The Power and Practice of Pausing A Threshold Conversation

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems….
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years . . .
-- from Adrienne Rich's “Twenty-One Love Poems,” in her book, The Dream of a Common Language

The old rules are breaking and even GPS is not always up to date. We are living on the threshold, in the liminal time and space between what is no longer and what is not yet. It can be exhilarating. It is often unnerving or even frightening. Always, it is an opportunity for transformation.

A blue double door is shown with some clouds above it and a sandy landscape in front. The doors are open to reveal a green field and cloudy blue sky beyond.

In the face of so much change, by what coordinates will we find our way? In what do we place our faith?

The power of worship – and ritual – is rooted in liminality, the state of being in between. When thoughtfully created, worship and ritual can move us outside of time as we normally experience and measure it. They invite us to pause and reorient ourselves – to our values and aspirations, to our ancestors and those who will come after us, and to our faith in that longer arc seeking liberation and bending toward justice.

But our exploration of liminality happens in many places, not just worship. This threshold invitation into transformation is the work of faith development itself and the many practices by which we grow in heart and mind and soul.

At their best, our faith communities – whether brick and mortar, virtual, or other forms, new and old – are covenantal gatherings supporting transformation that is rooted in each person and nurtured in relationship with others so it can be planted in the wider world. Our congregations are places where deep change can happen during any activity, making every aspect of our community life a locus for both faith development and cultural change.

But first we must slow down.

Slowing down

Change itself can happen as abruptly as an accidental collision or as slowly as evolution. But our participation in and adaptation to it almost always takes a long time. Like metabolizing a meal, integrating change in our own bodies, minds and habits cannot be rushed. So, the first guidance in making a community of faith conducive to transformation is to slow down. To take time to notice what is changing and how it is impacting us and others, our communities, and the earth and all beings. Then, we must take more time. Time to consider how we will practice our faith and live out our values in the face of change and its impacts.

Slowing down is as necessary for human transformation as time and patience are for an acorn to root and grow into an oak tree. Slowing down is also a significant challenge in the Overculture of white supremacy with its emphasis on efficiency, linear progress, measurable outcomes, and quantifiable success. Like the insistence on a sabbath practice, we might need to explicitly name a goal of pausing more and doing less, of taking more time while living in a hurry-up, do-more, 24-7 culture.

Some congregations have used slogans to set this intention, such as “Fewer, better” or “Do less, better.” It is what adrienne maree brown calls for in charging activists to “Move at the speed of trust.” It is the basis of the Nigerian proverb Bayo Akomolafe likes to share, “The times are urgent. Therefore, we must slow down.”

In her UU World piece, "Healing Community," Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka names the difference between “fleeting time” and “sacred time.” Fleeting time she describes as distracted and busy; our attention is divided, as we multi-task. By contrast, she says sacred time is attentive to the present moment. Sacred time is “biological time, the time our bodies take to act or think or feel.” It is time that does not outpace our bodies, our feelings, and the feelings of others around us. Sacred time opens in spiritual practices that awaken us to the present moment – an opening that we experience collectively in worship as well as in our church classrooms, kitchens, social halls and events, and gatherings for social action and service.

What can make a community of faith uniquely powerful among communities and organizations striving to improve the world is its core mission of transformation, paired with a commitment to slow down enough for transformation to occur, to take root, and to grow.

Learning from and with each other

How do we enter sacred, or biological, time in religious education and faith development?

If there is a curriculum for this invitation into the present moment, it is a spacious one with plenty of pauses built in for silence and conversation, spiritual practices, and being present to and with one another. Its emphasis is less on transferring information and more on building relationships, starting with each person’s relationship with their own heart’s truth and growing outward from there.

In the Article II image of shared UU values, we begin in the center, experiencing the giving and receiving of love. From there, we can explore and pursue the six petals unfolding around it and how we might live them with each other and in the wider world.

The volunteer teacher training for this approach to Religious Education might be based on a mantra I learned as a new parent from an old book, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare. Of course, many approaches to parenting have changed since 1945 when the book was first published, but I continue to find wisdom in the opening lines in the first paragraph of its first page: “You know more than you think you do,” began the book of some 700 pages of expert advice. For while Dr. Benjamin Spock offered plenty of scientifically tested and proven advice, the first thing he wrote about, the first thing he underscored, was not his own expertise but the expertise of the parent, which is to say the deep knowledge embedded in relationship and love.

“You know more than you think you do,” he insisted, then assuring us that much of what we didn’t already know we would learn – not from experts but from our children themselves, that in our willingness to learn from our children and with them, we too would grow and mature in our own development as adults while they grew and matured in our care.

In our congregations, can we similarly lean into faith development together, shared across generations? Can we trust that our need for and knowledge of love might be what guides us at all ages, especially now when the maps are outdated and the old rules are broken? Can we regard our congregations as places where we practice this relational learning?

Practicing the pause

Years ago, I heard a therapist teaching a class on how spiritual practices could support healing in a therapeutic setting. He began by telling a story about his early days as a father watching his daughter as she slept. He worried when he noticed a pause between her exhale and inhale. Only over time did he realize this was a natural rhythm, incorporating a short rest between exhale and inhale.

This is the kind of pause, he told our class, that spiritual practices create and support. A space, small or large, between thoughts, actions, and reactions. An opening in which choice has a chance and in which new habits, relationships, and possibilities can begin. I believe this is the space that allows transformation. It creates an opening where faith can take root and grow.

Spiritual practices take many forms. What works for one of us might not work for others. Our communities of faith can help each of us, at any age, to find the practices that help us pause and take time for relationships, for deeper understanding, and for spiritual growth. They make room for us to choose to affirm our values, even and especially when they are not supported by the dominant culture around us. Likewise, the shared spiritual practices of congregational life – in worship, in religious education, in gatherings of all kinds – help us experience being present to and with one another.

When the rules and the maps no longer guide us, it is our practices – of pausing, of being and staying in covenant across differences, of taking time to align ourselves with our values – that can help us invent a new way together, within and beyond our congregations.