I want to encourage those of you who are fairly new here at First Parish to raise any questions you may have about how things are done here, whether you ask a member of the staff or the Newcomer Committee, a lay minister, and any other congregant. Kimi and I in particular welcome the chance to get to know you and your concerns and interests and questions. We want to make the change involved in your joining this congregation as easy and satisfying as possible.

 For instance, you may be here today for the first time, and wonder, Kimi who? Kimi Riegel -- she is the other settled minister here. She will be leading the worship service next week, and this week she is leading an extended worship service with the children and their teachers.

 You can ask harder questions than that, of course, or you can save them to ask us on Question and Answer Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, when we, Tom Rosiello, and our music director, Polly Oliver, will publicly answer whatever you ask us, on the spot, reading your questions from cards. In the ministry trade, that’s known as doing it naked, which is to say, without having the questions to think about beforehand to improve our chances of having a coherent answer.

 There is an advantage in spontaneity in doing it that way, and some kind folks always give us extra credit for bravery, but most years, there is one question that you think you can answer, but you can’t, not well. One year someone asked, “Where does God reside?” And there you are, caught between a variety of silly answers, like, “in a houseboat in Bristol, Rhode Island,” and so many fundamental Unitarian Universalist declarations of faith that (as I recall), after several agonizing seconds of silence, I could only answer “Everywhere?’ without much conviction in my voice.

 I think it was just last spring that the question of that sort to me was, “What do you think about change?” I was pretty sure he didn’t mean nickels and dimes, but the idea of the other kind of change was too big for me to get my brain around. The questioner and I had a good discussion during coffee hour, but (again, as I recall) my public answer involved a fair amount of aimless wandering, concluding with something along the lines of, “sometimes change is a good thing, although sometimes it’s not, and you try to do the best you can.”

 Change has been on my mind as a subject since then. It seemed a good one to talk about today, as we begin a church year in different form than the double services we’ve used in recent years. We have new staff members, too, Peeky Abbott serving in Irene Praeger’s former role as Religious Education Administrator and Oscar Vasquez now our sexton instead of Bob Riley.

 It seemed a topic I could go on talking about next month when I preach the sermon at the installation of Robin Zucker, one of our former interns, as minister of our church in Reading, following a fifteen-year ministry by her predecessor there. I may even use the same title as this morning, “Everything Changes, Alas and Hurrah.”

 A number of our service elements this morning have called to mind the positive aspects of change, and we could have offered more. “Life, at its best,” wrote Carl Rogers, “is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. I find that when life is richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process.” (On Becoming a Person)

 And then there is the book that has been locked into the # 1 position on the New York Times list of best-selling books of advice for over half a year, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. No one is more enthused about change than Dr. Johnson, and the incredible success of his book may indicate that there are many people who want to catch some of that enthusiasm. (Of course, it may mean that a lot of business managers are encouraging a lot of employees to learn to adapt to change more easily, or else. Or it maybe that a lot of people, like me, like to be able to keep up with the times and read a best-seller without having to spend more than half an hour.)

 Johnson has a little fable to offer, featuring two mice and two little people who live in a maze. Every morning they get up and go in search of cheese to eat. In time, they all find a particularly large stash, and return to it every day. Then one day, it’s gone.

 Each character embodies a different response to change. The mice both leave immediately in search of other cheese, one sniffing to determine where it might be, the other scurrying ahead to check it out. The little people, though, were resentful – someone had moved the cheese! -- and they felt entitled to have it return. They expected it to, until one of them – our protagonist, named Haw – wised up and went looking for New Cheese, which in time he found.

 That’s the basic story, which with embellishments, large print, and some pages filled with an aphorism each (like, “The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, the Sooner You Find New Cheese.”) can stretch to the 94 pages that you get for your $19.95. The embellishments, the observations the fable affords, are not startling, but they are of the sort that I suppose we all need to be reminded of from time to time. There were signs that the first cache of cheese was diminishing, but the little people hadn’t noticed; we should be alert to changes in our situation. One of Johnson’s aphorisms is, “Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old.”

We shouldn’t get stuck in accustomed ways of doing things. As our hero, Haw, says to the other little person, the one who will not give up his expectation that cheese will reappear where it was before, “Sometimes, … things change and they are never the same again. This looks like one of those times. That’s life! Life moves on. And so should we.” [45]

 Haw discovers that there is pleasure in feeling free from the fear that had deterred him from setting out on a new search. He realizes that the most important change is the one you make inside yourself. He learns that it helps both to have a sense of humor about it all and still to believe you will succeed.

 Such simple messages, especially the one about keeping our sense of humor, are worth remembering as we go through a change like that back to single services. I expect us to do whatever it takes to enjoy this old new cheese. But as a general outlook on life, Johnson’s nearly-pure optimism goes farther than I can follow. Because I know that every new cheese means losing something of what the old one had that some people liked, like – for double services -- more congregational quiet during the prelude, and more room in the pews, at coffee hour, and for parking. Glad as we may be to find it, New Cheese has its own regrettable features. That’s the way it is with Cheese.

 Johnson himself offers one small note of reservation. He writes that Haw “knew that some fear should be respected, as it can keep you out of real danger. But he realized most of his fears were irrational and had kept him from changing when he needed to.

“He didn’t like it at the time, but he knew that the change had turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it led him to find better Cheese.

“He had even found a better part of himself.” [72]

 Carl Rogers made a similar brief passing nod to the element of fear involved in change, but likewise moved on quickly: “I find that when life is richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware.”

 My own ambivalence about change is more deep and wide. Because there are times when that flowing process is more than just “a little frightening.” In fact, change can be maddening, frustrating, confounding, embittering, and sad, even tragic, and not just because we have the wrong mental attitude. It’s one thing to have to leave your cheese behind. It’s another to lose a person you love. While Rogers may be right that life at its best is be a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed, that can also describe life at its worst.

 Please understand, I think a positive attitude, a resiliency in the face of loss, and adaptability are all wonderful things. I try to encourage them in my life, in your lives, and in our life together. But I get uneasy when someone like Johnson breezily declares “that there is always new cheese out there whether you recognize it at the time or not. And that you are rewarded with it when you go past your fear and enjoy the adventure.” [72]

 I figure, sometimes yes, sometimes no. But Johnson is convinced “that what you are afraid of is never as bad as what you imagine. The fear you let build up in your mind is worse than the situation that actually exists.” [63] What planet does this man live on? The person riding along in her Ford Explorer with Firestone Wilderness tires, worrying about running out of gas or maybe even having a flat, obviously has not begun to imagine how bad her situation is.

 I know several good stories of people and congregations that overcame their fears and set off on unhappy, unrewarding adventures, but I don’t want to dwell on the negative aspects of change. I just want to acknowledge that there is an alas as well as a hurrah about change. I feel it looking out on this room, especially this week, when I learned of the death of our oldest member, Ellen Dunnell, on September 3 at 95.

 Ellen moved to New Hampshire to be near her family not that many years ago, and until then, she attended services faithfully, sitting right there, as she had for decades. The service will be here, by the way, at a time still undecided.

 I keep going back to those sentences of Carl Rogers: “I find that when life is richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening.” Now of course life is a flowing process. We are aging every second and so is everyone who matters to us, the continents are drifting, the galaxies are racing apart. As Emerson put it, “The universe is fluid and volatile.” To experience this at its richest and most rewarding, it seems to me, is to be open to its sadness as well as to its fascination.

 And that’s okay, we can do that together, because there is so much to fascinate us, to coax us through the changes, to delight us with what’s coming next, whatever that turns out to be. My sub-title talks about Plan B. The phrase comes from a plaque I saw that said, “The key to life is how well you deal with Plan B.” Plan A is the one we expected to implement. I suppose it is the Old Cheese. The task is to fare well when that isn’t what quite happens, as it rarely does. Instead we deal with changed circumstances, over and over again, trying for the zest for new life that Johnson’s fable encourages.

This is a changed place. Ellen Dunnell is with us no more, nor are many others we hold in our memories still. But here we all are, with ninety-seven new members since we last met regularly as one congregation; and here now too is Julian Berla [a six-month-old child, dedicated earlier in the service] and his parents and sister and brother. Life is ever-changing, alas and hurrah.

So having had six months to thing about it, how do I feel about change? I figure, sometimes change is a good thing, and sometimes it’s not, and you try to do the best you can. We all do, together.
 
 

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