Isaiah 40:28-31, Mark 9:33-35
March 14, 2021
About fifteen years ago, our church welcomed new neighbors—the New England Buddhist Vihara, a Sri Lankan community initially located off Central Street. Jenny Allen tutored several young monks in English. An older monk walked through Edwards Cemetery daily, contentedly contemplating the impermanence of existence. Bhante Aluth, the head monk, taught us the Buddhist Loving-Kindness Meditation. The ancient practice invites us to send good wishes out in expanding concentric circles; for me it is a meditative way to practice loving my neighbor as myself.
I had experienced Loving-Kindness meditations before; this one was different. The language was more direct, blunt even. One line stood out: “May you find courage, patience, understanding and determination to overcome failures in your life.”
Failures? Clearly Bhante Aluth had not been in the United States long enough to know we prefer to deny the reality of failure. I’m accustomed to using softer terms to take away the sting: challenge, disappointment, obstacle.
At first I was taken aback by the word failure; now I am grateful for it. There is something freeing in naming reality. We all, at times, fail to live up to expectations—whether they are our own or imposed upon us, whether they are reasonable or unrealistic. We can pretend we never fail, but we don’t really fool ourselves. The blessing offered in this meditation is not that we might be shielded from failure, but that we find courage, patience, understanding and determination as we face it.
I bring my experience of that meditation to my hearing of our anthem, “Soar like an eagle.” It’s one of my favorites; it makes my spirit soar. Except for one line, which takes me aback the same way Bhante’s meditation did. “We cannot fail” is repeated over and over again, almost a drumbeat.
But wait, I want to say. That’s not true. We can be faithful, turning to God in prayer, listening for the Spirit, following Jesus, and still we fail. Faithfulness is no guarantee of success, at least not as the world defines it. In fact, over and over again Jesus turns our notions of success and failure upside down: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Our faith does not protect us from failure. Our faith promises that we are not defined by our failures; we are defined as God’s beloved. Our prayer of confession each week invites us to name failure, so we can be freed from the power it has to control our lives. Our words of assurance remind us that, by the grace of God, we can find courage, patience, understanding and determination to overcome what we experience as failure.
The BBC Earth video, which accompanied our anthem, depicts a young eagle learning to fly. I love the way the parent flies with the young one—offering encouragement and the guidance of example. I also love watching the young eagle figure it out—faltering at times, seemingly wishing she could land on water, almost crashing into tree branches too small to hold her weight, somehow finding strength to keep going. Ultimately he attunes himself to the air currents that keep him aloft. It takes practice—and a willingness to fail—to learn to soar.
That video, combined with what I have learned about birds this week, gives me a new way to think about the relationship between failing and flying. In his book, What It’s Like to be a Bird, David Allen Sibley writes this about how birds soar:
Birds use many techniques to save energy when they are flying, most of which are tricks to stay aloft without flapping. Riding updrafts to gain altitude is one of the most conspicuous. Bare ground such as fields or parking lots absorbs more heat from the sun, and as air near the ground warms up it rises. This creates a column of rising warm air –a thermal—reaching hundreds or even thousands of feet high. A soaring bird can sense the air movement and fly in circles to stay in the column. It simply fans its wings and tail and lets the rising air carry it up like an elevator. When it reaches the top, the bird bends its wings and glides in the direction it wants to travel, searching for the next thermal. Some species…can travel hundreds of miles with almost no flapping.
What a beautiful picture Sibley paints: majestic raptors riding the updrafts, circling, gliding, aligning their bodies to respond to subtle changes in air pressure. What an intriguing way to envision what it means for us, as human beings, to “mount up with wings like eagles.” How do we pay attention to the warmth of God’s love rising up from the open space in our lives? How do we position ourselves so we can soar with the energy of the Holy Spirit instead of exhausting ourselves by flapping our wings?
Often, when I am frustrated with my lack of progress accomplishing some goal, I complain that I am going in circles. My words reflect a deep-rooted cultural assumption that success means being the first or the fastest to get to the destination. Success means going in a straight line, undeterred by distraction or weariness.
With that as our definition of success, soaring looks a lot like failure. If we were to map out an eagle’s journey from one point to another, we would draw a circuitous route—circles spiraling up, a short glide, more circling, more gliding, maybe an occasional flapping of wings to assist in landing. For a significant portion of the journey, the eagle is actually heading away from the ultimate destination.
If we yearn to soar, to mount up with wings like eagles, then we are challenged to let go of this straight-lined definition of success. We are challenged to honor the times we seem to be moving away from our goal as an essential part of the journey, not as failure to be avoided and denied. We are challenged to stop our frantic flapping and be still. When we are still, we can begin to sense the warmth of God’s love and how it can lift us up. When we cease flapping our wings and simply fan them open, we can begin to ride the winds of the Spirit.
We are invited into a life-giving relationship with God, a relationship that renews and restores us and enables us to soar. We are invited to draw energy and lift from the warmth of God’s love, to revel in the circle of learning and growing, to glide from warmth to warmth, to flap our wings on occasion to help us position ourselves in the updraft of the Spirit. What a glorious invitation. Now is a good time for us to accept it.
As individuals and as a church, we are entering into a complicated time—full of possibility and peril, fear and hope. Slowly, tentatively, we are beginning to imagine what life might be like post-pandemic. At the same time, we are reeling from a traumatic year, filled with loss and isolation, anxiety and rage, disappointment and confusion. In the midst of all that is going on, we hear the poetry of Isaiah 40: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted, but those who wait for God shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles.”
If we rely on our own strength, if we define success as getting to the right decisions and taking the right steps in the right order, we will faint and fall exhausted. We will flap our wings frantically until we collapse.
Instead, we can choose to slow down. We can take time to clear out space so that God’s love can warm the ground beneath us and rise up in thermals of holy energy. We can pay attention to the energy of the Holy Spirit in our midst—building upon new sources of creativity that emerge, attending to grief and pain, honoring that we are not all in the same place at the same time.
I envision us, as a church community, fanning our collective wings so we are lifted up by energy created by the warmth of holy love we share. We soar in a circle, sometimes with our destination in our sights, other times moving away as we acknowledge loss, learn from our mistakes, and care for one another. As we reach the pinnacle of a thermal, we glide, trusting that losing altitude is part of the journey. We pay attention to the next thermal, new expressions of God’s warmth, new ways the spirit’s energy might lift us up. Occasionally, we decide we need to flap our wings, pushing our way through stuff we just need to get done. If we find we are flapping too much, we remind each other to slow down and pay attention to the rising warmth of God’s love.
It’s a beautiful image, and a challenging one. It is all about trust: trusting that the warmth of God’s love really is powerful enough to lift us up, trusting that there is something more important and more wondrous than a straight-lined definition of success, trusting that grief is holy and that failure leads to wisdom, trusting that the Spirit is at work through each one of us. May we dare to trust; may we dare to soar like an eagle.
I suspect it will not catch on, but I’d like to make two changes to our anthem. The first is at the end of the chorus: “Those who believe cannot fail.” Instead, I would like to sing, “those who believe are not afraid to fail.” When we trust in the power of God’s love, we are free to take risks, knowing that we are not defined by our failures but by our status as beloved children of God. Then, at the very end, instead of “we cannot fail, we can fly, we can soar,” I’d like to say, “We can fail, we can fly, we can soar.” Unless we are willing to fly in circles that lead us away from what is often defined as success, we will be stuck flapping our wings until we fall in exhaustion. As we honor failure and grief as part of the circle, as we wait for the warmth of love to lift us up, we soar.
Let us soar like an eagle—in circles of love and learning, lifted by the energy of God’s spirit. Amen.