Change brings anxiety; it can’t be helped.  And anxiety brings an urge to resolve the discomfort as quickly as possible.  But interesting, creative, thoughtful, and healthy change can’t be rushed.  And unsettling times don’t always require instant solutions.  How can we take necessary care of ourselves and stay anxious for awhile?  

This church has been through a lot lately.

I’m still hearing the stories and learning about all of the tough circumstances you were asked to go through.

Interim ministers, of course, are expected to work with a congregation to resolve issues and feelings surrounding the ending of a previous ministry.  That’s why the UUA recommends interim periods before a congregation begins a search to call a new settled minister.

But this congregation had much more to deal with than merely the ending of Rev. Mitra Rahnema’s ministry with you.

There were other staff changes and departures, under sometimes sad and difficult circumstances.  And most of those challenges took place during Rev. Rahnema’s sabbatical, so your congregation was asked to deal with those challenges while also dealing with the extra work required of sabbatical coverage.

That’s a lot.

Rev. Rahnema’s resignation did not resolve those issues, of course, rather, her resignation announcement threw you into another set of challenges as your church leaders worked to find new, interim leadership:  first Rev. Tomlinson, and now myself.  Another staff resignation came this fall.  Another new hire.  And it’s a blessing to have new hires to fill staff vacancies, but new staff also require additional work to train them and get them up to speed with the job.  And now with Kendra Frederickson-Laouini’s resignation, fortunately a happy parting, we have one more goodbye to say, and one more break in our hearts we will need to mend.

That’s a lot.

Additionally, I’m sorry to say that my first six weeks with you have not been a time of peace and healing, as I had hoped and you all have needed.  Our congregation has been further stressed by needing to take action concerning a member of our congregation who has been acting in ways that have made church members and staff anxious and afraid, and who has taken public actions that slander me and church lay leaders and damaged the reputation of our church in the neighborhood.  Dealing with that situation has been a challenge of its own, adding emotional toil for the church on top of the actual work required to respond to the situation.  And that work and emotional energy has used up resources that has forced us to postpone the still lingering work required of addressing the past concerns.  The emotions from those past concerns now face the threat of being buried rather than being brought to the surface and directly addressed thus making our healing work even more difficult.

That’s a lot.

I am exhausted by it all, as I’m sure you must be too.  I am troubled.  I move fitfully between fatigue and anger, frustration, some productive work alternating with what feels like spinning my wheels, feeling hopeful and calm, and then stressed and hyper-alert again.  In a word, I feel anxious.  Maybe you do, too.

So let’s talk a little this morning about anxiety.  Shall we?

Last week, I shared with you that I have the kind of personality that when I’m faced with a challenging situation I look to ease my anxiety by going to knowledge and wisdom.  I want to know the facts.  I Google.  And then I try to make sense of the facts by fitting them into a theory of the universe, or a “worldview” that I create in my mind.  In other words, when I feel anxious, I seek understanding.  Understanding a troubling circumstance gives me comfort.

So that works for me.  And probably many of you.  My personality type is a pretty common one in Unitarian Universalist churches.  In fact you might say that the personality type of the UU faith itself is finding comfort for our troubles through intellectual understanding.

But there are other ways that other personality types find comfort.  Last week, I listed:

The comfort of community and connecting with tradition

The comfort of humor and taking it all lightly

The comfort of feeling our strength and asserting our will into the world.

The comfort of seeing deeply into the shared values that often underlie surface conflict.

The comfort of refocusing on the good, the true, the highest, the ideal.

The comfort of turning away from personal needs and placing oneself at service to the needs of others.

The comfort of creativity and the ability to invent needed solutions to our problems.

And the comfort of appreciating the inherent beauty in existence even in times of trouble.

Those are all good, as is the comfort of wisdom and understanding.

But there’s another approach to dealing with our feelings of anxiety.  And that’s the recommendation that sometimes it’s OK to simply be anxious.  Sometimes it’s even good to be anxious.  To live permanently in an anxious state would be too much.  That’s not the goal.  But some anxiety, for some time, is good.  In fact, sometimes, deliberately holding on to anxiety, carefully managed, for as long as we can, leads to better outcomes than rushing away from our anxiety.

In organizational theory there’s a concept called the productive zone of disequilibrium.

Let me explain.

Imagine you’re baking a cake.  And I am not a cook so forgive me if I get this totally wrong.

But if you’re making a cake (you not me) you combine all the ingredients into a bowl and then you mix it.  Mixing the ingredients is what I mean by anxiety.  Doesn’t anxiety sometimes feel like someone is taking a mixer to your insides?

If you turn on the mixer too high then all the ingredients simply go flying all over the kitchen and you have a mess.  But if you turn the mixer down too low then maybe the ingredients don’t get broken down and recombined in the way they must in order to become cake batter.  And of course, if you don’t turn on the mixer at all than the ingredients just sit there; there’s no transformation at all.  There’s no anxiety, but there’s no batter either, and there will be no cake.

The same thing happens when the batter is made and poured into the pan and put into the oven.  The baker needs to introduce anxiety into the system in order to move through the process that transforms the batter into cake.  In this case, introducing anxiety means turning on the oven, adding a little heat to the system.

Now if the baker turns the heat too high, the cake burns, smoke comes out of the oven, the smoke alarm goes off, and the cake is ruined.  But if the baker turns on the heat too low, or forgets to turn on the oven at all, then the batter just sits there and no transformation ever takes place.

But if the baker turns on the heat just right, then we get to have cake.  The proper temperature, the temperature that allows transformation to happen, without creating a mess or a ruin, that’s the Goldilocks zone.  That’s the productive zone of disequilibrium.

A better analogy might be cooking a stew on the stovetop.  With a stew, a chef has to constantly monitor the cooking to keep it simmering just so.  Turn up the flame a little, watch what happens.  If it starts to boil, turn down the flame.  Stir, watch, adjust the flame, add a little salt, adjust the flame again.  Keep the stew cooking, which means keep the stew anxious, but keep the cooking in the productive zone of disequilibrium where the right kind of transformation happens, making our careful way between the missed opportunity of raw ingredients that stay exactly as they were, and the disaster of exploding the whole dish into a giant a mess and we never get our meal.

That’s the goal of navigating through this interim period.

You want to make a change.  In fact you have to make a transformation because the change has already happened.  Rev. Rahnema has resigned.  The next settled ministry will be good and bad in different ways than Rev. Rahnema was good and bad.  In any case you will not have Rev. Rahnema again, so a change has happened.  Now we are in a transition period:  an interim.

Change is unsettling. What was firmly planted has been uprooted.  The support structure of the church has been dismantled in a few places, and the remaining supports are being asked to serve in new and different ways.  Will the structure stay up?  Or will the whole church come crashing down?  You feel anxious.  Of course you do.

I do too, frankly.  I’m also anxious.  Not because I think the church is in danger of crashing.  It isn’t.  The church won’t crash.  In fact, the church structure is a lot stronger than you think.  It’s a healthy system.  A lot of resilience.  We will get through this.  We will be fine.

But I’m anxious, because, and this is what I said earlier, I don’t know what the future of this church will be, and not knowing something produces anxiety for me.  It’s not my job to know your future.  That’s your job.  My job is to help you dream then name then create your future, which will happen with your new settled minister.  I’m not anxious for your future.  Your future will be fine, no problem, one way or the other.  I’m anxious because I don’t know and not knowing creates anxiety for me.

But that’s not a bad thing, right?

That’s my message for today.  Feeling anxious is not always a bad thing.

Anxiety is the heat in the oven that transforms the batter into cake.  Anxiety is the mixer that transforms ingredients into batter.  We need to be anxious, a little.  We need to be mixed up, and unsettled.  That’s how cakes get made.  Now we’re cooking!

So the most common mistake that a congregation can make during the interim time, is really the same mistake that any of us are tempted to make every time we feel anxiety in our lives.

Anxiety is uncomfortable.  It’s scary.  Maybe it even feels painful.  We identify anxiety as the problem, and then we rush to get through the anxiety as quickly as possible.  Anything goes, as long as it relieves our anxiety.  How quickly can we get back to the status quo, we ask, rather than recognizing the gift we’ve been given of an opportunity to transform.  The productive zone of disequilibrium.

Sometimes it isn’t the anxiety that’s the problem.  The real problem is the underlying situation that caused the anxiety.  Sometimes our work to relieve the anxiety allows us to ignore the deeper problem, which only sets us up for greater problems in the future.  Let’s not do that.

You know about the phenomenon of the rebound boyfriend or girlfriend.  A person who is used to being in a relationship is so uncomfortable finding themselves single after a break-up, that they quickly pair up with a new person, who quickly turns out to be not a good match at all.  The new relationship re-made the status quo, and so, relieved the anxiety of being single, but didn’t really fix the problem that led to the break-up.

The better strategy for most people is not to get partnered again right away.  Instead, be willing to be anxious for a while, tolerate the anxiety of being single, and use the opportunity to learn the lessons of the past relationship, to figure out for yourself again what you really want to do with your life (your “mission” in other words) and to name for yourself who you really are for yourself rather than who you were in relationship with your old partner (your “identity” in other words).  And then having really learned the lessons of the past, with a clear sense of your true mission and identity, go out and search for that new minister, excuse me, I mean new partner, who really serves your goal of a healthy and satisfying, long-lasting and productive relationship.

You can’t do that if you aren’t willing to be a little anxious for a little while.

We can’t do this, if we aren’t willing to be a little anxious for a little while.

By accepting an interim you’ve already stated your willingness to not immediately re-create the status quo.  And we’ve got a good long interim period to work with, two and a half years, or a little less now.

So let’s agree that we have been given the gift of an opportunity to transform, to turn flour and eggs and butter and milk and sugar into batter, and batter into cake, but only if we willingly step into and carefully preserve, the productive zone of disequilibrium.  Let’s slow down and be anxious.

Now, if I were a chef, peeking into the kitchen of this church for the last several months, I would say that we have the oven turned up a little high.  Wouldn’t you agree?

So I’m not suggesting that we need to stay at this level of anxiety for the entire interim period.  We’re about to boil over, I’m feeling, or burn the cake, or burn out.

So let’s see if we can turn down the flame a little, without letting it go out.

Worship is one way we can turn down the flame.

Let’s sing some songs like “Comfort Me” because we need some comfort.

Let’s breathe in peace.  And breathe out love.  And let’s remember to keep breathing when the stew starts to feel a little over-heated.

Come to worship on Sunday, we need to be together and walk this journey together.

Come to the special worship I’ve planned for the afternoon of Easter Sunday when we will have a designated time to address the stressful circumstances we’ve experienced over the last several months.  I’ve called that worship service a Chalice Circle, deliberately building on the work that Rev. Tomlinson did with her Healing Circle back in December.

If you’re feeling anxious, remember that in a church community we’re all on the same side.  We’re all feeling anxious.  Everyone else here is struggling just like you are and doing the best they can.  We need each other to turn down the heat a little.  Give ourselves a break.  Practice some forgiveness; we’re just human.  Practice compassion; it’s a tough time for all of us.  We need not think alike to love alike.

“We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.”

“We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose, and cannot do it alone.”

We will get through this time of anxiety.  We will get through, quickly, I hope, this time of unhealthy, overheated anxiety.  We will come together into a place of peace, and there I will release you to your future.  But we will come to our best future if we are willing to be a little anxious for a little while.