Necessary Losses
a sermon delivered by Alan Taylor
January 9, 2000 at the Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church

When we think of loss we think of the loss, through death, of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety--and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.

Somewhat wrinkled, highly vulnerable and non-negotiably mortal, I have been examining these losses. These lifelong losses. These necessary losses. These losses we confront when we are confronted by the inescapable fact ...

that our mother is going to leave us, and we will leave her;

that what hurts us cannot always be kissed and made better;

that we are essentially out here on our own;

that we will have to accept--in other people and ourselves--the mingling of love with hate, of the good with the bad;

that our options are constricted by anatomy and guilt;

that there are flaws in every human connection;

that our status on this planet is implacably impermanent;

and that we are utterly powerless to offer ourselves or those we love protection--protection from danger and pain, from the inroads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death, protection from our necessary losses.

These losses are a part of life--universal, unavoidable, inexorable. And these losses are necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.

The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.

An eight year old boy was asked what he thought of loss and losing. In two words, he gave the most deeply human answer I could come up with. His answer was: Losing sucks. It doesn't matter how old we are, the losses we incur are difficult and painful. And loss is universal. The people we are and the lives that we lead are determined, for better and for worse, by our loss experiences. And further, the quality of our lives is determined, to a large extent, by how we deal and accept the losses in our life. Nothing is more potent to bring about personal growth than learning to deal with loss.

I will never forget when I lost my grandmother. The weeks following I was easily distracted, grouchy, hard on myself since I was not my typically upbeat, energetic self. My professor, Rosemary Chinnici, taught me more about the grieving process those weeks than I have learned in any class or relationship. She would say, "Of course your energy is depleted right now, you are in mourning." Or "Grieving takes energy and extra attention. Don't expect too much of yourself in the way of productivity. Sit with the sadness and notice what brings you clarity." She never said, "Oh its going to be all right," or "Don't worry, it will pass." Instead she gave me her attention and the space to acknowledge the pain and hurt. Now when I think of grandma, I can smile knowing that her life enriched mine, that her love need never die.

Each of us have our own unique losses, the loves, illusions, dependencies and impossible expectations that each of us must give up in order to grow. Some people might pooh-pooh this, saying this is pop psychology. Modern day shrinks do caution us that failure to mourn can be hazardous to your health and that mourning is a way to relieve the ache of sadness. But this wisdom was also expressed, quite succinctly, by William Shakespeare:

Author Judith Viorst wrote the book whose title I stole for this sermon. In Necessary Losses, Viorst addresses the many kinds of loss that people face while they are growing up. Indeed, she makes clear that growing up is really about learning to deal with assumptions we have about the world. As a minister, loss is the number one theme which people speak to me about. Although there is no one way of dealing effectively with loss, too often our culture does not allow the space, outside of therapy, to deal with the losses so natural to our lives.

W.H. Auden goes so far to say that human beings need difficult experiences in order to grow up. In his words, "The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting—had it not occurred, it would have found another, equally trivial—in order to find a necessity and direction for its existence, in order that life may become a serious matter." I believe there is much truth to the similar maxim, "No pain, no gain." Problems emerge when there is no space to deal with the pain of one’s past, especially the seemingly trivial pain of navigating through adolescence.

E.B. White wrote a short poem on how the struggles of adolescence and elder folks differ:

This is what youth must figure out:

Girls, love, and living.

The having, the not having.

The spending and giving,

And the melancholy time of not knowing.

This is what age must learn about:

The ABC of dying.

The going, yet not going,

The loving and leaving,

And the unbearable knowing and knowing.

I appreciate adolescents who grapple with the weight of their situation. Many of these youth long for independence and responsibility, I believe, because all their basic needs are taken care of and they need do little to take care of themselves. For many, their lives are in a holding pattern, as they seek to clarify their own values in the face of the dominant culture. A comment by Yerginiy Vinokurov is apropos: there is no ache more deadly than the striving to be oneself. There is no ache more deadly than the striving to be oneself.

In some ways we come of age again and again throughout our lives. We come of age, each time we integrate a new loss into our lives and rally again to a place of strength and clarity. Each of us must find what works for us, whether we face the melancholy time of not knowing or have learned about the unbearable knowing and knowing.

While I attended Pomona College, I dealt with a lot of changes. My first year I dealt with the loss of basic assumptions and dreams between leaving home for the first time, joining a religious community only to be deeply disillusioned, working with abused kids that first summer, and giving up my intentions to study mathematics. Many an evening, I wandered about campus and ended up in an enclosed courtyard with a fountain. The concrete perimeter of the fountain was a foot off the ground, with water near its edge. Something that I cannot explain urged me to walk that perimeter. Sometimes meditatively, in deep reflection, other times quickly, as fast as I could and still keep my balance. Sometimes, I would start quick and then gradually slow down. Often, I would hop up onto the two stone benches. Each bench was made of three slabs of stone, two endpieces three or four feet high with the seat in between. I liked perching on top of the endpieces and jump the four or five feet to the other endpiece. Rarely did I fall and bruise myself, but the fall was such I was lucky I didn’t break my leg. Don't ask me why it was so psychically healing for me to frequent this courtyard. It simply was. Sometimes I would explode into laughter; other times tears came forth. When my heart was full, brimming with either joy or sorrow, this was the physical place that I sought out.

One of the hard parts of moving to a new place for me is the need to find new sacred spaces, new ways of coming to know myself in relationship with the world around me. I am guessing that many of you have developed your own special places. Maybe you don’t perch on the side of a slab of cement, but I bet there are among us some rather absurd ritual motions that bring solace. Getting through difficult transitions often calls for our own signature ritual.

Eight days ago, we lost something as a society. Not only did we lose the past year, but also the entire 20^th century and the second millennium! I personally didn’t do anything of note to ritually ring in the new year. But Stan Crow did something quite extraordinary. He facilitated a weekend ritual at a Unitarian Universalist retreat center. The one hundred and fifty people who attended the Winter Eliot conference were invited by Stan to ritually throw out the old year which was burned in a fire, and then reflect on where they are now. He urged people to envision themselves standing on the shoulders of their parents who were standing on the shoulders of their parents, so that each person understood that they are dependent upon their ancestors. He had everyone do meditations of different sorts. Some people walked the labyrinth. One man, Stan reports, broke down in tears. When he spoke to Stan, he said that once he reached the middle of the labyrinth, he suddenly had a vision of his daughter on his shoulders, and her children being supported by both he and her, and realized the lineage will go on. Engaging in meditative rituals can bring the wisdom that beckons us to ever deeper maturity and balance.

Today I want to address one loss in particular—the loss of security. Less than a year ago, during the week I candidated here, two twelve year boys took several guns to school and killed twelve people and then took their own lives. Shootings have since occurred in schools, in the workplace, even in churches. Understandably people live in fear and are likely to distrust others all the more. In the past three weeks, our nation learned of an apparent plot to plant a bomb, likely in Seattle Center. In the wake of the trauma the city suffered from the WTO protests, Mayor Schell bowed to pressure stemming from the fear of violence in our metropolitan area and cancelled "the party of the millennium." What can we do when our fellow human beings are inflicting suffering on other fellow human beings? Whether we are thinking about Chechnya or Indonesia or Kosovo, where Serbian troops are threatening to return, after a long siege wreaking of genocide and then a peacekeeping mission that has seen similarly

Situations like these, from the local to the global, can serve to break open what Roger Gould calls "childhood consciousness." The essence of childhood consciousness is the illusion that we can live in a state of absolute safety. This illusion is fueled by four assumptions.

First: "I will always belong to my parents and believe in their version of reality."

Second: "Doing it their way with will power and perseverance will bring results, but when I'm frustrated, confused, tired or unable, they will step in and show me the way."

Third, "Life is simple, not complicated. There are no significant unknown inner forces within me; there are no multiple coexisting contradictory realities present in my life."

Getting more difficult huh? Now the fourth and kicker: "There is no evil in me or death in the world; the demonic has been expelled."

These assumptions, when present in our lives, get manifested in moral indignation and judgment. It takes a healthy psyche to shed these assumptions, and a healthy community in which healthy psyches can sustain themselves. I believe a great part of the spiritual quest is to free oneself of such illusions. Religion, in many manifestations, serves to foster moral indignation and division between people. I believe that the honest religious quest seeks to strip ourselves of illusion, including the assumptions of childhood consciousness.

We do not belong to our parents, and it is our religious imperative to critically reflect on the assumptions and beliefs we were raised with, keeping those that ring true under scrutiny, and setting aside those which stifle and are carryovers of a time long past. Acting upon our parents wishes, while not acknowledging our own, can suffocate a soul, making it forever dependent on "how things were back then." Failing to attend to the losses in our lives serves to promote childhood consciousness. When human beings don’t grieve their losses, the result is often closed heart that cannot grow.

I close with a passage from Judith Viorst: Examining these losses does not make for merry remedies like Winning Through Losing or The Joy of Loss. Our junior philosopher said it: Losing sucks. But to look at loss is to see how inextricably our losses are linked to growth. And to start to become aware of the ways in which our responses to loss have shaped our lives can be the beginning of wisdom and hopeful change.

Blessed be. Amen.