Delivered by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans
Sunday, April 24, 2011
"It Hurts When Buds Burst" by Karin Boye
Yes, it hurts when buds burst.
Why otherwise would spring hesitate?
Why otherwise was all warmth and longing
locked under pale and bitter ice?
The blind bud covered and numb all winter
what fever for the new compels it to burst?
Yes, it hurts when buds burst,
there is pain when something grows and when
something must close.
Yes, it hurts when the ice drop melts.
Shivering, anxious, swollen it hangs,
gripping the twig but beginning to slip--
its weight tugs it downward, though it resists.
It hurts to be uncertain, cowardly, dissolving,
to feel the pull and call of the depth,
yet to hang and only shiver--
to want to remain, keep firm--yet want to fall.
Then, when it is worst and nothing helps,
they burst, as if in ecstasy, the first buds of the tree,
when fear itself is compelled to let go,
they fall in a glistening veil, all the drops from the twigs,
blinking away their fears of the new,
shutting out their doubts about the journey,
feeling for an instant how this is their greatest safety,
to trust in that daring that shapes the world.
It seems like only yesterday, but in reality, it was 20 years ago or more. My son Stevie was 7 and in the first grade at Audubon Montessori School, and I picked him up as usual at 3 o'clock, and we walked our regular route through Audubon Park to catch the Magazine Street bus. It was our habit to go over his day as we walked, but this day was different. He seemed downcast, so I asked him, “Do you feel all right, son?” His reply was glum. “I feel sad, Mom,” he said, “I’m all mixed up.” I squatted down so that we’d be eye-to-eye. “What's the matter?”
“I feel like I’m two different people fighting against each other. Sometimes one part of me feels like I never want to leave you and Dad, and I always want to be with you, and then I wish I could be all alone! What's wrong with me, Mom?”
All this anguish at seven! It nearly broke my heart. Well, I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t cry, although at that very moment I knew *exactly* what it felt like to be “two different people fighting against each other.”
“There's nothing wrong with you, son. You’re just growing up,” I said carefully, “That’s part of what it feels like to grow up --you feel two opposite things at the same time. It's kind of confusing.” I hoped I was being comforting, but I felt inadequate.
He looked at me and his eyes filled with tears. “But it hurts, Mom! Why does it have to hurt?”
Why does it have to hurt? Why indeed?
In the poem by Karin Boye that began this sermon, and the story for all ages by Fern Stanley, the writers project that all living things, even plants, feel this pain, the pain of growth and change. When the wheel of the year turns to spring, Nature makes new life the first thing on the agenda. We like to think of Springtime in descriptive terms worthy of Hallmark greeting cards: glorious spring, the flowers of spring, young love, spring green, new growth, new beginnings. We like to pretend that all this birthing is accomplished painlessly – but we know better. No birth is painless. It does hurt when buds burst.
There can be no doubt that most human beings fear the idea of growth and change. Once I heard a church consultant tell a large group of UUs that “the only person who likes change is a wet baby.” (And the truth is, not even them all the time.)
Culturally and socially, we glorify lack of change. At reunions, we assure long-lost friends and relatives, “Why, you haven't changed a bit!” Lovers smile into each other’s eyes and sigh dreamily, “I wish it could always be just like this!” High-school seniors scrawl in one another’s yearbooks: “Don’t ever change.” Pop songs insist “I Love You Just the Way You Are.” After Katrina, if you really wanted to pick a fight with a New Orleanian, all you needed to say was, “New Orleans will never be the same again.” But even before Katrina, we were not the same city we had been in previous years.
However we try to fight it, or deny it, or refuse to acknowledge it, change is our one constant. Human life can be filled with moments of transcending joy, and pain is the other side of the same coin –- the inevitable price we must pay for happiness.
In some fundamentalist traditions, human suffering and the pain of life’s changes is seen as an evil not natural to the world, but interpreted as punishments, the result of human disobedience. In such schools of thought, the ideal of eternal changelessness is offered as the ultimate heavenly relief for the pain and strife of human existence.
But pain is not our punishment for being human. Pain is a signal, an alarm that something is going wrong. We need pain. I have read of people who suffer from a malfunction of the nervous system that prevents them from feeling any pain. Far from being lucky, these unfortunate people must live sheltered and protected half-lives; without pain, their health, their very lives, are at risk every day. Because they cannot receive their body’s pain warning, they can become seriously, even fatally, injured without realizing it. Many of us, in our eagerness to “feel no pain,” can become similarly emotionally crippled.
Once again, the Wheel of the Year turns, and it is Spring again, and Easter is finally here. Here in New Orleans, we are blessed with warm breezes, the scent of flowers, and the buzzing of honeybees. The Earth seems young and beautiful again, and we humans get Spring Fever. Even we urban dwellers can’t help noticing the young green growing things thrusting up out of sidewalk cracks. We don't realize what such an effort must have cost; we don’t think about the pain of growing.
The only thing that is permanent in life, the only thing on which we can truly depend, is change. Change is part of who we are, part of being human. Everything must change. In order to be fully human, we must not just tolerate growth and change -- we must welcome it.
Seed Meditation
As we arrived this morning, we each got the opportunity to choose a seed from a mixed batch, all ready for Spring planting. Let us hold our seed in our hands.
Today is Easter; this is the season of new beginnings, of birth, of change, of young green growing things, of celebrating the new and the reborn.
Look closely at your seed -- and notice how different each seed is. Hold your seed loosely in your hands, creating for the seed a warm dark safe place in which to rest. Let us plant some seeds this morning, either literally, when you get home, or figuratively, right now, in your mind.
New seeds ready for growing. All they need is nurture, care, healing dark, and warming light, and they will give birth to something new, something that has never been before. Mixed as the seeds are, we cannot tell what they might be, or what they might become.
In this congregation, we are mixed as these seeds were mixed. We are old and young and middle-aged; we are Republican and Democrat and Libertarian and apolitical; we are Humanist, Pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist. We are women and men and intersexed and gay and straight and bisexual. We are partnered and single, parents and those without children. Like the seeds, we too contain vast potential; we too are in the process of becoming. What are we becoming? We cannot yet tell.
It is the season for planting, for new beginnings. What will sprout from the seeds planted here? What will result from the pain of this new growth? What unforeseen changes will take place this year? How will we deal with change? What does growth mean to us?
Let us be together and ponder these great mysteries, and resolve to grow and change, even when we are afraid.
