“You Can’t Go Home Again”
Rev. Amy Russell
April 2, 2006

On one of the flights we took during our vacation I sat next to a woman who had just attended her twenty fifth high school reunion.  She had only been back to her home town a couple of times in the twenty-five years she had been gone and it had been a good twenty years since she had seen the small town where she had grown up.  She said she was shocked at the changes.  The small sleepy town where she had lived had become more like a small city with a growing downtown area with some almost high rises replacing the small town center that had been so inviting.  She felt totally disoriented when she first drove through.  She couldn’t really place where the old bank had been.  Was the new five story office building where the small movie theater had been where she had her first date?  The street where she had walked to school everyday had become a major thoroughfare, where it would no longer be possible for a young person to walk alone safely.

She said that she felt confused at first.  She wandered around figuring out what had changed and what if anything hadn’t changed.  She was sitting in a Starbucks that used to be a small restaurant where she had waitressed and she found herself almost in tears.  She couldn’t figure out why.  Why was she so upset about something that she had really left behind?

As human beings, change doesn’t come easy to us.  Even when we have plenty of time to process it, it always comes as somewhat of a surprise that while we look forward to new interesting challenges, we are also grieving what we’ve left behind.  We might love new things, but we also have a human system that craves familiarity and comfort.  It’s comfortable to be in places and situations that are known; it’s scary to move into new unknown situations. 

William Bridges, author and consultant on transitions in organizations, writes in his book, Managing Transitions, that there is a distinct difference between change and transition.  Change is “situational”, he says.  It’s about what is happening to the organization.  And transitions are “psychological”, he says.  Transitions are about how we deal with the change.  Every transition contains three phases as Bridges sees it;  phase one deals with the letting go of the old patterns and ways of doing things, phase two is the transitional time when “realignment” and “re-patterning” occur and phase three is creating a new identity and purpose within the changed organization.  He says that because people are anxious to move ahead with the changes, they often overlook the transitions necessary to become a new organization. 

Bridges says, “Before you can begin something new, you have to end what used to be.  Before you can learn a new way of doing things, you have to unlearn the old way.  Before you can become a different kind of person, you must let go of your old identity.  So beginnings depend on endings.  The problem is, people don’t like endings.”

We are at the beginning of the ending here at Sugarloaf.  We are starting to end our stay here at Mason’s Hall and look toward the transition we will make to our new building.  We are beginning to see what kinds of transition planning we are going to have to start.  As T.S. Eliot says, “What we call a beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”  We must begin to understand that while we are so excited by our new beginning at Sugarloaf House, we can’t get to that beginning until we have some endings. 

Some of those endings have to do with recognizing that we are a different community than we were when we moved here.  We are growing and with the new building, our continued growth is almost inevitable.  That means that after we move in, after we make the shift to two services and we continue our growth perhaps at a faster pace, we will no longer be the small family congregation that Sugarloaf has always been.  People have already noticed that they don’t know everyone who is here on a Sunday morning and that is a change. 

So while we feel that we are moving into the home that we’ve been awaiting in order to relax and be the small happy family that Sugarloaf has always prided itself in being, home isn’t going to be the same.  We are going to have to work hard on the transitions that will be inherent in making this change happen.  But even after all the transitions we make, it may not feel like “home”- because we will already be different from what we were here. 

I may have told you before about the year that I went through so many changes in my life that the stress index that measures life changes went through the roof.  In one three month period I married Bill, sent my daughter off to college, quit my job of 14 years, left my friends and a community where I had lived for 14 years, and moved with my son to Louisville.  While all of these changes in my life were positive and life affirming, the transition to get through them was unexpectedly difficult.  I did expect that moving my son would be hard on him and was not surprised at how much time it took him to re-adjust to a new school and make new friends.  But the transitions that I made psychologically in adjusting to a new marriage, a new home, a new community, and trying to find a new career were much more daunting once I woke up and realized that this new life meant giving up some things in my previous life that I really missed. 

Since finding and falling in love with Bill gave me this feeling of walking on clouds I thought that I was somehow immune to the problems inherent in attempting this much change in my life all at once.  I moved through this fog of being in love and tried to pay no attention to the nagging thoughts that pulled on me from time to time reminding me that I had much experience in moving- enough experience to know how hard it is to move.  But I ignored those nagging memories, thinking that since I was so in love, it would be a piece of cake.

Eventually, I woke up to the fact that I was in a new city with no job, no friends, and a son who wasn’t very happy.  I realized that I had jumped into my new life without saying good-bye to my old life.  There was some grieving I was doing without knowing it.  Once I recognized that, then I began the real work- the transitions work that was necessary to making the changes I had taken on.  The transitions work meant re-evaluating my career goals, finding a new church, and making attempts at finding new friends.  Looking back now at that time, I can see that I had no idea of the level of stress that change can bring into your life, but that probably was a good thing.  I probably never would have attempted it if I had been aware.  But love can make you blind.  And love can get you through difficult times.  So, of course, I have no regrets now. 

In my transitional time, I figured out that I wanted to go to seminary to become a minister and began that process.  But there were many endings that I hadn’t honored when I left my prior life.

So, you might ask, what are the endings that we should be honoring and how do we plan for the transitions we are about to enter?

We may need to let go of some feelings that we’ve been holding onto for a while-

1. let go of the feeling that we are a small, transitory community that may not make it without help from others
2. Let go of the attitude that we know everyone present on Sunday morning
3. Let go of the need to see all of our friends at the same service
4. Let go of the feeling that we don’t have time and energy to devote to the outside community because we have so many needs of our own
5. Let go of the identity of Sugarloaf as a small group of musical people

At the same time there is a strong identity of Sugarloaf that we will hope to maintain through these transitions.  We want to hold onto-

1. Our warm, friendly atmosphere
2. The way we reach out to newcomers
3. The caring that people exhibit when someone is going through a difficult time
4. The perseverance that enabled Sugarloaf to get through all the challenges that we have overcome
5. The diversity of belief, of age, gender, background and the interest in becoming more diverse

We are entering a phase of the ending part- phase one.  Part of that ending is saying good-bye to who we were in this space.  And part of that is the planning that it will take to enter the next phase, the transition phase. 

The phrase “you can’t go home again” was popularized by Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again  who was a passionate writer and believer in the American Dream.  He wrote in the 1920’s and 30’s during the difficult time for America, the time between the wars and time of the Great Depression.  But Wolfe, traveling often in Europe saw what was beginning to happen in Germany with the fixation on purity of race. His novels reflect his views about how America could become stuck in the past and mired in prejudice and fixed attitides about class status. 

He talks about the “Lost Generation” in his novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.  The Lost Generation was a term coined by Gertrude Stein to describe the generation that came of age during the first World War and immediately after it.  The members of this generation who survived the shocking devastation of the war experienced some regret at surviving when the more noble, heroic of the generation supposedly perished.  Wolfe refuses to belong to such a group and describes them as “those men of advanced middle age who still speak the language that was spoken before 1929, and who know no other.  These men are indubitably are lost.  But I am not one of them.”  (You Can’t Go Home Again, Wolfe, p. 715) He speaks continually of this class of people who are mired in the past, stuck in old structures of society, unable to rid themselves of the past heroics and past mistakes of America.

Wolfe’s theme of growth and renewal as the saving grace of America during that historic time, between the wars, echoes throughout his novels.  Wolfe warns America that in order to destroy it’s enemies of “fear, hatred, slavery, cruelty, poverty, and need” will take “a complete revision of the structure of society as we know it.”  He calls upon the agent of change and revision to shake the apathy and status quo of a nation that wants to revisit it’s past and find comfort in the victories of the last war. (Ibid, p. 738)

Wolfe’s belief that “the essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning” reminds us of many Unitarian Universalists’ beliefs.  “The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and everything must change…” 

Change is the nature of life.  Heraclitus said that “Change alone is unchanging”.   There’s a well known Buddhist saying that you can’t step in the same river twice- it will be different the next time. 

Knowing this intellectually is one thing.  But realizing it and preparing ourselves for change is always more difficult than we think.  Humans love their comforts of familiarity.  We love to go to the same places, see the same faces, sing the same songs, and feel comfortable with repeated rituals.  And while much of who we are as a community will remain intact, much of it will change.  But if we direct the change, then it will be good change.  Being intentional about looking for the bumps that we may experience along the road makes us ready for them so we won’t get bumped off the wagon. 

Many of you have invested a great deal of your time, money, energy, and soul into the future of the this community.  And many of you are fairly new to this community and are just learning what it has to offer you.  Together we’ll create the new community that we’ll be as we direct the transitions over the next few months. 

We’ll feel some discomfort and that discomfort may exhibit itself as feeling unsure about whether we made the right decisions in taking on this huge enterprise.  That’s expected when an organization is changing.  But the character of this community which is to listen to each other, hear what each other believe, and make the best democratic decision that we can will ensure the future of this community. 

We can’t go home again- but we can create a new home together.  A home for everyone -both members who have been here since the inception of the congregation and a home for people walking in the door. 

Thomas Wolfe ends his novel with these words:

“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—
Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending- a wind is rising; and the rivers flow.”(Ibid, p. 743