I need to start with a confession:  I’m not sure I’ve ever been more ready for the change to a new year.  I know it’s arbitrary, this one day.  I know, I say every Sunday – each day is a new beginning, as is each moment. I still believe that.

But this year, this marker of time – one year to the next – it feels like it matters more than usual – I feel this collective need to let go, to start again,  and to set ourselves and our lives on a new course.

2017 has been a hard year, for many of us. Therapists and counselors talk about a meaningful increase in people needing extra support for anxiety or depression, and for struggles in their marriages, and as parents. The New York Times recently reported
there has also been a meaningful spike in anxiety in teenagers and in pre-teens.

It’s not easy to be a person of any age these days – and there’s no one precise reason.
Personal stories of struggle, change, and loss, are mixed together with all the social reasons – a less stable government and country – especially for those of us on the margins, along with the high incidents of natural disasters across the globe – paired with a lack of political will to deal with climate change or the insights of science – at all, and all this combined with a growing loss of trust in our neighbors, and an increasing sense of isolation, and loneliness.

We live in challenging times.

Being a leader in this church over the last 12 months has allowed me often to witness much of this up close and personal.  In conversations and emails and texts with many of you, and in our work for economic, immigration and racial justice. The stories of struggle and also strength have been piling up in my heart, and in our collective hearts as we try to stay awake to all that life asks of us.

Much of the year has been intense – and sometimes that has been – so beautiful. Because it has been a challenging year, but I would also say, it’s been one of the most impactful and vibrant years this church has ever known.

From voting to be a sanctuary congregation and companioning Ingrid, to delving more deeply into our spiritual growth in small groups and classes and in our worship together – to committing to each other and our mission in new and bigger ways, this year we learned that courageous love often requires a capacity to live with a certain degree of pain, and grief, while also remaining open to grace.

It has been sometimes harder than I think we would’ve anticipated, but also we have been for each other in big and small ways, signs of hope, and encouragement – and that is the part that is beautiful, and inspiring.

A couple weeks ago, I heard an interview with Rebecca Traister of New York Magazine.
She was talking about the #metoo movement – the movement bringing to light the stories of misconduct, harassment and assault that have been too long protected in silence and secrecy.

The interviewer asked her about where this cultural “moment” would go next, and what it would really mean, and Traister responded by saying that it would mean nothing if it was really only a moment. She said, “anyone interested in making sure that this conversation help[s] transform the power structures and dismantles the injustices should be aware that they’re signing up for a project that’s going to last their entire lives. I’m not exaggerating,” she said. “This is a long haul.”

Traister’s words have stuck with me because I think they could be said about so much of what has happened this year – in our church, in our country, in this world.  So much of what’s been revealed cannot be fixed by way of a better new year’s resolution, or even by a transformational mid-term election, and not even with an election of a new President.

We are living in long haul times, and this work – whatever work of courageous love is calling to each of us, and our shared work – this work is going to last our whole lives.
And so my question lately has been about how we’ll sustain ourselves and one another through this long haul.

I know that many of you are hikers – my family and I love hiking, too. This past summer my son and I did some longer trips, but not too long – he’s only 9 – so we haven’t yet gotten more than 8 or so miles. But I bring this up because I’ve realized that the pack you can easily carry at 3 or 4 miles becomes a lot harder at mile 8 or 9, especially if some of those miles are at higher elevations, or require a scramble.

Which is particularly challenging because actually when you’re hiking longer, you need a lot more stuff – you need more water and snacks and more gear for weather.

Which means, the longer the journey, the more thoughtful you need to be about what you take with you, and even more, what you leave behind.

As we mark this one year passing into the next, we have a great opportunity to consider this question of how we will sustain ourselves for this work work that will last our whole lives.

We have this chance to consider with intention what we will need to sustain this path – a path that will surely involve at least a few scrambles – that already has – and most importantly what we should leave behind and let go if we’re going to maintain the
strength, endurance, agility, and balance to keep going, even when the terrain is rough and the road feels endless.

The idea of letting go can sound simple. But as the monk in our story reminds us, a lot of times we can end up carrying stuff that we never even wanted to pick up in the first place. Stories and worries and regrets that accumulate, and tire us, so that even if we are still able to make the journey, it’s with less joy than it could’ve been, as our packs are too heavy, and there’s not enough room for the stuff that we actually need.

So let us take this chance to reflect on this past year. Consider what we need to leave behind today on the brink of this new year.  What we need to let go of.

What parts of your life – what story, or experience, feeling or worry – or what habits, or ideas are weighing you down and keeping you from living the life that you long for? What is taking up space in your pack for the long haul that would be better reserved for something you truly need?  Now’s the time, let it go.  And let’s keep going, one step at a time.

Reading: For Memory by Adrienne Rich

Sermon, “For Memory”

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, two of my longest dearest friends came to visit with their new soon-to-be adopted 8-year-old son. We all met as undergrads, and even though in the last 20 years we haven’t lived in the same place, through a combination of letters and texts and calls, and a good number of cross-country trips, we’ve managed to remain close.

Whenever we get together, there’s always a pull to share some memory or another – it was such a formative time filled with BIG LIFE EVENTS.  But something about this visit made our memories feel especially tender, and alive.  Maybe it’s what it means to be forty-something together now, to find ourselves all with children, in the middle of life, career, marriage.

More than usual, it was as if we were trying to piece together how one choice led to the next; and then how these seemingly scattered moments turned into a whole life – bringing us here, now.And seeing in each other, still these years and years of history, the tragedies and the triumphs, that only we know the boring…. the truly embarrassing.

There are not that many people outside of family who have this stretched-out  understanding about any of us, and the ways that our lives could’ve gone – if only….

I found myself this trip especially trying to remember how we’d ended up as friends. Remind me, I said one evening over a competitive card game of Hand and Foot,when did you go from this random person I saw in class once a week, to this person I could not imagine not seeing every day? How did it happen?

It’s not that I don’t have my own memories, or that we hadn’t talked about all this a thousand times before.  But over this past year, beyond just the tendencies of my life stage, and age I’ve learned to be more skeptical of some of my most basic assumptions.  I’ve realized that doubt and curiosity, can be a healthy thing when it comes to some of my longstanding stories about how life “IS.” So I just needed to check in, to re-encounter these formative tales of friendship, and becoming and growing up.

This time of year, many of us find ourselves remembering and retelling old tales, or at least trying to recall these memories of ourselves and how our lives have played out – especially as we meet up with those others who call these stories, or a version of them, their stories, too.  And more especially, as we remember those who have died who were a part of these stories, feeling anew their absence, no longer remembering it all, with us.

The holidays can be especially hard for those of us who have lost loved ones, or who have strained relationships – for exactly this reason. It is a time pregnant with memories, so much so biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann would caution us to beware of the potential for “over-remembering,” by which he would mean, be careful not to be pulled by the past so much that we cannot experience the present, or allow ourselves to feel the possible, emerging future.  As the White Queen says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

Despite his warning not to overdo it, Brueggemann’s scholarship comes down strongly on the importance of memory as a moral and spiritual tool.

You can see this orientation in the quote on the front of the order of service. “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”   This quote is what inspired this service, actually… I kept thinking about it.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the past year contemplating what produces hope and how to ward off despair,but I confess, I hadn’t thought of a connection to memory.

Memory is an extremely complicated concept, despite its omnipresence not just in the holidays, but daily, weekly, and generationally. Memories tell us who we are, and in most cases, we believe them.  Which is interesting since the more we learn about memory, the less reliable source we realize it often is.  I won’t go so far as to call memory “fake news,” but…almost.

To explain, I’m going to ask you to try out this exercise with me.  I’m going to read a series of words.  Your job for now is just to listen.

Sour nice Candy Honey sugar Soda Bitter chocolate Good Heart taste Cake Tooth tart Pie

So now, I want you to grab a pen, and jot down as many of the words that you can remember from what I just read.  If you don’t have pen, raise your hand, we can pass some around.

I have one more list I’m going to read.  Put your pens down.  Just listen.
Mad wrath Fear Happy hate Fight Rage hatred Temper Mean fury Calm Ire emotion Enrage

Ok once more, write down the words you remember me saying.

Now, let’s go back to the first one. Look over the words you wrote, and see if the word “sweet” is among them.  If you wrote the word “sweet,” will you raise your hand? And then for the second list, look over your words you wrote.  If you wrote the word “anger,” will you raise your hand?

All of you are in really good company. 80% of people who do this pick out sweet, and angry as words they remember.  By this I mean, you are in really good wrong company.Because….of all those words I read, none of them were sweet, or angry.

This is one of many fascinating things about memory.  It works by association.  You don’t necessarily remember facts, you remember the feelings and ideas associated with facts.

This is what researchers Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy describe as the difference between story-truth, and happening-truth. “Happening-truth is the bare facts, what happened at such and such a time.  Story-truth is the story you tell yourself about that truth, the details you fill in, the version that helps you make sense of the world.”

Memories include both of these – the things we heard and observed and felt, and also things we hear later, as well as suggestions from others, and they are filtered through our existing stories, the ways we understand ourselves and life.  Over time, all this becomes integrated so that we really can’t tell which part is which, it’s all just one seamless memory.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus says that people are often really disturbed by this idea, because we feel “attached to our remembered past, and the people, places, and events we enshrine in memory” translate in our minds into our actual real selves, our real lives. But if we can’t trust our memories as real, then we wonder if we can really know who we are, or what’s real, at all.

As I started to learn this about memory, though at first I too was feeling pretty disturbed, I realized quickly that this might be really helpful and good news for my cousin Michelle.  Michelle is just a little older than I am, and is an accomplished pediatrician and advocate for children who’ve experienced abuse. She’s an awesome mom, wife, and friend.  And, Michelle has early onset Alzheimer’s.

Since her diagnosis, Michelle has been incredibly public about her journey, which means that even though she lives far away, when I saw her a couple of months ago for a family reunion, I wasn’t completely surprised that she sometimes forgot words, or where we were in a conversation, and sometimes I realized, for a moment or more, she forgot me.

By the time I next see her, I know, she will have forgotten a lot more.

So many of us today love someone who lives with dementia. Or we have it ourselves. Dementia can create in us a painful spiritual crisis.  Or at least it can if we imagine that we are our memories, and our memories are us – from this perspective, dementia makes us wonder if there is some point in the forgetting when a person is no longer a person. Because as the memories dissolve, we wonderif the self dissolves, as well.   But, in this new understanding of memory – we realize that we have had this all backwards.

Our memories do not represent a set series of fixed events that when stacked back to back add up to us.  Even in a brain without Alzheimer’s or other dementia, memories are malleable, and constantly under construction – subject perpetually to what Loftus calls post-event-information – so much so that with the right combination of factors, any of us can be completely certain of a memory that never actually happened; and completely forget one that did.

If anything, instead of our lives being the sum of all our memories, our memories are the sum of us at any given time – changing and becoming as we change and become – so that as William Faulkner said it, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”

While in many ways this understanding of how our memories work runs counter to our common assumptions,at the same time, I don’t think it’s new news to realize that our individual and collective memories can be unreliable sources for truth.  We are all susceptible to what Brueggemann calls selective remembering, or selective forgetting –
whether due to our desire to see ourselves a certain way, or to avoid the pain of a past event, or even just because we were distracted and not paying full attention – or a thousand other possible reasons – we all at times consciously or subconsciously forget portions of our past.

As an example.  About a year ago, Sean and I started talking about the possibility of this congregation ordaining him.  We had just finished my installation ceremony, which we knew marked the first new senior ministry for Foothills in a quarter century. We wondered if the last ordination had been any more recent. We asked around, searched the church history, and eventually we found our story.

In 1991, Foothills ordained the Rev. Thomas Perchlik, who coincidentally was last summer called to serve the UU congregation in Olympia Washington where my sister is a member.

Thomas confirmed our understanding with good memories and appreciation, and we all marveled that yet again we’d be marking something in this congregation that was 25 years in the making.

We shared this story frequently as we got closer to Sean’s ordination.  And many who have been members since ’91, or earlier, remembered Rev. Perchlik fondly, and shared our excitement that we’d celebrate this historic first ordination by Foothills in 26 years.
The story, and our collective memory would’ve all remained just this, maybe forever, if wasn’t for a Facebook post about a colleague’s death shared a couple months ago.  It was a remembrance of the Rev. Stephen Mead Johnson, who was, according to the post, a complicated figure, but one who had done important ministry, especially in his service to the UU Congregation in Laramie at the time of Matthew Shepherd’s death.

The writer remarked that this was noteworthy because it was early in Rev. Johnson’s ministry – he’d been ordained just a few months earlier at the Foothills Unitarian Church in Fort Collins. This was 1998.  As in, seven years after what we had thought was the “last” ordination.Now, I know that the ordination of ministers is not everyone’s big news, so it’s not that strange that hardly anyone would remember or correct our big pronouncement of the first ordination in a quarter century.  But the fact that no one remembered, or brought it up – it was – funny.

I challenged the person who posted the story, thinking he must be misremembering.  But then a few other colleagues jumped in and said they’d been at the ordination, definitely at Foothills.  I asked if maybe Laramie was doing the ordaining, and we just hosted it, but the ministers in attendance said no.  Foothills ordained him, because he’d done his internship here.  Marc Salkin preached the sermon.  It definitely happened.  Now, from what I can tell from our database, over 150 of you who are active today were around at the time.  But for some reason, as a church, we just, forgot.

…..Here’s my theory.  Here’s what I know about 1998 in this church.  It was right after a major church conflict, a conflict that people still describe to me as incredibly painful. I’m told about 100 members left the church.

My theory is, the story we retained about that time in the church, it isn’t a happy celebration of ordaining a new minister sort of story. It’s a story of struggle, and conflict, and pain.  And this story-truth over time, overcame the happening-truth.

There are probably other factors, but that’s my theory.

Like I said, this happens all the time in our collective memories, and individual lives, this process of selection and curation.

But, as my spiritual director reminds me often, those things in ourselves that are unknown to us are also the things that control us. The things that are unknown to us, in us, control us.

And just as importantly, selective remembering prevents us from knowing the fullness of who we have been, and therefore who we might still be.

For example, our selective remembering keeps us focused on the story-truth that in 1998 we experienced a big conflict, but the fuller truth is that it was also a time when we claimed the unique power of congregations to ordain a new minister – one whose ministry immediately made a big difference in Laramie.

It is only in the bringing to consciousness, the surfacing and the revising of the fuller memories which is possible only in community  (because like truth, we all have a piece…)only through story, and song, rituals and prayer – where we intentionally re-member ourselves that we can claim a fuller freedom and the capacity to choose more intentionally the story we will live from.

And  here I think is where memory produces hope.  When we can hold it all listening and learning the threads that we have too-often neglected, or failed to fully know as our own In this we realize how resilient we can be what lives in us already what lessons we have learned from all these failures these triumphs we feel ourselves a part of this great arc of life that marches on that through it all marches on…As the poem goes: Freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering.  Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

In these next few weeks, as we encounter once again the ancient stories of Christmas, and Hanukkah, as we sing familiar carols, and share in the familiar holiday rituals we will inevitably feel the waves come in-and-out the waves of memories both bitter, and sweet.

As we do, we have the chance once again to re-member ourselves whole, holy, a part of this past that is still unfolding, still becoming a chance to claim for us all a resilient hope for the future that we can still create, by memory.