Sitting with Trouble: Story and Sermon
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax
July 2, 2017
Rev. Julie Price, MDiv
Story
It is so good to be with you today in worship. The theme of our service today is “Sitting with Trouble.” And to begin exploring this theme, I’d like to share with you from a 2013 Op Ed in the LA Times, entitled, “How not to say the wrong thing.” In it, Susan Silk and Barry Goldman write, “When Susan [was ill], we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you."
"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My [illness] is not about me? It's about you?"
“The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had an aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie's husband, Pat. "I wasn't prepared for this," she told him. "I don't know if I can handle it."
This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan's colleague's remark was wrong.”
So in response, Susan developed a model to help people avoid making these kinds of mistakes and called it “Ring Theory”. It’s a model that has helped me think about how to sit with trouble of all kinds.
In the center circle, is the person who is sick. Then in the next ring around them are their close family members. The next ring is for close friends. The next ring is for work colleagues and so on…
The smaller the ring, the closer you are in relationship to the person who is sick. The larger the ring, the more distant in relationship you are to them. The rule of ring theory is simply this: comfort in; dump out. Or as I like to phrase it: support in; process out.
The person in the center can complain to anyone. They’re sick, they get to complain. And the role of everyone else to comfort and support them.
Immediate family or very close friends are also under stress because of their ill loved one. And so they too have a need to complain. But they need to reserve their complaining for folks who aren’t as close to the crisis. And they need to comfort their loved one. Support in; process out.
Remember Katie’s friend who told her husband how hard it was to see Katie in the hospital? Let’s say she was in that 3rd ring. Her mistake was not in thinking that she needed to process her shock, her mistake was that she turned for comfort to someone close to Katie instead of processing out to someone who was more distant in relation to Katie.
And so as we begin this time of exploring how we sit with trouble, I encourage us all to place ourselves and our own experiences inside of the rings of this model. How can we sit with one another and offer genuine support during times of trouble. Who can we turn out to for support when our caregiving is difficult to do? When we find ourselves in the center of crisis, can we trust that those around us will support us in our time of need?
Sermon
At the very first large gathering of Unitarian Universalists that I ever attended, it was a petite, unassuming Roman Catholic nun who stole the show for me. The year was 2014 and I was a new Unitarian Universalist attending my first General Assembly, the yearly continental gathering of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Sister Simone Campbell, a religious leader, an attorney, and a poet, had become famous for helping to organize the “Nuns on the Bus” social justice tour in 2012. She gave the prestigious Ware Lecture that year, given each year by a guest of the UUA president. This down to earth, dynamic story-teller and justice warrior absolutely blew my socks off!
Sister Simone told the crowd that when she was on the bus tour, a full-time videographer said to her, [Sister] “it seems like whenever there is trouble, you seem to walk towards it; most people run away.” She said, “I realized [then] that all of our spiritual leaders, when there are broken hearts or pain in our world, they have walked towards it. They walk towards the pain in order to embrace, touch, heal.” From that she said that she began thinking about “the journey of faith as walking towards trouble.”
My mind was blown. I eventually rephrased her nugget of wisdom to “the journey of faith as moving toward trouble,” in recognition of all the diverse ways our bodies move in this world. “The journey of faith is moving toward trouble.” I just think that speaks right to the heart of Unitarian Universalism.
Our second UU principle calls us to affirm and promote “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations”, and our sixth principle is “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all”. Living out these principles requires us to move toward trouble in our world – toward the people and the systems that are suffering or broken and to do what we can to “embrace, touch, and heal”. Yes, ours is a faith that moves toward and engages trouble in the world.
But as I grew in my Unitarian Universalist faith, and began to exercise more courage and move closer to trouble, a follow-up question began to take hold of me. If the journey of faith is moving toward trouble, what do we do when we get there? What do we do with the trouble we encounter once we finally move toward it?
Beginning in the Fall of 2015, after my ministerial internship with you here at UU Congregation of Fairfax, I spent eight months as a chaplain intern at the Hebrew Home, a Jewish skilled nursing center for elders in Rockville, MD. Rabbi Michaels was my supervisor. He guided our small group of trainees through a unit of the interfaith training known as Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. He gave us scant few instructions when we first began. He assigned each chaplain intern to particular floors and instructed us to go knock on doors, offering residents a ministry of compassionate presence. Just go knock on doors? Was he kidding? That wasn’t enough to go on. I wanted more training before I knocked on anyone’s door. But that wasn’t how the training worked.
The first couple months, I spent quite a bit of quality time in the interior stairwell, calming my nerves with mindful breathing and centering prayer. It was all I could do to gather up my courage and go knock on a stranger’s door. And of course, this was the very point of the methodology of the training. I was challenged right away to face my fears. I had to ask myself why I was afraid of knocking on someone’s door and asking if they’d like a visit? Well, I was afraid of being rejected. Since I am a natural people-pleaser, I was afraid of making people upset with me for disturbing them But as I dug deeper, and knocked on more doors, I realized that what I was most afraid of was not that residents would reject me, but that they would actually invite me in. I was most afraid that they would want me to come in and visit with them. I was afraid that they would share with me about their troubles and that I would have no idea what to say or do. It turns out I was not as afraid of moving toward trouble as I was afraid of sitting with it.
How do we sit with trouble? This is one of the big questions that occupies me as I train to be a chaplain and sit with people who are suffering. And it is also a question that occupies me as I engage more deeply in social justice work around systemic injustices. How do we sit with trouble? There are many, many facets to this but one that I have been exploring lately has to do with unpacking the bag of troubles that I bring with me into the room, whenever I go to sit with someone else’s trouble.
Every time we move toward trouble, we bring our own set of troubles with us. We bring with us our assumptions, our fears, our own hurts. And so learning to sit with trouble involves learning how to sit first with ourselves: to sit with the pain and the fears that get stirred up inside of us when we sit right up next to trouble. When we ignore them, pretending we don’t have them with us, we often end up putting them right in the lap of the person we’ve come to support.
Evelyn, one of the residents at the Hebrew Home, reminded me so much of my beloved grandmother, who passed away about 10 years earlier. Every time I saw Evelyn, I thought of my grandmother and felt a pang of grief. Sometimes, when talking with Evelyn, I would almost ache inside wanting to tell her how much she reminded me of my grandmother. And often, when Evelyn talked with me, I would find my mind drifting away toward some memory from my own life. I had had just enough training at that point to know that I shouldn’t share my grief with Evelyn. I was there to be of support to her and dropping my memories and pain into her lap was no way to do that.
Support in; process out. It is of no help to someone in the middle of a crisis for us to dump our own bag of trouble in their lap. Instead, if we can acknowledge the bag and gently set it down, our arms can be freed to receive whatever the one in crisis needs to share with us. Support in, process out. That bag of trouble would be there on the floor for me to pick back up and unpack once I had left Evelyn’s room.
Rabbi Michaels taught us chaplain interns that when a thought or feeling about our own lives surfaced during a visit, to acknowledge the thought and then let it go. Acknowledge it and let it go. It’s rather similar to the practice of mindful meditation, when we focus on our breath, notice when a thought arises and then gently return to the breath. Sitting with trouble asks us to engage in a kind of mindful listening – both to ourselves and to the one we are supporting. We listen to our friend, and when a thought or feeling surfaces, we acknowledge it and let it go, returning our attention to our friend. This is what I learned to do with Evelyn. Just like in meditation, I had no control over whether thoughts of my grandmother would surface. But I did have the ability to notice them and then let them go, again and again.
One of the really interesting thoughts for me lately has been how some of what I have been learning in my chaplaincy training is also helpful in thinking about social justice work, especially the work of trying to be an ally. Imagine again those concentric rings for a moment. This time though, instead of placing a person at the center of those concentric rings, place in the center some kind of systemic injustice, like institutional racism, Islamophobia or LGBTQ discrimination. Along the inner rings will be the people most closely affected by the injustice, the people whose lives are impacted directly and daily by that injustice. Friends of those folks and allies who want to be of support, but who are not as directly impacted, will be on farther rings.
Just like sitting with someone in crisis brings up our own memories, hurts, and fears, a similar thing happens for those working to be social justice allies. Allies wanting to be of support to the folks directly impacted by injustice, do well to recognize that the closer one gets to the trouble, the more one is likely to have a whole host of troubling thoughts and feelings get stirred up. And so a big part of the work is to sit with one’s own bag of troubles and process it with others who are at a similar or farther ring of impact.
When I was serving as a chaplain intern at Fairfax Hospital this Spring, the chaplain’s office was where I would unload my bag of trouble. If I had a particularly difficult visit, one that stirred up all kinds of emotions in me, instead of moving right on to visit another patient, I learned to go back to the chaplain’s office. There I would find another chaplain and tell them about the visit – what was hard, what got stirred up in me.
If we are going to live into a faith that calls us to move toward trouble and then sit with it, we are going to need a lot of really good support. Those most directly impacted by the injustice, have the right to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with just about anyone. In fact, this is what folks on the outer rings most need to hear in order to be transformed in ways that can help to overturn a system of injustice. But this kind of listening is hard and these listener allies are themselves going to need support as they confront issues and feelings in themselves. What Ring Theory helps us remember is that allies need to look for their support from other allied folks along the outside rings and not dump their troubles in the laps of the folks they are intending to support.
I heard a clear example of this on a webinar I watched in preparation for the UUA General Assembly that I just attended in New Orleans. The webinar was hosted by Allies for Racial Justice, a UU racial justice ministry specifically for white folks working to be allies in racial justice. ARE operates in a relationship of accountability and support to DRUUMM, the Diverse Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries, an organization specifically for UU people of color.
At General Assembly, DRUUMM and Allies for Racial Equity set up information booths next to one another in the hall. The leaders of ARE shared that is quite common for well-meaning white Unitarian Universalists to go up to the DRUUMM booth, staffed solely by people of color, and vent their outrage or disbelief at some expression of racism in their congregation. In a follow up phone call, a member of ARE told me that it can be really painful and draining for the folks at the DRUUMM booth to listen to these stories over and over again. And so ARE sits beside DRUUMM in the hall, offering a place for white folks to share about the troubles that have gotten stirred up as they have begun to sit with the injustice of institutional racism. White allies sharing with other white allies at the ARE booth can unpack their bag of troubles without further burdening the very folks who they want to support.
Our faith is calling us on to move toward, not away from, trouble in our world. And so, over and over again, we gather our courage, move a little closer to suffering and injustice, and sit with the trouble that we find both within and without. Whether we are on an inner or an outer ring of any given trouble, we are all impacted by it, but not in equal measure. So let us not unintentionally burden those most directly affected by setting our bag of troubles in their laps. Let us notice and attend to the hurts and fears in ourselves as we sit with the troubles of the world. Let us reach out to process with others similarly impacted. And then let us go back again to sit with trouble, setting our bag down next to us, so that with open arms and a listening heart, we can do our unique part in the work of transforming our world with acts of love and justice. May it be so.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax
July 2, 2017
Rev. Julie Price, MDiv
Story
It is so good to be with you today in worship. The theme of our service today is “Sitting with Trouble.” And to begin exploring this theme, I’d like to share with you from a 2013 Op Ed in the LA Times, entitled, “How not to say the wrong thing.” In it, Susan Silk and Barry Goldman write, “When Susan [was ill], we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you."
"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My [illness] is not about me? It's about you?"
“The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had an aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie's husband, Pat. "I wasn't prepared for this," she told him. "I don't know if I can handle it."
This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan's colleague's remark was wrong.”
So in response, Susan developed a model to help people avoid making these kinds of mistakes and called it “Ring Theory”. It’s a model that has helped me think about how to sit with trouble of all kinds.
In the center circle, is the person who is sick. Then in the next ring around them are their close family members. The next ring is for close friends. The next ring is for work colleagues and so on…
The smaller the ring, the closer you are in relationship to the person who is sick. The larger the ring, the more distant in relationship you are to them. The rule of ring theory is simply this: comfort in; dump out. Or as I like to phrase it: support in; process out.
The person in the center can complain to anyone. They’re sick, they get to complain. And the role of everyone else to comfort and support them.
Immediate family or very close friends are also under stress because of their ill loved one. And so they too have a need to complain. But they need to reserve their complaining for folks who aren’t as close to the crisis. And they need to comfort their loved one. Support in; process out.
Remember Katie’s friend who told her husband how hard it was to see Katie in the hospital? Let’s say she was in that 3rd ring. Her mistake was not in thinking that she needed to process her shock, her mistake was that she turned for comfort to someone close to Katie instead of processing out to someone who was more distant in relation to Katie.
And so as we begin this time of exploring how we sit with trouble, I encourage us all to place ourselves and our own experiences inside of the rings of this model. How can we sit with one another and offer genuine support during times of trouble. Who can we turn out to for support when our caregiving is difficult to do? When we find ourselves in the center of crisis, can we trust that those around us will support us in our time of need?
Sermon
At the very first large gathering of Unitarian Universalists that I ever attended, it was a petite, unassuming Roman Catholic nun who stole the show for me. The year was 2014 and I was a new Unitarian Universalist attending my first General Assembly, the yearly continental gathering of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Sister Simone Campbell, a religious leader, an attorney, and a poet, had become famous for helping to organize the “Nuns on the Bus” social justice tour in 2012. She gave the prestigious Ware Lecture that year, given each year by a guest of the UUA president. This down to earth, dynamic story-teller and justice warrior absolutely blew my socks off!
Sister Simone told the crowd that when she was on the bus tour, a full-time videographer said to her, [Sister] “it seems like whenever there is trouble, you seem to walk towards it; most people run away.” She said, “I realized [then] that all of our spiritual leaders, when there are broken hearts or pain in our world, they have walked towards it. They walk towards the pain in order to embrace, touch, heal.” From that she said that she began thinking about “the journey of faith as walking towards trouble.”
My mind was blown. I eventually rephrased her nugget of wisdom to “the journey of faith as moving toward trouble,” in recognition of all the diverse ways our bodies move in this world. “The journey of faith is moving toward trouble.” I just think that speaks right to the heart of Unitarian Universalism.
Our second UU principle calls us to affirm and promote “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations”, and our sixth principle is “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all”. Living out these principles requires us to move toward trouble in our world – toward the people and the systems that are suffering or broken and to do what we can to “embrace, touch, and heal”. Yes, ours is a faith that moves toward and engages trouble in the world.
But as I grew in my Unitarian Universalist faith, and began to exercise more courage and move closer to trouble, a follow-up question began to take hold of me. If the journey of faith is moving toward trouble, what do we do when we get there? What do we do with the trouble we encounter once we finally move toward it?
Beginning in the Fall of 2015, after my ministerial internship with you here at UU Congregation of Fairfax, I spent eight months as a chaplain intern at the Hebrew Home, a Jewish skilled nursing center for elders in Rockville, MD. Rabbi Michaels was my supervisor. He guided our small group of trainees through a unit of the interfaith training known as Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. He gave us scant few instructions when we first began. He assigned each chaplain intern to particular floors and instructed us to go knock on doors, offering residents a ministry of compassionate presence. Just go knock on doors? Was he kidding? That wasn’t enough to go on. I wanted more training before I knocked on anyone’s door. But that wasn’t how the training worked.
The first couple months, I spent quite a bit of quality time in the interior stairwell, calming my nerves with mindful breathing and centering prayer. It was all I could do to gather up my courage and go knock on a stranger’s door. And of course, this was the very point of the methodology of the training. I was challenged right away to face my fears. I had to ask myself why I was afraid of knocking on someone’s door and asking if they’d like a visit? Well, I was afraid of being rejected. Since I am a natural people-pleaser, I was afraid of making people upset with me for disturbing them But as I dug deeper, and knocked on more doors, I realized that what I was most afraid of was not that residents would reject me, but that they would actually invite me in. I was most afraid that they would want me to come in and visit with them. I was afraid that they would share with me about their troubles and that I would have no idea what to say or do. It turns out I was not as afraid of moving toward trouble as I was afraid of sitting with it.
How do we sit with trouble? This is one of the big questions that occupies me as I train to be a chaplain and sit with people who are suffering. And it is also a question that occupies me as I engage more deeply in social justice work around systemic injustices. How do we sit with trouble? There are many, many facets to this but one that I have been exploring lately has to do with unpacking the bag of troubles that I bring with me into the room, whenever I go to sit with someone else’s trouble.
Every time we move toward trouble, we bring our own set of troubles with us. We bring with us our assumptions, our fears, our own hurts. And so learning to sit with trouble involves learning how to sit first with ourselves: to sit with the pain and the fears that get stirred up inside of us when we sit right up next to trouble. When we ignore them, pretending we don’t have them with us, we often end up putting them right in the lap of the person we’ve come to support.
Evelyn, one of the residents at the Hebrew Home, reminded me so much of my beloved grandmother, who passed away about 10 years earlier. Every time I saw Evelyn, I thought of my grandmother and felt a pang of grief. Sometimes, when talking with Evelyn, I would almost ache inside wanting to tell her how much she reminded me of my grandmother. And often, when Evelyn talked with me, I would find my mind drifting away toward some memory from my own life. I had had just enough training at that point to know that I shouldn’t share my grief with Evelyn. I was there to be of support to her and dropping my memories and pain into her lap was no way to do that.
Support in; process out. It is of no help to someone in the middle of a crisis for us to dump our own bag of trouble in their lap. Instead, if we can acknowledge the bag and gently set it down, our arms can be freed to receive whatever the one in crisis needs to share with us. Support in, process out. That bag of trouble would be there on the floor for me to pick back up and unpack once I had left Evelyn’s room.
Rabbi Michaels taught us chaplain interns that when a thought or feeling about our own lives surfaced during a visit, to acknowledge the thought and then let it go. Acknowledge it and let it go. It’s rather similar to the practice of mindful meditation, when we focus on our breath, notice when a thought arises and then gently return to the breath. Sitting with trouble asks us to engage in a kind of mindful listening – both to ourselves and to the one we are supporting. We listen to our friend, and when a thought or feeling surfaces, we acknowledge it and let it go, returning our attention to our friend. This is what I learned to do with Evelyn. Just like in meditation, I had no control over whether thoughts of my grandmother would surface. But I did have the ability to notice them and then let them go, again and again.
One of the really interesting thoughts for me lately has been how some of what I have been learning in my chaplaincy training is also helpful in thinking about social justice work, especially the work of trying to be an ally. Imagine again those concentric rings for a moment. This time though, instead of placing a person at the center of those concentric rings, place in the center some kind of systemic injustice, like institutional racism, Islamophobia or LGBTQ discrimination. Along the inner rings will be the people most closely affected by the injustice, the people whose lives are impacted directly and daily by that injustice. Friends of those folks and allies who want to be of support, but who are not as directly impacted, will be on farther rings.
Just like sitting with someone in crisis brings up our own memories, hurts, and fears, a similar thing happens for those working to be social justice allies. Allies wanting to be of support to the folks directly impacted by injustice, do well to recognize that the closer one gets to the trouble, the more one is likely to have a whole host of troubling thoughts and feelings get stirred up. And so a big part of the work is to sit with one’s own bag of troubles and process it with others who are at a similar or farther ring of impact.
When I was serving as a chaplain intern at Fairfax Hospital this Spring, the chaplain’s office was where I would unload my bag of trouble. If I had a particularly difficult visit, one that stirred up all kinds of emotions in me, instead of moving right on to visit another patient, I learned to go back to the chaplain’s office. There I would find another chaplain and tell them about the visit – what was hard, what got stirred up in me.
If we are going to live into a faith that calls us to move toward trouble and then sit with it, we are going to need a lot of really good support. Those most directly impacted by the injustice, have the right to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with just about anyone. In fact, this is what folks on the outer rings most need to hear in order to be transformed in ways that can help to overturn a system of injustice. But this kind of listening is hard and these listener allies are themselves going to need support as they confront issues and feelings in themselves. What Ring Theory helps us remember is that allies need to look for their support from other allied folks along the outside rings and not dump their troubles in the laps of the folks they are intending to support.
I heard a clear example of this on a webinar I watched in preparation for the UUA General Assembly that I just attended in New Orleans. The webinar was hosted by Allies for Racial Justice, a UU racial justice ministry specifically for white folks working to be allies in racial justice. ARE operates in a relationship of accountability and support to DRUUMM, the Diverse Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries, an organization specifically for UU people of color.
At General Assembly, DRUUMM and Allies for Racial Equity set up information booths next to one another in the hall. The leaders of ARE shared that is quite common for well-meaning white Unitarian Universalists to go up to the DRUUMM booth, staffed solely by people of color, and vent their outrage or disbelief at some expression of racism in their congregation. In a follow up phone call, a member of ARE told me that it can be really painful and draining for the folks at the DRUUMM booth to listen to these stories over and over again. And so ARE sits beside DRUUMM in the hall, offering a place for white folks to share about the troubles that have gotten stirred up as they have begun to sit with the injustice of institutional racism. White allies sharing with other white allies at the ARE booth can unpack their bag of troubles without further burdening the very folks who they want to support.
Our faith is calling us on to move toward, not away from, trouble in our world. And so, over and over again, we gather our courage, move a little closer to suffering and injustice, and sit with the trouble that we find both within and without. Whether we are on an inner or an outer ring of any given trouble, we are all impacted by it, but not in equal measure. So let us not unintentionally burden those most directly affected by setting our bag of troubles in their laps. Let us notice and attend to the hurts and fears in ourselves as we sit with the troubles of the world. Let us reach out to process with others similarly impacted. And then let us go back again to sit with trouble, setting our bag down next to us, so that with open arms and a listening heart, we can do our unique part in the work of transforming our world with acts of love and justice. May it be so.