I Accept the Consequences
preached on Sunday, August 19, 2007
by Kilian Kröll
A few nights ago, I had a dream, in which I returned to the street I grew up on as a child. Now, in real life the place where I grew up was at the edge of a medium-sized and slightly provincial city, on a quiet street full of family homes, some of them with small apartments to rent to people like my mom and me. Most of the neighbors knew each other well, and we kids used to spend hours and hours playing on the street, in each other's back yards, sleeping over at each other's houses, ice skating on the nearby pond or playing hide and seek in the neighboring woods. When we moved onto this street in 1983, our closest neighbors greeted us with champagne - we had never seen them before in our lives. It was that kind of street. Kind of idyllic in my mind.
Anyway, I have this dream that I return to that street as an adult after having been away for a while, and everything has changed. I don't realize it at first, but bit by bit I notice that none of the old neighbors is living there anymore. Instead, I meet a bunch of college-aged people at outdoor parties, and I ask them what happened to this and that person and none of these students knows any of our former friends. I walk up the street and notice that several of the family houses had been turned into small store-front businesses. Everything seems quite busy and boisterous. I come to the corner where our street meets the major thru-way, and instead of a slightly wider street with traffic and bike lanes, the post office and a pharmacy, I find a totally urban bus shelter with people from all walks of life, many of them poor and transient. And some of them are waiting for busses, others are lying homeless on the street, there are run-down chain stores, and - of course - the sky is polluted and you can't see the sun.
In this dream I totally freak out: I start crying, asking people what happened to the neighborhood I remembered from my childhood, and when no one knows what I'm talking about because they haven't lived there long enough to remember, I get extremely frustrated. I know that everything has changed and there is absolutely nothing I can do to change it back.
I decided to talk today about Big Life Changes - those that happen
to us and those we consciously choose...
We're going to hear from the kids in a moment, but first I want to tell you what really happened when we moved away from the street I grew up on. It was 1991, and I was twelve years old, and my mom had married my step dad, and my brother had just turned one, and we moved in together for the first time as a new family - but to another country! I had to say good bye to our neighbors and the kids I played with on the street, to my school in my provincial city, to the lake and the woods and my two-person household with my mom... My whole life as I knew it changed in an instant and I felt as freaked out as in my dream. It felt like life had tripped me up, and all I could do was to get up and dust myself off and keep going, knowing that nothing I could do would ever change things back to how they were before.
Could I have a demonstration, please? [kids perform skit: one person hold up a sign that reads 'LIFE'; another person skips along the way and as soon as she passes the sign, she trips, falls, cries, gets up, and keeps going.]
This is what I would call an Involuntary Life Change. At the age of 12, I had little say about my mother's decision to move us from the Baltic Sea in northern Germany to a metropolitan valley in the Austrian Alps. I said earlier that all I could do was to dust myself off and keep going, but that's too easily said now. At the time, I had no choice but to go to that new school and learn the regional vocabulary and learn to cope with my new family constellation, but what also happened was that I entered a teenage depression that lasted for the remainder of middle school and it took me two years to make new friends - you know, the kind of friends you really know and trust. I would now characterize the time after I was moved to Vienna as the darkest period in my life - a period that would transform my life forever.
You see, even then, when I would surface from the prangs of my depression, I knew that what I was learning from feeling like an alien in my own surroundings was preparing me to be the kind of person I needed to be when I got older. And alienated I did feel: I was the only German in my new Austrian school (and my classmates let me know at every possible moment); in fact, I was also the only German in my new family constellation, so I felt like there was no one who could really empathize with what I was dealing with; I was also the only gay person I knew in Vienna; and only one of two people with divorced parents in my class. And I was a highly sensitive teenager - not fun.
It was during this time, though, that I started reading incessantly and listening to music, and I started intuitively educating myself about marginalized peoples around the world. I read the works of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin; I visited Holocaust memorials and a former concentration camp; I saw dances about people dying from AIDS and by people in wheelchairs; and I listened to music about social injustice and reconciliation. ...I also listened to Madonna and dressed up as a lady for carnival. (Some things are just genetic, I guess.) In retrospect, I got a bit crazy: For example, I spearheaded a campaign to get a neo-nazi expelled from my school; I ran for student council president; and I became the front man of a rock band. I mean, "crazy"; for a shy teenager like me. (I think Prince wrote a song about that - I believe it's printed on the bulletin cover...)
I'm telling all this not at all to impress you about my life, but to emphasize what I have come to know as a truth: An Involuntary Life Change happens for the most profound reasons. It informs our lives more than we could ever imagine at the time when it occurs. There is absolutely no cell in my body that believes I would have grown up to be the same person were I still living on that idyllic street of my childhood. That Big Life Change deeply enriched my understanding of the world and is completely responsible why I am here today.
It's almost time for Catie's second entrance, and let me introduce this second story by saying that there comes a point in our lives when we start making Conscious Life Decisions. As Catie will demonstrate, it's never too early to start being conscious about your life choices...
[2nd skit: Catie comes dress up in all kinds of garments (including flippers). Someone throws a blanket over her, she removes her costume, emerges from underneath the blanket and yells "I'm Free!";]
Some of you already know parts of this story: Last year I decided that I wanted to become a public school teacher. I got accepted to this crazy program that tries to make you a teacher in one month and then puts you into one of Philadelphia's worst schools while you study for your teacher certificate on the side. For some reason this sounded like a great opportunity to me, and I took some risks to make it happen: I quit my previous job as an accountant, I took out loans to go back to school, I bought hundreds of dollars worth of school supplies, and I projected my finances and social life based on my future life as a fully-employed public school teacher with a regular income and summers off.
So after a grand total of 7 days student teaching and a bunch of pep talks from corporate-like educators who are using "No Child Left Behind"; as a business opportunity, I ended up in my very own classroom as an 8th grade English teacher. It was February and my students had not had an English teacher all school year. The school was an all-boys school, 90% of the students lived below the poverty line. About half of my 88 students were special ed kids, but there were no records of who had what special need. The school had an extremely young teaching body, and they'd had a new principal every year for the past four years. And the school was being run by a corporation that demanded we teach the textbook page by page, even though most of my eighth graders read on a third grade level.
I could go on. I could describe the atmosphere in the school and what happened on my first day of work. But suffice it to say that it was an impossible situation for me. I started praying as soon as the assembly bell rang, and I didn't stop praying for the remainder of the day.
That night I went home and just cried and cried, because I felt so hopeless. I knew that I had close to no chance of making a real impact on my students and on the school. I knew that I would run myself into the ground before I could even get to breathe again during spring break. I knew that had been fooled by my idealism to pursue a path towards my own destruction. I went to sleep that night, still praying, and I woke up the next morning, took my shower, made my breakfast, dressed up for work, ...and just couldn't make it out the door. I just couldn't get myself to go back to that school.
That one hour between not leaving the house and not arriving at school was one of the most intense hours of my life. It felt like the most intimate prayer I had ever prayed, like I had lost all hope and still knew without doubt that I was being divinely guided through this blind experience. And I made the most Conscious Life Decision I had ever made. I said: I know I cannot go back to that classroom, and I accept the consequences of that decision, no matter what they are and where they may lead me. I trust that You, God, will guide me every turn of the way.
Saying that prayer was like stepping onto a surfboard to surf across the Atlantic. Totally insane.
Yet I instinctively knew that I was fully protected by the Spirit of Grace.
When you make a Life Change, be prepared to feel like you're crazy. That's why I love what Malcolm X writes about his pilgrimage to Mecca: You can tell that his decision to act on his inner calling to follow a more inclusive, orthodox Islam is going to cost him everything he's known and preached about. But the beauty of his transformation eclipses all the securities he could have returned to - fame, notoriety, family, the social movement he had built, and most of all a stubborn view of how things really are. He breaks expectations and literally risks his life in his act of rebuilding his ideals and his view of humanity, and he is ready to say: "I accept the consequences. I surrender myself to God's will. I will lead the life I was born to live."; It's true, the riskiest path harbors the most potential.
The result may be, as in the story of Jesus and the fishermen, that you may suddenly catch a year's supply of fish; or, if you're Malcolm X, you may be assassinated and remembered forever. OR you may lose your career, owe an extra $10,000 in student loans, get your apartment burglarized twice, experience your grandma's death, and move out of the country. All of those things were the consequences of my Conscious Life Decision. And yet, none of these things has prevented me from rebuilding my life completely and continuing to become the person I was born to be. I am taken care of, no matter whether changes happen to me or whether I make them happen... My life is serving its purpose.
In my dreams I apparently still return to the things I once had and I throw a fit when things aren't the same as when I left them -- But that's just it: nothing will ever remain the same. Life blooms in unexpected and truly marvelous ways - again and again. And differently each time you start over.
So I will end with Prince's instructions for life: "if the elevator tries 2 bring U down... get crazy.";
[silence]
© 2007 by Kilian Kröll. All rights reserved. Please consult the author at tabernacle@tabunited.org if you wish to use the text of this sermon, in whole or in part.
