By Rev. Eugenia Gamble
Change, personal, societal, systemic, is not easy for many of us. This is often true even of change that we think we want, or find necessary. Even if we are moving into our dream home, we can find ourselves frustrated and complaining when we can’t remember where we put our socks or the Phillip’s Head screw driver. It is, of course, much more complicated when the change is not one we sought, had any voice in creating, or one we can easily ignore. For many of us these days, the pace of changes in the church, it’s governing and mission structures, and even our country, are being met with emotions of both dread and grief. It all feels like it has a life of its own. We feel like we are daily running up and down the ladder of the stages of grief unwilling to land on any one for long enough to feel its feels and incorporate its treasures. So we use our precious energy in resisting everything all at once, often without an alternative strategy. Or else we disengage and seek refuge in the accompanying loneliness, helplessness and ennui.
For me it has been helpful to think back to the summer of 1985. For those of you that were not alive then, or who barely remember 1985, we Presbyterians were still in the early years of the reunion of the PCUS and the UPC, working hard at healing a breach initiated by the Civil War a hundred years earlier. Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was the number one song, and I was obsessively watching Angela Lansbury’s Murder She Wrote, the first American TV show featuring a mature, intelligent woman protagonist who solved mysteries and built a community of relationships and responsibility without having to wear a cape and a bathing suit to do it.
None of that, however, really defined that summer for me. For me, it was the summer of the Great Coca Cola Controversy. That was the summer that the patent on Coca Cola ran out and the powers that be at headquarters in Atlanta decided to change the formula and introduce it as “New Coke.” There was much publicity and fanfare. Suffice it to say that New Coke was met with what I would politely call ‘a fair amount of resistance.’ There was an article in the July 22 issue of Time Magazine that quoted a twenty-eight year old woman from San Francisco’s reaction to learning of the change. Time reported, “first she was in shock, then she grew numb, then she ran through the house screaming only to fall on her bed in tears and beat her pillow.” The proposed change in the formula was met with mass demonstrations nationwide and especially in Atlanta where I then lived. Most of those demonstrations occurred before anyone had even tasted the new product. The headlines the week of the announced change, in both the New York Times and the Washington Post were larger, and the articles longer, than were the headlines and articles describing the serious surgery of the President of the United States! People were having none of it. The final nail in the coffin was when, on the evening news, a man tried New Coke, looked directly at the camera and said, “It tastes just like Pepsi to me.” The push back was so frenetic that some analysts speculated that the Coca-Cola company had dreamed up the whole thing in order to re-patent the old Coke formula as Coca Cola Classic with enough free publicity to offset the cost.
That, I think, is my favorite story of resistance to change, although I have witnessed and experienced many. I still witness it inside of me, and around me, every day now. How can we truly worship online? How do we participate in building culturally respectful Christian community around the globe? Does changing the name of committees or mission personnel point to something meaningful, or are we just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic ship of church? How do we know when to accept the things we cannot change, and when to change the things we can, when change is rapid, radical and untested? Perhaps the life cycle of a butterfly and a glimpse at scripture can help us.
I had always thought when a caterpillar spun a cocoon to sleep in the darkness until the right time to emerge, that somehow the little creature just napped and sprouted wings at the opportune time. I am told, however, that that is not at all what happens. The caterpillar in its current form disintegrates completely into a goo that some call butterfly soup. It is the essence of the life of the thing, distilled and sticky. From that goo the new and beautiful creature forms, emerges at the right time, after beating its wings inside the cocoon in order to make them strong. When unwanted change, especially change to our comfort zones and the certainties and values we can’t imagine life without, is thrust upon us, we can feel like it is too soon, not right and our wings are not strong enough. We can even feel like we are just a gooey mess of disintegration and unrealized potential with no wings at all, and without even our old feet to hold us up. It sometimes feel like we are stuck in butterfly soup and that we will never emerge. The thing about butterfly soup though, is that it contains within it all the wild wonderfulness needed in order to rise. It may look and feel like a mess, or a defeat, to the dissolved creature if only caterpillars are acceptable, but Spirit has other ideas. The problem with living in the time of butterfly soup is that we can easily be frightened, think we are not up to the hard work of becoming, and are not sure we will like the colors of the new fantasy wings we hear about when they finally arrive. In times of disorienting and painful change, sometimes, too, we are secretly afraid that we are left in the chaos with nothing but our own wits to rely upon.
In Mark 4:35-41, we find the beautiful story of Jesus asking his disciples to get into the boat with him and head to the ‘other side’ of the lake. Whereupon he goes right to sleep on a cushion in the back and tells them to have at it. When the storm arises and they cannot manage their way across, what do they do? They wake up Jesus, tell him the problem and ask him if he doesn’t even care that they are perishing. So Jesus gets up, tells the chaos to ‘be still’ and then asks his friends why they were so afraid when he was with them all the time. What did they then do? They got even more afraid because if they thought a storm was formidable, they had no idea what to do with One who could control a storm and see them through to their destination in the midst of one.
What do we do when it feels like we are disintegrating or are just in the soup, butterfly or otherwise? What do we do when we feel like we must navigate the deep chaotic storms of our times when we are exhausted by the chaos, the grief, and both welcome and unwelcome change? Well of course, if we are like the disciples, we figure out where Jesus is and go to him immediately with all of our fears, questions and helplessness. Maybe we accuse him, or even his body the church, of not caring at all. There is, after all, some satisfaction in finding a target for our fear and someone easy to blame. But none of that stops the storm, unless, of course, by battering the ramparts we stir a sleepy Jesus into addressing our situation that wasn’t really bothering him in the first place until we got so scared we could no longer steer the boat. Why was Jesus unconcerned? Was it because he didn’t care about the outcome or the destination, or the pain and danger along the way? I don’t think so. Perhaps he was sleeping peacefully because he knew from the beginning that no matter the storm, no matter the watery chaos, no matter the gooey uncomfortable waiting, that the Spirit is always hovering over the waters contemplating how to push back the emptiness, the wasteland, the chaos, so that something new and life giving can emerge from it.
So given that, what do we do in these times? Perhaps we weep like the young woman at the thought of New Coke. I think that is a holy response. Perhaps we wait until the last possible moment to weave a cocoon in which to fall apart in the dark. I like that option too. Maybe we beat our frightened way to an unfrightened Jesus and beg for help. Good choice as well. Perhaps, as we do all of that, we just keep on keeping on.
I once had the honor of being a birthing coach for a young parishioner during the birth of her first child. Heavy into the painful labor, crushing my hand as I told her to breathe, she turned to the midwife, with the baby beginning to crown, and shouted, “I can’t do this! Put it back!” The wise midwife just smiled and said, “Honey, this is out of your hands. Breathe and then push.” New life is really hard. Labor is really hard. It is miserable hard. But once the waters break, in the thick of the pain, all we can do is breathe and push, trusting that the same Spirit that hovered over the waters, the same Jesus that quieted the storm, the same Creator who found a way for a caterpillar to become a butterfly, is at work in with and through us even now. So my prayer for us is that we will breathe and then push. Who knows, maybe something beautiful, new, creative and life changing is just one big breath away.