Sermon #52 (5th September 2021 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
I wonder how many of you were glued to the Toyko Olympics on TV this summer. Maybe not quite so many of us were watching as in years gone by, what with the inconvenient time difference to Japan, and the rights being sold off so that only a fraction of the action made it to free-to-air channels. But even if you aren’t an avid sports fan I imagine that most of you will have heard at least something of the story of Simone Biles, US gymnast, and all-round legend in her own lifetime. In large part, she inspired this morning’s theme.
In case this story passed you by, or you’re sketchy on the details, I want to share a little precis published in the Guardian, part of a longer and rather uplifting article by Sirin Kale, titled ‘Love, Courage and Solidarity: 20 Essential Lessons Young Athletes Taught Us This Summer’. She writes:
‘Simone Biles, widely acknowledged as the greatest female gymnast ever, arrived at Tokyo 2020 with the weight of the world on her shoulders. Commentators were predicting a clean sweep for the first woman to land a Yurchenko double pike. (I could try to describe it, but it wouldn’t do it justice. Just imagine the rules of gravity have been suspended.) But things began to go wrong in qualifying. They fell apart when she stepped out of bounds during her floor routine, then aborted her vault in mid-air during the women’s team finals, narrowly avoiding serious injury and scoring one of the lowest marks of her career. Biles subsequently pulled out of the women’s all-around and the women’s team event, explaining that she had lost her air-awareness –
a phenomenon known as the “twisties” – and was struggling with her mental health.
She later said it “sucked” not to be able to compete when she had spent the past half-decade preparing. But she explained that she had been inspired to talk about her mental health by watching [tennis star] Naomi Osaka [do likewise earlier in the summer] and that she had quit to protect her “mind and body”. Some armchair experts would have preferred Biles to risk her neck for their viewing pleasure. But, overwhelmingly, the public reaction was compassionate and supportive. Biles showed us that mental and physical health are connected – and that there is no shame in quitting to prioritise your wellbeing. For this, and not for her Yurchenko double pike, Biles will always be the GOAT [that is, the Greatest of All Time].’
In a way, Simone Biles is an embodiment of the message I want to get across this morning, and it’s a pretty simple message really: it is a wonderful thing to aim high, to strive for excellence, to commit ourselves to a goal or a practice or a way of being in the world. It is astonishing to see the amazing skill and verve of the likes of Biles who are masters of their art. Undoubtedly huge sacrifices are necessary in order to reach these (quite literally) dizzy heights and for some – not just those who reach the very top – these sacrifices will seem to be worth it. But for some people, sometimes, the cost of all this striving is just too high. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth the detrimental effect on mental and physical wellbeing, or on our relationships, or any of the other significant goods in our lives. This is not to endorse giving up lightly, or leaving people in the lurch, without good reason. I don’t think anybody’s saying Simone Biles just decided to give it a miss because she couldn’t be bothered.
But her example is a reminder we can just say no. Nope. No more. Even if the eyes, and the hopes, of the entire world are on us (though I don’t think any of us here today are under Olympian levels of scrutiny). That’s what Simone Biles showed us this summer. We can let ourselves off the hook – maybe just temporarily, taking time out, coming back later to try again – or maybe for good. Maybe a certain project or goal has had its day, and our focus, our time and energy, needs to move elsewhere, no matter how many people are invested in us keeping on keeping on. Because our ultimate worth does not depend on our achievement or our productivity. There’s nothing special we have to do to be worthy of love and respect, to earn our right to exist. As we so often say: we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Inherent – we don’t have to do anything to earn it.
I could stop there, with this mini-reflection, and it would be enough. There’s your take-away. But perhaps there are a few little asterisks I ought to mention too. The first is to acknowledge that many of us are kept ‘on the hook’ by the economic necessities of our lives. For as long as we are embedded in a capitalist society – one which wants ever more of our time and energy – one which encourages the false belief that we should measure our worth by our productivity, and relies on an unhealthy culture, piggybacking on the vestiges of the protestant work ethic – while we’re stuck in this culture maybe our choices are somewhat limited. That’s an unjust pressure coming from without, and one which we should collectively resist, but it’s a reality we need to acknowledge. Having said that, we often have more choices than we think we do, and it’s important to remember that as well. Letting ourselves ‘off the hook’ might be the hard choice rather than the easy one, there may be consequences, in this society that so often wants to use us up and burn us out for profit. But we don’t have to accept and internalise those values. And for those of us who have more choices, those who have a bit of (relative) privilege, it’s on us to keep our eyes and ears open to the pressures that keep others unjustly ‘on the hook’. And do what we can to disrupt, overturn, or at least ameliorate them.
Another asterisk, though, is contained in the reading from Harold Kushner that Antony read for us earlier. There are two voices of God, two messages we need to hear, and both are true. On one hand, we don’t need to be perfect, we are inherently worthy of love no matter what. On the other hand, it is good for us to aim high, to stretch ourselves, creatively, morally, to do better, to flourish in our fullness and make the most of the life we’ve been given. Both/And. There’s a tension between these two and a balance to be struck. Maybe each of us has a temperamental tendency to err on one side or the other: perhaps you tend to be pretty easy-going and don’t need to be told twice to cut yourself some slack (if so, this morning’s message probably isn’t news to you); but perhaps, instead, you’re someone who tends to be hard on yourself, someone who’s internalised those destructive messages from the society we’re living in, someone who feels that whatever you’ve done, whatever you’ve given, it is not-quite-enough (and if that’s you, I hope you’re really hearing the message of this morning’s service: you don’t have to justify your existence by working yourself into the ground and doing yourself harm).
The final asterisk I want to add, for today, is to ground this message in the context of this moment in history: the effect of living through the pandemic in particular, but also living into awareness of the increasingly obvious and scary impacts of climate change, and the clear unveiling of systemic injustices that are plain for all to see. Several of you will have already heard me say this in other contexts but I went to a workshop about a month ago which was, on the face of it, a training to help Unitarian leaders prepare to offer hybrid church services – services which will simultaneously bring together people in the building with people online – but before the leader, UU minister Kimberley Debus, said anything at all about the practicalities, she said the one thing that stuck with me more than anything else I heard in that training. She said (and I’m paraphrasing): each and every one of you has endured going on for 18 months of trauma due to this pandemic and it’s not over yet. You have all been operating in conditions of endless turmoil and uncertainty, in a time of fear, amid pressures to ‘get back to normal’ in all spheres of life, while everyone you know feels somewhat differently about that, there’s no consensus (and that is stressful in itself, as it will frequently raise tension and conflict). And you’ve come here to learn about hybrid services, which are a huge undertaking, when you’ve barely had a chance to catch your breath from everything you’ve had to deal with since 2020. So let yourself off the hook. You don’t have to do anything right this minute. Take the pressure off yourselves. It’s OK.
Now of course, given my job, the particularities of what she said really spoke to my condition. But the general principle applies to each and every one of us: whatever it is we are doing with our life, with our work, with our relationships – for the past eighteen months, we’ve been doing it through a pandemic, I don’t know if you’ve noticed – and most of us likely have a ton of accumulated trauma that we’ve barely begun to process yet. So let’s not minimise or discount the impact of that. Let’s let ourselves, and each other, off the hook, if we need to aim a bit lower, and settle for ‘good enough’ instead of expecting ourselves to excel. This is the humane thing to do; to show ourselves and each other loving-kindness, and to make our everyday choices in that spirit, safe in the knowledge that (as Sarah Bessey put it) we don’t have to be productive and we don’t have to change the world. For we are already so loved. In the days and weeks ahead, may we truly take this message to heart, for the greater good of all. Amen.
Sermon by Jane Blackall
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