When the idea of “reconciliation” first occurred to me as a good subject for a worship service I began to wrack my brain, trying to think of how it might apply to our experience as Unitarian Universalists. My imagination roamed far and wide, trying to picture who, if anyone, would be interested in this subject. Who, if anyone, would need to spend some quality time thinking about “reconciliation?” Then, finally, as if sunshine parted the storm clouds, it came clear to me, there was, in fact, one person in the congregation who would like to hear about reconciliation. And, I thought, well, even if it mattered to only one person in the entire Emerson community, it was a subject worthy of some good sermonic time.

So while that one person and I have engaged this subject with some depth and feeling, the rest of you, for whom reconciliation is probably only of incidental interest, can listen in and take some comfort in the fact that you have never had to deal with the issues that surround this topic.

Well, the topic did come up in a conversation with a member of the congregation. And she has taken no small risk in letting you know by speaking before you this morning that her life is not absolutely trouble-free. That admission is no small risk because most of the time most of us want to present ourselves as untroubled and that we’ve got everything under control. We all know we are not being entirely truthful about this, but that’s okay. We don’t want to be a burden to anyone else with the less than absolutely perfect parts of our life. We don’t want to become an object of pity and, most certainly, we don’t want to appear diminished in front of anyone else all of whom seem to be skating over the thin ice of life’s troubles with perfect ease and contentment. We can readily imagine to ourselves the less than charitable things other people might think about us if they knew some of the specifics of our private and periodic turmoil. So we smile, and we smile alone.

Several years ago Becky and I introduced an innovation in Emerson’s worship year, the Turning’s service, in which we honor the changes in life, the deaths and the births that have taken place in the congregation, in our families and in the world. Now you should know that ministers always introduce something new with some reservations because “newness” does not always correspond well with “goodness.” And, a congregation already knows how to do worship the way it has been doing worship. Change that worship and a congregation, certainly at first, does not know quite what to do. That can be very discomfiting. Even given the reservations, however, we have been and remain convinced that the service honoring the changes in the cycle of life is important. And over time you the congregation have figured out what to do with yourselves in that service.

I mention this because we know that some people avoid this service—which absence is regrettable. We have tended to imagine that some individuals avoid the service because they did not feel that it matched their expectations of what was supposed to happen in a Unitarian Universalist worship service. It is not a service in which we examine some abiding social, moral or theological issue and in as much as that is what they prefer, they avoid it. But I have recently found out that some avoid it, not because it doesn’t apply to their situation, but for precisely the opposite reason—it applies too much. They imagine that if they come they will do nothing but ball their eyes out the entire time. They’d rather not, even though we do have a generous supply of tissues on hand. “No, no, I’m not going to let you see the things that trouble my soul. No, no, I’m not going to let you in on my sense of loss, on my fears, my pain. No, no, NO! Talk about the war in Sudan please, but do not talk about the war in my heart.”

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the warring parties in the Sudan could become reconciled? Of course, But the ease with which we focus on OPT, or Other People’s Troubles, is a cause for some wonderment. Certainly some other people’s troubles, such as the massive tragedy in Haiti, require our immediate and vigorous response. But a question, for which I do not believe there is any one right answer: do we sometimes attend to other people’s troubles because we’d rather avoid tending to our own?

Let us say that sometimes the answer is “yes.” It’s not as if there is a direct correlation. It’s not as if, the moment something unfortunate happens in our own life, we immediately leap onto Facebook to start organizing a protest against government x or company y for doing something underhanded in country z to indigenous people a or rainforest b. But while there is no direct correlation like that; there is, I believe, a different kind of correlation. That is, if there is not peace in your own heart, than how effective can you be at inducing peaceful ways in other people’s hearts? Again, I don’t think there’s one right answer. But I do believe it’s an important question to ask oneself.

And you could extend this question, not only to how you regard people in distant lands, but also, people much closer to hand. People with whom you work, people with whom you live, or your family in general. That is, we do wish to have peace in our relationships with these people who matter a great deal to us, and we to them. But if there is not peace in our own hearts then how can we make peace with them? Normally we all go along to get along. But if someone important to you has done something hurtful—how do you find peace in your heart when misunderstanding and distrust seem to have supplanted affection?

So, I believe the place to really start with reconciliation is understanding that the possibility for, and the desire for, reconciliation begins in oneself. If things have not gone as well one as wishes with a spouse, a son or daughter, a parent, an aunt or uncle, a cousin five times removed, it is probably not only unlikely that they will someday magically appear at your door and admit to the terrible blunder they have made, but also—the likelihood of your believing them is fairly remote. Reconciliation is not that easy and it does not come cheaply.

I use as a rule of thumb in talking about family relationships the “loss of cabin pressure” instructions when on an airplane. You probably need reminding about these instructions because like me, you probably never pay the flight attendants the least bit of attention. For your information they are not saying, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.” They say, among other things, “If we experience a loss of cabin pressure and the oxygen masks drop out of the ceiling, please place the mask over your own face first before you attend to the mask for your child.” We need reminding about this because it is counter-intuitive. Just so, it is counter-intuitive to imagine that reconciliation with family members for instance, is only possible when we have first become reconciled with them within our own hearts.

So I do not mean, reconciled in general—but reconciled in specific with the person who you feel has done something wrong, misguided, or terrible. You see, if you do not want to be reconciled about that, it will not ever happen. If you are lucky, the other person may be on the verge of thinking along the same lines, secretly plotting reconciliation with you, but I would not suggest waiting for the other person to make the first step. And truth be told, the likelihood that they are contemplating taking the same step is probably remote. Alternatively, you might decide that what they did was indeed unforgivable and thus reconciliation is impossible. But if so, be prepared to carry that heavy load for a long time. You see, the real reason why you might be motivated to seek reconciliation is because you have become tired of lugging around that load of resentment, that load of slow burning coal fire of irritation. Recognizing that you need not carry that burden any longer is the first step of gaining peace in your own heart. And ultimately you have to ask yourself, why you are letting somebody’s else’s behavior determine what it is that you need to do for the well being of your own soul? You cannot literally force someone else to stop being a jerk, or cruel, or nasty, or even, in rare cases, contemptible. If you are waiting for them to change that, and hang your own peace of heart on their change, again, why are you placing the possibility of your own well being in their hands?

Taking control of your own well being, taking responsibility for your own well being is, of course, easy. Well. The truth of the matter is that when someone with whom you are in a relationship has done something which you feel is just plain wrong, and it has brought trouble into your own life, it almost always feels like a theft. Something has been stolen. Whether it’s your reputation, your feeling of trust, your affection—whatever it is, it was stolen—and that’s just not ever right. Theft always feels like a terrible violation and we feel quite justified in our unhappiness, even our rage. How dare they!

There may appear to be an immense gulf which separates what you thought the other person should have done and what they in fact did. And, if peace in the relationship seems to require us to act like nothing is wrong and no harm has been caused, that essential dishonesty only compounds the problem. Rather than submit to that intolerable regime, what most do is refuse to have any significant contact with the person they feel has stolen their happiness. In that relative degree of isolation then, we can become quite adept at marshaling bits of evidence on our side of the ledger. We may begin to see patterns we had not seen before, patterns which amplify our original complaint and further prove that we are eminently justified in our feelings of disappointment, of anger, of being hurt.

Those patterns may even be, in some sense, true. But we all have to, I believe; repeatedly remind ourselves that no one is born on this planet to make somebody else happy. No one exists to meet another’s expectations about what they should have done or avoided. Most everyone is trying to make a go of it as best they can. Most everyone avoids the largest errors in judgment. Most everyone does not commit heinous deeds. And most everyone is also not entirely blameless about all the details of their life. Each of us is not always right, and others always wrong. Oh Lord, There is more than enough sadness to go around, and it is pretty equally shared. We are all very complicated creatures leading very complicated lives in the company of a lot of other creatures leading just as complicated lives. It would be unusual for all that complicated living to take place without some friction and, on occasion, some real heat.

Religions have for a long time recognized the central fact of the universality of sadness and disappointment. Buddhism counsels that we should eliminate our attachments to people and things. If we have no expectations then we cannot be disappointed. I myself can understand the appeal of that approach but I rather prefer, at least some of my expectations; and will take my lumps of disappoint as a part of the bargain. Christianity, on the other hand, realizing the difficulty of reconciliation between what is expected of us, and what we in fact do, interpreted the death of Jesus as the ultimate reconciliation. The Buddhist approach is, I think, too light, the Christian, too heavy. I am going to care about what I think of others, and what they think about me. I do have expectations, and they are not all unreasonable even if it is unreasonable to imagine that what I expect will always be delivered. At the same time, I certainly do not expect that some set of cosmic wheels must spin, that God would have to kill his own son, so that I might experience a kind of reconciliation and thus feel happy, feel saved. Frankly, I’m not that important. And I don’t think reconciliation should be viewed as quite that difficult.

Surely there are times when we ourselves have caused harm, intentionally or not, inadvertently, or not. And there are times when we have been harmed intentionally or not, inadvertently or not. But it is not sufficient to say, “Okay, so we’re all in the same boat, no one is blameless and no one is thoroughly rotten.” What is required is that we summon the courage to say, “You know, what you did, what you said, was a sadness for me.” There is very little nutrition in the nursing of resentment.

Resentment is, in fact, a kind of death. It robs us of the life giving waters of laughter, of joy, of finding comfort in our companions. Surely we all will die sometime but we should avoid this kind of spiritual death before our actual demise. Life is too short, it is sometimes too hard to spend it on things which subtract from our capacity for liveliness. So let us summon the courage where we can to speak our peace but not expect that others will slap their heads in astonishment, “How could I have gotten it so wrong!” An apology might be nice, and sometimes it will be offered. But what we each really need is to set down that burden so that we may find peace within our own hearts.