When Things Fall Apart

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), May 15, 2005, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

One of the first things I see every morning when I awaken is this watercolor of a wave rolling in to shore. The artist is Joan Tillman, a former member of this congregation. I placed this painting across the room from my bed, because it reminds me to be open to whatever will come into my life that day — joy or woe. I know that the day will wash over me and change me, just as waves of seawater change the rocks on the shore. Most of the time the changes are subtle, but every so often, the wave is especially large and dangerous, like the tsunami that shocked all of us just a few months ago with the devastation it brought to hundreds of miles along shores and thousands of unsuspecting people. I doubt that any of us will forget the terrible pictures and video clips on TV that made us witnesses to this disaster. I wonder how anyone can go on living after such a devastating experience when everything that you knew and counted on has been lost.

When I meditate on this watercolor and the idea of life as a series of waves that wash over us and transform us, I recall events in my own life that seemed to thunder down on me like killer waves, ripping away people and things that I loved and counted on, transforming the landscape into something I couldn’t recognize. I know that many of you have also experienced the force of a sudden and unexpected change in your life: a death, a catastrophic accident or illness, the loss of a job and all that this brings, the ending of an important relationship. When these “killer waves” wash over us, we’re left stunned and shaken. We wonder how we will go on, what our lives will be like in the wake of such painful destruction.

As we contemplate the ruins around us, we may feel numb, angry, and frightened. We just can’t understand how something so awful could happen to us or to someone we love. “Why me?” we ask. “What did I do to deserve this?” And we begin looking for someone or something to blame.

I recall a woman I met when I was a student chaplain at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Her nurse thought that this woman was depressed, and she asked me to visit her. She was recovering from surgery after a fall in a parking lot. She had tripped over a concrete barrier and fractured her elbow. The surgery went well, she was going home in a day or two, but despite this good news, she was depressed and withdrawn.

I walked into her room and identified myself as the chaplain for the unit. This was all she needed to hear to make her angry. She burst into tears and said, “This should never have happened to me!” I asked her what she meant. “I’ve followed the Lord all my life and He has broken his promise.” When I confessed that I wasn’t sure what this promise was she snapped, “ Psalm 91: ‘For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. One their hands the will bear you up lest you dash your foot on a stone.’” She firmly believed that in her moment of peril, God should have sent angels to lift her up over that piece of concrete. But she struck her foot and fell. Now she was furious that the God she’d counted on had abandoned her.

She didn’t just break her arm. Her trust in God was fractured too, and suddenly nothing in her life made sense to her anymore. It seemed that all that she valued was lying in a heap at her feet. When I tried to encourage her to be patient and look for answers in her faith, she said. “I’ll never go back to my church, nothing will be the same for me. What’s the use?” I left the room feeling like a failure because I couldn’t help her. Her life had fallen apart, and she saw no way to rebuild it.

But perhaps my visit was more useful than I realized at the time. Buddhist teacher and nun Pema Chödrön says that when things fall apart, asking the question, “What’s the use?” is a good place to start.

What’s the use? What’s the use of all that I did to prevent suffering? Today we have it in our heads that if we are kind and honest to other people, if we follow the rules, if we do whatever the latest experts tell us we should do for ourselves, for our children, for our relationship, our jobs, our health or finances, then bad things won’t happen to us.

This is the fool’s paradise that we like to think of as “normal.” So when we’re caught up in something painful, when we’re shaken and suffering, all we can think about is how to make life “normal” again, how to get our feet back on solid ground and go back to what makes us feel secure

Chödrön says that the truth is that we’re not going to go back to that paradise where we were free of pain and suffering because it never existed! We never will find that rock-solid home in the land of “normal” where we can bar the door and live happily ever after with those we love. This is not what we want to hear. It sounds so harsh and despairing. But as we learn to face the truth of human life and our own responses to that truth, then, Chödrön claims, we have the chance to discover the wholeness and joy of our human situation.

Let’s start with what Chödrön calls the “three truths of our existence:” impermanence, suffering, and egolessness. To our Western ears, this doesn’t sound like good news. We think there’s something wrong when these truths pop up in our lives. But Chödrön invites to celebrate them and to realize that our fundamental situation as human beings is joyful.

Impermanence is simply the “goodness of reality” and the principle of harmony. Nature is dynamic, ever changing, and this is the beauty of life. It’s also what makes life precious. From the moment of our birth we are caught up in the processes of change until finally we die, and our own death is simply part of the natural scheme of things. Even so, most of us live in fear of impermanence. We fear change and loss, and this fear causes suffering.

No one likes to suffer. We are very good at finding ways to distract ourselves from suffering. The Roanoke Times recently ran a story about a young woman who had gone through some very difficult treatments for cancer. One way that she got through the emotional suffering of this time was to go shopping with her mother. I don’t mean to be critical. It’s great she was able to do something with her mom that cheered her up, and I’m sure it helped her mom too. But as I read this story, I wondered if this young woman had been given the chance to really experience her sadness, fear and, anger.

I hope she could share these difficult feelings with someone she loved and trusted. It’s only by facing our suffering and the feelings that arise within us when we suffer that we learn the lessons they have to teach us. If we can allow ourselves to be attentive — not judgmental — to our responses to suffering, then we have the opportunity to discover new truths about ourselves. We can be curious about what we do and why we respond that way. Now we can change the responses that aren’t useful to us. This process of recognition and change helps to heal us and decrease our suffering

Chödrön suggests that if we can hang in there long enough, we might be able to let our pain open our hearts and plant seeds of compassion for others who suffer — and even for ourselves. Here is another idea that can seem strange to Western minds.

Why do we need to have compassion for ourselves when life is falling apart all around us? Compassion for self helps us to see the truth about ourselves without using labels or beating ourselves up. We can observe what happens when we face despair or confusion or self-pity without calling ourselves “good” or “bad.” We don’t have to be ashamed that when we suffer, we tend to act like little children. We can accept that much of the time, we expect to have our own way as we go through life. We can just see these expectations for what they are — useless illusions — and begin to let them go.

This is “egolessnes,” and for most of us it’s one of the most difficult concepts in Buddhism. We think of ego as our personality, who we are as an individual. If we give up our ego, who will we be? How will we function in the world?

Buddhism tells us that letting go of ego — letting go of our preferences, our judgments of what is “good” or “bad” — allows us to be fully awake in the moment. By setting aside what we think life should be, we see clearly what is there before us, without being critical or wanting to change what is. Egolessness can help us see that we are very much like other people — especially the people who annoy us! Egolessness helps us to see that our suffering comes largely because we are fighting what is real.

How can we not fight? How can we be calm and complacent when our child dies or our most precious relationship is broken by betrayal? How can I not be afraid when the doctor tells me that my health — my very life — is being threatened by a terrible disease?

When things fall apart, it is natural to be filled with painful emotions and anxieties. But if we look deeply into the roots of these feelings, we may find that we have them because we are not able to accept the truth about our life: that nothing we have is really ours to keep forever.

When we standing in the midst of our demolished lives, we wonder if our pain and suffering will destroy our lives. But falling apart is living, and it is full of possibilities. If we are open and willing, we can learn about ourselves, explore all that we hold on to what we think we need for happiness. We see the fears and desires that may keep us stuck in lives that are limited and tightly defined.

There are more benefits. When our lives come undone, we may find that we give up judging other people when their lives come apart. Our compassion grows. When things fall apart, we awaken to the precious beauty of the moment, to the sacredness of life and love, and to the realization that grasping on to this precious moment is impossible. We cannot hold on to anything in life. But living in this moment — this very moment — being awake to what is present here and now, opens us to joy and to freedom.

My life has fallen apart over and over again. I have longed for “normal.” I have hungered for security and solid ground beneath my feet. I have suffered from fear and anxiety as I tried to pull myself out of the grasp of the waves that tumbled me every which way until I was dizzy and exhausted. I also realize that if my life had not fallen apart over and over, I probably would not have come to this place and all that I have gained from being here with this congregation.

I know that other waves will come with unexpected “disasters” and that I will struggle and suffer again. Life is like that, impermanent and ever changing. Know that this is the truth; I also know that life is full of goodness and happiness if I can appreciate what I have in this moment, this moment, this moment, this very moment.

May it be so!

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