“What wants to be born?”
A sermon given by Rev. Tricia Brennan
Follen Community Church
Lexington, MA
June 3, 2012
A Reading from The Way of Transition by William
Bridges:
In its most basic function, transition helps us come to terms with change. It reorients us so that we can mobilize our energy to deal successfully with our new situation.
Instead of being hampered by attitudes and behaviors that were developed for our old situation, we must ask:
“What is it time for us to let go of?”
The danger is that we will fail to ask this question and conclude that the outer change is the whole story.
The good news is that this process of transition can be a step toward our own more authentic presence in the world. By embracing the way of transition, we can come to know ourselves better and therefore express more fully who we really are and how we are called to be in the world .
Good morning.
One of the great things about being an interim minister is that I have the chance to delve into what it means to be in transition, for congregations and for people. It is an under-

explored topic, I think, and transitions are under-rated for their significance in our lives.
Five or ten years ago if someone asked me about transitions in human experience I would have thought about it as a parent with a child, because that’s where I heard the word a lot - transitioning from napping to no nap, transitioning to a new school, from the end of baseball season into soccer, from childhood into adolescence - and so on.
Doing this work has tuned me into how transitions are lifelong, how they are often hard and often the genesis of selfknowledge and transformation.
William Bridges, whose book I just quoted, has been a good guide for me as I seek to understand better this ordinary and powerful experience of transition.
I first heard of his work years ago at a workshop offered at my seminary. A fellow participant was raving about his book. She went to the newsprint at the front of the classroom and drew a bell curve. At the bottom of the bell on the left she wrote ‘endings’, in the middle of the bell she wrote ‘neutral zone’, and at the end of the bell she wrote ‘beginnings.’ Bridges’ work looks at the common human experience of transitions as consisting of these three parts, she said, and then went on to describe briefly those three parts. I was singularly unimpressed - it just seemed very obvious - and I thought to myself well, that’s one book I don’t need to read!
Well so much for my smug certainty. I’ve read much of Bridges’ work by now and value the author’s reflection on this ordinary yet profound experience of transitions. He models well for me a

compassion for the pain and loss and discomfort involved in moving along that bell curve as well as encouragement to truly live those ups and downs.
Bridges distinguishes between change and transition in this way.
“Change is situational, transition is psychological. Transition is not the events of one’s life, but rather the inner re-orientation and selfdefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. ” (p.xii, slight paraphrase)
So, yes, Bridges says that transitions begin not with a new beginning but with an ending – it could be a huge loss: the ending of a marriage, the death of a parent, the ending of good health, or it could be a huge gain - a big promotion, a graduation, the first child
- that ends life as it was. It could be a change that on the surface seems trivial, but to the one for whom it is happening it is not.
And a period of transition ends with the new beginning. To quote
John O’Donahue in his poem New Beginning :
“Then the delight, when your courage kindled, and out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream, a path of plentitude opening before you.”
Ah, how sweet.
But before you get there, you have to transition through the neutral zone. Like it or not, and frequently we don’t like it.
We don’t like the neutral zone, the in-between times, could be called the interim time, because it is full of uncertainty and loss

and feeling lost and not being in control. We don’t like not being in control. I don’t like not being in control. And when you’re in a neutral zone you don’t know when it will end or if it will end.
It is one thing to be swinging on monkey bars where you don’t let go of one bar until you’ve got a grip on the next- that’s fun, that’s stretching yourself and it feels good. It is another thing to let go of your trapeze, do a somersault or two in the air, and then grab the rung of the trapeze that you hope comes to you in time. That’s risky and scary ands calls for trust, among other things.
Like anything painful and scary in our lives, we can deny the fact that inner upheaval is happening. We can do our best to ignore the persistent questions that surface about our lives, the distress of feeling unsure of who we are or who we are becoming, we can pretend to ourselves and the rest of the world that all is well: I’m fine/everything’s fine. We can operate on automatic pilot. I’ve certainly done that plenty of times in my life.
Or we can take on the work of this seemingly empty time between ending and beginning, surrender to the reality of this stage and stop struggling to escape, and see what we have to learn, what we may need to let go of, listen for the new song of our lives that is ever so softly being sung into existence somewhere.
What I have come to understand is that making a good transition out of the inevitable changes of our lives means that our sense of self and our sense of reality are likely to alter.
Take my friend Ginny, for example.
Ginny is one of the best mothers I know.
Motherhood seems to be her calling- she gives herself wholeheartedly and with great intelligence to the raising of her three children.

When her first child was born, her nurse handed her a form to fill out that would then be used to type up the birth certificate.
Along with the newborn’s name and date of birth, she was asked to fill in the space of mother’s name and date of birth.
Taking care to answer all questions correctly- for she wanted her daughter’s birth certificate to be correct, she dutifully wrote …..her mother’s name and birth date in the space marked ‘mother.’
It was the date of mother’s birth, 1932, that gave it away…
For Ginny, the word mother, the identity of mother, had always belonged in her mind to her mom.
It was yet to be her identity in the fullest sense.
We don’t become mothers or fathers the moment we give birth or receive our children through adoption.
That identity comes in bits and pieces as we are stretched in love and exhaustion, until there comes a time, for most of us who are parents, when that identity is inescapable, woven into the fabric of our being.
When did I become a minister?
I was ordained on October 14, 2001, two weeks after the death of my father, one month and three days after the twin towers crumbled and whatever sense of certainty or security we Americans might have had left us.
My ordination was meaningful.
It rang true for me and gladdened my heart.
But it was not until people started to expect me to be their minister, to demand of me the love and honesty that is essential to the work, that I started to become a minister.
It was not until I felt for the first time
“I don’t want to do this ministry any more, this is too hard” which I felt in my car in the hospital parking lot early one Thanksgiving morning after spending the night

with a family whose son and brother had just died from injuries sustained in a car accident.
You can only want to return something that you already possess.
My identity as a minister derives as much from the times the work is hard and I want to quit, but don’t, as it does from times of delight and success.
You know what I mean, I suspect.
We come to know who we are in the struggle, in the mess of trying to do it right as best we can, and in the neutral zone times of our lives when we let go of who we are to embrace the new person we are becoming.
Yes, we come to our identities over time, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly, and often we fight the new.
On some level it is simply the way of the world and human nature to fight change.
Consider this curiosity: Did you know that the standard U.S. railroad gauge, the distance between the rails, is 4 feet, 8.5 inches- an exceedingly odd measure for standardization?
If you knew that obscure fact, then you probably know too why this is so.
Tracing back, we find the measurement was brought to the United States by English expatriates, who built the American railroads the way they were built in England.
And tracing that history, we find that same standard was copied by the English railroad people to match the pre-railroad tramways.
That standard, in turn, conforms to the jigs and tools for building wagons, which used the same wheel spacing.
And that spacing conformed to the old wheel ruts on old long-distance roads,

because wheels and axle would be broken if they did not ride smoothly in the well-established ruts.
And the ruts were developed through the use of these long-distance roads, constructed by imperial Rome for their legions and war chariots, which were build to standard specifications.
The conclusion is that the current U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is based on the original specifications of the imperial Roman army war chariot. *
So there.
We resist change, in our measurements, in our habits, in our sense of who we are.
We are resistant, I think, because embracing a new way or a new identity means a little death, a little dying of what was.
For all the power that comes from naming a new identity, for all the momentum arising when we move forward in a new form better suited to the present reality, we fear the loss and the little deaths that come with change.
Bridges writes that “most of us have been raised to define courage as the emotional fortitude that enables us to hold fast during difficult times, when the courage that is often called for is the courage to let go.”
What needs to be let go? What needs to die? What wants to be born? What is being called forth?
These are important questions not just for each of us in our own lives but for this congregation in its life together, for human beings and human systems grow in the direction of their curiosity.
We are rounding the bend now, coming to the close of our first year of interim ministry, heading into the spaciousness of summer and soon enough re-engaging in Year Two.

One of the five tasks of interim ministry is “Discovering a New
Identity”. It is a more nebulous task than some of the others like say - Coming to terms with history, or Leadership Changes or
Renewing Denominational Linkages. A new identity is more of a process than a task. All those questions about letting go and birthing the new are relevant as we move into Year Two of our work together.
Some sermons end with a bang, an exhortation, a call to action.
And some don’t - some end with a question that hangs in the air.
I’ll end with this sermon title - what wants to be born? and ask that the question be allowed some time and space in your individual lives and in this congregation’s life.
What wants to be born? - in your life, in my life, in Follen’s life.
Let us ask ourselves that question, believing that it is a really important question that can lead to more authentic lives.
To ask - what wants to be born - means we have to face what needs to die. To my mind there is no better place to ask that question than in a faith community, and there are no better people to ask that question with than those who call this community their spiritual home. For questions of life and death are at their heart religious questions, and we ask and try to answer them best in the company of those who have chosen to walk together on a path of faith.
Cricket and I thank you for a good first year together, and we look forward to engaging with you in these questions of ultimacy and intimacy.
* This example comes from Leading Change in the Congregation by Gil Rendle, P. 11