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Resilience
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Douglas Taylor
on October 6, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
How I got over,
How I got over,
My soul looks back and wonders
How I got over.
Have you ever noticed how there are some people who
have heaps of trouble and suffering in their life. (....how I got
over) Or maybe you are one of those people who have been seared by
the metaphorical forest fires that can burn through a life. (....how
I got over) And, somehow these folks are OK today, (....my soul
looks back and wonders). They have (or you have) transcended the
troubles that assail. (....how I got over) And then there are
other people you may know or maybe, (....how I got over) for whom
the suffering compounds upon suffering and there seems no break in the
storm (....how I got over). Folks who make bad choices on top of
bad situations, whose lives are littered with loss and hard luck
....My soul looks back and wonders, how I got over.
What is the difference between resilient people and
those who can’t seem to break free from the heartache. What are the
qualities of resilience? What are the characteristics we can point to
and say, "This is what you need to get through?"
How I got over,
How I got over,
My soul looks back and wonders
How I got over.
This gospel hymn I found has a wonderful opening
verse. But when the rest of the song does answer the question of how
this gospel singer "got over," the answer is Jesus Christ. Somehow,
Jesus Christ got this person over his or her troubles. But I want to
know a little more detail. How did Jesus help? What did Jesus do that
worked? I need a broader answer because I don’t have Jesus and I don’t
think I’m ever going to. So I want a song that will tell me how I’m
going to get over.
I had a professor when I was in undergrad studying
theater who would talk to us not about acting or set design or
directing, but about life as an artist. His philosophy was, "if you know
who you are as an artist, everything else will fall in place." This
professor was a bit of an odd duck, but you grow used to that when you
work in theater. There was one lesson in particular that I found and
still find of great value. He was talking one day about the role of
suffering in the life of an artist and he said it is important to name
and own the pain you’ve experienced. This way, for example, when you are
getting into character, you could relate to your character’s hurts and
suffering by saying "I know that fire, I’ve been through that fire or
one very similar."
That image of talking about the hurts in our lives as
fires we have lived though stuck with me when I switched my major from
theater to psychology, and when I then went through seminary as I
trained to become a minister. This idea that we all have been though
fires that have burned us has informed much of how I interact with other
people, especially as a minister. And it is an analogy that seems to fit
better and better the more I think of it and live with it. Fires are
deadly.
There was an article in the Washington Post in the
middle of last month about a fire that "burned through the Bitterroot
and Lolo forests that surround the college town of Missoula, Montana,"
back in the summer of 2000. The headline read, "Montana forests rise
anew from grey ash." It was a nasty little fire, burning so hot in some
places that there was not even ashes left, just charred rocky soil. But
in the second paragraph of the article the journalist writes, "During
the past two summers, while fires have raged in other parts of the
country, those seemingly dead forests [in Montana] have had a chance to
burst back to life." The article goes on to describe the amazing plants
and flowers that bloom after a fire has been through a forest. Certainly
a lot of the process can be chalked up to seeds that float in on the
breeze. The left over ash mixes into the soil adding rich nutrients for
the new seeds. But that is not the whole story, or even the interesting
part. Apparently there are some seeds that sit and wait for a forest
fire. There are seeds that will not germinate until they have reached a
certain high temperature, and then after that have to take in moisture
and go through a cold cycle before they will burst forth in bloom. The
seeds can lay dormant for hundreds of years waiting for the next fire.
"Some plants flowered in mass only the first year
following the fires; others, only the second. Some species, such as the
Bicknell’s geranium – a delicate, stringy plant with tiny, pink flowers
– and the dragonhead, will quickly disappear after this second summer,
and be unseen until the next fire event. Some perennials, such as
fireweed and wild hollyhock, will flower in mass several more years."
(Washington Post, September 16, 2002; pA9)
There is a natural resilience to the world. The piece
I read earlier about Mt. St. Helens also mentions this. There is a
particular lake called Spirit Lake that was temporarily killed as a
result of the 1980 eruption. The landslide caused by the initial
explosion fell into Spirit Lake at roughly one hundred fifty m.p.h.
according to reports. ("Spirit Lake Came Back" by Tom Paulson of the
Seattle Post, May 10, 2000.) "The day after the eruption, Spirit Lake
was the temperature of a hot bath. It bubbled like a witch’s cauldron
from the volcanic gases seeping up from the lake bed. ... Nothing was
left alive in Spirit Lake. ... A month after the eruption, the lake was
completely devoid of oxygen."
Now, as you might guess, Spirit Lake was resilient.
But how long did it take? It has been twenty two years now and the place
is once again a beautiful place to visit. One researcher wrote that, "it
went from a relatively unproductive lake prior to the eruption to a
highly productive lake by 1982 and 1983." And I love this line, "The
rapid turnover from a toxic sludge hole to a cornucopia of life
surprised scientists and demonstrated how little we know about the
complex biology of recovery."
So, what I get from reading these articles about the
resilience of the earth after the volcano or after the fire, is that
resilience is an inherent quality. It’s natural. Life moves toward life:
it’s a natural process. Life moves toward higher order. We sometimes
think entropy is the final word, not so. Life moves toward higher order.
In the Jewish and Christian story of creation, God takes chaos and
speaks it into order. And looking around it sometimes feels like God
said "go," and creation has been happening ever since. All around me and
within me there is birth, rebirth, and creation just leaping out. We
bounce back. That’s how we are designed! That is how all of creation is
designed.
Back in July there was a article in the newspaper
with the headline, "Some victims resilient while others crippled by
abuse." (Washington Post, July 29, 2002, pA14.) The article talked about
two individuals who were very similar in many ways: they were both in
their fifties, both came from middle income Catholic families, both had
been alter boys, and both were molested by priests in the mid-1960s.
Each, however, fared differently. One had dropped out of school, battled
alcoholism, attempted suicide, been diagnosed with predatory sexual
disorders, spent time in a mental hospital and jail, and is (at the time
the article was written) unemployed again. The other worked as an
insurance investigator, advocate for the abused, and recently a music
teacher. He takes medication for depression and anxiety, but seems to be
doing OK. Early in the article the journalist poses the question: "Why
are some victims permanently crippled by child sexual abuse while others
are able to transcend the trauma?" The question is not answered in the
article. I suppose I should not be surprised, after all it is a
newspaper article, not a sermon.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about people who are not
demonstrating their natural resilience. I know many people who are
spiraling down in their troubles and are not "‘Leaping with life and
creation." I’m even related to some of these people. I bet you are too.
There is not much you can do about the hand your dealt, but how you play
it is all up to you. I know a man who took years to break out of an
unhealthy relationship. He got married again a year later and I see him
now having many of the same old problems in this new relationship. I
know a couple who have never been able to make it economically, and then
when she decides to go back to school in her fifties, she chooses a
career with remarkably limited possibilities for making any money. Hard
situations on top of poor choices and these people can’t break out of
the cycle.
Now, it’s no secret that life is hard. There is
always the daily little stuff to deal with. For example, in my family,
we’re always stressed about not having enough money or enough time
together or about the draining and frustrating commute needed to get
anywhere abound here. Many of you have these or other daily worries. Are
you making the right choices for your children or for your aging
parents. Maybe your health is deteriorating. Maybe your older brother
just lost his job or your best friend is dying of cancer. Life is hard.
It always has been. It always will be. But that is just the regular
daily stuff. Each of us have been through various emotional or spiritual
forest fires in our lives. These events, these traumas threaten to
consume us. But somehow, so many of us keep going or even transcend the
hardship and really grow. How does it work? Well, as it happens, I did
finally get some answers. I took a course in Family Systems Therapy last
year and one of the faculty gave a lecture about resilience in which she
listed out several qualities of resilient people. That resilience is
natural was at the top of her list.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that resilience has
a lot to do with attitude. If you look around yourself when things are
falling apart in your life and think "this is all my life will ever be,"
then it’s not likely you are going to be able to tap into that natural
resilient quality within you. Your attitude can block the natural
resilience. I remember thinking when was a younger man that I had never
been as happy as I had been sad. That is to say, the most extreme and
most common feeling for me was sadness. Now this is no longer a true
statement for me and I sometimes doubt that it ever was a true
statement. I have a lot of joy and happiness in my like now. And I
suspect that when I made that assessment back when I was younger, I
blocked out the memories of happiness I’d had. I limited my definition
of myself and what I was capable of being. This closed off resilience. I
didn’t believe it was a possibility. So step one, of course, is to trust
me when I tell you that resilience is an inherent part of who you are.
There are things over which you have little control. You are not in
charge of the environment around you. Situations come up which you can
not stop from happening. What you can control is how you respond. People
who are resilient have a good sense of what they are in charge of what
is out of their control.
Another quality of resilient people is playfulness
and imagination. Serious people don’t bounce. Think about the way most
of us get when they are faced with a significant trauma in life, we tend
to over value the power the event holds. Maya Angelou has a line in her
book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which struck me when I read
it and I’ve never forgotten it. After some particularly tragic event
(and if you know the book you know that the tale is wrought with tragic
events) she says, "That night, the sun set and it never rose again."
Now, Angelou is a resilient person, remarkably resilient. But at that
moment life seemed to hold more possibilities for her beyond her pain.
But in her resilience, and as it unfolds through the rest of that and
her subsequent autobiographies, her imaginativeness returns as does her
playfulness. Having a sense of humor, or better, a sense of life’s
absurdity, is important.
Did you know that ninety percent of all scientific
discovery are mistakes! I can’t back that statistic up, but it sounds
good. I recently read somewhere that the invention of the air
conditioner and the microwave were accidents, that it was not necessity
serving as mother to these inventions, rather it was playful imagination
which noticed another possibility in a situation. Here’s another one: a
group of scientists set out to win the Nobel prize for bold research
involving the destruction DNA. Unfortunately they failed miserably, no
matter what they throw at it. They failed so big, they not only could
not destroy any DNA, their tests kept turning up more DNA. Now, another
group of scientists took on the same research, and got the same results,
but said they were trying to replicate DNA and they got the Nobel prize
for it!
Let me offer you another quality of resilient people,
were developing a list here for those of you taking notes. Another
quality is persistence. Persistent people keep plugging away at the
problems in their life and thus, tend to accomplish some positive
things. If you think about it, the definition of resilience is the
system’s or organism’s ability to resistance to change. It is the
ability to absorb change and disturbance while maintaining balance. It
make’s sense that persistence is a piece of that.
Now, in that brief definition there I mentioned this
works from individual organisms as well as systems. By "systems" I mean
families, churches, offices, organizations, nations, and the earth. I
had a three hour conversation with my wife a few nights back about our
families of origin because of this resilience sermon topic. Families can
be resilient. Communities can be resilient. Right now, many people in
our community are anxious and unnerved, myself included. A series of
people have been murdered here in Montgomery County and also in
Washington D.C. I think that more than anything, it is the apparent
randomness of the murders that has shaken most of us. Who know what will
happen next! This whole community is on edge waiting to hear news that
there has been another shooting or, better, that the murderer has been
caught. We will get through this.
I think as a nation we are more resilient since the
September eleventh attacks of last year. The newspaper this weekend had
a piece in the Metro section about how the police force and school
systems felt they had responded smoothly and appropriately to this
current series of shootings in large part because the terrorist attacks
of last year had heightened awareness of the need to be prepared to
respond quickly and appropriately.
We’re still in the middle of this local trauma. It is
hard to talk about being resilient in the midst of our anxieties and
fears. We can’t really talk about bouncing back when we’re not through
it yet. But we will get through this with resilience. We will get
through this with persistence and playfulness and faith in our natural
ability to rise above the hurt.
In a world without end,
May it be so.
Office@CedarLane.org
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