Leaving the Rhythm of Routine
Rev. David Takahashi Morris
August 20, 2006
In spite of what Jane Rzepka says, I suspect we all know that it’s not just New Englanders who cling to their routines, obligations, and the day-to-day rhythms of hard work and school and the logistics of the family transportation flow chart. Whether by choice or necessity, we all tend to order our time and then to keep the order in place with routines. Routines give order and structure to our lives, and we need that.
Jane Rzepka is right, though, that we also need the lesson of letting go. We need to remember that even if we grind to a halt, the world won’t. There will definitely be no significant existential or social crisis if every now and then we have ice cream after lunch. . .or a nap, instead of putting in four hours on the job or running errands, and it’s good to be reminded of that every now and then, lest we begin to think the world can’t manage to go on about its business without us. Or to think we can’t go on about our life without managing the world.
For those of us who have the good fortune to be able to spend some time away from the routines of work and daily life, whether in summer or not, there can be much value in using that gift of time to think more deeply than usual about how we want to spend our hours, about what really is essential activity, and what isn’t. In the time outside our usual measured moments, we ask questions: If I don’t have to get the groceries on Monday, do the laundry on Tuesday, spend 8 or 10 hours each day on the job, or go to this week’s roster of lessons, appointments, meetings and events—what do I want and need to do? In days that are more spacious, what do we find time for? What deeper rhythms guide us? Can I breathe with the sigh of the waves on the shore? Can a week of sunsets light the darker corners of your spirit? Is there really anything more important than a child finding a fossil in a pile of rocks on a beach?
These are
lessons summer can offer, and Rzepka’s story speaks well to that kind of
summery lesson, which is what we had in mind when Leslie and I first talked
about this service. But the slower,
elemental rhythms of summer time are themselves a routine; and life can call us
suddenly and urgently to a deeper, more overwhelming place. Even as we walked the gorgeous
This summer families and circles of friends in our church have been devastated by life’s most uncompromising truths. Death has walked among us, touching beloved members of this community and others we barely know, as well as the family and friends of some among us.
We have known other struggles among our number this summer, too, visitations of Shakespeare’s “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to:” Catastrophic illnesses, sudden reversals of fortune, unexpected and uncontrollable events that changed our lives beyond our imagining.
There have been joyfully overwhelming events among us this summer as well. When Leslie and I stood here last, two weeks ago, I was struck by the presence of several very small, very new faces. If you’ve ever lived in close proximity with a baby, you know that the rhythm of our structured days does not interest them, and your plans do not take precedence over their more elemental time-clock.
This summer too we have been reminded by world affairs that the peaceful and busy rhythms of everyone’s life can be torn apart any moment when leaders labor under the insane delusion that force is a tool with which security or peace or justice can be built. As long as anyone believes that, none of us, anywhere, is safe.
Summer always has lessons to teach, but this particular summer in our lives, in the life of this church, in the life of the world, has had lessons of its own, harsher lessons and more radical departures from the routines of the daily round. Yet this is not, in truth, out of the ordinary. Any summer, any day in the life of any community can bring such life-altering events.
All of this enormity brushes aside our normal rhythms and demands our attention at a deeper and more visceral level. The illusions that sustain our day-to-day existence give way to the truth that we are temporary beings, longing for permanence in a universe that does not offer it. We love mightily, we bring new lives into the world; we create beauty and we find delight and purpose and glory. And we know that it is all so fragile.
We are not in charge of the course of events within which we live. The routines of our lives are tools we use to try to manage the overwhelming and unmanageable reality of our existence.
When death comes, when suffering pounds at the door, when new life or new love reshuffles our priorities, when chaos reigns—the fabric of false control we weave with our ordinary routines is pulled aside. This is the lesson of letting go again: Letting go of the idea that we will have each other forever; letting go of the thought that we are somehow separate from the natural world where the sun rises and sets, and the seasons pass, and the rain falls or doesn’t without regard for what we might want or think we need. We are the same as all the other creatures who live and die and whose bodies harden into stones for someone to find on the beach. The deep rhythm of the universe is a slow and steady cycling of creation and destruction, of order and chaos, of birth and death, of love and fulfillment and loss and grief. Back and forth, again and again.
In that deep rhythm, we too live and move and have our being.