The Space Between
Pathways Church 4/15/07
Rob Moore
I bet you’re just itching to know how I’m going to incorporate that video clip into the sermon today and I’ll tell you…right after this reading, by the Rev. Dick Gilbert, to set the stage a bit more:
We live
In between festivals of gratitude and joy,
In between seasons of contrasting color,
Between floods of brightness
And seas of whiteness.
We live
On a remote island outpost in fathomless space,
Between stars and moons and planets and void,
Surrounded by meteors, comets, rays, and nothingness
In which there is no right or left, up or down –
Only between ness
We live
Not quite at the apex of joy,
Nor in the nether of sorrow,
But in the moving space between,
Uncertain of our location.
We live
Walking from city of birth to death,
Hoping along the way
To see something of beauty,
To touch hands with those we love,
To give more than we get,
To make some sense of it all.
We live in between ness.
As this reading so beautifully illustrates, we mostly live in between one thing and another. We know instinctively what it is to live in the space between. This reading speaks specifically of living between birth and death, but we experience between ness throughout our lives. Adolescence is the space between childhood and adulthood. As adults, we live in between jobs, houses, partners, moods, churches and ministers. As someone once said, “Life is what happens while you’re waiting for the next thing.” OK, that’s not exactly how it goes, but you get the idea. But while we may know intimately this space between, we don’t always want to linger there. We are often looking forward to the next destination or we are looking back to where we started. We usually do not intentionally embrace the journey and the state of between-ness. This space is where we can take stock, reflect on the past (but not live in it); figure out what we truly want to move toward; where we can take time to train, to prepare for the next phase of our journey.
We don’t usually have the luxury of doing this in life, however. How many times, for example, do we get to take time out between jobs to figure out what our next move will be, to train for our next job? In my experience, not very often. We are often forced by circumstances to move immediately into something, anything, to put food on the table and keep the rent or house payment going.
Now, look at the opportunity this congregation has before it. You have one minister leaving. You have another minister coming soon. You are rapidly moving into the space between. In more certain times, we hope our church can be the one place where we feel secure, anchored, firm in our foundation of faith and ritual. Well, you’re not going to have that for awhile. We can of course make the case that Pathways has never had it and this is simply another bump in the all too bumpy road of Pathways up to now. But either way you look at it, we do have a unique opportunity before us. We get to be really intentional about how to leave one thing behind and prepare and train for the next thing. We get to actually give some serious thought to what we want next, to what we need next. And we get to take concrete steps towards those goals. This is so easy to say and think about, but it may not be so easy to do or to live through.
Which now brings us to “The Empire Strikes Back” and our young Jedi in training, Luke Skywalker. Before we get to the scene we saw earlier, let’s briefly look at the movie itself. I chose it because it in itself is a perfect example of between ness. It is the 2nd movies in the series, between obviously the 1st and 3rd. It is a bit darker in tone and story than the other two and many would say it is the best of the three. That right there makes a ripe metaphor for the space between we are entering. We are between our beginning and the next phase of our journey. It has the potential to be both the darkest and the best experience at Pathways yet.
In our scene, Luke is off studying with Master Yoda to become a Jedi For most of the movie, Luke is separate from his friends and allies. They are off running from the Empire and he is trying to hold stones in the air with a funny little creature on his back. He feels this tension and is often impatient at having to be there going through his training. He wants his training and knows he needs it, but he just can’t help feeling like he’s wasting his time while the action is going on without him and while his friends are in danger.
How many of you can relate to that impatience? I know I get that way often in the space between. And churches have that impatience as well. Since I have been an interim minister before, I often get asked why a church needs an interim anyway. Why can’t we just go get a new settled minister to start this fall? There are of course just practical timing issues. But the main reason is that without an interim, a new settled minister often becomes an unintentional interim and only stays a short while. One reason for this is the church not spending enough time in between to learn new skills, to open itself to new ways of being, to break out of old habits, to be able to welcome a new presence into the church as fully and authentically as possible. This is what the interim year and an interim minister can offer.
Now I think we have a leg up on many congregations entering this time and space. As I watched this scene again, I listened closely to what Yoda was trying to teach the boy. He speaks of the Force and of Luke needing to feel it flow through him. It is the ground of all existence, the connection of all there is. If this were a sermon on the Unitarian Universalist Principle of affirming the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, I could easily make that metaphorical connection with the Force. But for our purposes here, when I heard that I immediately thought of our DNA. Our DNA is those statements that we as a church have come up with to describe what it is we believe in, how we want to conduct ourselves, and what this church is here for. I know it may be a bit corny to say, but the DNA is the Force of this church.
This is our leg up. One of the main tasks for an interim year is to discover and start building a firm foundation from which the next ministry can grow. We already have this foundation from which to continue to build and grow. When I returned to Pathways after spending some much needed time away after leaving the staff, I was curious about how much the DNA still mattered to folks. When we as a staff talked about it, we really tried to wrestle with it and strengthen it and try to live within it. We took it seriously. We also knew that since it was a new thing to many church goers, especially Unitarian Universalist church-goers, that the congregation might not take it so seriously. I am thrilled to say that I have heard you take it seriously since being back. Just recently, I have seen it used to begin the 1st listening circle here a couple of weeks ago. It was used to frame the meeting, to establish ground rules and a tone of respect and healthy dialogue. I heard one church leader say they use it regularly when reaching difficult church decisions, “What does the DNA lead us toward, what does it lead me toward?”
After being involved in Pathways one way or another for almost three years, I finally became an official member just last week. One of the main reasons is the DNA. I can’t get rid of it. It has truly become a part of me. Now I get to struggle with it in a whole new way. Just this week, I went to the Pathways website, found the DNA link, printed it out and hung it up on the wall of my cubicle at work. I did that because I want to take it seriously, not just at church but throughout my life. Just as Yoda is trying to teach Luke skills for the job at hand of defeating the Empire and bringing balance to the Force, he is also trying to teach him a larger life lesson; something that will infuse his very being. Luke doesn’t yet see that this in fact will improve his performance at the more immediate tasks.
So, the interim year is not just about church and getting through that year in between. It can also teach us about how to live life in the space between. We can create and strengthen our foundations through the DNA at church and this gives us a foundation for the rest of our lives as well. When you train to be a Jedi, you must first buy into the Force and let it guide and strengthen. Actually it would be better to say that you don’t really buy into as much as open yourself to it. It is around you all the time; you just have to learn to let it in. It is the same with the DNA. I have heard on occasion that one of the things to be a member here is you have to buy into the DNA. But I say it is not something to buy into, it is already here infusing everything around us. We just have to realize its presence among us and open ourselves to it and learn to let it in, in all its complexity.
Now at first when you get the initial buzz of joining a church, of becoming open to the DNA of it, you are just on fire. You want to get involved in everything. You get antsy for action. You start to see all the possibilities open before you for the church and for yourself within it. You get impatient when things don’t go fast enough, when others aren’t as excited as you are to get something going. As mentioned before, Luke struggles with this as well. He wants the action. He feels like he has learned enough and his friends need him now. Not a few weeks or months from now after he has trained more. He needs to go now. Yoda and Obi Wan try to get him to listen to reason and stay and finish his training. But he leaves anyway, promising to return to finish his training.
This is often a feature of the space between, how to balance action and reflection. It is also often a feature of our own lives. Always trying to stay busy, rarely pausing to reflect. That’s one thing church is for to begin with, having that weekly discipline to pause and reflect. The interim year lives within that tension. We can’t just stop all programming so we can reflect on what it is to be Pathways and how to make it better. We have to keep going at the same time. But then we can’t get so caught up with keeping things moving that we fail to take the time to reflect on where we are and where we are going. Again we have already started that process a bit with the Dreamcatcher meetings and discoveries.
Likewise in our own lives, our spaces between can be tough to navigate just because we don’t know whether to forge ahead and burst our way through to the other side or to stop all together and reflect on what’s next for us. Life often forces us one way or the other. But if we can be intentional and balanced as much as possible between action and reflection, we open ourselves to a future that has not only what we have to do to survive, but what we can do to thrive.
Now in taking the time to reflect on where we are, where we’ve been and where we might want to go, we often find ourselves face to face with our demons, with the places of ourselves and others with which we struggle. In an earlier scene of the movie, Luke enters a cave and sees Darth Vader coming toward him. He draws his light saber and in the brief confrontation that follows, he discovers himself behind the mask. This for me represents the difficult side of the space between, of wrestling with the DNA, of taking the time to reflect and train.
When taking the opportunity, the space between offers us the chance to take a hard look at what barriers there are in our lives and in our churches. One of the chief tasks of an interim minister is to speak the truth to churches about where they could do better. This is often not taken well. When we are faced with our own shortcomings, whether self discovered or discovered for us, we lash out and become defensive and try to hunker down and protect our sacred cows, whether personal or collective. The worst battles I have had as a minister have been when I try to mess with some deeply held belief about what should or shouldn’t be in the order of service. You would think I was separating a mother from her child. I guess in a way that is exactly what I was doing. But in doing so, I hope I was able to get the point across of this is keeping you from being the best you can be as a church. We have this wonderful picture of your future, and this particular aspect of your church is preventing you from getting there.
Yoda does the same thing with Luke. He pushes and pushes him to lift that ship out of the swamp. He breaks down his old ways and his old habits in order to build him up again with that solid foundation of the Force (again our DNA). But Luke likes his old habits and his old beliefs. He can’t just let them go so easily and he can’t get that ship out of the swamp. The famous line from this scene is when Yoda says, “Do or do not, there is no try.” But I think the more powerful statement is the very last one. After Yoda raises the ship out of the swamp, Luke comes to him and says, “I don’t believe it.” Yoda then responds with, “That is why you fail.” Churches do the same thing. They like their ways of doing things, they don’t want to change. They also have trouble seeing that they’re not lifting that ship out of the swamp. Then they wonder why they can’t break that 100 member barrier, why they can’t retain youth when they graduate, why they can’t have a bigger impact in their community, why they don’t seem to be growing and deepening spiritually, and why their church fails them when they need it. “I don’t believe it!” “And that is why you fail.”
There it is in a nutshell. You want to succeed in the space between, show up to it. Enter into it with intention. Believe in your self and your church, feel the force of the DNA in this place and within yourself. With it we can raise ships out of the swamp, raise ourselves out of the swamp and raise our church out of the swamp. My favorite task of the interim year, of the space between, is to be able to greet the future with anticipation and zest. That is all I hope for Pathways and for each of us, greeting the future with anticipation and zest. Do or do not, there is no try. Amen