Marshall Rosenberg in his work on non-violent communication, discounts the need to dwell on the past and advises instead to focus on the question, “what is alive in you in this moment?” Christmas tells us that in the midst of darkness there came a light. In the midst of a cold barn, hope, joy, love, were born. In the midst of a world of sin, a savior was born. Leave the past, now. Attend to what is being born in you this day.
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I realize this is a sermon for Christmas Day.
But I want to start from a time earlier this year.
When I was interviewing for this job as your interim minister last Spring, I subscribed to the church’s newsletter, and I started paying attention to what was going on at the church.
Of course, I’ve long been aware of what goes on at this church, just because I live in Los Angeles, and I care about Unitarian Universalism, and I have held a fondness for this congregation ever since I did my internship here, 25 years ago.
So I knew the congregation had been going through some major conflict. And I knew it would be part of the job for whoever became your interim minister to help the congregation resolve the conflict and move through it, and heal from it.
That felt like good work. And important work. Healing work is part of an Interim Minister’s regular job description even if the previous minister had left under good circumstances.
But in this case, healing work felt like it would be difficult work. I wanted to know that I could be helpful to the congregation. I wanted to be prepared. So I started looking for clues of how, if I got the job, I might be able to work with you all on healing from the past.
One of the clues I got, was that I noticed a few people in the congregation had been looking at the work of a psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg.
Dr. Rosenberg had developed a technique that he used to help couples and communities work through conflict called, “Non-Violent Communication.” He trained psychologists in this technique and, although Dr. Rosenberg died in 2015, there are now quite a lot of people offering this technique, as well as numerous books and videos devoted to it.
I thought something called non-violent communication might be helpful in a situation like what this church had gone through, and because at least a few of you were already looking in to it, I thought I would, too, so we would have a common language.
Dr. Rosenberg’s theory is actually quite simple. It goes like this.
When people feel emotions, such as hurt, or anger, or really any emotion, the emotion is a signal that they have an unmet need.
Think of the way a baby cries, for instance. The baby feels unhappy because it’s hungry or wet or tired. The baby cries because it has an unmet need. The cry means, feed me, or change me, or I need a nap.
Adults, too, cry when we have unmet needs.
Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what our need is. So part of the healing work is to move from the feeling: “I’m angry!” or “I’m hurt!” to being able to identify the associated need.
Dr. Rosenberg works with people to try to identify the unmet need. And sometimes these are as basic as the needs of an infant.
I need rest. I need peace. I need love. Even, I need a nap.
Once a person can name what they really need, the next step is to figure out what they can ask from the person they are in conflict with, that will help them meet their need.
This seems so simple, and it is, but it’s magical the way it works.
I feel an emotion because I have a need. I need attention. I need respect. I need time for myself. I need time with you. And you can help me meet this need by doing this specific thing.
And then Dr. Rosenberg suggests that when we ask someone for help we don’t phrase it as demand. People don’t like to be coerced. But they do like to help. He suggests we use this language, “Would you be willing to…?”
Non-violent communication just means those three steps;
I am feeling this negative emotion.
I understand my emotion is connected to this specific unmet need.
I think you could help me meet that need, so, “Would you be willing to…?”
The steps are simple. The difficulty is that it’s hard sometimes to identify what we really need. And then it’s also hard to say specifically what it is that another person could do for us.
Dr. Rosenberg gives the example of a wife who complains about a husband who works late at the office and is never home to help with dinner and the kids. She asks, “Would you be willing to spend less time at the office?”
And the husband says, sure, and then he joins a bowling league and spends his evenings with friends, instead of at home with her and the kids, which is what she really needs.
People are happy to help us meet our needs, but we want to be invited not guilted or shamed into helping. That’s why it’s important to phrase the ask as, “Would you be willing to…” And then we have to be truly willing to hear that the answer, sometimes, is “No.”
And we have to ask for something specific. Not, “treat me with respect!” But what does respect look like to you? What specifically can you ask your partner to do to show respect, so they don’t have to guess, and you can get your real need met?
I found the little I learned about non-violent communication to be truly helpful. I’ve already applied the lessons in my own life, and suggested them to several other people that I’ve counseled in pastoral care.
But there was one particular learning from my reading on non-violent communication that I thought was most relevant to the situation of a church that had gone through conflict and needed healing. And it’s a lesson I thought was appropriate for a Christmas Day sermon.
So here it is.
Dr. Rosenberg found that very often when couples came to one of his workshops, or came to him for counseling, that the thing they wanted to do was tell him all the stories about how one person had hurt the other person. They could go back for years. Stories that one person had thought was resolved but the other person wanted to dredge up again. Stories that served not healing but proved the point that the other person was a bastard, or lazy, or a disappointment.
Dr. Rosenberg found that it wasn’t productive to go back over these old stories and try to discover who was at fault, or who needed to apologize.
He listened to the stories. But he found that the question that really helped a couple move toward healing was this: “What is alive in you at this moment?”
He writes this, “The first step in healing is to put the focus on what’s alive now, not what happened in the past.”
“What is alive in you at this moment?”
Not what emotion from weeks or months or years ago are you re-connecting with now. Not, how good are you at re-activating a hurt that you experienced two years ago. But what are you feeling and needing right now?
Dr. Rosenberg found that when people spoke of their present feelings and needs it was a tool toward resolution of conflict, rather than re-hashing old resentments.
He writes, in a book called Practical Spirituality, “To give a gift of one’s self is a manifestation of love. It’s a gift when you reveal yourself nakedly and honestly, at any given moment, for no purpose than to reveal what’s alive in you. Not to blame, criticize, or punish. Just ‘Here I am, and here is what I would like.’ This is my vulnerability at this moment. To me, that is a way of manifesting love.”
He uses the phrase, “alive in you.” What is alive in you at this moment. Not a long dead anger, that you keep carrying around, and have found a way to resurrect whenever you need to feel angry again. But what is alive in you at this moment?
As Sophia Fahs writes in our meditation this morning, to be in touch with the present moment while with another person is a kind of holy communion: “We gather in reverence before the wonder of life. The wonder of this moment. The wonder of being together, so close yet so apart. Each hidden in our own secret chamber. Each listening, each trying to speak. Yet none fully understanding, none fully understood.”
I thought this was profound.
I had always been taught in my interim ministry training, that it was important for healing for the minister to listen to everyone tell their story of how they had been hurt in the past. We were encouraged to make a timeline of the church’s history, going back decades, and uncover all the unresolved traumas that we could name. All those old stories brought out again. And for the new church members who hadn’t been here at those old times to teach them the stories of the ministers who had failed us, all the old conflicts, the time the church nearly split over this or that.
The theory was that this history somehow get into the DNA of a church, and if we aren’t aware of the past hurts and worked to consciously exorcise them, then they will forever haunt future generations in the church.
But in my own interim work, I’ve learned to be skeptical of that theory. Especially for long ago hurts, it didn’t seem helpful to tell old stories. It felt like asking for a recitation of an ancient text. Devoid of meaning or relevance. Not something that’s alive in the moment.
It is the emotions of today, connected to the needs of today, that we can help with. “Would you be willing to solve a problem from decades ago?” is an impossible ask. But, “Would you be willing to do this specific thing, to help me meet my real need today?” is an invitation to healing we can actually make happen.
And this is why this is a sermon for Christmas Day.
Not a Christmas Day sermon for Christians, but a Christmas Day service for Unitarian Universalists, and for this particular congregation.
The Christmas story, for non-Christians, who aren’t interested in the Christian theology of Jesus as God incarnate and all that, is this.
There’s a woman and a man. Mary and Jospeh. A husband and wife. Who are about to have their first child. The government has required them to leave their home and travel to the husband’s ancestral town for a census. This means while Mary is close to giving birth, she has to leave the village where she has support for her pregnancy and the new baby when it comes, and she will give birth among strangers. The further insult is that the government requires the family to make the trip, not in order to help them, but in order to tax them.
Mary and Joseph arrive at the designated city, Bethlehem, and they find, because so many people have been forced to travel for this census, that there is no room for them at the inn. Instead, they settle down in a stable.
It’s cold. In December, even in Judea, it’s cold. It snows, you know, in Jerusalem, just a few miles away.
And it is here, with no help, no family, not a proper bed or a bathroom, surrounded by the smells of animals, that Mary feels the baby ready to be born.
Dr. Rosenberg encourages us, if we want to be truly empathetic to others, or truly in touch with what is most needful in ourselves, or would be most helpful and healing, to ask:
“What is alive in you at this moment?”
Not to focus on the past: the cold, the journey, the indignity of being housed in a stable, but to focus on what it alive in you at this moment.
What is alive in Mary at this moment, Christmas morning, and is ready now, ready to be born, is a symbol of hope.
Love is about to be born. The greatest love imaginable. Love for all humankind. Universal love.
Joy is about to be born. Great joy.
Peace is about to be born. Peace on earth. Good will to all.
Justice is about to be born. The promise that the old oppressions are about to be overturned. From earth’s old dust, a greenwood stem.
In that cold, dark barn, what is alive in the moment is a new life, a new baby, the future open in front of us, no past to hold us back.
As we come to the end of the year, and begin to imagine what the new year might bring for us, I heed this lesson, from Dr. Rosenberg and the Christmas story.
What is alive in you this moment?
What new life is stirring inside you, ready to be birthed in the new year?
Would you be willing to leave the past behind? Would you be willing to let go of the weight of old hurts and angers? Would you be willing to focus on what’s alive in you this moment?
On this Christmas Day, I think of the old story of Mary and Joseph, and the baby. The humble stable and the animals. It’s peaceful but it’s heartbreakingly poor, and plain. And then I think of the shepherds, and later the magi, coming to see this holy scene.
And what do they see when they arrive?
Well, it’s only a baby.
Yes. And all that new life represents.
That is enough. That in itself is the miracle. The miracle of new life, barely begun, ready to enter the world unburdened. Filled with the promise of what may come.
Find that new life alive in you this morning.
Let the love, joy, and peace, alive in you today, be the gift you give yourself this Christmas Day.