we expect to find, it is in the listening into the depths of life itself, that we can begin to hear the new songs. Songs of hope, and joy, and peace, and possibility. Listening deeply we can hear these new, fragile, songs. Songs that might come in a different sort of wrapping paper than we ever imagined.

Advent, a time of waiting, a time of anticipation. A time to look up for new stars in the heavens, and for new stars in our hearts. Tiny sparks, perhaps, but in these darkest days of the years, even the tiniest spark can raise quite a glow.

How is it with your heart?

Anticipation by the Rev. Dr. Lisa Presley December 2, 2007

Anticipation
by the Rev. Dr. Lisa Presley
December 2, 2007