This month’s theme is a good one for beginning a New Year: Possibility.
What does it mean to be a people of possibility? What does it mean for this to be a year of possibility? The Soul Matters introduction makes the point that the notion of possibility is central to our faith, our way of organizing the world. Our fate is not sealed; we can become the people we want to be.
We often quote Rev. Gordon McKeeman describing Unitarianism as a tradition with a history of “an exalted view of human possibility with Jesus as an exemplar.” And as our awareness of the world has expanded, so has our list of exemplars.
Possibility is also central to thinking about hope.
Here’s a paraphrase of a quote I remember from a fellow divinity school student: “If life were all possibility there would be no need for hope; if it were all determined, there would be no room.”
That captures both the lure and difficulty of possibility and hope. If the goal or hope seems very large or out of reach, success can seem unlikely and failure can feel too predetermined to start (even if it is only failure to make a meaningful or sufficiently consequential difference — by whatever standards we use to measure that).
Hope and possibility are diminished to the extent that hopelessness settles in. We fail to try; or if we try, we tend to get discouraged and distracted back into the comfort of habit and routine.
As the Soul Matters editor writes: “We tell ourselves so many small things about who we and others are. And we know that’s not really because we’re pessimistic. More often than not, it’s about protecting ourselves. There’s comfort in convincing yourself that the work is hopeless; that way you don’t have to try and risk failure, hurt or disappointment yet again.”
Last week, as I was reflecting on Kindness, it comes as no surprise that I would stumble on the gentle wisdom of Mr. Rogers. He was talking about the importance of kind words. He wasn’t talking so much about risking failure, but about people feeling that they are failing to respond to “the stresses of society.” Rogers wrote:
“Look around in your neighborhood or workplace, and you’re likely to find many people who feel severely pressured: Society is asking so much of [us] in today’s world … Many adults feel that they are falling short in one — if not all — of the ‘assignments’ of their lives; they often feel that they are failures. Well, people are not failures when they’re doing the best they can.”
I paused as I read that and realized that even Mr. Rogers was asking too much of me. Even in his reassurance, he wasn’t giving me the room and permission I needed to live into the possibilities and hope of everyday.
Experience tells me that the best I can be often sounds a little too perfect and inaccessible to really help me move forward. In that moment, it came to me that if I only changed “best” to “better,” what a big difference it would make. Mr. Rogers would be speaking to me. “People are not failures.”
I’m not failing when I’m doing the better that I can.
Not only that, but then I’m living into the possibility of being the best I can.
The last line of our UUFH mission statement says we engage (that is we begin) in practice (doing and learning) and service for love, justice and peace. To engage in practice is to do the better that we can.
In the recipe for mint Juleps in the Joy of Cooking (wrong season for a mint julep I know), Irma Rombauer quotes Voltaire with a line that has stuck with me ever since I first looked up the ingredients 40 years ago: “The good is the enemy of the best.”
That may be true for a finished product like bourbon, but it is not true for people.
The better is our religious invitation to living into our human possibility.
So, as we welcome this New Year and another trip around the sun, lets raise our glass for a (nonalcoholic) toast to Doing and Being the Better We Can!
In that way, we commit and encourage ourselves to the probable possibility of goodness and kindness and personal successes in the days to come.
Happy New Year indeed!
— Rev. Jim McKinley, Minister