Start Where You Are

A service titled ‘Start Where You Are’, led by Jasmine Cooray, with readings given by Roy Clark and Marianne Harvey, and music from Andrew Robinson. Apologies for the early fade-out of the closing music which was due to a technical issue. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 2:09

We whose journeys are always beginning. We whose mission always awaits us. We whose visions are bent on loving, we gather together here. We gather as a community drawn together out of common need, each carrying our own bundles of treasures and dreams. We gather together seeking meaning, yearning to understand life in all its dimensions as it challenges and expands, as it burdens, as it consoles and heals. We gather together with questions, the kind of questions that provoke us to the path of action we gather with hope. The kind of hope that pulses on to uncertain times. We gather with tenderness. The kind of tenderness that can only be born from knowing human capabilities as well as human imperfections. We gather wanting certainty and having none. But we are ever wakeful to possibilities as we seek discernment and gentle judgment. We gather then, not unbounded but close. We gather drawn to reconnect with the depths of life, to turn our attention to the spirit which flows around us and within us always. We gather to join with others in building beloved community, dreaming a realm of love and justice into being, helping to create a better world for all. These words from Mani Harmony, welcome all who have gathered this morning for our Sunday service. Welcome to those who have gathered in person at Essex Church, and to all who are joining via Zoom and to anyone tuning in at a later date via YouTube. For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm Jasmine Curay. I'm a member of this congregation and I'll be leading our service this morning. This morning's service has the title Start Where You Are. Over the next hour, we will reflect on the challenge of finding the drive to move forward after difficulty, what resistances we might be confronted with, and which reframings might be suit useful in getting ourselves on stock. Let's light our chalice flame now, as we do each week. It's a moment for us to stop and take a breath, settle ourselves down, put aside any preoccupations we came in carrying. This simple ritual connects us in solidarity with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists the world over and reminds us of the proudly progressive tradition in which this gathering is part. I have instructions, it's very helpful. The chalice lit among us is a beacon. A beacon of hope for a fragmented world in crisis, a beacon of possibility made manifest in community, a beacon of warmth felt through our interconnections, a beacon of light illuminating our shared human wisdom, and a beacon of connection sensed in this precious time together. Let us sing together now. Our first hymn is number 43 in the purple book, Gather the Spirit. For those joining on Zoom, the words will be on screen and feel free to sand or sit as you prefer. Let's take these joys and concerns into an extended time of prayer. The prayer is based on the words by Lynn Cox. You might want to adjust your position for comfort, close your eyes, soften your gaze. There might be a posture that makes you feel more prayerful. Whatever helps you get into the state of body and mind that is right for us to pray together, to be fully present with ourselves, with each other, and that which is both within us and beyond us. As we turn our full attention to you, the light within and without, as we tune into the depths of this life and the greater wisdom to which and through which we are intimately connected, be with us now as we allow ourselves to drop into the silence and stillness at the very centre of our being. We give thanks for the ability to begin again and to start over after each time of trial and loss, each season of struggle and sorrow in the midst of upheaval and the endless tests of our endurance. Grant us the courage to continue on the journey, the courage to act and speak for the well-being of others and ourselves and the planet we share. May we forgive ourselves and each other when our courage and care falls short, and may we resolve to try again. Grant us hearts to love boldly, to embody our faith and our values in living words and deeds. May our hearts open to embrace humility, grace and reconciliation. Grant us the ability to learn and grow, to let the spirit of love and truth work its transformation upon us and within us. Grant us a spirit of radical hospitality, the willingness to sustain a dwelling place for the holy that resides in all being. Grant us a sense of being at peace in the world, even as we are in perpetual motion, tossed and turned by lifeless tempests. Let us cultivate together the strength to welcome every kind of gift life brings our way and all manner of ways to be on the journey together. And in a few moments of shared silence and stillness now, may we speak inwardly some of those deepest prayers of our hearts. The joys and sorrows we came in carrying in our lives and in the lives of the wider world. Let us lift each other, let us let us lift up whatever is on our heart this day. Give thanks for all the blessings we have given, we've been given, and ask for whatever it is that we both need. As this time of prayer comes to a close, we offer up our joys and concerns, our hopes, our fears, our beauty and our brokenness, and we call on you for insight, healing, and renewal. As we look forward now to the coming week, help us to live well each day and be our best selves using our unique gifts in the service of love, justice, and peace. Amen. Let us sing again now. Our second hymn is number eleven, Blessed Spirit of My Life, Hymn eleven.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

At some point in life, almost everyone hits a wall, a business collapses, a job is lost, a relationship ends. A dream doesn't come true. Or everything just stops making sense. In those moments, one thought echoes louder than the rest. I have to start over. But starting over is rarely as clean as it sounds. It comes with grief, guilt, confusion, and often a lingering sense of failure. We look at where we were versus where we thought we'd be. And the distance between the two feels crushing. We compare ourselves to peers who seems who seem miles ahead. We question past choices, regret wasted time and worry whether it's too late. And yet the ability to begin again to rise, realign, and rebuild is one of the most powerful skills we can develop. It's not a sign of weakness. It's a quiet declaration of courage. It's not the starting, which is the hardest part, it's the starting over. That phrase carries emotional baggage. Disappointment, perceived wasted time, shame, and even embarrassment. But when we restart, we're not just building something new, we're also battling the narrative in our head that says, this wasn't supposed to happen. There's grief in letting go of a path we invested time, money, energy, and emotion into. Whether it's a degree we no longer use, a relationship we thought was the one, or a career that stopped feeling right. Walking away feels like admitting defeat. But there's a more compassionate truth. Changing direction is not failure. It's feedback. It means you had the courage to pursue something, the wisdom to res to realize it wasn't right, and the strength to start again. But that's not weakness, that's evolution. One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves when we pivot is, oh, that effort was for nothing. But that's never true. You're not the same person you were when you began. Even if the outcome wasn't what you imagined, you gain skills, experiences, insights, and resilience. But you're not starting from scratch. You're starting from experience, and that makes all the difference. What you saw a failure, not as a dead end, but a detour. Not a judgment of who you are, but an update on what's not working. This mindset shift is crucial. Starting over means letting go of the outdated timeline and embracing the one that's actually unfolding. The one that includes your detours, breakdowns, and breakthroughs. It's not about being late. It's about being honest with where you are and what you need now. You will not always feel ready. You will not always feel confident. But if you have even a tiny spark inside you that whispers, try again. Starting over is not an admission of failure. It's a declaration of hope, of growth, of refusing to settle for a life that no longer fits. You are not broken, you are becoming. And every chapter, even the messy ones, are part of a story worth telling.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

So to take us into stillness, I'm going to share a poem from David White called Just Beyond Yourself, which is printed on the back of your hymn sheet to take away. After that, we will hold a few minutes of shared silence, which will end with the sound of a bell that I will attempt to pitch at the right volume. Then we'll hear music for meditation. So let's do what we need to get comfortable. Adjust your position, put your feet flat on the floor to ground yourself, close your eyes. As ever, these words are just an offering. So feel free to use this time to meditate in your own way. Just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. Half a step into self-forgetting, and the rest restored by what you'll meet. There is a road always beckoning. When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon, and deep in the foundations of your own heart, at exactly the same time, that's how you know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you know it's where you have to go. That's how you know you have to go. That's how you know just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be able to do it.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Where do we even start? By Anne Lamotte adapted. Anne Lamotte is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. I nearly called my last book Doomed Thoughts on Hope, but my publisher wouldn't go for it. At any rate, a few years ago, I was traveling around the country giving talks at bookstores and churches about this book about hope. And everywhere I went, people were just so discouraged and defeated by the four years of Trump. And the UN the UN climate change reports were just coming out, and those are just devastating, really, end of the world. People just felt like, where do we even start? Will our kids wear masks? Just so many heartbreaking things were going on. We were all a little tenser than the average bear, and I wanted to answer that question of where do we even start? The answer to where do we start, whether it is with getting sober or starting a new book or a new relationship or getting over one, is you start where you are. You don't start in the fantasy of what you hope it will turn out to be, or in a grudge and resentment about how difficult it's been. You don't start in the fear of how hard it's going to be. You start where you are. You start where your bud is. You breathe. Breathing consciously or intentionally connects you umbilically to something greater than your own pinball brain. And then you do a little bit at a time, and you let yourself do it badly. You let yourself fail or fall or get stuck. You do it afraid. You do it kind of cluelessly. With my writing students, I always had them put one inch picture frame on their desk and kind of squint through the empty picture frame and see a passage or memory or a possible opening section. And then, of course, write a really god-awful first draft of it. Everything good springs from really terrible first drafts. You figure out one small thing you could do today that would be helpful rather than more defeating. And you see how it goes. You just stick with it.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

To burn the cake and have to begin again, to leave the house for a second time after coming back for car keys or umbrella or purse, to leave a field of work, to leave a marriage, to move to a new town, to once again clear an explosion of Lego from a living room floor, to change an appee almost immediately after putting on the last one, to peel oneself out of bed with a broken heart and no desire to go to work. In some moments it might seem harder. We might think, no, not again. I can't do this again, especially if we've been trying over and over to achieve something, build something, put in all our good faith only for it to crumble. Or we might long for a time before all of the trying, when we were blissfully armed with an idealistic mind and the uncautious step of inexperience. Or some of us might find ourselves going in circles around and around, doing anything except begin. So then how and where do we find it? That impetus to dust ourselves off, to look around and say, right, however I got here, I will not let that discourage me from moving forward, to say, I am going to do this. Those of us who know chronic illness or recurring health issues will be familiar with a life that flows in cycles or in a kind of snakes and ladders game. We know that good periods are often derailed or interrupted by flare-ups, sometimes predictable, sometimes not. You end up having to let go of a conditional relationship with time. You learn to start the day even if it means going painfully, slowly, vulnerable, exhausted, and pissed off. You argue with your body and you learn to let it win because it's the only place you have to live. You learn to stop seeing incapacity as failure and start seeing it as a communication that you've reached your limit and the body is a fact, not a concept that can be argued. Starting where you are involves getting to grips with reality. Not as you would wish it, nor as it might have been in the past. In her book, The Psychology of the Climate Crisis, psychoanalyst Sally Weintro questions the value of being protected from the challenges of life. Her argument is that if overly protected from disappointment, frustration, rejection, inconvenience, and the like, we then don't learn to cope. And we also end up imagining we are entitled to a life without difficulty, perhaps even seeing difficulty as a sign of failure or worthlessness. She links this with modern life's addiction to convenience at the cost of the earth. In her thinking, neoliberal society has become almost like a tantruming toddler demanding to have what it wants all the time at all times. It doesn't want to be told enough or that the party is over. And indeed, what if how we view challenge is part of a resistance to starting again? No, I don't want to date again. What if I get my heart broken? If I apply for a job, will I once again have a horrible boss? Are my seeds going to fail again? In Victor Frankel's seminal book, Man's Search for Meaning, he writes of embracing suffering as just another form of reality to be lived and in living it, allowing it to become concrete. He says, Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past. Not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are the things that cannot inspire envy. And why would sufferings take that position? When I think of suffering, I think of something arriving that usually I had not chosen. A loss, an injury, a stressor, and I recognize that somehow I met it and lived it, even while protesting or distressed. Maybe what counts is not perfect grace in the face of the unknown, but a willingness to greet it as it is rather than how you imagine it. In the piece we heard earlier by Nidimalik, they use the phrase starting over, but then acknowledge that you are never in the same place where you began. Perhaps it is then a misnomer. Perhaps to begin from where you are can also benefit from time taken to honour what came before, rather than erase it out of disappointment. If you look more closely, what were the unexpected vistas on that scenic route? Sarah Tinker mentioned in her service a few weeks ago the experience or question of futility, a what's the point of trying when we might just end up at square one? Every spring I watch as council workers mow down all of the flowers on our shared green spaces. Daisies, dandelions, yarrow, green alconet, ragwort, mallows, purple trumpets, cow parsley, violets, all shredded to nothing, and then once again growing, putting out new shoots, reaching again for the light. Sometimes I think that survival instinct, uncomplicated by consciousness, sounds like a more peaceful way to be. If I were a daisy, perhaps I wouldn't need so much navel gazing to decide what to how to get up and start again. But alas, I am and we are human. In the 1990s film Jurassic Park, bear with me, Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory to Laura Dern. He describes chaos theory as the multiple unplotable routes for a raindrop to take down a windscreen. He takes the opportunity to flirt with her in an oily way, but that's besides the point. What he seems to be emphasizing shortly before being confronted by a T-Rex in a toilet store is the value of not knowing, not being able to control how something goes. All the multiple possibilities beyond our imagining. As we heard in the Malik reading, starting over means letting go of the outdated timeline and embracing the one that's actually unfolding. The flowers on the lawn grow a different way each time. I imagine that they do it without complaint. They are in, as Mary Oliver says, the family of things. They play their part. In Judaism, collaborating with God, often framed as being a partner in the work of creation, is a foundational concept. It shifts the human role from passive subservience to active, responsible co-creation. So then each day, each challenge becomes something that requires your input, like a dance partner, like the other foot that turns the pedals. Anne Lamotte in the piece read by Marianne talked about looking through a tiny frame to see where the point of beginning might be. I liked this because it reminded me of trying to find the end of the cellotape. Poying it clumsily or with frustration, you might not find it. It takes care and perseverance. How many times, exasperated and drained of all imagination, might we say, oh, I just don't know where to start? Lamet says, start where your bud is. That is, start where there is a glimmer of life. Time for one last hymn now. Number one hundred and forty-seven, spirit of earth, root, stone, and tree. Okay, announcements. They are long. Okay, thank you very much to Ramona for uh hosting and to Aisha for co-hosting on Zoom. Thank you to Andrew for loving music and to Edwin for supporting our singing. Thank you very much to Roy and to Marianne for reading. Thank you to Patricia for greeting and to Julia for making coffee. I think she has now gone to the catalog. If you're online, stay for a chat with Aisha if you can, or if you're in person, please do stay for refreshments. This week we're starting a six-part course online called How to Be a Unitarian. That will be led by Jane and Charlotte. Even if you've attended it before, you can come again. We will be joined by friends from all over the country to explore questions of what it means to be Unitarian and all the different forms it can take. But please do support this and sign up with Jane ASAP if you can. For this month's Better World Book Club, we're reading just about coping. That's about mental health, written by London psychologist Natalie Cawley. And we have, I think, at least one copy of that to loan out if you'd like to come along. So email Jane to sign up for that. On Friday at 7 p.m., we've got our online heart and soul online contemplative spiritual gathering. This week it's on the theme of gardening. We haven't got a Sunday one this week as Jane is away. But when she's back next Sunday, she'll be back with a service entitled The Age of Artifice about the rise of AI among other things. Please sign up ASAP for a summer solstice labyrinth mini retreat on Sunday, 21st of June, and have a chat with Rita, although I don't think she's here today, but when you do see her, who is offering a Sunday afternoon workshop on Indian head massage on the 5th of July. The details of all our various activities are printed on the order of service and also in the Friday email. Please sign up for our mailing list if you haven't yet done so. Our summer newsletter is out now, I guess it's in the foyer. But please do take a copy if you haven't already got one. The congregation very much has a life beyond Sunday morning, so we encourage you to keep in touch, look out for each other, and do what you can to support nurturing connections. So just time for our closing words and closing music now. With faith in the creative powers of life, with hope for the future of life in this world. With love for all others who share this life with us. Our gathering has ended. Let our service begin. May it be so for the greater good of all. Amen.