Sermon given by Intern Minister Tori Rosati, February 13, 2022.

I took a class early in seminary on Spiritual Autobiography. I loved reflecting on the twists and turns of people’s lives – how they traced their experiences and wove together a tapestry of connectedness and meaning. At our first class, we were asked to define the words: spiritual and autobiography. My personal definition of “spirituality” had always included some feature of individual and collective meaning making. By extension, then, a spiritual autobiography would be a writing down your life in an effort to make meaning out of it. After I shared this with my class, the teaching fellow pressed me a bit and asked, “But…do you make meaning or do you find it?” In his question was a deeper one: does meaning enter once we’ve decided to make it – by some mental or purposeful act, or was the meaning there the whole time waiting to be found and listened to?

Last week, we talked about vocation as a process of uncovering, of centering down into the people we have always been – to look with our hearts at the core of who we are that transcends our jobs, our functions, and roles in this life toward a greater giftedness of soul that accompanies us no matter where we go. We asked the question of ourselves – what is that vocational gift? And how might we help each other see it – find it if you will? 

Parker Palmer, in his vocational meditation, Let Your Life Speak, tells us that “before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” Vocation, then, does not involve willfulness - it is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received and this gift comes from listening. But…how do we listen and what do we find when we’ve paused long enough to hear?

William Stafford, in one of our reading poems, “The Way It Is,” offers us this image of a thread and I wonder if it might be a helpful way for us to reflect on how we might do this – reflect on our vocations and our lives – and how we might listen. 

Stafford writes,

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I have always been struck by this poem. When I first read it, I saw in it my own agency. It helped me to see where I might connect to something greater than myself, this thread, and the motivation and call to intentionally orient toward it. To pursue the thread. To try and explain and understand it. To choose to never let it go. 

But as I continue to listen to this poem – I am always got stuck on that last line. “You don’t ever let go of the thread.” It’s slightly jarring, there at the end. The certitude of it. The strength of it. After a meandering reflection of how we engage with the thread in our lives we are told: “You don’t ever let go of the thread.”. It’s not, “don’t ever let go of the thread,” or “you shouldn’t let go of the thread.” It’s: ”You don’t let go of the thread.” As the title of the poem suggests – this is just…the way that it is.

Our lives are speaking to us, Palmer says – this is the way that it is and our vocations become clearer to us when we can find and trace the thread that runs through us. Beneath the current of our days – there is a stillness – a thread of connection that we don’t let go of – that doesn’t let go of us – that speaks to us even when we aren’t aware we are holding it. We don’t have to do anything – just open and receive the gifts of our holding. 

But…for me (and maybe some of you?) my own vocational discernment – this receiving, this finding and resting in that center - is not always a pretty process. Not always a still and reflective finding and tracing of the threads in my life. There have been times I have intentionally turned away, ignored and forgot it. Other times when I clenched it in my fist – holding on for dear life. Sometimes even, I have tried to yank, pull, or tear it down. 

I remember this moment – a while after we had joined the Universalist Church of Essex. My youngest daughter was ready for kindergarten and I was trying to decide if I was going to go back to work full time, or if I should enroll in a graduate program (at the time I was thinking about social work) and change my career path altogether. I remember sitting in the church sanctuary with our minster some afternoon discerning the next step in my life. We were sitting in the front pews – facing the chancel. Their familiar hard wood holding my body and my eyes gazing up the Universalist cross that hung over the alter. Out of seemingly nowhere, I mouthed the words – “I’ve also thought about ministry…” As soon as I said it, I took it back. I looked at that pulpit – tried to imagine myself standing in it and I was filled with fear. How would I ever be able to get up there and do that? It seemed an impossibility. So I turned away and returned to my life – went back to work to give another go at my career. 

But, what I didn’t realize at the time, was that I was still holding something – that my life had uttered those words and I drifted quietly on - unaware that I was holding anything at all. 

Over the subsequent years, I can trace the movement and holding of my vocational threads through transitions, new experiences, and more discernment until one day – I got up into a pulpit – one day – I applied to Boston University’s School of theology – one day – I walked into the doorway of this church for the first time and met all of you. We all do this at one point or another, right? We pause and look back at the trajectory of our lives and wonder at how we got here. All these seemingly innocuous choices – the causes and conditions of life’s unfolding - and beneath it this sense that we have been carried along – we were holding something we didn’t even know at the time. We were following the thread. 

Here I reminded of a rock climbing – a favorite past time of my husband and daughters. They go to a gym over in Newburyport and while I don’t climb – I enjoy accompanying them and watching. The rock walls have holds for your hands that are different colors and the idea if to follow different routes to the top by following the same colored holds. They can sometimes spend hours trying to make it up one route – falling over and over again – discouraged and dejected in their trying. And then, this thing happens – they’ll take a break for a while – sometimes it will be a day or two and then return again to the wall and immediately summit. It’s miraculous. That twisting route up the rock face, like a thread, lures them. Even when they are unable, physically to hang on, it accompanies them. Their minds holding on and working on the technical challenge, their hearts holding on to the possibility of finishing, and their spirit - holding on to a sense of determination and triumph at what they’d accomplished already. Their bodies and spirit never leave the wall. They don’t ever let of the thread. 

This thread – this holding – this assurance in the steady currents that move us along…There’s comfort in this I think. Especially in these days. As I noted last week, questions of life’s purpose, of what we are doing, and where we are going are tender in this pandemic world. We learned earlier from Dawn’s beautiful story basket about John Murray. Before leaving England, Murray experienced a series of tragic losses – financial ruin and the death of his wife and young son. Following these events, and forswearing life, he set sail. But, as we learned, he was swept ashore by some providential threading wind, unable to move – his boat stuck in the sand. This sounds familiar, right? Many of us, like Murray, have had and continue experience great loss and mourning and our individual and collective futures remains uncertain. And yet, even Murray – disembarked from his boat, met Thomas Potter and ultimately founded a church – he followed the thread and here we are today. 

“Some time when the river is ice,” the poet says, “ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” This is a poignant question from the earlier poem. But we can take comfort – that beneath those clamoring questions – what we are doing, how we are helping or hurting, is a stillness hidden that the river holds for us – even when we – on the shore – the surface – are battered around by the blowing storms. We don’t ever let go of the thread. This is what the quieting, the centering down we reflected on last week gives us – a chance to disembark onto our sandbars and look around – listen to the sound the winds make when the storm has stilled and know…that there is something to find here. There is something to find here. 

So maybe, in these quieter days of winter – there is an invitation to slow down and do that tracing, that finding of - the threads of meaning and connection that are woven within us –to find what has come about from our listening, to what are in service to, and who is by our side. Because at our core, as John Murray would preach - we are threaded through with a great and ever-present Love – a great Love that holds us and just as importantly allows us to hold each other. 

As I trace the thread of my own life – I am alighted by those moments when I experienced the joy of relationship – when I delighted in unexpected outcomes and destinations born of connection – these places where – if only for a moment amidst the confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety of life – I came alive in the midst of others – the Thomas Potter companions who met me on shore. That is what we find when trace the thread. We find each other. Returning to Palmer, quoting Quaker teacher Douglas Steere - the ancient human question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally important question, “whose am I?” for there is no selfhood our of relationship.” We help each other know who we are. We help each other find the thread. 

When you look at your thread, what do you find there? What have you been holding onto all this time? What tapestry motif unfolded in your holding even when you wanted to turn away, even when you forgot you were holding anything at all? Across our lifetime, this thread becomes a dynamic work of art, circuitous and winding, it travels around then cuts back again weaving in colors and textures along the way. It twists and turns into miraculous forms, opening new doorways, holding us through life's tragedies, up rock faces that we didn’t’ know we could summit - carrying us on shore and then back again out to sea – never letting us go. 

May we notice our grasp.  Notice how it bends and adjusts to the possibilities that unfold before us, finding meaning in our life stories – our spiritual autobiographies, those moments we chose and the ones that chose us. May we hold our gaze on the way it rests in the palm of our hands, feel, the texture and weight of the fibers, and find, trace and surrender to the pattern left behind by some ever present weaver.