Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
March 19, 2017
OPENING WORDS
The first day of Spring arrives tomorrow – the Spring Equinox, the moment when the hours of day and night are balanced. Today, inspired by the equinox, we ponder the theme of Balance.
Our opening words are by the writer Tom Robbins:
True stability results when presumed
order and presumed disorder are balanced.
A truly stable system
expects
the unexpected, is prepared
to be disrupted, waits to be
transformed.
READING
From the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 5
The Tao doesn’t take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn’t take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.
The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.
Hold on to the center.
SERMON
One of the many things one must do to become a fellowshipped Unitarian Universalist minister is to take a series of psychological tests and interviews.
I had to travel from Maine, where I was living at the time, to a center in North Carolina for this test. Before I even arrived, the psychologist had pored over the 40-page packet of questions they had asked me to fill out. Then there was a day of conversations with the psychologist, and before that a half-day of answering questions on a computer. They were yes and no questions I was supposed to answer fairly quickly, not thinking too long about my answer. The questions ranged from things like: I think stealing is okay some times. To: I cry when I am sad. To: I enjoy hurting small animals. For some of them, it was obvious what answer they were hoping for, and for others, you weren’t quite sure.
The psychologist called me in to talk about the results of the whole one-and-a-half-day process, and when she got to the portion of the computer tests, she pulled out a chart that showed with numbers where I placed on a variety of lines with labels like “Narcissism” “Schizophrenia” etc.
She said to me, “Now, you probably are hoping that you ranked at a 0 on each of these scales. But in fact, a little bit of each of these characteristics is desirable. …For example, if you ranked a 0 on the Narcissism scale, that would mean you never thought of self and couldn’t achieve basic self-care. It’s when we get off balance in these areas that we have concern.”
One of the scientific words for balance is Homeostasis.
Homeostasis: the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes. Homeostasis occurs within our bodies to keep our body temperature normal, for example. Homeostasis occurs within ecological systems: populations of predator and prey stay at balanced levels unless something outside the system puts things off balance.
BALANCE
How does balance play into your life? Perhaps it is work/life balance. The balance of self and community balance. The balance of moderation and indulgence…
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
Perhaps you’ve heard that quote by writer E.B. White. Or, like the writer Carlos Castaneda said: “The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
In our lives and in our world, we are often seeking to balance apparent opposites.
When it comes to this balancing act, it seems we often think of balance like a scale, or perhaps a seesaw.
We feel we need to get just the right amount to create the perfect balance.
Balance becomes a problem we are trying to solve, and these metaphors make it seem like our world is a static place. In reality, even if we balanced that seesaw for a moment, a bunch of people are going to come sit on one side, or part of the seesaw is going to break off, or the earth is going to heave up underneath it … all of these changes in our lives causing us to make constant corrections.
A DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP
What if we thought of balance, not as a static relationship between two competing opposites… But as a dynamic relationship between interdependent elements?
The tradition of Taoism has much to teach us in this area.
In Taoism the Tao is the reality behind appearances – the truth, the way. The Tao gives rise to yin and yang.
Yin represents the shadow, soft, earthly, female. Yang represents light, firm, heavenly, male.
One of the basic principles of Taoism is a dynamic balance between yin and yang. But it is not really this kind of balance (like a scale). It is a dynamic balance. Thus the curving line in the middle.
INTERDEPENDENCE
And these things we see as opposites, such as light and shade, rest and work, emotion and intellect are not opposing, irreconciliable forces but are in fact interdependent aspects of one whole, and in fact in reality, impossible to tease apart – thus a bit of each within the other.
These opposites only appear to be in contradiction with one another. When we are reactive to this apparent separateness and opposition, we develop our egos; we lose connection with the Tao.
Instead we must learn to understand their interdependence, see their wholeness, and be still in the midst of this dynamic rhythm.
It says in the Tao Te Ching:
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
So what is real is this moment, which is in constant flux between polarities, in a rhythm of eternal oscillation.
I think of the quote by philosopher Eric Hoffer:
It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties.
Yin and Yang not only complement and balance each other but move in and out in cycles, like night is replaced by day and winter is replaced by spring.
Taoism is meant to be in alignment with nature and all of the universe, and so you can see how in nature the cycles of growing/dying, yielding/fighting, giving/taking, play out over and over again. And thus it is believed that one can produce the other. Like the bamboo that yields to the wind and thus does not break, weakness can produce strength. Strength can produce weakness.
So, Yin and Yang affect all aspects of life – the energy they generate in constantly reacting with each other is the activity of ch’i. Ch’i is the energy necessary for life, and for things to come into being.
A FLOW
So next time we are feeling some frustration at trying to balance seeming opposites, such as emotion and intellect, or passivity and activity, or self and other… let us consider that softening into the interaction between the two might open us up to the energy of life.
We can feel that now, simply in our breath.
Take a moment now to breathe. Notice:
There’s the inhale and the exhale – an endless and interdependent process that makes a whole from which we draw life.
We’d never try to “balance” these. We don’t want our breathing process to become static. The trick is to let go and let the dynamic rhythm do its thing.
It reminds me of the short poem by John O’Donohue titled “Fluent”
I would love to live
like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
Our ability to surrender to this rhythm requires a dance of sorts, but even more so, it requires a stillness. A dancing that is stillness, and a stillness that is dancing.
The stillness is so that we can pause from our reactivity and our habitual responses. We can listen and observe.
Perhaps we can catch glimpses of the Tao – the Tao beyond the Tao – the way even behind the truth. Perhaps in our search for balance, from this place of stillness, we can glimpse a bigger view.
Perhaps this is one meaning of this passage from one of my favorite pieces by the poet T.S. Eliot:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense…
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon