Continuity and Creativity

"We can rejoice most of the time that we live in a world of continuities."

--Charles S. Stephen, Jr.

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring.

As most of you know by now, I am no great fan of winter, but I love the Spring. Alleluia! At no other time of the year is the creative force of nature so evident. But it is good to remember that this creativity of Spring is only a part of the continuous flow that we erroneously call the seasons. The continuity contains the creativity, if you will.

The idea that continuity and creativity are really part and parcel of the same thing is as reassuring as it paradoxical. I'm not a big fan of change, either, even though my theology affirms it. My theology affirms that change is necessary and even desirable. My heart sometimes argues against it.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who lived from 121 to 180 of the Common Era, wrote in his "Meditations" that, "Everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Thou, thyself, art in everlasting change. So is the whole universe." Again, change is only an aspect of a larger continuity of which we are all a part. We might almost say that change is an illusion: reality lies in continuity.

Poet Muriel Stewart comes at it in a different way in her poem "The Seed Shop":

Here, in a quiet and dusty room, they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shriveled, scentless, dry--
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

In this brown husk, a dale of hawthorne dreams.
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust;
It will drink deeply of a century's streams.
The lilies shall make summer of my dust.

Here, in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shell, a million roses leap.
Here, I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

Rachel Carson, perhaps the fountainhead of the modern environmental movement, author of Silent Spring, wrote,

On all these shores, there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before; of the sea's eternal rhythms--the tides, the beat of surf, the pressing rivers of the currents---shaping, changing, dominating; of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.

For, as the shore configuration changes in the flow of time, the pattern of life changes, never static, from year to year. Whenever the sea builds a new coast, waves of living creatures surge against it, seeking a foothold, establishing their colonies.

And so we come to perceive life as a force as tangible as any of the physical realities of the sea, a force strong and purposeful, as in- capable of being crushed or diverted from its ends as the rising tide.

On the other hand, we seek the new: new ways of seeing and understanding, new ways of being, new places and people and new experiences. The old can become stale and boring; we need the rush that only the fresh and the new can bring.

Not only individuals, but institutions also struggle with this dilemma. When does the old, in the form of tradition, ritual, and formalism, become an impediment? How do we accommodate innovation, or incorporate informality? My colleague Andy Backus has written,

. . .I feel keenly the tension in myself between learning old ideas and creating new ones. Though, certainly, neither act is pure: "creating" new ideas really involves first having learned the old ones, if not first hand by reading the preserved texts, then by living the manifested results in today's world. And, "learning" old ideas really involves translating them into terms that relate to one's present life.

When you get down to it "past" and "present" ideas may be useless, if not erroneous, categories. What really matters when one considers history is just what the word says: the story. The ideas that live in human minds really never die, living on in mass consciousness, continually evolving, hardly ever concerned with the individuals in whom they currently reside. The drama of our struggle, however--the saga of human significance--is a linear thing gathering steadily over the years. History, hers and his, is bound, to some extent, anyway, to what has actually happened.

And therein lies its power: you and I are the long result of "once upon a time" and on the verge of "happily ever after."

One of the things that I love about this building is that this truth is visually evident every single Sunday. While our ancestors would no doubt be shocked at some of the innovative content of our worship services in this place (teenagers dancing in the aisles comes to mind), they would also recognize the forms. As much as we have changed the hymn texts, moved away from theological Christo- and biblio-centrism, given up the Lord's supper and standing for the prayers, renamed the Baptismal ceremony, become more liberal in general, abandoned the "fatherhood" of God and perhaps even the neighborhood of Boston (as Unitarians of an earlier generation used to joke), we have nonetheless maintained almost all of the old forms. We still worship in this space created for a different time and place and theological understanding. Even as our ancestors did in the Reformation times, we still sing hymns, pray prayers, and preach sermons. Our order of service would be instantly recognizable to our Transylvanian Unitarian cousins of the 1500's. Like our Puritan ancestors, we still hold fiercely to the freedom and autonomy of our individual congregations and join ourselves together in a "covenant." Like our ancestors during the radical reformation of Europe, we still believe in the application of reason to religious questions and in toleration for different and even opposing points of view. We cherish individual freedom of conscience, even if, like them, we do not always do such a good job of living it out.

Indeed, in practically every way the past is present here on Sunday mornings. It is present in the words we say and in the songs we sing. Things have not so much changed as evolved. They have "continued." As the wise author of Ecclesiastes recognized so long ago, "there is nothing new under the sun":

The generations come and go,
But there the earth is, there shall it remain.
The rising sun goes down; it hurries round,
Only to rise again. . . .
What has been is what shall be,
What has gone on is what shall go on,
And there is nothing new under the sun.

The challenge, as always, is how much and how fast. Elizabeth Sifton, daughter of the 20th century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, reflecting on the Book of Common Prayer, has written in her memoir,

What I liked was the way it addressed the perennial question, still contested in every Protestant church, of just how much conformity, and how much improvisation, there should be in a religious service: "It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it." Well, there you had it! A church should allow for variation and personal development, but one had to have a structure. For centuries the formulas had been fought over. Who was in charge of deciding? Who would keep the mean? This was a vital, real problem--not an abstruse historical one.

I heard plenty of stuff and easy arguments between my mother and father about the right way to worship: I got the general drift that one didn't want slavishly to follow rote formulas, on the one hand, as I was led to understand Catholics and all too many Jews and Muslims had to do, since that meant that one had ceded to the priests the power and authority to determine the contours of one's faith. No Protestant would settle for this. On the other hand one couldn't favor unbridled self- expression, for that invariably led to self-indulgent sloppiness, pious banality, and triviality advancing under the banner of Personal Faith; that was mere entertainment. My mother was hilarious on the subject.

Like the Announcements period in our own congregation, like creative Christmas services full of teenage vitality, we struggle to maintain a creative mean. As my friend John concludes, "The question remains: When it comes to conformity and improvisation, how shall we keep the mean between the extremes of too much stiffness in refusing and too much easiness in admitting?" How, indeed?

As my friend and mentor Charles Stephen once wrote, "It is the continuations that attract us and give us strength. We come to appreciate that new mornings are but the continuation of our days."

Our challenge, in our lives as well as in our worship, is ever to strive for balance and harmony, remembering as we do that "there is nothing new under the sun." Ultimately, we need both things: continuity and creativity, and we need to remember that they are really not different things but only different ways of approaching the same reality. We must ever hold on to the old while trusting the new, maintain tradition while making room for innovation.

The Spring is now steadily advancing our way. Soon it will have arrived, or appear to have done so, and we will say that it is finally the season of Spring, but in fact it will simply continue to be. May we find that balance in our lives which allows us to live creatively within all the changes that life inevitably brings, recognizing the continuities which enfold and uphold us on this amazing journey of life. So may it be, world without end.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock